Phineas and Ferb is now ten years old, meaning that those of you who grew up watching it
are ready to enter the dating scene.
So in the hopes of helping you find your own true Isabella, it’s time to welcome you
back to MatPat’s Guide to Finding the One: Animal Magnetism Magnif-inator Edition.
“Hey baby, is there a magnet in your pants?
‘Cause my Magnetism Magnif-inator can’t resist your buns of steel.”
“Have you seen Perry?”
“Is that the name of your platypus?”
“No.”
“Oh.
Ooooh...”
“Hey girl, has anyone ever told you that you’re a Babe-inator with your settings
cranked up to STUNNING?”
“What’cha doin?”
“You.”
Hello, Internet.
Welcome to Film Theory, the show that looks at the animated characters who do crazy science
and does even crazier science off of their work.
Today, I'm returning to the world of Phineas and Ferb, which we did an episode on a couple
months back.
If you haven’t seen that one, definitely check it out--we basically prove that Dr.
Doofenshmirtz is secretly the good guy, a sleeper agent for the OWCA.
Episode is linked in the upper-right hand corner if you’re SO EXCITED that you need
to watch it RIGHT NOW well you know where to find it...otherwise, just click the link at the end.
But even though that episode talked about how ol’ Dr. Doof’s not such a bad guy
after all, it doesn’t mean he’s not without a few flaws.
Hey, we’ve all got our shortcomings...it just so happens to be that Dr. Doofenshmirtz’s
is literally his entire job.
Starting from the very beginning, episode 1 of the series, we see how this so-called
evil scientific genius basically doesn’t even science, bro.
This guy has hundreds of inventions over the course of the series, but the Magnetism Magnif-inator
from the pilot episode is not only the first we see, but it’s also one that gets referenced
time and again over the next four seasons.
Quickly, we must separate the magnet from the Magnifinator before it is too late...Is
it just me or is this a serious déjà vu moment?
I feel like I've totally been here before."
"That's it!
Agent P, you've got to get to that time machine and go back to the past, right before that
giant tin foil ball put you in a full body cast for eighteen months."
Basically, the Magnetic Magnifinator is a super-strong magnetic laser that somehow sucks
in a magnetic field on one end, amplifies it on the other, AND manages to shoot it directly
at a target, which in this case is all the skyscrapers on the Eastern Seaboard.
Dr. Doof’s plan is to cover the Eastern Seaboard in tinfoil, then use the Magnetism
Mangif-inator to pull on all the skyscrapers on the East Coast so that everything on the
East is pulled toward the West.
His goal is to ultimately wants to reverse the rotation of the Earth.
Why? Would you want to reverse the rotation of the earth?
...Well, that’s still up in the air.
"You may ask yourself, why would he do this?
Well, let me just answer that question, I haven't really worked on all the bugs yet.
I mean, tin foil alone costs a lot."
But is Dr. Doof’s most infamous invention of the series a scientific success or just
a load of electromagnetic excrement?
While it seems like this invention is a complete disaster in every way, today’s episode actually
looks at the science behind the Magnetic Mafnifinator to reveal just how advanced Doof is...and probably more accurately
how smart the creators of the show were in designing this thing...and then I'll just talk about the critical
flaw that makes it all fall apart.
Get ready --today is going to be one polarizing episode.
Polarizing episode.
Get it? Like Magnets?
Hey, I haven’t ever covered magnets, so I’ve got a lot of pent up puns to unleash
So even though he doesn’t know WHY he’s doing it, it’s clear Doof wants to reverse
the rotation of the Earth.
But already there’s a huge problem with that -- pretty much the first thing you learn
in physics: the concept of closed systems.
Yeah, dust off like the first 10 pages of your high school physics textbook for that
one.
In this case, the Eastern Seaboard that Doof is shooting the Magnificator at and his own
headquarters are both part of what's called a "closed system.”
According to classical physics, exerting a force inside a closed system doesn’t change
anything about the system relative to its surroundings.
In easier-to-understand terms, if Doof’s goal is to change the rotation of the early
in space he’s never going to do that by shooting one thing on the Earth at another
thing still on the Earth.
Trying to do this would be like trying to move a car by putting a moving tire inside
the vehicle -- nothing is going to change.
