Everyone tells about protons bumping in stars, but nobody has ever mentioned quantum tunnelling before, even in school, where we had an excellent astronomy and physics teacher. As always, new video, new interesting fact.
I came to know about the necessity of quantum tunneling for nuclear fusion in our star in David Butler's video last year. So yeah it seems no one (laypeople like me) normally knows about this because no one normally tell the likes of us.
If you ever lookup something astrophysics or nuclear in Wikipedia's rabbit holes, chance are you'll find quantum tunneling mentioned ^^ For example in the article about stellar nucleosynthesis en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_nucleosynthesis#Reaction_rate
I knew there was a non-convection zone in the sun but it never occurred to me that it isolates the core from additional hydrogen. Now a lot more about stars is making sense! Thanks Nick and Question Clone! What a team!
@@localverse well, no convection means no exchange of fuel, only fusion products like neutrinos and photons, and forces can go through the layer. There's so much energy coming out of the core that the hydrogen of the outer layers can't get close to the core to fuse Don't take my words for it, I'm just guessing from what makes sense to me x) Red dwarfs' cores would be of weak enough activity to not prevent this convection from happening
I remember reading a while back that quantum tunneling is the reason why modern electronics struggle to shrink size of processors due to transistor plates being too close to one another, allowing quantum jump of electrons. I really enjoyed your video Nick :D
lol quantum jumping electrons sometimes jump 2nm, but at the sun they love to do it over a few hundred kilometers or wait its theorized, not factual? maybe its a wrong interpretation of fields interacting, same for the magical leap at the suns surface..
@@vyor8837 any thoughts on what kind of circuit the solar system and by extent the universe is? i'm not trolling btw.. and what i was referring to in my previous post is the notion of some (in my view fairly smart and insightful people) its all fields and only that, not particles.. i know this must sound a bit weird and extreme if you're into technology and/or mainstream concepts of particle physics and cosmology.. i'm exploring plasma cosmology and trying to understand basic plasma physics, as there are quite a few phenomena in that field behaving unusual if looked from either fluid dynamics point and chemically.. (the relation of electric fields, magnetic fields, double layering, composition of plasma, dusty plasma etc) also i'm having trouble with some of the popular concepts in astrophysics and have the feeling they make it to hard on themselves when holding on to certain models, tweaking them with new observations.. thinking outside of the box is what has given us all this technology and for anything space exploration related the expertise of electromechanics is much appreciated, but if these people want to raise the notion on scalability of electric phenomena and certain observed things in space (mars geology is their most notable but also the shape of ultima thule etc) its strongly flipped off as if fools and certainly not capable of making decent statements on anything astrophysics made claims on..
@White Rice are you f serious? you mean vyor.. i found IT's answer short and unable to.. it makes sense there's no emotion in the linguistics but didn't cross my mind this shit is done already.. thanks
A book I read put the quantum tunneling process in the sun in an interesting perspective. Since the probability of a fusion event for any square meter of core material was extremely low, an equal volume of compost actually produces more energy. The book said the sun doesn't produce so much energy because it's efficient; it produces it because it's so huge.
That is why I liked open source software. You can always know how it works. It puts everybody in their place. Good for science and engineering. The Sun is open source 😀🙏👍. Unless they build a Dyson Sphere and start selling the Sunlight.
I feel like your videos serve different purposes. Nick's videos are to give high-level overviews to interested laypeople. your videos are to give more detailed explanations two people formally studying physics. A fourth year physics major won't get much out of Nicks video and I, an interested layperson, often don't get much out of your more serious videos (I'm here for the memes lol). But both of those are necessary and you both do a good job at your respective video types.
Fact about the Sun: sunspots are actually quite bright spots on the surface of the sun, and if observed isolated they would be brighter than the Moon. They appear as dark patches only because of the contrast with the surrounding area of the sun's photosphere, which is considerably hotter and brighter
Which is why black and white are the same color (if you consider them colors at all) just different shades, white is when the entire visible spectrum is being reflected a lot and absorbed a little, and black is when the entire visible spectrum is being absorbed a lot and reflected a little, but in both cases the entire visible spectrum is being reflected. Something can seem to be black or white based on its surroundings. Though you could just consider all of this to be a side effect of how we perceive light.
@@ArticBlueFox96 Seriously? Wow that's mind blowing! Something doesn't make sense though. Black holes should release zero amount of the spectrum, so is their black different?
@@localverse Our brains would still register it as black. It would be the darkest, blackest, black ever. We have been trying to make darker and blacker blacks as a pigment (like vanta black) for various reasons (like telescopes) and they come close, but they usually only absorb like 99.98% of the light that hits it.
dude the sun already consumed its time it lived for just one moment, energy protects that one moment from time. so that only moment which sun has lived is katrilion years in our time understanding
Did you not pay attention? The fusion is extremely unlikely. The sun got 10^56 protons available for fusion. And it fuses 10^(forgot) protons per second. So just fetch your calculator and find out how long it is going to take until all fuel is burned?
