+ David Steuber <·····@david-steuber.com>:
| Pascal Bourguignon <···@informatimago.com> writes:
|
|> CAUTION: The mass of this product contains the energy equivalent of
|> 85 million tons of TNT per net ounce of weight.
|
| Is this an accurate approximation of the exothermic energy in TNT?
According to Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent
the explosion of 85 million tons of TNT should release an energy of
about 85�4.184E15=3.6E17 J. I expect Pascal is using the formula
E=mc� for his estimate, so our biggest challenge will be to convert
the archaic unit "ounce" to metric units. Since it has not been
specified further, I conjecture that he had the international
avoirdupois ounce in mind, which is about 0.028 kg. Plugging that
into Einstein's formula, with c=299792458 m/s, I get about 2.5E15 J.
So it might look like Pascal has overestimated the energy content of
the product by a couple orders of magnitude, possibly on advice from
his lawyers. Or maybe he has included the packaging, which we may
then infer has a mass about 140 times the net mass of the product.
--
* Harald Hanche-Olsen <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/>
- It is undesirable to believe a proposition
when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.
-- Bertrand Russell
Harald Hanche-Olsen <······@math.ntnu.no> writes:
> I expect Pascal is using the formula E=mc² for his estimate, so our
> biggest challenge will be to convert the archaic unit "ounce" to
> metric units.
The ounce is no more archaic than the gramme or any other French unit;
it's in common use. Now, the stere--_that's_ an archaic unit...
--
Robert Uhl <http://public.xdi.org/=ruhl>
I had always secretly suspected that any country with better than 200
varieties of cheese couldn't be linguistically uniform either, so
having solid evidence thereof came as rather a relief to me.
--Alianora Munro