Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - How to be a supervillain with physics.

Episode Date: November 18, 2021

Daniel and Jorge answer questions from aspiring supervillains, helping with their schemes. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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It's time to tear the paper ceiling and see the stars beyond. Find out how you can make stars part of your talent strategy at tear the paper sealing.org. Brought to you by opportunity at work in the ad council. Hey, Jorge, do you ever think about your legacy? You mean like what am I going to be remembered for? Yeah, you know, what's going to be the first line of your obituary? Well, I'm going to be dead, so I don't think I'll be too worried about it. But I just hope it's not something like slip on a banana.

Ooh, revenge of the bananas. That might be like comically and carmically appropriate. Yeah, it's a slippery subject. But what about you? What do you want to be remembered for? I don't know. I guess it would be nice to not be remembered for like destroying the planet and exterminating the human race. Seems like a low bar there.

But you're a physicist. You work at a giant energy particle collider. I think you might be in the wrong field there. That's why I worry about it. Well, as long as you're not the one pressing the button, you're probably okay, right? That person is going down in history or lack of history because we'll all be gone. What's that? I didn't hear you. I was pressing this big red button. Don't do it.

Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle. physicist and I actually have pressed the big red button in the control room at CERN. No kidding. They have one. They have one. Absolutely. Is it like a toy one or for real? Like the one that pulls out all the stops or does all the stops? No, they have a real one. They also actually have a decoy for visitors so they can come in and press a button and see all the lights go on. That one doesn't actually do anything. But there is one in the center of the control room which shuts everything down in case of emergency. Wow. And you've pressed that one? I have pressed that one. I was on shift something like

12, 13 years ago when the LHC had that big accident and there was a short and liquid helium sprayed everywhere and we had to shut everything down urgently. Wow, that's exciting. Does that mean you saved the universe? I don't think I saved anything, but I did get to press the button, so good points for me. Maybe you'll get a noble prize for saving humanity.

I just want to not end humanity. Well, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Horhe, Explain the Universe, a production of IHeartRadio. in which we take you to the end of human thought and the forefront of human ignorance and ask questions about the nature of this crazy universe. We try to peel back a layer of reality and show you what's underneath. We try to ask questions that if we knew the answers would change the way we felt about being human and about living in this world.

We don't shy away from all of it and we try to explain all of it to you. Yeah, because it is a fascinating world full of interesting and awesome things to discover. and a lot of interesting things that could potentially destroy the world. I mean, that's kind of the nature of physics. There's a lot of power there. There is a lot of power. There are fearsome forces that are in delicate balances. You know, our sun, for example, is squeezed together by gravity

and constantly exploded by fusion bombs. And it's amazing how stable our situation is, given how fragile it seems. Yeah, it is sort of a weird sort of mixture in the universe of feeling like things could end at any moment, but also sort of being amazed that we're still here. It's sort of like we're balancing on a knife edge and we've been doing it for thousands and thousands of years. Billions of years.

Billions of years. If you include all the microbes, why hasn't, you know, just a puff of wind come to knock us off in one direction? Why haven't we been sterilized by a nearby supernova? Yeah, it seems like physics has a lot of ways in which things can end. It's almost like a handbook for future supervillain. The more you understand the universe, the better you are at manipulating it and bending it to your will. So in some sense, the task of physics is to reveal those handles is to figure out like, huh, how does this whole machine actually work? Because if you know how it works, you might be able to twist the knobs to get your particular desired outcome.

Yeah. And, you know, obviously, we want to do good things with physics. And people have done amazing and wonderful things with physics and their understanding of the universe. But you might also do some other things with what you learn about the universe. You might. And we often get questions from listeners that make me go, hmm, why? is this person asking this question? Why are they interested in building a giant laser

that they could put in space and point at the earth? Why is their email address double encrypted? And why can't you find any trace of this person on the internet? That's right. At undergroundvolcano layer.com. I've heard that has good reviews on Yelp. But yeah, it's a question we often get on the inbox. People seem to be very curious about different ways

that you can end the world using physics. That's right. And personally, while I'm very, interested in physics and revealing the nature of reality, I chose particle physics because I thought it would have basically no immediate applications, meaning I'm not equipping supervillains or master criminals or dictators with technologies that they can use to terrorize or slaughter innocent civilians. That's one reason I got into particle physics. So that makes me feel two ways about sharing these secrets of the universe with everybody out there. I thought your story was going to take a

different twist. I thought you were going to go with a butt. It's like I start. of wanting to do good for humanity, but then I learn more about particle physics. That's the character arc for Daniel Whiteson, the comic character. That's the supervillain origin story here. We're living it right now. Well, we're still in the preamble because I'm not a supervillian yet, so this is still all lead up to my supervillain origin story. I'm just creating other supervillians by sharing physics.

I see. You're like in that movie trilogy where you're the good guy in the first movie, but then you turn into the bad guy in the second movie. Hey, you know, every bad guy thinks that they're the good guy, okay? So maybe we're all just the bad guy. But we are here to help, or at least we try to help here on the podcast, answering people's questions. And so today we are going to take a step at some of these interesting suggestions from readers about ways in which you might use physics for the wrong ends. So today on the podcast we'll be tackling how to be a supervillain using physics.

