- [Scott] At the time I'm recording this video,
I am freezing to death in my apartment
because the heater's broken and Texas decided
to get unreasonably cold.
What are you doing, Texas?
My thermostat isn't even registering the temperature,
but my educated guess is that my living room
has somehow reached absolute zero.
Yeah, so naturally the icy weather has me thinking
a lot about the comic book criminals of the cold,
villains who flourish in frost and embody
below-zero badness.
And there's no arctic arch nemesis more well known
than Mr. Freeze, if we're being honest.
But aside from him, there's Captain Cold,
my shiny silver medal.
How are you doing, you wonderful nerds?
Scott here, and if you're not familiar,
Captain Cold has been one of The Flash's
more active adversary's since his debut
all the way back in 1957.
A victim of parental abuse and the grandson
of an ice truck worker, Leonard Snart turned
to a life of small time thievery
until the scarlet speedster subdued
him and his partners in crime.
Snart later developed a cold gun
capable of freezing Flash dead in his tracks,
and became Captain Cold,
the man who mastered absolute zero.
And from that instant, from these opening pages
of the character's creation, Captain Cold was infused
with fascinating science, history, and culture
that you may have missed,
like look at his goggles, for example.
It looks like Dr. Doom's mask,
but somehow even more limiting.
Where did this design come from?
Well, if you're a subscriber of this channel,
hint, hint, you know that nothing in comics
is ever born in a vacuum, and Captain Cold's
slitted specs are no exception.
Long, long ago, natives of arctic North America
were dealing with one of Mother Nature's many obstacles.
They lived in an environment that featured
both heavy snow and clear skies in the springtime,
like a Bob Ross painting.
- [Bob Ross] God was having a good day when he made Alaska.
- [Scott] And while it seems like a pleasant environment
on the canvas, the mixture of the bright, harsh
ultraviolet sunlight reflecting off of the white snow
was not a very safe combination and had the potential
to damage your retinas, causing a condition
known as snow blindness.
The Inuits were one group of people
who witnessed this issue first hand millennia ago
and forged specialized spectacles to combat the elements
and protect their peepers.
It may look simple, but there's a lot going on here
in these snow goggles to reduce the amount of light
entering their eyeballs.
In addition to the small-slitted openings,
the form fitting design, made from leather,
wood, ivory, bone, or whatever else they had available,
curved around the wearer's head, fitting tightly
to the face and preventing light from bleeding in
from the sides or the top.
And, as an extra measure, the insides of these goggles
were often coated with soot
to reduce glare even further.
This eyewear allowed the Inuits, and other groups,
like the Aleuts and the Yupik,
to maneuver in dangerously bright environments
without risking snow blindness.
Not only that, but it also has the added benefit
of focusing one's vision.
These narrow openings function much like
how you might squint to focus on something far away,
the light bouncing off of the object
that you're trying to observe is competing against
all this other light bouncing off everything else
in your field of view.
It's like unwanted visual noise crowding your sight.
By squinting or by wearing these snow goggles
a smaller amount of focused light enters your eye,
keeping out light from the periphery
leading to a slight improvement in vision.
And of course there is one last benefit
to these slitted spectacles.
I kinda think they look cool and I'm not alone there.
When Captain Cold premiered in the late 1950's
these snow goggles were in the midst of their transformation
from a utility to an accessory.
Early vehicle drivers wore an industrial metal version
of these goggles to protect their eyes from glare and dust,
which evolved further into sun visors in the 1930's
and slitted specs in the 1950's.
Eventually the eyewear was introduced
as part of the mod or space age fashion movement
in the sixties and seventies
when they were redesigned to look more futuristic.
And the same basic design and principle continued on
to modern day in one way or another.
Leonard Snart, fashion icon.
What a legend.
Do you get it? Because he was the Legends of Tomorrow.
In the comics however, the reason that Captain Cold
wears these goggles is to protect his eyes
from the Flash of his gun.
Yeah it turns out that the glare
from the cold gun firing off is strong enough
to affect one's vision but interestingly
the icy temperatures it produces affects eyes
in a surprisingly different way.
You see Snart's gun had another ability
back in the early days of Flash comics
a power that seems to have been forgotten and thrown away
likely due to how weird it is.
Captain Cold could create insane arctic mirages,
which coincidentally was also the name
of my mid 2000's alternative indie band.
We were terrible.
These offensive mirages were once a staple
of Captain Cold's attack strategy.
Disorient the Flash by creating mirages of weird beasts
or aggressive staircases and then try to escape
or incapacitate the speedster before he snaps out of it.
And believe it or not this tactic has a tiny bit
of real world science on its side.
Mirages often occur because of temperature gradients
in the atmosphere that bend light rays,
causing distant objects to appear displaced.
You know how a really hot day can make it seem
like there are puddles of water on the ground
when there really aren't?
That's because the hot air rising
from the scorching pavement collides
with the cooler air above it.
The light passing between the boundary
of the warm and cool air can affect our perception.
In this case patches of the sky appear low
to the ground like puddles of water.
That's an example of an inferior mirage
where the illusory image appears below the real object.
But what happens if that was inverted?
If there was cold air lying closer to the ground
that met the warmer air above it?
Well that is called a temperature inversion
and can occur in freezing environments
like, you know, when everything around you
is being shot by a cold gun.
The mirages that this inversion can create
are called superior mirages.
