Ooh - I knew someone mathy would come along and do the calculation....
You walk in worlds the others can't begin to imagine.
Drusilla ,'Conversations with Dead People'
Natter 63: Life after PuppyCam
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.
tommyrot - Feb 18, 2009 10:13:09 am PST #6872 of 30000
Sir, it's not an offence to let your cat eat your bacon. Okay? And we don't arrest cats, I'm very sorry.
Tom Scola - Feb 18, 2009 10:14:55 am PST #6873 of 30000
Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.
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.
Jessica - Feb 18, 2009 10:17:49 am PST #6874 of 30000
And then Ortus came and said "It's Ortin' time" and they all Orted off into the sunset
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!
tommyrot - Feb 18, 2009 10:18:56 am PST #6875 of 30000
Sir, it's not an offence to let your cat eat your bacon. Okay? And we don't arrest cats, I'm very sorry.
The thing I don't understand is how mass x distance² / time² ends up being energy, which is force x distance, right?
Tom Scola - Feb 18, 2009 10:21:02 am PST #6876 of 30000
Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.
force × distance is work, not energy.
[edit: WRONG, see my correction below]
tommyrot - Feb 18, 2009 10:22:07 am PST #6877 of 30000
Sir, it's not an offence to let your cat eat your bacon. Okay? And we don't arrest cats, I'm very sorry.
Oh, OK. Then my confusion remains the same in absolute terms - just shifted laterally.
Gudanov - Feb 18, 2009 10:22:22 am PST #6878 of 30000
Coding and Sleeping
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.
tommyrot - Feb 18, 2009 10:26:15 am PST #6879 of 30000
Sir, it's not an offence to let your cat eat your bacon. Okay? And we don't arrest cats, I'm very sorry.
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....
Tom Scola - Feb 18, 2009 10:29:16 am PST #6880 of 30000
Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.
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.
Gudanov - Feb 18, 2009 10:29:28 am PST #6881 of 30000
Coding and Sleeping
Tom's link says 21kt for Nagasaki so his 1/2 Nagasaki and my 10kt are the same answer.