Some toxic waste here, a helicopter crash there...
Ok, Peter Weller, Ray Wise, Paul McCrane... If Miguel Ferrer pops up in an episode of 24, I am going to have a fucking stroke.
All right, this is totally off-the-wall, but I have been thinking about it for a while.
E=mc^2, energy equals mass times the speed of light in a vacuum squared. Which means that one kilogram of mass has 89,875,517,873,681,764 joules inside of it. That is 21.48 megatons of TNT. The most powerful nuclear weapon ever exploded was around 50 megatons.
Now, nuclear fission bombs have shown that we can release a great deal of energy from mass.
What is stopping us from going in the reverse? Has the secret to converting energy into mass been explored seriously by anyone? Is there something I don't understand about the concept that makes energy to mass conversion either physically or humanly impossible?
I know that a few (ESC) of you who read and comment (ESC) know a few professors and other learned types. I would look it up myself, but I want to talk about it here, so I'm not gonna.
Discordant thought; let a solar collector soak up some sun, connect the batteries to a mysterious black box, and a few micrograms of gold dust waft out...
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
- President Dwight D. Eisenhower
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Paul McCrane
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5 comments:
allow me to clear up some misconceptions here.
I am a BIOLOGIST. I study GENETICS. I hate PHYSICS with the white hot burning passion of a thousand burning suns.
However...I know a physics person blogger. And I will pass along this link.
particle physicists do it all the time... they smash two protons together and a bunch of crap comes flying out that has far more mass than the two original protons... their kinetic energy has been converted into the mass of dozens or hundreds of new particles.
re: your "discordant thought"....
a "microgram" of matter would require an energy of mc^2 or (.00001g) (9 x 10^16) = 90 billion Joules.
the Sun delivers about 1000 J/s of power per square meter, which means that a one meter square solar cell would have to collect energy for 90 million seconds, or about 3 years to collect enough energy.
HA! see? I knew he would know the answers. And he even use uber-scientific language, like "bunch of crap."
awesome.
hehehehehehe, esc... that's great. "bunch of crap" i believe that is actually a newtonian tennet. "when words or descriptions really have no relevence on the outcome of the statement, you may substitute 'bunch of crap' whenever necessary" it's the newtonian law that physicists leave out of the public eye, but keep close to the vests.
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