[time-nuts] Time of death-Again

[jimlux]

Marshall Eubanks wrote:
> On Oct 27, 2010, at 6:51 PM, Perry Sandeen wrote:
> 
>> Gents,
>>
>> Wrote: < If you want a sub-microsecond time of death, sit on a bomb like Major T. J. "King" Kong in "Dr. Strangelove," and get your friends to time and triangulate the prompt radiation. That should be good to a few 10's of nanoseconds.
>>


Folks, one doesn't need a thermonuclear device for this sort of almost 
instantaneous disintegration.

Standard old high explosives could get your "duration of death" down in 
the submillisecond range, and a simple optical pickup could determine 
the time when the explosion occurs to nanoseconds (after calibrating for 
light time delay).

Black powder which is really a propellant might even be able to 
disassemble your corpus in less than a millisecond.

However, if one needs microsecond type uncertainties, then the nuclear 
device is probably your best bet. Probably not under a microsecond 
though, from simple mechanical disassembly.  say you were standing just 
outside the approaching fireball... the fireball (in early stages) grows 
roughly at the speed of light as the photons proceed out.  The question 
would be whether there is enough flux to ionize you in a suitably short 
time.  Basically, you'd have to heat your 100kg or so up to a few 
thousand K.  Let's see.. 400kJ would heat 100kg up one degree, so 400MJ 
would get you to 1000 degrees, which is hot, but not ionized.  probably 
dead though.
If you were, say, 10 meters away, and your body intercepts 1/2 square 
meter of the flux which is assumed spread evenly over 314 square meters, 
the instantaneous power of the explosion would have to be 400MJ*628 in 1 
microsecond, or about 251GJ/microsecond, or a mere 250E15 Watts

(As I recall, close in, the first thing to come out is high energy gamma 
rays, so you'd need to look at the first few microseconds of gamma flux 
vs time... I'm sure the data is out there somewhere)