Tag Archives: of

Uncategorized

Could you kill the human race with a BB gun?

As you might have guessed, this post is heavily influenced by xkcd’s brilliant weekly What-If blog. 

While pondering meteorites striking the earth with absurd velocities, I got to wondering whether or not you could actually kill the human race with a single BB. Because physics is a frightening place, the answer to questions like this is usually yes.

To simplify the first stage of calculations, we need to know how much energy is required to kill the human race. I will call this constant the “ohgod,” and I will set it equal to the kinetic energy of a 15-kilometer-wide stony asteroid traveling at 22 kilometers per second, which would be more than sufficient to cause a mass extinction which would almost certainly wipe out the human race. One ohgod is approximately 1.283 x 10^24 joules, or about 2.6 Chicxulubs (or, as people who fear the awesomeness of Mesoamerican words put it, 2.6 dinosaur-killers). 

The mass of a BB is surprisingly hard to find, although there is a very handy chart listing the masses of high-end BBs in grains, which can easily be converted to grams. By my reckoning, a standard 4.5-millimeter (0.177 caliber) BB should weigh about 0.4 grams. In order to figure out how fast a 0.4-gram BB would have to be moving to have 1 ohgod of kinetic energy, we must solve the relativistic kinetic energy equation for velocity. The relativistic kinetic energy equation is a little unwieldy:

E = [(1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2)) + 1] * m * c^2

I actually had to get out pen and paper to solve this equation for v. Here’s my math, to prove that I’m not a lazy cretin:

Image

When I calculated v and plugged my numbers back into the relativistic kinetic energy formula on WolframAlpha, I was greeted with one of the most satisfying things a nerd can ever see: I got back exactly 1.283 x 10^24 joules, which means I didn’t have to do all that algebra again.

As it turns out, in order to have a kinetic energy of a species-killing asteroid, a BB would have to be traveling quite fast. I would have to be traveling at 0.9999999999999999999996074284163612948528545037647345 c, in fact. That speed is slower than the speed of light by only a few parts in 10^22, which is to say by only a few parts in 10 billion trillion. A few parts in 10 billion trillion equates to a bacterium-sized drop of water added to an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Feel free to insert your own joke about homeopathy here.

Our lethal BB would be traveling almost as fast as the fastest-moving particles ever detected. I’m thinking here about the Oh-my-God particle, which was (probably) a proton that hit Earth’s atmosphere at 0.9999999999999999999999951 c. The Oh-my-God particle is faster by a hair. But our BB is still traveling a ludicrous speeds. Light is fast. A beam of light could circle the Earth in 133 milliseconds, which, if you look at reaction-time data, is about half the time it takes a human being to detect a stimulus and for the nerve impulse to travel down their arm and make a muscle contract. Very few physical objects can hold their own against light. But our BB could. If you raced our BB and a beam of light head-to-head, after a thousand years, the BB would only be lagging 3 millimeters behind, which is about the diameter of a peppercorn, which is ridiculous.

But the question here is not “How fast would a BB have to be traveling to have the same kinetic energy as a humanity-ending asteroid.” The question is “Could you actually use a hyper-velocity BB to kill the human race,” which is much more interesting and complicated. 

First of all, the BB would have an insane amount of kinetic energy. E = m * c^2, of course, and from that, we know that our BB’s kinetic energy (its energy alone) would have a mass of 1.428 * 10^7 kilograms, which is about the mass of five Boeing 747 jet airliners. I would have to be a very gifted physicist to tell you what happens when you’ve got atoms with that kind of energy, but I suspect that there would be very weird quantum effects (aren’t there always?) which would conspire to slow the BB down. Because of quantum randomness, I imagine the BB would constantly be emitting high-energy gamma rays, which would decay into electron-positron and proton-antiproton pairs. Which is to say that our BB would be moving so fast that, rather than leaving behind a wake of Cherenkov radiation, it would leave behind a wake of actual physical matter, conjured seemingly from the ether by the conversion of its kinetic energy. 

