OT dynamite question for BD

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teddy52food

Well-known Member
If you use a match to light the fuse to a stick of dynamite, does that break the laws of physics? The power of the explosion is greater than the match.
 
My understanding is the fuse ignites the Cap . The cap sets off the dynomite. Dad and uncles used lots of it back on the farm . 1/4 stick by gopher hole ,,wait till he pops up then shoot dynomite with .22 ....lil overkill for getting rid of them ,,bit pretty fun ! Used to buy it at hardware store or lumber yard . Blasted lot of stumps , opened frozen gravel pit. Seen it used for fishing . uncle used a stick and bread sack of fertilizer soaked in diesel fuel. Set it in low spot and blew hole big enough to drop a tractor in down to water, set in cement casing and instant well . Oh the good old days.
 
Lighting the fuse in turn sets off a blasting cap which in turn causes the dynamite to explode. To bad a person can not longer buy the stuff for farm use. Years ago I used some here to move a few rocks and sure wish I could still buy the stuff
 
Teddy,

Lighting a match to a fuse to set off a stick of dynamite is no different than pushing a boulder off a cliff. In both cases, the object has potential energy. Some event happens that triggers the release of that energy. At the end of the event, the energy is converted to some other form.

These scenarios are both excellent examples of the second law of thermodynamics, which your pal Crackpot Joe Newman doesn't seem to think applies to him. Despite conservation of energy, entropy (disorder) always increases. So your stick of dynamite will never become whole again on its own, neither will the boulder return on its own back to its original position on the cliff.

You would have us believe that Crackpot Joe has achieved some sort of nuclear fusion or fission (it's never clear which). A lot of guys far smarter than Newman have made similar claims that fell apart under peer review. It seems that the most comprehensive peer review of Newman's "work" was done by NIST, and they categorically refuted his absurd claims.
 
My mother when she was about 90 told me how her mother hated it when my grandfather used to use dynamite to break up big boulders into small enough ones to move. They would watch from a distance as my grandfather would light the fuse and then run. when I was a kid I remember that we had dynamite around. I remember it being in stick shape but it looked to me more like damp finely ground pressed sawdust. we also sometimes had blasting caps around and always dynamite wire and batteries. I guess fortunately we never had them all at the same time.
 
In terms of applied physics.... that sounds like a very narrow view of the small picture. Try taking a broader view of the big picture and you see the stored energy in the stick of dynamite...

Rod
 
I worked at a W.R. Grace fertilizer manufacturing plant, and whenever a bin of fertilizer drew too much moisture to move it with a bucket tractor [actually, it drew moisture, then dried like concrete], we'd "blow a bin" with dynamite. Usually took a pipe and rammed a hole about 6 feet back into the bin...then took a long pole and slid the 3 sticks with a cap, connected to an 12/2 extension cord, back into the hole. Then we'd pack the hole with damaged fertilizer bags from the shipping dock, step around the corner of the bin,and the foreman would set it off with a battery from his flashlight.

Guess the absence of diesel fuel made that a relatively safe practice, huh?
 
In the day I watched from not too far away as gramps used his teeth to set the cap to the fuse - saw a little creek fishing in the day also.
 
Thanks for posting that, interesting reading, I've worked on site jobs where we hired a blaster, 300-400 lbs in drilled holes, each time, we always got to watch, sounds like it was more fun in the old days, never knew they used it for the purposes mentioned.
 
I remember years ago blowing a rock up. One piece went up so high we lost sight of it, we just stood there and watched for what seemed like minutes till we could see it again. Then just made sure we where not where it was going. Hit the pond/lake and I never did find that rock in the years since that I have dug out that lake. At that time it cost me around $2 per stick to set it off but is sure was nice to have when you had a big rock right where you did not want it
 
You are releasing chemical energy that is stored in the nitro glycerine when you detonate dynamite. This expands when it changes state.
 
The little 'ol spark from a spark plug sets off and expansive explosion too, but there has to be fuel for the explosion, or 'controlled burn' as the engineers would say.

About thirty years ago the neighbor used dynamite to clean out about 1/4 mile of the end of the creek that goes through my place. He plugged a stick of dynamite in the mud every foot or so, maybe a little farther, and put the cap in the one on the end. The whole creek went up in one big tall cloud of water, mud and grass. It dug a channel a couple of feet deep in the bottom of the creek. First time I'd ever seen the creek with no water in it but the water from upstream came rushing in pretty fast. Jim
 
I can tell by your reply, you have no idea what is going on. There is no neuclear fusion or fission. Have you ever heard of a magnet? If so explain how , why and where it gets its power.
 
