SciShow is supported by Squarespace. Whether you need a domain, website, or online
store, make it with Squarespace [♪INTRO] It’s one of those fundamental rules of the
universe that we all eventually learn growing up: like, life isn’t fair, Picard was a
better starship captain than Kirk, and bigger isn’t always better. Sometimes though, there are things in nature
so huge or complex that the only way to really study them is to build something enormous. Like, physicists didn’t just find the Higgs
boson by fishing it out from under the couch — it took the world’s largest machine,
the Large Hadron Collider, to observe it. But when it comes to outright size, there
are a few scientific experiments that can even give the Large Hadron Collider a run
for its money. Take the Northeast Pacific Time-series Undersea
Networked Experiments, or NEPTUNE, which is a really big name for a really big network
of scientific equipment off the coast of British Columbia. You may have noticed that the ocean is gigantic. I mean, seriously. About 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered
in water, and despite all the seafaring we’ve done as a species, there’s still a ton we
don’t know about what’s going on deep under the surface. Enter NEPTUNE. It’s made up of an 800-kilometer loop of
fiber optic cable that ranges from just 23 meters deep to 2.4 kilometers below the surface. The cable serves as a link between five locations
that have all kinds of different equipment for studying the ocean, and allows them to
transmit data back to land. This equipment includes things like hydrophones,
which are special underwater microphones used to listen to the sounds of life down there
— from swarms of plankton to whales. There’s also an adorable robot called Wally
— yes, there’s fake Wall-E and there’s real Wally… different robots — and scientists
use Wally to study microbes that survive on deposits of methane, on the ocean floor. And, there are cameras that provide livestreams
of undersea activity, like mass crab migrations. There’s a link in the description if you
want to watch some of that! Since it started operating in 2009, NEPTUNE
has given us tons of data about ecosystems that adapted to the extreme pressure and lack
of sunlight on the seafloor. And because it covers almost the entirety
of one of Earth’s tectonic plates, scientists can use it to help build a more accurate model
for things like earthquakes. Further south, in Livermore, California, is
one of the world’s biggest — and heaviest — indoor experiments. It’s called the National Ignition Facility,
or NIF, and its goal is to show that nuclear fusion — where two smaller atoms combine
into a larger one — could be a viable source of power. Existing nuclear power plants work using nuclear
fission: they split atoms apart and turn the resulting energy into electricity. Unfortunately, in the process they also produce
waste that stays dangerously radioactive for decades. But fusing certain atoms together also releases
energy, and unlike splitting atoms, the process could potentially produce much less radioactive
waste. Problem is, pumping enough energy into atoms
to get them to fuse is … challenging. So the NIF’s strategy is to use the largest
laser in the world, which is housed in a ten story building more than 300 meters long. Most of that space is for the laser amplifiers
— 120 metric tons’ worth of a special type of glass. Under the right conditions, it’s capable
of giving a series of 192 normal laser pulses 10 billion times more energy than they started
out with. And then, all that laser energy gets fired
into a gold canister about the size of a pencil eraser, which contains a target pellet filled
with hydrogen. The beams heat up the pellet inside to over
3 million degrees Celsius, which is hot enough to make it implode in just the right way for
the hydrogen atoms to start fusing with each other. The chain reaction releases energetic, radioactive
particles like neutrons — ideally with more energy than what the laser beams put into
kickstarting the reaction in the first place. That’s what physicists call ignition. There’s just one small problem. The NIF hasn’t achieved full ignition yet
— at least, not the kind that gets us more energy than we put in. And even if the NIF does achieve ignition,
there are still a whole load of problems to tackle, like how to extract that energy efficiently
and deal with all your expensive equipment being irradiated by the same particles you
want to get energy from. But researchers are working on it, and eventually,
that giant building full of glass could lead to power plants that use nuclear fusion. So, NEPTUNE and the NIF are plenty big in
their own ways. But neither of them qualify as the biggest
experiment humanity’s working on. That award goes to the Laser Interferometer
Space Antenna, or LISA. It’s a proposal to use three small spacecraft
arranged about 1.6 million kilometers away from each other in space — four times the
distance from the Earth to the Moon! The spacecraft would shoot laser beams back
and forth to measure gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time generated
when massive objects like black holes accelerate — when they’re merging, for example. In 2016, researchers detected gravitational
waves for the first time using LIGO, a similar, but much smaller experiment set up here on
Earth. The waves came from two relatively small black
holes suddenly merging — the whole thing took less than a second. And detecting them involved measuring a change
in distance of only one ten thousandth the width of a proton. So there’s a reason it took us so long. LISA’s designed to detect gravitational
waves that are even more subtle — ones that come from events that can last for minutes
or even hours, like when the much-more-massive black holes in the centers of galaxies merge. LISA probably won’t make it off the ground
until about 2034. But in 2017 NASA completed a mission with
a sort of mini version of LISA, called LISA Pathfinder, that showed the technology can
function well enough to make measurements in space. So while it won’t technically be on Earth,
when it eventually launches LISA will be the biggest observatory we’ve ever built … by
far. And at 1.6 million kilometers across, that
is going to be a tough record to break. Speaking of game-changing upgrades: We’ve been updating our old, cumbersome
website, SciShow.com, to a sleek, user-friendly Squarespace site. Picking a template was the hardest part because
there were so many options we liked. But once we finally settled on one, it’s
been easy to add our own style to it. We’ve added a custom SciShow banner and
pictures of our staff in our about page. Importing images and adding and updating text
has been incredibly easy, and pretty fun. We’ll keep you posted on how our site develops
in an upcoming video where we add pages for each of the SciShow channels. And if you have a million dollar idea—or
even, like, a thousand dollar idea—you’ve been meaning to launch, now’s the time. Use Squarespace to bring it to life, and go
to squarespace.com/scishow for a free trial. Make sure to use the offer code to support
this channel and save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. [♪OUTRO]
