![]() ![]() A few months ago, I got my wish: The Vatican Museums agreed to let me spend most of a night inside and to go wherever I wanted. But I had long wanted to experience the museums in a different way: to wander the four and a half miles of hallways after the doors close and to be there in the early hours before the doors open to explore the collection-the 20,000 sculptures and paintings and other works on display-as night settles over Rome and the galleries adjust to a quieter state of being. Over the years I had written about some of the museums’ activities, and on several occasions had met with the director, the art historian Barbara Jatta. I HAD COME OFTEN to the Vatican Museums ever since a first visit when I was in grade school. The key in the vault was the key to the Sistine Chapel. If Lewis Carroll had invented a nuclear-launch protocol for the Holy See, this might have been it. I opened the vault and found another key. He handed the key to me, gesturing to a tiny, unmarked vault in the wall of the bunker. He had picked up the key that morning from a command post at the Porta Sant’Anna, one of the Vatican gateways, and would return it shortly before midnight. The flap, now torn, bore his signature and had been stamped with the papal coat of arms. He kept a larger set of keys for himself, so that he and I could make our way anywhere.īefore leaving the bunker, Crea had taken a key from an envelope. ![]() On this night, when the last of the visitors had gone, Crea piled a tangle of keys on the counter of the security station, then handed out key rings to his staff. The screen gives the enclosure a quiet glow.Įach sector of the museum has its own large key ring, the kind carried by a jailer. Behind the glass, alongside a crucifix and a photograph of Pope Francis, a flatscreen presents live images from security cameras. ![]() At the glassed-in security station in the Atrium of the Four Gates, departing guards punch time cards. Behind them, here and there, lights begin to dim. Over the next two hours, until the exit doors are also closed, the last visitors proceed through the hallways. The heavy bronze doors at the museums’ main entrance are pulled shut every afternoon at 4 p.m. In this round of physics vs supervillains, physics came out on top.Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. The metal armor would have not provided enough friction or compressibility, resulting in sluggish snaps. So the verdict on Thanos’ snap? The team tested the power and speed of the finger snap wearing thimbles, though the results fell short. The forces behind the highspeed event may be able to be applied to high-tech prosthetic hands, creating more realistic and free flowing movements. “This is the only scientific project in my lab in which we could snap our fingers and get data.” Understanding this mechanism isn’t just interesting, but also important for biomechanics. “Based on ancient Greek art from 300 B.C., humans may very well have been snapping their fingers for hundreds of thousands of years before that, yet we are only now beginning to scientifically study it,” said Bhamla. ![]() The report, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, showed the impressive seven millisecond time period of the snap – around 20 times as fast as a blink of the eye! The finger also accelerates at a rate of 1.6 million degrees per millisecond, three times the amount of a professional baseball player’s arm when pitching. When adding lubrication into the equation, the snap fell short, emphasizing friction as a key parameter also. “This is how this whole thing got started because we want to figure out the key ingredients required to snap our fingers.”Īfter recording the event, the results showed that the finger pads ability to compress is a key factor behind it. “We got into this heated debate, trying to understand if he could actually snap or not,” Bhamla said. They wanted to investigate if a snap in such a rigid glove would even be possible. Thanos, the evil villain in the story, uses his superpower snap whilst wearing a metal glove to wipe out half of the universe. The research group, led by Saad Bhamla, actually took inspiration from Marvel’s 2018 smash hit Avengers: Infinity War. Thanks to high-speed video footage from Georgia Tech in Atlanta, exactly how impressive the movement is has been exposed. Turns out the simple snap is a physics gold mine. ![]()
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