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bemusedlybespectacled:
jumpingjacktrash:
sometimes i think about how in the MCU the color of bad things happening is cherenkov blue.
back in the cold war era, we thought of Scary Radiation Apocalypse Bad as being green, like the radioluminescence of radon and tritium. but it became kind of trite and overused, and besides, nowdays you can get a tritium light keychain.
but there’s no getting cozy with the beautiful azure glow of cherenkov radiation. you can’t put that in a keychain. it happens in big reactors, and in swimming pools full of spent fuel rods, places you really don’t want to put your delicate human flesh.
that’s not a screenshot from a science fiction movie, that’s what it really looks like. and technically you can’t get this radiation in air; it needs a denser medium like water to happen. but it’s been teasing at the edges of our collective awareness enough that when we see this
we go “ohhhh that’s bad news cap, whatever’s making that glow is very bad mojo.”
green radiation is almost cozy by this point. the hulk is a big slobbery puppy really. but the blue stuff? the tesseract and all its terrible weapon babies? that is Not A Friend. and we know this because we’ve seen those pictures of blue glowing reactors on science magazines and so on, and because we’ve maybe heard mentions of the ‘blue flash’ seen at the moment of a criticality accident by people who inevitably die a week or two later.
that blue flash isn’t cherenkov radiation, btw, it’s ionization of the air, like in lightning. it’s more purple than cyan. but it’s part of the same mythos, you know?
anyhow, i just find it interesting that the color of danger has changed from peridot to turquoise.
something this post reminded me of: very few things in nature are blue. green we have in abundance; blue, we don’t. and especially not that kind of blue. certainly not glowing blue. you know what does glow blue?
that’s bioluminescence, most common in sea creatures that live in the parts of the ocean with no sunlight. the deepest part is called the hadal zone, after fucking hades, and it’s barely been explored. some of these creatures, like the anglerfish, are the will-o’-the-wisps of the sea, drawing unsuspecting prey to their death using their bioluminescence as bait.
to us, blue means two things: a) this is poison (see: poison dart frogs), or b) this is a mystery from the darkest depths of the ocean. both are terrifying.
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jumpingjacktrash:
sometimes i think about how in the MCU the color of bad things happening is cherenkov blue.
back in the cold war era, we thought of Scary Radiation Apocalypse Bad as being green, like the radioluminescence of radon and tritium. but it became kind of trite and overused, and besides, nowdays you can get a tritium light keychain.
but there’s no getting cozy with the beautiful azure glow of cherenkov radiation. you can’t put that in a keychain. it happens in big reactors, and in swimming pools full of spent fuel rods, places you really don’t want to put your delicate human flesh.
that’s not a screenshot from a science fiction movie, that’s what it really looks like. and technically you can’t get this radiation in air; it needs a denser medium like water to happen. but it’s been teasing at the edges of our collective awareness enough that when we see this
we go “ohhhh that’s bad news cap, whatever’s making that glow is very bad mojo.”
green radiation is almost cozy by this point. the hulk is a big slobbery puppy really. but the blue stuff? the tesseract and all its terrible weapon babies? that is Not A Friend. and we know this because we’ve seen those pictures of blue glowing reactors on science magazines and so on, and because we’ve maybe heard mentions of the ‘blue flash’ seen at the moment of a criticality accident by people who inevitably die a week or two later.
that blue flash isn’t cherenkov radiation, btw, it’s ionization of the air, like in lightning. it’s more purple than cyan. but it’s part of the same mythos, you know?
anyhow, i just find it interesting that the color of danger has changed from peridot to turquoise.
something this post reminded me of: very few things in nature are blue. green we have in abundance; blue, we don’t. and especially not that kind of blue. certainly not glowing blue. you know what does glow blue?
that’s bioluminescence, most common in sea creatures that live in the parts of the ocean with no sunlight. the deepest part is called the hadal zone, after fucking hades, and it’s barely been explored. some of these creatures, like the anglerfish, are the will-o’-the-wisps of the sea, drawing unsuspecting prey to their death using their bioluminescence as bait.
to us, blue means two things: a) this is poison (see: poison dart frogs), or b) this is a mystery from the darkest depths of the ocean. both are terrifying.
https://ift.tt/2PzDFHP
from Tumblr https://ift.tt/2NkjtMN
via IFTTT
