[catchy, upbeat music.]
Oh, hi there. I’m the great Orbax from the department of Physics at the University of Guelph.
We’re going to explore the science of pop culture as we see what’s Reel or Unreal.
What powers Thor's hammer? So how does Thor shoot lightning? Well, with Mjollnir of course!
[sounds of lighting and thunder]
OK. But it's a little bit more than that.
You see, our story starts far beyond the clouds in Asgard where Thor, son of Odin,
brother of Loki, whiles his time away getting different various haircuts for whichever movie he's about to star in.
But let's go back to that land beyond the clouds and actually look at the clouds.
You see, it turns out the inside of a thunder cloud is actually a pretty violent place.
It has incredibly fast winds and temperatures that can get as low as -25 degrees Celsius, even in the summer!
On Earth.
I don't...I don't know how clouds on on Asgard work, but...
The result is a lot of smashing together of ice crystals and water droplets.
And not unlike when you walk across a carpet and you pull up all that static charge or when I turn on this Van de Graaff generator.
This motion and these collisions actually strip electrons from these particles.
And what ends up happening is the heavier, denser particles move towards the bottom and the lighter particles
just sort of drift up towards the top, giving you these two distinct regions within the same cloud;
a positively charged upper region and a negatively charged bottom of the cloud.
So here's the thing. Nothing wants to carry unbalanced charge, whether it's a cloud or Dr. Massa’s hair.
I'm so scared right now.
The clouds are just putting out these things called negative leaders.
They're highly ionized gas channels that reach out towards the ground.
Now the ground is this massive wealth of positive charge which starts sending things out called upward streamers.
When these two connect, charge floods the crooked,janky lightning bolt-shaper egion of space with 30,000 amps of current.
This super heats the air to temperatures around 30,000 degrees Celsius which is six times the surface of the sun.
And not only that, the air burns up in a super hot plasma that we see as lightning.
Meanwhile, the explosive expansion of the heated air creates a shockwave which is what we hear as thunder.
There are many theories on Thor's hammer about the Uru metal is comprised of and what it can and can't do.
And it's even actually become canon in the comics that it can emit graviton.
But here's the thing, regardless of its makeup, if Thor's hammer is actually going to attract lightning,
it needs to become a more immediate and attractive path of charge to flow than the Earth itself.
So can you redirect lightning into some kind of usable power?
And the short answer is yes.
Many people think of a story of one night in 1752 when Benjamin Franklin tied a key to a kite and waited for lightning to strike it.
I like to think of a story in 1891 when Nikola Tesla created the Tesla Coil, much like the one that I have here.
So this resonant transformer takes 120 volts from the wall and turns it into a 250,000 volt discharge.
Now a lightning strike carries about 1200 times more voltage.
But we can use this experimental setup to see if you can actually redirect the power of a lightning bolt.
Now when I turn this on, you can see this electrical discharge again and you can really see...
you can really see the super hot plasma that I was talking about before, that purple isn't electricity.
It's actually the oxygen burning. And you can smell it too. Take a deep breath.
You know that smell? The smell you get right after a thunderstorm?
Well that's ozone
When you burn a campfire, you smell smoke. But when you burn air, you get ozone.
All right it's possible to redirect the power of this Tesla Coil through the body.
But of course, there's always some losses.
BY THE POWER OF GREY SKULL!
So if I can generate enough power to light up this fluorescent tube, then maybe a lightning bolt
with over a thousand times more voltage that carries an entire gigajoule of energy can actually cause some real damage.
But to survive that, you'd need the body of a god,or at least Chris Hemsworth.
[sounds of thunder and ligtning]
Remember to put in those lighting effects in.
[upbeat music]