SciShow Tangents - Bonus Backlog Bonanza - Ep. 33

Episode Date: August 29, 2025

This bonus episode was originally posted on Patreon on April 1, 2024 titled "Big vs. Small bonus questions!"SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents!And go to https://complexly.store/collections/scishow-tangents to buy some great Tangents merch!While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on socials:Ceri: @ceriley.bsky.social@rhinoceri on InstagramSam: @im-sam-schultz.bsky.social@im_sam_schultz on InstagramHank: @hankgreen on X

Hello and welcome to the Syshow Tangent's Patreon Bonus podcast. We've called it extra snacks last time. Can't remember why. Oh, man, I could use a crunch right now. And Hank's here this time. Hank. Hey, I was just thinking about crunchy things. I want a crunch.

Do you like a crunchy snack instead of a soft snack? Yeah, I mean, don't we all? I'm happy to have like a baked good, I suppose. Yeah. Cookie. But no, I want a crunch. What about like a slim gym? Those are soft kind of, aren't they?

That's what I actually. actually have in my desk. Yes, beef jerky is my favorite snack of all snacks. And I can't decide. This is what I snack on. I got a bunch. It's like just in case. Because my house is like 20 feet away.

So you never know. Case of emergency. He just held up two more bags. Yeah, you never know if you're going to get snowed in there for a couple days. You're going to have to ration. Yeah. Have to drink this old, old spin drift that I have had. There's still liquid in there.

Hank brought us on a tour of all the various drink receptacles on his desk. There's a lot. There's some sodas I've never heard of before on there. That's how old they are. They're like decades old. They're completely gone out of business. He's got a tab on there. A new Coke.

Before Sam was even born, just drinking these sodas, setting them aside. Oh, no. And Sarah's here too. Hi, Sarah. Hello, always here. Sarie, what year were you born in? Had I had a soda when you were born? Wait, can we guess?

1990, I don't know, five. Who knows? 1994. Nice. Yeah, I'd had a soda when Sarah was born. For sure. I'd had way too many Mountain Dews already, even. We came up in the age when your baby was allowed and encouraged to have soda.

Yeah, to stick a, it's an orange. Orange soda. It says orange right on the label. Yep. That's a fruit. It's a color and the fruit. We're not sure which one it's referring to, so we'll just assume fruit. I think I had a soda pretty early on, too. It was when I, so I was born in New Jersey. And my dad, I think. You were born in New Jersey? Yeah, that's a point. Yeah. If you're born in New Jersey, they give you a Coke right out of the moment you're born.

It's a kid. Mix it with a breast milk. Wow. You're a New Jersey name. That is amazing to me. Yeah, I thought you knew that. I guess we've talked about Alabama a lot, but we don't talk about my origin story. You're not made of stern enough stuff to be from New Jersey, I don't think. Wow. Didn't put enough coke in your breast milk growing up.

Well, what's your soda story? My soda story is that my dad tried to be really healthy when I was a baby and a toddler, including, I think, when my sister was born. But then when my grandparents visited, my grandpa would bring me to McDonald's and gave me my first fries and soda because my dad was like, that's not unhealthy. But then I loved my grandpa immensely because he gave me the good stuff. Salty, salty McDonald's fries, delicious orange soda. And I adore that right now, you guys. This is hurting me. This is making it hard to be me.

That sounds good. I would love an orange soda. I just got done having COVID. I can finally taste some meat again. Anyway, enough about that. For each episode of Tangents, the regular show, we ask our audience for science couch questions, and every week, we get a whole lot of them,

but we can only answer one per episode, but we don't want a bunch of good questions to just get thrown in the trash. So each month we answer on this podcast, some of your questions that didn't quite make it to the show, lightning around style. So here's your questions from our episode about Big versus Small. The famously, the episode I wasn't on.

So I don't even have, I don't even know what the regular science couch question was. He doesn't listen to the podcast, you guys. I just produced it, you know. It's like, you think, who's a celebrity? Jeremy Renner watches every movie he's in? No. And he doesn't watch every movie he's not in either. More to my point.

Yeah. See, he especially doesn't watch the ones he's not in. Yeah. He only watches the ones he isn't. That's what, that's right. When you go to Jeremy Renner's house, what do you watch? You watch the Hurt Locker. That's what happened.

I would not doubt it. No disrespect to Mr. Rinner. So the first question is from Mike 2369 on Discord. And it is, what's the tiniest possible measurement? Is it measurable? And if so, how? Is the tiniest possible measurement measurable? Yeah, I don't think it counts as a measurement if it's not measurable.

