Subject: The billion watt light bulb, or how I nearly got Darwined. Subject: The billion watt light bulb, or how I nearly got Darwined. From: "Keith F. Lynch" Date: Fri, 10 Jan 1997 18:55:06 -0500 Message-ID: <199701102355.SAA22638@access5.digex.net> Newsgroups: .mlist. DARWIN DARWIN@yorku.ca A billion years ago, I got to work with a fourteen watt light bulb. No, wait. That's not quite right. Let me start over... Fourteen years ago, I got to work with a billion watt light bulb. It wasn't a bulb, exactly. It was more of a candle. Except that instead of wax, it burned aluminum dust, which is sold in ton lots as a paint base. And instead of burning it in air, it was mixed with liquid oxygen in a supersonic jet. I forget how many tons of aluminum and oxygen it used per second, but it never ran for more than ten seconds at a time. The nozzle was about half a foot wide, and was made of some kind of durable high-temperature ceramic, perhaps fused lime. The flame that came out of it was much wider, and gave off slightly more than a billion watts of pure white light. We used it in the New Mexico desert, about fifty miles west of Albuquerque, in a five foot deep concrete-lined trench, which is in a natural depression. The area is completely desolate, and looks just like the Viking pictures of Mars. It's completely silent there when the wind isn't blowing. There is no sign of mankind, or any other life whatsoever. Nevertheless, calls were made to 911 from up to a hundred miles away whenever the thing was used. Panicky reports were made of UFOs, exploding substations, crashing jets, and nuclear explosions. Attempts to photograph it usually result in the destruction of the camera. One person managed to do it, by using something like f22 and 1/1000th of a second through welders goggles. But that photo makes it look like it's being set off at midnight, with nothing but darkness at any distance from the immense irregular white flame, and with a pitch black sky. In fact, it was taken at about noon on a sunny day. I've calculated that it ought to be easily visible from the moon. Better yet, arrays of them could be set up on the moon, and used to spell out advertising slogans. Obnoxious? Sure. But less so than unsolicited commercial e-mail. Give Spamford Wallace the moon, if he'll promise to leave our mailboxes alone. About ten feet away were our test samples -- heavily instrumented sheet metal covered with various types of "fireproof" paint, to see which ones would best stand up to nearby nuclear explosions. I ran the computer equipment that collected and analyzed the data, in a portable metal shed about a hundred feet away. The shed had a narrow window which faced away from the light source. When the light turned on, the patch of desert visible through the narrow window lit up as if it had been turned into the stuff the sun is made of. At the same time, there was a noise and vibration like a jet taking off nearby, only much louder. One of the people who ran the thing for us mentioned that he had gone outside during some tests. Darwin whispered a suggestion into my ear at that point, so I didn't hear the part about how far away he was at the time, or how he protected himself. I took Darwin's suggestion and stepped outside during the next test, about two seconds after I had pressed the ENTER key on the LeCroy 3500 microcomputer, and two seconds before the light came on. I then took several steps forward to get a better view. The light came on. I felt like I had stepped into a blast furnace. I couldn't see anything but *bright* -- as if someone had stuck a flashbulb in each eye and then somehow set them off in such a way that they stayed on instead of instantly going out again. On another Darwinian occasion, I had looked directly into a laser. This was incomparably brighter. I immediately turned tail and ran back into the shed. I have no idea how I found the door. When I could see again, I discovered that I was sunburned everywhere my skin was exposed, that all the tiny hairs on my hands and arms had gone up in smoke, and that my clothes were partially melted. I was strongly berated for my "suicidal" stunt, and told that I was lucky I had a programmer's complexion. If I had been black, or even had a tan, I would have made an ash out of myself. I had been about 70 feet away from the light. A trashbag inadvertantly left next to the shed 100 feet away from the light had burst into flames. The results of the experiment? All kinds of fireproof paint burn really well, when you give them a good start. Some of them explosively so. Sheet metal burns even better. Conclusion: If a nuclear bomb ever goes off nearby, be somewhere else at the time. Somewhere else very far away. Like on another continent. I've been left with no permanent effects from my short visit with Charles. I do have a permanent ringing in my ears, but I suspect that's due to earlier risk taking. Perhaps it's from the time I manufactured some high explosive and set it off so close to me that it tore my clothes off. On the other hand, it may be from the time I unrolled a capacitor, used the resulting long thin foil as a kite string, and flew it across some high tension lines. ------- End Item -------