This ugly, lumpy wad of light makes my skin crawl, somehow. It is a nuclear fireball, 1/1,000,000th of a second after detonation. Taken in 1952 with a camera with a shutter speed of 1/10,000,00th of a second, at this point, the nuclear fireball is only about 100' wide, just about to touch the ground below the tower on which the bomb was mounted.
You see all the objects on the ground? How about all the lizards and snakes and bugs and sagebrush you can't see on the ground? In another 1/1,000,000th of a second, they're all gone, vaporized, turned to high-energy plasma. This picture is the instant image of the immediate line between states, alive and dead, existence and non-existence. Every time I see this picture, I think about the zero-width present between past and future, about living in the present as a physical impossibility - by the time you apprehend the present, it's the past, because the computer in your head that processes and presents information to you is too slow by orders of magnitude to even begin to approach the "present" in real time. Our technology lets us see the present as it was, and, if it's done correctly, allows us to actually see transparently thin markers that record a flash of the passing of that invisible line as it sweeps through time from past to future.
You ever seen this one? It's five guys at ground zero during a nuke test. The nuke is 10,000 feet up and they are volunteers standing directly below it. All of them wound up with cancer. And at 0:59 into the video, you can actually see that split second between being ordinary people living and dying in ordinary ways and being transformed into people who've been bathed in near-light-speed beta particles and light-speed gamma particles. It looks like a flashbulb. At 0:58, ordinary, at 1:00 genetically damaged beyond repair, all occurring in a microscopically thin slice of time.
None of this means anything - no great insights, as far as I can tell. It's just that time fascinates me, trying to grab that slippery, zero-width thread of the present is a pleasantly impossible task, and watching people who are living their lives without ever really getting a grip on the fact that the sum total of who they are is a dimensionless marker experiencing the data stream of their lives as they slide from past to future is ... entertaining..
In Our Next Episode: Another refugee from the time stream finds a way to distract us from the discovery that we really hardly exist at all...
I absolutely *love* the fact that there is effectively no present moment. Love it. That sort of thing is why I got so into all the history of quantum mechanics and "basic understanding" stuff.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was very young (9?) I saw "The Day After." It changed my view of the world. I began believing, that night, I would never see my grandchildren grow up because we would all die in a nuclear holocaust. It didn't scare me, for some reason, it just felt like a given.