• Question: whats the most awesomest thing you have ever seen when blowing up things

    Asked by fabrywakley to Ben, Clare, Ezzy, Mario, Sam on 13 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by smeen7, scientistchick, 10samheac1.
    • Photo: Elizabeth Pearson

      Elizabeth Pearson answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      I don’t blow much up at work, but I did a demonstration with various chemicals dissolved in ethanol. When you set fire to it they burn in various colours. We sprayed it from a bottle and there was a massive green/purple/red fireball!

    • Photo: Sam Vinko

      Sam Vinko answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      A flash of light, a loud band, and then a large hole where the target was vaporised by the powerful laser. Often surprising things happen on the physics side of it. For example, you can imagine that for an explosion to occur the stuff exploding needs to be heated to very high temperatures, and then its pressure causes the blast. This is not always the case, and some materials can blow up very quickly even before they start heating up at all! Some materials, such as gold, do the exact opposite and resist blowing up for as long as they possibly can!

    • Photo: Mario Campanelli

      Mario Campanelli answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      not really blowed things up in the classical term.. however, if you consider high-energy particle collisions as “blowing things up”, then I saw the first W boson produced in my experiment at LEP, about 10 years ago, that was quite something!

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