And the Force is stronger than this?

[acroyear]

Built on Facts : The Physics of the Death Star:

Now let's say you wanted to take apart the earth. Yes, the whole thing. You want to grab each bit of dirt and pull it out of the earth's gravity and move it out to deep space. How much energy in total would it take? There's some practical reasons for wanting to know. The engineers who built the Death Star would need for their superlaser to deliver at least that much energy. And what could be more practical than that?

But figuring out exactly how much energy requires some finesse - figure out how much energy it takes to remove a kilogram worth of earth, and suddenly the earth has one fewer kilogram worth of gravity. So the next kilogram won't take quite as much energy to remove, and so on. We're going to have to do some thinking about how to get around this.

Lots of fun math in there...

Comments

[javasaurus.livejournal.com]

Maybe my physics is fubar'd, but I don't think the center of gravity for Earth would change just by blowing it up. And you'd not need so much energy to destroy a planet -- you just need to convince pent-up energy within the planet to be released, and to pulverize the mass, and if it re-forms afterwards, you've still killed the planet.

As for the Force, well, size matters not!

[petricat666.livejournal.com]

Patrick told me about this last summer, it's all in the book "Impossbly stupid movie physics."
Ask him about gunslingers and shooting flames off candles sometimes.

The stupidest movie physics of all time according to the book is The Core.