Game Theory: Sonic is TOO Powerful! (Sonic the Hedgehog)

sonic did you know that geico our sponsor for today's episode could help you save money on boat insurance oh i think i'm gonna puke but i don't have a boat oh i suppose that makes sense i know you're not the biggest fan of water rv nope how about like a condo or an apartment dude i live in a burrow it's literally a hole in the dirt well i would say that they could save you money on your car insurance but someone as fast as you would never needed now we're talking wait why do you have a car again and they have an app too it just takes 15 minutes to get a quote now that's my kind of speed [Music] game theory hello internet welcome to film theory the show that wait no no sorry welcome to game theory uh apologies if i'm getting my wires crossed today in the past two years i've done four sonic videos and three of them over on our sister location of film theory yeah three videos from one stinkin sonic movie really did milk that one dry didn't we anyway it's good to be back here on the video game side of things back where it all began we've tackled the subject of sonic speed a lot over the years and i have to admit i've been pretty hard on the old blue blur first we concluded that he isn't actually the super sonic hedgehog that he claims to be then we concluded that his running would completely destroy his fragile body then we prove that his chaos emeralds aren't even emeralds even i start to get tired of being a naysayer after beating up on a franchise for so long so you know what new resolution there's enough sadness and depression in 2020 so today i'm gonna stop being a naysayer i'm gonna be pro sonic i'm gonna take a page from jim carrey's playbook and try to come up with a theory where i say yes yes man wow today i'm gonna be sonic's yes man a yes matt if you will so what part of the sonic lore can i try to prove with actual science and to show that i'm trying to stay impartial and abandon any previous biases i might have against this character i'm gonna ask a completely unbiased source for assistance here hey computer what's an easily defensible part of the sonic lore that i could back up with actual science do a theory about the time travel in sonic cd what you've gotta be kidding me we're gonna talk about that sonic game the one with time travel where sonic can travel back and forth between the future the past and the present do i even have to start with all the paradoxes that that would uh no no no new matpat bad we're gonna try to say yes today i am sure that if we just dig into the science we can find some sort of justification for sonic's ability to travel through time now for those of you asking was that really part of sonic canon the answer is yes might not have experienced it firsthand since it only appeared in sonic cd well that and as a cameo in sonic mania which maybe a lot of you did play but sonic cd is the game where it's one of the main gameplay mechanics sonic starts off in the present but by speeding past signs either labeled past or future he can travel to the past or future versions of those stages the first time sonic travels to the future he finds himself in a ruined and decayed world and the main goal of the game is to change the timeline by collecting enough time stones it's basically the plot of avengers end game except with a blue protagonist looking to collect a bunch of multi-colored gems oh my gosh sonic cd is just avengers end game isn't it so let's start with what's probably the least controversial part of this right the idea that sonic can somehow use his super speed to travel forward through time into the future while it might seem like this breaks the fundamental laws of physics i mean how can mere seconds seem to pass for sonic while the rest of the world ages forward by several decades this is actually supported by the scientific concept known as time dilation something that i talked about way way way back in episode one of game theory by the way do not go back there for your own sanity it is not a pretty place though i gotta admit it was a pretty ballsy move of 2011 matpat to try and tackle special relativity for the very first episode of his little show about video games anyway i've gotten a lot better at explaining things since then and to be honest episodes have gotten a lot longer since episode one so i've got more time to explain it so you know what let's take another crack at it let's start with an easy example shall we you and your buddy sonic the hedgehog are jogging along the side of the road you at a speed of 5 miles an hour or 8 kilometers per hour sonic at 50 miles per hour or 80 kph meanwhile the cars driving past you are moving at 60 miles an hour or 96 kph so from your perspective those cars are traveling 55 miles an hour 88 kph their speed minus your speed from sonic's much faster perspective the cars are traveling a lot slower only 10 miles per hour 16 kph because he's moving so much faster that is the principle of relativity the car is always traveling the same speed but relative to me it seems to be going much faster than it is relative to sonic but you see light works differently and here's where special relativity comes in the speed of light is constant no matter what frame of reference you're referring to whether you're standing there or you're running at five miles per hour heck sonic's over there running at 95 the speed of light it doesn't matter light will always seem to be moving at the same speed but how can that be surely if you and sonic are moving at different speeds then you'd perceive moving light differently the same way you perceive that moving car differently right well you would think that but that's just not how it works in the real world a quick example literally the speed of light is roughly 300 million meters per second right so let's say that you're staying still and you observe light for one second you see a travel 300 million meters but let's say sonic is running really really fast say half the speed of