As for what would happen when the BB actually hit the Earth, that’s beyond my power to calculate, on account of I don’t have access to a fucking supercomputer. But we can assume that the BB would pass straight through the Earth with no physical impact: all of its interactions with our planet would probably be on the level of ultra-high-energy particle physics. And from that, we can estimate its effects.

The BB would cut a cylindrical path 4.5 millimeters across and 1 earth diameter long. If it deposited all of its kinetic energy along this track, it would raise the temperature of the rock by 10^15 Kelvin, which would make it one million times hotter than a supernova, which would most certainly be more than enough to kill all of us and vaporize a significant fraction of the Earth.

But the BB would only spend 44 milliseconds passing through the Earth, and somehow I doubt that regular matter would stop it entirely. Let’s assume instead that only one tenth of its energy got deposited in its track. We’re still talking a temperature a hundred thousand times that in the center of a supernova, which is ridiculous and would, once again, kill us all and peel the skin off the planet.

What if the BB only loses one one hundredth of its energy as it passes through the Earth? Same result: the Earth is replaced by a ball of radioactive lava.

But if, because of its ridiculous speed, it only loses one one millionth of its kinetic energy interacting with Earth, it still heats its needle-thin track to 3 billion kelvin, which is hot enough to fuse Earth’s silicon into iron and produce a violent explosion that would spawn earthquakes and firestorms and might, in spite of the energy losses, kill us all anyway.

But when you consider how much energy even the mighty Oh-my-God particle (which was, let me remind you, moving so fast that light was having trouble staying ahead of it) deposited just by hitting the atmosphere, I’d say the BB would lose quite a bit more than one one-millionth of its kinetic energy on impact. And I’d say that that kinetic energy would be spread over a fairly wide area. I’m thinking it would leave behind a column of hydrogen-bomb-temperature fusion plasma in the atmosphere, then hit the crust and fan out within an ice-cream-cone-shaped volume of the mantle. The nastiness of the results depend entirely on how big an ice-cream cone we’re talking, but it’s likely to be fairly narrow and fairly long, so we’re probably looking at a near-supernova-temperature column of fusing rock plasma with a length measured in kilometers. The explosion would be worse than anything the Earth has ever seen and would, yes, almost certainly kill all of us. If the immediate radiation didn’t get us, then the explosion would expose the mantle and lift enough dust to darken the sky for years.

You know, at the start of this, I thought I had an idea I could pitch to Daisy Outdoor Products. Now that I think about it, I think I’ll put the proposal in a drawer and forget about it.

Standard
Uncategorized

Fun with logarithms 2: A race between a snail and a beam of light.

In my last post, I mentioned how cool logarithmic scales were. A logarithmic scale, for instance, takes two numbers that differ by a factor of one trillion (say 0.001 and 1,000,000,000, which differ by 999,999,999.999) and reduce their difference to a much more manageable number: 12.

Logarithmic scales are handy in the universe we happen to live in, because, as you might have noticed, this universe contains a lot of very tiny things and a lot of ridiculously large things. It contains both bacteria and galaxies, which differ in scale by a factor of 950,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. But today, we’re not talking about distances. Today, we’re talking about speeds. Some things in the universe move very quickly. Others move very slowly. Continents drift together (and apart) at speeds of around 1.585×10^-9 meters per second, which is less than the diameter of a DNA helix every second. Light, on the other hand (which, as far as we know, moves as fast as it is physically possible to move) travels at 299,792,458 m/s. This is the perfect place for a logarithmic scale.

Therefore, I present to you, the Bolt, a logarithmic scale named in honor of Usain Bolt, who is the fastest Jamaican in the world. He’s also the fastest human in the world. To get a measurement of an object’s speed in Bolts, divide that speed by our reference speed (1 meter per second, which is about walking speed), and take the base-10 logarithm of the result.

