Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmonitor | Hacker News Reader

would they be vaporized or instantly compacted? my morbid curiosity kind of wants to see what would happen to a body under such insane pressure conditions.

View on HN

As I understand it: the pressure vessel was full of air, and at the moment it failed, that air-filled space became the equivalent of the cylinder of a 2-stroke engine, instantly heating as the air compressed.

You probably meant diesel engine. The compression pressure of those is around 300-500psi, and that's sufficient to heat the air to a few hundred degrees and ignite the injected fuel.

For comparison, what happened in this sub was 10x that pressure.

(Yes, 2-stroke diesels also exist, and sound absolutely amazing.)

Ignoring inertia (the water hammer effect), the air would reach 38,000 F, four times the temperature on the surface of the sun.

Much higher than that. The external pressure was ~6000psi, but water has inertia. The peak pressure as the bubble imploded was many orders of magnitude higher than that.

Correct. Except it is heated to a much, much higher temperature.

You're in luck, the Mythbusters tried this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEY3fN4N3D8

... and that was like, a couple hundred feet. The Titanic is at 12,500 feet. An unfathomable amount of pressure.

objection, that is clearly 2083 1/3 fathoms of pressure.

12500 ft is 2083.33 fathoms.

This reply is leagues ahead.

What other nautical-related terms are a part of common speech?

I'm tying myself in knots trying to think of one.

Those are two different meaning of the same word though, and the one in your usage is not specifically nautical, so I’m not sure it qualifies. But a good pun nonetheless.

> Those are two different meaning of the same word though, and the one in your usage is not specifically nautical,

So it was ... notical?

These puns are so deep

There is so much pressure to come up with one.

Ah -- I was confused for like 10 minutes by this comment, since technical divers have gone as deep as 1,000 ft without "anymore than a wet suit" and commercial divers go beyond 300 feet all the time. It isn't the absolute pressure that's the problem (in this video)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com