I can't tell if everybody out there just pulled out pencil and paper because they want to take notes or if they're now writing a furious angry email. Why would you even do that? We might get canceled from the internet. We also might get canceled because some supervillain out there might use this information to destroy us literally. Cancel the universe. But yeah, I guess this is sort of like Supervillain Consulting Hour. Like if you ever wanted to be a supervillain, here are ways in which you might want to approach this. And you could look at it the other way.

You could say, hey, supervillains out there, please send us a detailed spec of your plans to destroy the world so we can, quote, unquote, help you with it. Ccfbi.gov. Yeah, maybe there are superheroes listening to this, in which case, you know, they can start making, you know, counterplants. All right. Well, maybe what we should do when we answer each question is we should also give tips to the superheroes as to how to thwart this plan. And then sit back and enjoy it. with a bag of popcorn. Better than a Marvel movie.

Watch this happen in real life. Well, this is actually a thing. I mean, Daniel, you do get these suggestions and questions on Twitter and over email, right? I do, absolutely. And usually they don't explicitly say, by the way, I'm a supervillain. They just sort of ask the kind of question a supervillain might. But last week, I did get an email from a listener named Frederick who said he wanted to know if it was possible to be a super villain and destroy the world. And he had an idea he wanted to run by him.

me. Oh, wow. So he's self-identified as a supervill. Or was he asking for a friend, quote, unquote. No, he's self-identified, though I can't tell if it's tongue-in-cheek or if it's real and it's a tongue-in-cheek in cheek or something. Oh, boy. Did he end the email with bohah-ha-ha? That might be a telltale sign.

He does have a French accent, so I don't know what that means. Oh, right. The Bond movies, they always have an European accent. Well, yeah, so Frederick sort of started this off, and then you went out there and you asked people to send you more ideas for how to be a supervillain? Yeah, I was wondering how many aspiring supervillains were out there with burning physics questions that they hadn't asked us. So I thought, let's hear all of them. All right. Well, let's start with Frederick's question. And he's a question about the sun. Hello, Daniel and Jorge. That's Frederick from France. I wanted to know what would be the best way

to extinguish or turn off the sun. Not that I have any immediate plant. Thanks. Wow, he really does sound like a supervillain. Hey, but he says he doesn't have any immediate plans, so we shouldn't worry, right? Yes, Mr. Bond. I have all the time in the world. Exactly. I mean, I'm just planning to turn off the sun next year or the year after. So don't worry. Yeah, you can get back to me tomorrow or the day after. I still have time to implement my plan.

That's right. That does give us time to give some tips to the superheroes out there, working furiously to make sure Frederick's ambitions are not realized. Frederick has an interesting question. I guess if you were a supervillain and you wanted to take out the sun, how would you do it? Like, can you extinguish it, like he said, or turn it off somehow? Because that would be kind of catastrophic for humanity and the Earth. It would definitely be bad news. Almost all of the energy that we use here on Earth comes from the sun, either directly,

like solar panels, or indirectly, because plants eat it and then we eat the plants or use their remnants millions of years later as fossil fuels. It's pretty essential. Without the sun, our lives would definitely change a lot. So extinguishing the sun would be pretty effective. Things would get dark pretty quick. Exactly. But will we die immediately?

I mean, like, if you just turn off the sun, all the mass would presumably still be there. So our orbits would still be the same. I mean, it would just be kind of a permanent night. And then couldn't we use, like, energy from the core of the Earth? Like, wouldn't the Earth stay kind of nice and warm, at least at the center for a while? Well, it depends on how you extinguish the sun. We'll get into it. But some of these schemes involve adding a lot more mass to the sun,

which would definitely change the Earth's orbit. But if you could somehow just like flick the sun off so it just went dark and then we lived in a cold Earth, then yeah, it's not true that we would all instantly die, right? But we would just lose all sorts of external energy. And so while you could get energy from the core of the Earth, because there's a lot of energy down there, you'd need to use all of that to grow food and, you know, clean water and all that kind of stuff. So it would be a huge endeavor. We might not all die, but I think most of us would definitely die. I see. We would all look a little paler, probably.

And we would get cabin fever and we'd get grumpy and we'd be, like, arguing with each other. We'd be unhappy at least. That's probably the least of our problems. But yeah, I guess this question is like, how would you do it? How would you turn off the sun or, as he said, extinguish it? Like, can you just pour up a bunch of water in it to douse it? Right. That's a lot of people's first thought.

