by Hannelore Sudermann • photography by Robert Hubner

When Washington State University’s Shock Physics Laboratory first opened a half-century ago, it focused on a fairly new field—looking at what happens to an object under intense, immediate pressure. Bright graduate students brainstormed exotic experiments which they fired through a 40-foot-long gas gun housed in the basement of the Physical Sciences Building. High pressure and short timescales were the key ingredients.

Back then, the program was supported by national defense money, had ties to the nuclear industry, and produced scientists who went on to work at national laboratories like Sandia, Livermore, and Los Alamos.

Today the guns are still in the basement. The students are still concocting complex experiments. And the lab still has ties to the keepers of the nation’s nuclear stockpile. What has changed is the notion of what is fast and what is short.

The laboratory has evolved into a large institute with its own $12.4-million building. It encompasses a cadre of top scientists and some of the newest and best equipment, cameras, and computers for the research field and now gets millions of dollars in federal research support. Most recently, it received an $18-million extension on a Department of Energy grant and $6.5 million from the Office of Naval Research to expand applied shock research to Spokane.

“This is truly a multidisciplinary research organization,” says Yogendra Gupta (’72 Ph.D. Phys.), director of WSU’s Institute for Shock Physics. With the scientists and students from the University’s physics, chemistry, and engineering departments, and with millions in defense funding for research, “we have a terrific amount of freedom here to do what we want to do.” And what Gupta wants to do is conduct first-rate fundamental science, produce first-rate scientists, and perform work in conjunction with the national laboratories.

Often in science, simplicity is elegance. Shock physics is a simple idea. It is the physics of what happens to material that has been hit with a wave of shock, like a meteor slamming into a hillside.

At WSU, shock waves have traditionally been made by giant guns that shoot one object into another with such force and speed and precision that the impact can, at least for an instant, change the physical and chemical properties of the target object. Now the equipment here has been expanded to include laser/shock and high-pressure laboratories.

The Institute for Shock Physics pairs big curious kids with big fabulous toys. Their research, which can have practical applications, really comes about from the big question “What if?”

Simple, yes. But these experiments are connected to a problem so big and complex that few want to think about it, and most have forgotten it exists. Pullman, an oasis of education in the rural west, is very much on the minds of leaders in the national nuclear security scene.