> At 8:16 a.m. on August 6, 1945, a fission weapon containing sixty-four kilograms of uranium detonated 580 meters above the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and Einstein’s equation proved mercilessly accurate. The bomb itself was extremely inefficient: just one kilogram of the uranium underwent fission, and only seven hundred milligrams of mass—the weight of a butterfly—was converted into energy. But it was enough to obliterate an entire city in a fraction of a second.
This reminded me of this quote from "Midnight in Chernobyl". Quite amazing to thing of such small amounts of mass being converted into such extraordinary amounts of energy.
Guess this is saying that the one kilogram of uranium is converted to fission products which are slightly lighter--one kilogram minus a butterfly--and the amount of energy released from this difference is e=(mass of butterfly)*c^2
> In short, if I lost 1% of my electrons, I would not be a person anymore. I would be a bomb. A Coulomb bomb, if you will, with an energy equivalent to that of ten billion (modern) atomic bombs. Which would surely destroy the planet. All by removing just 1 out of every 100 of my electrons.
The most energy you can extract from any type of bomb would be if it was converted to energy at 100% efficiency.
70kg of mass is equivalent of 1,5GT of TNT.
So still a lot of bombs, but more like 1,5 thousand 1MT bombs and not "10 billions" of them.
I am not a physicist, but I think what this shows is physical impossibility of having 1% of your charge removed and your body still considered to be body even for an infinitesimal amount of time. To do that you would have to add so much energy to your body that just the mass equivalent of energy would have to be many times more than your body.
This is incorrect. Creating a charge gradient in a system increases its mass-energy. In this situation the potential energy is dramatically larger than the rest mass of the precharged person.
Edit in response to your edit: what it shows is that it would take an extraordinary amount of energy to cause the change.
Isn't that what I wrote? That separating the charge would be equivalent to adding potential energy basically adding to mass of your 70kg body so that it no longer is 70kg?
> The most energy you can extract from any type of bomb would be if it was converted to energy at 100% efficiency.
Under normal circumstances, a bomb's energy is endogenous. But in the blog's thought-experiment, the energy is assumed to be exogenous. Therefore, your assumption that "the explosion is bounded by the mass of the person" doesn't apply to this scenario. Instead of TNT, imagine a rubberband.
> The most energy you can extract from any type of bomb would be if it was converted to energy at 100% efficiency.
Not true, imagine 2 positrons next to each other, the force these particle subject to accelerate to avoid each other is greater than the mass of those positrons itself.
In other words, if you can get accelerated to 0.9999c, you'll possess far larger energy than your rest mass.
We commonly refer to the energy released if the bomb explodes. If what we cared about was the relativistic mass energy of the matter, we wouldn't need to even refer to bombs. We'd just refer to the mass.
> Because of my 40 million Coulombs, the force between myself and my “image self” would be something like 10^{20} tons. To give that some perspective, consider that 10^{20} tons is just a bit smaller than the weight of the entire planet earth. So the force pulling me toward the earth would be something like the force of a collision between the earth and the planet Mars.
Unnecessarily heavy imo.
And I'm just going to say, the person you do this to might not have the scientific experience to realize that the electrons are the reason why they can't move anymore and why they've ripped a hole in the vacuum, but they'll still notice the effect, so it's inaccurate to say that they don't care.
this website goes in a cycle. electrons bad, electrons good. nobody holds a real position. the current "correct" take is a whim based on flavor-of-the-week politics.
and of course nobody here talks about the end user, or the social effects of electrons. please take some responsibility!!
Seems apt if you think that every time someone uses a transporter, they are really committing suicide with a new copy of themselves reconstituted elsewhere.
I can't remember who came up with this, but this realisation is made a lot more vivid if you imagine the "original" you being killed with an axe while your "teleported" you is happily unaware. I believe the videogame Soma has an analogous situation, although I haven't played it.
> Similarly, cloning would violate the no-teleportation theorem, which says that it is impossible to convert a quantum state into a sequence of classical bits (even an infinite sequence of bits), copy those bits to some new location, and recreate a copy of the original quantum state in the new location. This should not be confused with entanglement-assisted teleportation, which does allow a quantum state to be destroyed in one location, and an exact copy to be recreated in another location.
For anyone interested in this conceit, I recommend an episode of The Outer Limits called "Think Like a Dinosaur" dealing with this idea and what happens when it goes wrong.
