Game Theory - The Pokedex is FULL OF LIES! (Pokemon)

Episode Date: October 23, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he reveals the DARK truth of the Pokemon Pokedex.

The professors in the Pokemon series are complete and utter hacks. Today I start my quest to expose their lies. Internet, welcome to game theory, the show whose primary strategy is flail. You know, try as I might, I openly admit that I occasionally get things wrong on this channel. When you've done nearly 200 episodes covering topics as diverse as helicopter physics to gemology and ancient history to hacking, then you fuse those with franchises that have lasted literal decades with even installment involving 60 plus hours of gameplay per game and do that weekly to meet the unforgiving treadmill of YouTube well things unfortunately slip through the cracks

hashtag excuses but you know what at the very least I have a better track record than the Pokedex oh yeah I am calling you out you septile spewing Siri wannabe and the more I looked into the Dex's entries the more this realization started to hit that the Pokedex this pocket encyclopedia educating young trainers, this storehouse of information that people take as fact is passing off legends and myths as hard facts at best and peddling in outright lies at absolute worst. And while that might not seem like a big deal, remember, this is one of the primary ways information about these creatures is handed down and who's out

there correcting it? Not the professors since as we know it's freaking written by them. Imagine if Wikipedia was just filled with lies. You'd never know and the false information would perpetuate virtually becoming fact. So like my ongoing series on the psychology of the Marioverse, today I'm starting a new series, debunk the Dex, where I deconstruct the science of the Pokedex one Garbador fire entry at a time. Because darn it, the 10-year-old Jotoans need to hear the truth that their Pocodex is full of lies. Today I'm starting my one-man quest to debunk the Dex with a generation. I haven't covered all that much in other theories. Sure, we've done plenty of Gen 1. and Gen 2, even some black, white, and XY, but I've never really talked about Gen 3, Ruby and Sapphire. The Mon on my mind specifically though is Gardevoir, the Embrace Pokemon. Embrace. Really, Game Freak? What? Like, it gives great hugs or something?

You can't just throw words out there and expect him to mean something, guys. That's what got you into this mess to begin with. Anyway, here's Sir Hugs-Zalots Pokedex entry from Sapphire. Gardevoir has the psychokinetic power to distort the dimensions and create a small black hole. This Pokemon will try to protect its trainer even at the risk of its own life. And in black and white the Pokedex says this. To protect its trainer, it will expend all its psychic power to create a small black hole. So these entries seem pretty consistent about two main facts. One, Gardevoir has protective instincts and looks out for its trainer, and two, Gardevor has the power to create small black holes. I don't give Gardivore a pass on the first point. I mean,

apparently it's the embrace Pokemon, so it's giving away more free hugs than cheddar samples at a Wisconsin Thompson cheese barn. But making black holes out of thin air? Really? I don't think that word means what you think it means game freak So let's ask the question. What would it mean for our little psychic fairy friend over here to create a small black hole? Well, to tackle that we first have to ask what is a black hole? Well, the official definition of a black hole is a region of space time where gravity is so strong that nothing. Not even light can escape. Hence the term black hole. Well, except once again, we're being lied to by sign. And this time it isn't even by a professor with a tree name. Black holes aren't black. They're invisible. I mean, think about it. It makes logical sense. Your eyes see things when light bounces off them. But if black holes suck in the light, nothing bounces back for our eyes to see,

making black holes actually invisible. So black holes are actually invisible death holes in space. That's a reassuring thought. But we know they exist because we can observe their gravity pulling in other space objects. Black holes have their own gravity just like. just like planets do. And much in the same way that anyone who jumps or trips is immediately pulled towards the Earth by the force of gravity, anything that gets close to a black hole is pulled toward its center. The difference here though is that when your feet or face hit upon the surface of the Earth, you're gonna stop moving.

Whereas anything that gets pulled towards the center of a black hole will eventually cross an event horizon, or cross the boundary past which it becomes impossible to escape from the black hole's gravity, and thus you're ultimately gonna be mushed by the forces of gravity into super dense, matter in the process. It's kinda like the genie from Aladdin. Phenomenal cosmic power. So how is Bhabi black holes formed? The black holes that we're able to observe in space usually come about when an aging star collapses and goes supernova. And I'm not talking about Mew's poor imitation of a supernova.

