1.21 JIGGOWATTS?!?!?!
t slaps head and wanders away
Spike ,'Sleeper'
Off-topic discussion. Wanna talk about corsets, duct tape, or physics? This is the place. Detailed discussion of any current-season TV must be whitefonted.
1.21 JIGGOWATTS?!?!?!
t slaps head and wanders away
Ooh - I knew someone mathy would come along and do the calculation....
In the equation E = mc², c² is a pretty big honking number. A lot of energy is released when you destroy a little bit of matter.
According to my calculations, 0.25g of antimatter reacting with 0.25g of matter would release 44 TJ of energy, or about half the size of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
Oh, there you go bringing facts into it again!
The thing I don't understand is how mass x distance² / time² ends up being energy, which is force x distance, right?
force × distance is work, not energy.
[edit: WRONG, see my correction below]
Oh, OK. Then my confusion remains the same in absolute terms - just shifted laterally.
How would the 0.25 grams of antimatter only annihilate the Vatican and nowhere else?
Well 0.25 grams of antimatter combined with 0.25 grams of regular matter would produce:
0.5 grams is 0.0005 kg
Using E=mc^2
0.0005 x 300,000,000^2 kg*m^2/s^2
That's
45,000,000,000,000 Joules which is roughly 10kt of TNT
But...
As I understand it, about half of that will be neutrinos which doesn't do anything destructive so about 5kt of actual destruction.
Edit: Shoulda known that I took too long with that.
I had to do calculations like that in college Chemistry, but I found them confusing even then.
But is Gud's answer the same as Tom's? I forget how many kilotons the Nagasaki bomb was....
I forget how many kilotons the Nagasaki bomb was....
It's in the Wikipedia article I linked to.
1 joule = 1 kg * (m² / s²), which matches the units of m × c².