We've all heard the story a man is standing in the deck of the Empire State
Building in New York City he then takes out a penny and throws it off the edge
to make a wish but the penny falls from such a height than it hits someone down
below on the sidewalk and takes them out this is a classic tale which has been
told for many years but is it true today we're gonna look at the science and
really see what would happen I'm Charlie and today we're going to look at what if
you dropped a penny off the Empire State Building but before we get hit by a
falling penny while subscribe and press a notification bell - so we've already
gone over the famous story but did you know that people have really tested this
out the Empire State Building is 1,454 feet
tall and one penny weighs around 2.5 grams this means if you were going to
throw a penny off the Empire State Building it would travel at a speed of
sixty four point four miles per hour one guy made a gun which could fire a penny
at sixty four point four miles per hour they launched this into various
ballistic dummies and found it caused very little damage but that's not the
only factor which would affect a penny falling from the Empire State Building
for example if you're in an elevator and the cable suddenly breaks then you'd
likely survive the fall that's because the elevator is in a very tight space
this would create an air pocket which would slow down your fall and a penny
creates a similar effect when it's falling from a great height because of
the shape and weight of a penny it doesn't simply fall down flat instead it
spins and tumbles around slowing down its velocity this means it may fall at
slightly less than sixty four point four miles per hour and remember this is in
perfect conditions I'm not accounting for any wind rain
snow or hail here so if the coins going at an average speed of 60 miles an hour
that really is not very fast bear in mind that a bullet fired from a gun goes
at around a thousand miles an hour in ballistics things were often measured in
foot pounds the average bullet would hit someone at around a hundred foot pounds
but a coin falling from the Empire State Building would hit someone at one foot
pound and luckily for that pedestrian it would not cause any serious damage in
fact would simply sting whoever at it would not cause a crater in the head
also if it hit the sidewalk or the road it would not caused a crater or crack
the pavement at all however if it hit the window of a car it would likely
shatter the window but what if someone threw a whole roll of pennies off the
Empire State Building a roll of pennies is 50 pennies so 50 cent these pennies
would probably weigh about 50 pounds and these pennies could reach a much faster
speed of 250 miles an hour that's about a quarter the speed of the average
bullet but it's also probably slightly heavier than the average bullet - well
if this hits someone on the head then it likely would take them out at the very
least make them unconscious so a single penny won't cause much harm to anyone if
you throw it from the Empire State Building but throwing a roll of pennies
would be enough to take someone out so don't do that scientists also say that
if you throw pen off the Empire State building it could piss someone's head so
be very careful next time you go up to the tallest building in New York and be
even more careful if you're walking down below it you might want to wear a hard
hat just in case anyone actually tries out this urban legend but now let's
ponder one more what-if question what if you fell into a black hole so first off
all our black holes a black hole is where an object is so dense that gravity
warps around itself this causes space and time to be twisted and because
gravity wraps around space itself it twists in on itself creating a black
hole this hole burrows through the very fabric of reality as we know it and most
black holes are actually large stars which have ran out of fuel these are
usually very dense and create a mangled bit of space these dense dead stars
buckle under their own weight and collapse inwards space-time caves in
with it and this creates a black hole this is a region where there are no
stars and all you can see is pitch blackness the boundary of the black hole
is called the event horizon and that is the exact part where light attempts to
escape the black hole it's pretty much the part which is farthest away so that
the black hole can't suck in all of the lines but go any closer to the hole than
the event horizon and there's no escape the event horizon is boiling hot as it's
piled with energy quantum effects cause lots of hot particles to build up and
radiate the outside of the black hole this kind of radiation is called Hawking
radiation named after Stephen Hawking and if you go into the black hole it
becomes more and more curvy as you go into the center of it eventually it will
become indefinitely curved and space and time become meaningless inside the black
holes the laws of physics that being space and time cease to exist
but now let's ponder one very scary question what if you were sucked into a
black hole well to really understand this we need to look at it from two
different perspectives one will be from your own perspective getting sucked into
the black hole and the other will be from your friends perspective who's also
in space with you your friends will watch as you're sucked into the black
hole as you get closer to the event horizon your friend will see you stretch
and distort it will be like seeing you go through a ginormous magnifying glass
or maybe one of those house of mirrors you see it circuses point is you'll be
very distorted and bent out of shape not only that the closer you get to the
black hole the more you'll appear to move in slow motion that's right for
your friend it will be like seeing you move in a slow motion movie obviously
you're in space so you can't call out to your friend but you could use sign
language to communicate per therm or maybe using a flashlight you could
communicate using Morse code well your friend will receive those messages much
