@@globalincident694 Perhaps like in electrodynamics and electrostatics, when electrical current can have a complex amplitude, when the imaginary part describes for example a phase shift.
If I remember correctly I think this was the last chapter in the first What If book. It's honestly a great way to end it with the words "sometimes it's nice not to destroy the world for a change" after all the global and sometimes multiplanetary destructions present in this book.
Yeah, and a magnitude -5 earthquake being the equivalent to someone pressing one button on a keyboard this means for every single computer that's being used every day we're generating magnitude -5 earthquakes All around the world in areas that have at least one computer!🫨🫨🫨🫨🫨🫨
I'd just assume it was some weird prank... or some viral Internet Challenge (like that thing where people would smash through fences that was a thing in the 00s) The "Entire Football Team Running into a House" viral craze =P
Uhhhh... Yah. It's three Terdongles per Fathom if you measure from the left side of the dog, and 2.3 Terdongles per Yard if measured from the right. I don't get why this is so difficult for metric people to understand.
@@10Neon my toes, hips, back of my head, front of my head (when I was a child), those times you lift you arm and don't estimate the distance between you and the table then smack your hand on its way up, all agree with you.
@@ND_R my friend who has a basically indestructible hand that he used to basically punch hard wooden tables has hit their hand with a table by moving it up and he said its the only thing that actually made him feel a lot of pain
in case anyone doesn't know, the reason it's like this is that the Richter scale is logarithmic, so increasing the number by 1 actually *multiples* the power, rather than adding a fixed amount.
@@ChinoKawaii1021 The numbers on the scale itself increase logarithmically. If we were looking at fixed values on the scale rather than "logged" numbers, then the numbers would be insanely large pretty quickly.
Fun fact. A magnitude 11 earthquake is calculated to have happened when the Chixculub asteroid hit the earth. The researcher who determined this found a fossil of a sturgeon that had been washed ashore from the seiches that occurred as a direct consequence from the seismic waves travelling through the earth. This happened 3500km away from the point of impact. Another juicy factoid, he determined that the fish had been hit with micro particles of molten glass. Which had been launched into the atmosphere on impact and came down 3500km further. Insane.
As a geophysicist (earthquake scientist), I found this explanation extremely accurate and useful with 2 exceptions. There are no such things as "fault lines". We call them "fault zones" since a fault, especially at or near the surface, doesn't really have a definite boundary. Also, magnitude is proportional to rupture area. So a strike slip fault like the san Andreas is only about 30km deep and 800km long. While a subduction zone like Cascadia is about 1200 km long and can be several hundred kms deep. This is why large earthquakes (above 8.8) only occur here since the surface area of plate contact is much greater.
In your explanation you said that magnitude is the proportion area of rupture. How in this video relate a magnitude with the falls of things, and also with destruction of sun?
I live right on top of a fault zone then. There had been several newsworthy earthquakes with an epicenter very near my home in the south of Mexico. Is good to know there won't be any level 9 earthquakes here, I've always been worried about a very big one happening.
@@eduardoarmenta9232 If you are in southwestern Mexico, then you are located along a major subduction zone which can cause earthquakes as large as 9.0. Luckily, these only happen every 300-600 years.
also you forgot to mention that because of the way the scale works, there can't be an earthquake over 10.0, that is what the strongest earthquake could ever possible be
"The Dallas Cowboys ran into his neighbor's garage with the force of a quadrillion dust motes landing on a table." Is my Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest entry.
I like the fact that the energy levels of negative-magnitudes "earthquakes" make less and less sense but are actually decreasing at a comprehensible rate.
I believe in theory you could go even lower than the -15 example, but then you run into conceptual problems (e.g. "Can earthquakes can meaningfully be considered to occur on the microscopic and quantum scales?") If you don't care about how the results look and just define it as "a transfer of energy from one object interacting with another", then the scale would end in meaningful terms with the equivalent of the smallest amount of possible available free energy (i.e. non-zero-point energy) being transferred between two objects, whatever that value might be. If you try to do anything different, then it becomes just as much an exercise in definition and philosophy as it would be science to get an answer. :3
@@gordontaylor2815 It wouldn't be so much about the minimum amount of energy, so much as, the minimum detectable disturbance. Eventually the quake would be indistinguishable from a measurement error (Heisenberg uncertainty) aka background noise (quantum foam).
for anyone confused why it gets so powerful so quickly, the scale doesnt increase linearly, it actually multiplies by 32. for example, a magnitude 8 earthquake is 32x stronger than a magnitude 7, and a magnitude -3 earthquake is 32x weaker than a magnitude -2.
Wouldn't the difference between of 32 times the amount of power be ~1.5 difference in magnitude? I'm not really sure how the math of it works. I see online that a difference of one magnitude seems to 31.667 times the energy released, but how come it is measured as 10 times bigger then? I kind of conceptually don't understand I suppose. Also, now I'm curious.. does a negative powered earthquake represent anything real?