I'm talking about something really tremendously massive, getting crumpled down into a teeny tiny space. And when I say massive, I mean, really massive. I'm talking 20 times the mass of our own sun massive. But why is that all cause a black hole? Well, we know that matter can't be created or destroy. This principle of the conservation of matter is derived from the first law of thermodynamics and Einstein's energy mass equivalence, E equals MC squared. But all of that is too complex and too nerdy to talk about here, so think about it this way.

It's like crushing a bag of potato chips. Even if you completely crush that bag into a teeny tiny space, and reduce it to a lump of crumbs, you're not gonna change how much it weighs, or how many calories are in it. There's still the same amount of chip in there, it's just sad, crushed up chip that you can no longer dip. So now imagine your potato chip bag is filled with the amount of stuff in a star, and then you crumple it down, well, that's gonna be one incredibly dense potato chip bag, meaning that it's gonna be creating huge amounts of gravity. So on its surface, the claim that Gardivore can create a black hole seems a bit unbelievable. I mean, sure, it might be good at embracing, but it's not embracing matter 20 times the mass of the sun to protect its trainer.

That would be one enormous group hug. But a cosmic event like a star going supernova isn't the only way to form a black hole. There's more than one way to skin a skitty after all. Atoms are mostly empty space, with a few tiny subatomic particles making them up. So the recipe for a small black hole is a lot like the recipe for guacamole. Take a bunch of avocados, or in this case subatomic particles, I personally recommend protons, and you mash them together until they form a teeny tiny microscopic paste. Voila, you've got yourself a mini black hole.

And a delicious dip for all those chips you smashed earlier. Can you tell that I'm hungry as I write this script? Where can I work Diet Coke into this analogy? Anyway, this sort of thing is actually happening on Earth. You may have heard of the Large Hadron Collider created in 2009, which was created for the purpose of mashing subatomic particles together at incredibly fast speeds to see what happens, because science! Seriously, it's like a toddler smacking trucks together, except these are highly trained scientists doing it in a lab that costs a billion dollars a year to run.

The scientists at CERN who run the Large Hadron Collider are mostly interested in observing new particles, and under the right conditions, they've confirmed that these particle collisions could form a black hole. To quote the official CERN website, Another way of revealing extra dimensions would be through the production of microscopic black holes. What exactly we would detect would depend on the number of extra dimensions, the mass of the black holes, the size of the dimensions and the energy at which the black hole occurs." End quote. Let me translate that for you. They are literally trying to create black holes on Earth. It's wild, right? So based on our current understanding, if Gardivore can indeed mash subatomic particles together like the large Hadron Collider, it should be able to make a black hole.

Well, at least in theory. In scientific theory. So is the Pokedex right? Can Gardivore actually make a tiny black hole to protect its trainer? If you keep reading the that CERN article, the very next sentence that I haven't read yet is this. Quote, If micro-black holes do appear in the collisions created by the LHC, they would disintegrate rapidly in around 10 to the negative 27th seconds. Wait, what? Deseigrate? Why? Well, remember, matter doesn't come out of nowhere, so a black hole will only have as much mass as the building blocks that you use to make it. If you make a black hole by mashing together two protons, well then congratulations, you've made yourself a black hole, but it's a black hole. with the mass of two subatomic particles, lighter than even a single atom, and completely microscopic.

And this becomes a problem for Gardivore because of something known as Hawking radiation. Now, this idea could get really complicated, but the simple way of putting it is that Stephen Hawking, the famous physicist, prove that black holes emit radiation, and radiation has mass. That means that as a black hole emits radiation, it loses mass. It gets smaller. It's like what happens to water on a hot day, over time, the water will evaporate until there's nothing left. In fact, this whole process is officially called black hole evaporation. Usually this doesn't cause black holes to completely evaporate because most black holes are so large and gain mass from all the matter that they suck in. Evaparating a black hole in space is more like trying to evaporate an ocean. It just ain't gonna happen.

