(Protip: just type "7 μs * c in miles" into Google)
Known to the entire world, including American STEM people, as a microsecond.
It also has very little predictive power for the loon with the checkbook right now. He might just as likely notice that people care a lot about that issue and hold it for ransom.
It doesn’t need to be profit making in the normal sense (see SpaceX) it just needs to be the only game in town when the US Gov spends on national security
The national labs are organized under the Office of Science (17 labs), NNSA (LANL, LLNL, Sandia), the Office of Nuclear Energy (INL), the Office of Environmental Management (Savannah River), Office of Fossil Energy (NETL), and Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (NREL). Some offices are doing better than others re: funding in the current environment!
Which may explain why no one wants to discuss a mysterious, $934 million transfer of funds from one of the Pentagon’s most over-budget, out-of-control projects — the modernization of America’s aging, ground-based nuclear missiles.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/us/politics/air-force-one...
I'm guessing we'll see more hidden spending in future as the nukes and the engineers that made them get older. its worth asking if they even work (in some countries arsenals at least)
edit: here is the important information in this article.
> Scorpius is a new accelerator project planned for the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) that will use an electron beam that can be broken into customized pulses to deliver x-rays and capture multiple images only hundreds of nanoseconds apart.
So 0.1μs or 100ns temporal resolution 3D X-ray.
Youtubers are a couple of magnitudes away from that, AFAIK
"Seven millionths" would be 7/1,000,000 s (7μs). They take 20 to 40 images in that period using 7 cameras, so any given camera might be as low as 1.4μs per frame.
I would guess it's a lot more likely that this is an editing failure, introducing a hyphen where no hyphen should be, than that they meant to divide a second into seven million equal parts.
For one thing, as SECProto alludes to, English would normally require you to say "less than a seven-millionth of a second" if that was what you meant. There's no such thing as saying "less than weeks". You have to specify less than how many weeks.
less than (seven) (millionths of a second)
less than (seven millionths of a second)
Edit: They mention in [2] that the Phantom camera they have can go to a 95ns exposure up to 1,750,000 FPS.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ys_yKGNFRQ&pp=ygUMc2xvdyBtb...
No camera is taking in 10 trillion frames of data per second.
I've never heard of `{number} {plural magnitude}` meaning `mag / number`. I've only ever seen it mean `number * mag`. As in 3-thousandths == 3 * 0.001 not 0.001 / 3.
7 * 0.001ms = 0.007ms or 7us or 7000ns.
Dictionary.com defines "real-time" like as, "the actual time during which a process or event occurs", eg "along with much of the country, he watched events unfolding in real time on TV". Or in the domain of Computing, "relating to a system in which input data is processed within milliseconds so that it is available virtually immediately as feedback to the process from which it is coming, e.g. a missile guidance system might have "real-time signal processing".
Neither definition work here. It seems like they took a sequence of pictures very quickly, and then, some time later, played them back at an enormously slowed-down rate.
Is it not obvious that if you're writing an article proclaiming to capture _explosions_ at 7mths of a second, people want to see some pictures of said explosions?
Clearly they're understanding that explosions are a hook to grab the reader's attention, but then they just don't include any of the resulting pictures?
C'mon y'all! We need to do better here!
They basically explicitly say that without just coming out and saying it. This kind of hyper fast explosion analysis and photography is a big part of making implosion bombs work properly.
edit: actually they just say it, they don't have to be coy everyone knows the US and other countries study this and it doesn't violate the NTBT because it's sub critical.
> essential to the Lab’s stockpile stewardship mission because it helps scientists test and understand the fundamental characteristics of materials and explosive events to inform computational models and analyses without ever detonating an actual weapon.
[0] https://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/trillionfps/
EDIT: Video with explanation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtsXgODHMWk
LAsteNERD•6mo ago
The Lab uses multiple systems to image these high-speed events:
• pRad uses proton radiography to get 20–40 frames of a detonation, with material-level resolution based on density.
• DARHT uses dual-axis x-ray imaging to create 3D snapshots from two angles, ideal for testing whether the computational models built from pRad hold up.
• Scorpius (in development) will take this a step further by using subcritical plutonium in a new accelerator at NNSS, capturing multiple high-resolution frames just nanoseconds apart.
The fact that they can tailor experiments based on frame-by-frame behavior of individual materials under explosive stress feels like the real-world version of “bullet time” physics modeling. The margins of error come down to billionths of a second.
josh2600•6mo ago