I just got what you meant on literally the next youtube video I watched lol. "You've probably seen a mixer truck before- and I'll forgive you for calling them cement trucks, even though cement is just one of the ingredients in a concrete mix." 10:52 - "Every Construction Machine Explained in 15 Minutes"
Every time you walk around, you produce tiny little earthquakes. And yes, they are absolutely detectable by seismometers if any are nearby and connected to the ground you're walking on. That's why seismometers are preferrably placed in remote areas, where they are shielded from seismic noise produced by things like traffic
A professor at the university I briefly studied at was doing femtosecond spectrography. That means resolving the energy states of particles in a timescale of 10 ^(-15) s. Then, the city build a tram right next to the university, which seismically interfered with his measurements. He worked around that by scheduling his measurements around the Tram.
@@gordonlekfors2708 Ok Mr. Genius, who considers 3 sentences a long essay. How about something less intuitive? A seismometer placed in a chamber in the middle of a mountain, sealed off from any air pressure changes, can still detect a changes in weather. Seismometers are so accurate that they will measure the tilt of the chamber as a result of the atmospheric pressure change deforming the mountain.
@@gordonlekfors2708 Okay, again, rude, and actually adds a whole sentence to the problem you imply exists, but let's take it as a challenge: "The tiny earthquakes made by footsteps can be heard by close seismometers, so we put seismometers far from disturbance." Hm... it's certainly a tad more concise, and has a little bit of XKCD simple-complex charm, but it loses a lot of its energy. LordAJ12345's version also parcels out the learning more clearly and attempts to speak to the reader, which may be better for learning depending on a few things. Conciseness is only useful insofar as it suits its purpose; here, the purpose is clearly to teach the passerby, which presents limitations other than simple efficiency.
there's something so soothing hearing about some of the lower negatives. "a mote of dust, landing on a table" "yeah... that's nice. The essence of gentleness."
I was a kid in Bremerton when the Good Friday quake hit. The epicenter was nearly 1,000 miles away in Alaska, but it broke windows in our house, tumbled our neighbor chimney. And that was 'only' a 8.4-8.6!
Side note, it's believed that the strongest earthquakes that have happened on earth were due to impactors, for example it's believed that the asteroid that killed the non avian dinosaurs caused a magnitude 11 quake. And I can scarcely imagine what kind of quake Theia hitting Earth would have caused...
given that Theia caused the moon to split from the Earth - that would be around about the gravitational binding energy of the planet earth - so based on the video that would be approximately magnitude 18 :)
@@VitchAndVorty True, but if you consider the small side of the scale (droping a truck, having a football team run into your house etc.) its technically still an earthquake, as it makes the planet shake. Theia was just kind of an intergalatic Dallas Cowboys football player running into our houses wall :D
I admittedly knew a decent amount of this given that I live in an earthquake prone area, but I didn’t know that the numbers could be negative or that pushing the upper limits would straight up just blow up the earth
Yeah... welcome to logarithmic scales and exponential functions. Each increase of 1 in earthquake magnitude multiples the energy release by 32 (it's a factor of 10 in shaking amplitude, but that translates to a factor of 32 in energy release.) So, while a magnitude 6 is 32 times more energy than a magnitude 5, a magnitude 15 would be around 32^10 = 1,126,000,000,000,000 times as much energy as a magnitude 5 (and, on the flip side, a magnitude -5 would be 1/1,126,000,000,000,000 times as much energy release as a 5.)
'new' lol, this stuff is over a decade old. Minute physics started in 2011, what-if started in 2012 That said, yeah, still super happy to see it migrate to video form ❤
This was an interesting video cause I never knew the magnitude could go negative, but I suppose it makes perfect sense since it’s an exponential function.
I feel it would be usefull to explain why there can be negative earthquakes. When they say a scale of 10 or -4, what it actually means is a power of 1×10^10, or 1×10^(-4). So you arent actually having a negative magnitude, you are just have a magnitude 0
"3.5 Earthquake Strikes Fear in Ohio Cornfield" gave me an extra chuckle, as I felt a *very* slight ~3.5 "wiggle wiggle" while sitting in my parked car yesterday.* The good news is I checked Bluesky and saw someone's "Obligatory earthquake tweet" to 1) verify I hadn't imagined it and 2) confirm the platform has enough Californians for our ritual "Did anybody feel that?" check-in while we wait for the USGS feed to update. [4 Dec 8:09 pm Fullerton, CA, 3.3, 6.1 miles deep]. *(I realize seismic waves transmit better in Ohio, where the bedrock is mostly solid granite, not limestone and sandstone beaten to smithereens by a zillion quakes.)
I love this idea! Not all the articles would be the best fit for general TV (looking at you, blood alcohol question...), but most of them would be fine and the snack-size format makes perfect sense.
I hate the idea that well produced content doesn't belong on RU-vid and that if you want your work to be respected, it has to be tied to traditional media. I know that that's probably what you didn't mean to say and that you're just regurgitating what most people already believe. I just think that it’s a backwards way of thinking. High quality RU-vid videos deserve to be praised on the same level as traditional media.
man i loved this book so much, pretty funny, and quite educational. got gifted the first one a couple years back for my like 11th birthday cause i made a speech about the same question of "what if?"
