Author: Sarah Laskow / Source: Atlas Obscura
Anders Sandberg, of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, describes himself as an “academic jack-of-all-trades,” and on arXiv.org, a gathering place for pre-prints of academic papers, his contributions include work on risk estimates, supersized machines, neck tie-knots, the Fermi paradox, and the energy required to run a brain as compared to the energy required to run artificial intelligence.
His latest work is a disturbing thought experiment that ensures that anyone who reads it will never look at a blueberry pie the same way again.
Sandberg is a user of Physics Stack Exchange, where anyone can ask a physics-related question and hope for an answer. One user, Billy-bodega, asked the following:
Supposing that the entire Earth was instantaneously replaced with an equal volume of closely packed, but uncompressed blueberries, what would happen from the perspective of a person on the surface?
And Sandberg, eschewing the usual can’t-be-bothered attitude of Physics Stack Exchange towards such whimsical questions, decided to give the question serious consideration. “The end result,” he writes, “is a world that has a steam atmosphere covering an ocean of jam on top of warm blueberry granita.”
Sandberg grew up in Sweden, where smaller, thin-skinned blueberries grow wild, and he has “very fond memories of exploring the forest and gorging myself as a kid.” But he loved the blueberry question not because of his childhood affinity, but because it immediately got him thinking about sphere packing (a deep issue in physics and math), elasticity, and complex substances. (A planet of blueberries is a more interesting problem than a planet of gold.)
“I like crazy-sounding questions that make me think in the next moment, ‘Hey! I could actually calculate this!’” he says. “Many good physics questions involve taking something everyday and pushing it to the extreme—what if the speed of light was really slow, or we tried to build the maximally tall tower?”
This process of imagining blueberry earth begins with fat, thick-skinned highbush blueberries (the kind you…
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