But actually, the Bolt is kind of a large unit. Ironically, we’ve gone from too large a scale (0.0000000015 m/s to 299,792,458 m/s) to too narrow a scale. So let’s take inspiration from the decibel, and multiply the result of our logarithmic calculation by 100, which gives us a measurement in centiBolts (cBo).

Let’s work an example before I get to the list, which is the fun part. The land speed record for a garden snail (which record, apparently, you can only challenge at the World Snail Racing Championships in Congham, England) is 0.002752 meters per second. To get the speed in centiBolts, we calculate 100 * log10((0.002752 m/s) / (1 m/s)), which works out to -256.035 centiBolts. Now that you know how the math is done, let’s compute the centiBolt rating for some ridiculously low and ridiculously high speeds!

With a helium-neon laser and a Michelson interferometer, you could (probably) measure a change in distance of 300 nanometers over the course of an hour, which is 0.00000000009 m/s or -1005.61 centiBolts.

Continents drift apart (or together) at a speed of about 3 centimeters per year, or -902.2 cBo.

Because it loses orbital energy by stretching the Earth (making tides) and slowing Earth’s rotation, the Moon’s orbit is very gradually getting larger. The moon, therefore is receding at about 3.8 cm/year, or -891.9 cBo.

Human hair grows at about 15 cm/year, or -832.3 cBo.

Bamboo grows at a rate of about 14 microns per second (meaning it can grow several feet in a day), giving it a speed of -485.4 cBo.

Jakobshavn Isbræ glacier, in Greenland, reaches a maximum speed of 12,600 meters per year, which comes out to -339.8 cBo.

As I mentioned before, the land speed record for a garden snail is 0.00275 m/s or -256.07 cBo.

A wind speed of 1 mile per hour (MPH) would just barely be detectable by the drift of smoke. It wouldn’t even move weather vanes. It gets a speed rating of -34.97 cBo.

1 m/s, being our reference point, gets a rating of 0 cBo.

Usain Bolt, for whom we named this unit, ran at an average speed of 10.438 m/s when he broke the 100 m world record. He was running at 101.9 cBo…

…but his maximum speed was 12.42 m/s, or 109.41 cBo.

In the United Sates, most non-residential roads have a speed limit of 45 MPH. In my experience, no matter the speed limit, people usually drive around 50 MPH, which is 134.9 cBo.

I once drove my car at 105 MPH (don’t tell anybody). I was moving at 167.2 cBo.

The Bugatti Veyron, the world’s fastest street-legal production car, can get up to 267.856 MPH (431.072 km/h), or 207.825 cBo.

The fastest wheel-driven car on record (as of May 2014) got up to 403.10 MPH (648.73 km/h), which is a terrifying 225.58 cBo.

The land speed record (again, as of May 2014, set by the ThrustSSC, the first land vehicle to break the sound barrier) is 760.343 MPH (1223.657 km/h), or 253.1356 cBo.

The F-22 raptor can supposedly reach Mach 2 (the actual top speed is probably classified), which is 277.093 cBo.

The awesome-looking (and sadly retired) SR-71 Blackbird could manage 2,193.2 MPH, or 299.1 cBo.

The even more awesome rocket-powered X-15 could do 4,160 MPH (6,695 km/h), or 326.9 cBo.

At this point, we’re moving from the realm of really fast aircraft to the realm of really slow spacecraft.

The International Space Station orbits at 7.656 km/s, which is 388.4 cBo. It moves so fast, that it only takes 14 milliseconds to travel its own length. Curious about what 14 milliseconds sounds like? So was I. It sounds like this: https://soundcloud.com/hobo-sullivan/the-iss-passes. Which is just barely long enough for my ears to recognize as an actual sound.

The human speed record (relative to the Earth) was set by the crew of Apollo 10, who reached 24,791 mph, or 404.5 cBo. At these speeds, which are frankly quite ridiculous, the spacecraft was covering 1 kilometer every 90 milliseconds. To give you an idea how fast that is, here’s a 90-millisecond tone: https://soundcloud.com/hobo-sullivan/apollo-10-travels-1-kilometer.