Yeah. I suppose there could be like a, ah. I don't know, hypothetically smaller. Yeah. Well, you could imagine. I mean, I guess plank length is like the shortest length there can be. But that's not just, like, there's other things. I don't know.

Like, are there, Sarah, is there anything that truly exists on a spectrum or does everything get quanted eventually? I think it gets quanted. I mean, the plank length is the smallest thing before physics breaks. Yeah. So I feel like that is, that is it. I don't really know why. I couldn't explain to you how that we decided, we determined there was a length at which physics breaks, but I do know that, that was determined.

But since we know that physics breaks, does that mean that we know that there's smaller things that we can't measure? So there's hypothetical unmeasurable measurements? You can imagine that if there is a plank length, you could imagine half a plank length. So is that what you mean? Like, there is an imaginable thing, but that does not have a bearing on the reality of the universe. The audacity to ask me, is that what you mean? I don't know. I seldom do.

Well, I can explain how we came to the plank length, and then we can debate whether there's a smaller thing. So the idea is, basically, there are these... Slikes of wood. Yeah. And then a guy named Max Planck related to them and cut them up as small as he could. And then he asked, what if I cut that in even one more half than from what I can see? No. The SI units, so the international system of units, but they're called SI units because it's French System International, which is that's not how they pronounce it, but that's how I pronounce it. Yes. Badly are basically like international agree upon unit standards. So the fundamental unit of length in general is the meter, given the symbol M. But obviously there are smaller things than meters.

There are centimeters, there are millimeters, whatnot. Basically, there are a bunch of other constants related to the SI units. Where instead, like, we used to measure the meter by just a length. Yeah, a rod somewhere. I was a rod somewhere, a meter bar. And then it was like the distance from the equator to the North Pole and whatnot and, like, subdivisions of that. We've redefined it a lot. But eventually we were like, we need to define the SI units in terms of universal constants.

Like the speed of light and a vacuum. So see the universal constant, the speed of. light in vacuum. And a meter is defined as one over, uh, the, the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum in one over 200, two nine, nine, seven, nine, two, four, five, eight of a second, like that fraction of a second. Surprisingly close to just three, which is awesome. It's just like, like, we weren't, we were like point zero zero three away from me being three point zero number, number, number, number, number, forever, which that's some, that's the

meter rod's fault. It's the person who made the first meter made it very slightly too short. Oh, wow. It did a bad job, but now we're stuck with it. There are other constants, too. There's the gravitational constant G, which is like how we describe the force of gravity.

And then there are other weirder constants, I guess weirder to our non-science coded brains, like the Boltzman constant, which is K sub capital B, which basically helps describe the thermal energy of particles in a gas, so like the wiggles. It helps categorize the wiggles. And so Max Planck, the physicist, was like, what if we use these universal physical constants to describe very, very small units? So units that are just a

by these physical constants and can be used to describe things like the behavior of protons and a, the plank length is like around, it's like 1.6 times

10 to the negative 35 which is very, very, very small. It's like a tiny, tiny fraction of a proton. Okay. And, okay, I was like, of a meter? No, of a proton. Okay. Of a proton. Yeah, yeah. I think

it was something, I saw a metaphor while I was reading this, where if a proton was the size of the known universe, this, the plank length would be the distance from like New York to Tokyo or something like that. Oh, good. So like, teeny, teeny, like scales of magnitude, unfathitively small. Yeah. And that is the lower bounds as far as theoretical physicists know and people who study quantum physics. That's the lower bound of where the. rules of general relativity and quantum mechanics still makes sense. But why?

Oh, that I don't know. The baseball sounds said. Something I forgot to mention is that what Sarah only has four minutes per question. And when four minutes elapses, the baseball sound plays. What's the next question? All right. Great job answer in that one, by the way. The next question is from green eggs and.

Ham, like Ann, the name, Anne, on Discord, who asks, tune on like to that. How different are the soaps we use for different parts of our bodies? That's the wrong question. That's the wrong doc, boy. That's for the next episode. A little teaser for you guys. Keep subscribing to the Patreon. Let's leave it in.

Yeah, yeah, that's for next time. Why do we find tiny versions of bigger animals so darn cute? Actually, by Incaug Brian on Twitter, not the green eggs. You know, tiny animals are cute. Because we can pick them up and go, gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh. Yeah. I mean, I guess that's the question is, like, why are they cute? And it's just because.

I can't look inside of my own brain. It's very strange to want things and to know things and to experience sensations such as that beef jerky was salty, that cat is cute. But I don't know why any of it works. It's all just a projection on the inside of my neurons. Yeah. I think my cat thinks that I'm cute, and I would love to know if that is true. Because my cat, well, like, she, like, pets my face when I'm asleep. He's just a small bead.