I hope you don't take offense to this, but you really need to take the time to sit down and understand the basics of Physics. You need a good basic book on General Physics, Nuclear Physics and Thermodynamics. A few books on Engineering and Mathematics would help too.

The types of questions you ask and the disagreements you have on this forum tell me you are lacking depth in the hard sciences.

There are principles in those books that you need to understand. Heck, you could probably learn most of these topics on wikipedia or some other free internet site.

Do you need to be a degreed engineer or physicist? Absolutely not. But you need to understand the principles and the application.

Your question of a match breaking the laws of physics because the explosion has much more energy than the match? That tells me clearly you need to study up a lot more. The match is NOT the piece of the equation creating the "explosion". Others below already answered in detail, so there is no need for me to how dynamite works.

Rick
Former physics teacher
 
I debated for a while whether or not to dignify such a silly question with an answer. I haven't figured out whether you're just trying to stir up the board or if you actually believe some of this nonsense.

I assume what you're asking is whether the process you describe violates conservation of energy and/or the laws of thermodynamics. The answer is no.

All combustion reactions are exothermic, which means they release energy, typically in the form of heat. A chemical explosion is nothing more than a very fast combustion reaction, which releases a lot of heat quickly. That heat causes the products of combustion to expand rapidly, creating the explosive shock wave.

The energy released in a chemical explosion comes from energy stored in the chemical bonds holding the atoms together in the molecular structure of the fuel and oxidizer. Where does that energy come from, you ask. Why it was stored when the molecules were originally created via an endothermic reaction, i.e., one that requires an external source of energy. An example of an endothermic reaction is photosynthesis in plants, where energy from the sun is collected and used to synthesize the materials the plant is made from. We recover the energy that originally came from the sun when we burn plant material in an exothermic combustion reaction.

Note that none of this has anything to do with fission or fusion reactions, or magnets, or anything except the way atoms bond together to form molecules, which is well understood.

Let me give you an example of how this works. Consider the combustion of hydrogen with oxygen, which makes water and heat. One oxygen molecule, containing two oxygen atoms, combines with two hydrogen molecules, each containing two hydrogen atoms, to make two molecules of water. There are several intermediate steps in the reaction, but end result is that the energy stored in the chemical bonds of the two water molecules is less than the energy originally stored in the bonds in one oxygen and two hydrogen molecules. The extra energy is released as heat, hence an exothermic reaction.

Note that in a fuel cell, in the presence of a catalyst, the energy is (mostly, anyway) released as electricity rather than heat.

This is an interesting reaction because we can readily reverse it using relatively low levels of energy via a process called electrolysis. In electrolysis, energy in the form of an electric current passing through water excites the atoms in the water molecules enough to break the water molecules apart into the constituent atoms. At this point, the hydrogen and oxygen atoms are energetic enough to re-combine into separate oxygen and hydrogen molecules, which have now stored the energy put into the electric current used to break apart the water molecules.

Nowhere in any of these process has any energy been created or destroyed; it has simply been stored and released in various forms, and therefore none of these processes violate any of the laws of thermodynamics. So in answer to your original question, no, using a match to light a fuse to ignite an explosive does not violate any of the laws of physics.

I can guarantee you that the first person who actually succeeds in building something that puts out more energy that it consumes (in whatever form, and not counting nuclear reactions that convert matter to energy) will have every physicist in the world beating down their down to try to be the first to publish the results.

Keith

By the way, magnets do store energy in the form of the magnetic field, but that energy has to come from some source that originally created the magnet. In the case of the earth's magnetic field, the energy source is the kinetic energy of the earth spinning on its axis, which in turn creates eddy currents in the core, which in turn create the earth's magnetic field.

If you want an idea of how much energy is stored in a magnet, look at how much electricity is required to initially charge a new magnet, or to re-charge a magneto magnet...not very much.
 
Where does a spring or rubber band get it's energy from?
Why don't you use gravity as a free and unlimited source of energy to move objects?
Where does the light go when the fridge door closes?
 
(quoted from post at 23:11:41 04/25/11) I can tell by your reply, you have no idea what is going on. There is no neuclear fusion or fission. Have you ever heard of a magnet? If so explain how , why and where it gets its power.

haven't we been down the Joe Newman Magic Energy Machine enough times?

It didn't work then and it still doesn't work.
 
Teddy, Teddy, Teddy.