light 150 million meters per second and he sees that same light well to him the light is still the same speed 300 million meters per second but for that to happen in a second it has to travel whatever speed sonic is going plus an additional 300 million meters but light can't be going 300 million meters per second for us and 450 million meters per second for sonic a thing can't go two separate speeds at the same time or can it and you see that is what makes this relativity so special the weird thing about the way light moves through space-time is this light's speed is always remaining constant but speed is just distance traveled over a course of time in this case a distance of 300 million meters to me and 450 million meters to sonic so for the speed of light to stay equal while the distances are changing it means the time of one second has to change as well so far we've assumed that one second always equals one second but in this example one second is no longer just one second or more specifically one second for you isn't the same as one second for sonic that is how light can travel two different distances in the same amount of time because it's not actually the same amount of time the definition of one second depends on how fast you're going all of this is a very long-winded way of describing the phenomenon of time dilation which says when two objects move through space at different speeds they also move through time at different speeds faster moving objects seem to travel through times slower than their stationary counterparts all of this seems like the kind of wonky physics thing that would only work in theory so the question is does it hold up in real world practice it turns out yeah if you've ever used a gps system you've probably connected to a satellite that was traveling around the earth somewhere in the neighborhood of 14 000 kilometers an hour about twice the speed of earth's fastest aircraft according to einstein's theory of relativity objects orbiting earth at that speed should appear to run slower by about 38 000 nanoseconds per day and wouldn't you know it but this is exactly what happens in fact it's become a bit of a problem for real world engineers it means that satellites that we rely on for data can actually become desynced with clocks that are back here on earth which can lead to things like software glitches when engineers don't account for them the tldr here is that time travel is a very real thing that you play a small part in each and every time you use a gps satellite to locate the nearest jamba juice of course that's an example of a very tiny amount of time dilation if sonic wants to go so fast that decades pass on earth or mobius while only a relatively small amount of time passes for him he's gonna have to go really really fast even if sonic manages to run so fast that he's traveling at 99 the speed of light time will only seem to pass 13.6 percent the speed for sonic that it does for the rest of the planet in short if sonic wants to travel forward in time by 10 years like we see him do in sonic cd he'd have to run at 99 the speed of light for one year four months and two weeks in short the idea of him running so fast that decades seem to pass in the blink of an eye like we see in sonic cd isn't likely to happen unless he finds some way to surpass the speed of light and as we all know since i've been saying it a lot for the better part of the past decade i don't think video game sonic is that fast enter something that i've always feared talking about on this show the archie comics you see in the games the fastest sonic ever runs is light speed and even that's kind of debatable sonic adventure first introduces players to what'll eventually become a regular power-up the light shoes which supposedly give the blue blur the ability to travel at light speed now you've got light speed shoes the light speed dash lets you race toward rings at light speed the same holds true for movie sonic as i calculated in a previous film theory movie sonic is able to hit near light speed allowing him to fire off emp style blasts but there's one other major source of sonic canon the sonic archie comics 290 issues spread across 24 years filled with panel after panel of absolutely insane physical feats performed by none other than our favorite chili dog chomping champion in the special super sonic vs hyperknuckles a battle between sonic and knuckles destroys an entire dimension boom just gone outright in issue 125 he runs fast enough to not only escape a black hole but creates enough force to reverse the spin of a black hole and if you thought that sounds ridiculous the ensuing explosion shoots him 849 000 light years away but perhaps my personal favorite of the bunch issue number 71 robotnik attacks using a time beam and sonic runs faster than time itself to save the day what does that even mean well we can actually calculate it in another of the one-off specials the sonic blast comic sonic in what we're told is faster than the eye can see forms a ball that's made out of water and quote before the physics of displacement can happen forms it into a ball and throws it at a robot bird now that alone would give us the information that we need but the comic takes it one step further telling us that he's able to do all of this in point oh god in point zero zero zero this is like an eye test point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero one milliseconds that is twelve zeros there people to be exact he's doing all of that in 100 ato seconds for context an add a second is one quintillionth of a second an ato second is to a second what a second is to 31.71 billion years 100 at a seconds is a third of the amount of time it takes for an electron to transfer between atoms so does this mean that we finally found a version of sonic that's able to break light speed buddy you betcha when you run the numbers in 100 add a seconds light is traveling point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero three meters thirty nanometers give