Instead of the mirage appearing lower than the real object
it looms higher, like land masses
or boats floating in the sky.
Objects below the horizon can become magically visible.
But okay, how much damage could these
superior mirages actually do, right?
They just slightly change how an image is perceived.
Well according to historian Tim Maltin
this kind of mirage may have been responsible
for one of the biggest tragedies in history,
the sinking of the Titanic.
Maltin proposes that on the night the ship sank
the weather may have created an optical illusion
that obscured the iceberg behind a superior mirage
of a false horizon.
Quote, "At night the miraging on the horizon appears
"like a narrow bank of haze,
"due to light scattering in the very long air path
"over the unusual distance you can see for,
"and the trapping of light in a duct beneath the inversion.
"Titanic's lookouts noticed this apparent haze
"around the horizon, despite the remarkable clarity
"of the night, and they testified that the fatal iceberg
"appeared to come out of this haze
"at the last moment," end quote.
Tragically, as we all know,
the crew did not see the iceberg until it was too late
but the effect of this superior mirage
continued to prove its dangerous nature.
A nearby ship by the name of the S.S. Californian
was attempting to find the sinking Titanic
and rescue its passengers,
and it absolutely could have except the mirages
also downplayed the Titanic's size,
making it appear smaller and closer to witnesses
than it actually was.
Captain Stanley Lord of the Californian saw the vessel
but didn't believe it was the Titanic
because it looked too little.
Passengers of the Titanic could have been saved or,
heck, even continued their journey without a single hitch
but a string of arctic mirages may have sealed their fates.
These cold mirages are real and they can be dangerous
in a passive sense, anyway.
They can be hazardous and manipulative, sure,
but they can't create brand new imagery
that isn't already there.
They can make boats look like they're floating in the sky
but they can't make someone see a boat that doesn't exist.
And that makes it a far cry from the colorfully wild images
that the comics showcased.
Get it? Showcased.
Either way, this forgotten ability seems to deal more
in hallucinations than mirages,
which are very distinctly different things.
Plus, I feel like giving Captain Cold the power to create
these mind bending images kind of distracts from the fact
that his gun already has one of the strongest abilities
in the universe, the power to slow all atomic motion
to an effective dead stop.
After all, Captain Cold is the man
who mastered absolute zero.
That's what makes him a perfect counter to the Flash.
They're opposites of one another.
I mean, yeah, there's already reverse flash
and boy, even the first villain
that Barry Allen faced off against was coined,
"The Slowest Man on Earth."
The Flash writers just really love this theme of opposites
when they're crafting villains, but whatever,
the point is that Captain Cold is Flash's atomic opposite.
Let me explain.
So we all know that the source of Snart's super villainy
comes from his lethal cold gun,
which he constructed using a device called a cyclotron.
He actually got the idea in the original comics
thanks to a newspaper article which theorized
that a cyclotron could effectively interfere
with Flash's speed, which raises
a completely different question.
Is that a regular thing for journalists to do
in a world full of superheros?
Publish comprehensive theories about their weaknesses
for the public to consume?
That doesn't seem very smart.
Back on track.
If you look at Captain Cold shooting off his weapon
it may look like he's firing out ice
or some other kind of frosty ammunition.
But cold is not a physical substance
that he can shoot at the Flash.
It's a little more complicated than that.
Heat is really just the kinetic movement
of molecules in a substance.
When atoms start quivering, you stop shivering.
However, when the particles start to move relatively slowly
you feel that lack of energy as cold.
But Snart's weapon is more powerful than
a misting fan on a hot day.
It somehow has the ability to freeze its targets down,
way down, to apparently a temperature
of negative 273.15 degrees celsius.
This is known as absolute zero.
The point at which the particles that make up an object
have minimal vibrational motion
and there's always going to be some kind of kinetic energy
and the lowest possible level in a quantum system
is called its zero point energy,
which does remind me of another villain
I want to talk about someday.
- Zero Point Energy.
I save the best inventions for myself.
- [Scott] The cold gun isn't putting cold
into whatever it shoots at.
Much like the thief Snart himself,
the beam from the cold gun is stealing from its targets,
robbing each molecule of its vibrational energy.
Compare that to the Flash, where a considerable part
of the Scarlet Speedster's kit
is that he can vibrate molecules of himself
and objects that he touches fast enough
to phase through matter and even entire dimensions.
What greater nemesis for the monarch of motion
than a man who has the ability to bring all motion
on an atomic level to a near stop.
From the cultural origins of his costume
to the science of his long since forgotten
arctic mirage powers, and even being the atomic opposite
of the fastest man alive, Captain Cold is just plain cool.
You get it? Cool.
There is so much that we didn't even talk about
in regards to Captain Cold, like the cold fields
that he projects to passively slow the Flash
or the really interesting way that his abilities differ
from that of Mr. Freeze, so I will leave that up to you guys
to discuss down in the comments below.
I know a ton of other Youtubers
are begging for likes or subscribers,
but honestly all I really want are lots of comments.
I enjoy reading you guys' comments, you guys are so smart,
and it really makes my day every time we upload a new video
and I get to see what everyone's reaction is,
everyone who has better ideas
than I could have possibly hoped for.
You guys are incredible.
So thank you to everyone who does leave comments
on our videos, it means a lot to me.
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That sounds pretty rad.
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Thank you guys so much for watching.
My name is Scott, reminding you to read between the panels
and grow smarter through comics.
See you.