QI | What's The Roundest Thing In The Universe?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 13 มี.ค. 2017
- 14 March: Today is International Pi Day.
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This clip is from QI Series H, Episode 1, 'Hodge Podge' with Stephen Fry, Alan Davies, Jack Dee, Phill Jupitus and Ross Noble. - บันเทิง
"Then show us the ROUND THING!"
Phill speaks for all of us
in order of smoothness it goes: quite smooth, jolly smooth, smooth
Where does "smooth as a baby's bottom" fit in?
@@TheWitchOvAgnesi that's well smooth
@@meridalemusicmachine Got it! Thank you! LOL
@@meridalemusicmachine
and as us americans hear it: weww smoove
@@ibieiniid4240 you cant hear the letter 'L'? That's weird. Even weirder for all those people who think they live in 'Wos Angeles'.
SHOW US THE ROUND THING!
Best part about that is that's it exactly 10 seconds before THAT'S NOT ROUND!
I love his outbursts. :D
hilarious...
IT'S NOT THERE
a circle seems round to me
Karl Pilkinton's head.
Jamilarr Alright.
Like a fucking orange.
I just had a Karl Pilkington binge watch, and I came here looking for this comment.
But was it really that round, or . . . Was there nothin else about so they just said . . . That's round enough.
I came here to make the same comment :P
"Nelly Furtado!!!" is the greatest exclaimation ever.
"All of space and time coming out of a timble, that's no way to treat the eldery." I am 100% certain that sentence nor any translation of it, was ever uttered in all history before the recording of this episode...
Haven't watched doctor who, but i am ready to bet that there is atleast something similar to the statement in the show
@@cpgautam172 pretty sure its not. Seen all of it multiple times. :p
Lots of nice space n time quotes though. Especially from David Tennant. He had a way with words that i just love. 💙
It could be from a Monty Python sketch. I know it is not, but it reads like something that could be.
It's even more unlikely (if that's possible) if we leave it as "timble" instead of _thimble_, and "eldery", rather than _elderly_.
😉
That thimble line has been trotted out for years and years. But not the eldery bit, admittedly.
I love Ross' look of pure pride after he thought of the waterdrop
"That's no way to treat the elderly."
One of the greatest QI lines of all time.
it was a great recovery from a joke that didn't land
@Clippy I find when people quote videos, it's like it's own subreddit to talk about that part of the video
@@kakapofan6542 I think that's a very succinct way of describing that phenomenon.
Dammit. That was the quote I was gonna put here. Seriously though, wonderfully dry quip.
THAT'S NOT ROUND!!!
SHOW US THE ROUND THING!!!
you're very upset aren't you
haha!! Phil speaks for all of us
Phil understood me in that moment
"If I had a -"
YEAH, BUT YA DON'T
Phil has power over Stephen and it's hilarious in every episode in which he guests.
What kind of power? He's embarrassingly unfunny.
Neutron stars can spin fast enough to become pretty ellipsoidal, but even if I'm to grant there's something even more so -- the electric field of the electron. There was a paper by Ed Hines, I think, which detailed an experiment that tried to measure a theoretical dipole moment for the electron, but found no such asymmetry. The result was spherical to such an extent that if you scaled up an electron to the size of the sun, the error bound is less than the width of an actual electron.
Where do you measure the boundary of an electric field? It continues to infinity in all directions. How can it have a shape?
Alex M. it's not so much the boundary so much as an isosurface. I.e. for a given distance from the particle, how strong is the field in any given direction? or, flipping it around to denote sphericality, if the field strength is x, how far are you from the particle in any given direction to have it be that strong?
The particular experiment was looking for the dipole moment, which should have shown some slight asymmetry, but the end result was that there was no such asymmetry... instead, they got a perfectly spherical field distribution.
An isosurface is not the same thing as a boundary. It's just a selection of points with the same property. And since the equation for electric field around an electron is -ke/r^2, the isosurface is just all the points with a fixed value of r - the points which are a set distance away from a fixed centre.
