This guy accidentally built a death ray. Twice.

oh hello i'm award-winning science educator and the chris hemsworth you ordered off a wish.com kyle hill you know when you have a multi-billion dollar secret facility like i do it's not enough to just do your own research you want to share it with the world and i regularly do that with my remote detonate iphone that's why i thought today's episode would be good if it was sponsored by skillshare skillshare is an online learning community centered around thousands of classes and courses that inspire creativity and creation i just finished iphone filmmaking create cinematic video with your phone and it showed me why my selfie videos are so gross looking angles it's all about angles it turns out if you want to try skillshare like i did the first thousand of you nerds that go down into the description and click the link get to try skillshare premium for free on me and after the trial is over it's only about 10 bucks per month you're welcome now on to today's episode wait for it you know who you are hey it's your boy kyle hill here let's get one thing straight look i know that sometimes i may give off some super villainy kind of vibes and that the glowing eyed giant skulls don't help that image but it's not like i designed and was paid a bunch of money for something that turned out to be an accidental death ray that damaged people and property yet what i'm saying is i'm not like this guy the death ray architect now entering the facility when you picture a death ray you're probably thinking of something traditional like this a big heck and laser intent on atomizing people pets places planets another p word what you're probably not picturing is something like this a skyscraper buildings like those you see before you but i assure you at one point these enormous edifices were indeed wielding dangerous beams of energy and again before we get really into it here i want to stress that i have nothing to do with this during the summer of 2013 the people of london started to notice that for about two hours a day the glare coming off of the 20 fenn church street building was extraordinarily intense like creating temperatures past the boiling point of water intense six times brighter than the sun intense reporters traveled to the site to cook eggs with the glare of the so-called walkie-talkie building the radiation bouncing off this towering glass structure was melting cars three years earlier bathers in the shadow of the vedara hotel in las vegas started complaining that the pool was getting too hot and that their shopping bags were melting one dude who fell asleep on the pool deck even had his hair which definitely wasn't plugs singed hotel employees told the media they called it the vadara death ray two buildings two extremely energetic events where were these death rays coming from they came believe it or not from the very same guy an architect named rafael vinoli for whatever reason my dude here just loves designing buildings that at some point in time become death rays i mean the buildings and their outsides look fine i guess but what my mans here has in effect done is designed the outside of buildings to mimic the activity of a very specific kind of reflector what's called a concave mirror but there's no super villain giant magnifying glass or laser beam so how is he weaponizing the outside of buildings allegedly it means he's not doing it on purp join me outside for a demonstration won't you you remember outside you know where where the people are and the stuff is to do grab your mask after being stuck in the sun's core for up to a hundred thousand years and after traveling over a hundred million kilometers photons of light from the sun come streaming through earth's atmosphere to make your selfies look terrible hey that's what apps are for but in the context of stuff reflecting off of other stuff i ask you this question how do we encounter these photons of light is it a chaotic mess of wavelengths or is it something more orderly well let's make a little diagram out of paper like you do in the park when it's windy so here we have the sun and here we have the earth obviously these are not to scale and the sizes are different this would be a million times smaller than that and volume don't worry about it what's important is the photons of light coming out from the sun here they're coming out in all directions in three-dimensional space way too many to show you with little pieces of paper but here's the important question i want to ask you which of these light rays are actually going to hit our planet one full astronomical one full astronomical unit away well it can't be these rays of light that are separated by a large angle right because even a smallish angle multiplied over 94 million miles is going to mean that at least one of these will miss the earth when it travels that space no instead it has to be rays of light coming out of the sun that have almost no angle between them at all almost parallel the fact that basically only parallel rays of light from the sun make their way to earth and interact with us is the main reason why something like a magnifying glass or a mirror can concentrate the awesome power of that great fusion reactor in the sky that we call the sun why do you even have a yoga ball out here kevin it doesn't make any sense go go over there go go now recall the concave mirror shape we mentioned when talking about raphael vinoli's buildings if light from a distant star were coming in at all different angles when they reflected off of it it would be chaos there wouldn't be any combined point to concentrate the intensity of the sun but with nearly parallel rays of light coming in from a distant star the reflections can actually