I mean sure, water is constantly evaporating from the ocean, but more water is constantly being added to the ocean via rainfall and rivers on land. Same thing with black holes. It's constantly evaporating away thanks to the radiation, but it's also sucking in new material New matter to help it keep growing. But things start to get tougher when we have our small microscopic black holes Because it's so small, evaporating a microscopic black hole is more like evaporating a single drop of water In fact, a microscopic black hole would evaporate so quickly that we'd only be able to observe it for like a fraction of a second I gotta admit when I first read about scientists creating black holes on Earth I was like, you idiots, you're gonna kill us all! But this fact that many black holes evaporate made me feel a lot better.

In fact, in order for a black hole to be stable, it would have to be about the same mass as the moon. The moon! And if that sounds like it's a lot, well, that's because it is. Or at least, it would be a lot of mass. But remember, black holes are incredibly dense, so all of that mass would actually be packed into a really tiny space. Get this! A black hole with the mass of the moon would see

still be microscopic. You still wouldn't be able to see it with your eyes. Well, you wouldn't anyway because they're invisible, which I already covered and all that. But ugh! Black holes are so complicated. So enough science back to Gardevoir. What we've just proven is that sure, it could create a really small black hole, but that's not going to do anything to protect its trainer. It'll evaporate in a fraction of a second. It is useless. On the other end, in order to create something that could possibly even remotely help its structure. trainer. It needs to find a nearby moon and squish it down until it's microscopic making it dense enough to form a black hole. But even this poses a problem. What Gardevar would have created is a super heavy microscopic marble that weighs 7.35 times 10 to the 22nd kilograms or 16.2 times 10 to the 22nd pounds. It's the weight of

the moon but squeeze down a whole lot. Imagine what would happen if you had a pebble that weighed 73,000 billion billion pounds. Well for one thing, it would still be affected by Earth's gravity and it would drop like a brick. Except, unlike a brick, it wouldn't stop when it hit the ground. Remember how black holes devour everything that gets close enough to cross their event horizon? Well, as soon as it hit the ground, the black hole would start eating the dirt, sand, rock, and anything else it touched as it continued to accelerate towards the Earth's center of gravity, gaining mass as it went, like a snowball rolling down the hill.

It would eventually reach the center of the planet, continuing to eat everything in its path, and just getting more and more massive as it consumed more and more of the Earth with it. Now I bet you're thinking, oh, I know how this ends. Once the Earth starts getting sucked into the black hole, there's no stopping it, and eventually the entire planet and everything in it gets sucked into the black hole. Well, I hate to say it, but that's where you're wrong, kiddo. The Earth would be destroyed much sooner than that. According to Frank Heil, PhD of physics at Stanford,

when the black hole consumes matter, it becomes part of the black hole. And as a part of that process, it gets compressed to be super dense. But when you compress matter, matter starts. to heat up. All that increased heat and increased pressure would act on the earth like it would an overinflated balloon that's near to bursting. Here's a tip, try over-inflating a balloon then heat it up. Spoiler alert, it doesn't end well for the balloon. Sure, the Earth's crust is a lot stronger than the thin layer of latex that covers the balloon, but remember that when the black hole is at the center of the earth, it's consuming everything around it, compressing it, and increasing the pressure. So no matter how thick your skin is, you can only take so much pressure, but you can only take so much pressure, but you can only take so much pressure, before you explode.

So the good news, the Earth would probably explode before we all got sucked into the black hole and were crushed under the infinite gravitational force. So taking all that research into account were led to one conclusion. The Pokedex is wrong no matter what way you look at it. Either Gardevoir creates black holes that are too small to be stable, which are completely useless and immediately evaporate out of existence,

or it creates black holes that are large enough to be stable and completely destroys the Earth in the process. And wait, isn't Gardivore supposed to be using its powers to protect its trainer? To protect its trainer, it will expend all its psychic power to create a small black hole. Yeah, that one's not happening, but in a cruel twist, it turns out Gardivore still gets to have the last laugh. Because according to the Pokedex entry in Pokemon Emerald, it apparently does not feel the pull of gravity. So while the entire planet and everything on it is being obliterated by the black hole, Gardivore is apparently completely immune.

No! Bad touch! I don't want your hugs, you. you creepy wisp monster. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.