Power is the rate at which work is performed. When a magnet is sitting in the palm of your hand, what work is being done? Nada. Power equals zero. There's no energy "in" a magnet, either. Only when you apply a force through a distance (like moving to magnets together or apart) do you get energy/work/power. YOU are doing the work when you force two magnets together or apart, NOT the magnets.

If you think there's no fusion or fission going on, then stop throwing "E=mc^2" into your silly posts.
 
(quoted from post at 22:11:41 04/25/11) I can tell by your reply, you have no idea what is going on. There is no neuclear fusion or fission. Have you ever heard of a magnet? If so explain how , why and where it gets its power.

How could you understand a nuclear reaction when you can't even spell "neuclear" .
You keep quoting E=MC2 as a source of power and claim no fission or fusion. Yet fail to understand that this mass into energy formula is built around a nuclear reaction.
I doubt if you know anything about or even heard tell of flux or gauss's law?
Again how do you think newman has discovered something that hundreds of thousands of researchers, nuclear physicists, students and backyard tinkers already haven't ?
I haven't seen such conditioned and blind loyalty to any false belief for some time. You are the ideal 'sucker" to be a loyal lapdog in a cult.
 
If you are being serious then you have about as much of a clue as teddy26food.
I threw that classic question/joke in there as humour.Didn't you watch that famous episode of the Beverly Hillbillies ?
 
Well if a magnetic field doesn't come from the atoms of the material according to E=MC squared, then please explain where it does come from.
 
You keep comparing a magnetic field to a spring. That is like a fishing bobber in the river. Push it down & it pops back up again. Why not put a water wheel in that flow and harness that river energy. That is what Joe's machine is doing.
 
The point I was trying to make is that in Joe's energy machine he is using a high voltage imput to excite the atoms in the copper coil which react to the permanent magnet rotor to produce torque. The imput is like the match but the power is coming from the machine. If the match & dynamite doesn't violate the laws of physics then why does everybody think Joe's machine does?It is the same priciple.
 
If a magnet didn't have a power of its own, a simple refridgerator would not stay on the door defying gravity for years. It would fall to the floor. You have yet to explain any of my questions about magnets. Why do like poles repel and unlike poles attract? Then you can take either one of those magnets and they will always attract a piece of iron & never repell it no matter which way you turn it? If you can't answer that , how do you feel qualified to judge Joe's machine?
 
You just nailed it by saying it doesn't take much to charge a magnet. The magnet will produce power for years afterwards if you put the right things together to harness it.
 
Teddy, if you want to redefine well-established terms like "power", "force" and "energy", go ahead and do so. Just don't use them to argue your point with people who use those same words every day to earn a living.

The magnet on your refrigerator is no different than a house sitting on the earth. It can sit there as long as gravity holds it down, yet it is doing no work. Whether or not I understand why gravity and magnetism exist is immaterial: I can observe their effects and predict their behavior, that's good enough. And nothing I've seen to date would lead me to believe that magnets have some magical energy we can tap into.
 
When you pass a wire through a magnetic field , electricity flows at C in the wire. Don't you think that what is in that field is moving at C??? You don't get something from nothing. Sorry about my spelling.
 
Teddy, unless I'm way out to lunch, you are trying to describe generating power using a form of generator or alternator. Guess what - ever tried turning a full fielded alternator? In electrical for my Ag mechanics we had one attached to a pedal bike. The instructor slowly added more power to the field coils, and boy, did it ever get to turning hard! Even the biggest, fittest guys couldn't turn it when full-fielded. So, you could get that big magic machine turning with batteries and magnets and electricity, but the moment you tried generating anything, watch that sucker stall.

Oh, and I watched that video for the heck of it. Why do I hear a one-lunger engine? Why does the water flow pulse, as if the pump is being driven by the slow turning one-lunger? Why does the amperage flow into the machine and back out to the batteries, as if coinciding with the power pulses of a one-lunger?

If you donated money to him, I congratulate you. You got suckered by a SECOND-RATE con artist.

Have a good day.

Lyndon

P.S. I'm not going into the physics aspects. It's already been explained really well by others already, and I don't have to patience to teach those who refuse to listen.
 
(quoted from post at 10:10:41 04/26/11) Sorry, the Beverly Hillbillies was on before my time, and it is spelled humor

It comes as a shock to some Americans but there are other countries than the US.
Tyre, plough, humour, rumour, thru, through are all accepted and correct in the English language. Check the dictionary used by the UK and her colonies.
If it wasn't for the UK you would be speaking German in the US. Wasn't decided during WWII either. In the later 1800's the US's official language choice was made.
 