you some context a sheet of paper is a hundred thousand nanometers thick in that same amount of time sonic scoops water and throws it at an evil robot bird in other words the speeds that sonic is traveling in the archie comics absolutely crushes light speed which makes this trip to the future via time dilation in this amount of time from sonic cd absolutely 100 plausible but what does it mean to travel faster than the speed of light after all our existing understanding of physics is built on the idea that the speed of light can't be surpassed and yet here's sonic doing it for the funsies well that question of course has drawn the attention of scientists with some of the most interesting results coming from physics researchers at michigan technological university by their calculations if a traveling person or in our case too cool for school hedgehog passes a certain speed the ratio of the traveler's time to the passage of time back home will actually become a negative value meaning that as time seems to move forward for sonic time would actually move backward on earth you heard that right we've actually solved the other harder part of our sonic cd time travel puzzle namely how sonic manages to travel backwards in time theoretically speaking he can go back in time if he travels fast enough how fast are we talking here about two 2726 times the speed of light which again in the archie comics is something that he is somehow capable of doing so for the second time in one episode i confirm again that something seen in a sonic game is plausible the exact way that we see it play out in said game except you know i can't let him get off that easily i'm a child of nintendo kirby is my homeboy and luigi is my plumber of choice i can't just let sonic get away from an episode unscathed because as you can imagine traveling nearly 3 000 times the speed of light comes with a certain set of consequences you might think that this is the part where we get into time paradoxes what happens if sonic goes back in time and kills his parents before his birth or something like that but he's actually got much bigger problems on his hands see if he leaves mobius and then through time dilation tries to return before he initially left we run into a basic physics problem which is that his body has mass and is made of matter so where did that matter come from imagine if sonic ran away and then returned five minutes before he left that would mean that there are just now two sonics existing at the same time where there was only one before so the question really is where did the other sonic come from you can't just create matter out of nothing can you well as it turns out no the returning sonic the one that experienced the negative time progression relative to mobius is well it's not really understood fully because this is strictly theoretical but the researcher's best conclusion is that this new sonic would be made of exotic negative mass and if this exotic negative mass came into contact with the original mass it would be similar to matter meeting anti-matter and the two would annihilate each other all this means is that the old sci-fi trope of don't go back in time and touch yourself or else you'll explode is well it's a lot more true to life than i think most of us imagine but to this you might propose an easy solution sonic could just go back in time before he was born he can't meet himself in the past if he didn't exist back then can he but here's where you're wrong every molecule every atom every subatomic particle that is a part of sonic was once a part of some other being or some other object you know the whole thing about the water cycle where the water that you drink today might have one time been a dinosaur's drinking water repeatedly being cycled through the water cycle of evaporation and precipitation for centuries until the day it wound up in your glass well think that but on a molecular atomic and subatomic level the carbon atoms in your muscles were probably once a part of some other living thing maybe they were previously part of the cow that turned into your steak that you ate for dinner before that they were part of the grass that the cow ate the circle of life in fact the further back in time sonic goes the more scattered those subatomic particles are going to be and the greater chance that he has of randomly running into a particle that just so happens to end up as a part of him the faster he goes the more particles he encounters and the greater the risk of his total annihilation so there you have it friends sonic is indeed the fastest thing alive maybe not in the video games maybe not in the movies but certainly in the comics where his speeds crush that of light time and all known physics except there's one catch every second that he spends running around in the past is a threat to his very existence and when the positive mass of past sonic meets the negative mass of time traveler sonic well that is what we like to call a sonic boom but like literally a big boom blowing him out of existence anyway that is just a theory a game theory thanks for watching and hey while time travel may be tough saving money on your insurance with our sponsor for today's episode geico is easy for as reliably as the blue blurs defeated robotnik for nearly 30 years geico has been saving folks money for over 75 years and okay so those are the lines that you know from the commercials but if i can give a personal experience with geico they've been great to me i've been with geico for both car and home insurance for nearly 10 years now and i've never once had an issue with any of their services their mobile app is incredibly well designed it's fast it's easy to use which makes it easy to do things like give proof of insurance to places that need it like the dmv no joke true story here i made an appointment a month in advance for the dmv to get some forms updated i 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Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 2,706,381

