- Have you ever seen a rock that isn't a rock?
I mean, like, have you ever seen a rock,
that is something resembling a stone,
but wasn't formed by natural processes?
I have, it's something very interesting produced by humans,
through our factory processes, and it is this.
It is called fordite.
Why is the word fordite used, though?
Well, it's because it is actually an aggregate
of enamel paint coating, used on old Ford cars.
From the 40s, all the way up through the 70s and 80s.
And as they were painting these cars, excess of it
would run off on to the factory floor plant,
and get on pieces of equipment and stuff.
It would take about 1000 layers of paint
to make about an inch of this material
that you're seeing now.
But then some workers found out that you can polish
and shape this stuff like actual stone.
And so fordite became something of a material,
that you could sell, and make into jewelry.
Fordite is on the market right now, and you can buy some.
But there's a limited amount.
Because they changed the system that painted the cars,
much more efficient, and so now, there isn't this buildup
of excess paint on factory floors.
And so fordite is a limited quantity,
and it's quite beautiful.
A human-made gem, born out of inefficiency.
(laughs) What is, it, baseball?
(laughs) Yeah, that's right.
Baseball sucks.
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Hello, and welcome to another edition of "Footnotes",
the companion show to "Because Science",
where I take all of your comments, questions,
and corrections, and I peel them back
like aggregate layers of enamel paint,
and then I break some off,
and I polish it up into a stone of science.
And then, I tell you what's coming up on this channel next.
Hint, it involves neutron stars,
and doing dangerous stuff with it.
Who would've thought?
But, getting right into it, in the last episode
of "Because Science", we were trying to figure out
what a Darksaber is.
A singular weapon, crafted by the first Mandalorian Jedi.
If it's supposed to function like a lightsaber,
what makes a darksaber the way it is?
How does it have the properties that it has?
In the full episode, which you can watch,
if you haven't yet, I said that if the Darksaber
was a black hole blade, then it would explain
the absence of light in the blade,
it might explain the glow, the hot glow around the edge
of the blade, as some sort of accretion disk,
like forms around black holes, and that accretion disk
could be so hot it might, in fact, cut stuff.
Of course, my explanation created just as many problems
as it attempted to solve, but hey,
sometimes you just gotta get ripped apart
by intensely strong magnetic fields, which,
what did you have to say?
Our first comment comes from Neo Spacian Sushi Roll,
who says "I have a hypothesis about how the darksabers work.
"They look cool, so it works."
That's how things in Star Wars works, it's cool.
It is inarguable, that Star Wars, as a franchise,
created some of the coolest sci fi designs,
of all time.
No doubt that's why they have stuck around
for the last couple of decades, and they've influenced
so much science fiction going forward.
If it's cool, it's cool.
I mean, lightsabers are awesome, but as for an explanation,
it'd be a lot cooler if they had one.
Yes it would.
My hero's myself in 10 years,
you know what I'm talkin' 'bout?
Yellstr has a comment, which says "Hey Kyle, great show."
Eh.
"Is there any science currently which could explain
"such sci-fi concepts as force fields or force shields?"
Well, yes, but you would need some sort of field,
like a gravitational field, a magnetic field,
an electrical field, that could impose a force on an object
moving through that field.
So say we're making a spaceship,
and we want to deflect incoming cosmic radiation.
How do we protect ourselves?
Well, one of the ideas is to create a kind of
magnetic force field or force shield, if you will,
and this involves projecting a magnetic field
outside of the spacecraft.
Kind of like how the earth's magnetosphere's projected
outside of the sphere of the earth itself
by the dynamo spinning at the core.
So if we projected a magnetic field
outside of our spaceship, when those particles,
those cosmic particles, encounter the magnetic field,
they would experience some force from the magnetic field,
and would be diverted around our spaceship.
This would be a real-ish force field.
From anything to divert bullets, or lightsabers,
you would need something a lot stronger.
Something that would have a lot
of knock-on effects that you'd notice.
Like, you know, ripping everything apart near you.
Alejandro Fernandez Castro says "Kyle, who do you talk to
"at the end of the videos?"
Oh, you mean them?
I wouldn't worry about them.
Don't you dare get on camera.
Douglas Wallace, ray33, braingasim, and others, say well,
for a darksaber, what about using antimatter?
How would that work?
Antimatter is cool, and as you know, in Star Wars,
all right, all right, all right, cool rules.
But anitmatter would be a pretty bad thing
to make a blade that you hold near your face out of.
If, for no other reason, then sure,
you could contain antimatter inside a magnetic field,
like a magnetic trap, so that it doesn't interact
with anything, and it doesn't, you know, explode.
But once you bring that lightsaber
into contact with anything, if the blade is made
out of antimatter, that antimatter will react
with the matter that it touches and annihilate,
releasing energy according to E=MC², and if you had
a lightsaber blade's worth of antimatter,
and you contacted that blade with a blade's worth
of normal matter, it would create an explosion
large enough to level the city.
Unless your whole planet was a city.
Then it would just be part of it.
It's a Coruscant joke.
But the nerdiest comment at the time I'm filming this video,
I gotta give to Lars van den Biggolaar, who says:
"So what Kyle is saying at the beginning of the video,
"is that lightsabers' colors
"are dependent on their temperatures, right?
"If so, then I have two questions."
And I wanna get to your first one.
"Could you consider blue lightsabers
"to be more dangerous than red ones,
"as they seemingly have a higher temperature?"
