Lasers vs. Steam | Because Science Footnotes

Kyle debates lasers vs steam, responds to your comments, and more!

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[dexis]

Your “professor trying way to hard to relate to youth” impression is agonisingly accurate.

[sfulweb]

"People salsa" - Best description thus far.

[barrybend]

10:44 transparent aluminum is actually a real thing.

[TheCammerhammer]

3:30 Could you say it would be the power of the sun in the palm of your hand?

[ryanryan]

Fun fact transparent aluminum is a thing in the form of aluminum oxide now if you were to heat aluminum oxide powder to the piont itcan bind with itself but not lose its oxidation properties you can create transparent aluminum it would be a similar process to creating synthetic rubies

[JacobEllinger]

There is a safety video about electrical risk that has some cctv footage of a guy who touched high voltage wires for a factory (three times the electrical power of a household outlet) and he exploded into chunks of burnt flesh and the room filled with what I thought was just smoke but now I think it might have been a bunch of human steam.

[denlara]

Hey Kyle. You mentioned that laser based weapons would be messy because of the explosive nature of the surface vaporization. Does that mean that Demolition Man got laser weapons right? Wesley Snipes' character gets a hold of one that a) took a long time to build up a charge to fire and b) blew apart the things that the laser blasted.

[KingKevin]

Thanks Kyle and the crew for consistently making quality content!

[ComradePhoenix]

Something else that should be addressed, is that at least phasers, don't work using lasers (at least, as far as I remember). Rather, it works by splitting up the bonds between atomic particles. So the effect would be less like popping the grossest water balloon ever, and more like spraying acetone on a sand sculpture held together by superglue.

[IMRROcom]

Mr. Hank Hill, is your Dad. Bobby you have aged well

[RyanAlexanderBloom]

Yeah!!! I actually made it into the video! All my watching of Because Science finally beefed my brain up to the scientific level where I could make an intelligent comment about something in the episode.

[GrowingAnswers]

The film industry needs to start vaporizing humans (in movies). The easiest way would be to use CG, but I think the best way would be to use high voltage/amperage on a human analog (the laser would be CG though). Now that would be excellent content for Netflix!

[Hanatash]

I don't wanna go take a few deep breaths. The air outside is filled with the vaporized gore of my enemies.

[yeahminecraft]

9:00 This is why I do this in my writing: "The operative reached for his gun, but before he could Lakirr blasted him with a very short plasjet burst. It hit his chest and the operative’s flesh exploded as its water rapidly turned into steam, dropping them dead almost instantly. Lakirr grimaced as they wiped his boiling red blood off their visor." Taken from my still WIP sci-fi novel. Gross, but realistic.

[noahbrown]

I died of laughter at "people salsa" 1:26

[kristjanbrezovnik]

OMG, Scanners! Now there's a reference.:D

[Luke.Raistrick]

When he said times are tough I thought Kyle was gonna ask me to donate to patreon or some stuff like that but he went so deep and now I'm hanging my head out of my window taking deep breaths... Thank u Kyle man 🖖

[ApothecaryTerry]

Question for you: If the sun did suddenly vanish, would we feel any physical change of momentum? Obviously we'd notice it for other reasons, like the absence of a huge flaming fireball in the sky. On the plus side, global warming would be pretty handy if this happened...so I could actually justify owning my car that uses more fuel on my 40 minute commute than a Delta IV getting to low earth orbit. Anyway, ignoring that long (and very slightly exaggerated) tangent- would we feel it?

Also those power requirements, I'm working my way through Stargate (all of it)...so ZPMs are clearly the way to go. Screw storing energy when you can pull it from somewhere else on the fly. Mass effect weapons seem more likely anyway...slice a chunk off something, find a "sciency" way to reduce the relative mass (I'd come up with some pseudo science way to do this but I'm drinking Chinese red wine, which is nice) and then piss off someone in the next solar system when you miss. Energy requirements could be minimal, since you only need to accelerate a tiny amount of mass (relatively). The problem is the amount of energy used to reduce the relative mass, or more accurately, the problem is that as far as we're aware it's probably impossible to do that so it's a stupid idea.

P.S. If the analytics say the middle bit of this video got watched a lot, sorry. I kept getting distracted by wine, tortillas and writing this, so I re-watched it about 40 times to actually listen. Make that 41, I just typed this and missed it again. That Chinese wine really is pretty good.

[KwanLowe]

Fascinating! Quick question: Knowing that mass is energy, is there an upper limit for how efficient conversion from one to the other would be? From a quick Google search, it seems that nuclear reactors are fairly inefficient as they use energy to produce heat rather than some sort of direct conversion. Is such a conversion possible? And if you can convert from matter to energy, how efficient could the reverse be? I.e., convert energy to matter, maybe like what a particle accelerator would do in converting kinetic energy to matter, but efficiently.

[sorokahdeen]

I love your shows.

One more thing: Larry Niven, in his Know Space series, describes a story or two that involves a technology gotten from aliens with a slightly different understanding of the mathematical nature of matter. 

This allows them them to ignore the conservation of charge/particle spin from which the electromagnetic forces that join atoms derive. This technology, which Niven describes as being used in mining, causes atoms to lose their interatomic bonds causing matter affected by the technology not to vanish, but to turn into a super-fine dust. Now that I've seen your bit, I imagine that some of that affected matter would become gaseous as well.

This is interesting. In this case, it isn't vaporization from bathing a person or object with *bathrubs* of energy of some kind that is immediately turned into heat with Godzilla-sized efficiency, but disintegration. Maybe this is a better idea to explain how "vaporizing" energy weapons that make people go "AhhhH!!!" and vanish work.

Please, please, please, keep up the infotainment.