Grrl Power #234 – Annihilation application
Yes Jiggawatt suddenly has gold hair to match her lipstick since a lot of people thought she looked too much like Storm, which is probably fair. I had planned on fixing all her previous appearances before putting this page up, but migrating the page to the new host took several hours out of several days this week so I’m a tiny bit behind. Like Maxima’s sudden and unexplained demotion, it will probably have to wait till I’m getting ready to do all the fixes at once for the book. Though I suppose I could just change Jiggawatts hair back to the beginning of the fight. I mean, she could have gotten her hair done before her family thing tonight.
I may need to revisit Jiggawatt’s 6 rank on the cast page. She’s turning out to be pretty powerful. I think I put her at 6 largely because she’s a one trick pony. She’d have a bad time against someone heavily resistant to lightning… but, with the “darkning” that really opens up her options. I actually asked about this on a Reddit science thread, and the consensus was that positrons would behave exactly like electrons. You could arc them, store or generate them in chemical batteries, transmit them down wires etc… assuming of course that the chemical batteries and wires were comprised of antimatter. It does make me wonder what would happen if matter was struck with positron lightning. The electrons in the matter would be annihilated, leaving behind a pile of highly charged and unstable gamma irradiated protons and neutrons (I’m guessing.) I’ll have to think about what impact that will have on the comic. I suspect my solution will either be “Holy shit Jiggawatt that’s dangerous! Never use that again!” or “Something about living matter destabilizes the positrons, limiting their effectiveness” which I don’t want to do because it’s such a trite comic booky excuse, but otherwise… jeeze, Jiggawatt may well be one of the most dangerous members of the team. Of course the hugely limiting factor here is the gamma radiation thing. Hulk jokes aside, gamma radiation is super bad m’kay? She wouldn’t realistically be able to use it often without significant risks to her own health. Dabbler’s going to have to have a talk with her.
On the other hand – half the stuff superheroes do should involve radioactive fallout, so I’m not sure why I’m picking on Jiggawatt. I mean… what the hell did Max shoot at that tank earlier? It wasn’t a shitload of C-4. And it wasn’t a thing that opened up a microsecond micro portal to the sun – that would be radioactive as balls. It’s that suspiciously clean energy that all superheroes use, from Cyclops and Havok to Starfire and anyone that shoots “energy.” Not lightning or fire or something identifiable. Just “energy.” Really Cyclops? You shoot kinetic blasts? What is it, red telekinesis? No, it’s “energy.”
So the site has been migrated to the new server. Hopefully it will be zippity doo da fast around here from now on. If you see anything weird (on the page, not in general) try dumping your cache (CTRL+F5) and see if that fixes it, if not, send me a screenshot and your browser version to grrlpowercomic-at-gmail. Oh and I had my guru flip a switch so now the reply field appears right under the comment you’re replying to which is rad.
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Smart Dabbler, this is going to be dangerous even for supers! Plus, matter/antimatter annihilations tend to, dare I say it, cause explosions.
Also some sciencey stuff for you, Dave, based on your commentary :)
Striking matter with positrons will cause their elimination, because they will rapidly encounter electrons, even be attracted to them due to their opposite charge. This is how PET scans work. The emitted positrons are rapidly annihilated by electrons, producing gamma rays, which are the measured quantity. You will end up with ionised matter as well, and heavy ions are the most dangerous form of radioactivity due to their extreme potential for damage, despite their low penetrative power. From what I know, air can stop them (somebody please correct me if I’m wrong), but once they are in tissue, they can cause great havoc, just like alpha particles that cannot even penetrate skin but rapidly destroy endothelial and mesothelial tissue, among other tender tissues.
Also, shooting the darkning through the air will rapidly diminish its effects, because air is filled with gas molecules containing electrons. Though gas density is very low, it will still eliminate a significant quantity of the positrons, so either Jiggawatt can generate an INCREDIBLE amount of positrons to counter normal lightning (and produce even more gamma ray photons along the way) or else she’ll be weaker than people like Glowbug, who do not need to up their power output to generate an identical amount of charge.
Other than that, HOLY GOD that would put Jiggawatt close to Maxima on power level, if not even more so, as she can easily annihilate people with this power. Antimatter generation would put her as one of the most dangerous people in the world, capable of annihilating matter and breaking substances (including tissue) into their ions. Zap someone with darkning and they will likely dissolve in an annihilation reaction.
kfox is prity much spot on he only forgot that the radiation relised if in high enough quantity can course a cascade reaction resulting i a lets call it effect
that’s meant to say Chernobyl effect
The radiation is not a concern here.
At least not compared to the fact that antimatter tends to react rather violently with normal matter.
On the contrary, “reacts violently” means it produces gamma rays.
It also means you’re looking at a “small” thermonuclear detonation. Quotes are because small is relative when speaking of thermonuclear events. I doubt the darkning would get more than a couple of inches through the air before consuming Jiggy in a cloud of expanding plasma, as well.
“The radiation is not a concern here.
At least not compared to the fact that antimatter tends to react rather violently with normal matter.” Prototype Cyborg
You are kidding right? gamma rays are lethal, deadly, killer, it could even kill you directly without the concomitant degradation death depending on the intensity. They are also called “cosmic rays” and might be behind some unknown cause deaths of animals should parts of the ozone layer weaken and thin for microseconds.
Still much less lethal than the kinetic blast that would accompany them I’m afraid.
