What if I were 1% charged? (2013)
gravityandlevity.wordpress.com
gravityandlevity.wordpress.com
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.
... 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-chemic...
If you could somehow maintain that configuration, you'd have a capacitor storing an enormous amount of energy, so it makes sense that the mass would increase.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/31326/is-a-hard-...
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.
Depending on how relativistically inclined you are, this may affect what you consider the weight of the person. But this doesn't really matter for the thought experiment.
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.
> 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).
Most successful migration in tech requires a time where both old and new system are running concurrently.
In terms of brain, this treat consciousness as software and brain/etc as hardware. whether said software can be modified to run on other hardware, or other hardware can be modified to run said software, is where the key's at.
The key to migration is to have a period when the same software is running on both platforms. As a single unit.
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?
I'm not smart enough to really think it through but at a glance it seems to resolve those various tests and scenarios. In the malfunctioning teleport example (where the cell destroyer fails to fire), _both_ London Tim and Boston Tim are equally alive because they share the past: the teleport has succeeded in bifurcating their consciousness. Same with the split-brain twins (though you'd expect the results to be diminished).
These thought experiments got me thinking about how a conscious entity might better be considered as its "world line", not just its instantaneous physical embodiment. Call that a soul if you want, but there's no particular reason to.
But we effectively always get back the the ship of Theseus, and circling back to Trek,
Does Data have a soul? I don't know that he has. I don't know that I have. But I have got to give him the freedom to explore that question himself.
Does that new copy become "you" if you simply incinerate the original?
If we clone A, then from A's perspective we now have A-Prime. A-Prime is unaware and believes they are A, who now presumably has been killed. If anyone didn't observe this happen, then A-Prime essentially -is- A. If they did observe it, then they know that it's technically A-Prime.
So I guess the difference is being able to observe the gradual changes. It's more tricky when discussing an inanimate object like a ship that doesn't care either way.
Btw, we talk about replica's but that's only because we assume the process leaves an original and a copy, but that's not necessarily so, for example a photon of high energy can split into 2 photons of lower energy. We are not talking about originals and replica's there. One can imagine that our duplication process follows similar rules.
When copying or simply making 2 out of 1, for computers, both still have computer-0 in /etc/hostname so there's that... It's just that neither of the computers will complain when we change their designation at random.
This leaves me feeling weird about the destruction of an original in any copying process. The destruction during copying feels ok, but doing it afterwards feels very bad. It's like we want consciousness to be continuous in time. But why? Again, Permutation City goes into this in a nice way...
And which one do you think we should kill off once the away mission is done? Should we be as sanguine about it as Captain Janeway was about murdering Tuvix?
> 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...
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.
Aside from the ensuing cataclysm, that is.
Hmmm, sounds like what happened when someone asked the coffee machine for a "cup of joe"
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.
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.
What if I were 1% charged? (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10161497 - Sept 2015 (21 comments)
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.
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.201900...
At a certain charge value, and at a not very large one, the surface electric field will exceed the breakdown field of air and a corona discharge will start.
See St. Elmo's fire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Elmo%27s_fire
So unfortunately the idea of using the repulsion forces does not work.
To prevent the discharges, the entire environment around the 2 charged moving parts would have to also be charged with the same sign, but then the repulsion forces between your parts would be balanced by the repulsion forces from the surrounding medium.
This increases several times the breakdown field compared to air but it is not enough to reach similar energy densities like with magnetic fields.
To give some numbers, the air breakdown field is around 3 MV/m, while the maximum magnetic field in a motor might be up to 2 Tesla.
The ratio of the energy densities is the square of the ratio between the product of the magnetic field with the speed of light and the electric field, i.e. the square of (2 x 3 x 10^8) / (3 x 10^6), so 200 squared, i.e. 40 thousands.
Even if you increase the breakdown field 10 times, which is quite hard to achieve with fluids, the magnetic field would give forces much, much higher at a given size.
A magnetic field can have very large intensities without creating problems, so that is the reason why we use electromagnetic motors and not electrostatic motors.
The maximum magnetic field in a motor is normally limited by the saturation of the ferromagnetic materials at values where the density of energy in the space between the stator and the rotor is many times higher than the density of energy at which an electric field would cause electrical discharges.
Electrostatic motors can be useful (and they are actually used in certain devices) only at microscopic sizes.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/pplate.h...
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.
I’m curious to run those numbers but I’m not quite sure how to approach it.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reissner%E2%80%93Nordstr%C3%B6...
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/
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....
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
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?