Actually my teacher told us in high school that source of sun energy is quantum tunneling but he just told the fact. After 2 years I finally found it complete .✌
Very complex concepts : made it look so simple! Once again, Brilliant choices of models/illustrations! 5:40 "Wave Particle in a box with a lil' tail sticking out" = Best illustration of Quantum Tunneling I've seen yet!
Nonsense, statistics are a descriptive language. Even if we have a trillion people on earth it still does’nt become likely one of them will spontaneously jump to the moon. They might build a rocket though...get the difference?
@@kenlogsdon7095 well all u need for that is to strap a bunch of regular fission bombs together and place some fusion material in the middle. Then when they all go off at once they fuse the heavy hydrogen into helium and make an even bigger kaboom. They figured that one out back in the 50s didn't they?
I'll have to mention quantum tunneling and fusion when I'm explaining "at least once" probabilities to statistics students. That should definitely make things more interesting.
Hi Nick. It’s so great seeing your channel grow. I started watching years ago when I think your subscriber count was in the single-thousands. Keep up the great work. Not only are you explanations...lucid...they are also readily accessible by me, a mere mortal. I a really appreciate your work.
Great video! But I think it would be beneficial in this case to explain that the "boxes" the protons are in are actually the Coulomb barrier. Otherwise it's not clear why the particle-in-a-box model applies here.
This model is just an idealized explanation of a particle with the boundaries of a box with barriers of infinite height. These do not have to be Coulomb barriers. When complicated quantum mechanics equations are solved they show that these quantum particles have a finite possibility of existing beyond these infinite barriers. When applied to protons in the core of sun we get a finite probability of the colliding protons to penetrate each others' boundaries causing some of these pairs to fuse and release energy. I learned the math of these calculations several decades ago and have forgotten all the details. They are very complex and easily forgotten.
Thank you. I have been explaining this in my grade 6 class for the past few years, and now I have a video to go with it! In fact, CPUs can't get much smaller because "quantum tunneling sets a fundamental limit on how small transistors can get. If any internal barriers get thinner than a nano-meter, too much current will tunnel through when the transistor is off." -QUANTUM MECHANICS IN YOUR PROCESSOR
Another wild thing about quantum tunnelling is in electronics. Microchips like those used for CPUs have channels in which electrons can flow to power the circuits as the building blocks of transistors. Those channels are now so small that the electrons can quantum tunnel to different parts of the circuit. To avoid this, the sides of the channels are now made with a material that has a higher electrical resistance than in previous chips, making it harder for the electrons to escape.
So... Nuclear fusion is like getting a royal flush. The Sun can get it every time because it's dealing a gazillion hands every second. On Earth, we have like three decks
What I find crazy is, the facts you resent... 1. the core of the sun has about 12% of the sun’s protons... 2. There are 10^57 protons in the sun 3. There are 10^56 protons in the core... Soooo... 10^56 is only 12% of 10^57??? That’s CRAZY, but it’s ok to be a little crazy!
Great video Nick! I would have loved you to discuss some applications of modern technology that use quantum tunnel. For example, I recently learned SSD's VNAND rely on electron tunneling in order to write information to charge traps. Also, you should try doing video premieres- even if it's an hour away premiere, it would be good to watch your videos with you and then have a 5-10 min discussion about them.
That is so hard to get off from particle model to everything-is-a-wave model. But, this is, to some degree, proves that conscious observer is not required in quantum mechanics to collapse wave functions. Because... Well, there is no observers in the sun's core (but maybe Boltzmann's brains :) ) and quantum effects like collapsing some bunch of particles to a single one, considering them as probabistic waves is still takes place.
vilkillian I don’t know much about quantum mechanics because I don’t have much knowledge of science, but doesn’t quantum mechanics basically just mean that life at the quantum realm is inherently random and unpredictable?
@@nick130420 as some smart guys says: "if you think you understand quantum mechanics, then you do NOT understand quantum mechanics" speaking shotly: we do really know bunch of things about quantum mechanics, but this is simprifies to a simple sentence: "We do not know why or what happens in the deepest realms, but we do know to what it is all leads, and we have have plenty of MATHEMATICAL models APPROXIMATING the results" Which means if we even have accurate model, wh can't really understand WHY something happens
@@nick130420 also as Einstein said: "The God does not play dice with the universe" Even if we approximate all of quauntum mechanics using probabilistic method, i do beleve that there is somethig more "predictable" which controls everything and we just still didn't discover it
This was a whole new fact to grab Never thought that fusion in stars would require quantum tunneling. That's great, that's awesome!!! Keep on the good work
Junior Mynos Not really since people consume food and inhale air then extract oxygen from the air and then do a bit of chemistry with energy loss to do actions with energy loss. If anything, humans being small radiators signal how inefficient we are at stocking energy. Typical batteries don’t have to stay alive as well and therefore don’t expand energy doing that. The Matrix -as good as it is- was dumb in that aspect.