Actually, gamma rays are the high energy radiation and require large amounts of high-density materials. I think you are thinking of alpha particles which can be stopped by a piece of paper or the layer of dead skin your body keeps around.
no he said heavy ion’s matter would be stopped by air not gamma rays
they whould be stoped by skin not air but they would be taken in the wind
Gama rays can’t be taken in the wind, irradiated particles emitting gamma rays can.
You’re mostly right (whereas lowten is mostly wrong :-))
but I feel the need to make a few remarks.
When you write “heavy ions are the most dangerous form of radioactivity” do you mean Cluster decay (which wouldn’t occur in this situation), or the suddenly ionised air molecules resulting from a positron annihilating one of its electrons (which technically isn’t a form of radioactivity).
Either way, don’t get it inside you and you will be fine.
I wouldn’t want to stand right by the darkning and inhale a lot but given the likely availablity of electrons in the area the air is unlikely to remain ionised for long/far.
As for “Zap someone with darkning and they will likely dissolve in an annihilation reaction.“, I would like to clarify that it is only the parts of them that were zapped that would “dissolve” (rather than a whole body consuming chain reaction) and then only if sufficient zapping was done.
Looking at the way Jiggawatt fires her bolts, I was imagining the darkning bolt enveloping a person, which led me to the image of them dissolving. I guess my imagination go carried away.
And yes, I did get the two mixed up. Normal ions are indeed not a form of radiation, so having an electron annihilated does not form “dangerous radiation” ions. Thanks for correcting my misinformation :-)
First thing that would happen would be that the darkening would strip the electrons from any atom it touches, next the newly ionized atoms might be a problem if it weren’t for the tremendous explosion. One molecular unit of positrons would produce energy equivalent to 1.5 Little Boy fission bombs. i.e. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
In destruction potential Jiggawat outranks Max easily.
“shooting the darkning through the air will rapidly diminish its effects”
This is the crux of the issue here.
What you need to realize about lightning is that it’s not a stream of electrons flowing along a path (at least, not at first). What happens is that static charge builds up in a cloud until the electric flied is strong enough to ionize the surrounding air molecules – basically, the outer electrons in the air molecules decide that their neighborhood has gone to hell due to the nearby cloud, and so they choose to be elsewhere. When this happens, some (a tiny fraction) of the excess electrons composing the static charge move in. Meanwhile, those displaced electrons start ionizing the air that they move into. This happens in a series of branching jumps – essentially at random – called the step leader, and this process persists until the refugee electrons find a new home (usually, the ground). As soon as that connection is made, a circuit is formed, and electrons can begin to flow along the path of ionized air (but they still jump atom to atom).
In order for lightning control to work as a superpower (from a physics standpoint), you have to somehow be able to produce the static buildup (this is the easy part) and control where that build up goes (the hard part) – either by controlling the step leader or pre-ionizing the air along the desired path.
Now, suppose we were to try this with positrons. We have a technique to produce a static buildup of positrons similar in nature to the static buildup of electrons in lightning (say, in our intrepid heroine’s hands). Once this static charge reaches a sufficient strength, it will be capable of ionizing the surrounding air, just like lightning. However, this is where the similarity ends. Rather than the static charge displacing the nearby electrons, it attracts them. This creates an immediate matter-antimatter annihilation reaction inside our heroine’s hand. Boom. Dead hero.
Okay, how can we get around this? If we have a way of pre-ionizing the path, we may be able to avoid the range-zero explosion of the positron payload. Suppose, via “regular” electric control, we create a pathway where we have cleared out some of the electrons. Problem now is that our pathway is positively charged, so our positrons are actively repelled from travelling down it. Thus, in order to make this work, we have to not only get rid of the electrons our darkning might encounter, but also force the darkning down a path that it really doesn’t want to travel down (and the better we are at avoiding electrons, the harder it is to force the darkning down the path).
So, what if we just get rid of everything, and form a colimated beam of positrons in vacuum? This is the most promising approach. If you can accelerate a beam of positrons in a manner similar to that of a particle accelerator, and then shoot it down a tunnel of vacuum, you’re in business. At least up until the point where that vacuum tunnel collapses. After that, your beam starts encountering air molecules every few nanometers. If there are a lot of nanometers between the end of the tunnel and your target, the fireworks might be impressive but they won’t be very effective. (Not immediately, at least; fry everyone with enough hard radiation your villain problems will solve themselves in a week or two.) Unfortunately, this particular solution is looks a lot more like a beam gun (which it is) than it does lightning (which it isn’t).
So, what else can we do here? If you can emit electricity, it’s not a stretch to say you can also absorb it (the physical processes are almost identical), so that’d work.
It’s conceivable that you could produce a static buildup of anti-protons, which would act a lot like regular lightning – at least up until the point where the circuit gets established and they start trying to travel down the tube; after that point, they begin interacting with the ionized air molecules and people start wishing they hadn’t waited so long to have children.
There’s one other potential candidate, though, and this one may be a winner. Antimatter is not the only type of exotic matter that exists. There’s also the (theoretical; it’s never been observed) possibility of negative matter. That is, matter with the same charge, spin, etc. of normal matter but negative mass. This type of matter, if it existed, would behave similarly to normal matter (the only difference is that it would have repulsive gravity) until it came into contact with normal matter. At which point, it would simply cancel. No radiation, no explosion, nothing – just vacuum where particles used to be. So, a beam of negative-matter electrons would behave a lot like lightning, until it came into contact with normal electrons, after which it would simply vanish. Darkning.
