Is it Possible to Predict Randomness? The Double Pendulum Experiment

okay everybody today we're going to be seeing if you can actually predict chaos hey Google it's science time it says on Wikipedia that on top of Mount Everest water blowing at 160 degrees Fahrenheit thanks Google and I'd like to thank Google for sponsoring this awesome video today so the Google assistant team and I have teamed up to create this awesome room today so we fully automated the room using the Google assistant and we're going to be using it throughout our experiment today so one cool thing that you can get the Google assistant to do is to flip a coin for you hey Google flip a coin alright it says as opposed to just flipping a coin by yourself tails however actually neither of these methods of flipping a coin or random for example if I knew the initial linear and angular momentum of the coin and the amount of wind resistance I could calculate exactly how the coin would land every single time there's nothing random about it flipping a coin is completely deterministic the same goes for flipping a coin using a pseudo-random number generator like the Google assistant uses so they use a function that's very predictable and it actually produces the same result every time you use it only that it has an initial condition that is unknown to the people using it but if you did know those initial starting numbers then you could predict perfectly every time what the random number generator would output for example I can make a simple pseudo-random coin flipping algorithm by using the digits of pi if the digit is odd it's heads if it's even it's tails so I just write out the digits of pi and every time someone asked me to flip a coin I just look at the next digit of Pi in the column and tell them the result based on whether it's odd or even now to someone who doesn't know the algorithm it seems like it's random with no repeating pattern whatsoever but if you just knew that I was using the digits of pi and whether they were odd or even then you would know what was going on and everything I was going to say every single time so the more correct term for this is actually not a random system a chaotic system and a chaotic system is one that appears random but simply because we don't know all the information to predict the results so before we do my next experiment I program the Google assistant to help warn my wife when an experiments about to begin hey Google let's do a safety check don't forget to wear your safety glasses okay you might hear a boom let's do this okay so I have here something that's called a double pendulum and what a double pendulum is is it's like a normal pendulum but instead of one degree of freedom it has two degrees of freedom and that means that you can create an amazingly chaotic system so you can start it in any position and give it a spin and it starts to do its own thing after that and make its own pattern hey Google dim the lights so now with that dark you can see that if we have a black light we can make this amazing pattern on the back and we can actually show the chaotic system in action [Music] [Music] and so I have to find chaos and randomness in two different ways chaos is a thing that's determined it's deterministic meaning that if you knew everything everything about the initial conditions you could predict what will happen in the future whereas randomness is completely unpredictable you can never predict what will happen to a specific thing so what is a truly random system well the only truly random systems are quantum mechanical based systems so what I have here is some metal rods that have thorium in them hey Google what's the half-life of thorium the most stable isotope 232 th has a half-life of 14 point zero five billion years and so we can predict very well how many atoms will decay over time but we can never say with exact certainty when that decay will occur but actually for chaotic systems and random systems you can still use statistics to predict what you think what that will happen on a large grand scale let me show you what I mean one example of a chaotic system is one like this so I have some metal beads up here and as they fall down they hit these little pegs but when you drop a lot of balls it becomes easier to predict where the average ball will land and what's interesting about this is there's no specific thing telling the balls to fall in this order but when you get a bunch of chaotic motions all working together they end up to produce a very predictable curve in fact one of my favorite quotes about this subject by the statistician Sir Francis Galton who invented the Galton board that I'm showing here he said that whenever a large sample of chaotic elements are taken in hand and unsuspected and most beautiful form of regularity proves to have been laying all along so that quote is actually really interesting so what it says is that the more chaotic a system is the more predictable it actually is and that even applies to human behavior so even though we make individual decisions and it seems like we're making individual decisions we're actually very predictable in what we do in fact scientists have found that we're 93 predictable in almost every aspect of our life if you take a large enough population of humans it doesn't matter matter age ethnicity gender we're really predictable we all do the same things and so we as humans are completely random and unpredictable yet we're very predictable and I'd like to thank Google again for sponsoring this video and the awesome Google assistant team that helped me build this awesome lab and helped me program the Google assistant to do these awesome queries and remember to share in the comments section below and on your social channels how you're using the Google assistant with the hashtag hey Google and remember to click the link in the description to learn how to try this at home with the Google assistant hey Google repeat after me thanks for watching the action lab if you haven't subscribed yet remember to hit the subscribe button thanks for watching and I'll see you next time thanks for watching the action lab if you haven't subscribed yet remember to hit the subscribe button thanks for watching and I'll see you next time see you next time

Channel: The Action Lab

Views: 800,132

Keywords: google, google assistant, the action lab, randomness, chaos, double pendulum, pendulum, predictable chaos, chaos theory, #HeyGoogle, make google do it, Advertisement, YouTube, Influencer, Pixel, Smart Home, How To, chaotic motion, dynamical systems, chaotic pendulum, triple pendulum, chaos pendulum, action lab, vacuum chamber, venus fly trap, hydraulic press, stretch armstrong, science experiment, home science, cool science, science experiments, action lab box, quantum mechanics

Id: 4xViPStT5II

Length: 6min 41sec (401 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 27 2018