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Old 10-September-2008, 02:39 AM
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Originally Posted by Jim View Post
Using your experiment above, and making some very quick and dirty calcs, the two atoms have about 2 million joules of kinetic energy; the coal releases about 9 billion.
Joules are much larger than that, perhaps you meant eV?

Apply 1 joule to knocking a 5-gram nickel up in the air. Ignoring air resistance, it will reach a height of 20.4 meters and hit the ground 4 seconds later. The same energy will heat a cubic centimeter of liquid water by 0.24 K, or 240 nanograms, or 8e15 molecules, of water vapor by 2 million K...of course, the specific heat constant used becomes entirely invalid long before it reaches that point. Ionization, dissociation, etc...and that assumes no change in other parameters like volume: the products of the collision will rapidly expand, and thus cool. Though I assume a quark-gluon plasma is not a particularly ideal gas...

For reference, 1 joule = 6241510 TeV. Flow/production/consumption of 1 joule/second is 1 watt of power. A 100 watt light bulb could also be given the rating of 624151000 TeV/s.
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