But, you know, the sun is not like a fire. It's not just like an enormous fire. A fire is chemical, right? And you're extracting energy from the bonds stored in wood or whatever. fuel that is. And the reason water puts that out is because part of that reaction is using oxygen from the air and the water suffocates the fire and cools it very quickly. But you can't do that with the sun because the sun is not fire. The sun is a huge exploding nuclear bomb. And the nuclear bomb doesn't require any oxygen to go off. And more importantly, if you add water to it, it's just like adding

more fuel. This fusion bomb can burn that water. What? So like if I, well, if I pour some water on the sun. First of all, it would probably like evaporate, right? It would turn into plasma right away before it even gets to the center. It wouldn't stay as water. It would break down into hydrogen and oxygen. And what's hydrogen? Hydrogen is the fuel, the sun burns. So it's like adding oil to a cooking fire. You're literally adding oxygen and hydrogen to a hydrogen bomb. Yeah, you want to put out this fire and you pour kerosene on it. Well, yeah, that didn't work. That's essentially what you'd be doing. And that's true of almost anything you add to the sun unless it's too heavy unless it's got too many protons inside of it, it's too high-numbered an element for the sun to

burn. Right, because as a reminder, the sun works using fusion, which kind of takes two light elements together and builds a heavier element that releases energy. That's right. The sun is a factory for taking lower number elements, elements with fewer protons in the nucleus and producing heavier things. Or as astronomers say, metals. Because for astronomy, everything that's not hydrogen or helium is a metal. And so it's turning hydrogen and helium into heavier stuff, lithium and carbon and neon and oxygen. And it does that by squeezing them together and then releasing some energy. But that's only true up to about iron. If you squeeze two hydrogen nuclei together, you get helium plus energy. If you squeeze two iron nuclei together, then you get something heavier, but you

lose energy. It costs energy. So at that point, you start to cool down the sun. Right. It's almost like things that are lighter than iron want to fuse together or at least it's like a positive reaction but anything heavier than iron doesn't really want to get together so you have to put energy it well we'd have to invite it on the podcast to ask it about like what does it really want man but energetically yeah it's not favorable if you have a star that has a lot of iron at its core that iron isn't going to be able to fuse or if it does it's going to be sucking energy away from everything else so it'll be cooling the star the whole point is you need to self-sustaining reaction you need to be producing energy to make the next one. And so that's why

less than iron is fusion that drives the star forward and heavier than iron cools the star. Right. It's almost like adding ashes to a fire. It doesn't do anything, right? It can't burn anymore. That's right. The ash just sort of gets in the way. So I guess a way to turn out the sun would be just to dump a bunch of iron into the sun, right? Like it just back up truckloads of it and pour it in and it would all sort of, I guess, fall to the center of the sun. And then the sun would just be, you know, unable to sustain the diffusion reaction. And more technically, the reaction happens mostly at the core of the sun. And so if you put a bunch of iron in and it just sort of like floats around the surface for a while, the sun will just burn away happily.

The iron won't fuse, but the helium and the hydrogen inside of it still will. But if that iron gets to the core and it sort of pushes out the hydrogen, then that really will disrupt the burning of the sun. Interesting. Would it be hard for the iron to get to the core? Because I imagine the center is like exploding and there's like stuff coming out and being stuff being pushed out. Would it be hard for like if I just sprinkle the sun with some iron? Maybe the iron would just stay on the surface. Well, we don't really understand the convection inside the sun very well.

And that's why, for example, we still don't really understand the sun's magnetic field and stuff like that. But we do think that the heavier stuff tends to fall to the core. In really large stars, you end up with these shells with the heaviest stuff at the core and the lighter stuff on the outside. And so eventually the iron will fall to the core, but it might not be immediate. All right. So that's one way to turn off the sun. Just give it some iron supplements. So what are other ways that you can take it out?

The other thing is you don't really need iron. It's true that iron can't fuse and release energy, but there are other things that are too heavy for our sun to fuse. Like the really biggest stars can fuse things up to iron, but you've got to be really massive for that. Our star is not heavy enough to create the conditions to fuse even lighter things like oxygen or carbon. So you put enough oxygen or carbon at the core, you can actually put out our sun because it's not hot enough to fuse that, even though in theory another star could.

What? You mean I could put out the sun with ashes, is what you're saying? Anything that it can't fuse would put it out. And our star is not big enough, not hot enough at its core to fuse things like oxygen. Other stars are, right? Which is how we get heavier elements. But ours is sort of a smaller, colder star

compared to the big popas and mamas out there. I mean, we just said that if you put water, you're putting oxygen and hydrogen. Wouldn't the oxygen then can I put out the sun? Yeah, but you're also adding hydrogen, right? And so you're adding fuel to it. So water is not the way I would do it. I would put pure oxygen or pure carbon or pure iron.

I feel like you're saying that we can just blow on the sun and it'll go out. Like you just go, if you're big enough and your puff is big enough, you could put out the sun that way. Yes, that's true. If you can blow out an entire sun's core of breath, then you could blow out the sun. There you go. That's the problem for the supervillant. Super lung man could totally blow out the sun. And you can also put out the sun by taking stuff out of it, right?

The reason the fusion is happening in the sun is because there's so much gravitational pressure because it has so much mass. And we once talked about how small a star could get. And we figured out it's something like 80 times the mass of Jupiter, whereas our sun is like a thousand times the mass of Jupiter. And so if you stripped away a lot of the fuel from the sun, then it wouldn't have enough mass to keep a lot of the mass. of that gravitational pressure and it would basically fall apart and the fusion would stop.

But you'd have to take away like more than 90% of the mass of the sun and blow it out into space somewhere. Really? Like if you took out 80% the sun would still keep going? The sun would still keep going. It would be a much smaller, colder star, but it would still keep burning. Well, this one seems harder than blowing on it. How do you take out 90% of a star?

