I fucking LOVE science... (the Truth about the Ghostbusters Twinkie)

[Levon]

"I'm worried, Ray. It's getting crowded in there. And all my recent data points to something big on the horizon."

"What do you mean, 'big'?"

"Well," says Harold Ramis's Egon Spengler, the science geek of the original Ghostbusters crew, as he holds up a Twinkie. "Let's say this Twinkie represents the normal amount of psychokinetic energy in the New York area. According to this morning's sample, it would be a Twinkie 35 feet long, weighing approximately 600 pounds."

That's a big Twinkie, you think to yourself, as Ernie Hudson's Winston Zeddemore says it on screen.

But exactly how big is it?

***********

In an effort to help myself visualize a Twinkie of this magnitude, I started doing a few basic calculations, and realized that there are some major inconsistencies in Dr. Spengler's hypothetical Twinkie.

How Much Would a 35-Foot Twinkie Weigh?
Your standard Twinkie is a shelf-stable, cream-filled sponge cake that weighs in at 38.5 grams and is about 9.9 centimeters long (about 3.9 inches and 1.4 ounces, in imperial units). Let's start with the assumption that Egon's 35-foot-long Twinkie maintains its proportions—the dimensions all scale; the ratio of cream to cake stays the same. Given that he's using it to illustrate a visual metaphor, I think this is a fair assumption to make.

I made a spreadsheet to calculate the weight of a Twinkie of various sizes. Let me quickly walk you through the math. To make things a little easier, we're going to assume a Twinkie is a simple box.


First, let's start by converting everything into metric units, so we can pull a Venkman and at least pretend to be scientific. Thirty-five feet converted to centimeters comes out to 1,070,* or 108 times the length of a single Twinkie. Now, because this Twinkie is three-dimensional—that is, it expands proportionally along all three axes—it's also going to be 108 times taller than a standard Twinkie, and 108 times wider. Thus, it would take 108 (cubed) standard Twinkies to make up the equivalent of a single 35-foot-long MegaTwinkie.

Dimensions of Egon's Twinkie**

	Length (cm)	Length (feet)	Weight (g)	Weight (tons)
Modern Twinkie	9.9	0.3	38.5	n/a
1984 Twinkie	10.2	0.3	42.5	n/a
The Ghostbusters Twinkie	1,070	35	49,200,000	54

Now do you see Egon's problem? A Twinkie 35 feet long would actually weigh 1.25 million times more than a standard Twinkie, or approximately 53 tons. And it gets worse. As any snack-cake historian could tell you, modern Twinkies are different from 1984 Ghostbusters-era Twinkies. Twinkies were discontinued briefly a couple of years back and reemerged from Hostess's bankruptcy as shorter, less dense versions of their previous form. While modern Twinkies are 9.9 centimeters long and weigh 38.5 grams, 1984 Twinkies were 10.2 centimeters long and weighed 42.5 grams. Redoing the calculations with those measurements gives you a Twinkie that weighs 54 tons.

Now we have two problems, the first of which is that since Twinkies are just sponge cake and white goo, you could not possibly make one this size that would not collapse upon itself in earth gravity. I invite you to do the math yourself.

And the second problem is, HOW COULD A 600-POUND TWINKIE WEIGH ONLY 600 POUNDS?

How can you make something that weighs 54 tons weigh only 600 pounds? Easy: You just lift it really, really high. We all remember our high school physics, right? The mass of an object never changes, but its weight can change based on its relative location to other objects. Gravitational pull (a.k.a. weight) is a force proportional to the inverse of the square of the distance between the center of mass of two objects. That is, the farther you get from the center of the earth, the less you weigh.

Time for some more napkin math. First, let's convert to metric again. Six hundred pounds is 272 kilograms. In Lower Manhattan, about 6,500 kilometers from the center of Earth's mass, a 35-foot Twinkie has a mass of about 54 tons, or 4.9•104 kilograms. So we're looking for the point in space where an object would weigh about 0.0056 times its weight on the surface of the earth. The formula for gravitational force is:

where F is the force, G is the universal gravitational constant, m1 is the mass of the first object, m2 is the mass of the second object, and d is the distance between those two objects.


Let's call the mass of the earth me and the mass of the MegaTwinkie mmt. Plugging in the original weight of the MegaTwinkie (Fmt), its original distance from the earth's core (6.5•103km), and the new weight we're looking for ((5.6•10-3)Fmt), we get two equations:

where d' is the new distance we're trying to calculate. Solving those two equations for d', you get a distance of about 87,000 kilometers from the center of the earth. In order for that Twinkie to weigh 600 pounds, you'd have to blast it off on a rocket (shoring it up so it can withstand those G-forces, of course), fly it past the stratosphere, watch those meteoroids ignite into burning meteors as it whizzes through the mesosphere, wave at the astronauts aboard the International Space Station at 400 kilometers, photobomb the Hubble Space Telescope at 600 kilometers, disrupt armies and Uber drivers all over the world as you smash through GPS satellites at 20,000 kilometers, then leave them all in the dust and set the cruise control as you coast the rest of the way, pulling off that interplanetary superhighway when you're almost a quarter of the way to the moon.


Here's a scaled representation of how high each of these orbits is. (Note: The objects themselves are not drawn to scale. Neither is the earth.)

​

 

[Levon]

Looks to me like nobody here likes science except me, and maybe Admin.

Most everybody else probably has trouble reading the equations or following the math.