(quoted from post at 10:56:46 04/26/11) You just nailed it by saying it doesn't take much to charge a magnet. The magnet will produce power for years afterwards if you put the right things together to harness it.

Power is force over distance during a period of time. Work is force over distance.
I assume those fridge magnets don't move once stuck to the fridge.
Does a spring make power as an object hangs or bounces under it while suspended?
Does a post holding a barn beam up, use energy to bear the weight?

As previously stated. How do you try to explain something when you can't even use the proper terms and definitions.
 
You didn't see the whole video or you would have seen the output gear driving the gear on the mud(piston) pump. There is no one lunger engine involved. He has that machine on a trailor and moves it to different places where people can see there is nothing else powering it.
 
The spelling depends on where you're from.... The 'U' in many such words is common in Canada. IIRC that's one of the few remaining Briticisms we have left.

Rod
 
If you have seen the video then you have just seen that Magnet energy being tapped into. Joe has put together a machine that does something that no other machine has done in the past. In a conventional generator when a conductor passes through a magnetic field a current is induced into that wire which produces its own field. The problem is that those fields couple together causing it to turn hard. In Joe's unconventional design those fields are working together to produce power instead of consuming it. Some time I will try to breifly explain what is going on in that machine. It is pretty simple once you understand it.
 
Ok sorry, maybe I'm wrong as far as the one-lunger is concerned. I didn't watch the whole video because I couldn't stomach anymore bullshlt. And do tell, how can you use magnets to generate electricity without one being moving?

If it truly worked, why aren't there companies and universities and scientists all over the idea? Why does he need donations? A con man. Pure and simple.
 
Let me put it to you another way - in this magic machine, what is consumed to make electricity? In your dynamite example, a match (with its head being fuel) lights a fuse to detonate the dynamite (another fuel). Thus, you are using one reaction that is turning fuel into heat to TRIGGER a completely separate reaction, the detonation of the dynamite. The match's energy has NO bearing WHATSOEVER on the energy of the dynamite.

Now, I'll break the magic machine into two parts. First, to get it turning. He used batteries and an electric motor. The chemical energy in the batteries is released as electricity to power the electric motor, which converts the electricity into mechanical energy. Now, all along the path, there are energy losses. Your electric motor becomes warm, ja? That is energy being lost as heat. There is no such thing as a 100% efficient electric motor. You have already lost energy from your circle. Heck, simply by your machine turning you are losing energy to air resistance and friction of turning parts. (when I say lost, I mean it leaves the circle in an undesirable and unusable form, such as heat)

Now, the charging part. The machine turns, so you would like to turn mechanical energy into electrical energy. A generator. Again, your generator becomes warm. Energy lost as heat. Same with all the pesky connections and various minor voltage drops in the wiring. You lose a tiny bit of energy at each one. So, by the time that energy has come full circle from the batteries back to the batteries, you have less energy inside your circuit than you began with. The batteries will eventually fade, and your machine will stop. Your batteries(fuel) have been consumed. So how can use any kind of energy from this machine if it cannot maintain itself? How can it pump water? Like every single magic "perpetual motion machine" or "super energy machine", there is another, hidden source of energy being input into the circuit to keep it going.

The only place for magnets is in the motor or generator. They have no ability to affect energy input or output anywhere else.

And don't even mention E=MC2 because that's nuclear and has absolutely no bearing on this machine.

Hopefully that sounds coherent. I wish I could introduce you and Newman to my electrical instructor in Ag Tech school. He would set you straight, and make you say "How could I have been so backwards before?" Or my physicist older brother who makes me look like a drooling caveman.

Lyndon

P.S. Whew, I feel long winded!
 
You guys have entered a battle of wits with an unarmed man. Watch, I'm going to make some power myself. Hang on, it's going to be a wild ride.

E=MC^2
F=MA
Work = Force * Distance
Power = Force * Velocity
PE=MAD
KE= 1/2 MV^2
PV=NRT
HP = 550FT-LBS/SEC

CAN YOU FEEL THE POWER OOZING FROM YOUR SCREEN?
 
(quoted from post at 14:46:21 04/27/11) You guys have entered a battle of wits with an unarmed man. Watch, I'm going to make some power myself. Hang on, it's going to be a wild ride.

E=MC^2
F=MA
Work = Force * Distance
Power = Force * Velocity
PE=MAD
KE= 1/2 MV^2
PV=NRT
HP = 550FT-LBS/SEC

CAN YOU FEEL THE POWER OOZING FROM YOUR SCREEN?

I rather enjoyed that.
 

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