In other words, you're literally defining a sphere. That's cheating.
Nobody said that it was the "boundary" of the electron field. Just the field's shape itself. Assuming that it actually fits the -ke/r^2 definition, yes. But much like the way Einsteinian gravitation is not symmetric about all rotations of space even though Newtonian gravitation is, that's not the whole story. According to the Coulomb definition of a charged particle, that's exactly what we should expect, and yes, that would be cheating... However, the Standard Model of quantum mechanics gives some suggestion that there should be a dipole moment, and that would imply that the -ke/r^2 is not quite correct (though the "failure" is very very tiny)... however, the experiment by Ed Hines and co. suggested that the dipole moment, if there is one, is many times smaller than predicted... doesn't rule out supersymmetry, of course, but it does show yet one more thing that falls outside the predictive capacity of the Standard Model.
Fair enough, but the isosurfaces of the field still aren't the 'shape' of the field - they're just a collection of points with a similar property, which happen to form a sphere to enormous accuracy. If anything, the 'shape' of the field is just the field lines radiating outward.
"That's no way to treat the elderly" really got me haha
HO HO NELLY FURTADO!
Sam Wh frittata*
Why does Phil mention her? I don’t get the reference
@@kirkyit Woah Nelly is an expression of surprise so Nelly Furtado is a joke version of that
greatmightypanda it’s like instead of say ‘wow’ in surprise, someone says ‘wowsers in my trousers’
It is cringe.
I thought this was going to be about that sphere made of pure silicon that you have to wear special gloves to handle.
that would have been my answer as well
exactly
that's my one dislike of the show, I never know how pedantic they're gonna be. Because you can say a "Neutron star" but one of the original answers of essentially "Fluid Dynamics" in zero G I would think would be the perfect answer by the mere nature of having an adjustable surface with surface tension. but if they want to say a neutron star is "Smoother" because it's "more dense" and therefore smaller gaps in between atoms or something like that, then the correct answer would be something like Electrons, or Quarks, but then again those are just fluctuations in a field which we can "model" as spheres and have spherical type properties, but aren't actually spheres themselves, which means there are in fact "no spheres" in existence.... or some such theoretical math non-sense.... lol.
@@dementare you really had to follow up all of that with lol
@@tmas-yv1nr ... Well, yeah. I mean I know how far down the rabbit hole I've gone with physics and philosophy, and when I get done with an explanation like that and look back "up the hole" of where my explanation started to where I am when done... Yeah... I laugh. I've always been a bit too analytical for my own good. It wasn't until Weed and joining a Metal Band that I learn to be "mellow". I.E One of the first times I was hanging out with the metal band, we had just finished working on a song called "Concrete Slab" (about sleeping on the slab in jail cells, I guess, was the only one in the band never been arrested). And one of the guys told the joke: "What's the last thing to go through a bug's mind before it hits your windshield? .... .... .... "It's ass". Everyone else laugh or chuckled, I pondered... then said: "Well, that's not right. If it's ass went through ti's head, then it *already* hit the windshield... Unless you're talking about the fact that nothing ever *actually* "touches" something else. The closest two atoms or molecules will get is an "angstrom", so in that case it *never* would hit the windshield so I guess...." At which point my friend said " *Shut up man* . Damn! ... It's just a joke, learn to laugh...". Then we got high... I've learned to laugh a bit more since then... I still over analyze... but I try to inject some humor into it now.
QI production meeting
Stephen: who are we having on QI this week?
Producers: Ross Noble, Jack Dee, Allan, and Phil Jupitus
Stephen: Oh jolly good. We must include some questions that will make him angry.
the image on the screen isn't a supernova, it's a planetary nebula. It is part of what is left behind after a star collapses into a neutron star.
