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Z Machine Sets Unexpected Earth Temperature Record

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Thanks for a great link ,I've added this one to the favorite places .
 
It seems global warming is having far outreaching effects. ;)

Cool article. I hope nuclear fusion pans out someday. It's going to take a lot of power to run a climate control system on this planet. Might be simpler to unfold the planetary winshield sunscreen. Better watchout who gets the remote control. :)
 
"During the unexpected powerful contained explosion, the Z machine released about 80 times the world's entire electrical power usage for a brief fraction of a second."

I don't understand this sentence. I frankly don't believe this sentence.
Can someone please explain? Where did the power come from?
 
There is another thread on this somewhere in here that asks many more questions, and gives some answers. I'll try to find it.
 
Soapy Sam said:
"During the unexpected powerful contained explosion, the Z machine released about 80 times the world's entire electrical power usage for a brief fraction of a second."

I don't understand this sentence. I frankly don't believe this sentence.
Can someone please explain? Where did the power come from?
Click to expand...

Note it doesn't say energy usage. If energy is released in a short enough time interval, one can do this. Power = Energy/Time.
 
Soapy Sam said:
"During the unexpected powerful contained explosion, the Z machine released about 80 times the world's entire electrical power usage for a brief fraction of a second."

I don't understand this sentence. I frankly don't believe this sentence.
Can someone please explain? Where did the power come from?
Click to expand...

Power is an 'instantaneous' measure. For electricity, it is generally measured in Watts. Power (in Watts) is a product of the voltage and current. P = I x E (I = current in Amps, E = emf in Voltage).

By charging a bank of capacitors over time and discharging them quickly, you can (for brief moments) deliver thousands, if not millions, of times more power than is used to charge the capacitors.

For instance, the engine in a car is not powerful enough to damage the car it is in directly (at least not in a properly designed car). But, you can store all the power the engine produces as kenetic energy by putting the car in gear and adding throttle. For this thought experiment, we'll park a car 1/2 mile from a solid wall. The car is put in gear and run wide open until it impacts the wall. For the 20 or so seconds it takes the car to reach the wall, the power produced by the engine is used to increase the speed of the car towards the wall. In that fraction of second between the front bumper touching the wall and the car returning to a stop, all the power accumulated for 20 seconds of running the engine wide open is then released all at once to destroy the car on impact.

We'll ignore all the losses that happen with a real car and real engine. And, we'll say for this throught experiment that the car took .05 seconds to stop after the bumper touches the wall. If the car's engine makes 150,000 Watts of power (about 200hp), x 20 seconds / .05 seconds = 60,000,000 Watts for the 1/20 sec the impact lasted. 60 Million.

Well, they are claiming (and I doubt them little) that they can store enough energy and release it over a short enough duration, that for a very brief moment the power flow is 80 times greater than the typical usage of the entire combined world.

Edited for grammar
 
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Didn't Reed Richards say that Johnny Storm shouldn't go so hot, because it posed a danger to life, the universe, and everything? :j2:

Or maybe it's just the Hellfire.
 
Iamme said:
You win! You guessed it. That is the story!

Bottom line: 2 billion degrees Kelvin!!!!! Is that hot or what? What is Kelvin in relation to Fahrenheit?
Click to expand...

I don't know how accurate the conversion is, but tapecalc came up with:

3,599,999,540.33 degrees fahrenheit. Eh, be a good chap and pass the sunblock, would you?
 
Soapy Sam said:
"During the unexpected powerful contained explosion, the Z machine released about 80 times the world's entire electrical power usage for a brief fraction of a second."

I don't understand this sentence. I frankly don't believe this sentence.
Can someone please explain? Where did the power come from?
Click to expand...

This makes sense only if you understand the proper definition of "power" - most people confuse it with "energy" and this leads to the confusion.

Power is the *rate* at which energy is produced or used up. So this sentence isn't saying that the Z-Machine (what a cool name) created more energy than the entire world, it's just saying that it generated, for an instant or two, energy at 80 times the *rate* at which the world does.

Make sense now? I hope you were paying attention, there will be a quiz later ;)

Cheers - Mattus
 
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