create what's called a focal point right here with a concave reflective shape which can take the about a thousand watts per square meter intensity from the sun and concentrate it into something a lot more intense observe here is a concave mirror i got from my brothers over at vsauce in one of their curiosity boxes now like i was just mentioning with the shape associated with vinolis buildings with this concave mirror if i can find its own focal point in the correct orientation with the sun i should be able to bring something up to its ignition point fairly quickly and show how you can turn a building or that kind of shape into a death ray so let me just set this up nice and oh kevin i'm doing science here nice to him he's just a boy i know i created him okay so if we can find the same focal point on our concave mirror here we should be able to quickly demonstrate how to harness the awesome power of the great life giver in in the sky that's what i call it what do you call it here we go just gotta find the focal point where all the almost immediate smoking could you imagine this happening to your head while you were vacationing in vegas and being all gross i sure couldn't success see all you really need to turn something into a death ray is a nice curved reflective surface parallel rays of light from the sun now i know many of you are way ahead of me on this but all this physics brings us back to our very own death ray architect ah right with our newfound knowledge about how light from the sun comes into earth's atmosphere and reflects off of stuff let's look at vinoli's architecture once again looking closely it definitely looks like his buildings are at least partial giant concave mirrors don't they well then the best physical explanation for what's going on here is that for a certain number of days in the year for a certain number of hours in the day the specific orientation and shape of the fenn church street building and the vadara hotel creates solar focal points near the ground floor of both of these buildings that burn bathers and end up melting miatas or mercedes or jaguar who cares now i should say that my legal representatives have advised me to say this don't get sued my guy i do not personally think nor am i alleging that rafael vinoli intentionally created death rays i do not think he's a super villain at all he actually claims that he had no idea this would happen oh it's hot outside it wasn't a direct quote but what if he was a super villain now if i were a supervillain architect working for i don't know lex luthor but the cool lex luthor like gene hackman not the insufferable lex luthor like jesse eisenberg i can imagine a structure using the same death ray slash concave mirror shape that creates a kind of solar convergence in all directions if done correctly and depending on the weather of course you could make a kind of transient dangerous moat of solar energy that deterred and or outright destroyed let's say um people don't get sued my dude i mean um just cars and eggs and gross hair in vegas yeah yeah let's go with that my dear facility faculty and staff let this unfortunate collision between vision and reality be a lesson to you so often science needs art and art needs science they both need each other to function properly because if you don't heed this lesson you might accidentally become the next deathray architect which again i would never want to be construction of the quicksand football field is at 97 percent until next time why you always gotta be blowing my spot up like that like they weren't supposed to find out until they were sinking in now exiting the facility thank you so much to the very nerdy staff at the facility for their direct and substantial support in the creation of this here video today especially i want to recognize research assistant s f edwards and visiting scholar the bespectacled and very handsome joe hansen if you want to join the facility if you want to get on staff and drape on a silky white lab coat join me in discord every day get behind the scenes photos see videos early get private members only live streams with yours truly not like that you can go to patreon.com kyle hill and join the what's up there join the facility today and hey if you support us just enough you get your name here on arya each and every week as you can see there's literally hundreds and hundreds of you i have no idea how i'm gonna pass the time okay so a little bit of epilogue here so even though rafael vinoli he claimed he had no idea this would happen he's like well maybe it's climate change it's not you built a giant mirror he didn't know this was going to happen but since then they installed they tried to make the building less reflective buff up the mirrors and try to put some non-reflective material on it to make the effect not as bad but there was still the added effect because it was curved the curved wood focused wind which it gets the velocity of wind gets much higher once you get a couple of stories off the ground the wind would be focused downward kind of like the light from the sun but it'd be focused downwards such that the downdrafts off of these buildings would quote knock people off their feet now i'm not saying he's in i'm not saying he's trying to do anything but it doesn't not seem like that you know thanks for watching

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 673,715

Keywords: because science, engineering, kyle hill, learning, math, physics, science, stem, the facility, chernobyl, death ray, solar death ray, walkie talkie building, fenchurch street, vdara hotel, vdara death ray, raphael vinoly, rafael vinoly, concave mirror

Id: 3aR9su6Q3xs

Length: 12min 28sec (748 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 16 2021