Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains the Smallness of Molecules

all right before we get into it i want to thank surfsharkvpn for sponsoring this video you know in an ocean of online content there's a lot of websites and little crabs that take your info without you even knowing it but you can swim under their radar using surfsharkvpn or virtual private network you can stop websites from tracking your info and selling targeted ads to you nothing is creepier than when you have a conversation with a crustacean about something and then it pops up in your ads plus with serp sharks alert id production you'll get an alert when some little jerk manta ray is trying to break into your email you know one of my favorite features about surf shark is that you can see content not available in your area that means your viewing isn't bound by your geography just log in with surfshark and you can get access to videos that aren't normally available to you look if you want both protection and freedom online click the link in the description and use code star talk it not only gives you 83 percent off the regular price but also three months of totally free service surf shark offers a 30 day money back guarantee so there's no risk to try this out for yourself thanks surf shark [Music] chuck do you do you have any idea how small molecules are well seeing uh as i can't see them i'm going to say n i do not right and even if you did say you knew i would say you didn't know i'm just pulling rank here i'm just saying molecules i mean think about it our understanding of the existence of atoms did not even come into age until the 20th century atoms were still a hypothesis all right that there'd be this sort of smallest unit of a material called the atom by the way the word atom from the greek means indivisible so they imagined that there was some individual minimal part of a thing but of course we break out bust atoms all the time so no they're not indivisible but we kept the term right we kept the term atom to describe the electrons protons and neutrons the classical particles you learn about in in high school chemistry and maybe physics so uh so molecules are um i i could give an example okay and this is my favorite example of them all so uh think about how much water there is in the world in all the oceans okay and if you go in the middle of the ocean it's miles deep okay the titanic was like three and a half mile i forgot the exact number multiple miles below earth's surface okay that's a lot of water it's a lot of work and what is the water molecule h2o h2o okay so two hydrogen one oxygen h2o so this is salts and dissolved salts and fish poop and stuff like that but by it's basically h2o all over the world all right i love that you threw in the fish poop [Laughter] i'm so proud of you i'm thank you that's the juvenile part the eight-year-olds will want to know that yes there's also fish poop right in the ocean so where else does it go right um and just to recite the title of a book they may have grown up on everything poops wow actually an italian kid story that uh translated i got what the translated version of it yeah and it shows it's just a story it's for little kids because they poop and they know they poop and they're fascinated by it and it's just an account that everybody poops and all the fish poop in the ocean okay they don't go onto land to poop yeah i i read that book to my daughter she thought it was crappy i couldn't help it all right so they don't have outhouses on the land right right that would be amazing though oh god you just gave me the best thought in the world where a fish a fish just shows up at somebody's apartment door or house and just lets one go and goes how do you like it put it into your own house because we put all our sewage put them into theirs right how great now you know how it feels all right so i now take a glass and fill it with water okay a regular cup a cup okay that you might drink water out of okay fill it up so stare at that cup and i will tell you that there are more molecules of water in that cup then there are cups of water in all the world's oceans holy crap wow okay now the reason why i couched it that way is because that leads to fascinating conclusions okay if this cup of water has more molecules than there are cups of water in all the world that means when i drink this cup of water and it comes out of me eventually right through snot spit sweat right whatever it'll come out of you and it goes back into the environment okay you have excreted enough molecules to populate every single cup of water that is ever drawn from the oceans just got to give it enough time okay so this moisture goes back into the environment and the molecules that pass through my kidneys are now working their way around the world give it enough time i can guarantee you that there will be some molecules in that next cup of water you scoop that pass through my kidneys so i get to make the following statement every glass of water you drink contains molecules that pass through the kidneys of abe lincoln uh genghis khan uh joan of arc uh pick your favorite historical character okay have shared water molecules with that person well all i can say is that somehow you've done it neil you've done it you've made it so i am never again going to drink water i think i did i ran the calculation it's about a hundred molecules per per cup of water that's how that's how small molecules are that's that's my point that's the whole point of this exercise like i'll give you one more you ready go for it all right there are more molecules in a breath of air okay this would be now nitrogen molecules mostly nitrogen and then oxygen okay n2 and o2 because they're each in a molecular form a little bit of argon and some carbon dioxide but it's predominantly nitrogen and oxygen there are more molecules air molecules and a breath of air you take then there are breaths of air in all of the earth's atmosphere oh gotcha right okay so it means when you exhale right air that comes out of your lungs scatters back into the air and there are plenty of air molecules to scatter into every other breath that will ever be taken in the future history of the world wow so you're not only sharing water molecules with people who've come before you you're sharing air molecules that you have breathed that's how small they are this is my point and and so so um