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Feynman knew this and claims to be the only person to have watched the Trinity test with naked eyes, rather than through welding goggles: > In Surely You’re Jo
by kough 8y ago
Feynman knew this and claims to be the only person to have watched the Trinity test with naked eyes, rather than through welding goggles:
> In Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, American physicist Richard Feynman speculates that he may have been the only person who watched the Trinity Test relatively directly, using a windshield to exclude ultraviolet light. Everyone else, he claims, was looking through something akin to welding goggles.
https://www.sindark.com/2011/02/22/feynman-and-the-trinity-test/ https://www.sindark.com/2011/02/22/feynman-and-the-trinity-t...
- Bartweiss 8y agoI've never really understood this story. Feynman wasn't wrong, but UV-A and even sufficiently-bright visible light also cause eye damage. Did he know the main visual hazard from the bomb was UV-B? Did he just get lucky?
- Spellchamp 8y agoYep, he basically says that he knew the only thing that would damage his eyes would be UV-B, so he just went for it. Long time since I read the book but that's what I remember.
- StrictDabbler 8y agoWe don't even know that he got lucky. Lasers didn't exist yet to force us to study retinal exposure to bright non-UV light and the flash from the bomb didn't last that long, nor were the first few bombs that bright, so he may have been fine... but obviously if you stare at the sun through three inches of glass you're still going to burn your retinas. He says "I figured the only thing that could really hurt your eyes (bright light can never hurt your eyes) is ultraviolet light. I got behind a truck windshield, because the ultraviolet can’t go through glass, so that would be safe, and so I could see the damn thing." What we know from later laser research is that unless you have a comprehensive visual field test, it's often hard to identify that part of your retina has been scorched. Your brain just filters it out as a blind-spot and you don't realize what you're failing to see. There's every chance that Feynman totally burned a section of his retina and never realized it, and there's every chance that he was fine because the exposure at his distance wasn't that bad, but at the end of the day he was more reckless than insightful in this situation.
- kragen 8y agoMaybe he should have closed one eye, but the first atomic bomb only explodes once. Your body won't last forever no matter how well you care for it (as Feynman well knew, having just watched his wife Arline die slowly of incurable tuberculosis); seeing the first atomic-bomb test with your own eyes seems eminently worth the risk of blindness, or even sacrificing an eye.
- abdulhaq 8y agoI really can't agree. I would not exchange my eyesight for the whole world, literally. Therefore the qudos of having looked at a novel explosion in no way compensates for any risk to my eyes.
- kragen 8y agoYou are guaranteed to lose your eyesight, no matter what you do. Nobody has eyesight after they die, and like all human bodies born before the 19th century have already done, your body is going to die within the next few decades, barring great medical breakthroughs. The most you can do for your eyesight is to delay its inevitable loss. (Wow, awareness of mortality sure is unpopular on HN! To all humans downvoting this: you, too, are going to die, because that is what happens to humans.)
- bryanrasmussen 8y agoI thought the next few decaces was a climate change reference.
- kragen 8y agoSorry, no, I just meant that the maximum human lifespan recorded so far is 12.2 decades, and the vast majority of people reading this will die in even less, 2–5 decades, regardless of what happens with climate change. Given that, it's silly to treat your body as if you could make it last forever. I've edited my comment above to clarify.
- BurningFrog 8y agoThe window didn't block a lot of other high power radiation, and he died from cancer 35 years later, though the connection is not scientifically certain.
- Jaepa 8y agoHe was also smoker. He also lived in Los Alamos during its development where the cancer rates where significantly higher
- jsweojtj 8y ago43 years later (Trinity test was in 1945, he died in 1988).
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- BurningFrog 8y agoSorry, my morning coffee must have been weak.
- gist 8y ago> Feynman knew this and claims to be I don't get this type of thinking. Unless he thought it would be worse to wear the googles what is to be gained by doing something like wearing goggles (in that situation) just in case you were wrong? Why not reduce the chance of harm as much as you can?
- pasta 8y agoBecause he was a curious man and wanted to see every detail?
- brunoqc 8y agoYou probably can't see shit with those goggles.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoThere's a fine line between genius and madness.
- perl4ever 8y agoI think this also has to be considered in the context of an ongoing cataclysmic war encompassing the world where whole cities were being destroyed and of course they were developing a weapon to destroy them faster. Today, WWII is that long ago thing that lasted for a few years and then it was over. Soon the veterans and the Holocaust survivors will all be dead. To anyone then, a lot of things probably didn't seem as important. A lot of people reacted to the atomic bomb once it was public as the impending end of the world, too. So the scientists who knew about it first probably had their attitudes affected.