12 ms·
What if I were 1% charged? (2013)
- marstall 5y agothat escalated quickly toward the end!
- HenryKissinger 5y ago> 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 Chicxulub impactor struck with the force of ten billion Hiroshima bombs, and while the world underwent a mass extinction event, the planet itself was fine.
- datameta 5y agoIt's possible that by "(modern)" the author means hydrogen bombs which are 3 magnitudes more powerful than the fission devices used in WW2.
- Ekaros 5y agoPlanets are tough things. Destroying them is hard, oh the things on them sure. But the whole planet no. It will just probably gather itself together in a while anyway...
- zaphar 5y agoMight have a few new moons afterwords.
- lisper 5y ago> the planet itself was fine That depends on your quality metric. I don't think the dinosaurs thought it was fine. IMHO, destroying all of the things that are cool and interesting (to me) about this planet counts as "destroying the planet" even if there is still a hunk of rock orbiting the sun afterwards.
- dylan604 5y agoMercury, Venus, Mars are all planets. None have organic life on them. What you "consider" a planet is not what science calls a planet. Just ask Pluto.
- ben_w 5y agoThe spherical cow in a vacuum approximation I used in a different thread gave me 1e33 J, which is 4.78e15 Tsar Bomba nukes or 1.6e19 Little Boy nukes. This was unnecessarily compact (because the suggestion there was drinking antimatter) and thus high-energy, but it’s 4 times the gravitational binding energy of planet Earth.
- akshayB 5y agoAny biological life keeps itself alive by maintaining a steady state of entropy. Making even a small changes like this is never going to end well.
- MrRadar 5y agoThis reminds me of the XKCD What If series. I wish Randall was still doing that.
- thanksforfish 5y agoAgreed, very enjoyable. https://what-if.xkcd.com/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/
- rob74 5y agoMy thoughts exactly... "this is just like Randall Munroe's What If, but without the funny drawings unfortunately"
- GuB-42 5y agoThat one specifically: https://what-if.xkcd.com/140/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/140/
- ranger207 5y agoDoesn't he have a New York Times column now? I think I saw he had a What-If-looking article there, but I couldn't read it without a subscription
- reizorc 5y agoWould the same happen if you ate 800g of positrons?
- Retric 5y agoYes, assuming all those positrons started out in your stomach, the actual antimatter wouldn’t add significant energy in comparison. The charge balance stays the same when positrons and electrons collide. So, bigger boom than just an anti mater sandwich, not that you would notice the difference. Relativity actually makes this worse as the electrons are limited to the speed of light but the charge can keep dumping ever more energy into them until their far enough apart. Similar idea, just larger scale: https://what-if.xkcd.com/140/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/140/
- ISL 5y agoBefore any concerns about charge, the simple act of doing so would release 100000000000000000 Joules of energy. For scale, the largest nuclear weapon ever tested converted around 2300g of matter to energy[1]. Please don't do that :). [1] https://faculty.etsu.edu/gardnerr/einstein/e_mc2.htm#:~:text=The%20Tzar%20Bomba%2C%20from%20Wikipedia,equal%20to%20about%205%20pounds https://faculty.etsu.edu/gardnerr/einstein/e_mc2.htm#:~:text....
- ben_w 5y agoIf you could somehow do that without the 140 gigacoulombs of charge exploding violently before you got close, approximately this: https://youtu.be/YtCTzbh4mNQ?t=16 https://youtu.be/YtCTzbh4mNQ?t=16 If you don’t invoke space magic to prevent the positrons from exploding even before they annihilate anything, and they are confined into a 0.1m radius ball, the charge density energy overwhelms the annihilation energy and the ball of positrons explode with a yield of ~1e33 J, which — without exaggeration — looks more like this: https://youtu.be/KNjWpSglUOY https://youtu.be/KNjWpSglUOY
- jcims 5y agoSeems like a positron beam would be a sweet weapon in space.
- 8bitsrule 5y agoA similar philosophical what if: What would happen to us if we were suddenly able to understand anything with no effort ... no matter what the question, as soon as we thought of it, the answer appeared?
- npwr 5y agoThen we would have to build a computer that generates the questions. Let's say, a computer the size of a planet..
