Matthew Dea

– Have you ever seen a
rock that isn’t a rock? I mean, like, have you ever seen a rock, that is something resembling a stone, but wasn’t formed by natural processes? I have, it’s something very
interesting produced by humans, through our factory
processes, and it is this. It is called fordite. Why is the word fordite used, though? Well, it’s because it
is actually an aggregate of enamel paint coating,
used on old Ford cars. From the 40s, all the way
up through the 70s and 80s. And as they were painting
these cars, excess of it would run off on to the
factory floor plant, and get on pieces of equipment and stuff. It would take about 1000 layers of paint to make about an inch of this material that you’re seeing now. But then some workers found
out that you can polish and shape this stuff like actual stone. And so fordite became
something of a material, that you could sell,
and make into jewelry. Fordite is on the market right
now, and you can buy some. But there’s a limited amount. Because they changed the
system that painted the cars, much more efficient, and so
now, there isn’t this buildup of excess paint on factory floors. And so fordite is a limited quantity, and it’s quite beautiful. A human-made gem, born
out of inefficiency. (laughs) What is, it, baseball? (laughs) Yeah, that’s right. Baseball sucks. (bouncy techno music) Hello, and welcome to another
edition of “Footnotes”, the companion show to “Because Science”, where I take all of your
comments, questions, and corrections, and I peel them back like aggregate layers of enamel paint, and then I break some off, and I polish it up into
a stone of science. And then, I tell you what’s
coming up on this channel next. Hint, it involves neutron stars, and doing dangerous stuff with it. Who would’ve thought? But, getting right into
it, in the last episode of “Because Science”, we
were trying to figure out what a Darksaber is. A singular weapon, crafted by
the first Mandalorian Jedi. If it’s supposed to
function like a lightsaber, what makes a darksaber the way it is? How does it have the
properties that it has? In the full episode, which you can watch, if you haven’t yet, I
said that if the Darksaber was a black hole blade,
then it would explain the absence of light in the blade, it might explain the glow,
the hot glow around the edge of the blade, as some
sort of accretion disk, like forms around black
holes, and that accretion disk could be so hot it might,
in fact, cut stuff. Of course, my explanation
created just as many problems as it attempted to solve, but hey, sometimes you just gotta get ripped apart by intensely strong
magnetic fields, which, what did you have to say? Our first comment comes
from Neo Spacian Sushi Roll, who says “I have a hypothesis
about how the darksabers work. “They look cool, so it works.” That’s how things in Star
Wars works, it’s cool. It is inarguable, that
Star Wars, as a franchise, created some of the
coolest sci fi designs, of all time. No doubt that’s why they have stuck around for the last couple of
decades, and they’ve influenced so much science fiction going forward. If it’s cool, it’s cool. I mean, lightsabers are awesome,
but as for an explanation, it’d be a lot cooler if they had one. Yes it would. My hero’s myself in 10 years, you know what I’m talkin’ ’bout? Yellstr has a comment, which
says “Hey Kyle, great show.” Eh. “Is there any science
currently which could explain “such sci-fi concepts as force
fields or force shields?” Well, yes, but you would
need some sort of field, like a gravitational
field, a magnetic field, an electrical field, that could
impose a force on an object moving through that field. So say we’re making a spaceship, and we want to deflect
incoming cosmic radiation. How do we protect ourselves? Well, one of the ideas
is to create a kind of magnetic force field or
force shield, if you will, and this involves
projecting a magnetic field outside of the spacecraft. Kind of like how the earth’s
magnetosphere’s projected outside of the sphere of the earth itself by the dynamo spinning at the core. So if we projected a magnetic field outside of our spaceship,
when those particles, those cosmic particles,
encounter the magnetic field, they would experience some
force from the magnetic field, and would be diverted
around our spaceship. This would be a real-ish force field. From anything to divert
bullets, or lightsabers, you would need something a lot stronger. Something that would have a lot of knock-on effects that you’d notice. Like, you know, ripping
everything apart near you. Alejandro Fernandez Castro
says “Kyle, who do you talk to “at the end of the videos?” Oh, you mean them? I wouldn’t worry about them. Don’t you dare get on camera. Douglas Wallace, ray33,
braingasim, and others, say well, for a darksaber, what
about using antimatter? How would that work? Antimatter is cool, and
as you know, in Star Wars, all right, all right,
all right, cool rules. But anitmatter would be a pretty bad thing to make a blade that you
hold near your face out of. If, for no other reason, then sure, you could contain antimatter
inside a magnetic field, like a magnetic trap, so
that it doesn’t interact with anything, and it
doesn’t, you know, explode. But once you bring that lightsaber into contact with anything,
if the blade is made out of antimatter, that
antimatter will react with the matter that it
touches and annihilate, releasing energy according
to E=MC², and if you had a lightsaber blade’s worth of antimatter, and you contacted that
blade with a blade’s worth of normal matter, it
would create an explosion large enough to level the city. Unless your whole planet was a city. Then it would just be part of it. It’s a Coruscant joke. But the nerdiest comment at the
time I’m filming this video, I gotta give to Lars van
den Biggolaar, who says: “So what Kyle is saying at
the beginning of the video, “is that lightsabers’ colors “are dependent on their
temperatures, right? “If so, then I have two questions.” And I wanna get to your first one. “Could you consider blue lightsabers “to be more dangerous than red ones, “as they seemingly have
