Can anybody out there tell me how much energy it would take to stop the earth’s core from rotating? I’m guessin’ you’re gonna need twelve D cells at the very least …
Lissa
April 6, 2003, 11:38pm
22
snort They would.
I was stunned to see this headlining their review:
By any chance is MSNBC owned or heavily sponsored by the company who made this film?
from The Bad Astronomer’s review (link given above):
It takes a lot of energy to stop a ball that size and that mass spinning that quickly. In fact, the spinning core (if I have done my math correctly) has about 10[sup]35[/sup] ergs of energy stored up in its rotation, or about the amount of energy the Sun emits in 100 seconds. That’s a whole lot of energy. If it doesn’t sound like much, let’s convert it to megatons: it’s the equivalent energy of five trillion one megaton bombs going off. That is comfortably more than the entire arsenal of the planet; in fact, it’s thousands or perhaps millions of times the explosive energy of every single nuclear weapon on the Earth.