Yeah. Does she look at my little hands and be like, oh, look how cute his little hands are? Guy, I would love to know. Like, elephants think we're cute, allegedly. I'd love to know if that's true. what do you do you do we do we have any thoughts sari i mean how much can we determine cuteness from chemicals brain science is always so mysterious um it it is basically what you modeled which is that we think tiny things are cute because they kick in some sort of like

caretaking this is baby uh instinct for it um Sure. Whereas if I try to imagine like a giant baby, I'm like, that's not cute. That's, it's got the proportions of a baby, but I hate it. What about a giant puppy, though? No, yeah, a little bit. I like that. My cat is very big, and I do love that. I'm like, you're a freaking bear. You're a big hyena boy. But. Yeah, he's still smaller than you. So relatively speaking.

still a little guy. I can pick him up and throw him onto the bed. Even just a kind of too big baby is creepy. And I think small things also make us focus more. I don't know if that really relates to cuteness, but I

think there are some either studies or intuition that miniature things, like condensing a lot of visual information into a very small space, whether that's like a dollhouse or those videos where a hamster is eating a tiny, tiny, tiny

burrito or things like that. There's something appealing about those because there's like a craftsmanship to those things. And I don't know if there's like a craftsmanship to a tiny version of a big animal necessarily or to like a baby. I mean, there is kind of. I don't know. Maybe this is an interesting angle of analysis. Why do I find that tiny burrito so cute? The burrito seems like it's influenced by the hamster being there.

you think it is but like just imagine a tiny like imagine i'm holding a plate and there's a tiny burrito on it yeah i would go oh it's just a burrito it doesn't have eyes doesn't have anything it is a small a small boto though apparently um which yeah separate set of problems and interface with uh are you talk what like a donkey yeah that's what that's what the name burrito comes i know i know a tiny donkey's cute too. Donkeys are the cutest animal, I think. Okay. Have you ever seen that giant, very cute cow on TikTok slash Instagram? I don't know what her name is or his name, I think it's a her.

But it's very cute, very cute. Is it one of the Scottish Highland cows? It's not. They are very cute as well. But this is not, I don't think is that species or whatever cows have. but like the woman who owns and takes care of this cow is like the same size as the cow's head but it's still cute

it's a very big cow she invited me to come see the cow and I was like that would be I think my wife would be so happy where is it? America okay I guess that's enough of an answer is the cow's name Nickers I don't think so there's a lot I think you could look at for famous cows all day on TikTok or Instagram.

That's true. There's too many. I, I just looked up. She's the first person. She's the first person that came up. Lacey. When I searched for a giant cow TikTok.

Is the cow named Lacey or the person? Person is named Lacey. Okay. I just searched giant cute cow and then Knickers, the extremely large cow came up. So different algorithms. Oh, this is a big cow. Oh, he's so cute. Yeah, super cute, cow.

Well, that's the answer to your question. I don't know. I don't know, but also sometimes giant animals are cute. Yeah, so as long as they're not babies. Yeah, as long as they're not human babies. Human, giant, babies are not cute. It's very upsetting. But we don't deserve it, Tina.

Play us the baseball sound. All right, I like this next question. At Trisket Bells. I like that name, too. On Twitter asks, I've noticed small things. Don't take fall damage. Why? I've also noticed.

Air. I like to, could I answer all the questions with one word from now on? Air. I always wondered what it feels like to be an ant falling, because it probably, do you think it feels weird? They're like.

I bet it feels like something. I bet they, I bet they know they're falling. It probably feels like you just need more air pushing on you to have that same feeling. So if it's like one of those places where they let you do indoor skydiving, where you're like a flying squirrel kind of thing, probably. I would think it's more similar to that. But less than that, right? Because they have such a high, like, surface area to volume ratio.

They just don't have a lot of mass. And so it would, I mean, it'd be more like being a feather, you know. It's just sort of like float, float around, just be like, it's kind of like being in the water almost. And when you fall, you think, oh, no. But when they fall, I bet they think, whoopsies, here I go. Yeah, I'm like, oh, gosh, I'm going to have to climb back up there again. That sucks. Oh, well.

Also, I don't have thoughts. Tiny brain, no thought. Smooth, smooth. Most of my nervous system is outside of my head. Their thought or absences, chemical, chemical, chemical, light, chemical, and then follow their little footsteps back. Maybe a little bit what it's like to be a human too, though. That's true. Yeah, so it's the thing I always like, people bring this up a lot, is like imagine an elephant falling out of an airplane and then imagine a person and then imagine an ant because the elephant's not just going to like hit.

the ground and be like, oh, no, the elephant died. It's going to hit the ground and it's going to be like, that is just nothing anymore. So just liquid. Whereas a person falls out of an airplane. Sorry, Eva's not happy about that. Yeah. I just want to imagine an elephant falling out of an airplane. We've never done this before, just for clarity.

