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.

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Tags: frozen pizza, Technology