But esoteric as all this sounds, it is actually very applied stuff. The scientists at the national labs need some very basic information to support and feed their models and simulations. Which of course is where WSU and other academic institutions come in. As was announced by the Department of Energy on June 23, Gupta is the director of the newly formed Institute for Shock Physics. In light of this relationship, what universities are particularly good at, says Gupta, is taking on hard, long-term, fundamental problems.
Universities provide young, bright minds who bring new ideas to difficult questions.
Universities are also, relatively speaking, cost effective for fundamental research. As such, the institute will study such things as equations of state of materials under appropriate conditions of interest, material yielding and failure, chemical decomposition of condensed explosives, interface response, and material response at high energy densities. One example is the role of aging on the shock response of materials. All this means is striving to achieve a detailed understanding of a given shock phenomenon from the atomic level all the way through to the macroscopic effect. The boom, in other words, at both ends of its short-lived reality.