Apocalypse for Beginners by Nicolas Dickner Translated by Lazer Lederhendler Read Free Book Online

Randall name, Hope never let go of an obsession. She twisted and turned it in every direction like a Rubik’s cube and could keep this up in the background for hours, sometimes days. I watched her spend the day sketching the outlines of variously sized lemons on her desk, in the margins of her English notebook, on the palm of her hand.
    The mystery was cleared up in the late afternoon in the chemistry lab. Mr. Chénard was going to teach us how to use lemons to put together an electric battery.
    The experiment seemed perfectly straightforward. All it required was to stick two electrodes into the unfortunate fruit and, with the aid of a voltmeter, note the very faint electrical current generated by the potential difference. The current was just barely perceptible—around 1.5 volts—so several hundred lemons would have to be hooked up in series for a 40-watt bulb to light up. Of course, the main point of the experiment was not to produce electricity but to explain the role that citric acid, zinc and aluminum played in this curious phenomenon.
    Hope and I made a formidable team—admittedly, thanks mostly to Hope—and we completed the experiment in no time. I was already proofreading our report while our closest neighbours were still struggling with their prescribed fruit, trying in vain to lance the peel with the copper wire.
    Armed with a scalpel, Hope proceeded to dissect our lemon.
    “Do you know the origin of the word ‘electricity’?”
    “No idea.”
    “The Greeks discovered static electricity by rubbing a piece of amber against some fur. In Greek, ‘electron’ means amber.”
    Hope’s face puckered as she bit into a lemon wedge.
    “Can you imagine what would have happened if they’d been fiddling around with citrus fruits? Everything would have another name. We would be taking courses in citricity, and the lemon would be an official unit of electric measurement!”
    “That’s pretty absurd.”
    “Yeah, but
all
units of measurement are absurd. It doesn’t matter if you measure time with drops of water or the rotations of a cesium atom—both are merely absurdities with different degrees of accuracy. Everything else is cultural.”
    Right then I observed a sparkle of excitement in her eyes. She opened her chemistry textbook to the conversiontables and began jotting down notes in the margins of the book and punching numbers into her calculator.
    “What are you doing?”
    “I’m converting the Hiroshima atomic bomb into lemons.”
    Of course. What could be more obvious?
    Hope explained that all you needed was a little logic and a smattering of data to obtain a significant, if not altogether exact, answer. In other words, the renowned Fermi method.
    In this particular case, you could start with the fact that a lemon contains 15 to 20 calories, that is (she tapped away on her calculator) an average value of 73.2 kilojoules (
×
). The Hiroshima bomb, on the other hand, released an estimated 15 kilotons of energy, amounting to approximately 6.3 × 10 13 kilojoules (
y
).
    To convert the bomb’s energy, you had only to divide
y
by
×
, which resulted in a total of 8.6 × 10 11 lemons or, more plainly, 860,655 megalemons, the equivalent of Florida’s agricultural output over a period of six thousand years.

18. AN ORDINARY COMPONENT OF EVERYDAY REALITY
    Hope went back to work, calculator in hand, and was now computing the volume 860 billion lemons would take up.
    Around us, the other students were busy with their coils of copper wire, their sticky fruits and their stacks of loose-leaf filled with scribbled notes. As for me, I pondered the heresy of converting the deadliest explosion in the history of humankind into lemons.
    Yet it was inevitable that it should come to this sooner or later.
    For the average citizen in 1945, the atomic bomb came from the future, just like the extraterrestrials in
The War of the Worlds
. While physicists were piercing the core of the atom, people in the countryside were still