Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains How Quantum Physics Can Spoil Food

chuck i'm back in your face yes yes you are or at least virtually virtually in your face yes i want to talk about when food goes bad okay so you're already you got me i love it when food goes bad because something i'm very well aware of because i come from a childhood where mom and grandmom almost refuse to almost throw away i mean to freeze their throw away they didn't want to waste food they don't want to never even if the food would kill you they wouldn't throw in the food i'm just like mom this thing is moving what are you talking about you know well you put that in the pan it'll be just fine dang number little molds burn that right back up you cut that mold off of there you that's just fine these are people who like grew up in the depression you know and where hunger was a thing yeah so they don't want them young whipper snappers just throwing away food it's like how dare you waste food and one of my favorite comics was gary larson and the subtitle was when the potato salad goes bad and you go inside the refrigerator the potato salad's got a gun and it's holding it up to the lead it's not funny it's like mugging other food when it goes bad right it shows the right thing the potato salad right because that's the one you gotta watch out for exactly so why am i an astrophysicist talking about that i'll tell you why because there's the normal kind of way food goes bad all right you leave it in there too long and something grows on it all right something else wants to eat the food and it's some kind of microbe some bacteria or combination of bacteria that start eating the food and it could be mold that's enjoying the food that you were going to eat all right now first of all there's this bacteria's on the food all the time it's just a matter of how much is there right and you have a digestive tract and depending on what you ate the food will take a certain amount of time to go from your mouth to come out the other side or to get metabolized all right so if you ingest bacteria on your food that would otherwise be bad for you that bacteria begins to multiply all right it's multiplying at some rate in the refrigerator but when it warms up to your body temperature because you've just eaten it it will duplicate faster okay so there it is duplicate now it's in your throat and it's in your stomach do you play faster it's in your your small intestine you're larger and says if it gets out before it takes over then you don't even think anything of it no it's no problem it's no problem so but these thresholds where if you in just a certain amount the doubling time of that bacteria will then manifest itself while it's still in your digestive tract and then you end up with nausea you know diarrhea whatever okay so that's sort of normal food poisoning all right normal and we also we have we've developed a means to detect by the smell when something goes bad okay evolutionarily if you casually ingested things that would make you sick and possibly die if you enjoyed the smell of rotting food that's a branch that is a genetic branch that's headed for extinction because right because you and all your descendants who like the smell of rotting food that would kill you you would end up with none of you to then propagate this feature about yourself all right so we do unless you're a vulture unless you're a culture right right but they they're cool but they're cool with it depending on you know how digestive your gastric juices are from one species to another for humans we know what those limits are you smell it that's bad and you throw it away except for your mama that's right all right so that's the normal kind of when food goes bad all right but suppose you got rid of all the microbes and then you sort of vacuum sealed it nothing no microbes anyway and you put it in a really cold temperature because all as far as we have been able to measure chemical and biological processes double their rate every 10 degrees celsius okay okay that's why cooling things make them last longer right that's right so you can do this you can so does it mean it stops at zero it would have to stop yes okay zero yes nothing happened nothing nothing happens absolute zero oh no i don't mean absolute zero i mean if you just start you say every 10 degrees celsius oh okay yeah so you it would stop at absolute zero at absolute zero oh you think zero just on the underneath yeah i was thinking on a regular there's nothing special about that zero the only special zero is on a kelvin absolute scale and we did a whole explainer video it and we got a link we put a link in there somewhere okay that's right that's right all right so every 10 degrees it's half so you can just keep having all the way down okay so you can do the experiment if you wanted you know have uh get milk and bring it to room temperature okay then get milk put it at um in the refrigerator temperature and they get milk put it like right at near freezing and then get milk and just freeze it and just sit back and just watch what happens all right the microbes that are already in it are doing their thing and you can look at the temperature differences and you can calculate this up and basically the milk might last a day or two if oh by the way what is ultra pasteurized mean ultra pasteurized they they took out even more microbes than were there in the normal pasteurized wow okay now what now with twice as little twice as little i would say half as much but you can say twice as little all right that's fine so when you do that the pasteurized smoke look at the expiration date on the ultra pasteurized milk versus the regular pasteurized milk it's way longer in the future because there's so few microbes there they're slowly coming along and they're doubling time they still have a doubling time all right but they started out with fewer so they're not going to get there this milk smells nasty threshold until much later okay so that's the biological when food goes bad but i want to take this up a notch okay go ahead let us get rid of all microbes let us irradiate the food all right so now there's nothing living on it at all now we don't want anything to come to it after the fact so now let's vacuum seal it okay so now nothing's getting to it nothing's on it okay so now i have a slab of meat vacuum sealed okay now i don't have to refrigerate it because there's no microbes that i don't i can put out on the counter i can put it up in the cabinet okay you can put it there for years and years and years you know why i know about this and think about it because when you're going to store food on a long space mission you don't want to carry