- withinboredom 5y ago42
- nick238 5y agoIf 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.
- ben_w 5y agoIt’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.
- lmilcin 5y ago> 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.
- simonh 5y agoWe 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- benchaney 5y agoThis 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.
- lmilcin 5y agoIsn'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?
- danShumway 5y agoOh, so now HN suddenly likes electrons? > 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.
- ruined 5y agothis 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!!
- cheschire 5y agoYou meant the “correct current take”, surely.
- formerly_proven 5y agoIt's a super position, really.
- topaz0 5y agoWorth noting that this electron cycle is important if you want to have a magnetic field.
- malwrar 5y agoDid HN ever not like electrons? I kinda need them to dick around with computers, I was pretty sure most other people here were into that too.
- 5y ago
- modeless 5y agoI've wondered for a while why we don't use electrostatic forces more. Electrostatic motors and electrostatic speakers do exist but they are very rare compared to the ubiquitous magnetic types. It seems like it should be possible to make a really good electrostatic muscle for robots. I know that there has been some work in this direction like https://www.artimusrobotics.com/technology https://www.artimusrobotics.com/technology, but what makes it so much harder and less developed than regular magnetic electric motor technology?
- npwr 5y agoConstraining the electrons apart would require a very serious insulator. The muscle would just arc between its two ends. To make it work you have to distribute electrical potential along all the "motor". Just like biological muscles do with protein configurations. We just aren't technogically advanced enough to build such metamaterials ourselves.
- modeless 5y agoIf you charge two halves of a muscle oppositely so they attract, you would get arcing between them without a strong insulator in between. But if you charge two halves both negative or both positive there would be no arcing between them. They would still strongly repel and it seems like you could use that to do work.
- jcims 5y agoElectrostatics generally require high voltage (the HASEL muscles you linked to require 2-20kV [0]) to generate usable force. This creates lots of engineering and regulatory challenges for product development because, as the esteemed William Osman says, "Welcome to the world of high voltage, where everything's a wire and you're probably going to die" [1]. [0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/advs.201900178 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/advs.201900... [1] https://youtu.be/IiJAq53knwc?t=288 https://youtu.be/IiJAq53knwc?t=288
- adrian_b 5y ago
- Symmetry 5y agoWould the mass from all that potential energy be enough to create a black hole?
- ben_w 5y agoNot even close. My (excessive) estimate in another thread is 1e33 J, which would have a Schwarzschild radius of about 16 picometers, and something (I don’t really understand it) happens if a black hole is charged which makes the event horizon radius smaller than the Schwarzschild radius. Now I’m wondering what would happen if you tried to create a black hole purely from the energy density of an electric field. Do you asymptotically approach an extremal charged black hole? Or do you make a super-extremal black hole? I’ve heard conflicting claims about if super-extremal is even possible.
- VBprogrammer 5y ago> 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mrtnmcc 5y agoGuess 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
- shadowgovt 5y agoYeah, the mass-energy relationship is at scales that are hard to wrap a human brain around. A charged laptop battery gains about 2 picograms of mass.
- mrtnmcc 5y agoWait is that right? I thought charging a lithium battery was simply displacing electrons from cathode to anode, but the total number of electrons in the whole battery is conserved (and hence mass). Or is this converting that electric potential into an equivalent mass? Does this actually manifest as a difference on a scale?
- shadowgovt 5y agoThe total particle count is conserved. ... But the total mass of a molecule is also affected by the energy in the chemical configuration; the chemistry of the charged battery has more energy than the uncharged battery. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/195696/do-chemical-bonds-have-mass https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/195696/do-chemic...
- teekert 5y agoThe moment we invent the Star Trek transporter we have the ultimate weapon by just teleporting some electrons out of our enemy.
- nescioquid 5y agoSeems apt if you think that every time someone uses a transporter, they are really committing suicide with a new copy of themselves reconstituted elsewhere.
- rnoorda 5y agoFor 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.
- User23 5y agoPart 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.
- teekert 5y agoThe pattern that is "the other" you will argue otherwise.
- ASalazarMX 5y agoIn fact, the other you would be very grateful that you (both) didn't succumb to narcissism, and instead copied your consciousness to a better body.
