[singing rug] Hank: Good morning, Joh...
I, nope.
I'm sure about now, everybody's super missing Craig, so I...
Other Hank: I don't miss Craig.
Hank: Did I ask you?
Other Hank: I don't care.
Hank: I mean, do you know what we're doing right now?
Other Hank: Yeah.
You're doing the thing where you're like, 20 different Craig things, and everybody's
gonna [inaudible] Hank: Yeah.
Other Hank: [inaudible] like, we miss Craig so much
Hank: Yes.
This is one of those things that we're doing.
Other Hank: G'dangit!
Hank: Yeah.
[intro] OK, I, a beard, I guess?
I got to do a beard.
That's better, right?
Are you more comfortable now?
I'll punch an eagle.
Temporary inexplicable shirtlessness.
That's a solid number of Craig-y things right?
But you know what definitely isn't a thing?
Explosion Wednesday!
I don't even know if it's Wednesday.
But that shouldn't matter.
Because explosion Wednesday never really was a thing and it certainly isn't now.
If the thing isn't the thing, then there's no reason not to do it, just because it's
not exactly the thing that the thing is.
This is not working.
Ah.
Ow.
So you want to know about the coolest science explosion of all time?
You're probably thinking to yourself, of course it's the Cambrian explosion.
Duh.
But the Cambrian explosion wasn't a literal explosion.
The Cambrian explosion is absolutely my favorite figurative explosion, but my favorite literal
explosion that happened in the 1950s.
At that point, the US government was doing a ton of nuclear tests.
They were blowing up nuclear bombs in the southwest of America and also in other places,
and people were starting to get worried about the effect that all of the radiation from
those eploding nuclear bombs might have on people.
Correctly, by the way.
Good on people for being concerned about that.
So they started doing experiments to see if they could blow up nuclear bombs underground
and contain all of the fallout under the earth and none of it going in the atmosphere.
In 1957, they were doing one of these underground tests.
They drilled like a 500 foot deep well and put like a concrete casing around that well,
lowered the payload into it and then on top of it, there was a bunch - I'm not getting
into all the details here - but on the top of it, they welded it like a 2000 pound iron
disc like a... basically a manhole cover.
A very heavy big manhole cover.
They welded it in place on the top of that well.
Some engineers did some calculations and they determined that that manhole cover was not
gonna be enough to contain a nuclear bomb and it would fail.
It would break and that, like...
But they did it anyway, I guess just to make sure that they were right that it was not
gonna work.
So they did and that cap popped off the well going over 125'000 miles per hour.
For comparison, the fastest bullet goes about 2600 miles per hour.
That's very different from 125'000 miles per hour.
They don't actually know how fast it was going, because it was only captured on one frame
of the high-speed camera that was filming it.
If they had two frames, they could have figured out exactly how fast it was going, but just
one frame told them that it was going fast enough that it was only captured one time.
So minimum speed 125'000 miles an hour.
At that speed it, would have been the fastest man-made object ever at that point and also
the fastest man-made object ever on the earth, still.
Some space probes have now gone faster than that but on the earth nothing has ever gone
that fast.
That is the fastest thing that's ever happened on this planet.
It was fast enough that it would have punched through the atmosphere and been in space in
less than nine seconds.
And there's some thought and debate about whether this manhole cover was in fact launched
into space.
Some people think that as it pressurized the atmosphere ahead of it as I was heading through
the atmosphere, the atmosphere would have gotten so hot that it would have disintegrated
that piece of metal faster than in eight seconds.
Basically, the situation here is that we built a gun out of the earth and instead of like
a little bit of like gunpowder to push the bullet forward, it was a nuclear bomb.
And we shot a piece of iron out at, the fastest anything has ever gone on earth.
That's what happened.
We will never know if it vaporized on the way out of the planet's atmosphere or if it's
still out there floating around in space, going real fast.
That, my friends, is my favorite actual explosion.
Hey, if you came to this video just to see me or to hear about fast things and you were
really confused by the first part, that might be because you don't watch WheezyWaiter, which
is one of the most interesting and cool channels on YouTube.
You can check it out at youtube.com/wheezywaiter - subscribe there, find out all the amazing
and peculiar things that my friend Craig does.
Craig, I will see you when you get back from paternity leave.
[wink]