@@Blastgun1 But how does the human body produce more energy than the sun's core per volume? And how does the sun unleash blinding light and sweltering summers from many millions of kilometers away if the core's energy per volume isn't even a mere equivalent of a human?
Thanks Nick, these videos are really excellent for high school IB Physics... you pitch the level just right and make it really memorable and engaging. I really appreciate it and I know my students do too!
I'd love to watch 10^38 of these videos, but I don't think I could do it in one second... Regardless of my bad jokes, these videos are amazing. Keep up the good work.
Physics can be beautiful; but I didn’t think statistics could be beautiful-until now! Thanks for your peerless illustrations of fundamental processes. You’re the best.
Holy crap! I thought I understood the H->He fusion process(es) in stars. That quantum tunneling was needed to bring protons together is totally new to me. Mind blown!
It really is amazing that there are enough protons in the sun for this to actually happen regularly. E.g. My textbook says that, for an electron with an energy of 5.2eV, the probability of it tunneling through a barrier of only 7.5*10^(-17)m is approximately 45*10^(-6). For a _proton_ in the same scenario, the probability is approximately 10^(_-186_)! (The huge difference is because protons are _far_ more massive than electrons.) The probability isn't as bad for protons in the sun, since they've got a lot more than 5.2eV of energy, but it's still only 10^(-28), like Nick said. And yet this incredibly low probability event is a big part of what makes life on earth possible (since we'd all be dead without the light and heat from the sun). I know I'm just reiterating what he already said in the video, but it's just so amazing. To think that our source of heat and light relies on something that, on average, happens only 1 in 10²⁸ times. 🤯🤯🤯
@@bitterlemonboy I can tell the probability of any macroscopic object quantum tunneling anywhere, while not _technically_ zero, is zero for all practical purposes.
I found this video very interesting... I remember back say 15 years ago when I was studying my first year at college... Quantum tunneling did my head in... Took a good dose of magic mushrooms for me to 'get' the concept. But this concept, I've never heard it before, or seen it an any textbook... I found this video absolutely fascinating!
Interesting fact about fusion in the sun: when two protons fuse, one of them turns into a neutron, releasing a positron, neutrino, and energy in the interaction. A positron is an anti-electron. The core of the sun is a plasma (which is, basically, a soup of positive nuclei and electrons). At least some of those positrons will find electrons and they will annihilate each other. Therefore... A portion of the sun's energy output is from matter/antimatter reactions!
Also most of the time helium two decays strait back into two protons via proton emission only 1 in 10000 fusions result in beta+ decay of (2)He into deuterium.
One of your previous videos made me understand why everything gives of infrared light better I think! Still waiting to see that topic explained better if it's still in the works! Keep being you and awesome!
Theoretical models of the Sun's interior indicate a maximum power density, or energy production, of approximately 276.5 watts per cubic metre at the center of the core, which is about the same rate of power production as takes place in reptile metabolism or a compost pile Quote from wiki
That moment when, here on Earth, we need hundreds of milions of degrees C and the Sun is like... " - pfff, newbies... I can do it with only 15 milion C !"
Tunneling reminds me of those bingo/lottery machines with all of those balls bouncing around, but with the glass painted black. If you have a very large number of these machines, all identical aside from "microstate", running at the same time, you can predict how long it will take for about half of them to spit out their first ball. But if you're just looking at _one_ of those machines, you can't predict to any useful level of precision when it will spit out a ball. Even if you know that it usually takes two million years, you can't tell when it's just about to happen, even if it's "overdue" for that. The best you can say is there's a 50% chance that it will happen in the next one million years, but that's the same prediction you'll have every single time you guess, from the moment the machine is turned on until 100 billion years later, it always has a 50% chance of spitting out a ball in the next one million years from that moment. Of course, lots of other probabilistic things also fit with this analogy, but specific discussions of "half life" usually hover around nuclear physics and medicine.
Next time when someone tells me to think outside the box, I'm gonna be like, "dude, there's no such thing as outside the box...that's not reality!! I possess an infinite number of 'thinking' states..."
I think the sun's magnetic field is in interesting. Could you make video about the sun's magnetic field ? (And about 8 planets' magnetic field as well ? Why do some of them have and not have ?)