So yes, according to that Wien's displacement law
that we looked at, during the episode,
blue to bluish-white hot,
is the hottest region of visible light.
If something is blue or white-hot, it is the hottest.
And if it is reddish, or orangeish, then it is red hot,
but that is necessarily at a lower temperature.
It has to be if it's acting like black body radiation.
So yes, even through the temperature difference
isn't all that much, relatively speaking.
You still have thousands of Kelvin,
versus thousands of Kelvin, but a Jedi's blue lightsaber,
usually wielded by Jedi, right,
would be technically physically hotter, in our estimation,
than a Sith's red lightsaber, and you'd wanna fear
the blue one more.
Strong the light side of the Force is.
And hotter our lightsabers do.
They cut that line.
I did submit it to Lucas, but he cut it.
Don't you dare get on camera.
But, Lars, for that very interesting point, you are indeed,
a super nerd. (yells)
But of course, I'm not always right.
Sometimes, I'm Kylo wrong.
So what did I get wrong last week?
It's a Star Wars pun.
A bad one.
Oh, and if you were watching outside of the time
when I published this video, and you want to correct me
on something, I'm sure that you do,
make sure that you like and subscribe to this channel,
and hit that notification bell so that you can get
all the video notifications, so you can get in there
and say oh, but Kyle, (yelling)
Our first correction comes from super nerd Infinite Asseem,
who says: "Okay, I did some research, and I found out
"what's much more viable than a black hole sword.
"It's just a regular lightsaber that contains
"an invisible plasma.
"In the Korean tokemak KSTAR, which you can read about,
"the plasma here is a blistering 150,000,000° C,
"and it isn't visible, because it simply doesn't emit light
"in the visible spectrum."
A darksaber could be that.
Well, Infinite, I do like your comment,
but two problems with it.
One, just like you said, if it's not emitting
any visible light,
it wouldn't necessarily look black, would it?
That's something that is taking in all the radiation,
like a perfect black body, or like a black hole,
like we suggested.
And, if you look up footage
of tokemak reactors switching on, and in operation,
I'm not totally sure what you're talking about.
Because I can see a lotta hot, hot plasma in there.
And I wouldn't wanna touch it.
Don't touch it.
Don't touch it!
Hey.
Kevkiller 777 has a correction.
He says "Humans breathe oxygen."
Citation needed.
"But in the episode you were drawing lots of helium atoms.
"Does that mean you breathe helium?
"Does that mean you're not from earth?
"Does that mean you're an alien supervillain
"who wants to replace all oxygen on earth with helium?"
(gasps)
No, that's completely ridiculous.
I don't breath only helium.
(speaking gibberish)
What a weird correction.
Another big correction comes from doomforzombies who says
"The dark saber shouldn't cut through a Mandalorian helmet."
And in the opening of the episode,
I have Boba Fett's helmet being cut by a lightsaber,
but of course, as you know, a Mandalorian armor
is the only armor in the Star Wars universe
that can repel a lightsaber attack,
so it wouldn't necessarily cut through Boba Fett's helmet
like that, like I showed, just to illustrate the point
of lightsabers cutting stuff.
Come on.
But the nerdiest correction at the time
I'm filming this episode, I'm giving to Adrien,
who says "Hey Kyle, love the show.
"One quick observation.
"If the light emitted by a lightsaber was simply due
"to the heat alone of its plasma, as dictated by Wien's Law,
"then you could not have all the colors that we see
"in the movies.
"You could only add up the colors
"from the large wavelength end of the spectrum
"to the smaller wavelength end, ie red, orange, yellow,
"then white, and eventually blue for the hottest plasmas.
"In the same way there are no green stars,
"there could be no green lightsaber."
in case you've never thought about this, no there are,
in fact, no green stars in the universe.
Some stars may look green, to our eyes,
after the light passes through the atmosphere,
but this is an optical illusion.
There are no green stars, period.
And that's because, if starts are emitting light
like near-perfect black body radiators, as they are,
then we can actually characterize how that light will look
in the visible portion of the spectrum.
And it just so happens that even though some stars
can emit most of their wavelengths
in green light specifically, because they're also emitting
red light and blue light,
because of how all those colors combine,
no stars will ever look green, at least according
to the physics here in this universe.
And as long as Star Wars is still in the same universe,
if it's just using plasma alone and temperature
like you're saying, Adrien,
then there can be no green lightsabers.
It would have to be more like a gas discharge
mercury vapor kind of thing going on,
but then it wouldn't be hot enough to cut through stuff,
and this is a great correction.
So you are a super nerd.
(rock music)
Had to get that out.
And now, moving right along to this week's episode
of "Because Science", you can get this at the Nerdist store.
The next episode of "Because Science"
is the neutron star slingshot.
That's right, in the next episode of "Because Science",
we are delving into decades-old research,
into a kind of gravitational machine,
featuring neutron stars, which may end up being
the ultimate in interstellar transportation.
(laughs)
You thought I was gonna say somethin' didn't you?
Didn't you?
But before we get to the neutron star slingshot,
please go watch the latest episode of "Because Science"
if you haven't yet, all about whatever it was,
and leave me your best comments, corrections, and questions
at youTube.com/becausescience, facebook.com/becausescience,
and @BecauseScience on wherever you type that in
and you get stuff and it is me.
And don't forget, I don't know who out there
needs to hear this, so I'm not gonna say it.
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