Morning Amusements.

[swestrup]

This slashdot article talks about the US Military's research into antimatter-based weapons. The story it links to describes the power stored in 1 gram of antimatter as being equivalent to 23 space shuttle fuel tanks of energy. Now, that being a rather unusual unit of measurement, the slashdot folks decided to convert it to more usual measures.

Thus, it was found that, 1 gram of antimatter can liberate as much energy as:

• a 39 Kiloton bomb
• 33,000 6-ton elephants dropped from a height of 100km.
• .032 Burning Libraries of Congress

Research is still being done on how many football-fields worth of destruction that is...

Comments

[sps.livejournal.com]

I'm more interested in the mutual attraction of elephants at infinity as a measure. That and measurements involving square fortnights per scruple-metre, to keep the NASA crowd happy.

On reflection, that explains it - probably the original source used foot-poundals and space shuttle fuel tanks had the only other similarly denominated specification on the web....

[ims.livejournal.com]

This suggests that dropping 33,000 six-ton anti-elephants from a height of 100km might make quite a devastating weapon.