I once heard a quite amusing joke that tends to circulate around physicist circles (not one myself, but I know some) that goes like this:
How many pebbles does it take to destroy the moon?
One.
At sufficient velocity.
That's great. Reminds me of the "Oh-my-god particle"
There was a single particle observed hitting our atmosphere back in 1991 that was doing 99.99999999999999999999951% of the speed of light. Assuming it was a proton, that means that this single subatomic particle had about the same kinetic energy as a baseball doing 60 MPH.
Thanks to relativistic time and space dilation, from that particle's perspective the universe was about 16 seconds old, and the Earth was a flat disk about 0.04mm thick.
If that had been a pebble, I don't know if it would have cracked the earth in half, but it would have been a bad day for pretty much anything with a backbone.
I once heard a quite amusing joke that tends to circulate around physicist circles (not one myself, but I know some) that goes like this: How many pebbles does it take to destroy the moon? One. At sufficient velocity.
That's great. Reminds me of the "Oh-my-god particle"
There was a single particle observed hitting our atmosphere back in 1991 that was doing 99.99999999999999999999951% of the speed of light. Assuming it was a proton, that means that this single subatomic particle had about the same kinetic energy as a baseball doing 60 MPH.
Thanks to relativistic time and space dilation, from that particle's perspective the universe was about 16 seconds old, and the Earth was a flat disk about 0.04mm thick.
Source: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/OhMyGodParticle/
If that had been a pebble, I don't know if it would have cracked the earth in half, but it would have been a bad day for pretty much anything with a backbone.