The negative-mass electrons seems the best bet, if you ask me.
Gamma rays? Oh god please let there be a soon to be hulk moment. On an unrelated note why are two of my favorite webcomics written by people named dave?
Or at least a Hulk joke from Sidney, which I’d say is almost guaranteed.
It’s a depressingly common name in English. I don’t think I ever had a class in school where I was the only David. In my last job, on a floor with 80 people, there were 3 of us, and the job before that in a department of 20 people I was the second Dave, so everyone just called me Barrack.
My brother is David, he had a bully named David (same age) (his brother had my name too, same age), my jr high best friend was David, in college I roomed with 2 Davids at the same time, my mom dated a David, my softball team had two Davids…
oh god, it’s the Dave Conspiracy…
I got the reference. Was thinking the same thing. :)
To quote Thomas Chong:
( •_•)
( •_•)~⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)
“Dave’s not here!”
“I’m sorry, Dave.”
Hal 9000:”I’m sorry Dave. I can’t do that.”
For different reason the names my mother gave us became extremely popular after we were born I can trace the obvious reason in my case because a Kennedy was born shortly after me and he was given the same name. Often people are named after celebs or famous people. Since most are time specific this means a lot of the same names are given to children of the same age. (BTW my youngest brother is named David though he prefers Dave)
Perhaps we could simply respond with a classic “Tommy Chong”-routine:
“Uhh, Dave’s not here, Man…”
I fall on the oposite end of the spectrum. My given name is almost unique. I saw a video game character with it a few years ago, and it’s also an extremely uncommon surname. However, my surname is Jones.
It’s better than being called John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt (because his name is my name too).
What’s the second Webcomic?
Selkie selkiecomic.com
So, what happened to Morph?
Suspenseful yes?
Not just your everyday run-of-the-mill photons, gamma ray photons.
a photon is a partial (sort of) of em radiation. so all em energy is in photons whether it is light or gamma or even the microwaves from your cell. so it is correct to say which type of photon you are referring to
Ahem. A photon is a particle (maybe parcel) of EM radiation. Otherwise, spot on.
Wavicles!
nope – only Aquaman and Sub-Mariner have wavicles
It’s both, really. A photon is has no rest mass, making it wave-like, but its relativistic mass gives it particle properties as well.
Makes for an interesting concept. “The photon identity crisis.”
Because the universe is weird!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8Cx70UlCC0
Although I prefer the version on his album.
https://www.amazon.com/Incongruent-Explicit-Green-Perfect-Strangers/dp/B00JXJ7G6U
Depends on how you look at them…
I got that info straight from Wikipedia. It sounded weird to me but I didn’t have a source to refute it and that sounded like a weirdly specific thing that Dabbler might say.
It’s completely correct. Matter/antimatter annihilation results in gamma rays, the highest energy type of electromagnetic radiation currently named.
Oh please tell me there’s going to be a huge explosion because of this. Can’t ever get enough of big explosions.
Technically there should have been a big explosion at the instant she started firing it. The positrons should have started blowing up the electrons in the air around her. Basically in the microsecond after she starts to let the first burst out, her hands should have been blown off and the rest of her body should have been thrown across the parking lot at high speeds. A big question of whether the heat, the shockwave, of the radiation killed her (and probably a few bystanders) first.
i think you are overestimating the power of the electrons in the air. i haven’t run the numbers but im shour you need a much denser concentration than air for an explosion
Physics time!
My assumptions:
A bolt of lightning (or darkning) is essentially a cylinder, about 10 centimeters across.
Jiggawatt is about 20 meters away from Glowbug.
The fight is taking place at STP.
Using these:
Air is mostly nitrogen, in the form N2, which has a denstiy of 28g/mol
1 mol takes up 22.4 liters, or 22,400 cm^3
The volume of the darkning is 5cm^2*pi*2000cm= 157,000 cm^3
The total mass of the air that the darkning occupies is 157,000/22,400*28=about 200 grams.
But this isn’t a number we care about, because we are only annihilating electrons.
The number of moles of gas is 157,000/22,400=7.01
N2 has 28 electrons per molecule.
7mols*28electrons/molecule*6.02*10^23molecules/mol*9.11*10^-28grams/electron=
.11 grams of electrons.
Theres also .11 grams of positrons then, for a combined annihilation mass of .22 grams.
E=mc^2
E=.00022(kg)*300,000,000^2 (the speed of light squared is not to be taken lightly, as it basically adds almost 17 0s onto the end of the other number)
E=1.94*10^13 J
19.4 Terajoules of energy.
TNT is about 4.2 megajoules /kg
19.4 terajoules/4.2 megajoules=
A 4.6 megaton explosion
I’ve rechecked my math, it seems fine.
So the restaurant and most of the combatants apparently no longer exist now…
On second thought, I don’t imagine a bolt of lightning to be 10cm in diameter, let’s use a quarter of that.
1/4^2*4.6 megatons=
Slightly less than 300 kilotons.
However, this is more of a sustained effect…and not every positron will “find” an electron immediately.
Also, this would be pure radiation in the form of gamma rays, not explosive force. Think of it as being a lot like a Neutron Bomb…everyone nearby will die of radiation sickness shortly, but the buildings should be fine.
(Death by radiation sickness assumes that dabbler doesn’t have some means of absorbing the gamma rays and healing any damage it has already done.)
