Timeline for Would a wound from a monomolecular blade instantly heal?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
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| Sep 7, 2016 at 22:32 | history | edited | Vincent | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Sep 2, 2016 at 22:27 | comment | added | Nobody | @trichoplax Well that depends on the amount of hand-waving you want to do. I just assumed the blade/edge exists, without anything supporting or projecting it. In reality you won't get anything resembling such a blade anyway, so when we are already messing up physics, why not make our life easy? Just add some story telling sugar coating around it and be done with it. | |
| Sep 2, 2016 at 20:30 | comment | added | trichoplax is on Codidact now | This is a fascinating variation on the idea of a molecule-thick weapon, but if it depends on having an electric field focused along a line, then presumably the ends of the weapon need to project this field somehow, so I would expect that the body would block this process, resulting in a lot of damage concentrated at the entry points of the line, rather than a little damage distributed evenly along the line. | |
| Sep 2, 2016 at 10:38 | comment | added | Nobody | Maybe I could use a 2d surface which reflects electric fields instead. That would be a single assumption without obvious contradictions and would wreak havoc with any electrons or nuclei it encounters. | |
| Sep 2, 2016 at 10:33 | comment | added | Nobody | @PeterCordes The filament has no width at all, I let it go towards zero, but still let it have a field at r=0. The hand-waving part is that this is a blatant contradiction and I was just choosing to apply physics where it suited me. I should have probably gone to sleep instead. I guess I could either go with a finite width or find out how I need to extend electrodynamics to allow for something like this. Intuitively I would claim that the filament has a linear charge density and so a force is exerted on it but this doesn't hold the other way. (I meant "tiny bit" from a sword size perspective) | |
| Sep 2, 2016 at 5:35 | comment | added | Peter Cordes | I really like the idea of this thought experiment; atoms/molecules interact with electric forces, so consider a cylinder of electric-field gradient and the limit as its radius approaches zero. I just disagree with your conclusions. And I think the interesting case would be as the radius of the cylinder increases to more like the bohr radius, or even the radius of a polymer, not proton radius. IDK if we could expect this hypothetical weapon to interact chemically with the target, or if its atoms would be too tightly bound to each other to do anything else. | |
| Sep 2, 2016 at 5:30 | comment | added | Peter Cordes | Forcing an actual proton into an existing nucleus would lead to decay in most cases, but you're just talking about an electric field gradient in your interesting though experiment. Even if you did have actual protons (e.g. a line of H atoms), getting a proton into a nucleus requires a lot of energy. Unless you can swing a sword at relativistic speeds... (Also, speaking of scale, 1mm is not a "tiny bit" compared to a monatomic line! That's about half a billion atomic radii.) | |
| Sep 2, 2016 at 5:23 | comment | added | Peter Cordes | I'm extremely skeptical of any nuclear effects from an electric-field gradient anything like what you'd find around any atom you might put in your monofilament. Unless the hand-waving/magic that makes it stick together produces a filament much narrower than a hydrogen atom, it's not happening. An electric field would just push an atom around when interacting with the nucleus; the molecular bonds holding it in place have orders of magnitude less binding energy than the nucleus. Most atoms in the human body are light elements with very stable nuclei. | |
| Sep 1, 2016 at 23:37 | history | answered | Nobody | CC BY-SA 3.0 |