Special effects technician Jeremy Chernick anchors a tiny detonator into a bit of clay inside yet another clock ready to give its life for the cause of art. "Firing in three, two, one…" Boom! Even through the hot pink ear plugs the sound of the explosion is impressive.
Chernick was blowing up clocks not just for fun (though that may well have been one reason), but to help us create the cover of the March, 2010, issue of DISCOVER. We wanted an image to illustrate Cosmic Variance blogger Sean Carroll's piece, "How to Travel Through Time," and blowing up a clock seemed like a concrete way to get at the article's more abstract ideas.
So we worked with Biwa Studios in New York City to capture the whole event. Biwa used a high-speed, high-def Phantom video camera made by Vision Research rather than a still camera; explosions don't exactly last a long time, so timing a shutter to the right split-second can be pretty tricky. Filming the clock exploding allowed us to pick the exactly the frame we wanted—and gave us some great footage, which you can see below. At explosion speed, gravity is not much of a factor. "Nothing makes sense in this world," says Chernick.
