Translator: Gabriella Chihan Stanley Reviewer: Denise RQ
Alright.
In the 1660s, there were no internet videos.
I know that's kind of a profound statement.
Something you'd expect at TED, right?
What I want to do is explain how something used to happen.
A long time ago, if somebody had something interesting
or unexpected they wanted to explain to other people,
they had to do it in person, right?
A long time ago there was a guy named Prince Rupert of Bavaria,
and he had something very interesting he wanted to show people about science.
I'm going to do it right now, just as he used to.
First of all, let me get this set up, I've borrowed a glass from my hotel room.
Just borrowed it, alright?
(Laughter)
I need to goggle up because science is about to happen.
Let's get ready here.
Behold!
I don't know if you knew this or not, but glass - let's see I've got a hammer-
Here we go.
(Glass breaking) Thank you. Yes, I know.
(Laughter)
It's pretty awesome.
(Applause)
So glass breaks, right?
Prince Rupert of Bavaria brought something over to King Charles II in England
and he wanted to show it to him because it was different.
Look at this.
This is called The Prince Rupert's Drop because of that guy right there.
(Laughter)
But it's just a little bit different.
If you take it and you tap it with the same hammer
(hammer hits)
it won't break, even though it's glass.
Isn't that weird?
There's something different about this
If you take the tail - you've got a bulb, and you've got a tail -
if I just nick the very end of it, watch what happens: it doesn't break,
it does something a bit crazier than that.
(Glass shattering)
It explodes.
It's a little unexpected, isn't it?
So, that's called a Prince Rupert's Drop.
A long time ago, if you were to explain a phenomenon like that
you had to get in front of people to show it to them, just as I just did.
Which is pretty cool, but you can show it to what 1,000 people?
But this will be on the Internet.
How many people are going to see it? A lot.
I've been doing this for the past several years.
I've been creating internet videos showing phenomena like this, the unexpected,
to all different kinds of people.
That's a Prince Rupert's Drop.
We filmed it with a high-speed camera at 100,000 frames per second.
And I explained the science behind how it works.
I won't tell you about it right now because I want your internet view.
I let you go and look at that yourself.
"The Mystery of Prince Rupert's Drop."
Right now, about 4 million people have seen that.
It's pretty cool, right?
So, that's what I do. My name is Destin Sandlin.
I have a YouTube channel called Smarter Every Day.
And basically, I go around trying to discover the unexpected things.
The things that are right in front of you, but you don't really know about them.
This is how I got started.
I know, it's a chicken. So, check this out.
So, everybody has seen a chicken, right?
This is Vienna.
This is kind of high class so you guys might not own chickens like we do.
(Laughter)
But I own chickens.
And my daughter gets eggs for us.
I don't know if you knew this, but if you take a chicken
and you move it around...
Have you seen this?
Just watch.
If you move him around, his head would be in one spot.
Check this out.
(Video) ...and where the rotating motion is going so they can compensate for it.
But chickens are very good at this. I'll show you.
Watch his head, totally stationary
(Laughter)
as I move his body
(Laughter)
I can move his body in pretty much in any direction
and his head stays rock solid in one position.
DS: Yeah, yeah, I get it, I get it. (Laughter)
This is very hard to do, so anyway...
Are you laughing at me or with me?
(Laughter)
What I want to explain about this video is when I put this video up...
(Laughter)
You're supposed to be listening to me! This is a TED talk.
(Laughter)
Listen to me.
(Applause)
OK.
Listen! Listen!
I have a really important point,
and it's going to make you feel important and stuff; just listen.
So, when I put that video up on the Internet,
I wasn't thinking, "Hey, pretty cool. Check it out."
"Chicken does this, chicken does that. I love it."
I put that video on the Internet because at the time I was taking classes,
I'm still wearing glasses, aren't I?
I was taking classes in guidance and control,
and I understood that that chicken was a closed loop system.
And what he was doing was tracking
the position of his head based on two things:
based on inertial input from his body and also an optical input
which is really fascinating.
We have something called the vestibulo-ocular reflex,
to track things with our eyes like this.
I can move my head. I can track you.
Chickens can't do that, which is why they put their head in a spot,
and then they walk under their head.
They put their head in a spot and walk under their head again.
Does that make sense? (Laughter)
That's the level I was at when I made this video.
