Let’s think about this for a few minutes.
The linked article says the butter sculpture weighs 800 pounds. That’s probably a approximate figure, and it may be somewhat lighter or heavier. But for our purposes, let’s use the 800 pound figure. As you’ll see shortly, we’re dealing with such large numbers, a few pounds either way won’t matter.
Now, as we all know, Bob, E=MC^2. Or, energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light. So how much energy is there in 800 pounds of butter?
If I were a truly honorable person, I’d step through the unit conversions here: converting 800 pounds to kilograms (362.8739), using the speed of light in meters per second, to arrive at an energy figure in Joules.
Say ‘what’ again. Say ‘what’ again, I dare you, I double dare you m**********r, say what one more G****n time!
No, Joules, not Jules. Anyway, this would be if I were a honorable person.
But I am a lazy and shiftless blogger, and my stepping through the unit conversions and math would bore my reader. Even if I did use my HP-16C. Fortunately, there are online mass-energy calculators, like the one at Omni Calculator, which lets you select your units.
800 pounds yields 32613479325840537567 Joules.
That’s a really big number. Can we put it into terms that are easier to understand? Something like…megatons?
Honorable person, unit conversions, blah blah, online calculator like this one.
For comparison’s sake, the estimated yield of Tsar Bomba was between 50 and 58 megatons. Taking the low end, that’s about 156 Tsar Bombas.
Looking at this another way, that’s 7794808.6342831 kilotons.
The estimated yield of the Trinity test, per Wikipedia, was 25 kilotons.
I bet you thought I was going to use “Oppenheimer” footage here, didn’t you? So did I. But I couldn’t find any on the ‘Tube. At least not of the explosion.
So about 311,792 Trinity tests.
Rounding errors, significant figures, floating point math, etc. I’m just doing this for fun.
(Wikipedia estimates the impact energy that formed the Chicxulub crater at 72 teratonnes of TNT (300 ZJ). You could probably use one of those online calculators to compare 800 pounds of butter to a six mile wide asteroid, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for my reader.)
And, yes, there’s more to the article:
Farmworkers are planning to combine the butter with food waste and run it through the farm’s “digester.”
The digester converts food waste into energy, specifically electricity.
Sigh. Then again, this is the NYPost.
I see we have different tastes. While I like a good nuclear event, I happen to love toast. And 800 pounds of butter converts to
https://coolconversion.com/cooking-weight-volume/~pound~~~to~tablespoon
“800 pounds of butter equals 25700 ( ~ 25696 3/4) US tablespoons.”
(They let you specify your ingredient… and butter is a suggestion. What forethought!)
According to this randomly selected repository of butter knowledge:
https://goboldwithbutter.com/how-to/tips-to-make-the-perfect-buttered-toast
1.5 tablespoons is recommended for an optimal buttered toast experience. Okay, their own words were “The magic number is 1 and 1/2 tablespoons.” Which while informative, didn’t sound sciency enough.
So, therefore and in conclusion, this is an opportunity to create 17,131 slices of excellent buttered toast.
I then asked the Internet to help me use some of that butter to run the toaster. According to a Reddit post
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/ulrlgr/how_much_nuclear_energy_does_take_to_toast_a/
It would take 180,000 Joules to make a slice of toast, and they were even kind enough to further solve it down to two nanograms of nuclear material… if you were using your own separate source of fissionable nuclear material instead of butter, then you’d be done.
We’re not done. We’re only about medium rare.
As our gracious host originally posited, our nuclear material IS the butter, so how much can we spare for the toaster, so we have enough for the bread?
(Omitting some puzzlement time)
We need to set aside 1600 pounds of butter for 34260 slices of excellent buttered toast.
My math went off the rails there, requiring more butter than was provided in the original art display. Corrected for illness and illness related lack of sleep, the 800 pounds of butter will produce enough butter energy and butter butter to prepare 8564 slices of excellent buttered toast. (8565.3 is the total but we’re only putting pairs of bread slices into the toaster, bro)