Good morning John, it’s Monday. And Pizzamas is going by
very quickly. So quickly that it is reminding me of a video I’ve
been wanting to do for a very long time. Because I’m fascinated
by what happens when you ask seemingly simple questions like,
for example, what’s the fastest thing? That sounds like it would be
really objective and you could just answer it and be done with it.
Like the answer is light-- light is the fastest thing. But is light a thing?
It’s not matter. It doesn’t have mass. I can’t like grab it. Also in
some cases, particles can go faster than light, as long as the
light isn’t traveling through a vacuum. So mehh. The interesting thing to
me is that I think a bunch of different people could have the same
title for this video and make very different videos. But here’s the
video I would make. Here are the top 4, 6, I don’t know, things that are
the fastest. Let’s start out with the fastest a person has ever gone.
Now for a long time, that was just running. And then it was horses.
And actually, bad news, it was neither of those things.
For a long time the fastest person was someone who did not survive,
because they were falling off of something very high up.
The terminal velocity of a human body in our atmosphere is 120 mph,
you can easily reach that if you fall off a number of different
water falls. And the 120 miles per hour that somebody probably
experienced when falling off of a waterfall or a cliff somewhere was
not exceeded until the 1900s. Specifically, probably the 1910s
or 1920s. We’re not entirely sure because cars were very new and people
were driving them very fast and we didn’t have great ways to measure
how fast they were going. Anyway, people were definitely going over 120
miles per hour by the 1920s. And then over the next few decades we very
rapidly increased our top speed until the 60s when we had gone from 120
miles per hour to over 24,000. And that record, set in the 1960s by
3 people at the same time, has not yet been beaten. And we are not
on the way to beating it. The 3 people in question were
Tom Stafford, John Young, and Eugene Cernan and they were on the
way home from the moon which they did not land on because this was
Apollo 10, it went faster on the way back than any other Apollo mission.
I don’t think because they were like in a hurry to get home, I’m guessing it
was because of orbital mechanics reasons. But yeah, that’s the fastest
a person has ever gone and we’re not looking to exceed it until
probably we head to mars. But we have made lots of things that
have gone way faster than Apollo 10. Here’s the thing that’s pretty easy to
understand. As the orbit gets lower, it gets faster. So mercury orbits the
sun faster than venus, which orbits faster than Earth, which orbits faster
than mars. So if you want to get a probe really close to the sun to do
science on the sun, it’s going to be going very fast during the part of its
orbit that’s close to the sun. And that brings us to the Parker Solar Probe
which this year broke its own record for the fastest a man-made object has
ever gone at around 330,000 miles per hour. Now very strangely, this might
not be the fastest a manmade object has ever gone. If you remember my 2017
Wheezy Waiter paternity leave video, you’ll know about this but it might be
that the fastest manmade object ever was the manhole cover that capped
an underground nuclear test that went slightly awry. The shock of the explosion
was vented improperly so it all went to this one manhole cover which was then
of course blasted off. There was a high-speed camera running and the
manhole cover appeared in one frame of the high speed film.
That allowed scientists to calculate that at minimum it was going 125,000 miles
per hour. And there wasn’t enough data to put a maximum on that. So it
could have been going significantly faster than that. That manhole cover
may have been blasted into space, where it would still be.
Or it may have vaporized as it slammed through the atmosphere.
Either way, it did not fall back to Earth. And that brings us to the final question,
alright so those are the fastest things that we’ve made. What is the fastest thing Hank?
What’s the fastest thing? And if we’re not counting light in a vacuum,
because of course that is the fastest thing, the fastest stuff that has mass?
Well that would be the super-heated jets of plasma that come off of active
galactic nucleuses. So super massive black holes at the center of galaxies,
called blazars. Blazars shoot big globs of this plasma out. Some of them as big
as the planet jupiter, going over 99% percent the speed of light.
Why does this happen? I have no idea. And then here at the end, a quick note.
Speed is a function of distance and time. And time it turns out, is relative.
And so speed itself kind of doesn’t exist. But Pizzamas does! And it’s going fast.
You can go to Pizzamas.com right now to see all of the amazing products
that we have available now that will never be available after the end
of this week. John, I’ll see you tomorrow. The fastest thing in the world is me!