Was checking for this comment before posting this myself 😂
It’s a photo of the Crab Nebula, a still expanding supernova remnant. It suddenly became visible in July of 1054. It was so bright, it could be seen in the daytime for several weeks. At its center is a neutron star. Planetary nebula are what’s visible in a telescope after a dying star blows off its outer atmosphere, something our sun will eventually do. In the early days of modern astronomy, these roundish blobs looked like planets in the crude telescopes of the day.
HOHO NELLY FURTADO!
@Jim Crow I’ve never heard of this form of woo before so I had to google it. Micronovas don't exist but are a mashup of weird religion and pseudoscience. There is a good article explaining this false doomsday prediction at the Bad Astronomy website.
Randall Munroe had an excellent “What If” article about the gravitational *pull* of a thimble’s worth (actually a bullet’s worth) of neutron star matter. It’s strong enough that if you manage to touch it and not get pulled in completely, it will rip all the blood out of your body.
XKCD! 🙄
Zal Brill Well actually xkcd is more likely to refer to his main article, his “what if” article is separate
A thimble full of neutron star weighs about a mountain. That's a lot, but not enough by far to have a huge gravitational pull. Does Mt. everest pull everything toward it? No. But the electromagnetic properties of the thimble of neutron star (it still contains quite some electrons) would be strong enough to rip the iron out of your blood.
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 Actually because of the way gravity drops off with distance extremely rapidly, having all that matter close together has a massive impact on how it behaves. The strength of gravity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between 2 masses. So you don't have to go very far before gravity is incredibly weak, take the earth for example, huge mass, but a person can easily overcome it's entire gravity and lift an object off the ground.
So you put your hand 1cm away from a mountain, the atoms on the surface directly under your hand pull with x, the atoms 1cm under the surface pull x/4, 2 more cm under the surface x/16 etc. it very quickly drops off, more than 99% of the atoms in the mountain have basically 0 effect on you.
With neutron star material in a thimble every atom of the mountain would be effectively the same distance from you so every atom would pull on you just as strongly as every other.
This is exactly why black holes have such incredible gravity despite (some small ones) having less mass than some stars. It's about how close the matter is and how close you can get to all of it at once.
@@nekogod You've done your homework. Me 2 :) If you replace the sun with a black hole of equal mass, things here would get dark but we'd still remain in the same orbit as we were around the sun. It's just that that same gravity strength is coming from an object about 3 km across, the black hole. I am looking into a theory that assumes the gravity from a black hole doesn't originate from the pinpoint location of the singularity, but from the whole surface of the event horizon, treating it as a hard barrier, the surface of the singularity which is 0-diminsional but given a radius in a 3-dimensional space. It would mean you can never cross the event horizon and any information reaching it is imprinted on that surface like the holographic principle, ready to be re-emitted to the universe as hawking radiation. Food for thought and it might turn out to be hogwash, but interesting nevertheless. I haven't come across any evidence debunking it yet.
"That's not round!!!" 😂😂😂
The silicon sphere that's going to become the new kilogram standard is much smoother - scaled up to the size of the earth, it's 'mountains' would only be 15mm high. That's quite a bit smoother than 5mm for a 15-mile object.
Wouldn't that mean that the neutron star is much smoother?
Yep, George.
No it wouldn't, as a neutron star is much smaller than the earth. So if you scaled up a neutron star to the size of the Earth the "mountains" would be quite a bit taller than 15mm.
I'm not so sure that's true, Steinal. The gravitational forces that shape it are so great that even scaled up the star is smoother.
Then you're talking about physically scaling it up rather than scaling up your calculations purely for reference
I must remember to use "Nelly Fertardo!" as an exclamation next time I need a non offensive swear word/ exclamation word.
Mongo Boogie it's woah nelly..... Followed by Furtado....
I also like using the exclamation "Sacrebleu," a lot of the time despite my not being a Frenchman. lolz
Mongo Boogie shut the front door!
Nelly furtado is a swear word did you ever see her she was naughty
It took me many years to understand why W.C. Fields yelled "Godfrey Daniel"
Just discovered this show recently and I'm glad I did.
