DIANNA COWERN: This episode is supported by Squarespace.
Whoo!
Bounce pass!
[SCREAMING]
It's a good thing everything on that plane was padded.
I got my butt kicked in zero-G. It was--
[SCREAMING]
This was the coolest thing I've ever done.
This giant plane is going to go up at 50 degrees and dive
back down toward the earth.
We're taking off.
DEREK MULLER: Here we go.
I think I'm gonna pee my pants.
Oh my god.
I'm not as nervous as a normal--
You're not?
Just kidding.
(VOICEOVER) I'm irrationally terrified of normal flying.
They're really climbing at a high rate right now.
Seat belt sign is on, so that means everybody
is getting up and going around.
Aaaah.
Aaaah, I think this is where we set up.
We were on the zero-G plane with Novespace in France--
like, in the air off the coast of France.
The vomit comet, the micro-gravity meteor--
that one was all me.
I've been dreaming about this for three years,
ever since I made a video with Emily Calandrelli talking
about how the zero-G flight works.
Number one thing on my bucket list!
And then Simone got to go and I was like, you know what?
I'm just going to save it.
Five years from now, it's going to happen, and in the meantime
I'll just build up the yearning.
And then bam, Bruce from the YouTube channel E-Penser
invited me and Derek Muller from Veritasium
and said, if you can get yourselves to Bordeaux, France,
you can come on the zero-G flight.
Oh my god.
OK.
Oh my god.
Slowly.
Holy.
That is so strange.
Oh my god.
My head is not--
aaaah!
Oh my god.
Wow, wow, whoa, ooh!
[CHATTER]
Whoa.
Wow.
What happened?
Lay down, lay down.
Oh my goodness.
I didn't know that was the whole thing.
That was awesome.
That was crazy.
That was amazing.
I look like a little kid in a onesie that got woken up
in the middle of the night and is like, whose world is this?
OK, so the counting you heard--
30, 40.
40 degrees.
--was the pilots telling each other the degrees that
the plane was flying along its trajectory and this was
a training flight for pilots, which, I know how that sounds,
but it just means the pilots are making sure they're flying
these types of zero-G flights often enough.
They were awesome pilots.
Plus it meant that there were only four of us instead of 10
with so much space.
Get ready, go for it.
Whoo!
Oh my goodness.
DIANNA COWERN: And there was a dancer on our flight,
and a startup testing VR goggles, which I got to try.
There's so much to tell you, and I
wasn't telling you a whole lot of words during the flight.
Oh my god.
Oh my goodness.
Wow.
Oh wow.
Wow.
Whoa!
Wow.
OK, so you're not weightless the whole time, because in order
to feel weightless, the plane needs to either go up
slowing down or dive down toward the earth,
accelerating at the same rate gravity
would accelerate your body if you were
falling with no air resistance.
And guess how long it would take you
to fall from cruising altitude at 37,000
feet to the surface of the earth, while feeling weightless
the whole time and with no air resistance?
48 seconds.
That's it.
So as a safer alternative, these planes
go up for 11 seconds slowing down and then
down for 11 seconds speeding up, so you're
weightless for 22 seconds each parabola.
It's the same phenomenon as going over the top of a roller
coaster, but perfectly timed and balanced
to match gravitational acceleration.
But then they repeat that over and over
and over for about five minutes of microgravity
over the whole flight.
We did 14 zero-G or microgravity parabolas,
plus one parabola of Mars gravity--
I feel so strong.
--and two of moon gravity.
Whoo!
This-- whoo!
And no, it feels nothing like skydiving, which, to be honest,
I've only done inside in a wind tunnel with VR goggles on,
which is a whole bunch of other physics.
Anyway, before the weightless part of the parabola,
you go into a pull up and then a pull out
that both press you into the floor.
DEREK MULLER: I can't believe that when we're climbing,
the g-force will be more than in the space shuttle.
Yeah.
I was surprised to know.
One point--
Eight.
Eight Gs.
During this part of the flight, you
feel like someone piled a bunch of mattresses
on top of your body.
I like it.
No peas involved.
Oh, and no peeing, either.