The light gas gun at Sandia Labs (which, it has been noted, is essentially a high-tech BB gun) can fire projectiles at a silly 36,000 MPH, or 420.7 cBo. At these speeds, a small plastic projectile can make a hand-sized crater in a block of aluminum.

The Helios 2 solar probe holds the record for the fastest human-made object. When it swung by the sun (getting slightly closer to the Sun than Mercury), it hit 157,100 MPH, or 484.7 cBo.

But, as all physics geeks know, 157,100 MPH isn’t all that fast. It’s only 0.00023 times the speed of light, or 0.00023 c (as science-fiction authors put it). There are much faster things in this crazy-ass universe.

Like, for instance, the brightest component of a lightning bolt, the return stroke, which, according to some measurements, reaches 220,000,000 MPH, or 0.3281 c, or 799.3 cBo.

The Large Hadron Collider can accelerate protons much faster. It can get them up to 670,615,282 MPH, 0.999999991 c, or 847.7 cBo.

Which is not far from the maximum speed any object can attain, the speed of light itself: 670,616,629 MPH, 299,792,458 meters per second, or 847.7 cBo.

Sorry, Mr. Bolt. You’re going to have to train harder. You’re still running 29,979,246 times slower than you could be. Are you even trying? Come on!

Standard
Uncategorized

Decibels of DEATH!

Ear Protection

When I see the word “decibel,” I think two things. First, I think “Noise.” Then, I think “Oh god, decibels confuse the hell out of me…”

Well, I think I finally understand the decibel. It’s kind of a weird unit, but it’s also nifty, and it showcases one of the coolest things in mathematics: the logarithm.

Here’s how you compute the decibel-level of a sound. First, you figure out the acoustic power of that sound, probably using a microphone (or using a sound engineer who has a microphone and understands better than I do the difference between “acoustic power” and “sound amplitude.”) The acoustic power tells you the maximum pressure the sound wave exerts on things (say, your eardrums). Most of the time, you measure that sound pressure in pascals. Take that sound pressure and divide it by 20 micro-pascals. 20 micro-pascals is a semi-arbitrary reference point. It’s about the sound pressure where a 1000-Hertz sine wave first becomes audible to a human ear. It’s not a lot of pressure. The pressure 10 meters underwater is about twice what it is at sea level, which means the overpressure is about 1 atmosphere (1000 hectopascals. I’d like to note that Hectopascal would be a good name for a movie villain.) Well, the depth of water it would take to get an overpressure of 20 micropascals is 2 nanometers, which is about the diameter of a strand of DNA. Did you know human ears were that sensitive? I didn’t.

Anyway, you can use decibels to express a wide range of noise levels without using too many digits (Because, let’s face it, we all start zoning out after you get beyond about six digits, give or take.) To get the decibel number, you divide your sound pressure by 20 micropascals, take the base-10 logarithm of that, and multiply the result by 20. For example: a sound pressure of 20 micropascals gives you 20 * log10(20/20) = 20 * log10(1) = 20 * 0 = 0 dB.

With a title like Decibels of Death, you knew this article was going to be all about extremes. The quietest officially-measured place in the world is the anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories. It’s a room encased in a foot-thick concrete vault. The room itself sits on I-beams which are on springs to isolate external vibration. The inside of the room is full of wedge-shaped foam blocks which prevent echoes and dampen the sound from outside even further. The Guinness Book of World Records measured the sound level in the Orfield anechoic chamber at -9.4 decibels. That works out to a sound pressure level of 6.8 micropascals. To produce an overpressure that small, you’d only need a layer of water 0.612 nanometers thick. At that point, it’s less a puddle and more a molecular stack. That’s pretty damn quiet.

It’s actually intolerably quiet, apparently. The longest anybody’s ever spent in the chamber is 45 minutes, according to that Daily Mail article I linked above. I’ve heard stories about people who freaked out in the chamber because, all of a sudden, they can hear their heartbeats. And some people have auditory hallucinations when deprived of sound long enough, which probably makes the Orfield chamber even scarier.

