In my previous article, I discussed the equation E = mc2 and talked about how scientists used this equation, a ton of money, and a mountain of hardware to invent the “atomic bomb.” The city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was constructed solely for the purpose of enriching the uranium needed for the atomic bomb. A former member of the Monticello community, (Roy Grizzell, who passed away a few years ago) was a member of the military team that delivered the uranium to New Mexico. Two of these bombs were dropped on Japan in 1945, ending World War II.
In this article, I thought I would touch on the lighter side of this equation. A good friend of mine grew a 4 pound sweet potato in her garden . I had this potato for a while, showing it off to my friends! Several people said they had seen larger ones, but it was, by far, the largest sweet potato I had ever seen.
In the international system of units, also called the metric system; mass must be expressed in kilograms, and speed in meters/second. A good rule of thumb in converting is that 1 kg weighs about 2.2 lbs. A 4 pound sweet potato would have a mass of about 1.81 kg. The speed of light is 3 followed by 8 zeroes. C squared (c2) would be 9 followed by 16 zeroes – 90000000000000000. That’s a lot of zeroes! Doing the multiplication gives the number 1.63 followed by 15 zeroes. The unit of E in the metric system is in Joules.
So, what does this mean? The Joule has no real significance (for most people) other than being the world wide accepted unit for energy. To put things in perspective: my home is a 150 Amp, 240 Volt service. This means that the current cannot exceed 150 Amps and the voltage cannot exceed 240 Volts. If I multiply these 2 numbers, I get what is called the ‘power’ expressed in Watts. P = 36,000 Watts. If I now equate the energy calculated above to the product of power and time, I can solve for the time in seconds. The result is 4.53 followed by 10 zeroes. Again a meaningless number, but if I convert it to years – divide by 3600 seconds/hour, 24 hours/day, and 365 days/year – I get around 144,000 years! The actual time would be much larger since I rarely, if ever, use all the 150 Amps.
So, what does this have to do with a Sweet Potato? The energy contained in one 4 lb. sweet potato would be enough to heat and cool my home for more than 100,000 years. Including keeping my food cold and frozen, keeping my wife’s electric toothbrush going, run all my power tools, etc. All we need now is to figure out how to get it out. I’m sure someone is working on it!