(upbeat music)
(television):
Reports of paranormal activity, and it's spreading across the city.
(female anchor):
Our next guest believes a ghost is living in his light switch.
Shocking.
- I'm Jake, and before becoming a buster of ghosts, I had two loves in my life:
science, and movies.
So, I decided to put myself in one of my favorite films, Ghostbusters,
to find out if you could survive it.
Could you survive a nuclear accelerator strapped to your back?
A giant marshmallow creature walking through a city?
Or crossing proton streams?
So, give us a call at 1-800...
(all): Could you survive Ghostbusters?
I'm gonna be honest...
that commercial was incredible.
- I hope so, 'cause we just spent the last of our money on it.
So, I couldn't pay the power bill
to keep the ghost containment grid online.
I just got that ghost in there that wants to destroy the world.
The city could shut it off at any moment...
Which would be bad, because according to my research,
we're on the verge of a cataclysmic convergence of PK energy.
- It's a good thing I've upgraded our proton packs.
- Great! And speaking of proton packs...
In Ghostbusters, they refer to the packs
as "unlicensed nuclear accelerators."
And well, it could be called that because it is getting particles
from the nucleus of an atom,
they are generally referred to as particle accelerators,
because they are accelerating a specific type of particle.
Protons from the nucleus, or electrons from the electron shell of the atom.
and fun fact, you actually do need to license a particle accelerator.
And particle accelerators aren't just things like the Large Hadron Collider.
There are over 30,000 in the world
with some of them used in hospitals for anti-cancer treatment proton therapy.
The accelerator uses positively and negatively charged electric fields
which create radio waves to accelerate the beam,
and the beam is made up of...
Particles. Either protons with a positive charge,
or electrons with a negative charge.
The particles begin to orbit around the accelerator,
gaining momentum along the way.
And in general, the particles are protons,
so the backpack being called a proton pack
makes a lot of sense.
And speaking of...
the proton pack we see in the films has a circular device on the back of it.
A cyclotron, one of the earliest types of accelerators built.
In fact, it was first invented in 1930, and was used to discover elements
like Plutonium and Neptunium.
Now, based on the proton packs from the movie,
they would generate five mega electron volts of energy.
Which sounds like a lot, but it's not even enough energy
to power a 100 watt light bulb, for a tenth of a second.
The ones used for proton therapy use around 200 MeV.
This means the proton stream coming out of our ghost busting backpack
would go 35 cm.
So the ghost would have to be right in front of you.
And, since it uses such a small amount of energy
you wouldn't have to worry about things like excess heat or radiation
being produced by it.
Also, you wouldn't actually see the proton stream when it was firing
like you do in the film,
because they aren't hitting anything that makes them visible.
I mean, think of a laser beam.
The beam itself is invisible unless it's going through something like smoke or water.
Do we fix that? - No.
(power surging)
(alarm blaring)
(computerized voice):
Containment grid powering down.
(metal rattling)
(power surging)
(explosion)
(coughing)
(Jake): The flowers are still standing.
(eerie music)
(demonic voice): I will rain terror down upon your land
and you will be powerless to stop it.
- I think he's possessed. - Mmm...
(demonic voice): Your destruction will be of your own choosing.
Whatever you think of will come to life
and be your end!
- Kevin? Hey.
(Jake): Whatever you think of will be your end? What does that mean?
Wait! Nobody think of anything. Don't think of anything!
(demonic voice): The choice has been made!
Your world will be destroyed! (Jake): Whoa! Whoa!
Nobody chose anything! Did you chose anything?
Did you chose anything? I didn't chose anything.
- I couldn't help it. I tried to think of the least threatening thing.
(explosion)
(stomping, sirens wailing)
(intense music)
- Kevin? What did you think of?
- A giant marshmallow Captain Disillusion.
(intense music, stomping)
Hey, team? I'm really sorry about this.
It looks pretty bad.
- But is it?
How deadly can a 34.3 meter creature actually be?
- Great question!
And to answer it, we've built a to-scale pneumatic foot
to simulate the pressure exerted by a giant marshmallow creature
applied to our to-scale city street.
A 34.3 meter tall creature would be the same height as a 13 story building,
and would weight 203 metric tons.
about 22 tons more than a blue whale,
the largest animal currently alive.
And you might imagine that something with that much mass
walking on the ground would do this.
(dramatic classical music)
But, it wouldn't.
Instead, it looks more like this.
Even though its mass, its weight is extremely high,
it's being distributed across a large surface area:
Our marshmallow creature's foot,
which is around the size of a car.
While the pavement does flex a bit,
it doesn't break. And the damage becomes even less
with the marshmallow added to the foot.
The marshmallow acts as a giant pillow,
reducing the pressure so much that it probably wouldn't even crush you.
