Amazing Experiment Actually Makes Black Fire! The Shadow Fire Experiment

okay today I'm going to be teaching you how to make dark fire so in order to understand how to make a dark flame first we have to understand what fire actually is so fire is what's known as a partial plasma and what that means is that most of it is just really hot gas but a small percentage of it is actually ionized gas because it's gained so much energy that it's lost some of its electrons and the light from fire comes from when those ions gain their electrons back they release a photon of light and so fire in and of itself is a light source even when you shine a brighter source of light on it you still don't get a shadow behind it let me show you so you can clearly see the shadow of my hand here but you can see that the fire doesn't make a Shadow at all and if you look really close though you can see slightly something behind the fire and you can a little bit tell that the fire is there but that's just due to the fire heating up the air around it and it changes how light passes through the air it bends the light a little bit basically the same reason you see a mirage on a hot day so that's basically what's happening here so it's not a shadow but it's changing the refractive index due to heating up the air and not only does it not have a shadow but if you put a light source behind it the light from behind it can easily pass through it and get to the camera so you don't see that this is dimming the light behind it in fact it's adding light to it and that makes perfect sense because like I said fire is a light source and so you see the light behind it and in addition you see the fire but it doesn't get dimmer it doesn't make the light behind it dimmer but is there a way to make fire dark meaning is there a way to make it actually absorb light instead of lit it off so in order to make dark fire or fire that absorbs light I need help from a special kind of lamp and it's called a low pressure sodium lamp and this lamp lets off only one specific wavelength of light so it's a monochromatic light source as opposed to this white light that just lets off the full spectrum of colors okay so this is a low pressure sodium vapor lamp here so inside here is a tube and in that tube there's some Neon gas and you can see every few inches or so there's some Dots here and those dots are actually sodium metal and what happens when you apply a very high voltage to the ends here the sodium metal heats up due to the Neon gas inside heating up and it heats up enough that it starts to vaporize the sodium metal then the sodium atoms begin to ionize and they ionize and recombine with electrons and in so doing they let off light but they only lit off light in one specific wavelength range around 589 nanometers it's actually two very close spectral lines a 589 and 589.6 but it's considered a monochromatic light source because those two wavelengths are so close together so basically it lets off light of only one wavelength in a yellowish orange range the weirdest effect of a sodium vapor lamp has to be that it basically turns everything into a black and white movie so I have here a tomato and my orange extension cord watch what happens when I turn on the sodium vapor light and turn off my regular light and everything's black and white so it's just crazy looking at my own hands here they basically just look black and white everything becomes a total shade of gray and the reason this happens turning everything black and white like this is because this is a monochromatic light source basically the only thing you can see is either this yellow light or a lesser shade of it and so everything in the room is either reflecting a little bit of this yellowish light or absorbing in so it looks a little bit darker so the only way we're going to get a shadow is if this fire can actually absorb this specific wavelength of light okay let's lie our alcohol on fire you can see that there's no Shadow to this flame here light the alcohol and fire also no Shadow behind it but now let's see what happens when I stick this tissue that's soaked in salt water in it watch this look at that you get black fire so when I stick this in it suddenly you see a shadow behind the flame and the flame also turns black so I can assure you that what you're seeing now isn't camera trickery or anything it actually looks like what you're seeing it actually even looks cooler in person because it actually looks like black fire when I stick this in it so what's happening here is that this has sodium atoms in it and those vaporized sodium atoms can now absorb the wavelength of light coming off the sodium vapor lamp because it's the same wavelength the same atoms and so basically we create a fire that can absorb light so cool okay I've discovered something even cooler than just sticking the tissue in it if you drop a stream of the sodium chloride water in it then you get this black flame coming out of it so awesome look at that black fire it's totally black [Music] okay so I have to say I've done a lot of experiments on my channel and out of all of them this has to be one of my favorites this is so cool to see in person it's so cool to see the flame actually turn black it looks like I'm watching a movie or something and there's a special effect happening in front of me this is so awesome it's this is not smoke there's no smoke coming off of it whatsoever but this is black fire that is so cool okay look at this black fire so it's definitely hot this is not smoke but it is fire hey everybody thanks for watching another episode of the action lab I hope you enjoyed it if you did hit the Subscribe button and hit the Bell to be notified when my latest videos out and head over to the actionlab.com if you haven't yet to check out my subscription box where you can do experiments similar to the ones that you see me do on my channel thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: The Action Lab

Views: 6,215,082

Keywords: dark fire, black fire, shadow fire, black light, dark light, experiment, action lab, amazing experiment, the action lab, can light be black, amazing science, sodium vapor lamp, low pressure sodium vapor lamp, lps lamp, sodium, burning sodium, colored fire, how to, cool science experiments, cool science, vacuum chamber, venus fly trap, foil ball, stretch armstrong, iron man suit, zombie ant, black 2.0, brightest flashlight, blackest black, Amaterasu

Id: 5ZNNDA2WUSU

Length: 6min 25sec (385 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 25 2018