slower than you're putting them out for example if they could hear you and you
went help they would actually be hearing that's because light and sound waves are
stretching making them go way slower then when you reach the event horizon
your friend will see you freeze it will be like someone's just pressed a pause
button on you you will then remain there totally motionless but you'll be
stretched across the surface of the event horizon that's right at that point
you look distorted to the shape of a circle
you'll be laid out flat on the event horizon until the heat begins to engulf
you your friend will then see you
obliterated by hot particles and before you even get into the black hole you
will be reduced to ash so that's what your friend sees when you get sucked
into a black hole but what happens to you well the answer is nothing in
particular instead you'll just be sucked into this black hole you won't be
stretched nor will you be burned by particles instead you'll be free falling
as there'll be no gravity you see a black hole is an artifact of perspective
this means your friend outside can't see through the black hole this means that
while they see you distort and then burn into ashes you just go into the black
hole and don't notice any change then once you're in the black hole you can
pretty much live out the rest of your life until you pass away naturally
seeing as you're in space this will likely be due to lack of water or food
it may be a hard concept to wrap your head around being sucked into a black
hole never to return but you can pretty much think about it like how you
progress through time for example as you watch this video you're going through
time now of course you can't turn back and go backwards in time time pulls us
along against our will and that's exactly what a black hole does you can't
turn around or escape the black hole you're just stuck in there indefinitely
and you can't turn around an escape a black hole any more than you can turn
around an escape time so you may wonder if you're in the black hole experiencing
zero gravity then why did your friends see you distort and then be burned into
ashes you may wonder is your friend just hallucinating well no that's not the
case from their point of view you really were burnt to a crisp
everything your friend sees will be very real and if they wanted to they could
even go and collect your ashes and bring them back to earth but at the same time
you remain as you are being sucked into the black hole the reason why this
happens is because the laws of nature require you to remain
outside the black hole from your friends perspective quantum physics says that
your information can never be lost so this means your friends laws of physics
are not broken but at the same time you're also totally normal inside this
black hole you see them also physics require you to both be outside the black
hole as a pile of ashes and also inside the black hole totally fine according to
the laws of physics you cannot be cloned however you can be in two places meaning
there can be one copy of you it seems confusing how to your friend you're dead
in a pile of ashes but to you you're alive and in a black hole for many years
physicists were baffled by this and they called it the black hole information
paradox but in 1992 they solve this a physicist named Leonard Susskind
realized there is no paradox at all that's because your friend never sees
your clothes they only see a copy of you your friend will only see the copy of
you as ashes and you'll only see the copy of yourself as a regular human in
the black hole but your two clones can never be compared this means no laws of
physics are actually broken so by now you're probably wondering which is
reality are you dead or are you alive well that's what's so amazing about
black holes and what they've revealed to us black holes have revealed that
reality is subjective depending on who you ask
there's your french reality and your reality both are different and both are
valid so because black holes break the space-time continuum there's a clone of
you that's created and this creates two different forms of reality but will
there ever be a way for us to break the laws of physics and actually see inside
black holes well it was only a few weeks ago that we got the first image of a
black hole's event horizon I'm sure you remember it as it went viral online now
seeing as black holes were discovered in the 1970s look how far we've already
come it's only taken us around 50 years to get an image of a black hole's event
horizon so perhaps in another 50 years we'll be able to see inside black holes
without actually going into them right now physicists say we cannot take photos
inside black holes but they said even if we could it would take so long for black
holes to actually be seen by these cameras think about it the inside of
black holes are billions of light years away this means that by the time we'd
have taken an image of it it would have long evaporated it takes around 167
billion years for a black hole to evaporate but it would take even longer
than that to decode the entanglement and actually get an image inside a black
hole that's if we actually have the technology to do this which we don't so
sadly we may never be able to compare two different kinds of realities with
each other but even so it's pretty amazing to think that there's more than
one version of reality and Stephen Hawking himself even said that we live
in a multiverse this means there is infinite different versions of our
universe right now and each one is a valid reality so reality is pretty much
infinite but now your mind has been blown we now know what black holes are
what would happen if you fell into one what your friend would see and also what
version of reality is real but now it's time to make your voice heard vote in
the poll in the top right corner have you ever thrown something of a high
building if you want some more amazing videos then check out my second channel
they'll be a link to that on screen in a moment but as always thanks for watching
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