I guess you blow on it really hard. I don't know. I don't have a plan for that, you know. I see. Well, that doesn't help. our super villain friend Frederick here. About that, I'm kind of relieved, maybe. So I guess what's the lesson for superheroes then?

If you see anybody accumulating Jupiter-sized blobs of carbon or iron, be worried. If you see a giant Jupiter-sized ball of oxygen heading towards the sun, start digging, I guess, is the lesson. Call somebody and start digging. Do something. I mean, if you're a superhero, don't just watch this happen. You know, at least let us know. All right. Well, let's get into some other questions we have for potential supervillains here.

We want to use physics to spice things up in the universe. We have questions here about freeze rays, giant nuclear power ants. So let's get into those. But first, let's take a quick break. Don't let biased algorithms or degree screens or exclusive professional networks or stereotypes. Don't let anything keep you from discovering the half of the workforce who are stars. Workers skilled through alternative routes rather than a bachelor's degree. It's time to tear the paper ceiling and see the stars beyond it.

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And conveniently, Daniel, you're already a professor. So your, you know, codename could just be the professor. Is that a supervillain or a superhero code name? I think it's usually a super villain. I know why is that, right? You never see a good professor. Hmm. What about Professor X?

Isn't he lead the X academy? Oh, true. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, well, he has the X. So are you Professor D? I'm Professor W. Professor Y. All right, we're answering questions here of suggestions people have sent about ways that you can use physics to potentially kind of end things for humanity.

On purpose or by accident? I think these things would be pretty tough to do accidentally. So there's not a lot of mystery about people's intentions if you see them pulling off one of these schemes. All right, well, our next question is from Brian. And he has a question about ants. Hi, Daniel and Jorge. This is Brian Field Calling, longtime listener, first time caller. As you well know, I have developed a race of giant, nuclear-powered robot ants as part of an unholy technological horror I plan to unleash and crush my many enemies. During my beta testing phase, I allowed the ants to communicate with each other via wired internet cables to speed up the debugging process. But now that I've upgraded to Wi-Fi 6 on the ants, they really only function well in swarm mode and tend to get lost when they go on individuals seek and destroy missions. And I think the Wi-Fi is the problem. Any advice? Also, let me know which major city would like to be appointed the local

warlord of. Thanks so much. Talk to you later. Wow, that was a pretty detailed confession there. I don't know what to do with that, man. This person is already very specific plans. It sounds like he just needs to call tech support, not a physicist. He's like, I'm in control with my Wi-Fi. Maybe he can turn it off and on. Maybe they'll help. I happen to know, this person is already a working theoretical physicist. I see. All right. Well, his question is, how can we build giant nuclear-powered ants? And I guess he means like ants, the insect, not your parents' sister. Giant nuclear-powered ants and uncles and cousins. That sounds even more terrifying. Oh, my gosh.

Even more dangerous. Yeah. So this is a fun question, you know, giant nuclear-powered ants. And, As I was thinking about how to answer this, I thought, I wonder if I know anybody who's sort of an expert on robotics, maybe like robotics inspired by insects. And then I remembered, I do know this guy who got his PhD thinking about how cockroaches run. I know someone like that too. So I like to forget him sometimes. So I thought, let's ask him instead of me answering the question. Let's see what Jorge has to say about giant nuclear-powered ants.

Yeah, I do have a PhD in robotics. and I focused on making carcroach robots, but ants are a bit of a more of a challenge. I think he means like little tiny robots, which is kind of like a whole new, different kind of problem. Like, how do you miniaturize all of these things? But I want to ride down the street of the city

I've been appointed warlord of on top of one of these giant nuclear-powered ants. Oh, I see. You're thinking like giant. Oh, I see. I'm going to crush my enemies. Oh, because I don't think Brian said giant in his question, did he? I wonder if he meant like little tiny ones, like a swarm,

or like once you can ride around it. All right. Well, let's think about both. How hard would it be to build super tiny miniaturized nuclear power dance? Well, it would be kind of hard. Yeah, I know that at least 20 years ago, people were making little tiny robot flies.

So I've seen those. I've seen videos of those. You can make little tiny little mechanisms and little wings that can beat and generate enough lift to, you know, fly around. So I think that's possible, like making little tiny mechanisms. And is the idea there that you're trying to

understand how the insect does it by repeating it, or are you just trying to have the advantages of the insects? Like you want a tiny robot that can fly into a window and spy on your enemies. Well, I think it's mostly engineers doing this. I don't think they think too much about the... Engineers don't have enemies? Engineers just, you know, facilitate the supervillains. Stop asking why, just do it.

No, it's a combination of both. You know, you want to understand how flies do it and what's going on. And if you can replicate it, if you can make a robot that does it, that means you understood it pretty well. So that's kind of the theory. And also, you know, to make better robots. Like, little, you know, flies are super efficient and super fast. And they're super, like, good at turning corners when they fly.

