Isn't this how those Chinese popcorn makers work?
this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
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I feel like the whole bag would just rip open and popcorn would go all over the microwave if every kernel popped at once.
imagine two onions. heck, imagine three onions.
that's how you make 뻥튀기! Street vendors let off a loud whistle before the pop. nearly jumped out of my shoes the first time I heard it
You can literally do this with a pressure vessel.
Let's do the math! If you assume there are 300 kernels, the popcorn will be finished within two minutes, and all kernels popping within 100 ms of each other is sufficient for a big bada boom...
There are 2×60×10 epochs where the bang could occur. Each of the 300 kernels needs to pop in the same epoch, so 1/(2×60×10) is the probability of the second kernel popping in the same epoch as the first kernel. The probability of all 299 popping in the same epoch as the first kernel is (1/(2×60×10))^299 = (2×60×10)^(-299).
Crunching the numbers in the Google search calculator... the probability is zero. That was anticlimactic.
I can't imagine it would be equally distributed? Probably normal distribution applies over the span, most of the kernels would probably pop within say 20s of each other, and none in the beginning.
Except Kerbal popping is rate limited by energy input, there's not an instant of energy flow, there's 150 seconds of energy input, each second increasing the energy, popped kernals absorb less energy allowing the unpopped ones to absorb the incoming energy to each the same state.
If you wanted them to all pop at once you'd need to put that amount of energy in all at once. Not impossible, but not going to happen with your home microwave oven
The exact probability is something more like 2*10^-921. Given that it would take around 9 gogol (9*10^926) years of constantly popping popcorns until that happens. Should we try?
Should we try?
Absolutely. You can feed all the unsuccessful attempts to the Shakespeare-typing monkeys.
That math assumes a flat distribution of popping times, which I suspect is incorrect.
Listening to a bag of microwave popcorn, it starts off slow, gets more rapid, and then tapers off again, implying that kernels are more likely to pop near the average time, which makes it somewhat more likely for two kernels to pop simultaneously.
But yeah, whole bag at once is probably still basically zero. Unless you use one of these, of course.
Agreed! I admit I made a few sweeping simplifications to shoehorn this into a discrete math problem.
Assume a frictionless spherical microwave.
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Bombcorn
I like this game. Imagine if all of the water vapor in a cloud condensed in an even distribution so that all of the rain fell at once.
"There's an xkcd for that"
After explaining the destructive force of a single raindrop over a kilometer in diameter:
Fear reigns supreme as the world fears rain supreme
Poetry. True poetry.
I can only recommend Randall Munroe's books "what if", " how to" and "what if 2". They are really entertaining comedy.
Think explainer was great if you were in for that sort of thing.
That one, I wasn't a big fan of. But maybe that's because I am not a native English speaker. Maybe its better for native speakers.
I could absolutely understand the difficulty of a non native English speaker in understanding the extreme amount of implication and nuance that book requires.
Using simpler words does not mean a smoother conveyance of information.
imagine that you're looking at the night sky and the stars blinked out all at once for just a second
Since they're all so far away and so many different distances away, it would imply something very very very large and very very very fast passed between us and the closest stars. Probably aliens. That would be cool
It'd be fine, we'd have 400 years to get ready.
Oh, so we can start next year?
Then you just live in a totally dark world forever
no no, just a second. like a cosmic blink
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