General > General Technical Chat
What happens if all the electrons from a lump of material are removed?
Alex Eisenhut:
Well it's a sci-fi weapon, a disintegrator ray. In Niven's novels there's the "digger", that doesn't remove electrons but cancels their charge so the target violently flies apart. (What the weapon emitter is made of is anyone's guess). In one story they come up with a matching weapon that cancels the charge on the proton and they fire both beams in parallel at a planet's surface.
I think Niven described the result as "there will be a current" that looks like a 12 mile long bar of solid lightning. :scared:
Funny stuff.
I wouldn't even know how to begin looking for how it would be physically possible to cancel the charge of a fundamental particle like the electron. The proton seems to be made of three quarks that are constantly flipping around and maybe a beam of weird particles can force a preferred configuration of a proton that would have more or less charge. Shrinking atoms or prying them apart, oh my.
Even more sci-fi fun are fictional non-nuclear super-materials that simply don't react to said beams. Cuz they're like made of gluons only or space-time distortions. Like a cosmic string. :-DD
I love this stuff.
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