The only way for a car to move is for it to exert force against something external, like
the road.
By the same token, the only way to move an object like the Earth through space is for
the object to exert a force against something outside of itself.
When you’re able to do that, it’s called an OPEN system.
But in order for magnets to affect anything about the Earth’s rotation, he’d need
to be aiming the Magnifinator at the planet next door, not some tin foil a few buildings
away.
"As a lazy tailor would say, suit yourself!"
But ok, so cat’s out of the bag that he can’t change the rotation of the Earth.
But maybe he could have done something else interesting with the Magnifinator instead?
As it turns out, at the time of the premiere episode of Phineas and Ferb, Dr. Doofenshmirtz
was actually eight years ahead of his time with the Magnifinator.
No joke!
Believe it or not, astrophysicists have spent almost the last decade trying to catch up
to exactly what you see him doing in this episode.
Think that’s nuts?
Let’s take a closer look at the Magnetic Magnificator and see just what’s going on
here:
On the one end you have a huge magnet--seems to make sense if you’re trying to suck the
buildings right off the pavement with magnetism, but if you know something about magnetism
you’d immediately notice two huge problems right off the bat.
The first is that regular magnets don’t have directionality.
They have poles, but that doesn’t make them directional.
You can’t point a magnet like a gun and go, “Bang!
I just shot you really hard with this magnetic field!”
When you create a magnet, it honestly just kind of sits there and emanates a magnetic
field all around itself...not exactly threatening.
Problem two is that even if he has a strong magnet over here, it won’t do anything to
those buildings over there.
Magnetic strength works by the inverse cube law, which means that as two magnetic objects
get farther away, their attraction drops off exponentially.
An object that is twice as far away from a magnet will require 8 times as much strength
to attract it.
Increase the distance by ten times, and you'd need to increase the strength by a THOUSAND
times to compensate.
Dr. Doofenshmirtz is trying to use his magnet to pull on buildings a kilometer away, which
is basically impossible for any magnet that exists on Earth.
The strongest magnet that currently exists in the world today is located at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Florida,
which has a magnetic strength of 25 Tesla (that's the unit used to measure magnetic
field and not,you know, the car) -- that's half a million times stronger than the Earth’s own magnetic field, which
seems ridiculously strong, but remember that we as people living on the surface of the
Earth don’t even feel the Earth’s magnetic fields and the only way we ever even notice
it is if we’re using an instrument sensitive enough to detect it like a compass.
So to get around these problems Dr. Doof either needs to focus that magnet or find a way to
get the magnetic field a heck of a lot closer to those buildings.
And bizarrely enough, that’s exactly what we see him doing in the show.
You heard that right, Dr. Doof is doing exactly the right thing.
"I did not expect that..."
Take a look at the other parts of the Maginifinator, namely this tube here and what looks to be
a concentrated magnetic laser beam that he shoots toward the city.
He might not have known it at the time but these are now real things that the most advanced
physicists in the world are still developing.
The first is this magnetic pipe, or hose, which is 100% a real thing.
By placing a magnetic field close to the opening of a specialized tube, theoretical physicists,
or just “Theorists” as I like to call them, have actually managed to preserve a
magnetic field over much longer distances than the field would exist by itself.
Right now they believe they could actually preserve 90% of a magnetic field in a magnetic
superconductor hose, transporting magnetism in a way that previously seemed impossible.
The other thing that’s going on here is potentially even more exciting because it
doesn’t just involve magnets, it involves lasers, which are just inherently cool.
We can see that the Magnifinator doesn’t just seem to be a plain old magnetic field
generator, it’s a laser beam at one end.
Once again, Dr. Doof is actually way ahead of his time, creating what would have been
the world’s first super magnet laser, something that, as of 2016, is being built for the first time ever.
These magnet lasers are pretty much exactly what they sound like: ultra powerful lasers
that have the special ability of also creating extremely powerful magnetic fields--thousands
of times more powerful than any field humans have created in the past.
Basically these thing would be a lot like Metroid grapple beam.
The physics behind these things is incredibly complicated and if you’re a Faraday Effect
aficionado I invite you to dive into these things in the comments, but for what we’re
talking about right now I’m basically going to boil it up to the very top level.