I was really hoping that there would be a klaxon saying "Phill Jupitus"
I love Phill's "Woah, Nelly Furtado!"
Oh how I wish the Klaxon had gone off and they'd put "Phil Jupitus" on the screen.
2:27 Jack flipping us off
business as usual, really
Phil Jupitus makes this episode hands down... Loved him in Never Mind The Buzzcocks and pretty much everything he is in.
I find it more compelling to say that all the matter that makes up the mountain is compressed into the size of a thimble.
Can you imagine having enough mass concentrated so that you could feel its local field of gravity? We'd never be able to contain it, but it's fun to think about.
The way Stephen said it had a better flow however
i honestly thaught someone was gonna say "Your mom"
Your mom
Do you mean "your mum"?
They definitely had a klaxon prepared for that
@@marinnabigh, that's fair
Enoch Greensock the country that made Little Britain does not get to act smug about their national sense of humor
Karl Pilkington's head.
Head like a fucking orange
Parson Atreides I was about to say it
They've studied him at NASA ,but not for the roundness of the head.
Fun fact: The density of a neutron star is actually higher than the density of a single neutron. The gravitational force is so big that it compresses the neutrons themselves
Stephen Fry's hair looks very 1974 here
However, I really like Stephen's hair in this one
“I’m sorry I didn’t know there was a follow up question” me in every class
That shirt and tie combo is... spectacular!
Love this show
Phill goes full Dalek in this!
That billiard ball claim is actually false. It's based on misunderstood regulations set out by the billiard ball commission or whatever it's called. Where basically the technically allowed troughs and peaks scale up greater than those on earth, how ever most would not have anywhere near that. Most billiard balls would have peaks and troughs far shallower than scaled mountains and trenches on earth.
Jonas Hamill was looking for this comment thanks
Vsauce eh ;)
Source?
Billiard Ball Commission? AKA the BBC perhaps?
QI NEVER LIES!!!!! NEVER!!! YOU TAKE THAT BACK!!!
😂😂😂
i love the look on alan's face when he, much like I am captivated by stevens quite interesting facts
There’s something I love about the phrase “Jolly smooth” and I don’t know what it is.
i love phil getting upset with stephen xD and ross noble being the golden retriever that he is
Ive never thought of him that way but right you are. No matter the topic hes just happy to be there
What is the roundest thing?
Me: a circle
That's circular not round
The charge distribution on an electron is currently the most perfectly spherical thing we've observed.
'Ohoho Nelly Furtado!'
The abstract concept of a perfect sphere.
Is the *concept* round though?
Everything is made of atoms so to the extent that an object can be spherical, its not just a concept - it could exist
Is an abstract concept 'in' the universe?
VERITASIUM was the dude that visited the lab with the PERFECT SPHERE! Go check em out if you're actually interested :D
Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking of!
Does anyone know how they calculated the roundness of the neutron star?
Or more importantly how do we know how round a black hole is? I thought we didnt have an info beyond the event horizon.
"They can get jolly round"
Ill have to use that phrase more
Frankly I’m surprised no one just bypassed the spirit of the question and simply said “A sphere”
But there is no perfect sphere in the universe...
@@scintillantflea4698 Have you looked everywhere? It’s a big place…
@@ChocolatierRob point taken lol
I really wanted to see the round thing.
i hit thumbs up on this before i even heard his response to this........just cause i had a feeling what was coming
Phill Jupitus looks EXTREMELY young in this one! :o
Black hole event horizon would have been my first guess
JustGame But that’s not technically a thing 🤔🤓
Could you say the idea of a sphere? No matter how round something may be, unless it’s perfectly round, it can be imagined as being rounder.
But then I can say a shmicksmack is rounder, which also only exists in my head.
Darson Idomar depends if you’re a Platonist or not guess
@@jparry5305 world of forms is a load of bull.
