00:00The core of the sun burns at 15 million degrees.
00:03Nothing we have ever built survives there for even an instant.
00:06And yet one thing we made with our own hands briefly beat that temperature here on earth.
00:10It lasted less than a microsecond.
00:12It was an atomic bomb.
00:14Now imagine an extreme question.
00:16The moment it detonates, you are standing exactly 2 meters from the core.
00:20Not touched by the blast wave, not caught by the fireball,
00:23just the first fraction of a second.
00:25What happens to every atom in your body?
00:28And would you even know?
00:29Here is the most counterintuitive part.
00:32Almost everyone imagines this moment completely wrong.
00:35So who is the real killer?
00:36Not the tens of millions of degrees.
00:39Not even the shockwave.
00:41What kills you before you can fall is the timescale itself.
00:44And that is why 2 meters matters.
00:46The bombs dropped on Japan detonated 500 meters up.
00:50Even standing directly below, you were still half a kilometer from the core.
00:53So no human has ever truly stood 2 meters away.
00:57The closest anyone came was a night in July, 1945.
01:00A young physicist named Donald Hornig sat on a 30 meter steel tower in the New Mexico desert,
01:05guarding the first atomic bomb ever built.
01:07Through a thunderstorm he kept wondering, what if lightning struck the tower and set it off?
01:12The answer hides in the first microsecond.
01:14Remember one unit, a nanosecond is one billionth of a second.
01:18At detonation, what reaches you first is not fire, and not light.
01:22It is X-rays.
01:24They cross those 2 meters in 6.7 nanoseconds.
01:27The neutrons arrive about 100 nanoseconds later.
01:30And here is what people never consider.
01:32At 2 meters, you are not standing outside the fireball watching it grow.
01:37You are inside the very air that is becoming the fireball.
01:39You are not the audience.
01:41You are part of it.
01:43What happens next is too fast for any instrument, and any living thing, to experience.
01:48The X-rays are absorbed with terrifying efficiency.
01:51The body is mostly water.
01:53The energy does not pass through evenly, it deposits in your outermost layer.
01:57That tissue loses its electrons, turns to plasma, and blows away, revealing the layer beneath.
02:02The same thing repeats.
02:04Layer after layer.
02:06And your whole body is engulfed in air that is also turning to plasma.
02:10Now put the timescale next to it.
02:12Your nervous system needs milliseconds to carry a single signal.
02:16Sending a signal from your ear to your brainstem alone takes about 10 milliseconds.
02:20Everything above is over in 1 microsecond.
02:22That is a thousand times faster than the fastest thing your nerves can do.
02:26No time to see the flash.
02:28No time to hear the blast.
02:30No time to feel pain.
02:32You simply no longer exist.
02:34So yes, you would never know anything happened.
02:37Now, you may remember the most widespread claim of all.
02:40People say the closest victims were instantly vaporized.
02:44They point to the human shadows burned into stone at Hiroshima as proof.
02:47The truth is the opposite.
02:49Those bombs detonated 500 meters up.
02:52The fireball never touched the ground.
02:55People below were not inside it, they were underneath.
02:57The blinding light struck at 1.7 milliseconds.
03:01The heat arrived at a tenth of a second.
03:03The shock wave was felt at six tenths of a second.
03:06In other words, they had time to see it.
03:09Survivors described it, first a searing white light.
03:12Then a moment of silence.
03:14Then the roar.
03:15Japanese has a word for it, pikidan.
03:18Flash, then boom.
03:20And the key point, bodies were still bodies.
03:23Molecular structure survived.
03:24The entire medical record of the bombings exists because there was biological material left to study.
03:30The shadows on stone were the body blocking the flash, while the stone around it was bleached.
03:34The shadow is the part that did not change.
03:37It proves that person was still there.
03:39So was it really hotter than the sun?
03:41Inside the bomb, yes, but only just, and only for an instant.
03:45The core reaches tens of millions of degrees, beating the sun's 15 million degree core.
03:50But the fireball never did.
03:52By the first microsecond it had already fallen below, and was dropping fast.
03:56So, hotter than the sun, is only true of the weapon physics, for one instant.
04:01Not of the fireball.
04:02Not of the person inside it.
04:04The sun's core is also far denser than water, burning for billions of years.
04:09The fireball was just a ball of gas that scattered in microseconds.
04:12It could be hotter than the sun and still be nothing like it.
04:15But inside it, something rare was left behind.
04:18On July 16, 1945, the first nuclear test detonated.
04:23The blast fused desert sand, steel, and wire into one mass.
04:27Cooled, it became a glass called trinitite.
04:30In 2021, scientists found inside a red sample a quasicrystal never seen before,
04:35atoms arranged in an order that never repeats.
04:37Not new elements, but familiar ones forced into a structure nature had never made.
04:41And here is the unsettling part.
04:44The copper and iron in your body were forged inside stars,
04:47millions of degrees hot, far larger than our sun.
04:50An atom could never reach that scale.
04:52But for an instant, it was lifted to the temperature of a burning star.
04:55Less than the time of a single nerve twitch.
04:58The atoms that made a person were stripped of every arrangement they had ever held.
05:02Then, as things cooled, they returned as ordinary matter,
05:05thrown into the sky, forming new molecules.
05:08Matter was conserved.
05:09And the order that one person had been, was completely erased.
05:13And the machine that did all of this, we built it ourselves.
05:16Not�� politicalatoriums.
05:17Goddamnation.
05:18Goddamnation.
05:28Goddamnation.
05:33Godresser.90
