Relativistic ball, Yoda power and other pressing issues at xkcd.com
The xkcd.com website, known for its comics on near-topic themes, has a new section - “What if ...”. Visitors can send any hypothetical questions, and the author of the site is Randall Munro, a physicist by education who worked at NASA - once a week , on Tuesdays, gives a detailed and (as far as possible) scientifically based answer to the most interesting and insane question.So far, readers can find out what will happen if a baseball player throws the ball at a speed of not 50-100 km / h, as usual, but 270,000 km / s, or 0.9 the speed of light,
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What are the chances of a perfect SAT test (American equivalent of the Unified State Exam), marking the answers in an arbitrary way,
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This is far less than the likelihood that every living ex-president of the United States and every actor in the television series Firefly will be independently struck by lightning on the same day.
This is far less than the likelihood that every living ex-president of the United States and every actor in the television series Firefly will be independently struck by lightning on the same day.
and how much power (in watts) Master Yoda can develop using the Force.
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18.3 kW, or about 25 horsepower. If the energy of Yoda is converted into electricity with 100% efficiency, it will take about one hundred million Iodine to provide our planet with electricity. But it would be 100% green energy.
Details and calculations are on xkcd .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/148107/
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