Qadir

The broader point worth taking from this is that early official explanations of complex system failures are usually wrong or incomplete, and not because anyone is being dishonest.

A large grid disturbance produces an enormous amount of recorded data across many operators, and the sequence is reconstructed over weeks or months. Anything said within twenty-four hours is a hypothesis stated under pressure to say something.

The useful move is to wait for the formal incident report. Those are typically published, detailed, and far more informative than the initial statements — and they frequently contradict them. Treating the first explanation as provisional is the correct scepticism here, rather than assuming a phrase that does not appear in textbooks must be a cover-up.

Two separate reasons, and both are decisive on their own.

Energy. Removing an electron from an atom typically costs a few electron-volts. That is an amount of energy available from ordinary chemistry, from light, from heat, from friction. Removing a proton from a nucleus costs something in the region of millions of electron-volts, because you are fighting the strong nuclear force rather than electromagnetic attraction. Ordinary processes are short of the required energy by around six orders of magnitude.

Identity. Electrons are interchangeable and an atom's chemical identity does not depend on how many it has — a sodium atom that has lost one is still sodium, just charged. The number of protons is what defines the element. Add a proton to a hydrogen nucleus and you have helium, which is not a charged hydrogen atom, it is a different substance entirely.

So it is not a variation on ionisation. It would be a nuclear reaction, and it belongs to a completely different branch of physics.

There is a second failure that is independent of the economics: heat in the wrong place.

Heating systems put heat low in a room, usually deliberately, because warm air rises and you want the occupied zone warm. Lights are at the ceiling. Heat delivered at ceiling level largely stays there, which is why high rooms are famously hard to heat.

So even in the perfect resistive-heating case, a unit of heat from a ceiling fitting is worth less to your comfort than a unit from a radiator. Not worthless, but the substitution is not one for one.

Also worth noting for completeness: the summer case reverses everything. If you ever run air conditioning, the waste heat costs you twice — once to produce it and again to remove it.

Worth adding the phrase in the first answer that is doing a lot of work: barring any other failure mechanism that occurs first.

Over the timescales where creep at low stress and low temperature matters, the bar will almost certainly fail by something else. Corrosion, fatigue from any vibration at all, damage, or the building around it being demolished.

That is not evasion. It is how engineering treats time-dependent failure generally: you calculate the design life and check that every mechanism has a comfortable margin over that life, rather than asking whether something lasts forever. Nothing does, and the useful question is which process wins.

Creep genuinely is the deciding mechanism in some designs — turbine blades, boiler tubes, anything hot and loaded continuously — and those components are designed to a creep life explicitly.

Your torque analysis is right and it is not the whole system. What differs is where the paper leaves the roll and how far your hand is from that point.

In the over orientation the sheet leaves the roll at the top and comes towards you. You can grip it close to the roll and pull almost straight down, and there is very little free paper between your hand and the point where the sheet is still supported.

In the under orientation the sheet leaves at the bottom, behind the roll, and hangs against the wall. Your hand is necessarily further from the departure point, and the paper between them is unsupported and free to stretch.

That matters because tearing depends on applying a sharp local stress, not on average force. A long unsupported length absorbs your pull by stretching and by the roll starting to turn, so the force arrives at the perforation gradually. A short length transmits the jerk directly.

There is a deeper point hiding in your discomfort, and it is worth naming: the model is a model.

Exponential decay with a constant probability per unit time is an extremely well-tested description, and it is a description. At the extreme tails, where you are asking about events with probabilities like the one above, we have no experimental access whatsoever and never will. Nobody has ever observed the tail of that distribution and nobody could.

So strictly, the answer "yes, with vanishing probability" is a statement about the model, not a verified statement about the world. Whether the model holds to twenty decimal places in the tail is unknowable by any experiment we can perform.

That is not a reason to distrust it. It is a reason to be precise about what is being claimed, and your instinct that something odd is going on is picking up on exactly that.

The second mechanism is error averaging, and it directly addresses your worry that errors must accumulate.

They accumulate only if they are systematic. Random errors do the opposite: measure the same thing many times and the average is more accurate than any single measurement, improving with the square root of the number of measurements. Take a hundred readings and you have roughly ten times the precision of one.

This is why a dividing engine cutting a hundred gear teeth can produce a wheel far more accurate than the mechanism cutting it — errors distributed around the circle partially cancel when the whole wheel is used.

So the discipline of metrology is largely about converting systematic errors into random ones — by reversing, rotating, swapping, and repeating — and then averaging them away. Once you know that, the whole field looks like one idea applied in a hundred forms.

The gravitational half of your intuition is exactly right and the answer is dominated by something else entirely.

Gravity. At any distance, a black hole with the mass of an apple pulls like an apple. It does not suck things in from across the room; gravity depends on mass and distance, and neither has changed. Its event horizon would be unimaginably small — far smaller than an atomic nucleus.

So if it passed through your hand, it would almost certainly miss every nucleus and interact with essentially nothing. It would pass through, and through the table, and continue into the Earth. It would not eat you, and it would not eat the planet in any reasonable time, because its cross-section is absurdly tiny and matter is mostly empty space.

That is the calm answer. The other one is that a black hole that small would not be sitting on your table for long enough to touch.