Electron weapon?

**Justinian** · October 06, 2010, 03:39 PM

So, this might be catastrophically dumb (in fact I think it probably is), but anyway...
In my physics class yesterday ("physics for non-science majors", which appears to mean "physics for complete retards"), the power of electrostatic force was described with the following hypothetical:

If you could transfer 1% of the electrons in your body (there are 3 billion coulombs of positive and of negative charge in the body), which would be 30 million coulombs of electrons, to a person standing a meter away, you would become positively charged (as you now have 30 million coulombs more protons than electrons) and they would become negatively charged. The force of attraction between you would be 8.1 x 10^24 newtons or 9.1 x 10^20 tons -- nine times a billion times a billion tons. Ostensibly you would slam together with that force and instantly disintegrate.

Which means that if you had two atoms (let's say Hydrogen atoms), and you could move 1 electron from H atom A to H atom B, the two atoms would slam together and implode, releasing their energy. Wouldn't it be theoretically possible to create an incredibly powerful (as in billions of times more powerful, I'd estimate, than a nuclear bomb) weapon that "simply" moves a relatively small number of electrons a relatively small distance into other atoms, causing a chain reaction wherein the atoms implode with that massive force?

Wouldn't it also be possible to destroy planets, even stars, with such a weapon -- since if you did it with 1/1000th% of a mass that big it would still generate enough of a force for the entire thing to implode? And if you were able to do that to stars, couldn't you create black holes at will by causing the stars to implode -- or at the very least, cause them to go nova or supernova (since I'm not sure of what would happen: if all the atoms implode, would their mass be condensed into an infinitely small area, creating a black hole, or would it just release huge amounts of energy like a nuclear bomb?)

Wouldn't it also be possible to say, power engines with this as each atomic implosion would release large amounts of energy?

One last thought -- the smaller the "D" in the equation F = (kq1q2)/d^2, the larger the force, right? So if you did this with very heavy atoms, you would have an exponentially greater force than with H atoms (though you would have to move a much larger number of electrons to achieve the same proportional change in charge)?

**Phier** · October 06, 2010, 03:50 PM

Its been WAY too long since I took physics (for science majors) but I think the problem is the energy it would take to MOVE those electrons would be equally insane.

**Justinian** · October 06, 2010, 04:09 PM

Originally Posted by Phier

Its been WAY too long since I took physics (for science majors) but I think the problem is the energy it would take to MOVE those electrons would be equally insane.

Probably... though I'm not convinced, I mean electrons are really tiny and really light, but if you can just move one of them you can generate a huge force. Obviously this is all theoretical and I'm certain technologically impossible at the moment. Theoretically if you could do it just once the energy from one reaction would be enough to move two electrons out of two other atoms, so you could create a progressively bigger reaction using the energy from the first reaction. And yeah, I should have taken the real physics

I updated the OP.

you're assuming the electrons will stay in the other body.

in reality the spare electrons will just go right back to the nearest positively charged ions, i.e. you.

However, you'd probably get a powerful electric shock.

Say we have a very small cube of steel. If you were able to pull out the electrons from 1% of the atoms on one side of the cube and move them to the other, even if they were going to go back to the other side of the cube in a few milliseconds, wouldn't that (now negatively charged) side of the cube instantly become attracted to the other (now positively charged) side of the cube, causing the cube to implode and release all the energy of all the atoms within the cube?

**Tiwaz** · October 07, 2010, 05:17 AM

Originally Posted by Justinian

Probably... though I'm not convinced, I mean electrons are really tiny and really light, but if you can just move one of them you can generate a huge force. Obviously this is all theoretical and I'm certain technologically impossible at the moment. Theoretically if you could do it just once the energy from one reaction would be enough to move two electrons out of two other atoms, so you could create a progressively bigger reaction using the energy from the first reaction. And yeah, I should have taken the real physics

Except you have to build force to move the electron. You can't move it and at the same time get power out of it. If it would move out of it's own volition, you could get power out of it (perhaps).

To put your theory to an analogy. Moving one electron and getting energy from it is same as charging battery a bit and then draining energy from it to charge it more.

For it to work, energy drained from battery would have to create even more energy. With such technology you could make perpetual motion machine.

**~~removeduser_4536284751384~~** · October 06, 2010, 03:55 PM

you're assuming the electrons will stay in the other body.

in reality the spare electrons will just go right back to the nearest positively charged ions, i.e. you.

However, you'd probably get a powerful electric shock.

**~~removeduser_4536284751384~~** · October 06, 2010, 04:57 PM

that's only true if the electrons in the negatively charged side were somehow fixed to the iron atoms in that side. However, they wouldn't be. The individual electrons would just fly back, they wouldn't pull the iron atoms with them.

electrons aren't particularly useful in weaponry. They have tiny mass and I can't think of a way to utilize their charge, apart from electrocution.

particle beams of heavier particles such as neutrons and protons are more effective. They weigh like 2000 times more than an electron so having a huge beam of them crashing into the target at near the speed of light would do terrible damage. Of course you could use electrons but they would be considerabely less powerful.

**Justinian** · October 06, 2010, 07:12 PM

Well the idea isn't to harness the power of an electron itself but to utilize the much more significant attraction between negative and positive charges... So if you could find some way of smashing the electrons into the neutral atoms so they stick...

**Elfdude** · October 07, 2010, 10:33 PM

The electrons aren't fixed to the atomic nucleus. The force of the attraction would generate nothing more than a charge of electricity of electrons flowing back to the negatively charged area assuming you could maintain it negatively charged for a long period of time. If you bring the electrons to the nucleus all I'd suspect would happen is that they would become neutralized by the positively charged protons. However doing that would require monstrous amounts of energy.

Essentially the efficiency of such a device would be so low to the point that today it would only be theoretical it could be centuries before we discover how to approach the levels of energy required to do something as meaningful as that with the charges. Not to mention the heisenberg uncertainty principle.

**roy34543** · October 07, 2010, 10:57 PM

By the sound of it, Even if you mustered the immense energy to move all these elecctrons at once somehow , They would still just flow back to wherever they came from. Electrons are mobile, Protons are not. So the attraction is one-sided. Besides all these electrons are concentated over all your body, not just one spot. Imagine how hard it would be to center them all in one spot and transfer them all at once , and they would probably scatter upon impact.