What do you base this on? I assume you don’t have personal experience of this phenomenon, so where did you read this?
–Mark
Sorry, I thought I had quoted something above and following up on that. *If *all of the water in your body turned to steam I think you would turned to smithereens.
Eh, the temperature alone isn’t the issue. The BLAST itself has a rather large pressure wave.
Am I correct in that an oven set to 250 Celsius will still take several minutes to reduce a steak to blackened stuff? Why would 500 degrees Celsius “instantly” vaporize flesh?
From what I understand, the shadows were the result of the initial flash of the explosion, not the subsequent effects like the fireball or blast wave. The people who left those shadows may not have been atomized or even killed by that flash. The flash created all the shadows in that one instant and then it’s possible that the various people were then incinerated in the heat and/or destroyed by the blast wave, depending on the distance from the hypocenter or other local conditions like intervening materials. There are anecdotes of people having one side of their body charred by the flash but otherwise surviving the bomb.
The initial burst is 100 million degrees. It is literally the sun at 1/3 of a mile away. It’s enough energy to flatten a city to nothing. It vaporized the roof on the exhibition building.
Why you think 3000C from a nuclear device is somehow different than 3000C from the tip of a torch is something that needs to be explained.
Let’s step through this.
Not relevant. All that energy dissipates quickly, most of it X-rays heating the surrounding air into an incandescent fireball.
Just a few milliseconds, though.
Little Boy flattened a few blocks of the city. Most of the city was destroyed by the ensuing fire.
Overpressure effects.
Because a 3000C oven transfers heat differently than a blowtorch. I know this because I’ve processed samples in a muffle furnace, but you can demonstrate it yourself at home. And even a blowtorch isn’t the holy finger of God. Hit some spare ribs with the hottest torch you can find for 1 second, and see what happens.
^This.
Temperature alone isn’t a good metric for estimating thermal effects. Put your hand in a 400 F oven for 5 seconds and it will feel warm. Put your hand in a 212 F pot of boiling water for 5 seconds and you’ll have third degree burns.
–Mark
It’s an interesting question.
This very issue was tackled by a newpaper published by Japanese teenagers:
http://www.hiroshimapeacemedia.jp/hiroshima-koku/en/exploration/index_20090309.html
The consensus: no “vaporization” of bodies; but they may have been “carbonized” to burn bones & gristle and then the remains blasted away by the shock wave, leading to the notion that they had simply “vanished”.
The people who were not made of metal also disappeared.
Hit some spare ribs with an acetylene torch the size of the ribs and see what happens.
Aluminum melts at 993k. that’s a third of the temperature people were exposed to.
This.
Not sure what point this supports, but again, blast effects.
The same thing will happen. A bigger flame doesn’t mean heat gets transferred faster.
Just because you a block of aluminum in an oven at 993K doesn’t mean it’s instantly going to melt, and it’s certainly not going to vaporize. Again we’re talking about heat transfer in air. Air is not a good thermal conductor. That’s why you can safely put your hand in a 500F oven to pull out the ribs, but you wouldn’t want to touch a 500F piece of metal or water at the boiling point.
What are you claiming would happen, that the meat would instantly vaporize? If that were true, then hitting the ribs with an ordinary acetylene torch would instantly vaporize the part of the ribs directly touched by the torch.
That’s a good point, which refutes your argument. Aluminum melts at 993 K. Steel melts at about 1650 K, both much lower than the temperatures reached at the bomb site. Yet there are pieces of steel still sitting there, not reduced to molten puddles. Why? Because the heat didn’t last long enough to melt them, just as it didn’t last long enough to reduce the bodies to ash.
–Mark
There was a flash and a fireball. The fireball doesn’t last milliseconds.
Here is John Hersey’s original New Yorker article. (Some changes were made for the book. Alas it is not available as an ebook.)
“Others found that mica, of which the melting point is 900° C., had fused on granite gravestones three hundred and eighty yards from the center; that telephone poles of Cryptomeria japonica, whose carbonization temperature is 240° C., had been charred at forty-four hundred yards from the center; and that the surface of gray clay tiles of the type used in Hiroshima, whose melting point is 1,300° C., had dissolved at six hundred yards; and, after examining other significant ashes and melted bits, they concluded that the bomb’s heat on the ground at the center must have been 6,000° C.”
If you were unsheltered very near ground zero, there was nothing left but ash. But the heat dropped off quite rapidly with distance.
The surfaces of clay tiles exposed to 1,300C temp for milliseconds wouldn’t have dissolved.
If it’s any consolation to most vaporized victims, they would have been immediately blasted with a shock wave that would have killed them just as well.
I am quite amazed that this morbid thread is still on, I am also wondering what would be the result if one would translate all of it into Japanese and have it posted on a Japanese site…
Remember, NO Americans got “vaporized”…
Peace
There were 20 Dutch, British and American POW’s that died from the bombings.
Some POWs got et.
Peace
I wonder how much x-ray energy was converted to heat inside the bodies of victims right at ground zero.
And yet.
If you look atvideos of structuresused at test sites the wooden ones begin smoking before the shockwave hits them and blows them apart. It’s s not just X-rays. There is a substantial release of infrared heat released.