text: In response to an inquiry from the British MAUD Committee, G. I. Taylor estimated the amount of energy that would be released by the explosion of an atomic bomb in air.  He postulated that for an idealized point source of energy, the spatial distributions of the flow variables would have the same form during a given time interval, the variables differing only in scale.  (Thus the name of the "similarity solution.") This hypothesis allowed the partial differential equations in terms of r (the radius of the blast wave) and t (time) to be transformed into an ordinary differential equation in terms of the similarity variable   ,
  where  is the density of the air and  is the energy that's released by the explosion. This result allowed G. I. Taylor to estimate the yield of the first atomic explosion in New Mexico in 1945 using only photographs of the blast, which had been published in newspapers and magazines. The yield of the explosion was determined by using the equation:  ,
  where  is a dimensionless constant that is a function of the ratio of the specific heat of air at constant pressure to the specific heat of air at constant volume. The value of C is also affected by radiative losses, but for air, values of C of 1.00-1.10 generally give reasonable results. In 1950, G. I. Taylor published two articles in which he revealed the yield E of the first atomic explosion, which had previously been classified and whose publication was therefore a source of controversy.
  While nuclear explosions are among the clearest examples of the destructive power of blast waves, blast waves generated by exploding conventional bombs and other weapons made from high explosives have been used as weapons of war due to their effectiveness at creating polytraumatic injury.  During World War II and the U.S.'s involvement in the Vietnam War, blast lung was a common and often deadly injury.  Improvements in vehicular and personal protective equipment have helped to reduce the incidence of blast lung.  However, as soldiers are better protected from penetrating injury and surviving previously lethal exposures, limb injuries, eye and ear injuries, and traumatic brain injuries have become more prevalent.