Conjuring Hugh Jackman (Or: Why the Film "The Prestige" is, Alas, a Bit Hard to Swallow) (Or: An Amusing Lesson in Physics)

(First off, a warning: if you have not seen the film The Prestige and would like to avoid spoilers that will basically give away the entire film, then stop reading. Go see the film, and then read this. I have now warned you.)

Okay, time for a glib science lesson that is nonetheless pretty cool. 

It all involves Einstein’s legendary formula E=MC2, and the film The Prestige.

To set this up, let’s make E=MC2 really simple (physicists probably won't like this, but so it goes). Then we’ll get to The Prestige.

Trust me, it will be amusing. I found it amusing. Admittedly, I wrote this, but I still found it amusing.

So okay:

E=MC2…

…Means, as we all know:

Energy=Mass x The Speed of Light Squared

Which means…

Energy=mass x a really, really big number

Which means….

The amount of energy you can get from something= its mass x a really big number

Which means

The amount of energy you can get from even a small amount of something=a really big number, as in, a whole lot of energy.

In order to really see this formula in action, you need to have atoms either break apart or fuse together. When this happens, there’s a certain amount of what was there before that simply….isn’t there anymore. 

To repeat: yes, when atomic bombs blow up there’s a certain amount of uranium (or plutonium) that simply…isn’t there anymore. 

The thing that makes this mind blowing is that if you can convert matter to energy, the reverse is true. If you have a huge amount of energy kicking around you can actually create matter from it.

So to simplify this (and physicists, I know that this is a gross simplification; be kind, or just…I don’t know, go play with your Higgs boson particle):

1 gram of stuff can get you the energy equivalent of about 20,000 tons of TNT (that was the destructive power of the Little Boy atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima).

…So if you have the energy equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT kicking around, you can make a gram of stuff.

Okay. The next thing we’re going to do is convert those units of energy from tons of TNT to an energy unit called a joule. We need to do this for the other stuff that comes later in this post (and I’ve just about gotten to the point where I’m going to explain what this has to do with the film The Prestige).

Now if we consult Wikipedia (which I’m consulting, in spite of its notorious unreliability, due to the fact this is a blog entry, and not a physics paper), we find out that 1 gram of explosive plutonium (okay, not uranium, but just bear with me) will yield 89.9 terajoules of energy. 

Once again: considering that this is a blog post, let’s just say that 1 gram equals 90 terajoules, or 90 trillion joules.

So you need 90 trillion joules of energy to create one gram of something.

(Remembering, of course, that 90 trillion joules of energy was the yield of the Little Boy atomic bomb.) 

So now let’s get to The Presitige.

In The Prestige, a key element of the plot involves a fictional device of Nicola Tesla’s that allows people to create duplicates of themselves. It just conjures these duplicates out of thin air; there’s no need, for example, to gather large clusters of Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen. All you need is this device. 

Hugh Jackman uses this device to create many, many copies of himself. 

Okay.

Let’s talk about how much energy it takes to create even one Hugh Jackman. 

Now, admittedly, I’m not using the Hugh Jackman from The Prestige as my model. Instead, I’m using Wolverine Jackman, became Jackman gained an insane amount of weight in pure muscle to look as jacked as he did in those films, consuming about 6,000 calories a day. 

Now. To make the math clean, let’s just put his weight, fully clothed, at 220. He weighed a bit more than 210, and clothes can weigh a few pounds.

(And anyway, the film makes it clear that anyone can make a duplicate of themselves. So I’m making a duplicate Wolverine Hugh Jackman. It’s my right.) 

I say 220 because that easily converts to 100 kilograms.

In other words, Hugh Jackman Wolverine weighs about ten thousand grams.

Now, let’s remember that it took about 90 trillion joules of energy just to create one gram of something. 

But if we want to create one Wolverine Hugh Jackman, we need to create  one hundred housand grams of something.

If we multiply 100,000 by 90,000,000,000,000, we get 9,000,000,000,000,000,000 (nine quintillion) joules.

Now, considering that there are many other things that we see created in this film—rabbits, top hats—let’s make it easy for ourselves and just round it up to ten quintillion. That allows us to simplify it, in scientific notation, as 10 to the 18^th power. 

So…how much energy is 10 quintillion joules, the amount of energy necessary to conjure one Wolverine Hugh Jackman (and some top hats and rabbits) out of thin air?

Put it this way: 10 quintillion joules, according to Wikipedia (and there’s a way cool diagram at http://circlon-theory.com/HTML/joules.html) is the yearly electricity consumption of South Korea.

Wait, there’s more. One element of the plot concerns the fact that Hugh Jackman creates copies of himself frequently, which means that it’s entirely possible that he’s created 100 copies of himself (a concept with which, no doubt, many women have no problem whatsoever).  

To create 100 Hugh Jackmans, you’d one sextillion joules (10 to the 20th), which is the entire annual energy consumption of the world. Again: this is all energy, not just electricity.

Now, to mess with your mind even further, here’s a sobering fact:

In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t a lot of energy at all. 

In a day, the earth receives 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10 to the 22^nd, or 100 sextillion) joules of energy from the sun.

That’s enough energy to create 10,000,000 Hugh Jackmans.

And that, of course, is only a fraction of the total energy that the sun puts out in a day, which is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10 to the 32^nd, or 1 dectillion) joules of energy. 

This is enough energy to produce 100,000,000,000,000,000 (100 quadrillion) Hugh Jackmans.

And this is small potatoes compared to a supernova (an exploding star), which gives off so much energy, that it’s just a lot easier to express it in my new unit of energy measurement, The Jackman (which, as you may remember, equals 10 quintillion joules of energy). 

A supernova is 1 septillion Jackmans. That is, you can create 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10 to the 23rd) Hugh Jackmans from a supernova.

And a supernova is just one star. It is estimated that there are about 100 sextillion (10 to the 20th) stars in the universe.

This effectively means that if every star were to spontaneously explode and devote all energy to creating Hugh Jackmans--if, in other words, it were Jackman's Universe, and no one else (and nothing else) lived in it--there would be 10 to the 43rd, or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Hugh Jackmans in the Universe.

The science lesson is over. Go have a donut. And watch The Prestige. It’s a great film.