One of the problems with Tower Heist

I can admit to having not seen the movie Tower Heist. I'm okay with that fact since the reviews generally weren't all that positive.

To give you the relevant summary, a bad Alan Alda has stolen money from lots of people including the employees of the building in which he lives via a ponzi scheme. The employees break into his apartment to steal back the money only to find the safe empty. Luckily, they happen to scratch the paint job on vintage Ferrari in the apartment and find that it's made of solid gold.

Bad science ensues.

In the above clip, nebbishy Matthew Broderick does some quick math and states that the car weighs 2000 lb at $1872 per ounce of gold which makes for about $45 million.

The math doesn't even check out as 200lb x 16oz/lb x $1872/oz = $59.9 million...even allowing the 'give or take ten million,' that's lazily off.

But the issue here is that a 2000lb car made of steel, rubber, and glass wouldn't translate to the same weight in gold since steel, rubber, and glass have different densities than gold.

2000 lb of gold would make for a cube roughly 14 inches on a side because gold is way more dense than steel, rubber, or glass. If the Ferrari were actually made of gold, it wouldn't be 2000 lb; it would be more like more than - according to one article I found - 10,000 lb...because gold is very dense.

Which would lead to so many problems in the subsequent scenes when the team tries to lower the Ferrari down on a rope, swing it into an apartment being renovated, and then has to pull the Ferrari back up the roof where a single person unhooks it and drops it into the rooftop pool.

Oh, spoilers...

None of that would be possible with a solid gold Ferrari weighing in excess of five tons.

Then, in the touching end scene, each of the building's employees gets a chunk of the solid gold mailed to them - a grill, a wheel, a bumper - all of which are easily delivered by a friendly UPS-type man...and each of which would weight hundreds and hundreds of pounds.

Shipping would be pricey.

The Big Idea Behind Avogadro's Number (That Most People Miss)

This video steps backward to begin the story of Avogadro's number back in ancient Greece, similarly to how I teach the atomic history in my chemistry class at Princeton.

The development of relative masses of the elements, though, is something that I tend to skim over fairly quickly, though I might start putting a bit more emphasis on this concept in the past.

I do, however, mention - partially thanks to Steve Mould's explanation of moles - define the moles as the conversion factor between one gram and one atomic mass unit. 

I didn't know, however, that the value for Secret Number N was discovered in 1909. Now I guess I need to find out how that value was discovered more than 100 years ago.

Even the Densest Metal Doesn't Exceed USPS Shipping Weight Limit

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by CW&T (@charliewhiskeytango)

So many words there...

That's 48 pounds of tungsten in a post office mailing box right there that people are trying to pick up. 

Apparently it's really tough to pick up 48 pounds of tungsten - which makes sense because tungsten is really dense...but not as dense as osmium.

Apparently filling the same box with osmium would give you 61.5 pounds (source) - thankfully still below the post office's maximum weight limit of 70 pounds. To quote...

Osmium’s density is 22.6 grams per cubic centimeter. OP measured the inside dimensions of the small flat rate box and multiplied them to get the volume, 75.3 cubic inches. This is equal to 1,234.5 cubic centimeters. So all we have to do is multiply 22.6 x 1234.5. This gives us 27,899.7 grams, which is 61.5 pounds.

So, unless you go hunting neutron star matter or dark matter or something exotic like that, you're good to put just about anything inside one of those post office mailers.