These follow-up questions pertain to a dynamic context, and I’m afraid I’m not equipped to answer them. Moreover, I would also claim that not even Randall Munroe himself would be able to answer these questions, or anyone who hasn’t got a supercomputer and a team of physicists at disposal.
I bought the What If book myself and loved every chapter of it. But if you look closely, you will notice that basically every analysis in that book was made from a static context or a dynamic one that has ridiculously simple solutions (i.e. linear or exponential). Even exotic topics like neutron star matter and supernova neutrinos can be analysed with ease under a static context; just a matter of typing large numbers into a calculator. But as soon as dynamics is involved, even mundane things like Earthly weather or air flow over ailerons are going to require a supercomputer.
It doesn’t help to analogize the problem with more familiar scenarios, either. Quantity has a quality of its own, as Stalin famously said. Things like the cube-square law make big things behave very differently than small things even if they’re made out of the same material or undergoing the same basic process. Nuclear explosions and supernovas are not hard to understand because of the extreme energies involved per se. Nuclear interactions relevant to these processes are many orders of magnitude lower than the energies achieved in particle accelerator experiments. What macroscopic effect a gargantuan amount of these simple interactions can produce, however, is a different matter.
That’s why you need lots of brute force computational power as well as a team of physicists doing clever simplifications just to get a general understanding of the problem at hand, not even a precise prediction of a specific problem instance like weather forecast. And I’m afraid they won’t let you borrow their precious compute for a fun thought experiment.
Worse yet, in the case of real phenomenons like nuclear explosions and supernovas we at least get to observe their aftermaths (bomb yield/supernova remnant) to set a few boundary conditions on our analysis. For completely hypothetical scenarios, we can’t even check our predictions against reality. Can we, for instance, safely ignore temporary phase changes into exotic ice forms? How about nuclear interactions triggered by locally extreme heat and pressure?
Though this particular curiosity will never be satisfactorily quenched, at least I know when to stop pushing it further and try to put it into the back of my mind. You know, acting rationally :)
I think I won’t be able to express enough gratitude.
These follow-up questions pertain to a dynamic context, and I’m afraid I’m not equipped to answer them. Moreover, I would also claim that not even Randall Munroe himself would be able to answer these questions, or anyone who hasn’t got a supercomputer and a team of physicists at disposal.
I bought the What If book myself and loved every chapter of it. But if you look closely, you will notice that basically every analysis in that book was made from a static context or a dynamic one that has ridiculously simple solutions (i.e. linear or exponential). Even exotic topics like neutron star matter and supernova neutrinos can be analysed with ease under a static context; just a matter of typing large numbers into a calculator. But as soon as dynamics is involved, even mundane things like Earthly weather or air flow over ailerons are going to require a supercomputer.
It doesn’t help to analogize the problem with more familiar scenarios, either. Quantity has a quality of its own, as Stalin famously said. Things like the cube-square law make big things behave very differently than small things even if they’re made out of the same material or undergoing the same basic process. Nuclear explosions and supernovas are not hard to understand because of the extreme energies involved per se. Nuclear interactions relevant to these processes are many orders of magnitude lower than the energies achieved in particle accelerator experiments. What macroscopic effect a gargantuan amount of these simple interactions can produce, however, is a different matter.
That’s why you need lots of brute force computational power as well as a team of physicists doing clever simplifications just to get a general understanding of the problem at hand, not even a precise prediction of a specific problem instance like weather forecast. And I’m afraid they won’t let you borrow their precious compute for a fun thought experiment.
Worse yet, in the case of real phenomenons like nuclear explosions and supernovas we at least get to observe their aftermaths (bomb yield/supernova remnant) to set a few boundary conditions on our analysis. For completely hypothetical scenarios, we can’t even check our predictions against reality. Can we, for instance, safely ignore temporary phase changes into exotic ice forms? How about nuclear interactions triggered by locally extreme heat and pressure?
This. Is an eye-opening answer. I see now.
Though this particular curiosity will never be satisfactorily quenched, at least I know when to stop pushing it further and try to put it into the back of my mind. You know, acting rationally :)
I think I won’t be able to express enough gratitude.