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A comment on The “Oh-My-God Particle”.

Re:The “Oh-My-God Particle” by zaarn on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @10:38AM (#16474279)
To make it a bit more graspable; A baseball at 90% the speed of light will cause a fairly large nuclear detonation. [0]

This particle moved at 99.99999999999999999999951% the speed of light. IIRC from when I worked it out a month ago or so (baseball with that speed), it was in the region of 10^25 J, pretty close the energy the entire sun is outputting each second or a couple million nuclear bombs. (10^25 particles, 4.8 joule per particle)

[0]: https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The “Oh-My-God Particle” by Parcissons on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @11:04AM (#16474638)
If such a particle interacts with the water of my brain- would i drop dead?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The “Oh-My-God Particle” by zaarn on Wednesday February 28, 2018 @05:26AM (#16482047)
If such a baseball would interact with your brain, then yes. That would be kill.

If only the particle interacted: no. It's too fast to reasonably interact with something as short as going through a human body with any meaningful amount of energy.

[ Parent | on HN ]