How Long Would the Large Hadron Collider Take to Defrost a Pizza?

Posted by Adam Kuban, September 11, 2008 at 8:00 AM

The Large Hadron Collider site. It looks like a big pizza.

Scientific American figures it out:

According to an old Cosmic Variance post, the power of one of the LHC's proton beams at full energy is 10 trillion watts (TW). (A watt is a joule of energy per second.) A household microwave produces 500 to 1000 watts of power. Let's call it 700 watts. And defrosting a frozen pizza takes about six minutes*. So that's 700 joules/sec x 360 sec = 252,000 joules of energy needed to defrost a pizza
Therefore: 252,000 joules / 10^13 joules per second = 3x10^-8 second for the LHC to defrost a pizza
That's 30 nanoseconds (billionths of a second).

I've always hated thawing my frozen pizzas.

7 Comments

Tags: frozen pizza, Technology

7 Comments:

This is awesome.

Raphael at 9:19AM on 09/11/08

now if you could just fit one of those things in your NYC kitchen... hmm...

foodinmouth at 11:02AM on 09/11/08

The risk, of course, is that the process would create a black hole, and the pizza would eat itself. You've been warned!

Barry Foy at 11:02AM on 09/11/08

@Barry Foy: L(HC)OL

Adam Kuban at 11:20AM on 09/11/08

Adam, if you fired the LHC proton beam into a pizza target, not only would it be defrosted in those nanoseconds, but it would be annihilated. Which wouldn't be a far cry from what Domino's produces on a daily basis in terms of culinary merit.

jperlow at 12:49PM on 09/11/08

Just remember "Never cross the streams!" Why? It's bad thats why...

burgerboy at 5:06PM on 09/15/08

Still good 9 months later......awesome!...lol :)

Pizzablogger at 6:01PM on 06/17/09

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