Part of why I don't see the appeal, even if it were possible, of uploading your "consciousness" whatever that is, to extend "life." It's not you, and you're still dead.
Most of the mass of an atom is concentrated in the nucleus. I don't want to dig out a calculator, but you probably couldn't easily measure the loss of 1% of your electrons.
If there's such a large voltage, would it discharge fast enough that the actual force doesn't matter that much? The extreeeeemly high force is probably commiserate with the extreeeeeeeeemly fast discharge, so you wouldn't build that much kinetic energy.
There'd still be loads of energy, definitely enough to turn you into a cloud of plasma with the 'millions of lightning bolts' he references, but that seems like it's orders of magnitude short to destroy the entire planet.
It’s a thought experiment to teach physics to students rather than a practical idea, so this scenario magically deletes all the specified electrons simultaneously without a chance for the body to discharge gracefully.
Given this wildly implausible conceit, you would explode much as they say.
Readit News
This reminded me of this quote from "Midnight in Chernobyl". Quite amazing to thing of such small amounts of mass being converted into such extraordinary amounts of energy.
A charged laptop battery gains about 2 picograms of mass.
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The most energy you can extract from any type of bomb would be if it was converted to energy at 100% efficiency.
70kg of mass is equivalent of 1,5GT of TNT.
So still a lot of bombs, but more like 1,5 thousand 1MT bombs and not "10 billions" of them.
I am not a physicist, but I think what this shows is physical impossibility of having 1% of your charge removed and your body still considered to be body even for an infinitesimal amount of time. To do that you would have to add so much energy to your body that just the mass equivalent of energy would have to be many times more than your body.
Edit in response to your edit: what it shows is that it would take an extraordinary amount of energy to cause the change.
Under normal circumstances, a bomb's energy is endogenous. But in the blog's thought-experiment, the energy is assumed to be exogenous. Therefore, your assumption that "the explosion is bounded by the mass of the person" doesn't apply to this scenario. Instead of TNT, imagine a rubberband.
Not true, imagine 2 positrons next to each other, the force these particle subject to accelerate to avoid each other is greater than the mass of those positrons itself.
In other words, if you can get accelerated to 0.9999c, you'll possess far larger energy than your rest mass.
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> Because of my 40 million Coulombs, the force between myself and my “image self” would be something like 10^{20} tons. To give that some perspective, consider that 10^{20} tons is just a bit smaller than the weight of the entire planet earth. So the force pulling me toward the earth would be something like the force of a collision between the earth and the planet Mars.
Unnecessarily heavy imo.
And I'm just going to say, the person you do this to might not have the scientific experience to realize that the electrons are the reason why they can't move anymore and why they've ripped a hole in the vacuum, but they'll still notice the effect, so it's inaccurate to say that they don't care.
and of course nobody here talks about the end user, or the social effects of electrons. please take some responsibility!!
They are joking about HN not liking Electron (the framework).
How about heart? What if you removed part of your brain.
What if you grew a replacement part instead of reattaching? When does Theseus become a new person?
Alternatively can you prove you were alive yesterday? Or do you just have the memories, and others have memories of an indistinguishable copy?
How much of your body existed 20 years ago? Are you the same person?
> Similarly, cloning would violate the no-teleportation theorem, which says that it is impossible to convert a quantum state into a sequence of classical bits (even an infinite sequence of bits), copy those bits to some new location, and recreate a copy of the original quantum state in the new location. This should not be confused with entanglement-assisted teleportation, which does allow a quantum state to be destroyed in one location, and an exact copy to be recreated in another location.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem#Consequence...
https://youtu.be/vBkBS4O3yvY
Edit: No, not sure it is.
I... Really? Y'all ok with just losing a randomly selected pound or two of flesh? I think that'd be pretty exciting, and not in a good way.
Hmmm, sounds like what happened when someone asked the coffee machine for a "cup of joe"
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-294
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Aside from the ensuing cataclysm, that is.
There'd still be loads of energy, definitely enough to turn you into a cloud of plasma with the 'millions of lightning bolts' he references, but that seems like it's orders of magnitude short to destroy the entire planet.
Given this wildly implausible conceit, you would explode much as they say.
A hand-held device that can temporarily "suppress the charge on the electron" seems like a really bad idea now.