Class Project

Avengers: Infinity War is one of my favorite super hero movies. It is an enthralling tale of superheroes teaming up to take down the evil threat of Thanos. The more I watch the movie, the more I think about if the film makers are truly capturing the grand scale of the world shattering hits that the heroes and villains dish out. One scene in particular that I want to focus on in this post is when Thanos throws the moon at Iron Man. More specifically, I want to try and figure out how much mechanical energy Thanos would add to the system by throwing the moon.

To figure how much mechanical energy the system has after Thanos drags the moon down onto Iron Man, we need to assume a couple things. The three things we have to assume is that Titan, the planet they are all on, is the same size as Earth and that its moon is the same size as our moon and the distance between Titan and its moon is the same as the distance between Earth and the Moon. The first thing that needs to be calculated is the average force Thanos needs to apply to the moon to pull it down. To do this, we first need to find the average acceleration which could be found by estimating the time that the moon takes to reach the surface of Titan and then dividing that by  the distance between Earth and the moon to get the final velocity before it hits Titan. Then, finding the average velocity of the moon and dividing that by the time, you get the average acceleration. Take that acceleration and multiply it by the moon's mass to get the average force Thanos applies to the moon. To find how much energy that takes, you need to find the work Thanos did to the moon. To find that, multiply the average force and the distance it was applied over (which is the distance between the Earth and the Moon). 

To understand the magnitude of the energy Thanos adds to this system, we would want to find what the mechanical energy of the system is after the collision. The mechanical energy after would equal the mechanical energy before added to the work Thanos did to the moon. The initial mechanical energy of the system is the kinetic energy of the Moon's velocity around the Earth added to the gravitation energy of the Earth on the Moon. When all is calculated the mechanical energy of the system after Thanos throws the moon is 8.49 x 10^37 Joules. To put that into perspective, the world's most powerful bomb ever testing was the Soviet Union's Tsar Bomba and it had a yield of 50 Megatons (or about 2.092 x 10^17 Joules) which means the mechanical energy after Thanos throws the moon is a little more than 4 x 10^20 times bigger, or 400,000,000,000,000,000,000 times more energetic than the largest bomb ever created.

The Twin Paradox

One of the craziest theoretical concept in physics is that of the Twin Paradox. The Twin Paradox is rooted in Einstein's theory of general relativity. It relies on a concept called time dilation. Time dilation says that when an observer in is an inertia reference frame (acceleration equal to zero) and another object is in motion relative to it, time will appear to slow down for the person in motion. The Twin Paradox states that if two twins both started measuring time at the same instance and one of the twins moved around at a high speed and came back, the twin that stood still would have experienced more time past then the twin in motion.

In the movie "Contact", Palmer, played by Matthew McConaughey, explains the Twin Paradox perfect but the movie didn't listen to its own script though. They actually did the exact opposite; when Dr. Ellie Arroway travels ear the speed of light and comes back, she ends up experiencing more time than the people on Earth. If it was reality, she would experience a short amount of time while the people would experience a longer amount of time. If I had to fix the script, I would have her be away for the same 18 hours as in the movie, but instead of everyone experiencing no time at all like in the movie, I would have every person be long since removed from that instant having a couple years passed.

Final Project: Movie Scene

To Bomb or Not to Bomb

Atomic weapons have always been a major source of controversy ever since they were first imagined. The ludicrous amount of power they produce can be scary for most to comprehend. I personally believe that the research and development of such weapons is a great way to further our understanding of the universe and can lead to more scientific discoveries. One great example of this happening already was the development of nuclear power plants. Without the Manhattan Project and the development of Little Man and Fat Boy, the world's second largest producer of energy wouldn't even exists. Aside from fossil fuels nuclear power plants generate the most energy in the planet and that is all due to the nuclear bomb. Who knows what kind of developments could come from nuclear testing in the future.