> At 8:16 a.m. on August 6, 1945, a fission weapon containing sixty-four kilograms of uranium detonated 580 meters above the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and Einstein’s equation proved mercilessly accurate. The bomb itself was extremely inefficient: just one kilogram of the uranium underwent fission, and only seven hundred milligrams of mass—the weight of a butterfly—was converted into energy. But it was enough to obliterate an entire city in a fraction of a second.
This reminded me of this quote from "Midnight in Chernobyl". Quite amazing to thing of such small amounts of mass being converted into such extraordinary amounts of energy.
Guess this is saying that the one kilogram of uranium is converted to fission products which are slightly lighter--one kilogram minus a butterfly--and the amount of energy released from this difference is e=(mass of butterfly)*c^2
Wait is that right? I thought charging a lithium battery was simply displacing electrons from cathode to anode, but the total number of electrons in the whole battery is conserved (and hence mass). Or is this converting that electric potential into an equivalent mass? Does this actually manifest as a difference on a scale?
... But the total mass of a molecule is also affected by the energy in the chemical configuration; the chemistry of the charged battery has more energy than the uncharged battery.
Yeah, this is also why an empty hard drive should have less mass than a full one. It's an immeasurable amount, but it should be there. Adding energy to a system should increase it's mass.
To be pedantic, I think you need to say "the act of writing to a hard drive adds mass". There is no reason to expect that writing a 1 or a 0 adds more or less mass; if there is a difference in energy states, it would depend on the encoding scheme.
Interesting, so in the context of this broader discussion, if you displaced 1% of electrons in your body by a centimeter, you would weigh 10x more than you did originally. (Both gravitational mass and inertial mass increase)
Assuming that you displaced all the electrons in the same direction, you'd produce a 1 cm electron cloud on one side of your body, and 1 cm of electron-deficient matter on the other side.
If you could somehow maintain that configuration, you'd have a capacitor storing an enormous amount of energy, so it makes sense that the mass would increase.
This reminded me of this quote from "Midnight in Chernobyl". Quite amazing to thing of such small amounts of mass being converted into such extraordinary amounts of energy.