Just don’t forget a neutron warhead still explodes and the blast radius is at least a mile around it. But no fall out. If we are going to have nukes at least make them all N-bombs.
Well, this isn’t ACTUALLY a Neutron bomb, but merely a means of generating a lot of radiation without a one-shot explosion.
IANAP but does lightning……or any electrical charge for that matter….even HAVE a measurable diameter? It’s really just energy moving from one atom to the next isn’t it? So shouldn’t any given charge have an absolute diameter ranging from atomic to molecular? i get that it has what appears to be a diameter caused by the light given off and the burns caused by it’s transmission but that doesn’t seem like it’s an actual……you know…solid…..diameter. It’s like we’re talking about how much electricity you can fit into a baby food jar.
so a 300 kiloton burst of gamma radiation, in a downtown area, Arianna’s going to have her work cut out for her covering that up.
Even so, since, this is still the first day of the “Let me back up a few months” flashback (so as far as I know), and since Omnigal was around to blow Kopy Kraut’s copycap of his head with her dice karma a few months later, I can only assume that Dave has more then just his arms up his sleeves.
Have you been exposed to gamma radiation and it wasn’t your fault?
Does the radioactive glow now coming from your own body keep you up at night?
Then you may be entitled to compensation!
At Arc, Arc, Arc & Arianna, our trained staff will get you the compensation you deserve, not the compensation you need.
For
One tiny point – the calculation assumes electrons and positrons at rest, as does the Wikipedia article quoted a few times in the comments and by Dave. The lightning and darkning will have considerable (kinetic) energy. This will make the annihilation reaction progress at a slightly larger rate than assumed in the static cylinder thought experiment. e- and e+ will be ambling towards each other at a leisurely a 360,000 km/h (224,000 mp/h) or 5950 km per second each. At a 20 m distance the cylinder will be filled with reactive particles 297500 times per second.
Oh, what was this REM song?
I believe the one you’re looking for is called “It’s the end of the world, as we know it!”
oh, yeah.. and I feel fine!…
The problem is that the lightning isn’t a solid stream. If you consider the amount of electrons and positrons being put out, you get a more accurate result.
First, let’s assume that both JW and GB are putting out the full power of a lightning bolt (around 10,000 Amps, or Columbs/s) That is about 10^10 joules/second.
Assuming that’s all going into gamma radiation, that’s 10^10 rad/s being put out. Based on a distance estimate of 12m apart, JW and BG are both getting about 1.5 * 10 ^8 rad/s. Both of them should be dead by morning.
Given how little damage we see JW’s missed bolt do, it’s likely that neither can put out more than an amp, so at tops 1.5 * 10^4 rad/s is the radiation dose that they seem to be getting. Still not a safe amount. Dabbler and Hiro probably around 3 times as far away, so they’re probably getting about 10^3 rad/s, which is unpleasant for a human, but probably safe for a super.
Ignore my comment below; it’s right as far as it goes, but I was still buying the “positrons” comment from Jiggawatt at that point.
What she’s doing is visibly soaking up the lightning… This is Energy Absorption!
doubt there would actually be an explosion. Yes, matter/antimatter reactions generate an obscene amount of energy. But that’s obscene on the scale of individual particles, which themselves are ridiculously small. So you still need a fair few of them for a decent explosion. Without actually doing the maths, I’d guess that Dave has is right by putting what Jiggawatt’s doing in the “gonna give everyone cancer” range indtead of the “explodes everything” range.
Sorry for going grammar nazi, but “impune” means “unpunished”; the word Glowbug should be saying is “impugn”.
Also, I don’t think Jiggawatt having only electrical powers makes her a one-trick-pony. That more depends on how she uses her power. If she’s creative, her single power will be able to do a multitude of useful things.
No, that’s a spelling error, get your German Nationalism correct next time you decide to correct someone
That’s “National Socialism”
Are you implying that the National Socialist Worker’s party had difficulty with spelling and grammar, Honey Badger?
No, I was just correcting a corrector.
Besides, Glowbug may have the wrong in mind.
“wrong word”
technically, Magneto is a one trick pony with electro magnetic energy powers.
it’s not the number of tricks, when dealing with fundamental forces its the throughput that counts.
Think of someone who could manipulate the strong nuclear force. Shut that down and atoms fall apart.
Fall apart?! More like fly apart! All those closely packed protons will want to get as far apart as possible as quickly as possible. The strong nuclear force is all that is keeping them in there (as far as we know). Big Bang, part 2.
Every atom in the universe would simultaneously undergo nuclear fission.
Not quite as big as the Big Bang, but definitely impressive to watch for any outside observers.
The only reason why we are here is because there was a slight bit more of Baryonic matter over anti-matter. Not even counting all the hidden matter and energy that makes us 96% of our universe.
So, you’re saying that now is a good time to step outside for a breath of fresh vacuum? Maybe sit back with a tub of popcorn & watch the show?
Ah yes, I’ll make a note to fix that.
Please, make Jigs the first Super fatality!!!
Oh, and she’s only super dangerous to all life when fighting someone who uses lightning attacks (either self- or tech-created)
Or she just dampens the electrical fields present in all living things, causing them to explode/irradiate the body being dampened. Sort of like how Jenny Sparks of The Authority killed ‘god’.
Wow, I’m beginning to see why Dave says this is an insane power. It’s like instant death, only in comics death only lasts long enough for the writers to get a story arc out of it.
