In Chaos by James Gleick it is mentioned that bunch of early mathematics related to fractals was worked out in the context of research into soot - the story went that soot is very black because the surface geometry has high fractal dimension, or something like that. In turn, this soot research was motivated by efforts to calculate just how black the sky would become in the event of a nuclear war. Now any time I see scientists trying to learn about soot, a small alarm bell goes off in my head. I'm sure it's nothing though :)
On another note, I think streak cameras are cool but they count as cheating in my book. Any time someone is publishing papers with streak cameras they should only be allowed to put "trillion fps" in the title if they also put "sustained for up to one nanosecond".
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 16.7 ms ] thread>Single-pulse real-time billion-frames-per-second planar imaging of ultrafast nanoparticle-laser dynamics and temperature in flames [open access]
On another note, I think streak cameras are cool but they count as cheating in my book. Any time someone is publishing papers with streak cameras they should only be allowed to put "trillion fps" in the title if they also put "sustained for up to one nanosecond".