The term
vaporization has also been used in a colloquial or hyperbolic way to refer to the physical destruction of an object that is exposed to intense heat or explosive force, where the object is actually blasted into small pieces rather than literally converted to gaseous form. Examples of this usage include the "vaporization" of the uninhabited
Marshall Island of
Elugelab in the 1952
Ivy Mike thermonuclear test. Many other examples can be found throughout the various
MythBusters episodes that have involved explosives, chief among them being
Cement Mix-Up, where they "vaporized" a cement truck with ANFO. At the moment of a large enough
meteor or
comet impact,
bolide detonation, a
nuclear fission,
thermonuclear fusion, or theoretical
antimatter weapon detonation, a
flux of so many
gamma ray,
x-ray,
ultraviolet, visual
light and
heat photons strikes matter in a such brief amount of time (a great number of high-energy photons, many overlapping in the same physical space) that all molecules lose their atomic bonds (atomization) and "fly apart". All atoms lose their
electron shells and become positively charged ions (
ionization), in turn emitting photons of a slightly lower energy than they had absorbed. All such matter becomes a gas of nuclei and electrons which rise into the air due to the extremely high temperature or bond to each other as they cool. The matter vaporized this way is immediately a
plasma in a state of maximum
entropy and this state steadily reduces via the factor of passing
time due to natural processes in the
biosphere and the effects of
physics at normal
temperatures and
pressures. A similar process occurs during ultrashort pulse
laser ablation, where the high
flux of incoming
electromagnetic radiation strips the target material's surface of electrons, leaving positively charged atoms which undergo a
coulomb explosion. ==Table==