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The video game Team Fortress 2 contains a weapon called "Bonk! Atomic Punch" that renders the user invulnerable for 8 seconds when drunk. According to its release notes, "Bonk! contains several hundred times the daily recommended allowance of sugar." The American Heart Association recommends a daily allowance of 36 grams per day for adult males. "Several hundred times" is at least 200, so Bonk! contains at least 36 × 200 = 7200 g = 7.2 kg of sugar.

What would happen if you compressed that much sugar into a space the size of a 355mL soda can? The density of sucrose is 1.59g/cm3, meaning that under normal circumstances it would occupy 7200 ÷ 1.59 = 4528 cm3, or about the size of a football. All I know about the compression of solids is that under extreme circumstances they either explode or form a black hole.

TheWreckersCompanion
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    The soda can explodes because it can't contain the pressure or heat. – DKNguyen May 01 '21 at 04:01
  • @DKNguyen I might have said there was a can in the title, but I didn't in the question, just "a space the size of a 355mL soda can". And I'd like to know how much heat and pressure we're talking. – TheWreckersCompanion May 01 '21 at 04:03
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    Pretty sure that's far below the limits of the size of actual sucrose molecules. So at the very least, the bonds would break down and you'd have something not sucrose anymore. I also believe it's below the limits of any solid or fluid form of carbon or oxygen, probably even hydrogen. So I think you're into the realm of a plasma at least. You might possibly need to fuse nuclei and create heavier elements. It is very far from black hole territory, however. – geshel May 01 '21 at 05:15
  • Somehow related https://bit.ly/2RJrE8S – Alchimista May 19 '21 at 13:30

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To answer the question you need to have on hand something called the equation of state for sugar. This lets you solve for the pressure required to squeeze the sugar down to the desired density. I don't have that equation, but I will tell you that the pressure needed will be truly gigantic.

Machines can't do such a drastic compression job as this. You'd need to use high explosives in shaped charge form to implode the sugar to that volume, and in the process it would probably get hot enough to vaporize. Then, when the explosives are spent, the sugar itself would explode outwards with great force.

niels nielsen
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Making the assumption here that sugar = carbon: Diamond has a density of 3.51g/cm^3. Your material has a density of 20.3g/cm^3 (a bit more than tungsten). So ~6 times more than needed to make a diamond. A supernova is required to do something like fuse sugar into tungsten such that it remains stable.

If it doesn't remain stable, it will explode as plasma. Since the density is a bit higher than tungsten anyways, it might just explode out anyways, just as tungsten plasma.

This assumes that if you apply enough energy to compress a solid to the density of another element it will fuse to that element which may not be true (though I see no other alternatives).

DKNguyen
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