We've never intentionally dropped the elephant out of an airplane. But like a person stays pretty much intact. Sometimes they live. Yeah, if it's a really soft thing that they land on. And then, like a cat actually can survive. And then a squirrel survives most of the time and an ant survives every time. A squirrel can survive most of the time falling out of an airplane. Yeah, squirrels most of the time falling at terminal velocity will survive.

Whoa. I guess that makes sense. They're just like jumping around up there. Yeah. I get so worried about them when they're jumping around up there. They're going to be fine. I don't know. The fox squirrels, the ones we have out here are really big.

They might have a harder time. But I still think that they probably can do it. Well, is that right, Sarah? Air, best they end. But like, why? Yeah, I mean, so it's air partially. So when you're falling or when an object or a thing or an animal or a human or elephant or ant are falling, the thing that is pulling you down is gravity. and the effect of that force on you?

What? I just loved your list of things. It was exhausted. Okay. Oh, I guess that says something about me that when my friends laugh, I assume that I've done something embarrassing or wrong. Instead of made a good joke or just said something normal. Did something correctly.

Yes, I must have made a fool of myself. And so as... The thing that is, the force that is acting on them to bring them to Earth, to reach that terminal velocity is the force of gravity, which is, like, affects a thing proportionally to its mass. And then the thing that is pushing back is air resistance. And so those forces are kind of opposed. It's a lot of physicsy questions this episode, and so I'm doing a bad job of explaining them. And basically the principle that makes an elephant liquefy and an ant knot is that as you get bigger in size, there's this thing called the square cube law where if something like a thing, a chair, an elephant or whatever, is twice as tall and twice as wide, then it's like cross-sectional area. The amount that it would, like the surface area that would, the air can push against would increase like about like a square of something.

So if like you increased the width, length, depth by two, the cross-sectional area would be increased by a factor of four. But the mass of it would increase by a factor of eight, which is that cube, like that square cube law. So like a square of that two by two by two is four. A cube of that two by two by two is eight. And so as you get bigger and bigger things, their mass increases a lot more relative to the surface area that the air can push against. And so as they're falling, they're much heavier and the air can push against them less. Which is why they get dragged down so fast. Yeah.

And like the wild fact here is also an ant and an elephant. from the same height on the moon will hit the ground going the same speed. And they would both probably die because there's no air. And it's just like wild to think of an ant hitting the ground going very fast. But like if there was no atmosphere on Earth and we dropped an ant, it would hit the ground going as fast as like going faster than a bullet and would probably not survive that, even though they are very strong. and there might be like a chance of survival because insects do have like a quite strong exoskeleton in many cases I guess it would depend on the ant but they also don't like force equals mass times acceleration so they like they don't have as much mass to accelerate to decelerate when they hit the ground so they experience less force yeah and they have extra protection from being crunched like when you if you were to step on an ant sized elephant it would be pretty squishy but if you would

would just step on an ant, then it's like crunchy and maybe it wouldn't survive that step. I do like the idea of, like, there is a height at which you can drop an ant in a vacuum that it will die just because, like, there is no terminal velocity. It will continue getting faster forever, the higher up you drop it from. You like that? I bet the ant doesn't like that. I do like it. I like it. Like, it's just sort of a remarkable fact.

Like, or you just have a bigger planet, you know, that has more gravity. So there's, you can always get it. You could always, you know, if you drop an ant. You can always kill an ant. If you want to survive. If you want too bad enough. There's a, there is a circumstance where you can imagine an urt, an ant not surviving a fall. Drop it on a neutron star.

It's not going to be okay. That's the only one, though. That's the only situation when an ant will not survive a fall. Active volcano, fine. All right. Well, great job. Speed answering those questions. But now we have to move on to Eve's thing. Hello, I'm AP Eve and welcome to Eve's thing. It's been the same thing for a while. And that is I ask Chat GPT to give me some delightfully insane Would You Rather is based off of our episode topic. Yeah. So the first one is, would you rather wear shoes that are three sizes too big?

and make funny squeaky noises with every step or shoes that are three sizes too small and force you to do a comical shuffle. Well, I do a comical shuffle all the time anyway. That's just, that was how I was born. Yeah, but then you'd also have to be wearing shoes that are three guys too small. I don't think that's even possible, really, is it?