Having read every comic and book that you've published, I'm very excited to see you branching out into videos! And with wonderful quality right from the start, no less.
Based on the examples in the video, that's true of any magnitude -3 or below (well, down until the point where the energy values get low enough that the quantum nature of energy prevents going lower). People drop their phones all the time. -2 to 0 are probably pretty common too, since something like a piece of furniture falling over would probably be somewhere in that range. Oh, and about that lower limit: according to Wikipedia's "Orders of magnitude (energy)" article and the Richter Scale formula, the emission of a single AM radio photon would be around magnitude -21. I'm sure there are lower meaningful values (I suspect something like "a single electron hitting your table" would be lower, but I'd need to spend a little more time remembering the physics on collisions before calculating the true minimum meaningful value).
I was about to watch all your videos you've uploaded because i really liked the 2 videos i watched so far. Only to discover that those are the only 2 available. Please upload more
I remember when I received the what if book on Christmas. I was of course appreciative for the book but it wasn’t anything close to the video games on my list so I didn’t think much of it. At one point I was bored and decided to take the book out of my shelf where many other book say there collecting dust and boy was I hooked! I basically devoured the book in its entirety right then and there. It became my favourite book and one I’ll cherish and probably try to force onto my own kids in the future (emphasis on try… I was already hooked on video games when I was younger so who knows what else there will be in the future). In any case I want to say thank you for taking the time to solve the what if’s of our minds and thank you for bringing that magic to us again on RU-vid
I was in SF for the Mendocino earthquake - 7.2 - in 1992 and that was the single most terrifying moment(s) of my life. I've had a few near death experiences over the decades but none remotely as frightening as that. Everything is made of Jello. There's nowhere you can go. There's nothing you can do except cower and hope you don't get crushed like an ant, or worse. It lets you know just how fragile and mortal you really are unlike anything else.
Judging by those negative magnitudes, a footstep would most likely be a higher magnitude than a single itsy bitsy grain of sand plunking onto other itsy bitsy grains of sand, so don't give up on yourself lol
This is the first book I ever bought myself when I was 10 years old in 2014. To this day I have never re-read a book more times than Randall Munroe’s ‘what if?’- this book will live in my heart forever
This "what if" series was basically MADE for RU-vid. It always felt like something was missing with the online text version. Putting it here as a video is just perfect.
Hey! I've been a fan of your comic since I got the original 'What If?' for my birthday. I then went on to get complicated things explained with simple words, and the second what of book. I love your work, and this new voiced video series is super exciting! Keep it up, and have a wonderful day!
Knowing that earthquake magnitudes are literally measured in orders of magnitude, I knew that asking about a magnitude 15 or 25 earthquake wouldn't make much sense. But I never thought that _negative_ earthquake magnitudes were a thing! And they are cute, too!
Funnily enough, they're measured not in exact orders of magnitude, but in orders of magnitude * 1.5, i.e. +2 earthquake magnitude = +3 orders of magnitude of energy
@@mathcookie8224 I mean, compared to some of the wacky irrational bases people try to use, base 10^1.5 is pretty tame. At least every two digits can be compressed into an integer base, unlike phinary. And by virtue of being useful for simplifying earthquake math, it's already more practical that many large prime bases.
I don’t know, this felt pretty dry to me. I miss the framing device in the book where it was usually told almost as if some mad scientist was actually setting up the experiment.
I love how in random reddit conversations someone always seems to drop a link with: "Hey, there's actually an xkcd about that". Soon it won't just be a four panel strip anymore, but a link to this channel. Can't wait :)
How did I not already know there was a YT channel for What If? What a ghastly oversight. Now I have to catch up on the hundreds of... wait - sorry, TWO other videos I missed. Subscribed, though, of course. :)
I thought it was an xkcd article that said magnitude 40 on the Richter scale would release an equivalent amount of energy as the Big Bang itself, so, you know, all of the energy.
Accounting for the energy of the big bang is tricky. For one, many cosmologists believe the universe has exactly 0 total energy as a result of a balance between gravitational binding (negative) energy and mass-energy etc. For another, if you want to measure a particular component of this, the answer is probably infinite in most cosmological models which model the universe as infinite. I think the best you can do to get a nonzero finite answer is ask for the mass-energy of the observable universe, which is about 10^70J, or a magnitude 43.
I'm sure it's just a coincidence but thinking about negative scale earth quakes brought me a sense of peace. A mote of dust coming to rest on a window sill.. ahhh
I remember one of my geology professors saying if you were to cut the Earth in half and rotate it (either half way around or all the way, I can't remember which) you'd have a magnitude 13 earthquake.
I've only ever been in a magnitude 3.4 quake, and even then it felt like I had jumped in the air and was "falling" but with my feet still on the ground. And as if my knees suddenly turned to jello and it took every ounce of my concentration just to stay standing. Fooking weird sensation.
I’ve never imagined the Death Star as an “earthquake weapon” until now; and tbh that makes it even more terrifying of a weapon than just being a big space laser