So -9.4 dB is quiet enough to make you crazy. 0 dB is the threshold of hearing. 10 dB is about the quietest environment you or I will ever experience, and that’s only if we don’t breathe too loud. 25 dB is a very quiet room. According to a funky app I’ve got on my smartphone, the noise level at this desk is 51 dB. The EPA (the US environmental agency) recommends your everyday environment not exceed 70 dB. 85 dB can cause hearing damage over the long-term. 130 dB is painful. 150 dB can rupture your eardrums. This is what I was talking about earlier: logarithmic scales allow you to convert numbers orders of magnitude apart into nice numbers with low digit counts, which makes it easier to compare them side-by-side. When we started out, back at -9.4 decibels, the pressures were so low they were almost impossible to measure. Now, they’re so high they’re doing organ damage.

And speaking of organ damage… The strength of a blast wave is measured by its overpressure, just like the strength of a sound wave. In this fascinating and unnerving paper, some doctors report the effects of 62,000-pascal blast waves on rats. They speak of “minimal to mild alveolar hemorrhages,” as though there were such a thing as a mild case of bleeding fucking lungs. The upshot of all this is that, although 150 dB may burst your eardrums, 189.9 decibels (which is the decibel equivalent of 62,000 pascals overpressure) can actually damage your guts.

But if you’re catching a 190-decibel blast, you’ve got more serious things to worry about than bleeding lungs. Yes, really. There are a lot of reports of soldiers who have been hit by blasts from roadside bombs and car bombs and other such nasty things. Some of these soldiers, although they didn’t hit their heads on anything and nothing hit them in the head, developed serious cognitive problems: difficulty concentrating and short-term memory loss, enough to pretty much spoil their day-to-day lives. In another experiment, rats exposed to a blast overpressure of 20 kilopascals (180 decibels) experienced similar symptoms, and when they were dissected, had lots of dying brain cells. Which is all really pretty damn sad.

As it turns out, there’s actually technically a maximum sound pressure, at least if you want an undistorted sound wave. A pure tone has the shape of a sine wave: the pressure rises a certain amount above atmospheric, drops in a graceful sinusoidal curve, falls that same amount below atmospheric pressure, returns to atmospheric pressure, rinse and repeat. The thing about these kinds of sine waves is that, after their maximum overpressure, they have to drop that far below atmospheric pressure. And if the sound pressure of your sine wave happens to be greater than atmospheric pressure, that can’t happen: pressure is a number that doesn’t go any lower than zero, which is a vacuum. So a sine wave with a sound pressure larger than 1013 hectopascals (1 atmosphere) will sound all right when the pressure goes up, but will get cut off (“clipped,” the sound-engineer people call it) when it goes down. (And when I say “Will sound all right” I mean “Will rupture your aorta, destroy your lungs, tear your limbs off, and knock your house down,” as we learned from nuclear tests.) The maximum for unclipped sound, therefore, is 194.1 decibels.

But since we’re already blowing everything up, why worry about a little distortion? You know the Barrett M82? The big-ass .50-caliber sniper rifle? That one from that movie The Hurt Locker? The big scary one? Well, when that thing fires, its cartridge sees a blast wave of 265.5 decibels, which is just one more reason not to live in a rifle barrel.

You would experience 270 decibels if you were standing about 100 meters (350 feet) from a 1-megaton nuclear bomb when it went off. I use “experience” loosely here, since you wouldn’t have long to enjoy the racket before you were spread over an alarmingly large area.

Now, let’s say you were standing on the surface of a star just as it went supernova. Well, you’d be exposed to a blast pressure of something in the (very rough) neighborhood of 476 decibels, which I’m pretty sure the EPA would classify as “potentially hazardous.”