And the heliosphere -- the furthest extent to which the sun's magnetic field shields the solar system from interstellar winds, just like how the Earth's magnetic field protects the Earth.
The magnetic field is an interesting point! The nuclear fusion model has failed dismally to account for the strength of the suns magnetic field. The convection currents are 100 times to slow to produce the field. The plasma cosmology theory accurately predicts far more observable phenomenon. A much better theory IMO.
I learnt some new stuff with this video, I also learnt some stuff from Up and Atom's video on quantum tunneling. It would be nice to have the information merged into one video. Hers is the only video I'm seen on RU-vid which refers to total internal reflection for quantum tunnelling.
My hunch regarding the temperature of the sun's corona is that the sheer intensity of the solar radiation near its surface is enough to generate the million+ degrees plasma. Nothing to do with the temp of the surface itself.
Possible video topic: how does the process of turning two protons into two neutrons, two photons, two neutrinos, and two positrons actually work?? @The Science Asylum
Fact that photon emitted in the core takes millions of years to come to surface is Sun and reaches Earth in 8 mins... The light from Sun that you see is millions of years and 8 mins old...🙃🙃🙃😅
But the light itself will have experienced 0 time and traveled 0 distance from being generated in the core of the sun and hitting the retina in your eye. That's special relativity for you!
@@ChrisWalshZX I believe that it's not the same photon. It's absorbed and re-emitted billions of times, each time at a slightly lower energy. That's why we have visible light and not gamma rays by the time it reaches the surface.
It's a fairly intuitive physics concept: when you reduce the volume of a container while conserving all the particles inside, you effectively increase the gas pressure as those particles are squashed into this confined space. And as you increase the gas pressure, you effectively increase its temperature, because you increase the number of effective collisions occurring per unit volume. Remember, by the physics definition, temperature is a measure of the average particle oscillations and effective collisions per unit volume.
@@GTAVictor9128 That's not true. Temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of particles. It does not depend on collisions per unit time. The number of collisions depends on the molarity (particles per volume): a dilute gas will have fewer collisions than a dense gas, even at the same temperature. In fact, pressure itself does not directly increase temperature even. The reason compressing a gas increases temperature is you are doing work on the gas, which by definition increases its energy. The sun's core is hot because gravity does a huge amount of work on particles to bring them there. In general, the best place to start is to look at the ideal gas law PV=nRT, although of course it's only an approximation, and it doesn't tell you *why* something is happening.
@@gardenhead92 Ah. Thanks for the correction. What I said was what I assumed to be the case, based on my own intuition. I guess I should've done the research. Edit: What I said seems to be a common misconception, then, because that is what some scientific books and science textbooks claim. Whenever I presented this explanation to teachers, no one ever corrected me. During my course on thermodynamics, I remember that there was some mention of how work done on a gas heats it up, but I never considered how it didn't match my previous explanation. I was also partly misled because I a reading the book "A Brief History of Time". In that book, it said: "A star is formed when a large amount of gas starts to collapse in on itself due to its gravitational attraction. As it contracts, the atoms of the gas collide with each other more and more frequently and at greater speeds - the gas heats up."
@@GTAVictor9128 It is a common misconception. If you find a textbook that has that explanation it would definitely be a flaw. The quote isn't wrong, but it is misleading. The atoms collide with each other more and more because they are being confined to a smaller space and increasing in speed due to gravity. The collisions ensure the core will reach thermal equilibrium, but they can't provide the energy for a temperature increase in the first place. Remember that energy is conserved. Atoms can't come away from a collision with more energy than went into it.
I read somewhere that the sun is so dense, it takes tens of thousands of years for light (photons) produced in the core to reach the surface. It's hard for people to understand how stupidly large the universe is. Thanks, Science Asylum, for making it all a bit easier to grasp. 8)
That's a good thing. Most light produced in the core is gamma rays, and very few of those make it to the surface. The light we see comes from blackbody radiation at the surface.
That non-convection zone gave me an explanation of a calculation I've done with my students: Calculate the Q value of the sun's fusion reaction. Compare this value with the power of the radiation of the sun to get number of reactions happening each second. Use this to get mass of hydrogen used every second. Divide mass of sun by hydrogen/sec to get time for the sun to burn out. You get a timescale that is 10 times the lifetime of the sun that astronomers predict. As only 12% of mass is actually available for fusion in the core, that suddenly makes perfect sense.
@@Monody512 I wanted to not mention them because *some* have fusion just not much. But white dwarves? That glow is just the left over heat from when it was fusioning. But I'm pretty sure those classify as stelar remnants and not true stars, too.
Thank for the video. Last time you made videos about light. Can you please make a video and explain why the phosphorus emits light for some time? Of course if you consider it as a good topic for your channel.