freezers with you in refrigerators you want food that can just stay you want food that could just survive on the shelf that could just be b you need food that just is that food that is right you need your steak to be a twinkie i'm i'm eating twinkie steak twinkies from eight years ago just the same as i bought them yesterday right my steak is good for 20 years all right so but here's what happens okay right and this is where quantum physics comes in so you didn't see that coming did you i did not you did not see that coming all right you you totally had me all right so molecules exist in a state of existence all right all molecules do and you can ask yourself is the molecule happy in that state of existence is it happy in other words is there a lower state of energy that this molecule can occupy because if there is it's going to want to go there is that state of energy i'm such a big molecule let me break into two now i have less energy than before because molecules don't like remaining in higher states of vendor and those two molecules can break and then they settle into a lower and lower form of energy that's how the molecule wants to exist gotcha okay right all right so how does it get access to that lower form event if you made the molecule and it's happy here how does it decide one day to not be happy it has me as a father okay it is it is so think of it it's in a well but there's a lower well off to the side how do you get to that little you have to go up a little hill before you go down to that lower well so this molecule has to find a way to get over that hill and it'll immediately go to a lower energy state if there's nothing to stick it over that hill it would last forever but quantum physics said all these molecules and particles are also waves and the wave has an existence on the other side of that hill and there's a chance that this particle can disappear from this state and reappear on the other side of that hill in a state where it slides down to a lower a lower energy level quantum physics takes it there it's called tunneling okay so these bonds that are formed chemically they're not forever if there's another bond they could think about that has a lower energy by the way it has lower energy it gives off energy so so this so your food has complex molecules in it these protein fibers and it's it's complex right so given enough time quantum physics degrades the texture of the food so your meat will still be meat in five years but you'll start noticing stockholm you can go mealy right where's that what's happening what's happening why does my meat now taste like soylent green because it is hey what happened to mac the astronaut where is he well he died why is this suit still here so so all i'm saying is food can go bad biologically and food can go bad chemically wow now the you know the lowest energy state of anything something at absolute zero uh well yes that's in by temperature but in terms of uh configuration the lowest energy state one of the lowest energy states you can occupy is crystal oh crystal form so that's why it's weird that there's whole there's a whole cult around crystals crystals like i get so much energy crystals have the lowest energy of that molecule that's so it's just weird to knowing physics and chemistry to see this unfold that's fine in this the 21st century but anyhow when you go to buy salt are you checking the freshness date on the soil have you ever done this are you kidding me i actually have some jesus salt in my cupboard so sorry where do you get salt it gets mined from places that have been there for milli millions of years okay do you salt that's down below the ground right that's just salt it's been there hadn't been touched that's right okay it didn't become something else it is salt it has been salt so crystalline things like diamonds are forever diamond as crystal okay um now i learned that there's another state of carbon that's a slightly lower energy than diamond so diamonds are not actually forever but they're really really long-lived okay and so another crystal sugar okay by the way if sugar goes bad it's not because it's something to happen to the crystal because you put it next to the barbecue pit or something and it took on the smells right right or something else was it or or it absorbed water somehow yeah exactly so you didn't have it in a place that was dry enough and then the other things are what then messes with it but the sugar crystal itself is happy so yes i think salt does have dates on it but that's just that you can use it and buy the next one right better put some more salt on that man it's about to go bad that happened with the tibet with tabasco sauce i don't think this is apocryphal i think this is real you know what happened you know tobacco sauce the little thing yeah i love tabasco you kidding me okay yeah um they figured out how to double your consumption of tabasco sauce how's that someone in the company suggested that they make the hole twice as big brilliant so you still think you're not using much you're using twice as much as you use guess what that makes perfect sense and they just double the sales and that person got a raise so anyhow so i just want to say that when food goes bad it can go bad by the this other way that we don't think about much but for very long-term storage like in the apocalyptic earth this sort of thing that's how you you would need to think about that and want to know about but that'll be true for any food stuffs at all so you have to watch out you can't you can't really stop the quantum phenomenon from going on so so it would still taste like steak but the texture tends to be one of the things that goes first so the moral of this story is during the nuclear apocalypse you better make sure that you have some salt because by the way salt itself is a preservative of other foods i was about to say because your meat is going to taste like crap and your salt's the only thing that's going to last so so they have a chuck it so there's a just a quick one nah that was a good one i like that the chemical decomposition of molecules food molecules molecules in general that's right yeah super cool man there you have it all right there's been another star talk explainer video neil degrasse tyson chuck always good to have you always a pleasure as always keep looking up

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 141,288

Rating: 4.9543352 out of 5

Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, chuck nice, quantum physics, quantum tunneling, quantum tunneling explained, quantum phenomena, food, quantum food, comedian

Id: f2bRLJLiuMs

Length: 14min 44sec (884 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 06 2020