So if you can make a robot, they can do that, that would be, you know, super useful. And how do you power these tiny little robots? Obviously, Brian is imagining some super tiny little arc reactor. But in reality, how do you power a super tiny robot? Yeah, that's always the question in robotics. It's like how, where do you get enough power to, like, carry? it around and have enough to last for a while. That's kind of the core issue in robotics.

Well, I think that's a question kind of for you. I mean, he's asking about nuclear powered ants. Like, what's the smallest nuclear reactor you can make? Can you make one that's like the size of an ant? Depends on the size of your ant. You know, I think the current existing smallest nuclear reactors are things like on submarines. And those tend to be small and quiet, but definitely bigger than an ant since you have people inside of them. So if we go warlord-sized riding on top of ants, then maybe you could

fit a nuclear reactor inside of them. And I know that people are working to make these things smaller and smaller because also we have nuclear reactors on satellites. Those tend to be much lower power. That's the kind of thing where you want power for like 50 years, but you really only need a trickle, not like, you know, I'm going to climb up this building and shoot lasers out of my eyeballs kind of power. Right. But things like the Mars, The robots we sent to Mars, those have nuclear powered reactors, right? Or not reactors, but at least they have like a, you know, radioactive material and then it's decaying and you capture all the energy and then that's how you kind of fill up your battery.

Exactly. That kind of thing is not really a nuclear reactor. It's more like a nuclear battery. You have some kind of material there which has a lot of energy in it and you know it's going to decay and release heat. And so it's sort of like just going to gradually give up some of its energy, which then you can use, you can turn it into electricity and use it. But a nuclear-powered submarine, for example, has a real reactor in it that's undergoing fission all the time, this controlled, sustained

nuclear reaction. That's a huge amount of energy. It's much, much more powerful than one of these nuclear batteries that's on the rover or on some of our satellites. But theoretically, you could make a tiny version of it, right? Like, couldn't you just miniaturize everything and make a little tiny reactor that is doing fission? You could, although it's a challenge, right? Because for or fission, you need these neutrons to fly out and you need them to be not too hot and not too cold. And so you need some sort of moderating thing. And the surface area to volume is very important for keeping the reaction going. And so, you know, you can't just scale everything up and down, which is why, for example, like if you take an ant and you scale it up, the physics doesn't work

because the surface area to volume changes. And so the physics changes. So shrinking things, the physics also changes. And you might need a completely different design. But I don't think there's anything in principle preventing it. I think you could probably design a super tiny nuclear fission reactor. You would just need really tiny tweezers to kind of put it together, basically. Yeah, and the good thing about it is that the energy lasts a long time, right? A little bit of fuel can last you for years or even decades. Wow.

So this would be nuclear-powered radioactive ads just to add to the list of potential dangers. Well, what about the computer you would have to put into an ad like that? Can we make computers that small or does at some point, you know, we're limited by how much processing power we can fit into its brain? Depends how smart you want the ant, I suppose. But we can make chips really, really small these days and pretty powerful. And so I don't think that's really going to be an issue. All right. Well, then I guess the answer is that you can make a tiny nuclear powered ants and giant ones for that matter because all the problems are kind of about scale.

Yeah. It's much easier to make them big than to make them small. But, you know, good luck, Brian, with your Wi-Fi connection. You know, I'm sure you can debug that. It's funny how he's gotten this far, but the problems are in Wi-Fi. Well, that's because he's a theoretical physicist. He tackled all the hard problems. Now, he's stuck on the easy one.

He's like, why am I only getting three bars? But not four bars. I can't figure that out. All right. Well, thank you, Brian, for that question. Our next question is a pretty traditional supervillain weapon, I think. You always see this in comic books. So our question is from Mark, and he has a question.

question about freeze rays. My super villain weapon of choice would be a freeze ray. And there are really two types of devices here. One device would just let me freeze an individual person, turn them into a block of ice like that, sort of like the old Batman shows or the Incredibles. The other choice is a device that would let me select, say, a thousand square miles and either cover it in 500 feet of ice or freeze everything down to 30 below zero in that space. And must be a way to do this because if Duluth, Minnesota is 30 below zero, Indiana is not 30 below zero. So there are ways to contain it using high pressure or low pressure. Or could we get rid of the ozone layer? Doesn't that trap the heat? Like couldn't you cut that out above a space and just let

space freeze it up? I don't know. Oh boy. Yeah. Mark has ideas. Mark does have ideas. He wants options. He seems like he's thought about different angles and a lot of different ways. in which he could use this. That's true. He's very creative. I happen to also know that Mark is a cartoonist and you know

you have to watch out for those. That's right. Don't let him near physics. It's a dangerous combination. Don't mix cartoons and physics. Exactly. It's an explosive cocktail. But yeah, his idea is a freeze ray,

which like he said, you can see in a lot of comic books like Batman, Mr. Freeze, or Frozo, I think, was in the Incredibles, the movie. Isn't that something you eat, a Frozo? Like, I'd like a chocolate Frozo.

