Buffy ,'Empty Places'
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.
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.
Tom's link says 21kt for Nagasaki so his 1/2 Nagasaki and my 10kt are the same answer.
Fat Man and Little Boy were in the 10-12 kiloton range, weren't they?
eta: Ah, perhaps that was a lowball estimate I heard somewhere.
Oh. I was just thinking the Nagasaki bomb was more powerful than that.
OK, all is well. You may all resume your non e=mc² activities....
damn you people making me have equations running around in my brain. I'll be walking around mutting f=ma, d=.5atsquared
I'm in the middle of a boring project, so I was hoping people would start talking more here to distract me.
Be careful what you wish for I guess.
I have Bust a Move in my head and I don't know why.
You're welcome.
So what's the equation that relates energy to work?