3 ms·
I thoroughly enjoyed What If 2. I was, however, quite disappointed he chose to mock the "balloon one atom thick" question instead of answering it.
by causi 4y ago
I thoroughly enjoyed What If 2. I was, however, quite disappointed he chose to mock the "balloon one atom thick" question instead of answering it.
- bombcar 4y agoThat's sad to hear, a big part of the fun was answering "stupid/impossible" questions by assuming whatever makes them impossible was actually possible.
- B1FF_PSUVM 4y agoWhat was the question? My search-fu is failing there ...
- causi 4y agoIf you inflated a normal party balloon until its skin was one atom thick, how large would the balloon have to be?
- B1FF_PSUVM 4y agoThanks, it looks pretty reasonable, except for rearranging the molecular bonds like atoms were shingles. Assuming that was possible, it might be just a matter of r-squared - supposing we started with a million-atom thick skin, stretching the radius by one thousand should do it.
- scythe 4y agoI assume that's why he didn't bother answering — you just take the volume of rubber, divide by the covalent radius of carbon, and plug into A = 4 pi r^2.