Fairly sure, in this comic, death will be permanent
Possibly, but that’s up to Mr. Dave. Realistically, there’s no way Jiggawat can die in this fight. It’s impossible she hasn’t used this power before and obviously she has lived, and realistically it’s not permitted someone die in the first fight. Maxima would be unhappy, and no one wants an unhappy Max.
To use another Authority line, Max would dig Jig up, bring her back to life and put her back to work.
Zack Tilly, how deaths are handled is up to DaveB, and don’t personally believe he would dick with the readers by making deaths cheap
You mean Uncle Ben.
not a problem, since both Gwen and Zephan Zoeng both magic, they just resurrect her (and Arianna will no doubt point out that “since Jiggawatt signed on the dotted line even death won’t release her from her contract”)
Depends on if they
1) Can resurrect them at all.
2) Those resurrected aren’t just a litch or zombie without their own minds.
3) There isn’t some terrible price to pay for doing it.
4) If they even practice Necromancy at all.
Magic is no different from the rest of physics concerning matter and energy. Just a few curve balls in the Laws that govern it.
Don’t be so dismissive of it. Resurrection vs Reanimation isn’t a light matter.
…In this particular case, death isn’t a “lightning” matter either…
Uh, that is all sorts of bad Jiggawatt. Like really really bad. Why did nobody give her the rest of the lesson on that crap? Did she just skip that day or something?
Nah, she just thinks she is better than everyone else, ie a noob
To be fair, she is blonde now.
She is a recruit, like Sydney, so I don’t know how well she has been trained yet.
Though Sydney is obviously much newer.
As a true Nerd I expect Sydney would know this was a “Bad Thing”. While she’s a bit of a spaz she seems to be in the upper 5% I.Q. wise.
Also, seeing as how powers tend towards unique, who would be able to train her except Trial and Error?
Now I totally want to see a super-duo named Trial and Error. They never make the same mistake twice.
Depending on the error, they might not get a chance to make it twice.
No Who’s Who?
I was hoping to find out who Skullface McArmpads was.
Fairly sure a ‘grunt’ doesn’t count as an introduction
Whoops, forgot to populate that.
I just call him “Budget Skeletor” :D
Shao Kahn on vacation? :P
Bill Shatner’s head pops into view “KAHN!!!!” looks around “Sorry wrong comic” and pops out.
Hahahahaha! +50 if I could!
Hmm, Dabbles better pay attention to Zeb-head next to her
If he paid attention to what Dabbler just yelled, he’ll be beating feet for the horizon.
So he’s a mook with half a brain. Enough to be asking himself should I be concerned about that but not enough to act on it.
mook looks at xurial “should I be running?”
xurial “huh? whats the point we’re all on a short clock from radiation poisoning already.”
mook pales to pure white “that means dead right?”
xurial “well max and halo could be able to survive with the shield power they have, you on there level?”
Mook running around in circles, screaming “I’m dead! I’m dead!”
I think the next training session will be everyone sits in a class room and Dabbler explains them which stupid things they shouldn’t do with their powers.
you may have to wait a while
Nov 28 2011 Grrl Power – Dabbler’s Science Corner #1
Apr 23 2014 Grrl Power – Dabbler’s Science Corner #2
Dabbler’s Science Corner #3 not due until the back end of Nov 2016
Creating antimatter is … wow. That might even be dangerous to Achilles, who can resist damage at the subatomic level – if he’s made out of normal matter at all and her bolts can actually touch him (no repulsion field) ….
Matter/antimatter annihilation is subatomic, so I’m guessing that Achilles is protected from that as well. If his atoms are “quantum locked” or somesuch as was speculated, he will never undergo radioactive decay (like carbon-14 or potassium-40) and darkning cannot harm him.
And no, my terminology was not inspired by the Weeping Angels, though it did remind me of them.
…I hope you didn’t blink while typing out all of that…
I’m still here, so I guess I didn’t :P
Well, antimatter (in large quantities) is the only thing that can damage a GP hull.
Antimatter or getting too close to a gravitational singularity, if memory serves.
Nah, the hull was ok after the black hole. The tidal stresses of the near pass did bad things to the contents of the hull however.
It was a neutron star, not a black hole.
Yes and everything inside ended up in the front squeezed into a very small space some of which used to be the pilot.
There are two aspects of radiation. The energy of a single particle and the number of particles. A single gamma ray photon doesn’t really harm. They are so small, they even pass through lead rather easy. You need a lot of them to be dangerous. But I will shut up now because I don’t know exactly what happens during lightnings.
Lightning does generate a dab of positrons. But Jiggawatt is firing a pure beam of the stuff. Even if she can control it to the extent the darkning only reacts to the lightning, she pumping out a lot of high power gamma.
Ahh, so that’s what is happening here.
At least, scientists in this world have a good explanation for the surplus of matter over antimatter. Supers.
Eehm…
Are you telling us that Jiggawatt is capable of creating Antimatter out of nothing? Where does the energy come from?
Anti-Hammerspace.
Maybe Jiggowatt has the capacity to alter charges so that electrons become positrons, photons become antiphotons, protons become antiprotons (what the Dooms Day machine fired in a pure beam to slice up whole planets.) Oh an neutrons remain neutrons.
She would spend more time converting matter to anti-matter for our govt and NASA than fighting crime.
Punches from the punch dimension.
You could ask where the energy to kick a tank fifty feet comes from. Sure as @#%^ takes more than a steak’s worth of chemical energy to do that. What about the energy used to heat stuff up like poor heatwave? Or the energy required to fly a 200+lb muscleman around? Or, or, or.
