Things for the homemade space station where we’ll live in some sort of harmony and wear space rags. It’s like the Millennium Falcon, but nicer.
[Update: As it turns out, the object at top is a reproduction of the Trinity Gadget, the first nuclear bomb, and not a friendly robot. Of course in science fiction, utopia is doomed anyway.]
Above: Trinity Gadget reproduction by unnamed photographer; lounge by Joe Colombo; spacey driftwood root from the Pacific; Gabriella Crespi steel table; 7′ steel sculpture by Paul Evans; Roger Tallon helicoid aluminum spiral staircase. Click each for more information.
Love these.
Regarding the Gadget: An aesthetically beautiful work of engineering that causes terrible, unholy things when triggered… Sounds enough like sci-fi to me. Just add some random blinking lights that serve no real purpose, or maybe make it self-aware, and we’re in business!
I didn’t realize that this object, which looked like just a friendly but mute robot to me, was the Trinity gadget, the first atomic bomb. Good grief. It was the predecessor to Little Boy and Fat Man. Horrifying. Wikipedia explains its appearance, with all those wires:
An exploding-bridgewire detonator has two main parts; a piece of fine wire which contacts the explosive, and a “strong” source of high-voltage electricity — strong, in that it holds up under sudden heavy load. When the wire is connected across this voltage, the resulting high current melts and then vapourises the wire in several microseconds. The resulting shock and heat initiate the high explosive.[1]
This accounts for the heavy cables seen in photos of the Trinity “Gadget”; they had to deliver a large current with little voltage drop, lest the EBW not achieve the phase transition quickly enough.
PS Maybe it’s the chaos of the times, but when i think of decor, my mind keeps going off-planet. Of course nothing good happens off-planet either. It starts with ground control to Major Tom and just gets worse. It’s fitting that this friendly robot turned out to be a bomb.
Many US soldiers were exposed to massive doses of radiation when the Trinity Gadget was detonated at Los Alamos.