Yeah, I think that was the joke. But yeah, I guess he wants like some kind of device that shoots a ray that whatever it touches, it freezes. Like it lowers the temperature immediately. Yep, that sounds super cool. And, you know, I'd like to have one in my kitchen, sort of like the anti-microwave. So I could like super quickly cool something down rather than have to just let it gradually diffuse out into the air. But it's a difficult proposition. And the biggest obstacle is that if you're shooting a ray at something, a ray is typically like a

beam of energy, right? It's particles or it's waves or it's something, but it's energy. So if you're going to shoot a ray at something, you're basically always going to be adding energy to that system. Interesting. Yeah, because like anytime you're admitting something, you're probably putting energy out into the world. Yeah. Even if you shine a flashlight on something, you're heating it up. I mean, a really small amount because the amount of energy in your light beam is small compared to the energy that that rock or whatever is holding, but you heat something up every time you shine light at it or shoot electrons at it or any kind of ray is going to heat something up. So it's almost like you need like a vacuum ray, like a ray that sucks energy out of something and

that will cool it down. Yeah, that's right. And there is one exception. There is one way that people have figured out how to cool something down by shooting a laser at it. Interesting. You can use a laser which normally would heat something up to cool stuff. Yeah. And this is a cool technique that people invented to try to get materials really. really, really cold. People interested, for example, in like the quantum state of objects when they get really close to absolute zero, things like Bose-Einstein condensates, invented this really cool technique called laser cooling. And it seems weird because you're like shooting a laser beam at something. And that seems like it must heat it up. But if you set it up in a very,

very clever way, then it can actually result in overall cooling. I have this picture in my head that it's a blue laser. Is it a blue laser? Because it's blue as cold. Yeah. And the red ones are the hot ones, right? Yeah. And it's got like ice crystals all around it, the laser beam. Yeah. So how do these cooling lasers work? Well, the idea here is that you have a very specific kind of atom, atoms that can absorb energy at one specific energy. Remember that atoms can't just absorb all kinds of energy. They can only absorb it if there's like the right spacing between energy levels for their electrons. Electrons zooming around them, for example, can't just be at any arbitrary energy. It's quantized. It's like a ladder there.

So if you shoot energy at an atom and the energy corresponds to exactly one step of the latter, then it can absorb that energy. If it's too much, if it's a little bit more than that, it can't absorb that energy. So that's something you have to know about atoms when you think about this. So you start with a bunch of atoms and you shoot a laser at the atom that has energy just below what the atom can absorb. So then only atoms moving quickly towards the source of the laser will be able to absorb it. They can do that because they will see the laser energy. Doppler shifted up. It'll be blue shifted to just the right energy.

Then they absorb that energy and emit it in a random direction. And this has the overall effect of slowing their speed because it takes their speed in one direction and sort of bends it in another direction. And so that overall, their magnitude of their speed has decreased a little bit. Whoa, that's a pretty interesting scheme there. It sounds like you're sending in light. through this laser that's just at the right frequency for only some of the atoms to give off

their energy, whereas the other atoms ignore it. Exactly. So it selects some of the atoms to absorb it, and they absorb it, and then they naturally reammit it, but they go in another direction. And so it takes, like, all the atoms that are moving at the laser really fast, and it points them in other directions. This has the effect of overall slowing down the atom, because it takes, like, some of its speed in one direction and points it in another.

direction. And I guess you take that energy that goes off in the other direction and you absorb it or you take it away another way. Yeah, it just gets radiated off exactly, shoots out as a photon. And so you can do that, but only with a certain kind of atom. Like if you shoot it at a person, it wouldn't have the same effect. It has to be like a specially tuned atom and laser to work together. Yes, and you need a bunch of atoms that are already pretty cold.

You need them to be happy to absorb this laser. So you need a laser that's very finely tuned to the kind of atom. and you need a pretty pure, like, cold gas, and this will help you cool it even further. Like, nobody starts with, like, a hot hamburger and laser cools it down to room temperature. That's just not something that's practical. But has anyone thrive? We're all working on that all the time, man. It's like the biggest open problem in physics.

Forget dark matter. How do you cool down a hamburger? No, it's something like, if you have atoms at 10 degrees Kelvin, this can help you get them down to one degree Kelvin or micro Kelvin or mili Kelvin. But it is an example of a real ray which can actually cool a material. But if you shoot it at a person, even if they're pretty cool, it wouldn't work. It would just heat them up. Yeah, exactly.

It would just heat them up unless there happen to be exactly the right gas of sodium atoms. But otherwise, no. And Mark wants to do more than that. He wants to freeze like an entire square mile of Earth. But what if I'm just using my imagination here? What if you have like some special ray gun, you know, that looks at what it's shooting and tunes the laser just right for each atom it's shooting at? and to maybe get it, use the same cooling effect.

Is that possible? I suppose it would be possible on the surface, but you're such a complicated mix of stuff. You'd need so many different kinds of beams. And I think that those things might interfere with each other because you'd need objects that would only accept with the one kind of laser light. And if the other laser lights that you mean for, you know,

a different kind of material hit the wrong kind, then they might accidentally heat it up. What if you kind of expand your imagination a little bit? Like, what if you make a ray that shoots a certain kind of particle maybe that when it hits you, it absorbs your energy? It hits you and absorbs your energy. It interacts with you somehow, does some sort of like fusion. Yeah, I suppose, you know, fusion absorbs energy above a certain element, as we were talking about earlier. So imagine you're shooting like really heavy elements at somebody hard enough that it creates fusion and that eats up some of the energy.