it's remarkable that we were able to discover them at all much less the atoms that they comprise what you do is you look at things that they do that you can see through microscopes electron microscopes this sort of thing and you say the only understanding of this is if the atoms got together and made a molecule but nobody's holding up a molecule here take this and plug it in this way all right there's some ways to image molecules we're on the verge of that there's something called quantum construction there's a bet there's a real term for it but what they're actually doing is if you get tools small enough you can take a molecule and put it here and add an atom and build things at a molecular level the way carpenters or construction workers assemble buildings by putting bricks together okay that's freaky and scary it's a little freaky and scary right if you have a brick that's a smaller part of a larger hole you just need tools that can maneuver the bricks right if i want to make a molecule that's never been made before and i make sure that it's a stable molecule how am i going to do that do i just put all the m and jiggle them maybe they won't want to do that on their own but if i make it happen with with quantum tweezers then i can start making molecules and you might even be able to make life at that point and not wait for it to happen by chance so so a frontier is our ability to manipulate those things that we could never see interesting that is amazing that so but but why think of it not as creepy that you're you're you're drinking water that passed through someone else's kidneys no i don't i don't ever want to have that thought again i'm so sorry that you brought it up you're gonna stop drinking water let me tell you the whole time you've been talking i've been wanting to drink this right here i'm not doing it you're not doing it i'm not doing it now it's over i just can't i can't drink water anymore you know i have to go my whole life now it's go it's gonna have to be great kool-aid because guess what i know that i'm not sharing that with with jesus and genghis khan because i didn't have kool-aid i know that jesus and genghis khan did not have kool-aid so now i can only drink grape kool-aid thank you [Laughter] so um yeah so it's just they're impressively little yeah and here we are in our big macroscopic scale i mean think about most of the history of research and investigation and trying to understand the world around us we were anchored to our five senses as the one and onl as the only means of of measuring and decoding what the world was doing around us right and forget molecules we didn't even know about bacteria or viruses all right and so you catch a disease you find somebody to blame or you were a sinner you know you had other explanations for it none of which bore any correspondence with an objective reality that we would not then glean until many many centuries later i don't know what you're talking about we still haven't learned that lesson oh that's true people say yeah people don't know how to relate to viruses yeah they still don't know oh man oh that is really cool though yeah so so so there it is i i have nothing more to add to that oh and by the way this is how you get um avogadro's number that's that's that's the count of molecules right in in a mole what's what's the mole number yeah so you have to look at the element on the periodic table or the the atomic weight of the molecule itself right and so let's look at carbon if carbon has is its atomic number is 12. the natural carbon has six elec six protons and six neutrons so a mole of carbon is 12 grams of carbon gotcha okay a mole of of silicon would be 18 grams of silicon okay so because it's atomic number is 18. right i'm sorry i'm sorry i didn't say this right carbon's atomic number is six because you're counting protons but its atomic weight is six plus six you get 12. okay all right so that's six protons six neutrons so my only point here is uh so you can ask if you have a mole of a substance how many molecules is that okay so 12 grams you know 12 gram is not very much no it's not okay it's it's not so 12 grams it's a third of an ounce of carbon how many molecules in that well it's avogadro's number of molecules and that's 6.022 just call it six times 10 to the 23rd power right okay cool 23rd that's insane that's insane yeah yes i mean that's i i i mean that's really not a conceivable number i was 100 times bigger than the number of stars in the observable universe yeah i was going to say that it's not a conceivable number because like the 23 zeros like what's up you can't say oh it's twice as big as this other thing you already know about exactly there's no because there is no other thing it just doesn't there's just nothing that it's crazy that's crazy right right this is a problem when you are dealing with extremes and we confront this all the time in astrophysics right um how do you talk about the biz the biggest explosion in the universe how do you measure that right you know usually you measure something because you have other things that are bigger other things that are smaller and then you say with somewhere in there and then you triangulate on it and now i understand but if it's more than anything you've seen before it becomes a challenge to explain it's it's a it's a philosophical issue of communication right and and our own physiology's ability to to uh come to terms with things that fall far outside of our life experience but anyhow chuck that's about it oh man that was good that was great and please do drink water never again great kool-aid only cool never again kool-aid has water in it just i thought i'd just but then it's flavored now i'm drinking your flavored kidney water i i get it you're guaranteeing that no one before you had passed that kool-aid flavor through their kidneys there you go the kool-aid headquarters they're phd chemist inventing this stuff there you go i got one thing to say to that oh yeah okay all right chuck we're done here all right all right be good neil degrasse tyson four star talk keep looking up [Music]

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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, size of molecules, chuck nice, quantum construction, Avogadro’s number, molecules, universe, mole

Id: 3qlx-6h3i6Q

Length: 15min 9sec (909 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 24 2020