Whoa, amasci.com traffic spike!

Heh, wasn't there a Larry Niven SF story where an alien weapon would zero out the charge of electrons, so the nuclei would fly apart? Our undergrad phys-101 had calculating the force between two (copper!) pennies 1M apart, with all electrons removed from one and deposited on the other.

Later I realized that it would have been even more impressive to estimate the energy-equiv of kilotons of TNT which would be released when the meter-long spark brought the two pennies back into equilibrium.

Another: calculate the width of one coulomb. It's about half a mm, like a grain of sand. That's assuming its the mobile electrons in copper wire (so, not Cu's electrons, but just one free electron per atom.)