Do you know that you are a potential walking bomb, not only you everything you see around you is a potential atom bomb.
How?
For that we have to look towards Einstein’s famous equation E=mc square the most famous equation in the world. We have all read it in our school, some have understood it and some just mugged it up, and students like me conveniently bypassed it as beyond my comprehension ability.
But in later years it caught my attention and I tried to understand it at the most rudimentary level. And this is what I understood.
The amount of energy locked up in matter is so immense and we as common people are totally ignorant about it. The nucleus of an atom is like a furnace and if we open the door it spills out, often violently.
Einstein was able to fully grasp the correlation between mass and energy and jotted down the famous formula.
First let’s understand the 3 terms.
E= is the energy and is measured in joules. One joule is the calculated as the force required moving an object 1 metre in the direction of the force. Its formula is kilogram multiplied by metre squared per second squared – Kg x m square/s square. It is like the force required moving your sofa 1 metre in a particular direction.
m= stands for mass of an object. I will use kilogram.
c= is the speed of light. It is 300,000,000 metres per second or written as 3 x 10 to the power 8 m/s
So what the formula says basically is that to calculate the energy output from a matter you need the mass and multiply it by the speed of light squared.
Let’s take an example for better understanding.
My weight( mass) is 80 kg
So if I input this data in the formula then
E= (80 kg) x (3 x 10 to the power 8 m/s) square
E= 7,190,041,429,894,541,000 joules, that is more than 7 septillion joules of energy.
It is a lot of energy but to fully understand it we will have to compare it with something else.
Let us take TNT explosive, it is measured in kiloton (1000 tons).
1 joule of energy = 000000000000239 kilotons of TNT. It is quite small amount of energy. I will flip it now. 1 kiloton (1000 ton) of TNT =4,184,000,000,000 joules. Now you see a formidable number.
Now after doing a little more math we will find that the 80 kg man is approx 1.7 million kiloton worth of energy. If you compare it with the bomb dropped at Nagasaki, it was only 21 kiloton of explosives. So I have in me about 85,000 times more explosive energy than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
I hope I have been able to bring out the meaning of this formula and what it actually means when we compare it with something. I am sure none of us had an idea about the amount of energy we possess.
Also as it happens in star, when two hydrogen atoms join to form a helium atom, only 0.7 % of the mass gets converted to energy.
But that doesn’t make us a human atom bomb. It is a theoretical calculation for understanding purpose. To make a bomb lot of other things are involved and we don’t have the capacity now to harness our body energy. But still it is fascinating.
Note: the superscript to depict square as it comes in Word document is not coming here so I have used words in its place.
Also the article is for a very basic understanding.
Any damage caused due to experimenting to create a human bomb on the basis of this article is his responsibility.
Thanks dear