I would worry more about particle duality than the energy that would be required to make the positrons. I guess that she is required to make both matter and antimatter and some how stores the positrons for latter use.
Is lightning matter? This sound more like an energy thing. Technically lightning is the passing of electrons through a conductive medium, in this case the air, just like all electricity. Each electron bumps one from the next atom in turn and replaces is. Sort of like a hose. you don’t get water out the far end until you have enough behind it to push it out. That’s why laymen talk about the 40% line loss in electric power lines. It isn’t actually lost, it’s just like pressure in the hose, still there but contained.
This “darkening” is another matter entirely though, there are no positrons in the air to pass along. I suspect it’s more a matter of transforming electrons into positrons, which is insanely powerful. Unless she has a secondary ability to handle the gamma radiation, not impossible under the rules Dave is using, everyone there just received a lethal dose of radiation. (As someone else mentioned above, I haven’t run the numbers. This guess is based off the current needed for electricity to jump the gaps we’re seeing.)
Yea that’s basicly what I meant
Turning electrons into positrons would require her to turn the electrons into pure energy (which is ALOT of energy), than contain that energy and somehow force it to turn into positrons.
If she could turn matter into energy, she could turn anything into a gigantic bomb. Less than a gram of matter was actually annahilated (turned into energy) when the Hiroshima nuke exploded.
This not necessarily a process that requires much energy. Both between matter & antimatter is made of the same quarks, just with different “spins” and “colors”. Jiggawatt could just be taking ordinary matter and converting to antimatter.
That is incorrect. Antimatter baryons consist of antiquarks, whereas mesons consist of a quark and an antiquark, and as such, “anti-mesons” do not exist, since they already incorporate both forms. Leptons and anti-leptons, such as the positron, do not contain any quarks at all. The difference between positrons and electrons is the charge, not the colour or spin (I don’t think leptons even possess colour charge, does anyone know?)
Color charge is carried by gluons and is the basis of the strong force.
Leptons do not participate in the strong interaction, and so no, do not have color charge.
Cheers for the clarification! You have upgraded my geek knowledge!
That’s the thing with superpowers: there doesn’t have to be an explanation right away.
As Arianna mentioned in the press conference bus flight to the demo range, …corporations and universities alike are scrambling to discover how super powers work… Even they don’t know the answers, and they live in a Universe that has supers.
Think of it as lightning from the evil goatee mirror universe.
Well not everyone was evil mostly just the Humans at first. I actually really liked the dark mirror version of Enterprise. Evil Scott Bakula was awesome and needy at the same time.
Or clean shaven with a scar and eye patch from a Dr. Who mirror universe.
Wouldn’t that be Anti-Anti-Matter? Or rather Anti-matter as it exists in another universe. I think this was covered in the Sten Chronicles by Chris Bunch and Allan Cole. Not that really solves the radiation issues :(
Quick! We need some ImpervioumX!
The law of conservation of energy (and by extension the law of conservation of mass) is usually the first law of physics to go when superpowers are involved.
I find Newton’s Third Law to be a very easily ignored guideline as well.
they made that a law in what country? I thought it was a suggestion. most cats I know don’t even credit it as that.
Cats like to break the law
Sooo only one safe here would be sydney
I forsee sydney being ordered to do something with shield next page, or else…bad very bad.
Why do I see ‘a great burning’ and Dabs’ old BF/GF showing up due to this little stunt here?
+1
for reference the electron positron reaction would not be limited to the lightning and darkning. but would also destroy the electrons in any matter it cam in to contact with.
this would have the effect of destabilising any atom hit with it and coursing it to explode on the atomic scail realising alpha and beta radiation.
if this was dun to dense enough matter the the A, B & G radiation realised could coarse a cascade resulting in a nuclear explosion
No, radiation can’t cause a nuclear explosion.
What CAN cause such a gigantic explision though, is antimatter/matter anahilation itself
when an atom decays in to alfa beta and gamma radiation that radiation can destabilise surrounding atoms coursing them to decay like wise
if enough atoms decay at the same time in a dense enough material you get a run away reaction aka a cascade reaction. resulting in a nuclear explosion.
this is how a nuclear fission bomb works
Fission bombs work on neutron cascades. Alpha, beta and gamma rays aren’t involved in triggering the initial fission cascade.
no not in the initial but they are what perpetuate it once it starts
Nope.
Neutron cascade only.
Alpha, Beta & Gamma Radiation are irrelevant to nuclear explosions.
you do realis that the Neutron’s are initially released as alpha partials right?
No.
The neutrons are released as neutrons.
There may also be Alpha, Beta, Gamma & neutrino emissions but these are irrelevant to the neutron cascade.
All of that is irrelevant when there is no fission material nearby.
You can’t just bombard the air with neutrons and expect a reaction. There’s a reason they use highly enriched uranium for that
Alpha radiation is PROTONS, not neutrons though (beta is electrons, and gamma is photons)
Alpha radiation consists of helium-4 nuclei: 2 protons and 2 neutrons.
Pure proton radiation comes from proton emission, never from alpha emission.
If I recall correctly, only elements heavier than iron can undergo a fission reaction (fise? fissulate?), while elements lighter than iron can only fuse. Basically, all the elements want to be iron.
Except iron-256. I don’t know what the hell it wants to be, probably a TARDIS or something.
Also, an alpha particle is two protons and two neutrons (no electrons). So, soon to become helium.
