A3_4 ‘Afraid of a Little Lightning?’: Mjolnir’s Capacitance

Thor’s hammer, Mjolnir, appears to store the energy from lighting. By modelling Mjolnir as a parallel plate capacitor, with a hollow centre, we calculated that it has a capacitance of 2.1 ×10^−11 F. To store the energy of one lightning bolt, an electric field of 1.6 ×10^12 Vm−1 is created. This would ionise any air inside Mjolnir, and so a dielectric is needed to maintain the capacitor

A3_9 Flying Thor

If Mjolnir can change its mass by controlling gravitons, this may explain how Thor is able to fly. By spinning Mjolnir, angular momentum is gained. Mjolnir looses mass (by manipulating gravitons) as Thor jumps, and so for momentum to be conserved, Thor is able to fly. In order for Thor to fly from the ground to thunder clouds, Mjolnir must have a change in mass of 774 kg

A3_6 Tribbling Times

In the Star Trek universe, tribbles are small furry creatures whose population increases exponentially. Using the assumption made by Spock, that a tribble has 10 children every 12 hours, we find the growth constant for a tribble population to be 0.1998. From this, assuming the tribbles have an unlimited food supply, we find that the time needed for the tribble family to grow such that it fills USS Enterprise is 4.5 days

A3_10 Christmas Spirit

In this article we explore the amount of energy that can be produced from Christmas spirit. We investigated an event shown in the movie ‘Elf ’ where Santa Claus’ sleigh needs the energy of Christmas spirit to raise it off the ground and back into the air. We found that to raise the sleigh required a total Christmas spirit of 4.51 × 10^14 J which is a significant amount. We find that each person shown in the film would need to produce 2.89 × 10^12 J, yet if this Christmas spirit was shared amongst everyone in the world they would only need to produce 71.0 kJ

A3_7 The Trunchbull Olympics - Pigtail Hammer Throw

In the 1996 film Matilda, Amanda Thripp is thrown by her pigtails, in the style of a hammerthrow, by Miss Trunchbull. Based on how long she is airborne for, we determined that she wouldhave travelled 1086 m. To reach this distance she would also have to be spun around up to 535RPM where her body would experience 5.89 G’s of force

A3_8 Death by Lecture

This paper explores the time required for the CO2 levels in a sealed lecture theatre,  filled with 100 students, to reach life threatening levels, effectively giving a estimated time limit for a lecture.We  found  that  for  the  lecture  theatre  we  modelled,  it  would  take  30  hours  and  55  minutes  for CO2 levels to rise to deadly levels.  Therefore, we estimate that a 31 hour lecture is the maximum lecture length students can endure, in a sealed lecture theatre, before they literally die

A3_3: A Pretty Positive Guy

In this paper we discuss the potential energy associated with a sphere of hydrogen once all of its electrons have been removed, which we have used as an approximation for a person. We calculated this energy to be 4.8x10^29 J. We compared this value to known processes and it was found to be extremely energetic, billions of times greater than nuclear explosions and of a similar magnitude to the Sun’s energy output. We also found that the same process when applied to an approximation of an ant has 1.5 × the energy of the Tsar bomb

A3_2: Waving to the ISS

The aim of this paper was to determine how long it takes the ISS to repeat an orbit. We created an orbital simulation of the International Space Station (ISS) using official orbital data, from which we found that the time taken for the ISS to travel along a pre-travelled orbit (same latitude and within 1o longitude) was 6 days 21 hours and 21 minutes

A3_1 ”Scared Potter?”: The Force of Spells

In this paper we investigate the magnitude of the force experienced by a body following an impact from a spell in the Harry Potter film series. After comparing five different spells we determined that the strongest spell was cast by the character Dobby, producing a force of 3600N. Comparing this to the force of a static push, we find that this force is not large enough to propel a human several meters in the real world

A3_5 Fifty Shades of CO2

In this article we consider the environmental effects if the Fifty Shades of Grey series had not been published. We investigate the number of trees required to produce all the books sold and relate this to the amount of carbon that could have been stored had these trees remained in place since date of publishing. Using this we found the amount of CO2 that could have been stored in these trees to be 179,200 tonnes. This is a negligible amount when compared to road transport and power station emissions for just one day