(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
I mean, you're technically right, but that doesn't invalidate anything the parent commenter said.
I could equally ask "What if it turned out that turpentine was actually _healthier_ than water?".
Like, yeah, if that assertion turned out to be the case and you rejected the new data, you'd be following dogma rather than data. That doesn't mean that the assertion is likely to actually be true though.
>Your answer to this question determines whether you believe in ideology or data.
I've upvoted your comment to give you time to show us your data.
There’s one data point against the original comments assumption or intention
The pool of skilled scientists to be hired shrinks when you cut funding in arbitrary ways.
A quote from Carl Sagan’s, Demon Haunted World.
> We are rarely smart enough to set about on purpose making the discoveries that will drive our economy and safeguard our lives. Often, we lack the fundamental research. Instead, we pursue a broad range of investigations of Nature, and applications we never dreamed of emerge. Not always, of course. But often enough.
[0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9975718/
[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016975529...
[2]: https://www.nsf.gov/impacts/internet
[3]: https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/impact-nih-research/improving-...
We're at a point right now where we can't even calculate the damage Musk has done, where the discovery process on that issue alone will be a multi-million years long effort. We're looking at large-scale remediation projects on every system Trump gave him access to because the cost of not doing that is functionally unknowable. E.g. every table DOGE had the ability to change is now a legal liability per row.
These savings are not material. And if they were they wouldn’t matter—the Congress blew out our deficit by trillions irrespective of anything DOGE did.
"if pigs could fly"
"when hell freezes over"
"when Trump and the GOP care about truth"
They all mean the same thing.
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!
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•14h 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•12h ago