Three Pearls of High-Pressure Shock Compression of Solids

To honor Prof. Thadhani's outstanding accomplishments in shock synthesis of inorganic compounds and related subject matters, this paper highlights facets not often exposed of his activities beyond materials science and into the physics and thermodynamics of shock compression of solids, which is this author's field. There are many overlapping subjects of interest as covered in this article, but the subjects focused for discussion in this paper are first order phase transition, condensed phase detonation and nonequilibrium fluctuations.