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For context, 120 PeV is about 10% the kinetic energy of a ping pong ball during typical play.
One of the lead researchers in KM3NeT mentioned that the particle was emitting 2 horse power in light during detector transit. A typical body builder expends about 1 horse power while performing, so its 2 body builders in a single particle.
For context, 120 PeV is about 10% the kinetic energy of a ping pong ball during typical play.
Right, and it is this amount of energy in a single particle . A ping-pong ball is comprised of who-knows-how-many billions of particles, so the energy of any one particle is a fraction of the whole.
The article references the "Oh-My-God particle, the most energetic particle yet encountered. Here's the late John Walker's excellent piece on that: https://fourmilab.ch/documents/OhMyGodParticle/
> These calculations involve some elementary but easy to mess up algebra and some very demanding numerical calculations for which regular IEEE double precision is insufficient. If you'd like to double-check these results, be sure to use a multiple precision calculator with at least 30 significant digits of accuracy. So you're saying my iPhone built-in calculator app is going to have problems....? Time to whip out dc…
For context, 120 PeV is about 10% the kinetic energy of a ping pong ball during typical play.
From nothing, to detectable, to lethal, to big boom?
My intuition would be "detectable" but I don't know enough to do the maths.
And by the way, I am using the mass-energy, not proper mass, because the question is crazy enough not to even consider what would be the mass of a neutrino.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the lead researchers in KM3NeT mentioned that the particle was emitting 2 horse power in light during detector transit. A typical body builder expends about 1 horse power while performing, so its 2 body builders in a single particle.
Can we harvest that energy?
For context, 120 PeV is about 10% the kinetic energy of a ping pong ball during typical play.
Now, what will happen if you get hit by a ping-pong ball mass of 120 PeV neutrinos? 120 PeV is about 2e-16 grams, so a ping-pong ball will have about 1e16 of them. From nothing, to detectable, to lethal, to big boom? My intuition would be "detectable" but I don't know enough to do the maths. And by the way, I am using the mass-energy, not proper mass, because the question is crazy enough not to even consider what wou…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can we harvest that energy?
This particle spread this energy through a volume of seawater a few km deep in the Mediterranean. It's going to raise the temperature of that volume a few billionths of a degree, if that. So, no, we can't.