I’ve been investigating and tracking deadly Pokémon for 3 years now.
Electric types, water, poison, grass, rock, fire.
You’ve seen my reports.
But nothing prepared me for this one...I sealed my fate months ago.
Let’s start from the beginning.
Vsauce, I’m Jake and I’m here in the UK.
Because I’ve been playing a lot of Pokemon GO and as you might know some of the Pokémon
are region specific.
Here in the UK and Europe there is a very deadly Pokémon and one that I must find because it might
just be the most dangerous pokémon we have yet to encounter.
That’s right, pokémon #122 Mr. Mime.
Mr. Mime can shape an invisible wall in midair by minutely vibrating its fingertips to stop
molecules in the air. But what if they were your molecules?
That was me a few months ago...I think...I’m not sure.
It’s hard to keep track of time here, but to understand why Mr. Mime is so incredibly
dangerous, we first need to discuss how to slow down a molecule, that is to reduce it’s
movement or energy.
The lower their temperature, the slower they will be moving.
So let’s begin our journey by going to a temperature that nobody has been able to achieve,
that we have yet to even find anywhere on Earth or in space...infinite cold...absolute
zero.
Absolute Zero is 0 degrees Kelvin.
To put that into perspective the coldest natural place recorded on Earth was in Antarctica
at 184.0 K.
In our solar system it’s a perpetually shadowed crater on the moon at 33.15 K. And in the
universe, 5,000 light years away at the Boomerang Nebula which has a temperature of 1 Kelvin,
the lowest natural temperature ever recorded.
In general, the universe has a temperature of 2.7 Kelvin because of the residual
cosmic microwave background radiation from the Big Bang that still remains.
2 is pretty darn cold but in labs we’ve gone colder.
In one particular study, scientists were able to cool a piece of rhodium metal to 0.0000000001
kelvin.
The lowest man made temperature ever recorded.
We’re still not at absolute zero though but some interesting things happen as we approach
these extreme temperatures.
For instance, we start to experience superfluids.
If we take the gas helium down to 4.2 K it becomes liquid helium 1.
If we go even further, past 2.17 K, the lambda point, liquid helium becomes a superfluid.
That is to say that it now has zero viscosity.
In this example, we see a glass that has hundreds of 1 micrometer holes in the bottom.
Normal liquid helium doesn’t come through the holes because the liquid is viscus.
However, once it transforms from helium 1 to helium 2, the superfluid, it loses all
viscosity and starts to drip out.
Some studies have shown that hydrogen can also become a superfluid.
Hydrogen makes up 9.5% of our bodies.
So if it that happened, it would leak out of your body through our pores eve though
on average, a pore is about .08 micrometers in size.
Smaller than the 1 micrometer holes in the video but as physicist Alfred Leitner says,
Liquid helium is generally used for superconducting magnets.
The thousands of magnets that direct the proton beam around the 27 kilometer ring at the Large
Hadron Collider are cooled using superfluid helium.
But we keep getting colder and since we are dealing with something as small as molecules,
they’re governed by quantum mechanics.
At this temperature, molecules don’t collide anymore because their quantum mechanical waves
stretch and overlap forming a Bose–Einstein condensate.
A state of matter in which separate atoms or subatomic particles, cooled to near absolute
zero coalesce into a single quantum mechanical entity, a giant matter wave.
The good news is that there are a few...problems with reaching absolute zero.
As MIT professor Dr. Seth Lloyd puts it, the time scales get longer the smaller the amounts
of energy involved.
It would take the age of the universe to do it, and you’d need something the size of
the universe to do it.
Not to mention the 3rd Law of Thermodynamics that the entropy of a perfect crystal is zero
when the temperature of the crystal is equal to absolute zero (0 K).
And you also have the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that you can’t know both an atom's position
and momentum therefor you can’t bring something to absolute zero because you’d know both.
In quantum mechanics, you can't have things be 'absolutely still' even at absolute zero,
there always has to be some motion, some energy contained in a system, in its quantum-mechanical
ground state, or another way to state it, it’s Zero-Point Energy.
It’s lowest possible energy.
As far as we know, absolute zero is unattainable in physics as we know it.
But the rules and laws that govern us don’t matter to something like Mr. Mime.
You see, this entire time I thought I was tracking it, when it was tracking me.
And now that we know all this, I finally was able to realize why Mr. Mime is so deadly.
With Mr. Mime there is no gradual or even rapid drop in temperature to experience the
effects of near absolute zero.
If there were though, you would get very cold, you’d get hypothermia, your heart starts
to slow down, your body would try to keep your core warm so your extremities would begin
to fail, you would lose consciousness as you froze to death.
The temperature continues to drop.
The cells in your body would burst as they froze and expanded.
It gets colder.
The hydrogen in your body would become a superfluid and leak out of your pores.
But with Mr. Mime, it’s instantaneous.
You become stuck, frozen, in place.
To the outside world you would likely be a black massless shape.
No light would be absorbed, reflected or scattered.
Or you might not be able to be perceived at all.
Every atom that makes you you would be flattened out and no longer distinguishable from one
another, you’d be a quantum system of matter.
It’s been speculated that if you could bring atoms down to absolute zero, their wave functions
would extend across the universe, meaning those atoms, those pieces of you, are located
nowhere.
Trapped in this nothingness.
Once Mr. Mime releases its hold on you, any form of light would agitate your atoms, warming
them up, freeing you from your quantum state, but dispersing you as well.
In short, Mr. Mime would freeze you and then disassemble you on a quantum level.
There would be nothing of you left.
Carl Sagan famously said, we are made of star stuff, and Mr. Mime would return you back
to that.
I can only hope he’ll release his hold on us soon.
And, as always, thanks for watching.