The whole sequence is designed to do one thing relentlessly well: turn stored energy into extreme speed.

The old magic trick where the magician pretends to catch a bullet in their teeth, we're really doing that.

But this bullet is traveling 10 times faster than a rifle bullet.

The portion of time where we are collecting useful data is less than a microsecond, or one-millionth of a second, and that's actually maybe for our slower experiments.

Some of the more typical experiments, it's more like 100 nanoseconds.

So a typical experiment for us would be we may be measuring the speed of a shock wave as it transits through a sample.

So we'll measure very precisely the moment of impact, and then we'll measure how long it takes for that shock wave that's generated to transit across the sample.

In a fraction of a microsecond, plutonium is pushed into extremes too fast to see and too important to guess at.