Hyperbolic Time Spaceship | Because Science Live

[akizeta]

23:40 Just to raise the complication level a bit, while you're right about the way a helicopter works in mid-air, you do actually have an effect near the ground — called, curiously enough, 'ground effect' — where the mass of air pushed down from the rotors is stopped by the ground, so it has to change direction and spread out sideways. This has the effect of raising the air pressure under the rotor, so improving lift from the blades. The effect peters out at the height equal to the rotor blade diameter, and has a distinct effect on the handling of the helicopter. (And in fact is a feature of emergency landing helicopters after power has gone, the idea being to let the rotor pinwheel at neutral pitch until you're close to the ground, then increase the rotor pitch at that rotor-diameter height to get the most lift before the rotor slows to a stop.)

Meanwhile, you can use a smaller fan and trap most of the air in a rubber skirt (kinky!), letting it bleed out the edges. You get a much greater pressure under the fan than a helicopter, so you don't need so much power. I forget what they call these craft that hover now.... Anyway, when they're over the water these hovering craft push the water down under their skirts, so that there's a dip in the water surface under them (and a lot of spray). They don't cope with rough water terribly well, though, needing more power to maintain air pressure in the skirt as the air leaks away more readily.

Also, ground affect is a thing you see in fixed-wing planes, especially on landing. You can see aircraft of all types as they get close to the runway quickly lose their downward momentum and skim along the runway for a while before they lose enough speed to drop so that their undercarriage touches down. I remember Space Shuttle landings being especially prone to this.

Also also, check out Ekranoplanes aka Wing-in-Ground-effect or WiG. These impressive Russian aircraft used a wing near the water to take advantage of the ground effect, enhanced in some designs by pointing jet exhaust over the wings to increase lift. They also did not like rough weather, though.

[tiagotiagot]

"Hyperbolic" is actually a huge hint at what is going on; the more mass you add, the more positive the curvature of the Universe is, the more spherical it is; but the more mass you remove (or the more negative mass you add), the more the negative curvature of the Universe is, the more *hyperbolic* it is. So the hyperbolic chamber is simply a chamber with significant quantities of negative mass, maybe they're harnessing dark energy or inflatons or something of the sort, or maybe they just worked out how to obtain negative mass particles of some sort, or even just filter out enough dark matter that the space inside the chamber does not have enough mass to counter the expansion of the Universe and so it develops hyperbolic curvature. And just like mass can slow down time, negative mass can speed it up.

[alexanderwolf]

Its okay Pluto you'll always be a planet in my book. You don't need those other planets anyhow.

[adirmugrabi]

According to the definition you used, Pluto is a planet.
He got demoted (by evil people) for not being evil enough to kill anything else in its orbit

[dexis]

“Fist bump me, it’s more hygienic”

I feel like that should be on a t-shirt

[imofage]

Considering some of the comic book feats attributed to the Human Torch (reaching super nova temperatures), yes, he could survive a lava bath.

[readjordan]

that last sentence was wonderful.
like i wasnt really expecting that in a sign off, but its really important.

[andrewxc]

21:30 - The question-asker was talking about hovercraft, like turbine-based hovercraft going over land vs. water, not helicopters. The mechanics are roughly the same, but the specifics are not.
If the surface of the water is flat(-ish), the hovercraft presses down on the water, and since water is incompressible, the hovercraft pushes upward on a cushion of air. The hovercraft also produces waves underneath itself, potentially creating some air pockets in the troughs of these waves.
On land, the surface is already compressed (mostly), but dirt and sand may get blown out and away from the hovercraft much in the same way that they usually spray water out from under themselves, when on water (Top Gear did this a number of years ago, with a DIY hovercraft...).

In BOTH cases, the lifting force is normal to the surface being traveled over, so if you have hills on land or waves on water, you may end up with lifting forces that will cause your hovercraft to travel in... *less than optimal* directions...

[zachh]

Does the Void not give you access to erasers?

[ludeawakening]

Johnny Storm going into lava would be like us taking a relaxing dip in a swimming pool. His flames aren't just regular fire, he emits plasma. He's been shown to casually reach millions of degrees F.

[Williamw]

The hyperbolic time chambre could work if its function were to remain in its inertial frame while simultaneously accelerating the rest of the universe away at near light speed and then bringing it all back. No one would feel anything so long as the chambre worked not with large external forces, but instead by pushing every particle in the universe at the same rate of acceleration. (You only feel acceleration when something is pushing or pulling you at a contact point, such as a car seat, so your particles get bunched up in weird ways. That's why falling toward a massive object and floating in a void feel the same even if you're only accelerating in the former case. It's because gravity tugs on all your particles evenly. Of course, the chambre would need a universe-creating/ending level of energy available to it, plus some unknown force projecting mechanism that works equally on disparate particles and even on light, but never mind all that.)

[fredericouno]

It's called the Room of Spirit and Time! Gosh, Kyle, get it right!


Love the show.

[HWK]

The tangent about a human accretion disk made me laugh really hard, because the idea of a glowing disk of meat slush is just very funny.

[killakiwi]

Just discovered this channel, gotta say im enjoying seeing the same Kyle style but with less practice, always enjoy your stuff bro keep it up

[pyroslavx]

21:09 At certain height, like hovering few meters or something above ground, you DO push helicopter off the ground, and ascending above feels like abrupt transition, like "glueing away from floor", you need MUCH more engine torque/pwr to lift above certain very low hovering height, which feels like broken controll/error/engine loosing power on rc heli, i guess it feels the same to pilot of real one.

[Ralph-bwpe]

21:00 about helicopters. The blades of the rotor work the same way the wings on an airplane works. By adjusting the angle of attack of the blades of the main rotor you are making air flow faster over the top of the blade than it does the bottom. Therefore the pressure on the top of the blade is reduced by cooling the air around it. In other words the helicopter is sucked upwards by a vacuum of pressure rather than pushing itself up.

[ntm]

For those interested here are a couple "What-if XKCD" articles related to some of the questions:

[odedmartial-arts]

I saw someone remarked on the ground effect, which is correct, but a helicopter does NOT generate lift (at least not most of it) by pushing air down. The wings of a helicopter rotor are just that - wings - with the same type of profile of airplane wings. The difference is that airplane wings are fixed and have air move around them due to the speed of the plane, while the wings of a rotor turn and have air move around them due to their spin. In both cases, lift is generated through differences in air pressure and not momentum.

[thekman]

I like to imagine that kyle just walks around the void until he sees a camera and then starts spittin science at it.

[gilgaloregames]

I love some of these villain ideas lol "super man brings you up into space one inch a second"