a higher temperature?” So yes, according to that
Wien’s displacement law that we looked at, during the episode, blue to bluish-white hot, is the hottest region of visible light. If something is blue or
white-hot, it is the hottest. And if it is reddish, or
orangeish, then it is red hot, but that is necessarily
at a lower temperature. It has to be if it’s acting
like black body radiation. So yes, even through the
temperature difference isn’t all that much, relatively speaking. You still have thousands of Kelvin, versus thousands of Kelvin,
but a Jedi’s blue lightsaber, usually wielded by Jedi, right, would be technically physically
hotter, in our estimation, than a Sith’s red lightsaber,
and you’d wanna fear the blue one more. Strong the light side of the Force is. And hotter our lightsabers do. They cut that line. I did submit it to Lucas, but he cut it. Don’t you dare get on camera. But, Lars, for that very
interesting point, you are indeed, a super nerd. (yells) But of course, I’m not always right. Sometimes, I’m Kylo wrong. So what did I get wrong last week? It’s a Star Wars pun. A bad one. Oh, and if you were
watching outside of the time when I published this video,
and you want to correct me on something, I’m sure that you do, make sure that you like and
subscribe to this channel, and hit that notification
bell so that you can get all the video notifications,
so you can get in there and say oh, but Kyle, (yelling) Our first correction comes from
super nerd Infinite Asseem, who says: “Okay, I did some
research, and I found out “what’s much more viable
than a black hole sword. “It’s just a regular
lightsaber that contains “an invisible plasma. “In the Korean tokemak KSTAR,
which you can read about, “the plasma here is a
blistering 150,000,000° C, “and it isn’t visible, because
it simply doesn’t emit light “in the visible spectrum.” A darksaber could be that. Well, Infinite, I do like your comment, but two problems with it. One, just like you said,
if it’s not emitting any visible light, it wouldn’t necessarily
look black, would it? That’s something that is
taking in all the radiation, like a perfect black body,
or like a black hole, like we suggested. And, if you look up footage of tokemak reactors switching
on, and in operation, I’m not totally sure what
you’re talking about. Because I can see a lotta
hot, hot plasma in there. And I wouldn’t wanna touch it. Don’t touch it. Don’t touch it! Hey. Kevkiller 777 has a correction. He says “Humans breathe oxygen.” Citation needed. “But in the episode you were
drawing lots of helium atoms. “Does that mean you breathe helium? “Does that mean you’re not from earth? “Does that mean you’re
an alien supervillain “who wants to replace all
oxygen on earth with helium?” (gasps) No, that’s completely ridiculous. I don’t breath only helium. (speaking gibberish) What a weird correction. Another big correction comes
from doomforzombies who says “The dark saber shouldn’t cut
through a Mandalorian helmet.” And in the opening of the episode, I have Boba Fett’s helmet
being cut by a lightsaber, but of course, as you
know, a Mandalorian armor is the only armor in
the Star Wars universe that can repel a lightsaber attack, so it wouldn’t necessarily
cut through Boba Fett’s helmet like that, like I showed,
just to illustrate the point of lightsabers cutting stuff. Come on. But the nerdiest correction at the time I’m filming this episode,
I’m giving to Adrien, who says “Hey Kyle, love the show. “One quick observation. “If the light emitted by a
lightsaber was simply due “to the heat alone of its plasma,
as dictated by Wien’s Law, “then you could not have
all the colors that we see “in the movies. “You could only add up the colors “from the large wavelength
end of the spectrum “to the smaller wavelength
end, ie red, orange, yellow, “then white, and eventually
blue for the hottest plasmas. “In the same way there are no green stars, “there could be no green lightsaber.” in case you’ve never thought
about this, no there are, in fact, no green stars in the universe. Some stars may look green, to our eyes, after the light passes
through the atmosphere, but this is an optical illusion. There are no green stars, period. And that’s because, if
starts are emitting light like near-perfect black
body radiators, as they are, then we can actually characterize
how that light will look in the visible portion of the spectrum. And it just so happens
that even though some stars can emit most of their wavelengths in green light specifically,
because they’re also emitting red light and blue light, because of how all those colors combine, no stars will ever look
green, at least according to the physics here in this universe. And as long as Star Wars is
still in the same universe, if it’s just using plasma
alone and temperature like you’re saying, Adrien, then there can be no green lightsabers. It would have to be more
like a gas discharge mercury vapor kind of thing going on, but then it wouldn’t be hot
enough to cut through stuff, and this is a great correction. So you are a super nerd. (rock music) Had to get that out. And now, moving right along
to this week’s episode of “Because Science”, you can
get this at the Nerdist store. The next episode of “Because Science” is the neutron star slingshot. That’s right, in the next
episode of “Because Science”, we are delving into decades-old research, into a kind of gravitational machine, featuring neutron stars,
which may end up being the ultimate in
interstellar transportation. (laughs) You thought I was gonna
say somethin’ didn’t you? Didn’t you? But before we get to the
neutron star slingshot, please go watch the latest
episode of “Because Science” if you haven’t yet, all
about whatever it was, and leave me your best comments,
corrections, and questions at youTube.com/becausescience,
facebook.com/becausescience, and @BecauseScience on
wherever you type that in and you get stuff and it is me. And don’t forget, I
don’t know who out there needs to hear this, so
I’m not gonna say it. (gentle electronic music) (logo buzzes) (logo whirs)