Can You Swim in Shade Balls?

I'm in! I'm floating in shade balls! This feels incredible because like I can hardly tell there's water under me. It feels like just being in a ball pit. But it's kind of like quicksand Oh no! Uh oh! I feel like this is the Internet's fault because I made this video about the shade balls on LA reservoir and a lot of people asked: can you swim in shade balls? and I'm like it's a drinking reservoir, obviously you can't swim in the drinking water but then I thought you know what we know the people who actually made these shade balls and so I could call them up and order them and sure enough I've purchased 10,000 shade balls to try to swim in. Now there is a scientific and safe way to test this which would be to go in the shallow end but I'm gonna do the YouTube way which is to jump in the deep end and just see if I can swim In 3... 2... 1... it was probably right about now that I thought back to my conversation with the Shay ball manufacturer you don't recommend swimming and shake balls so do you think it's a bit dangerous maybe so dangerous in fact that he regularly refuses requests from residential customers they didn't even want to sell me shade balls I appreciate you making an exception for our Channel and for science and we will not promote this as a thing that people should do we will show people what it what happens and therefore that they should probably not do it what makes shade balls inherently more dangerous than other plastic balls is that they're half-full of water so they're heavy this bag of 1,200 shaped balls weighs 300 kilograms or 660 pounds so when I ordered 10,000 of these things I didn't really think about how hard it would be to get them home and now we have them all in the back of u-haul now the only challenge get in the mouth after driving the largest vehicle I've ever attempted across LA I hired a moving company it's time to release the balls kind of surprised 6,000 shape balls doesn't quite cover the whole pool but it's it's just about there and you can see already the balls have sort of arranged themselves in crystal structures for their clothes packed and then there's some boundaries between these grains we've basically got a single layer of balls on the whole pool I'm gonna jump in and try to swim with them we'll see how that works and if I can do that then we have 3,600 more and we can put on top which brings us back to what I'm swimming so this is breast rate and on I can swim but I am getting a lot of balls into the face a few observations for objects whose purpose is to block out sunlight a surprising amount still gets through that's because even packed as tightly as possible Spears only cover about 91% of the water surface light coming through the cracks and reflecting off the balls makes these really interesting patterns on the bottom of the pool when swimming through shaped balls the other thing that hits you is the noise they make so much noise so close to your head that it's virtually impossible to hear anything else I feel like you're getting an extra workout frankly I'm gonna try a different swim stroke I'm gonna go over to front crawl or freestyle ah I feel like I got like a bloody lip I feel like I'm getting knocked around like in a rock tumbler swimming in shape balls made me reflect on drag the force that opposes motion when moving through a fluid drag is typically proportional to your velocity squared why is that well let's imagine these shaped balls as particles of their own fluid and the faster you go the more of them you encounter per second but also the faster they're moving relative to you and hence the impact they have on you as you push them out of the way so that's why drag is proportional to V squared because you run into more of them and they're moving faster relative to you so they have a greater impact swimming is a good workout swimming you shade balls next level next level so I'm not actually the best swimmer so I brought over some friends Christian and Jorden butterfly is even more challenging because not only do you have to push the balls forward they also get pushed down and up and out however that's insane it looks hard you can hit your face with your shoulders so with it clear that you can swim albeit with difficulty in a single layer of shaved balls it was time to test if you can swim in multi layer shade balls this is in fact how most of la reservoir is covered it looks as though you could like float on the top so I'm gonna see if I can like run across these shape balls it's gonna end poorly I'm sure three two one similar attempts to slide across the surface of the shade balls were also doomed to failure each ball is almost half full of water so when fully submerged it only supports around 300 grams that means to support my body entirely above the water I'd need more than 260 shade balls trapped under mine this is amazing I'm still I'm still but what about the central question can you swim in multiple layers of shade I don't think you can swim until I found the kind of unorthodox style swimming mostly beneath the shade balls just like the guy in the boat said you just don't move I was swimming I don't say good and I just couldn't like go anywhere but don't just take my word for it watch Jordan try butterfly amazing unlike in the single layer where the balls could easily move past each other with multiple layers the balls kind of get trapped against each other and act more like a solid providing significantly more resistance so I wanted to see if I could use this to my advantage to lower myself gently down with the hose hit and see if I can float on top of all these v-shaped balls all right I'm floating in shape oh this feels incredible because like I can hardly tell there's water under me it feels like just being in a ball pit that is exactly like quicksand oh my goodness if you don't move you're good on the surface but then if you start moving around all the balls get enough energy to sort of shift and then you start sinking down deeper and deeper and deeper now after all this the one question I'm left with is what do you do with 10,000 shade balls well I've decided that I am going to sign each one and mail it out to a patreon supporter so if you want to receive one of these balls signed by me go and sign up to be a patreon supporter now I my plan is to send these out to basically every patreon supporter I have everywhere in the world I'll put more details in the description below obviously the shipping costs are going to be horrendous but it is your support on patreon that allows me to do things like this so this is my way of saying thank you

Channel: Veritasium

Views: 12,869,158

Rating: 4.8057327 out of 5

Keywords: veritasium, science, physics, shade balls, balls, black balls, reservoir, swim, swimming, los angeles

Id: BZbChKzedEk

Length: 10min 41sec (641 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 13 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/memzkunt]

the answer is yes, but no

[u/minicooper237]

I'm disappointed they didn't show how dark the water was in the hottub at the end. It looks like at least 3 layers which might be able to block all the light.

[u/Santos_L_Halper]

Shipping 10,000 shade balls individually, supposedly globally, is going to cost a fucking fortune.

[u/primus202]

He really leaned into that "game the algorithm" video. Good for him. He deserves the views.

[u/DiplomaticDoughnut]

Damn, this guy has one nice house!

[u/JohnNutLips]

Damn he must be loaded. A house that big in LA

[u/firmakind]

That giveaway is stupid as fuck. I'd rather have my shade ball used somewhere else than paying for gas halfway accross the globe.

[u/oldDotredditisbetter]

a little too Youtube-y for my taste, he even stretched the video to be 10:41, which is just over 10-minutes. i guess he's really embracing the "game the system" trend

[u/tickettoride98]

Seems like he's really milking the shade ball thing. He keeps talking about the LA Reservoir, but they've been removed from other reservoirs and are only still on the one because the cost of creating a cover is so high. However, the EPA is requiring exposed outdoor reservoirs be covered, even if it costs billions per reservoir. Shade balls, while novel, aren't going to be used on reservoirs.