Vsauce, I'm Jake, and Thor's hammer...doesn't weigh that much. According to MARVEL it's
42.3lbs which is still a lot to hold...especially one handed (veritasium clip)...but the reason
the hammer can't be lifted isn't due to weight but because it takes someone who is worthy
to wield it. It's a common misconception that Thor's hammer was forged from a dying star
when it was actually forged in one. But let's say it was made out of a dying star, specifically
the densest in the known Universe...a Neutron Star.
Once a massive star dies and goes supernova, the core may collapse to such a degree that
the protons and electrons smash together to form neutrons, giving us a celestial body
that can contain two times the mass of the Sun within an object that is only 12 miles
in diameter.
In Caleb Scharf's great book "Gravity's Engines" he mentions how a sugar cube sized amount
of Neutron Star material has the same mass as all of humanity. Taking the dimensions
of Thor's Hammer, and assuming it's made entirely out of that material, it would weigh over
10 quadrillion pounds
So now you have 4.6 trillion metric tons, about 97 million Titanics, condensed into
the size of an American Football. Let's say you and I are having a conversation, I'm holding
my hammer, and I accidentally drop it - BOOM! Being alive is no longer a thing you do. In
fact living is a thing that a good portion of humanity has stopped doing.
The Tsar Bomb, at 50 megatons, was the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated. Thor's Hammer
hitting the floor would be 1.3 MILLION times that. The closest comparison would be the
Chicxulub Asteroid that's thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs.
When the asteroid impacted, debris was ejected out of our atmosphere and upon re-entry, it
grew so hot that it glowed white and rained down globally, setting whatever could be lit
on fire...on fire. Earthquakes shook the ground, megatsunamis crashed into land masses, volcanos
erupted spraying ash into the air combining with the dust and debris to cover the surface
of the Earth and fill the atmosphere, blocking out the Sun.
Since the hammer is so insanely dense and covers such a small area, if you put it on
the ground it would drill through the Earth until hitting the core. So it's best not to
touch anything with Thor's Hammer, however it wouldn't even have to touch you to horribly
kill you.
Newton's Law of Gravity states that any two bodies with mass will attract each other,
and we happen to have an object with an incredible mass, squeezed into an incredibly dense package.
If you were 100ft away, you would be pulled towards it at almost 1100ft/sec^2, which is
close to the speed of sound and then things get really messy because parts of your body
closer to the hammer will experience a stronger gravitational pull than parts that are further
away and that difference near the hammer will be so dramatic that your body will ripped
apart by them also known as spaghettification. If Mjolnir were made of a dying star, it'd
be devastating, it would also make Thor one of the strongest super heroes ever. And before
we say, "but, Jake it's magic" remember what Thor said in the first film, "Your ancestors
called it magic...but you call it science. I come from a land where they are one and
the same." Or in the words of author Arthur C. Clarke "Any Sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic." And, as always, thanks for watching.