If there was a ‘bomb’ that could totally turn off gravity for a second or so, I mean totally go from the normal 1g right to 0g instantly for lets say 1 second (or 2 or 3), then totally resume normal gravity after, again instantly. How much fun could we have … I mean how much damage could be caused.
I imagine that road vehicles would spring up from their springs and tires, how high would these things get when gravity is resumed, and would they go straight up, or would the twist due to different spring loads front and back? How would bridges make out, buildings and people?
My guess is just about everything in the area is destroyed in the area of effect, and massive damage done outside. The crust in that region will try to rip itself free, due to the Earth’s spin and internal pressure; then it will fall back. Massive earthquakes, and the region itself might well be engulfed with magma from below. Over water you’d get a massive tsunami. You also might get major air effects; mabye an implosion and explosion, even.
The real question is can atoms hold together if the attraction we call gravity is removed. Wouldn’t the atoms fly apart, if gravity is nuetralized? Gravity is a collective attraction of individual atoms on other atoms. Remove the attraction and the atom flies apart does it not? Do we get something like a Earth sized nuclear explosion?
Yes, atoms would still hold together. Atoms are held together by the strong nuclear force and electromagnetism. Gravity is extremely weak compared to those.
Yes and no. The strong and weak nuclear forces only operate within the nucleus of an atom, and play no role in bonding one atom to another. Electromagnetism has both positive and negative charges which attract one another if the charges are opposite and repel if they are the same. Much outside the radius of a normal atom, these charges cancel out and the net charge is zero; as a result, atoms can only bind to adjacent atoms. But gravity is purely attractive. It accumulates as you increase the mass of a body, without limit. At some point, an object ceases to held together mainly by the electromagnetic force and becomes held together by gravitation, instead. When this happens, solid bodies tend to form into spheres since the force pulling them together acts acts over its entire radius, rather than just between individual atoms; this happens at much smaller sizes than our home planet: Pluto is tiny compared to Earth, but it, too, is gravitationally rather than electromagnetically bound together. The Earth, as well, is held together largely by gravitation; if the gravity were suddenly reduced to zero throughout the planet, it would puff up like a giant marshmallow. This would not be good for us, I think.
So it’s not a large atomic bomb. How disapointing, because I can picture the arc villain thinking for an instant “Oh shit! I didn’t expect that to happen.”
Well, I dunno about that. I say “puff up like a giant marshmallow” mainly in jest. In truth, there’s a metric shitload of energy stored in the Earth by gravitational attraction, in the form of pressure. Remove the gravity, and nothing prevents that pressure from causing the Earth to expand–probably quite violently. “Explosion” might be something of an understatement, actually.
No that’s not exactly what I meant. I thought that any method of turning off gravity, would result in the atom having to undergo a change of it’s subatomic particles. Change the structure and they possibly fly apart. Atoms can’t exist in their current form without having a gravitational effect can they? Wouldn’t it require a disruption of the electromagnetic force in an atom, to turn off gravity?
Atoms, as stated, are held together internally by the strong nuclear force and the electromagnetic force. Gravity is the very weakest of all the four fundamental forces; the next strongest one, electromagnetism, is orders of magnitude stronger than gravity. No, atoms are not held together internally by gravity at all.
I think what he’s saying (uh, maybe), is that any bomb capable of disrupting one of the 4 fundamental forces of the universe might possibly fuck around with the others too. Since it is impossible (uh, again, to my knowledge) to remove gravity (again, to my knowledge) utterly from any environment, we don’t really know what a universe with only the remaining 3 physical laws in it would look like, do we? I mean, even if you have a single hydrogen atom in a perfect vacuum in complete isolation… it still exerts gravity however infinitesimal it may be, right?
lokij has summed up my point. QED I’m always happy to see you post on these subjects, because you make a great sounding board for stuff I think of, but have no chance of figuring out. The ear of a master so to say. I understand your point that gravity and electromagnetic force are not the same.
I’d say that how much damage would be done would depend on how “zero-gravity” would affect momentum, and it might not at all. My guess is that there would be almost no damage from a brief local interruption to gravity.
Imagine you stanging on the ground. You yould continue your straight ahead movement imparted by the earth’s rotational velocity, while the earth would drop away beneath you proprtional to the curvature of the earth. In other words, you would very slowly appear to elevate for as long as the effect lasted , and then drop down. How much this happens to objects would vary on how firmly they are fixed to earth by other means than gravity.
Like tornadoes, this would do most damage in trailer courts, as they pulled loose from their gas/electrical fittings.
But if the WHOLE planet lost gravity, we would be pretty fucked, as we would begin to leave orbit, and be pulled into some new unpredictable orbit afterward, that might kill us all.
I’ve always thought the deadliest weapon imaginable would be a gravity inverter. So rather than turning the gravity off for a few seconds, it actually reverses the gravity. I imagine the effect of shutting gravity off would be negligible. But imagine the effect of 1G pulling straight up for three seconds. Most freestanding objects are weighted so that gravity will keep them in place. Reverse the gravity and you have a house full of tumbling projectiles with all the weight being in exactly the right place to impart even more impact. Just imagine dropping your computer desk from ceiling height onto a surface that is as resistant to impact as your ceiling is. In my non-scientific opinion, a gravity inverter would rip houses right off their foundations. The three seconds of upward gravity would wreck everything not nailed to the floor and the fall back down would finish the job. It would be as deadly as a nuclear bomb.
as just pointed out by DW, negating gravity locally probably wouldn’t do anything, Unless you had the misfortune to, say, be taking a jumpshot right as the bomb went off, which would probably result in you flying a good amount into the air during those three seconds.
It also depends on the size of the bomb. let’s say the planet of Earth stopped causing gravity for three seconds… Assuming it doesn’t stop everything’s inertia too, or negate friction as well, I imagine a few things would fly around crazy-like for a few seconds and then drop back down. Some regions might get some serious damage from something that accidently was launched as a projectile just as gravity shut down, but overall, I don’t think it’d be bad.
Now if we were suddenly propelled away from Earth for a few seconds… oy… that would suck
Except that the Earth’s insides are under enormous pressure; if the zero g region extends down to any depth, I expect you’d get a massive push upwards. If the whole planet was involved, I expect it would swell like a balloon and the surface break into fragments; then take even more damage and frictional heating as it collapsed back. For extra fun, even afterward I bet you’d have a huge amount of volcanic action as magma pushed up throguh the fragmented crust.