I put it on the Internet and everybody reacted the same:
"Oh, look at that redneck with his little chicken. Isn't that funny?
(Laughter)
I realized at that point in time
I was like, "So, I just played with a chicken on the Internet,
and millions of people like it for totally different reasons than why I do.
What is going on?
So anyway, I kept doing it.
This is a video of me with my children.
And I don't know if you know this, but if we go forward in a car
(Video) ...and we're just going to drive forward, we're going to accelerate.
If we go that way, which direction do you think this pendulum will go?
DS: What do you think?
Driving forward.
(Video) Daughter: Yes! DS: Which way is it going?
Daughter: My way.
DS: That's right. Because I'm accelerating, right?
DS: That makes sense, right?
(Video) Now I'm going to replace this pendulum with a balloon.
We should see the same thing, right? We cut this off.
What we're going to do is we're going to accelerate that way.
We have the mass of the balloon in the acceleration.
That should emit a force that would have to react with the string.
Are you guys ready?
Daughter: Yes, sir.
3...2...1...Go.
Wait a second!
DS: What's happening there?
(Video) What did just happen?
Its a little unexpected, isn't it?
But this stuff is all around you. You're just not looking for it.
Seriously. Like this morning,
We ate breakfast at the hotel where I stole that glass from.
I'm going to have to figure that one out.
There you can put honey on your toast in the morning. Do you guys ever do this?
If you take honey and you drizzle it on your toast,
this is something called The Liquid Rope-Coil Effect.
Have you ever seen this? This might've happened in front of you.
You just haven't see it because it wasn't at 100,000 fps.
But this is very complicated, and you can do this every morning.
If you look at it, this coil here is a super duper complicated math function.
We've got the diameter of the liquid rope there at the top,
and the diameter of the bottom, - they're different -
then we have the mass flow rate,
and then we can calculate an orbital frequency of honey.
What is interesting about this is I've seen this a lot in my life.
But I've never taken the moment to think about what it was.
Because this is still not understood fully by science.
Did you know that?
No, seriously, we don't know exactly what happens.
We know there's 4 regimes that it operates in:
there's the inertial regime, there's the gravitational regime,
there's something called the inertio-gravitational regime.
We don't really understand it.
We do know it's a 17th-order polynomial with 18 boundary conditions,
but we don't know what that means.
(Laughter)
This stuff is all over the place; I promise you, you'll see something
on the way home if you just look at the world a little differently.
People ask me [this] often when they meet me.
They say, "Where do you get your ideas for these videos?"
And the real answer is I have no idea. I really don't.
I just look at the world a little bit differently.
And this is what I want to challenge you to do.
This is all I want. Hear nothing else in this whole TEDx thing.
I want you to hear this. Look at the world differently.
You got it?
Because If you do, you're going to see things
that are more beautiful than you ever thought of before
even though they were right in front of your face the whole time.
I also want to say and it's not lost for me if I'm saying this at a TEDx event
in a world of talkers, you need to be a thinker and a doer, OK?
You've heard a lot of talking. I'm talking.
But in a world of talkers, you need to be a thinker and a doer
because that's where crazy stuff starts happening.
Until you actually do something, you're not going to experience anything strange.
Make a discovery, perhaps.
I was asked to go to the rainforest.
Do you ever read the YouTube comments?
(Laughter)
Anybody ever read comments on YouTube?
It's pretty bad stuff. Never read the comments.
I made the mistake of reading them one time,
and this guy, I promise this is how it happens,
he was like, "Hey, what would you do if you went to the rainforest for a week?"
I was like, "That was a strange comment, out of 1,500 comments on this video."
I think I will... "Well, I don't know what I would do. Why do you ask?"
And this guy asked me to come to the rainforest.
What do you do when people ask you to go to the jungle on the Internet?
You go to the jungle. That's what I did.
I went down to the Tambopata Research Center in South America in Peru,
and I just started exploring; I had no business there.
I'm an airspace engineer from Alabama.
(Laughter)
Yeah, let's go to the rainforest.
(Laughter)
So I did.
I went with a buddy of mine named Gordon McGladdery. He's an audio engineer.
I also met a couple of guys down there, Jeff and Phil.
We just walked around the jungle and just did stuff.
And we came across this.