As it turns out, there’s a maximum pressure that is still physically meaningful, at least according to our current understanding of physics. It’s called the Planck Pressure, and it’s very large. It’s the kind of pressure you get inside black holes. It’s the kind of pressure the universe experienced (we think) right after the Big Bang. The Big Bang had a noise rating of 2,367.3 decibels. The explosion that set the current universe in motion had a pressure which can be quantified in five significant digits.

That’s what I mean about logarithmic scales being awesome. They turn unimaginable cosmic numbers into nice, manageable, comprehensible numbers. You’d better believe I’m going to be playing with logarithmic scales again soon. Which sounds way dirtier than I intended.

Standard
Uncategorized

Forget flying cars. I want a submarine car!

The metal container powered by the explosion of million-year-old liquefied algae which transports me over long distances (My car. Yes, I know I’m a smart-ass.) is a 2007 Toyota Yaris hatchback. It’s a decent enough car, I suppose. It looks about like this:

Image

(Many thanks to the nice person on the Wikimedia Commons who put the photo in the public domain, since I lost the only good photo of my car before it got all scruffy.) According to its specifications, its engine can produce 106 horsepower (79 kilowatts), it weighs 2,326 pounds (meaning it masses 1,055 kilograms), and has a drag coefficient of 0.29 and a projected area of 1.96 square meters (I love the Internet). Those are all the numbers I need to calculate my car’s maximum theoretical speed. I’ll be doing this by equating the drag power on the car (from the formula (1/2) * (density air) * (velocity)^3 * (projected area) * (drag coefficient)) with the engine’s power. I will be slightly naughty by neglecting rolling resistance, which for my car, is usually negligible.

1. Maximum speed on Earth, at sea level: 135 MPH (217 km/h or 60.19 m/s). I may or may not have gotten it up to 105 MPH once, so this estimate seems about right. Worryingly, according to the spec sheet for my tires, they’re only rated up to 112 MPH…

2. Maximum speed on Mars: (Assuming I carry my own oxygen, both for me and for the engine.) 538 MPH (866 km/h, 240.50 m/s). I would break the speed record for a wheel-driven land vehicle (Donald Campbell in the BlueBird CN7) by over 100 MPH. And probably die in a rapid and spectacular fashion. But that’d be all right: I always wanted to be buried on Mars.

3. Maximum speed on Venus: (Assuming I avoid dying in burning, screaming, supercritical-carbon-dioxide-and-sulfuric-acid agony.) 36 MPH (58 km/h, 16.23 m/s). Unfortunately, the short-sighted manufacturers didn’t say whether my tires are resistant to quasi-liquid CO2 at 90 atmospheres. The bastards.

4. Maximum speed underwater: This is the one we’re all here for! Water is dense shit and puts up a lot of resistance, as anyone who ever tried running in a swimming pool can attest. Maximum speed: 15 MPH (23 km/h, 6.52 m/s). Wolfram Alpha tells me I’d only be driving half as fast as Usain Bolt can run. I shall withhold judgment until we clock Mr. Bolt’s hundred-meter seafloor sprint.

5. Maximum speed in an ocean of liquid mercury: (Assuming we filled my car with gold bricks to keep it from floating to the surface. Also, why is there an ocean of liquid mercury? That’s horrible.) Maximum speed: 6 MPH (10 km/h, 2.74 m/s). I can bicycle faster than that (although not in a sea of mercury, admittedly). Of course, mercury is so heavy that, even if our sea was only 5 meters deep, the pressure at the seafloor would be high enough to make my tires implode. Which would, of course, be the least of my problems.

6. And finally, just for fun, my maximum speed in neutronium. Neutronium is what you get when a star collapses and the pressures rise so high that all its atoms’ nuclei get shoved together into one gigantic pile of protons and neutrons. It’s just about the densest stuff you can get without forming a black hole, and my car could push me through it at a whole 0.1 microns per second, which is only fifty times slower than the swimming speed of an average bacterium.

I’ve now spent far too long imagining myself being crushed by horrible pressures. I need to go lie down and imagine myself being vaporized, to balance it out.

Standard