  Based on his 50-year career in static high-pressure research, P. W. Bridgman
(PWB) is the father of modern high-pressure physics. What is not generally
recognized is that Bridgman was also intimately connected with establishing
shock compression as a scientific tool and he predicted major events in shock
research that occurred up to 40 years after his death. In 1956 the first phase
transition under shock compression was reported in Fe at 13 GPa (130 kbar). PWB
said a phase transition could not occur in a ~microsec, thus setting off a
controversy. The scientific legitimacy of shock compression resulted 5 years
later when static high-pressure researchers confirmed with x-ray diffraction
the existence of epsilon-Fe. Once PWB accepted the fact that shock waves
generated with chemical explosives were a valid scientific tool, he immediately
realized that substantially higher pressures would be achieved with nuclear
explosives. He included his ideas for achieving higher pressures in articles
published a few years after his death. L. V. Altshuler eventually read Bridgman
articles and pursued the idea of using nuclear explosives to generate super
high pressures, which subsequently morphed today into giant lasers. PWB also
anticipated combining static and shock methods, which today is done with
pre-compression of a soft sample in a diamond anvil cell followed by
laser-driven shock compression. One variation of that method is the
reverberating-shock technique, in which the first shock pre-compresses a soft
sample and subsequent reverberations isentropically compress the first-shocked
state.
