Can a human-size statue of chocolate weigh more than 10 times as much as a human-size human?
In order to calculate that you’ll need to figure out how much chocolate weighs per square inch, and how many square inches there are in a pope.
People are just about neutral buoyant in water so they have a density around 1 g/cm[sup]3[/sup]. Lead has a density of 11.3 g/cm[sup]3[/sup]. I doubt very much chocolate is anywhere near that.
You know, now is a great time for this question to come up. How often are there actually TWO popes? So, let’s take one of them, toss him in a tank of water, and measure how much water he displaces. Then weigh him, reckon it out, and get the actual density of a pope. Of course, if a pope doesn’t sink in the water, that would mean he floats in water… like a witch!
So, is the pope a witch?
The current pope isn’t so bad, but the previous one sure seemed pretty dense.
But a human body (even a Pope) contains a fair amount of empty (air-filled) space – lungs, ear, nose, throat, sinus cavities. It’s unlikely that someone making a chocolate Pope would try to duplicate this – it’d be much easier to create a solid chocolate pope*, given the relatively cheap cost of chocolate. So it’s likely that a chocolate pope would weigh more than a real pope.
- That is what is done here at the Minnesota State Fair, when the Minnesota Dairy Princesses likenesses’ are carved in butter each year – they are solid butter figures of their upper torso & head. See photo here.
You’d have to find a way to seal his cassock, though. It looks like everything inside the chocolate pope’s clothes is solid chocolate, so to make a good comparison you’d want the air to stay inside the real pope’s clothes, especially around the legs.
I suspect the air filled space is less than you think, but in any case I was counting that. Humans typically float. As a young child, I’d float if I took a deep breath and held it. I’d sink if I emptied my lungs* so my claim is in our natural state we’re about neutrally buoyant and about 1 g per cubic centimeter.
For a life-size solid chocolate pope to weight 10 times as much, chocolate wold have to have a density almost as high as lead. I’m quite sure it does not. If you made a hollow chocolate pope that was ten times as heavy, chocolate would have to have an even larger density.
*This sigh is no longer true.
Given that we had a thread on this a few weeks ago, I’m going to close this one and refer further comment to the previous one.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator