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.
<– If you enjoy this comic, consider supporting it via Patreon. Or buy something via the Amazon referral link, it’s all good.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Well, the amount of radiation wouldn’t be massive but they might want a dose of radiation meds after.
The combination would make a powerful explosion, but not as massive as you might think. The mass of electrons is so tiny, but they wouldn’t just cancel out, there would be a clear affect where the electrons and positrons where meeting as the energy is been released in all other forms (Not just gamma radiation).
Stock up on Radaway and Rad=x.
“Luckily Robin, I brought my anit-steam pills.”
-Batman from the 60’s campy t.v. show.
Actually, the reaction produces 2 gamma particles (high-energy photons) and pretty much nothing else. Now, that radiation can interact with other matter to convert the electro-magnetic energy into other forms of energy (kinetic/thermal), which is why its dangerous.
The math here so far (my own included) seems to disagree with you.
The energy released, according to what I’ve seen here, is somewhere between a few pounds of tnt and a few million tons. My number was in thousands of tons, so I’m happy with it.)
This energy would be released as gamma rays, which would interact with air, superheating it and very closely resembling a conventional explosion.
No matter how you look at it, the energy released is not a lot, even with 100% electron–positron annihilation. As Science Guy stated, all you get is basically gamma radiation and maybe a few random particles of other junk. Best case scenario, you get gamma radiation on the level of the total energy of the electrons and positrons.
Explosion, no. Kinetic force, no. Lots of nasty gamma radiation, yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron%E2%80%93positron_annihilation
Eep… Diving here had me reading a blurb about Dysprosium… The stuff can become nasty-radioactive in the right setting, which Jiggawatt could probably provide.
Not even that.
“The heaviest particle pairs yet produced by electron–positron annihilation in particle accelerators are W+–W− pairs. The heaviest single particle is the Z boson”.
To put that into perspective, its basically non-existent mass (its not really, but it gets very hard to explain simply). If you must know Z: 91.1876±0.0021 GeV/c2 or in other words, basically 0 for what we are talking about as far as this application.
TL;DR Not really. The annihilation couldn’t produce anything of that mass. I know, science kills fun, but that’s what you get when a writer tries explaining superheroes using real science.
All of this presumes that these two are able to output *exactly* the same amount of energy, be it electron or positron, *and* that their output matches a real world lightning strike. As in, enough to arc hundreds to thousands of feet to the ground. As in, hotter than the surface of the sun at touchdown point, enough to power a major city for quite a while.
The potential to arc a long distance is an inverse distance squared thing, so to double the distance the voltage has to multiply by two squared (4). Ten times the distance? One hundred times the voltage.
Now Jiggawatt demonstrated that she has cloud-to-ground kind of range, but only when her entire body is converted to electricity. Glowbug? I don’t know. But I’ll bet that, when push comes to shove, Jiggawatt can crank it up a lot more than Glowbug. Converting her body, say 50 kilos, to energy as she travels is a mass-energy conversion bigger than the most powerful bomb in the US nuclear arsenal. (Yeah, shades of the Star Trek Transporter argument.).
Now, all this particle physics aside, has anyone considered this possibility: Maybe Jiggawatt isn’t actually generating a positron bolt. Maybe she’s recharging, healing herself by absorbing Glowbug’s lightning bolts. If Glowbug figured that out, or saw that her power was being absorbed, she’d stop. But if she was bluffed into thinking that she had to continue to avoid being hit by an anti-matter lightning bolt, then Jiggawatt gets all the juice she needs to reconstitute and repair her body. The ability to convert your body into electricity and back kind of implies the ability to manipulate oher power sources in a similar way.
While I like the idea of “healing” from Glowbug, that’s just not going to happen. One thing that DaveB does well is be consistent with the ideas behind what he wants out of the heroes abilities. That being said, science is being used to explain what’s going on right now. So, no.
I don’t mind super heroes having crazy ass abilities, and even love it when they do. But as soon as “science” is sited to explain those abilities, you have to be accurate.
Superpowers are involved, saying we do not know quite how the power does this but it does it for some reason we may understand some day is a good explanation. Superpowers tend to be some kind of clarktech/magic anyway.
I.E flash speed force or tactile TK for explaining why powers physics work in odd ways.
A nuclear explosion is caused by a small amount of matter to energy conversion. Lower yield, 10s of kilotons are fractions of a gram.
The initial energy release is in the form of photons (light particles). When those photons strike other things, that energy converts to other forms, primarily heat. The matter-energy conversion does not release much heat, but that energy rapidly turns into heat when it encounters other objects.
Anti-matter is the ultimate form of nuclear weapons or power. Complete matter to energy conversion versus current technolgies which convert only a small fraction of the material involved. If a gram of electrons where annhilated it would be on par with the energy released by the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs.
The issue then is how many positrons does she actually emit.
Electrons are tiny, 9.109×10^-28 g each. To put that in some context, it would take 1823 moles of electrons to have a mass of 1g and that would be every electron in roughly 3 metric tons of water. So if she could annhilate all the electrons in 3 cubic meters of water, it would be the equivalent of detonating something on the low end of the strategic nuclear weapons. So it would only destroy a small city.
Since she is firing into air and at people sized targets, the destruction would be less, but you still wouldn’t want to be anywhere nearby. If it hit a person or object, the target would pretty well cease to exist and there would be a small nuclear explosion. She’d likely only cause something in the 10’s to 100’s of tons TNT equivalent. If she could sustain emission and shot a building, she could wipe out a major city.
This is not a power where you want to use real world physics because those physics are brutal.
1823 moles of electrons / 28 electrons per molecule of N2 (the primary component of our atmosphere)=65 moles of N2
65 moles * 22.4 Liters of gas per mole at STP=1458 Liters of gas
1458 Liters/1000Liters per cubic meter = 1.458 cubic meters of air per gram of electrons
1 gram of electrons + 1 gram of positrons=2 grams converted into energy
2 grams/1000grams per kilogram= .002 kg
.002kg*9*10^16 (speed of light squared)=1.8*10^14 Joules
180 Terajoules /1.458 liters of gas=
123 TJ per cubic meter of air (technically nitrogen gas but it’s close enough)
123TJ/ 4.184MJ per kilogram of tnt=
29 kilotons of tnt per cubic meter of air.
That would be the case if it was a mater to energy conversion. However, from every description so far, its not a conversion, its an annihilation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annihilation). Because its an annihilation the energy output can only take form in a few ways, as myself and Science Guy stated.
Its not a mater of math, its a mater of what is actually happening, and what is interacting with what. In this case its opposite particles colliding, thus an annihilation.
Did you read your own link? Annihilation *is* matter-to-energy conversion. Each electron-positron pair turns into two or more photons, conserving momentum and energy (including rest energy, a.k.a. mass).
Yes, I did in fact read what I posted. That is why I said what I said. This type of annihilation only results in a finite list of results, nearly all of them are gamma rays. If you don’t understand that, I cant break it down any easier. Read up on gamma rays or my original link on THIS SPECIFIC TYPE OF ANNIHILATION and you will see that what I’m talking about is correct.
It’s a multi-step process and you are looking only at the first step.
You are correct that in the first step, the energy is emitted as light rather than heat. That’s completely correct. Matter – antimatter annhilation is staggeringly efficient at converting the mass to light.
It’s what happens to that light where things get messy. That light blasts out from the interaction area, and hits things. When the light hits things, it imparts its energy to them, much like the light from the sun will warm things up when it strikes them. But in this case it’s an enormous amount of high energy light in a small space. Torrenal mentioned that half the energy would be absorbed in 500 feet of air. All that absorbed energy becomes heat.
When the light is absorbed and converted into heat, you build up an area of superheated air and that creates an area of high pressure.
That high pressure area then expands into the lower pressure surroundings. And that’s an explosion.
The explosion isn’t a direct result of the matter-antimatter reaction, it’s a result of where the energy released by the annhilation goes.
The point I was getting at is this specific type of annihilation. Not all types of annihilation behave the same. That’s what makes things so complex. This specific type of annihilation only goes one direction, gamma rays(radiation). Its the TYPE of energy that’s being put out, not just that its photons of light. Its not “light”, its gamma radiation(rays). Just as gamma radiation didn’t make the earth catch fire when we released atomic weapons (NOT this type of conversion mind you), the gamma radiation that gets emitted here wouldn’t cause a “boom”.
Evry 500 feet in air, half the gamma radiation would be absorbed… You may get an energy release like an explosion, but that’s over a large area. Think ‘outdoor football stadium sized oven’. For people watching the game… Think ‘too many chest X-rays’.
That I can gather, this isn’t the cleanest type of radiation, but she could have picked worse. Neutron radiation is nasty.
OK, so I’ve run the numbers and everyone close is going to die from radiation poisoning unless something happens to clean it up. I’ve based my numbers on 15C of charge in a lightning bolt which wikipedia lists as an “average” cloud-to-ground amount.
If an electron and positron meet they annihilate into two photons. The energy of the photons is the same as the electrons so electron mass is 9.11e-31kg*(3.0e8m/s)^2/1.6e-19(eV/J) = 511 keV, lightning is around 300kV so each electron and positron is carrying around 800keV of energy. From the 15C above, we have 15/1.6e-19=9.4e19 of each electrons and positrons.
Next we have to convert this to Grays. I used radprocalculator wedsite, and used Cs-137 as an example. Cs-137 emits 662 keV gamma rays, close enough to our 800 keV. If we put in 1Bq (1 decay per second) of Cs-137 then at 5m you get 3.0e-15 Sv/hr divide by 3600 to get Sv per decay. Finally for gamma rays 1 Gy = 1 Sv, so standing at 5m from the blast point a person would receive 9.4e19 * 2 * 3e15 / 3600 = 150Gy of radiation. 8Gy is 100% fatal.
At 20m away you’d get about 8Gy so anyone over 20m away may live. By the time you get to 55m away you’re receiving about 1Gy and so only have a 0-5% chance of dying with proper care.
Particle physics aside, radiation meds won’t work on that type of radiation. Over-the-counter radiation meds are made from potassium iodide. In the event of a dirty bomb explosion or nuclear meltdown, radioactive iodine is a likely product. The thyroid sucks up iodine like mad, so you want to flood your system with excess iodine prior to exposure to prevent the radioactive stuff from accumulating. For a couple other radioactive chemicals there are also a number of chelating agents that can be administered by a doctor. However, if you get exposed to a sufficient dose of energy-style radiation you’re pretty much boned all around.
I think Sydney is needed here, shielding and all. Monkeyball her in the middle and have her spell it out for Jiggy.
the telepresense ball would be a better idea really, I believe it can be used to make a readable sign since Jiggawatt can’t hear. And sydney could still keep her shield up.
I keep forgetting to ask, and I’m not sure if this is the place, or the forums are. Just how canon is dabbler in the Wereworld comic? https://wereworld.comicgenesis.com/ NSFW!!! I recall that Rann received Dave’s permission to use her long ago, but is her time in that world canonical as far as grrlpower is concerned?
It’s canon, AFAIK.
After all, it’s where the character came from.
I’d say how canon in part depends on if she got a double mastectomy.
Hrm, good point … though she could just be hiding her second set of breasts while around humans, so as to fit better in with the humans.
How, you ask ?
Magic, offcourse.
IIRC Dave said it’s Canon, but I can’t remember it was decided if Wereworld is Dabbler’s Past or Future.
Or an alternate reality of the same character.
I didn’t dare to mention it, but now since the theme is on the table: Wereworld should have an X instead of an R – it’s rather explicit.
Also, I think it’s a real pity that it got shelved. Great pencil drawings (not inked, only partially colored), cool story.
Well, in order for her to KNOW that she can generate positron-based electricity and even has a name for it, she had to have used it under controlled laboratory conditions and either been told what it was by the scientists, or she’s a particle physicist herself. Either way she should be fully versed on the effects– and risks– of using her power the way she is. So either she knows something Dabbler doesn’t, or Dabbler hasn’t thought it all the way through yet.
Wait, you are trying to imply that Jiggs knows more about science than Dabbles? o_O
Cool, except positron lightning wouldn’t reach far in real world. With the exception of the H+ ion, all atoms and ions have an electron cloud, so any positron she emmits would be annihilated the first time it hits matter. And that would be a few nano meters from her fingertips.
But if you annihilate all the electrons in a lighting bolt… Well I wouldn’t be worried about dieing from radiaton poisioning, the release radiation would most likely cook you alive or something.
This.
Air doesn’t react to antimatter electrons (positrons) the way it does to normal electrons. You don’t get a dark arc of lightning.
And there should be light and heat generated by the positron-electron annihilation in addition to the gamma radiation.
Air is composed almost entirely of empty space. And by almost entirely, I mean 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of it is empty space.
So are you. All atoms are mostly empty space.
So the next time someone says I have a bunch of space between my ears, I can just tell them, “True, but then so does everyone else.”
And some just fill it with hot air direct from their arse
you know what… I’ve changed my mind about Jiggawatt’s hair… I still liked the white hair better and I don’t think the gold is a very fetching look for her, but I no longer feel that her haircolor should either simply stick to white or change according to her power use…
We’ve all forgotten about the wonders of Hair dye. She could just color her hair according to whatever shade of lipstick she happens to be into that week. Her bio in the cast page says her natural color is brown anyway so why shouldn’t it be because of bleach and hair dye?
Normally, that shouldn’t be a problem. But when her hair color changes within minutes during a fight, I don’t think many are gong to buy the explanation that she dyed it mid-melee.
he said he was going to go back into the archives and change it in previous strips, so I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the hairdye explanation taking that into consideration
She can generate positrons? Oh, my.
Can she stop them from attracting to and interacting with the electrons in the air?
Can’t she generate a proton beam or something less fatal to existence on earth?
anyone else hear the news that thor odinson is now thor freyadaughter owned buy disney aka thor is a disney princess …………….. jiggy could you show that darkening trick to the disney execs?
Unless you also change her individual power rankings, there should be no need to alter her rank. As it is, she has only a 3 attack, 3 absorption (which seems to be all electrical), and 2 teleport. Sydney is also a 6 and has far higher individual power ratings (4, 3, 5, 1, 3), and more of them.
I’m not sure why you see any need to change Maxima’s military rank. While it’s true that an officer at her level would be commanding a far larger force of regular military forces, ARC isn’t anything like a regular military force.
It’s my (no military experience) understanding that a Lt. Col. is the highest rank one can achieve and retain field command of a small special forces team. Equivalent (I believe) to a Commander in charge of a SEAL team.
Lt Col was the demotion. She started the comic as a higher rank but it got retconned. Likely because of the reason Defnestor pointed out
It was reconned because she was really too young to be a full bird. Even given her indispensability, she doesn’t have a perfect record, so she wouldn’t necessarily have raced ahead in rank. Plus if watching Stargate SG-1 has taught me anything, it’s that a full bird goes into the field all the time. Two of them in later seasons. Clearly, S:SG-1 hasn’t taught me anything. :P
Just as a note, at 34 (which is what her bio says), she’s still young for an LTC (Lieutenant Colonel). Assuming she graduated college at 21 (which is a requirement for being a commissioned officer), a normal track is 16 years to LTC which means 37. For her to be LTC at 34 she commissioned earlier than 21 or gotten promoted early 3 times (of 2 normally available to her). Because of the timing of early promotions one of those promotions is likely what’s called “double below zone” which is a fancy way of saying “two years early.” Below the zone (1 year early) is incredibly rare and, for *normal* people, requires a stellar record. DBZ requires an act of God (or war) and an almost inhuman record… so…
This page is a pretty good crib sheet for the timing on this stuff; https://usmilitary.about.com/od/promotions/l/blofficerprom.htm
A few possible explanations:
1) Necessity is the mother of early promotions (IOW, they’re not going to put a non-super as field leader, although I admit I don’t know the lowest rank necessary to be field commander);
2) She earned the promotions for action in Iraq and Afghanistan
3) she graduated earlier than 21; and/or,
4) Halo-Earth military has slightly different time requirements for promotion.
Well, the story in my head goes like this, so you can tell me if it’s at all realistic. She did some summer courses during high school in order to graduate early, then straight from there she joins the Air Force with the intention of becoming a “pilot.” Normally you have to be an officer, but of course, she already has her own jet so to speak, and the taxpayers aren’t on the hook for anything if she lands too hard or something. Her Air Force basic training was accelerated since could obviously blow away all the physical requirements, so as soon as she was finished there she started doing college courses at night. She was given time to do so because the Air Force was quite frankly salivating at having someone like her hanging around. Still I see 34 is a little young for an LTC, but she was very resistant to the idea of running Arc-SWAT, and leveraged her promotion to LTC in exchange for being “domesticated.”
She’s got gold skin and purple hair, she’s a flying brick with a laser cannon, is it really that hard to just say she was emancipated at 9 and graduated college at 12? You can’t really expect normal rules to apply to someone who would otherwise be treated as a science experiment if she couldn’t nuke anything they sent to retrieve her.
Pretty much my first and third explanations combined, so I’d buy that*.
*I’m tempted to add “for a dollar”, but don’t know if anyone would get the CR.
What about air? Wouldn’t a positron arc through the air be suppressing/destroying the electrons in that as well?
Small science note: Electricity will arc to the nearest grounded object, no matter where you point your finger. That’s usually the ground, if it’s coming from your hand. To make it go anyplace else there would have to be a micro pulse of some kind of energy to ionize the atmosphere between you and your target. Then the electricity has a verifiable “path of least resistance” to follow.
Actual lightning tends to light up the air as it passes through, because it superheats it. Would “Darkening” do something else, I wonder. Ultimately it would leave an ionized trail of its own, air with a heavy positive charge, since it just wiped out the electrons along the way. If Jiggawatt stops her Darkening, it will leave Glowbug’s Lightning an ionized road map straight back to her. Likewise, if Glowbug stops first, Jiggawatt’s attack will follow the ion trail back to her. So this is a game of super powered Chicken: Whoever quits first loses, in a big way.
So theres no way “positron lightning” would work like that. I like the idea of if, but positrons would simply annihilate extremely close to the source, would never make it that far unless she could somehow shield them, which would make her the most powerful super. Just imagine, she could send her stream positrons into anything, any person, and cause unimaginable damage (seriously i’m not even sure what part of the interaction would end up the worst for the target).
I thought of that, but presumably she’s generating a lot more positrons than the local atmosphere can supply, which allows it to arc to a more energetic source.
*Had* to respond to that one. It’s the reasonable inference from what she’s saying, but it has some impressive, and somewhat disturbing, implications.
The electron-positron reaction invariably creates 2 gamma rays. That’s pure matter to energy conversion, and leaves the nuclei of the nitrogen (and other) atoms bare, so they become highly caustic ions, stealing electrons from pretty much everything around, and emitting more light. The gamma rays from each reaction, including the ones that actually reach Glowbug’s lightning, will mostly cook the air, adding to the effect. Combined, it would basically create a glow the way a nuke does, and might even equal an EMP, depending on just *how* many positrons she can generate, and how many go into stripping the air of electrons. This is about the most hazardous and power-intensive way she could stop Glowbug’s attack, period. If she really is doing that, though, rather than, say, absorbing the attack, then yes, she can lightning *much* better. Especially if generating positrons is any harder than generating electrons. Chalk it up to inexperience, or ego?
An attack power of 3 suggests she can’t do nuke level positron generation, or anything like it, and probably is not generating enough electricity to jump the distance she was shooting, she’s controlling the path directly. It also suggests she has not experimented with stripping matter of its electrons. Particle cannons and plasma explosions are very real possibilities for her power set, and could make her potentially *very* dangerous, without giving herself (or others) cancer.
Possibly something here can be useful to you. I love this comic, and would be pleased if I could contribute in some small way like this. EMP’s, by the way, are just broad-spectrum (as in gamma-to-radio broad) flashes of light that are intense enough to cook things the way a laser does. The photoelectric effect would power nearby electronics, given enough brightness. Florescent tubes in the area would light up even if unconnected to electricity, and circuits cook because of the high current the incoming light induces. My uncle once used a radar emitter to light a bunch of dead fluorescent tubes as a prank. Hilarious? Yes! Cruel? Maybe.
TLDR: if she really *is* using positrons, and not carefully moving the air molecules away from her strike path, the bolt would be even *brighter* than a normal one, as noted above. I know it’s tempting to portray an EMP as something other than a nuke-bright flash of light (everybody does it) and am not bothered by the artistic license, but it occurred to me that you might not know, and might appreciate knowing.
Sorry about the double-post, I just realized after sending that my wall of text might be less helpful than a short statement. Keep up the good work!
I don’t think that it’s fair to call anyone with electricity powers “one trick ponies,” you have characters like Cole McGraff who can short out equipment, drain power sources, and both stop and restart hearts; Static Shock who can power and manipulate equipment with magnetism or static electricity, see the EM fields that living things generate, or replicate an electric tazer which should stop most people no matter how physically tough they are; or Misaka Mikoto who can use magnetism to run up walls, manipulate iron dust into solid forms and constructs, and create railgun strong enough to flip a truck and mess with all basic electrical equipment in the area using only her powers and a 100 yen coin. Basically electricity and do a lot of things based on how well you can manipulate it. Even Jiggawatt can use her powers to turn herself into electricity to travel at high speeds and by pass any non insulated obstacles.
Electricity, in my mind, is one of the best if not the best non time, space, or reality bending powers you can have.
Sure you can do a lot with power stunts, but Jiggawatt is actually quite inexperienced with her powers at this point, at least she is at using them to attack other people. I should have said she’s a one trick pony at this point. Eventually she’ll rank up as she learns to do more stuff. Sydney too.
this brings up an interesting and tangentially related question: Why are there no 8’s or 4’s in the power rankings?
I think you did a great job illustrating her inexperience in this and the next page. The fact that she knows some of the science but not all of the science behind what she’s doing kinda reminds me off Static Shock figuring out new tricks from paying attention in his Physics class.
Oh shit, gamma radiation?? That’s the worst kind of radiation D:
Actually it’s the best. Sure it goes through most materials without being absorbed, hence it’s hard to shield, but that applies to humans too, You can survive much more gamma radiation exposure, that alpha or beta, those are gonna be absored into your body at a much faster rate.
Except that Alpha radiation is stopped by a piece of paper. No penetration to speak of. Beta radiation needs something denser. Human skin works pretty well, due to the water content.
So you might get some skin exposure, like a sunburn, but that’s kind of what skin is for. It’s ablative armor against sunlight, and other nasty radiation sources.
I would like to post a possible security problem with the new web host. I tried to get to this site at work today (in case anyone asks, tell them it was my lunch hour). I got halted by a message from the security firewall system saying the http://www.grrlpowercomic.com web address was blocked due to it being listed as a confirmed source of malware/spyware. It has always loaded properly before today.
I don’t remember the specific external web security service blacklist it was on, but I can look it up and post the company name if you want. Anyone else who subscribes to them may be blocking the page as well.
Yeah that would be helpful.
Our web access (state government department) is run through Cisco Ironport Web Reputation Filters. They have you blacklisted as ‘a security threat to the organization’s network’ due a ‘known association with malware/spyware’. You may want to contact them to see if they have you listed in error, or if your site has somehow been compromised. You are still blocked as of sending this message (12:20 am Eastern Monday)
Late to the game on this thought, and might have missed someone else saying it on pages 2-3 of these comments, but has anyone considered the possibility that JW actually has no idea about the nature of her darkning? So instead of it being “positron lightning” with all the immediate effects that would have killed everyone in the area by now, it’s actually some sort of electric charge dissipation field that makes an arc of electricity go all incoherent, like an unfocused laser becoming a fuzzy beam of light.
And another science question for the physicists out there: Since lighting causes ionization which leads to the O2 in the area rebonding and turning into O3 (ozone), if there were enough lighting bolts in a given area, wouldn’t the air start becoming hard to breathe? Or is there enough air exchange for this to be mitigated?
It’s an open area. The superheated air will quickly rise and dissipate.
As far as the rest of it: What happens if a lightning arc loses it’s ionized guide path? Maybe that’s all Jiggawatt is doing
That is more or less my idea. Jiggawatt just came up with the positron idea but that is not even close to what is happening. She is somehow suppressing the energy in the area. Dabbler and other smart people will want to figure out exactly what.
The ozone, being heavier than air will sink to the ground and quickly react with the asphalt, concrete and other stuff. A light breeze will be enough to dissipate it. It might be enough to smell (that after-a-thunderstorm smell), but not enough to do damage.
Not really related, but the next time you need Leon to have a blank stare or something, here’s what to put in the thought bubble:
void main();
It’s a computer science joke. Basically it’s a valid and complete program that holds no information and does nothing.
Unfortunately, I’ve worked with far too people that fit that description.
Heh, I’ll keep that in mind.
Actually it would be:
void main(void) { }‘Plasma’ most times is the argument used.
Ya could just call it chaos energy looks and acts like standard matter but acts how the wielded wants it to. chaos energy is technically considered a negative element on the periodic table of elements, same as zero element, anti-matter, point-of-singularity, dark matter, etc…
Technically, “zero element” would be the one with no protons in the nucleus, or what is called (in popular parlance at least) “neutronium”–assuming that a mass of neutrons could actually be bound in some sort of stable configuration. Negative elements would either be anti-matter versions of current elements, or something possible mathematically but not physically, like if you had a plate containing a negative number of doughnuts.
I liked her better with white hair. =(
The “problem” was that a black lady with white hair that could command lightning felt too much like Storm from the Xmen to some. Considering that the same superhero comic books exist in this world as in ours, I think that all it would take is JW saying that she bleached her hair white as a deliberate homage to Storm would be all it would to render this similarity a non-problem in any sense of the word.
Personally, I’m still really uncomfortable on how close that JW’s name is to an (admittedly archaic) racist term for black people, but since no one but me sees it as a problem, I’m not going to raise the issue again–besides right here to mention that I am not otherwise raising it–and wait and see if it is indeed a non-issue or if I will eventually have an opportunity to graciously refrain from saying “I told you so”.
by all means, let’s remove any possible even slightly homonymical term from the english language to avoid any mental manipulation of said terms in people’s heads. If people are going to make that type of racist comment, they’re going to do it anyways. Tell all the rappers to remove the term from every rap song (please, I’m sick and tired of hearing it every 3rd word).
That’s a doubleplusgood idea! Lets call this evolved version of English Newspeak!
We all know that a member of a group can use impolite terms referring to that group freely whereas people outside that group can not. It’s disingenuous to suggest otherwise. And though JW, the character, could use such terms without blowback, DaveB, the actual source of the words coming out of JW’s mouth would not be so immune. But as I said, as of now, it seems to be a non-issue, and I’m more than happy just to let the whole thing drop.
You do realise she has Doc Brown to blame for her name, don’t you?
But guess we need to find a new name in place of ‘Gigabytes’ because of it’s similarity to a term that is more offensive to some idiots than the name for a German political party from the 30’s and 40’s
1) I’d say Jiggawatt is about as close to being a Storm clone as Iron Man is to being one of Batman. As for her hair, I don’t see why she needs an explanation more complex than that’s simply how she likes to color her hair.
2) While I agree that people should abstain from using ethnic (and sexual) slurs as dehumanizing, but think that proscribing words that simply come close to them is a bit far. For example, I read a post claiming that people should stop using the phrase “the jig is up” because evidently it was used to refer to lynched black people. However, the term itself is not inherently racist, but rather was used long before being misappropriated in that manner. By such “logic”, Buddhists (and other religions) should refrain from using the swastika*, despite the symbol being part of such religions long before its use by a certain madman. Or perhaps I should refuse to cut my hair really short since such a style is often associated with skinheads despite my finding it easy to care for (and probably no one would question my doing so if my skin tone were different)?
* So much so that the version of the Red Cross for some religions is known as the Red Swastika Society since 1922.
TECHNICALLY speaking, if you annihilated the electron of something it wouldn’t as much become irradiated as it would decay away, basically speaking the removal of electrons would change the atomic charge from Ca molecule to Ca+ molecule (since humans are carbon based) the effect on a persons physical body would be… extreme… to say the least, as with this change in charge the body would basically not be able to keep it’s coherency, since the + charged molecules would start to drag electrons from the other molecules causing a chain reaction within the body.
In short the body would most likely tear itself apart in a rather violent manner before finally undergoing spontaneous combustion as the friction from this constant and never ending chain would cause it to reach the temperature needed for self ignition.
this would be a VERY unpleasant way to go… to say the least
Nonsense.
There is no chain reaction.
You have +ve and -ve charged molecules in your body right now and you are not spontaneously combusting are you?
In fact, lightning with positive charge exist in the nature, and about ten times stronger and dangerous as “normal” lightnings… They can strike more than a miles away from the storm, what generate it!
I should hope it can strike more than a mile away, otherwise it would never reach the ground.
A “positive” lightning is usually just the electrons running the other way: Into the cloud instead of out. It all depends on the charge distribution in the cloud and perhaps if the cloud gets sheared.
So will the gamma radiation magically give the waitress superpowers.
mmmmmm-maybe!
I’m pretty sure that there is no way to use “darkening” at all without creating gamma radiation. Electrons are pretty ubiquitous. Yes. So I have to assume that Jiggawatt’s immune and has only tried this trick alone, as that quantity of gamma radiation would probably blind other witnesses in minutes. Not to mention radiation sickness.
Sorry, my bad… I wasnt accurate enough.
“Positive lightning makes up less than 5% of all strikes. However, despite a significantly lower rate of occurrence, positive lightning is particularly dangerous for several reasons. Since it originates in the upper levels of a storm, the amount of air it must burn through to reach the ground usually much greater. Therefore, its electric field typically is much stronger than a negative strike. Its flash duration is longer, and its peak charge and potential can be ten times greater than a negative strike; as much as 300,000 amperes and one billion volts!
Some positive strikes can occur within the parent thunderstorm and strike the ground beneath the cloud. However, many positive strikes occur near the edge of the cloud or strike MORE THAN 10 MILES AWAY, where you may not perceive any risk nor hear any thunder.”
Source:
https://www.srh.noaa.gov/jetstream/lightning/positive.htm
Positive lightning strikes is not referring to positron lightning. Most lightning is caused by a flow of excess electrons at the bottom of the cloud to the ground or from a region of excess electrons in one cloud to a region deficient in electrons in another. Positive lightning happens when a cloud region has a deficiency of electrons. So the static leader isn’t pushing electrons; it is pulling them. When it finally connects to a large source of electrons, like the ground, the cloud gets to suck them up.
In fact, early workers with electricity thought that electricity flowed from positive to negative. It wasn’t until the late 19th century that there were serious hints they got it wrong and until we understood the actual structure of the atom in the early 20th century that we truly understood that electrons are flowing from negative to positive. Despite that, most work with electricity, even today, consider electricity to flow from positive to negative, even though the electrons are going the other way..
If we’re lucky, the result of crossing the streams will reveal at least one of abilities of Halo’s unknown orbs.
you have no idea how much I hope you’re right…. Those last two orbs have been figuratively killing me
“Whatever you do, DON’T CROSS THE STREAMS!”
There be dragons over there :P
I was expecting ghosts (or at least a very big ‘splosion afterward).
we are already here. it’s breaching dimensional fabric that the crossing streams threatened in the source of the quote. a far more problematic event than me stopping in for a chat.
I think the positron explanation is just Jiggawatt’s idea. I do not think she actually understands what is going on here and has come up with this answer as to what she is doing. Too bad her answer is wrong.
Hmm, what could cause a dark effect like that? Electrons? Clearly not; the energy of the partial ionization of the air would have quite an incandescence to the path of the mini-lightning bolt. Positrons? A stream of positrons in an atmosphere would be even brighter as electrons move around to fill in the spaces of the destroyed electrons and gamma rays hit stuff to fluoresce even more light all the way down into the visible range. This would be brighter than the lightning beam.
To create a dark beam like that, she would have to be suppressing light emission/transmission. So she can stimulate electrons to move along an ionization / magnetic corridor, or she can suppress the activity of electrons or photons in that same corridor to produce her darkning. So, this darkning is some region of energy suppression or absorption, but Jiggawatt just has the wrong explanation for what is happening.
I like the outcome of this explanation a lot better than the antimatter idea.
+1 to you, sir.
Well Dab, if you’ve got telepathy, now’s the time to use it.
hmm…. That’d be a good power for one of the unknown halo orbs…
No, she just has porno-sense.
OK time for some BOTE calculations about the lightning bolt mass anihilation.
Per the sources I have looked over a lighning strike moves between 10 and 90 Couombs worth of electrons. a couloumb is 6E18 electrons, so we are talking between 6E19 and 5E20 electrons
the mass of an electron is ~9E-31 kgs so total mass involved in a lightning strike is between aproximately 5E-11 and 4E-10 kg.
energy of annihilation is going to be 2( 1 for Glowbug, 1 for Jigawatt) x mass x 9E16 m^2/s^2 so approximately 1E7 to 9E7 Joules of energy released.
So by my sloppy calculations the energy of annihilation should be within an order or so of magnitude of the energy of the lightning strike itself( mind you I am relying upon internet #’s here, but the math is sound).
So the pair annihilation is probably not much worse than the lightning, but the numbers I get are scary. That kind of energy should melt the parking lot and produce concusive forces on the level of Maxima’s demonstrated yeild.( even without pair annihilation ). My bet is that what they are throwing is in the large comercial tesla coil yeilds, which while still impressive is reduces all the numbers here by orders of magnitude.
I really wouldn’t mind if Jiggawatt herself is immune to gamma radiation, and it would be cool.
It could be kinda like “Last option that is dangerous to everyone in a large area” thingy.
Or you could make her just absorb gamma radiation so nobody gets hurt. But that’s lame.
Soooo….. are they all gonna get radiation poisoning or something?
See, the problem with the “It’s a Superhero universe, just roll with the pseudoscience” is that, in world, it’s been pointed out what the pseudoscience explaination would actually do. Once you do that, you cannot rest on the handwave.
will they go BOOM!!! will they not? will halo say DENIED? will maxima pwn everybody? who is that guy in the mask? tune in next week same web channel, same web time!!!
No vote incentive this month?
See i’m going to agree with David Nuttall here, it is more likely that she is absorbing or suppressing energy rather than emitting it. Which would make sense in a way. Clearly she is generating the energy to shoot lightning somehow, far more energy in excess of the standard biological system. So if she is absorbing ambient energy to power her powers (awkward phrasing aside) would it not be possible for her to have stumbled upon a focused absorption method that causes the illusion of a “black lightning” due to its appearance (a ray of darkness forking out on occasion due to glitches in her focus). Although that would assume that her powers work more in the lines of a rectenna converting ambient energy into a direct current she can use… and would be an amusing explanation for her hair. “i just can’t seem to get as much juice if i don’t have my hair braided in rows.”
Frankly, I do believe that “massive amounts of gamma radiation” would only give you a good sunburn, which IS a radiation burn itself, by the way. You’d need several metric shittonnes for it to actually be dangerous.
According to the math whizzes who posted much earlier in the pages, they have about 6.2 megatons worth to play with. Is that enough for more than a sunburn, do you think?
Ya know…..I just want to get to the next comic to get away from all the science discussion about Jiggawatt.
And what do you know? There is a plushie squid toy eating up all the SCIENCE!!!! in the next page (a relative of yours? o_O)
I know there’s been a whole lot of discussion of the science in this comic. I haven’t run the actual numbers for exactly how crazy-dangerous the ability to create antiparticles is, but I would expect you wouldn’t need to shoot your “darkning” head-on at a lightning bolt in order to get full anhilation of all your positrons – there are more than enough electrons in the atmosphere already.
Well. There are some people going “pu pu it would only be tiny”…
Sorry to break it to them, but antimatter really blows stuff up.
That’s a charged stream of electrons hitting a stream of positrons. Regardless of the composition of the surrounding air, that’s going to go nova and should destroy a good region of 40 yards or so…. Which will then spread radiation out every which wazoo way.
Assuming a low-end lightning bolt has 10 Gigawatts of power… we’ll cut the blast down to 1 gigawatt as the distance traveled (so electric force required to jump the gap) is lower… that’s 1,000,000,000 Joules/Second.
So 1 Bil kiloton =~ 0.000239005736138 kilotons of force
Which is 526.917 pounds of force per second.
Using the Wikipedia entry for the size of dynamite… 1 stick 8 inches x 1.25 inches = 1 MJoule (1,000,000) So the small bolt requires 1,000 pieces of this dynamite.
So if we stacked them in rows of 50, at 20 pieces high… (62.5 in wide, 25 in high, by 8 inches long)
That’s about 5 feet wide, 2.5 feet tall. So, the crate would be the same size as the backing of those 3-person chairs usually found in small towncars.
But if it was an actual bolt of lightning, the 10-gigawatt variety that’d be 5,000 pounds of force, which is about the weight of a small car (2.5 tons) being thrown in every direction each second.
10 of those crates next to each other would be as long as the interior of the towncar itself. 80 ~= 6 2/3 feet.
So, an antimatter explosion of this scale would be quite problematic.
And mind you, that’s the LOW end of this.
Outside of the explosion zone, there would be a heavy radiation burn radius, and beyond that, you’d have to deal with the radiation damage that leads to cancers of all varieties.
You cut the power by 90%. Good start. Keep going.
Typical lightning strikes start at around 5 kilometers up (3.1 miles) according to most sources. Since the voltage needed to create that arc follows an inverse-distance-square rule, the power release in the 50 to 100 foot range we’re seeing in the comic panel (estimating distance is hard in a comic, but that seems like a workable range), we have a much greater drop off than you suggest.
16,386 feet (3.1 miles, but let’s round that down to 16000) to 100 feet is a160 to 1 drop off. So 160 squared is 25,600. So the power drop off is 1/25,600, not 1/10.
Some bolts are known to strike as far as 10 miles away from the storm clouds, by the way, but let’s leave those alone.
In any case, drop your doom scenario by a factor of at least 25,590 and you’re more in the ball park.
Remember that you’re dealing with the electrical force here, not the nuclear one. Both “Strong” forces, but you aren’t splitting atoms. No stray particles to throw about. No Alpha or Beta radiation, no slow neutrons released, nothing to cause secondary or tertiary radiation from exposed substances. Nobody gonna glow and develop super powers from this light show. (We are talking about a comic, after all.)
Consider this though: Where are they getting that much energy to throw around? Jigawatt can actually transform her body into that electron stream (don’t even want to try to rationalize converting protons and neutrons into electrons). Since the matter-energy conversion at Nagasaki was about 1.6 ounces, and she probably weighs 110 pounds… It’s like the Transporter in Star Trek: You’re creating a potential nuclear explosion big enough to split the local tectonic plate every time you do that conversion, and you’re containing and controlling that much energy every time you reform.
Looked at that way, Jiggawatt is by far the most powerful super in the world. She could literally make half the planet uninhabitable.
Why do I get the feeling Jiggawatt is one day going to accidentally turn the Moon to electrons or something?