- Aperocky 5y agoNot if there's a transition, a migration if you will.
- 5y ago
- jredwards 5y agoThis reminds me of Randall Monroe's "What If" blog/book. I really enjoy these types of questions, which are adequately described by Munroe's subtitle: "Serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions." https://what-if.xkcd.com/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/
- mitko 5y agoHow do you reconcile the two seemingly contradictory statements “it would be equivalent of getting hit by three lightnings at the same time” and “it would destroy the planet” Lightning happens all the time without affecting the planet, I doubt a triple lightning would do more than 10x the damage of a single lightning. To me this kind of contradiction is a sign that the initial assumption is impossible as lmilcin suggests here, and as the original author concludes at the end of the article. EDIT: 3 million, not 3. My mistake. Thanks for pointing that out.
- ben_ 5y agoExcellent read, I'd recommend anyone that likes this to check out 'What If' by Randall Munroe (XKCD)
- jppope 5y agoArticles like this are literally why I come to HN
- muterad_murilax 5y agoThe original HN-rewritten title ”What would happen if I lost 1% of my electrons?” was way better imho.
- gigatexal 5y agoWhat an amazing write up. I feel inspired to study physics now. I wonder how my life might be different if I sought math and science courses instead of bailing after calculus.
- mrfusion 5y agoI don’t see why we can store energy with this concept. Eg getting even a small object to .01% charge would be a ton of energy. We could store it with something with an equal and opposite charge (across a large insulator) to cancel out the net pull on things. And encase it in even two meters of glass or plastic if needed. Anyone know if this has ever been researched?
- nayuki 5y agoThat's called a capacitor. The theory is well-known and many different products exist. But they don't store as much energy as you would hope.
- mrfusion 5y agoThat’s not what I mean though. Capacitors are limited by the breakdown voltage. But what if we make the plates separate by more distance and just increase the charge.
- klyrs 5y agoThen you'll have a capacitor with a larger plate separation. Play with the equations! http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/pplate.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/pplate.h...
- mrfusion 5y agoOk now we’re getting somewhere. So the equation shows that as d goes up, C goes down. But as d goes up the breakdown voltage also increases so my question is why can’t we force more voltage on there.
- goldenkey 5y agoYou can but eventually the voltage gets so high that the resistance of the air isn't enough to prevent a short via a discharge. And in a vacuum, the resistance is even less. One would have to keep the capacitor in a super resistant gas or fluid to prevent a short.
- SavantIdiot 5y agoThe only people who ask questions like this are Physics TAs and children. Both are equally intimidating. The former, because they know how students learn, and they can ask fantastical oblique questions to test basic knowledge. The latter, because they have no prejudices about physics and ask fantastical oblique questions without regard for logic.
- throwaway1239Mx 5y ago> Now, 1% may not sound like a big deal. After all, there is almost no reason for excitement or concern when you lose 1% of your total mass. 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.
- curiousllama 5y agoDoesn't say random... I lose about 1% of my mass some mornings in the bathroom!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mcguire 5y agoMost 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. Aside from the ensuing cataclysm, that is.
- mikewarot 5y ago>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 https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-294
- dang 5y agoDiscussed at the time: What if I were 1% charged? (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10161497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10161497 - Sept 2015 (21 comments)
- klyrs 5y agoWhat would happen to a black hole which was charged to 1%?
- Aperocky 5y agoIt becomes a charged blackhole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reissner%E2%80%93Nordstr%C3%B6m_metric#Charged_black_holes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reissner%E2%80%93Nordstr%C3%B6...
- kabdib 5y agoAnyone else remember Larry Niven's "slaver weapon" (a common weapon / digging tool from his Known Space stories)? A hand-held device that can temporarily "suppress the charge on the electron" seems like a really bad idea now.
- mcguire 5y agoOn the two-beam version, do not pull both triggers at once!
- beefman 5y agoAh, the last year of the blogging era, when still it took several clicks to find the name of the author, and his photo was nowhere to be found.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> when still it took several clicks to find the name of the author Well, for 0 clicks the post is noted "by Brian", and for one click the blog's About page identifies him as "Brian Skinner[,] an assistant professor in theoretical condensed matter physics." What are you talking about?