Well, I think that they had a contraption you could have
used, but there were no bathrooms on the plane,
for obvious reasons.
And they provide barf bags because--
Oh my god, oh my god.
But to answer your question, no, I did not get sick,
and neither did anyone else on this flight.
Thank you, modern medicine, because we actually
got a shot before the flight that's supposed to help you
with motion sickness.
But it makes your mouth really dry.
Dry mouth already?
Yeah, lots of dry mouth.
And it made us super loopy.
Is your head spinning?
Yeah, my head's spinning.
All of us--
I feel a little bit weird.
Yeah, I feel very weird.
We feel weird.
Maybe that enhanced the experience.
So during the 1.8 Gs, you feel your jaw drooping
and it's impossible to lift your legs.
And I tried jumping and it blew my mind.
I thought it would feel, you know, hard to jump,
but it didn't at all.
Jumping was fine.
But then it felt like the floor was coming up to meet my feet,
which it kind of is, because after you jump, then
the floor is coming up faster than when you left the ground.
It's just like when you try jumping
at the bottom of an elevator when
it's just starting to go up.
And then the pilots say "Injection,"
and you hear this droning drop in the sound
and that's where it's freaky, because you're
going from 1.8 Gs to no Gs, and it
feels like your stomach is coming out of your feet.
This was, no joke, the most amazing experience of my life.
But I'm a clumsy human, so combine that
with a weightless environment and there were mishaps.
I haven't even gotten to the ferrofluid.
We brought some demos on the plane
to try and see what would happen,
but it's really hard to imagine what's
going to happen to things in zero-G
when you've never experienced it before.
So I asked for Derek to spin a top on a platform,
but you can't spin something on something else
when there's no gravity to pull it down.
So he did spin it, but it just flew across the plane.
And then there was our attempt to take a floating selfie--
also my brilliant idea.
And the gyroscope-- that sad moment
when he grabbed it and stopped it from spinning.
But my big grandiose plan was to show you
guys some ferrofluid, and I was imagining a blob of ferrofluid,
a giant neodymium magnet, and like "whoosh" in zero gravity!
And then they said no open ferrofluid,
because this is what happens to liquids in zero-G.
And with all of this worry and focus on the ferrofluid,
this is the best footage I got.
OK.
It didn't--
[CHATTER]
I think that was the biggest difference
in, like, super amazing idea to lamest execution I've ever had.
But I got some other amazing shots of the gyroscope spinning
in the same direction, and you can see here
the gyroscope starts precessing.
And before the flight, we tied some helium balloons
to the ground.
What is going to happen when we go zero-G?
So first you-- you've got a climbing part.
I'm going to guess that it comes up a little bit.
I'm going to guess it comes up a little bit.
Yeah.
Sure enough, they go downward because of the release tension
in the string, and they end up on the floor.
So the ferrofluid was a huge failure,
but this is the thing--
when you're in such an unpredictable
and unfamiliar and unusual environment,
you'll have some epic failures but also some fantastic
discoveries, like when I got invited
to try the VR goggles during a last Hail Mary parabola.
These guys have to deal with the fact
that in a zero-G environment, you're falling.
VR headsets are not typically programmed
to be constantly accelerating toward the ground at 9.81
meters per second squared.
So these guys have to deal with that balance
and the constant adjustments of microgravity,
and you're left with an incredible experience.
Looking around at the space station and the Northern Lights
and galaxies and back at earth, all while feeling weightless--
oh my gosh, wow.
And then it was over.
I want to say a huge thank you to Bruce, because none of this
would have happened without that dude.
And thank you to Novespace, who made
this an incredible experience by showing me
just why we wear these--
so they can grab us and turn us legs side down.
And now I'm going to tell you about the videos
that Derek and Bruce made while you
get to watch footage of me landing
in the cockpit with the pilots.
By the way, I'll put links to these videos
in the description.
But Bruce brought a Tardis on the plane
and he did a bunch of flips, so if you
want to watch a really entertaining French guy,
check out Bruce's video.
And Derek brought a lighter on the plane
and was able to fill a flame in zero-G, so check that out.
Both links are in the description.
Hey, thank you for watching this video and happy physics-ing.
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And then it was over.