http://www.ldsmysite.com/blog/category/technology/ Blog categories... http://www.ldsmysite.com/soccerdude/blog/perfect-numbers/ the...]]> the highest perfect # I have heard of is 33,550,336. The pattern for finding these is by powers of 2 (1,2,4,8,16,32, ect.) all of these #'s are factors of perfect #'s. But there is one catch. Every so often, you have to subtract 1 in order to make it a factor. Take 8,128. 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,127 ect. Ver y interesting...]]> http://www.ldsmysite.com/soccerdude/blog/perfect-numbers/ Wed, 15 Dec 2010 03:15:58 +0000 soccerdude http://www.ldsmysite.com/soccerdude/blog/the-first-man-made-object-in-space-was-it-really-spudnick/ Okay, so everone knows that Spudnick (a satellite) was (supposedly)the first man made object in space right? Well, I have a different object in mind t...
In the Cold War, a group of scientist and engineers working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory were instructed to reduce the amount of radioactive material thrust into the atmosphere resulting from nuclear testing. Astrophysicist Robert Brownlee was a principal participant in these tests.

Dr. Brownlee and his team were testing to see if the could move testing underground. In order to achieve their objectives, they needed to explode several nuclear devices. The testing area was a 400-foot-deep well lined with a thick steel pipe, and was capped by a steel plate.

Forty stories below the surface, researchers tried to figure out if they could safely test the effects and designs of nuclear devices while reducing the amount of radioactive material in the air to the least amount, maybe even completely.

First, the placed a small (by high-energy physics standards) nuclear device in the steel well. They then put on a four inch thick steel manhole cover. It weighed over half a ton.

The device they put in the well had the explosive equivalent of less than one kiloton of high explosive. In nuclear terms,small is still incredibly large. The effects of loosing lots of nuclear particles can be very difficult to predict. So, Dr. Brownlee and his team armed themselves with state-of-the-art equipment to test it.

The scientists were trying to figure out what happens during the first tiny moments of a nuclear explosion. They wanted to know what type of particles there were, hom many there were, and the most important, where they went.
What they were trying to measure needed to be measured in the first few shakes
after the explosion(shakes being the time it takes light to travel 10 feet and becuase light travels at 186,000 miles per second, a shake is a small amount of time).

at the time of the explosion, the scientist had put all kinds of detectors and sensors to capture data, including high speed cameras some distance from the top of the well to film the explosion. The average camera takes 16 frames per second, but the cameras they used were ten times faster.

When the device was triggered, the scietists got a bit more than they bargaind for. Photons were emitted during the first few shakes of the explosion, vaporising the steel walls into super heated ion gas. At three hundredths of a second later,a shockwave of gas, light, and radiation blasted against the man hole cover.

The cameras recorded the effect. in one frame, the plate is there. In the next,(1/160 of a second later) it was gone. Afterwards, the area was carfully searched for the plate. In fact, in the last 40+ years afterward, no trace of the plate has been found.

The team figured out where it went. Based on the expected bomb yield, the depth of the well and so forth, Dr. Brownlee calculated the the plate was going 41 miles per second. Notice, it is not per hour, but per second.

The escape velocity to escape earths gravity is 7 miles per second. That ment that the plate was going over five times the escape velocity.

So, a few years later (1959) the Soviet Union launched what was supposedly the first man made object in space. So now I ask you: Was Spudnick the first man made object in space?

If you want to know where I got my info. read a book called Backyard Ballistics by William Gurstelle]]> http://www.ldsmysite.com/soccerdude/blog/the-first-man-made-object-in-space-was-it-really-spudnick/ Thu, 26 Aug 2010 17:34:49 +0000 soccerdude