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[♪INTRO]
It's one of those fundamental rules of the universe that we all eventually learn growing
up: like, life isn't fair, Picard was a better starship captain than Kirk, and bigger
isn't always better.
Sometimes though, there are things in nature so huge or complex that the only way to really
study them is to build something enormous.
Like, physicists didn't just find the Higgs boson by fishing it out from under the couch
— it took the world's largest machine, the Large Hadron Collider, to observe it.
But when it comes to outright size, there are a few scientific experiments that can
even give the Large Hadron Collider a run for its money.
Take the Northeast Pacific Time-series Undersea Networked Experiments, or NEPTUNE, which is
a really big name for a really big network of scientific equipment off the coast of British Columbia.
You may have noticed that the ocean is gigantic.
I mean, seriously.
About 71% of the Earth's surface is covered in water, and despite all the seafaring we've
done as a species, there's still a ton we don't know about what's going on deep
under the surface.
Enter NEPTUNE.
It's made up of an 800-kilometer loop of fiber optic cable that ranges from just 23
meters deep to 2.4 kilometers below the surface.
The cable serves as a link between five locations that have all kinds of different equipment
for studying the ocean, and allows them to transmit data back to land.
This equipment includes things like hydrophones, which are special underwater microphones used
to listen to the sounds of life down there — from swarms of plankton to whales.
There's also an adorable robot called Wally — yes, there's fake Wall-E and there's
real Wally… different robots — and scientists use Wally to study microbes that survive on
deposits of methane, on the ocean floor.
And, there are cameras that provide livestreams of undersea activity, like mass crab migrations.
There's a link in the description if you want to watch some of that!
Since it started operating in 2009, NEPTUNE has given us tons of data about ecosystems
that adapted to the extreme pressure and lack of sunlight on the seafloor.
And because it covers almost the entirety of one of Earth's tectonic plates, scientists
can use it to help build a more accurate model for things like earthquakes.
Further south, in Livermore, California, is one of the world's biggest — and heaviest
— indoor experiments.
It's called the National Ignition Facility, or NIF, and its goal is to show that nuclear
fusion — where two smaller atoms combine into a larger one — could be a viable source of power.
Existing nuclear power plants work using nuclear fission: they split atoms apart and turn the
resulting energy into electricity.
Unfortunately, in the process they also produce waste that stays dangerously radioactive for decades.
But fusing certain atoms together also releases energy, and unlike splitting atoms, the process
could potentially produce much less radioactive waste.
Problem is, pumping enough energy into atoms to get them to fuse is … challenging.
So the NIF's strategy is to use the largest laser in the world, which is housed in a ten
story building more than 300 meters long.
Most of that space is for the laser amplifiers — 120 metric tons' worth of a special type of glass.
Under the right conditions, it's capable of giving a series of 192 normal laser pulses
10 billion times more energy than they started out with.
And then, all that laser energy gets fired into a gold canister about the size of a pencil
eraser, which contains a target pellet filled with hydrogen.
The beams heat up the pellet inside to over 3 million degrees Celsius, which is hot enough
to make it implode in just the right way for the hydrogen atoms to start fusing with each other.
The chain reaction releases energetic, radioactive particles like neutrons — ideally with more
energy than what the laser beams put into kickstarting the reaction in the first place.
That's what physicists call ignition.
There's just one small problem.
The NIF hasn't achieved full ignition yet — at least, not the kind that gets us more
energy than we put in.
And even if the NIF does achieve ignition, there are still a whole load of problems to
tackle, like how to extract that energy efficiently and deal with all your expensive equipment
being irradiated by the same particles you want to get energy from.
But researchers are working on it, and eventually, that giant building full of glass could lead
to power plants that use nuclear fusion.
So, NEPTUNE and the NIF are plenty big in their own ways.
But neither of them qualify as the biggest experiment humanity's working on.
That award goes to the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, or LISA.
It's a proposal to use three small spacecraft arranged about 1.6 million kilometers away
from each other in space — four times the distance from the Earth to the Moon!
The spacecraft would shoot laser beams back and forth to measure gravitational waves,
ripples in the fabric of space-time generated when massive objects like black holes accelerate
— when they're merging, for example.
In 2016, researchers detected gravitational waves for the first time using LIGO, a similar,
but much smaller experiment set up here on Earth.
The waves came from two relatively small black holes suddenly merging — the whole thing
took less than a second.
And detecting them involved measuring a change in distance of only one ten thousandth the
width of a proton.
So there's a reason it took us so long.
LISA's designed to detect gravitational waves that are even more subtle — ones that
come from events that can last for minutes or even hours, like when the much-more-massive
black holes in the centers of galaxies merge.
LISA probably won't make it off the ground until about 2034.
But in 2017 NASA completed a mission with a sort of mini version of LISA, called LISA
Pathfinder, that showed the technology can function well enough to make measurements
in space.
So while it won't technically be on Earth, when it eventually launches LISA will be the
biggest observatory we've ever built … by far.
And at 1.6 million kilometers across, that is going to be a tough record to break.
Speaking of game-changing upgrades:
We've been updating our old, cumbersome website, SciShow.com, to a sleek, user-friendly
Squarespace site.
Picking a template was the hardest part because there were so many options we liked.
But once we finally settled on one, it's been easy to add our own style to it.
We've added a custom SciShow banner and pictures of our staff in our about page.
Importing images and adding and updating text has been incredibly easy, and pretty fun.
We'll keep you posted on how our site develops in an upcoming video where we add pages for
each of the SciShow channels.
And if you have a million dollar idea—or even, like, a thousand dollar idea—you've
been meaning to launch, now's the time.
Use Squarespace to bring it to life, and go to squarespace.com/scishow for a free trial.
Make sure to use the offer code to support this channel and save 10% off your first purchase
of a website or domain.
[♪OUTRO]
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