Which is a pile of caterpillars.
And most people, when they see a pile of caterpillars, they're like:
"Well, that's weird. Why do caterpillars do that?"
"Are they trying to look life feces so something doesn't try to eat them?"
What are they doing?
I started looking at them a little bit more
because I've done some motion control stuff.
And then I've realized that the caterpillar on top
is actually not having to walk as much as the caterpillar on the bottom.
Does that make sense?
This caterpillar on the bottom is moving,
and the caterpillar above him is moving on top of him.
And then I got to realize it, because I used my engineer brain
and I looked at it a bit different because I'm not an entomologist.
I realized the whole group of caterpillars
can move faster if they move as a group.
Does that make any sense?
I came home like, "Surely, this is a well-known phenomenon.
I started googling trying to figure out what's going on.
Nobody talked about it before because they didn't have an idiot from Alabama
down there looking at a pile of caterpillars in the rainforest.
Does that make sense?
What I'm saying is look at at the world differently
because that's where discoveries happen.
Here's another interesting discovery we made:
Gordon, my friend-- We're tired. We're in the jungle.
Haven't slept very well. It's all sweaty at night.
And Gordon is like, "I kind of want to go on a jungle walk to record some audio."
"Because that's what I do. I'm an audio engineer."
"Whatever, Gordon. I'll go with you."
Phill Torres, A buddy of ours is down there too, he's an entomologist.
We say, "Hey, Phil! Can we go on a jungle walk
and you take us to places where we don't get bit by animals that'll kill us?"
He said, "Yeah, let's go."
We're walking and walking through the jungle
and all of the sudden, Gordon says, "What is this?"
I said, "I don't know. What is it?" It's a spider.
We pick up the spider, and we start looking at it,
and it's actually a spider that has never been documented before.
That is not the spider on the left. That is a fake spider made by a spider.
(Laughter)
Seriously. Eight legs. They're made from debris in his web.
He's even got an abdomen that he has created.
And he's got a cephalothorax, just like real spiders.
But it's a spider that made that. And I caught the moment on video.
Did we potentially discover a new species? Watch this.
(Video) It's a tiny spider disguised as a big spider.
Shut up. Weird!
(Laughter)
DS: Yeah!
(Laughter)
You can hear the Alabama just coming through it, right?
(Laughter)
(Video) OK, so we're in the jungle, and our current theory is
that this tiny, tiny, tiny spider at the top of this
- give me backlight there Gordon, so I can get it -
This tiny spider has created-- is that dust or what are we thinking?
No idea. Debris or something. Debris that looks like a big spider.
And he's vibrating the whole web to make it look like he's a big spider.
DS: Listen to what I say here.
(Video) This doesn't seem like it can be true.
DS: This doesn't seem like it can be true.
So, that happened.
We discover a potentially new spider species in the rainforest.
We didn't know what we were looking at,
but we were looking at it a bit differently; that's awesome!
You can't plan stuff like that. But this is the point here.
Discoveries often happen when you venture into the unknown.
When you get outside of your comfort zone. You don't know what you're doing.
And if this seems like some kind of revelation to you,
then you don't know the definition of the word 'discovery'
because discoveries don't happen in places where things have been discovered.
I think I've said that right. You get what I'm saying.
In order to discover something awesome,
you have to be somewhere you don't really know what's going on.
So that's what we did.
Are you in a place in your life where you can make discoveries?
Think about that.
You might think this piece of paper is interesting.
People think I do YouTube videos
because [some say], "Hey, you're real big on Youtube. That's a big thing."
Not really. This is why I do it.
This is a letter I got from NASA telling me I'm not qualified to be an astronaut.
(Laughter)
I've got 2 of these, actually. I've got 2 of these letters.
I want to be an astronaut. I do.
People say, "I want to be an astronaut. That would be cool."
Ah! You want to be an astronaut! I really want to be an astronaut.
I'm not just saying it. I do stuff to try to be an astronaut.
This is my granddad. This is why I think I have the motivation to be an astronaut.
When I was young, he worked for NASA, and he worked on rockets.
He worked on big stands that you test rockets on.
We would walk outside at night when I spent the night with him.
He looked at the sky and said, "Look! the Pleiades! The 7 sisters."
"Look at Sagittarius."
We just breathed space.
