Question: How do you see inside a nuclear explosion and what does it look like?

Matthew Selwood answered on 4 Mar 2019:

I haven’t managed it yet, so I will let you know when I do! I am trying to use a technique, which is pretty much like an x-ray machine at the airport but on enough steroids to kill an elephant.

When I do manage it, it may not look too exciting it will be a rather unglamorous blob. The interesting thing, at least for scientists studying it, will be the shape of the blob. We want it to be a perfect sphere, but it is probably going to be a lot more random. Shortly before explosion (going out), we force the capsule to implode (going in) with 142 lasers. So it is like trying to compress a water balloon into a small sphere with 142 well sharpened pencils! Once we can look inside the explosion, then we can try to figure out how best to arrange our pencils and keep the fuel compression uniform.