However, like this dude,
you would be absorbed into the marshmallow and suffocate.
But what if we kept the same mass and lessened the surface area to say,
the size of a human's foot?
By decreasing the surface area but retaining the mass,
each footstep becomes more destructive.
Why? Well, think about trying to penetrate an orange with the flat side of a fork,
versus its tines. Scale that up to a 34.3 meter human,
and we get this:
We can see the car get squashed, but also the concrete around it crack and break.
So, surprisingly, a giant marshmallow creature
wouldn't be that devastating.
Definitely not as damaging as a giant human would be.
- Cool science, dude. - Thank you.
- Hey, good thing I thought of a giant marshmallow thing
instead of a giant human, huh?
- Yeah, I mean, it would've been better if you'd thought of nothing,
but hey, silver lining, bud.
- Guys? Where's Captain Disillusion?
- Ah. I mean, I guess he disappeared, so that's good.
(intense music)
Oh. Alright, we should fire all our beams at it at once, right?
But we don't want to cross the streams.
- No, that's actually just in the movies.
Three streams separate is the same protonic energy as three combined.
So, if our proton streams are only 5 mega electron volts each,
then when we combine them they'll generate a stream of only 15 MeV.
Crossing them doesn't multiply the effect.
- But what about total protonic reversal?
- Again, just in the movies.
- Speaking of movies...
Greetings, corporeal beings.
I'm not always 34 meters tall but when I am,
the square cube law increases my volume
more than the cross section of my muscles, and I collapse.
(shouting, thudding)
So, how do you fake a building-sized ghost of a corporate mascot
in the era before digital compositing?
Well, you make a miniature in the form of a guy in a suit,
and place him into an even smaller miniature of a street,
complete with realistic buildings, trees, and even model cars,
pulled on strings by every available member of the visual effects crew.
But no matter how realistic it all looks, it's not enough.
It takes an instant for this 1/24th scale Ecto-1 to drop a few centimeters,
but for a real car, this would constitute several meters.
to cover that distance at the same speed takes more time.
We can't simulate this by simply slowing down the footage.
The temporal information between frames just isn't there.
But, by filming at a higher frame rate than we play back,
we can effectively alter the scale of time itself
to match the scale of our miniatures.
Raising the frame rate in camera like this is called "overcranking".
In fact, there's a handy formula for figuring out exactly how much to overcrank.
You take the final playback frame rate,
and multiply it by the square root of the model's scale,
well, the larger number in the ratio of the model's scale.
You know what? Don't worry about it.
The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man shots in Ghostbusters
were overcranked at 72 frames per second.
Not because it was physically accurate,
but because that's what looked good to the filmmakers.
In the end, that's all that really matters.
(sighs): I love him. - Me too.
- And that's what I call movie magic.
- Fire it up! - Oh.
(intense music, guns powering)
Roast him! (electricity zapping)
- This would be a lot easier if we could actually see the proton stream.
- This is true. And it would also look a lot cooler.
But in the real world, you wouldn't.
But thankfully, we're not in the real world.
(groaning)
Thanks VFX artist!
(electricity crackling)
(roaring, explosion)
(police sirens)
- We did it! We saved the city! - Ah... mother puss bucket!
One thing that I should've mentioned earlier
is that the most dangerous part of a marshmallow creature
is when the marshmallow explodes,
because in the movie Ghostbusters when they do it,
there are some chunks of marshmallow,
but most of it is now liquid marshmallow,
which turns into a liquid between 112 to 116 degrees Celsius.
And if that landed on you, it would do this...
Since we can't pour molten marshmallow on a human,
we're going to use the flesh side of a pork shoulder
to see what happens.
Once that molten marshmallow hits your skin,
you would instantaneously receive third degree burns
anywhere your bare flesh made contact.
It's actually hard to see in this shot just how hot it is.
Oh. That's better.
And because the marshmallow is so viscous, so slow-moving,
it is on your skin for much longer
than something like boiling water.
So it would continue to burn you.
We can actually see here where it started to cook the meat of our test subject.
Yeah. So not great.
- According to my calculations,
there are now 203 metric tons of marshmallow falling from the sky,
which will completely crush anything it lands on.
- This won't end up like the Mad Max episode, right?
- Oh no, of course not.
We're going to come up with a much more creative way to end this one.
(intense music) And, as always...
(all): Thanks for watching.
- Oh. That wasn't too bad.
(Narrator):
(grunting)
The punch would go right through you and the result is devastating.
(Jake): How does venom kill you?
Welcome to the party pal!
Oh!
The effects of jumping 10 meters with a fire hose tied around
your waist are rather devastating.
- Ahh! - Oh! What is that?!
- No!