If you're not reading Boston Globe"s The Big Picture blog, I have to say that you are depriving your mind of some pretty intense and without fail breathtaking imagery. One pretty unbelievable example is this post from the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is better known as the place on the planet with the most powerful laser. The NIF has a system of 192 beams that are focused onto a 2mm-ish target, applying a megajoule onto that target.
Yeah. That's the energy of 10,000 100W lamps in one second.
I have four images of the 27 posted on the Big Picture Blog's NIF post, which I implore you to visit. I hope that someone reading the website will visit this post and get excited about the future of photon science, because that is what places like The Big Picture are all about – piquing interest.
I grabbed the captions for each image too – you must have the captions!
Ok, go. No, RUN, over to The Big Picture Blog.