Well, I think that you're going to end up putting in more energy in the beam still than it's going to get absorbed by the fusion. All right. Well, it sounds like it's not really possible, but here you have an idea about maybe using liquid nitrogen. I think Mark has to give up on the ray idea, but if instead you're willing to do things like shoot a tube of liquid nitrogen at somebody, that could very effectively freeze them. It's not exactly a ray. It's like, you know, it's a cylinder of matter you're shooting at somebody, but still it could

really effectively cool something down. Right. And that works because the nitrogen in your liquid nitrogen is so cold that when it hits you, it absorbs energy, right? Yeah, the energy that is in you spreads out into you and the liquid nitrogen. And since it has essentially no heat in it, it's a huge sink for energy. And so it spreads out very rapidly. And so I did a little back of the envelope calculation. And for example, to freeze a person pretty rapidly, you would need about a ton of liquid nitrogen, about 1,000 kilograms of liquid nitrogen.

Wow. Yeah, let's be specific. We can be as helpful as possible. Well, look, you know, superheroes and supervillains have to have budgets also, right? Everybody has operations and legal fees and stuff. So you've got a plan. The devil is in the details and in what you do with those details. All right, so I guess liquid nitrogen and, well, I mean, if you have something that shoots liquid nitrogen, you could call that a ray, right? Technically, because it's atoms too and particles in it.

Yeah, I suppose. So, I mean, technically the definition of radiation is any kind of energetic. particle or matter. And that includes things like helium nuclei and electrons. So sure, why not liquid nitrogen? Sure. That's radiation now. All right. I guess it's past FDA approval here. All right. Well, thank you, Mark, for that cool question. And so let's get into our last question for supervillains here on the podcast. But far as, let's take another quick break. algorithms or degree screens or exclusive professional networks or stereotypes don't let anything keep you from discovering the half of the workforce who are stars workers skilled through

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All right, welcome back to Daniel and Jorge's Academy for Supervillains, and or Superheroes, Academy for Marvel movies. How to Guide for Destoring the Human Race. And our next question comes from Andres. who has a question about televisions? Yeah, this is a question from Andreas on Twitter. He wanted to know if it would be possible to invent a remote control that could control simultaneously all of the televisions on Earth.

Presumably to then brainwash people or just to sell them, you know, late night products. I think to drive them crazy. Imagine you're sitting down for your favorite show and boom, the TV switches to something else. At the most exciting moment or your sports team is about to score and boom, the TV switches to something else, that could drive people crazy and basically spark an apocalypse. You think this supervillain is more like a super prankster?

I think the right prank could definitely push humanity over the edge. I mean, we're all a little bit nervous these days. So like you're watching the season finale of like Tiger King and some of you cut to an endless commercial, decided it would crumble. We're hanging by a thread already, man.

That's what I'm thinking. All right, well, the question is, can you devise something that will control all televisions on the planet. And I think they have already, right? This has been done. It's called Netflix. To me, this seems like a programming problem, right?

You know, there's really no physical or technical barrier. All these devices are online, as you say, and they already receive messages. And so you just got to somehow get through a few layers of security, which probably aren't amazing. I wonder if hackers out there have already tried this, have tried to, like, hack into your television to change what you are watching. I imagine it's probably not that hard. I see.

So you think it's just like a hacker problem? Yeah. I mean, my television, for example, talks to everything with Wi-Fi. So you have a laptop out there. You somehow get connected to my Wi-Fi network. Not that hard. You could probably hack into my TV and upload new instructions and Bada-boom, Bada-Bing, you're in charge.

Well, maybe the question is, like, can you come up with a device that somehow emits some sort of wave or some sort of, you know, signal that somehow overrides all television? That's usually what you see in movies. Well, in this case, I think what I would do is I would just have a program somewhere distributed via the internet to everybody's Wi-Fi in their house, right? So you wouldn't need to, like, reach everybody's TV from your own individual broadcast antenna where you just want to go over the internet and then do it locally. I mean, actually, this happens to me all the time. My son somehow has hooked up his phone to the TV, and when it's in his pocket, he's accidentally changing channels without realizing it.

So, let's hire your son. Sounds like he's a supervillain hacker in the making. He's just like stumbled his way into it without even knowing how he's doing it. I'm always calling out to him like, hey, turn off your phone. I was watching that. Maybe he's trying to drive you crazy then. Yes, maybe he is. Maybe this is him.

Maybe his name actually is Andreas Torgerson. He's a domestic supervillain. And by domestic, I mean, your house. Yeah, so I think if you're a supervillain and this was your plan, probably you just need to hire a teenager, pay them in pizza for a week. And they could probably figure this out. Done. All right. Our last question here of the day comes from someone on Twitter again,

and they have a question about dark energy. This comes from somebody whose name we don't know, but they title themselves as hopeful cynic on Twitter. And their question is whether it's possible to harness dark energy to power a Death Star-style tri-point laser. Interesting. First of all, anonymous question that is suspicious. Very suss. And also great Star Wars reference here.

