It turns out this is a trick question- Dragon Friend, November 23, 2021, 06:52:24 pm
It most certainly is not, I have no ulterior motive or intention of trickery. I'm just tipsy and thinking about old movies. It is surely a question that has no truly correct answer, but not because it's a trick.
A gigawatt is a measure of power, not energy, so you’ll only ever get the heating rate. You need to know for how long the gigawatt of power is applied to the car in order to figure out how much it heats up.
Agreed, at the beginning I assumed one second for the sake of the thought exercise both because a watt is a joule per second so the math is simpler and because it seemed like a reasonable estimate of how long the on-screen time travel stuff took.
edit: it’s worth mentioning that there have been several instances of cars being struck by lightning with the occupants surviving, so even in the case it’s the larger energy estimate it doesn’t necessarily mean that Marty Mc Fly would turn into Marty Mc Fried
The location of the energy is important though. We all agree that lightning delivered to the outside of the car will affect the occupants differently than lightning delivered to the inside of the car. The flux capacitor is a machine that is within the passenger cabin, so the heat loss inherent to all machines is applied to the air in the passenger cabin first.
For example, 1.21 GW of power applied for one second would mean a 1.21 gigajoules of energy imparted into the Delorean, which is nearly the energy contained in a typical lightning bolt. However, if it was applied for say 1 millisecond it’d only be 1.21 megajoules, which is about half the amount of food energy in a big mac. So the period of time the burst of power needs to be supplied to the flux capacitor is what determines whether Marty Mc Fly would be totally raw or well-done.
I'm sorry, did you just say that the energy in a lightning bolt is 2000 Big Macs' worth?
This probably ought to have been (and still ought to be) in the drunk thoughts forum, but I appreciate you all getting on board.