We were always reading books about Mars. All this stuff.
Even the way granddaddy would talk to me was different.
He would say-- He wouldn't say I love you. You know, granddads love their grandsons.
He wouldn't say I love you. He said something weird.
He said, "I love you to the comet belt and back."
What the heck does that mean?
(Laughter)
I'm 10. I don't understand what a comet belt is
and why granddaddy loves me there; I don't get it.
He said, "I love you to the comet belt." More about that later.
That's pretty interesting to say to a 10 year old, I think.
I wanted to be an astronaut so I decided to do things that astronauts would do.
On the top left is the moon buggy. You had to fold it out.
And you had to be able to drive it off.
You might not know anyone with a moon buggy scar,
but I actually have a scar on my leg from this moon buggy.
My wife made me do that. She was in the passenger seat.
Made me pedal harder.
Anyway, I did things that looked like space things.
I did undergraduate research to get the flaunt of Vomit Comet
(Laughter)
or as they call it, The Weightless Wonder.
I just wanted to be an astronaut.
I still do. So, what kind of things do you study? This sort of stuff.
It's really cool by the way. We can talk about that later if anybody wants to.
Then I started reaching out
and tried to talk to people that did these things for real.
I explained one time on YouTube how cats, if you drop them, they'll flip.
And it seems that they violate the conservation of energy-momentum
if you know anything about science.
But they actually don't.
Cat flipping
- you might not know it, this goes back to look at the world differently -
is one of the most complicated things you can do on paper when it comes to math.
It's very, very complicated.
I asked the guys up in the space station how a cat flips
without touching anything and inserting rotational momentum into his system.
(Laughter)
So NASA hears that and said that's not actually a bad question.
Let's talk to the astronauts and have them do it
and demonstrate it for this guy in Alabama.
That's what we did.
That's the kind of thing that I'm doing.
I'm just trying to look at the world differently.
And I want you to do the same.
In a world of talkers, I want you to be a thinker and a doer.
Does it make sense to drop a cat in a back yard, film it and try to analyze it?
Well, heck yeah it does. It's awesome!
(Laughter)
Does it make sense to go to the rainforest
and try to figure out a pile of caterpillars?
Yeah! It's pretty awesome.
But in a world of talkers, are you being a thinker and a doer?
Think about that.
I'm trying to.
I'm trying to look at the world differently.
Something else happened. My granddad died.
I went off to the university and I was studying.
I'm trying to be an astronaut and all those good stuff,
and I realized something one day.
I realized that I was in a class,
and I was calculating the delta-V requirements for a manned mission to Mars.
On paper. You can do that. It's easy math.
I'm sitting there doing the math,
and I realized my granddaddy knew he wasn't going to be around
to get me excited about all this stuff forever, he was going to die.
But when he told that 10-year-old boy, "I love you to the comet belt,"
and made no sense to the 10-year-old boy, I had this moment.
I was sitting doing my math, and it clicked in my head.
I looked up, there was a bunch of people pencil-whipping things around the room.
And I looked up, and I was like, "Oh my goodness, the comet belt!"
He loves me to the comet belt. The comet belt is on the other side of Mars.
And then I looked at my piece of paper,
and I looked at the delta-v requirements for different stages of of the mission,
and I said It's not only possible for man to go to Mars.
It's probable. It's going to happen.
I was looking at the paper, and then I had that moment,
and I realized that my granddaddy was trying to get me excited
about something long after he was dead.
And all he did was investing a little time in my life and do that.
It's a very personal thing.
It might not mean this much to you, but to me, this is everything.
When I realized that in a world of talkers I was a thinker and a doer,
and I can look at the world differently, just because my granddaddy did that for me
a long time ago and told me how to view the world,
if I spent a bit of time doing that with my own children
and with maybe your children by showing them the same stuff on the Internet,
that perhaps we can all change the world.
Does that make sense?
I'm not sure if I'm making the point exactly clear,
but what I want to make sure you understand
is that in a world of talkers, you have to be a thinker and a doer.
You have to look at the world differently
because when you do that, you do crazy things.
You inspire the next generation of people to do stuff you're not capable of doing
because the technology doesn't exist yet.
You change things,
just because instead of talking about stuff, you're doing stuff.
I'm Destin. Get smarter every day. Have a good one.
(Applause)