Rating: 4.9348965 out of 5

Keywords: sonic, sonic the hedgehog, sonic speed, how fast is sonic, sonic hedgehog, sonic movie, mario sonic, sonic full movie, sonic 2020, summer sonic 2020, ok ko sonic, old sonic vs new sonic, sonic loops, sonic physics, sonic olympics, sonic mania, sonic music, sonic exe, science of sonic, sonic games, sonic game, the game theorists, game theory, matpat, game theory sonic, mario & sonic at the olympic games, mario sonic olympic games

Id: _3DHGXgZ-_s

Length: 18min 45sec (1125 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ComfyCatgirl]

EITHER SONIC IS A GOD OR COULD KILL GOD, AND I DO NOT CARE IF THERE IS A DIFFERENCE

[u/InnardEnnard]

This was made just to shut up the sonic fanboys who harass mat even though in a Philip de Franco interview. He said he loved sonic.

[u/buzzkill_aldrin]

1. ⁠14,000 KMPH is not “about twice the speed of Earth’s fastest aircraft” if MatPat meant the displayed SR-71’s 3,500 KMPH. Even the theoretical Mach 5 Aurora stealth bomber (which may or may not exist) isn’t that fast. If someone secretly knows about a 7,000 KMPH aircraft... please tell us about it!

2. ⁠Sonic doesn’t need to “surpass the speed of light” for 10 years to be a few seconds in his frame of reference. He’d just need to travel very, very, very close to the speed of light. For instance, if you were to travel at 0.9999999999999999c for 1 second, a little under 2 years would have passed on Earth. Unfortunately the calculator I used wouldn’t let me add any additional 9s to that.

*All references to speed of light means “speed of light in a vacuum”. You can easily travel faster than the speed of light... if you slow down light.

[u/3n3ry]

when are u doing a theory about the rings

[u/johnnybskillz]

Technically matter CAN be created & destroyed. Nuclear fission taught us that. Could Sonic’s mass not be created via conversion from energy to matter, reversing e=mc^2? I’m sure there are a LOT of caveats, but is it theoretically possible?

[u/362Ninja]

Did the whole crazy speeds causes the reversal of time blow anyone else’s mind?

[u/getfukyes2]

Yea remember that Neil deGrasse Tyson collab?

[u/StealthOfAir]

I would assume that the mass comes from the future? If there are two Sonics at point A in time (where there should only be 1) and 0 Sonics at point B in time (where there should also be one) then clearly, one Sonic has been transferred from point B to point A. It's not technically cloning (they don't exist as separate entities, but one continuous entity interacting with itself from the future, thus causing the future self to know what they do and react accordingly only for the memories to change, and the "past" Sonic becomes the future one and the loop repeats until the time where they meet stabilizes). Seeing as (meta)time is technically a dimension with a really strong will to push you forward, the energy used for running is the amount of energy sonic used to push back.

(in this, past, present, and future are all relative to perspective) To summarize, "Present" Sonic interacts with "Future" Sonic (in what is probably a stable interaction that doesn't change with the knowledge of that conversation), does some stuff, then goes to the past. Now, "Present" Sonic interacts with "Past" Sonic, and reacts accordingly. Probably what happens though is what I dub a "flasher". Once the loop has stabilized, it might go like this:

Sonic A goes down Timeline path A.

Sonic B goes down Timeline path B because of the influences of Sonic A.

Sonic C goes down Timeline path A because of the influences of Sonic B.

Sonic D goes down Timeline path B because of the influences of Sonic C.

And so on and so forth. I'd assume that there was no "Sonic 0", as in meta time, there is no limitations like the death fo the universe, so there is always another Sonic.

[u/Jesterskull25]

.... this makes think Marvel Endgame should have ended differently then... cause Captain America wrestle himself.