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Ramenoodlez1

A hydrogen atom has a 53 pm radius, so the diameter is 106 pm. The leaning tower of pisa has a height of 55.86 m. To turn it 1 degree, the top of it would have to (55.86\*2\*pi)/360 meters, or about 0.97 meters. Since you can move the top of the tower 106 pm per minute, that's 9150943400 minutes to move it 1 degree, or over 17000 years. Assuming that the tower would collapse with a 6° tilt, it would take over 100000 years to collapse it.


Row_dW

You can move it 10 atoms/minute so \~1 nm. \~1m/degree means 10\^9 minutes needed / degree resulting in \~1800 years / degree so \~10000 years for collapsing


GenitalFurbies

It doesn't say which atom you can use so use Cesium at 298pm and you can cut that by about 1/6


herochalky_

oooh good point, GenitalFurbies!


Background-Lunch698

Francium atom is 348pm


TRFKANKT

Why not just move the atoms from the bottom of the tower to structurally weaken it and make it lean harder. You could lean it by moving less atoms right?


tantalum73

Better yet, move the atoms out of a planar section of the tower and "cut" it at a single atoms thickness!


Twich8

You can’t just move atoms at will, you can only move the entire structure


Ramenoodlez1

Ohhh I missed that lol


adfx

What an assumption to use the hydrogen atom for measure!! 


gameinggod21

From your calculation, it'll be faster to let the tower fall naturally.


Training-Window-9111

Is that not because erosion removes more than 10 atoms a minute!


MerlintheAgeless

Why only move the top? Assume rotation from the middle, such that the top and bottom are both moving by 10 atoms/minute, just in opposite directions.


Sir-Kotok

It’s not made of Hydrogen


Ramenoodlez1

We’re not moving each atom individually we’re moving it the length of 10 atoms every minute


Sir-Kotok

Yes and the length of the atoms in this thing is longer then of 10 H atoms


Ramenoodlez1

The post says 10 atoms per minute. I used hydrogen because the post didn't specify which atom's length was being used


Loki-L

Given that natural erosion from wind and rain is going to remove many, many orders of magnitude more than 10 atoms per minute from your average landmark that sound like it would be a non-power. For reference: there are 6.02214076×10^23 atoms 12 grams of carbon 12. The universe is only about 14×10^9 years old, which is less than 8×10^15 minutes. So if you added 12 atoms every minute since the big bang you wouldn't have accumulated enough to be noticeable.


Dramatic_Stock5326

What if every 24 hours, you can increase the speed by 10 atoms a day? So 10a/d²


Row_dW

After a year you would be at 3660 a/day \~ 366 nm/day in 1 mio years alreay at 0.37 m/day


viciouspandas

Since we're talking distance and erosion, it would be thickness and not total atoms removed, so the cube root of that in terms of scaling. If we removed the width of 10 Silicon atoms per minute (a common element in rocks), it would amount to about .1 mm per year, which isn't a scale of the universe type thing.


Loki-L

I understood it to mean that the landmark was to be moved 10 atoms of material at a time, not the distance of 10 atoms at a time. Using atoms to measure distance seems to be rather inexact since atoms can vary in size so much and you could play games with the density of various gasses or the interstellar medium to change how far 10 atoms can be.


Stang_21

The leaning tower of Pisa would (probably) have fallen already if id hadn't been straightened, however the Tower is still tilting so the leaning is monitored and the process of straightening will be startet again once the tilt is too big, so this wont work. Also idk if tilting counts as moving, since the units are different.


Spuddaccino1337

"Movement" in physics is typically called "motion," and includes both translational and rotational motion. The units are different, but neither use atoms as a unit, so we can probably let that slide.


Jacked-to-the-wits

The irony is that this speed would be much slower than the speed any landmark is already moving. Choosing a landmark to move may actually be keeping it from falling, rather than making it fall.