You don't have to like it. It doesn't really not have any laces on. That's a bad vibe. I just wouldn't wear shoes, basically. Big shoes is also bad. Big shoes is also, I agree, it's just not physically painful in the same way. Little shoes is maybe a little less noticeable. Oh for sure.

Self-conscious you are, but. Yeah, I guess is the question that will, are we assuming that our feet would automatically fit into these shoes or do we have to suffer from the consequences of the blisters? I think suffer. I think the discomfort is the thing. I'd rather have the two big shoes, I guess. Everybody's looking at me all the time anyway. Jesus.

I made too many Instagram reels, you guys. With the grocery store, like, is that the Instagram guy? And it's like, hon, hon, hon, hon, hon. Yeah, everybody just rolled their eyes, be like, of course, he's wearing those shoes. It's probably making another reel. It's for the content. I'll do it for the content. I hate attention in that way of like if I was late to something and like trying to walk in the back of a movie theater and I was like I just wouldn't go I just wouldn't go to things a lot of would you rather's are like I'll end up taking one of these options but then never going out again just leaving your house for the rest of your life I was wondering if there's an option to just not wear shoes in the snow

I don't think so. I don't think there ever is. I think you have a genie. It's Montana. You got to wear them in the wintertime, at least. You got to wear shoes. What's the small punishment? Again, blisters.

Is that what it is? No, shuffle. It forces you to do a comical shuffle. I guess I'd rather have the big ones. I don't even know what that means and I don't want to find out. Yeah, I don't know what it means either. Only chat, GPT, knows what that means. Okay, I have one more.

more for you. Would you rather have a jumbo-sized chocolate bar that never runs out or a miniature pizza that magically replenishes every time you take a bite? Wow. Would it get to stay warm and stuff too? Yeah. These ones are good things. It can be whatever you want to be. If I, if I eat the miniature pizza and I think I'd like the next bite to be Cool Ranch Dorito flavored, will it do that? Oh. Definitely. Yeah. Okay, okay. Then that. Yeah.

I think the pizza, the pizza could really change your life. I think the chocolate bar. I think the limit on, at least, I think the limit on the pizza is that it will never be sweet. It will never be a sweet flavor. I can't make it into a chocolate. Because that's the chocolate bar. Uh-huh. Yeah.

No, I'd rather have a pizza. The chocolate can't be savory. Yeah, me too. I mean, maybe I'd rather have the chocolate bar just from my health. Because if I had a constantly replenishing pizza, that would be getting eaten a lot. How big are you imagining your pizza? Because I'm imagining like, yeah, that is mine too. You said a miniature pizza, right? The miniature pizza.

Could be even a, could be like a personal fan size or something. Just put in the chat. Gosh, this is a tough one. I mean, yeah, the infinite pizza would make you sick. Like, I would eat too much of it. But I could get you out some pickles. Could you pass it around at a party and just say, here's the food for tonight? What if the catch is this, that if you eat the whole thing, it disappears forever?

Oh, no. You have to wait for it to regenerate, but it takes a little while. Absolutely not. That would immediately push me towards the chocolate because I can't not eat a bagel bite in one bite. Oh, yeah. Heck yeah. You got to pop the whole thing

into your mouth. Otherwise, it's not satisfying. Burn the roof. Yeah. Yeah. And eventually you'd mess, you'd forget and mess up. Uh-oh.

Can you believe they put pizza on a bagel? They are truly unhinged over there at spaghetti headquarters, whatever, Chef Boyardy. I don't know. Who made them? Spaghetti headquarters. That's got to be it. Is it?

Are you thinking you're a chef, boyardy? Yeah. I don't know. It's like it's the same people Lipton probably Unilever Craft Heinz Yeah

Who makes bagel bites Let's see It's probably some private equity company Oh Heinz you were right Yeah I'm on the Wikipedia yeah Via orida It's underneath the tater tots people

They're really good at bite size things They found their niche Bangle bites tater tot That's the only two. Mozilla sticks, they probably have. Orida. French fry. Sure.

Do you know what? Do you know, or Ida got its name? Because I do. Isn't it just Oregon in Idaho? Yeah. Because that's where the potatoes come from. And that's Eve's thing. Thank you, buddy.

Thank you, Eve and Computer for another great installment. We never really decided, but I think pizza seems like it's got to be. the clear one. It's got, yeah, yeah. If it disappears, though, I'm going chocolate. Okay. I will not take that risk. I won't waste my infinite food on something that I'll...

Well, we'll ruin. All right. Well, that's the end of our show. I want those foods. And now we're all really hungry. So thank you for being, for patronizing us for so long. We really appreciate it. Thank you for being.

patronizing. Yeah. All right. Bye. Bye.