synchronicity

Trinity was set off at 5:29:45 am (local time - 11:29:45 GMT). Couldn't they have waited 15 seconds? I'd have thought there were all sorts of advantages to having it occur precisely at a nice round time. It's not like a nuclear test is an instantaneous event - the initial radiation release occurs over seconds, the pressure wave lasts minutes, the mushroom cloud hangs around for a while and fallout rains down for days and weeks. In such a controlled environment, accumulating so much data, surely it would have been much nicer to not have to add those extra 15 seconds. Shockwave reaches pressure sensor XYZ at 5:30:14 - okay 14 + 15 = 29, no problem, but for god knows how many zillion sensors they had sprinkled out all over the place, before computers, surely that same +15 second calculation is going to get really tedious. I guess the alternative is to set up an independent timing system but given the effort society has gone to in synchronising time across the globe and sorting out all the time zones and everything, it seems a waste not to take advantage of it.

What's interesting is that precisely 24 years (and 2 hours, 2 minutes and 15 seconds later), another of the more siginificant technical events of the century, the Apollo 11 launch, occurred. Launch time was 13:32:00 GMT - they *did* make sure that launch time at least lined up on the minute, although they still couldn't hit the 13:30. The proximity makes me wonder though whether that was the goal and somebody forgot at the last moment to flip some switch and set everything back by two minutes.