Iron-256?
I hope that’s a typo, because otherwise your iron is outweighing plutonium.
Not entirely
There are elelements lighter than iron that are still radioactive (the lightest being Tritum, a hydrogen isotoop with 2 neutrons.
But those are rare, and not energetic enough to cause any kind of explosion.
And yes my bad, I mistook alpha radiation. Either way still not lose neutrons :P
They are not. Alpha particles are exceedingly stable and are very unlikely to decay themselves, due to their doubly magic properties (2 each of protons and neutrons). Neutrons are emitted as they are, through neutron emission, usually after fission or fusion from excited isotopes, but it can also happen in heavy isotopes of some light elements, or in the very heavy elements like californium.
For an explosion, the mass involved has to be rather significant. Recently scientist created 6 antimatter atoms and keep them intact for several seconds when finally annihilated they released significantly more energy than even 6 atoms worth of fissioning material but far below what’s required for an explosion. Positrons and electrons are extremely low mass. It won’t go boom but it will irradiate the area.
What about the intensity of the radiation ionizing(exciting, what have you) the air into plasma?
You may have just opened up a Pandora’s box level power there DaveB.
Antimatter is the single most energetic substance in a matter universe.
You need less than a gram of the stuf to cause a nuclear level explosion
Someone may have to sandbag JW quick.
Positron beam?
POSITRON BEAM?!
….bring my brown pants.
And sorry for the double post, but… wait… can she do both at once? Can she fire parallel lightning/darkning beams?
Because HOLY CRAP SHE’S GOT A WUNDERLAND TREATYMAKER.
Worse. The Wunderland Treatymaker only suppresses charge until matter is outside the beam. She apparently creates/destroys it. So she has the Treatymaker plus a butt load of gamma radiation.
Duck And Cover, definitely – in the next state.
Gamma rays + Sydney = ???
It’s too terrifying to imagine.
Sydney-Hulk? Evil doers beware! Also anyone on THE LIST!
My bet is that since she can create this power she can also absorb it. Its really the only way she could have used it once before without it killing her and a bunch of people without making the news or becoming a last ditch effort power move.
It would appear as though someone else has already explained the explosion prat of this, but even so…
Darkning idea, freaking cool power otherwise!
Glee! Someone else’s mind went to the Wunderland Peacemaker. Fire parallel beams and watch the horrific arc between them consume everything the impact points.
as to the cyke squad.. Marvel has a standing handwavwe for that; the powers of all super beings in the galaxy (or others) are each created by a super machine, a celestial artifact called the m’kran crystal.
all the ‘mutations’ do is create a code, which the crystal reads and then alters reality to suit.
(there is more than one crystal, Earth’s galaxy has one on the dark side of Earth’s moon. It’s why earth has very strong super heroes)
turn off the crystal, all powers stop. It’s happened before. That’s also how power neutralizers work- and why people like dr doom are so dangerous; they understand part of the crystal’s tech.
so power use only creates fallout if the crystal wants it too :)
…huh. When did they retcon the M’Kraan as being the source of all superpowers?
(I am way behind on my Marvel continuity.)
Marvel has continuity?
I think he either got it from a non-canon source or confused some important details.
neither. Its from the original Claremont/ byrne xmen run, (which introduced the first crystal) and later confirmed in other stories.
for example, when the crystal was once turned off, all ‘non magic’ super powers failed.
that the celestials are responsible for ‘non magic’ super powers was long known before that, back from the Kirby ‘fourth host’ stories. All Claremont and Byrne did was establish the how.
and there are more than one crystal; some may have other abilities- when the shiar one was turned off. ‘all of reality flickered’ to quote Reed Richards.
now there may be other power sources beyond that, the elder gods exist in Marvel as well, and seem to give magic based abilities- albeit a bit more directly.
But Marvel tends to like ‘ science fiction’ as an answer to things, and ‘super advanced aliens did it’ works fine for them.
why they are doing it is debatable- there have been different alternate explanations- from earth houses a baby celestial to imprisons the elder gods- but the various celestial crystals are canon.
Woulnd’t “shooting” that stuff around also eat into her own fingers (for starters)?
Bo more than a lightning blast would burn her fingers. The big question is can she absorb the gamma level photons like absorbing a lightning bolt?
Nothing like a super who doesn’t know the consequences of using their powers, eh? Jeez, you’d think she’d know that already. THis can’t be the first time she’s played with that.
Her brain is a little scrambled at the moment from the sonic attack
She’s probably not thinking straight
The part I don’t understand is that if she can absorb lightning, why not…do that thing?
The thought bubble explains she needs to lock on something in order to be able to aim in her current situation.
My physics is old but, if Jiggawatt is only creating positrons then:
The direct effect only destroys electrons, releasing gamma rays.
The gamma rays do not destroy nuclei. Therefore there is no long-term radioactivity.
Think “everyone is getting an unhealthy dose at the X-ray machine” rather than Nagasaki. So there are long-term health effects but not long-term radioactivity. How unhealthy this is depends heavily on how much power J and G are pumping out, distance, and length of exposure. J is by far the worse off. Moral of this part: stop J, fast.
Electrons from the environment will be rushing in to replace the destroyed electrons. Think: nasty secondary lightning effects. Unless Glowbug is actually producing an equal amount of electrons. Conservation of charge, what the he** is that?
The positron beam should be a bright effect, not a dark one. But still less bright than the lightning.
Very much this.