Death Star, dark energy, I feel like, you know, the power of the dark side is coming through. Yeah, this is a great question. This made me wonder, ooh, I would like to know if that's possible. I wonder if that is possible. And one of the things that's exciting about this is the idea of harnessing dark energy. Dark energy is our description of the fact that the universe is expanding and that that expansion is accelerating, which requires some enormous amount of energy. And the cool thing is that when the universe expands, dark energy does.

doesn't get like thinner or more dilute when you make new space between like here and another galaxy that's what dark energy is doing it makes new space that comes with new dark energy and so it's constantly essentially creating energy which means that whatever dark energy is it's capable of creating energy out of nothing out of the vacuum a violating conservation of energy so that definitely seems like an appealing way to like gather a bunch of energy i don't know about focusing into a beam that can destroy planets, but it definitely is a potential source of energy. Well, what's kind of interesting about dark energy is that it's sort of like, physicists think it's sort of embedded in the fabric of space itself, right?

Like it's somehow coming from space itself and it's stretching it. So it's literally kind of all around us, we think. Yeah, we really don't know anything about the mechanism of it. One idea is that it comes from the nature of space itself, that the quantum zero point energy of space provides some sort of repulsive effect. which stretches space. That's like an idea of an idea. That idea itself doesn't actually work

because if you try to use that idea and calculate how much dark energy there should be, you get a number which is different from what we measure by 10 to the 100. So we're pretty far off from like understanding the detailed mechanism of it, which makes it pretty hard to know how to harness it. But we do know that it's out there

and that there is a lot of energy stored in it. Yeah, I mean, it seems like, what is it about two-thirds of the energy of the universe is dark energy? So that's a lot. The universe is mostly dark energy. The universe is mostly dark energy. That's right.

Though it's weird to think about because sort of like dark matter, there's more dark matter than normal matter. But dark matter is much more diffuse because it's spread out more. Like normal matter is pretty dense, like our planet and our bodies and our sun. And there isn't that much dark matter in our solar system because there's also dark matter between the stars. It's spread out. And in the same way, dark energy, even though there's more of it than anything else,

It's not that powerful on a local scale because it's spread out throughout the entire cosmos, all that empty space between galaxies, for example, has dark energy in it. And so dark energy doesn't seem very powerful, it's just because it's everywhere. Well, I guess then that kind of puts a kiboshin things because even if we did sort of know what it was

and could harness it, I mean, to get any significant amount of it, you would need to sort of like farm a huge volume of space just to get a little bit of energy, right? because it's so diffuse and so kind of in the background. Yeah, exactly. I did a little calculation. And if you built a spring that was one light year long,

then dark energy would make it longer around 22 millimeters per second. So, you know, that's not tiny, but it's also not huge. You know, two centimeters per second is not that much energy. I see. It's not something you could maybe put into a death star ray right away. Not immediately. and also I don't know how they got those lasers to do that where they come together at a point and then change direction

like that's pretty cool that violates some lots of physics right there and that's the part that bumped you not how they're all standing upright in the same direction in space so many things to talk about there but that's the part that always makes my physics brain go what how do you bend the path of a laser with another laser yes exactly all right well it sounds like hopeful cynic You'll have to do some physics first to build this death rate.

I mean, you'll have to understand what dark energy is, which currently we have no idea. We have no idea, but it is promising because it means that there are ways to create energy. And if you really understood the nature of space and time, it might give you the power to extract free energy from the universe. Okay, I think that covers all of our questions for today. Daniel, how do you think our supervillain students did? Would you give an A or an A plus? Well, we have to see. We've given them basically assignments.

and now what comes next to see how well they execute these. Hopefully they get an F, and if they get an A, then we're all toast. Yeah, if they get an A, you probably won't even know about it. That's right. We'll be floating out in space, either frozen or mostly frozen. I think most of these seem to freeze us. I guess if you see me and Jorge riding down the street on giant nuclear-powered ants, then you'll know that Brian at least has succeeded.

You know that we co-opted our students' ideas and used it for our own. on purpose. What kind of professor would do that? But I do think jokes aside that it is fun to think about these incredible forces that are at play in the universe, that you know all around us is an incredible amount of energy bound into the nucleus of atoms and created in space in between everything. We have only begun to understand the very nature of the universe and we know that it is filled with incredibly powerful forces and energy, some that we haven't even yet imagined. Yeah, because, you know, it's amazing to think about. about the power that comes from understanding these things about the universe.

You know, like once you understand them, then you can do stuff. And, you know, hopefully we won't just do supervillain stuff. But think about all the amazing things you can do with some of this knowledge about the universe and some of the amazing technology that can come from it. I mean, you can really, you know, get humanity out to the stars or help our civilization live forever. Yeah, it could be that in a thousand years people have a deeper understanding of the nature of the universe and that some of the problems that we are struggling with,

with today will seem trivial to them. They will seem like, why didn't they just figure this out? And so it could be that the obstacle between us and some utopia is really just knowledge, is really just figuring out the nature of this crazy universe. Yeah, and so in the third movie of the trilogy, you know, all those supervillains actually turned out to be the good guys. See, I told you. Just have to wait for the third movie.

The arc resolves itself. All right. Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime.

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