Lasers--which are basically streams of super-energized electrons--start to get all kinds of special
properties as you turn up the intensity of the laser.
One of the special properties that starts to happen is radiation friction, or RF.
This is basically the friction of electrons at incredibly high energy levels, which gives
you more than just atomic rug burn, it actually creates an ultra-powerful magnetic field around
the laser beam.
Again, this is the made-for-Youtube version of this incredibly advanced science, so if
this sounds interesting to you, have a look at this stuff, it’s literally as close as
humans get to magic.
Anyway, what you come out of this process with is a magnetic field on the order of 1
Billion Gausse, which is a big number but doesn’t mean a lot if we don’t have anything
to compare it to.
So for comparison, an MRI machine creates a magnetic field of 70 thousand Gausse, which
is enough to interfere with pacemakers, metal prosthetics, or any other electronics that
end up inside it.
And this magnetic field is in the billions of Gausse, basically an astronomic level,
and can do things like contain nuclear fusion and rival the magnetic strength of a neutron
star.
You heard that right, Doof created a device that rivals the power of STARS!
So yeah, with that kind of magnetism, Dr. Doofenshmirtz could definitely do some serious
damage.
"If you give me another chance I promise to hurt you in the right way, with cartoonish physical violence and elaborate
traps made out of strange things I bought over the internet."
OK, so far we’ve found a way to make the Magnifinator possible, in theory.
But here’s where it all comes undone: To create what he thinks will be a super strong
magnetic attraction, Dr. Doofenshmirtz covers all the skyscrapers on the Eastern seaboard
with tin foil.
Let’s see what happens at the big moment when he’s going to rip them all up!
"Pull the Eastern Seaboard thereby reversing rotation of the -
“Oh, well that didn’t work.”
You bet it didn’t my little Doofle-pants.
Get your dipoles straight, my friend, you created the world’s first magnetic hose,
hooked up to the world’s most advanced magnetic laser in history which can literally harness
the power of effing STARS, but you forgot one thing...one CRUCIAL detail in your ENTIRE plot.
Tin foil isn’t magnetic.
While it's true that metals like iron, nickel, and cobalt are attracted to magnets, not all
metals are.
Ferromagnetism is the property that we use to describe things that are magnetic.
What we refer to as "tin foil" isn't magnetic and...isn’t actually made of tin, at least
not today.
Back in the 1800's, actual tin foil sheets were commonly used, but when it came to covering
food, they left everything they covered with a metallic flavor, which is why in the 1930s
and 40’s tin was replaced with cheaper, tastier aluminum.
But while switching to aluminum may help Doof’s tuna sandwich stay fresher, it’s not going
to help him create mega-magnets any sooner, since neither tin nor aluminum are magnetic.
In fact if anything, covering these buildings in foil is going to make it harder for the
pieces of these buildings that ARE magnetic, like all the steel, iron supports, or pipes,
to all come ripping out.
He’s literally creating a barrier against his own magnet laser.
And yes, technically iron foil does exist and would be magnetic here, but Dr. Doof specifically
says he uses tin foil because “I mean, tin foil alone costs a lot."
If he were to upgrade to iron foil, to cover even the one city section we see on screen
in the episode, which is just a tiny fraction of the real Eastern seaboard, it would cost
at least $742,500 and we know realistically that for the entire East Coast he’d have
to repeat this dozens or hundreds of different times.
So in the end, despite all the resources and incredibly advanced technology Dr. Doofenshmirtz
has at his fingertips, from ultra lasers to theoretical physics, his whole plan is undone
by not paying attention to the most fundamental rules of magnetism. The stuff that we learn in like third grade!
And instead of taking over the world in the very first episode, we got four more seasons
of Phineas and Ferb science to dissect.
So don’t worry, we’ll have plenty more of his plans to FOIL over on this channel, so make sure
you activate the SUBSCRIBE-INATOR you see on screen right now so you’re around as
we cover more classic Disney Channel and Nickelodeon shows, everything from Danny Phantom and Fairly
Oddparents to Drake and Josh and Zach and Cody.
Here’s our previous Phineas and Ferb episode on the left and remember, that’s just a Theory.
A Film Theory!
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