Only I would expect the positron beam to be brighter than the lightning as it has to counter the lightning whilst compensating for the loss due to annihilation with the electrons in the air molecules.
Even worse – the electrons rushing back in will generate a nasty EMP effect. Goodbye, any digital electronics in the vicinity.
DAVEB- Please make this cannon: that Leon has already chosen the names “Skullface McArmpads” (per Thor’s comment), and “GlowBitch”. This needs to happen so badly.
I’m kinda hoping Max can absorb radiation. Got no reason to assume it’s one of her powers, but someone must have been standing around (and survived) when Jiggs fired darkening off the first time to demonstrate it to ARC.
Also: Holy Balls! Jiggawatt is insanely powerful and surely gets requests from the DoE and DARPA all the time to come visit, cuz they gotta want what she has put into a bottle so very bad….
In fact, Jiggawatt’s brain may not be working right at this point. If I were Maxima I’d have Medevac’d her outta there already.
Yea, looks like she’s a danger to herself right now (and to everyone else)
The who’s who is not showing up for me (Firefox 30.0). Anyone else experiencing this?
I don’t see it either, but I think it’s just a page glitch; I can see it for other pages.
FF30 as well, by the way.
It’s the page, not you. It does not appear in any browser tested (Firefox, Opera, IE).
this is NOT going to end well…
I hadn’t noticed it before, but since Dabbler communicates via her cybernetic implant, she’s wearing a collar as a fashion statement. If you add in the piercings, it makes me wonder if the tiger-striping is natural or tattooed.
After several days of exhausting…*ahem* exhaust-ive research into the matter, I have come to the conclusion that…more research is needed. ლ(´ڡ`ლ)
Has anyone else considered that Jiggawatt knows exactly what she is doing, and has a plan?
It would be nice. Like I said above, JW might be able to absorb energetic photons.
I think I see a mook getting ready to run like hell
Yea, I love that little detail
And now one of the unknown orbs makes itself noticed. Either it reacts by soaking the radiation to make it harmless or it gets charged by it, or it charges all the orbs, giving Syd a possible ‘Ding, motha…!’. Maybe it just transforms the radiation into something harmless.
Or well, maybe there will be a mighty burning to herald Dabs’ old GF/BF.
I think that was one of Xuriel’s ex-husbands.
Or ex-wives.
Never know with demons… especially succubi.
Nope.
Neutron cascade only.
Alpha, Beta & Gamma Radiation are irrelevant to nuclear explosions.
This was meant to be a reply to a earlier comment.
Since Jiggawatt has used this ability enough, in the past, to have named it, she should know how dangerous it is, or she should have the ability to deal with the hard radiation, like absorbing it as a power source for herself.
I did some back of the napkin math on this and assuming she doesn’t have any durability based powers she would be very very dead.
MATH / Physics
—————
Any time you are dealing with anti-matter you end up hitting e = mc^2, which means that the energy your reaction produces is directly proportional to the mass supplied. A quick Google search shows that the average lightning bolt is 25 coulombs which with a single coulomb containing 6.24150962915265×10^18 electrons. Each electron has a mass of 9.10938291 × 10-28 g, but so does each positron so we need to double this. So from this we can get the total energy produced in joules from the reaction which is:
2 * 25 * 6.24150962915265×10^18 * 9.10938291 × 10-28 g * (299,792,458 m / s)^2
So about 25,560,000,000 joules. There are 4,184,000,000 joules per ton of TNT to move this to a more understandable measure. So the net result of this blast would be the same as roughly 6.1 tons of TNT going off between them. As pointed out earlier most of this energy would be given off in the form of ionizing gamma radiation, which has a tendency to smash apart chemical bonds as it throws electrons to extremely high charge states. That said, it would be very, very bright.
Sorry I noticed a math error on my part. I should be using kilograms not grams divide the result by a thousand which means:
.0061 tons of TNT or 12.2lbs of it
That’s less than I would have guessed. But certainly (in the form of Gamma Rays) enough to kill everyone in the parking lot and blind everyone in line of sight. Probably enough to cause a noticable uptick in cancer rates for the entire state….
It is not as bad as that.
Gamma radiation is very good at passing through people/things without interacting.
Everyone in the vicinity will probably want to have regular health checks for the next few years (maybe decade) but it is unlikely to kill or blind anyone immediately.
(That is assuming they are stopped quickly.)
More than I guessed. I’m sure the ramp up might shave a couple pounds of that figure but still 10+ pounds equals a world of hurt.
Fermi answered a question “How much energy is created when the particle-antiparticle annihilate? Does it release a large amount of radiation?” to this at https://www.fnal.gov/pub/science/inquiring/questions/annihilation2.html
The important line is: “if a person found themselves 1 foot (30 centimeters) away from a point source made up of material containing annihilating electrons and positrons, to receive one rad of dose, one would have to witness 57 trillion annihilations”. Using the 25 coulombs that means there are 1.56×10^20 annihilations in each lightning/darkening strike. Which then translates to 10,000,000 rads for someone a foot away.
Assuming just one bolt of lightning/darkening means everyone is very very dead from radiation poisoning in an incredibly short time. I have this image if Sydney all alone in a dead city after she was protected via her force field.
I bet the number of electrons in a bolt of lightning scales with the length of the arc. I don’t know the size of these arcs or the average size of a lightning bolt, but these could be much smaller.
Huh, here I’ve been guessing Jigga was a Storm tribute all along.