Adam Goldenstein I’d probably agree but it’s definitely interesting
But doesn't the gravitational field of a neutron star cause the matter it's made up of to vibrate and collapse in on itself rapidly in certain areas? Is it still the roundest thing in the universe even including that?
neutron stars are not round, they flatten at the center because of the rotational spin speed is so great, they are elliptical not spherical(the correct term for 'round')
He's very upset, aren't you?
YES!
The Earth is smoother than a billiard ball. 😲
I'm fairly sure it's a 1.00000000000000000 kg silicon ball, which was carefully rounded so that the exact atomic density at that specific volume, would be precisely 1 kg. Veritasium did a video on it
still not as round as a neutron star
that was quite interesting
QI | What's The Roundest Thing In Our Galaxy?*
*fixed it.
1:23 😂
Surely the most circular thing in the universe is the theoretic circle.
This really made me say *Quite Interesting!*
It makes sense because gravity is essentially piling everything toward the Center of mass, so with something dense enough, it would have such a large gravitational pull that all the matter would be condensed into as tight a space as possible, leaving it exceptionally smooth, or round.
I was waiting for Phil to say "I HATE this show"
Jolly interesting
I believe, aside from minute surface irregularities, the earth is actually considerably less round than a billiard ball, or any such fabricated ball. One relatively commonly known or plausible difference is that it is actually squashed a bit, but I believe it is also more irregular than that, with indentatons and relatively raised areas which however we don't notice because of the overall size of the thing, and glow, if we ever see it. (It might well be an exaggeraton as well, but this does make sense, compared to other interstellar objects.)
And what happens when that 5mm defect over the surface settles back into place?
STAR QUAKES!!!!
This is the most English thing I've seen in my life.
Why?
Are you American and this is the only English thing you've seen in your life?
Stephen Fry's Scale of Roundness: Not Round, Round, Jolly Round, Superbly Round.
Answer: electron. If an electron had a diameter equivalent to the orbit of Pluto, its divergence from spherical would be less than the thickness of a human hair.
Neutron stars are in fact theorised to be 'wrinkly', with sub-millimetre 'mountains', thus I refute thee, QI.
Jolly interesting. Frightfully so, really. Do pass me my monocle, dear, I'm feeling rather squiffy.
It's only Pi Day if you're using an _illogical_ date system. (Where the numbers _don't_ change in a logical order.)
I agree on the illogicality of said system, but it's not easy to say when Pi Day should be observed in a more logical system, since the month of April only has 30 days.
Easy. 22nd of July. 22/7 is even a better approximation of pi than 3.14.
So, you prefer a date system that's verbally uneconomical. "It's March 14th." < "It's the 14th of March."
Yes, but is logical in terms of scale and magnitude when written down.
The verbal part doesn't really matter since you write it down or see it written down much more often.
Ross and Phil are always great
Are you trolling?
Well now I know why I miss those big shots on a pool table
But Schwarzschild black holes are rounder even than neutron stars. Ideally speaking, they are perfect spheres. The roundest thing in the universe should just be a large and very slowly rotating black hole, right?
It's difficult to say with black holes.... you can only theorise as they aren't directly observable. I don't know about the current thinking but they used to think the body of a black hole disappeared down it's own gravitational sinkhole leaving only it's gravity behind (heard this on Carl Sagan's Cosmos, mind you, which was 70s and 80s era science)
Karl Pilkington's head?
1:50 how big is the mountain?
Doesn't a neutron star have the same issues as a blackhole for the sake of roundness? Wouldn't it bulge in the middle due to its rotation?
IF the fact about the billiard ball is true, then playing pol with planets should give phenomenal spin (see red dwarf series 3).
jakamneziak series 4 white hole 🕳
I legit thought he was gonna say the silicon balls used in the gravity probe B experiment. They were really frickin accurately round ~ 5 atoms surface deviation supposedly.
Some Neutron stars spin at about 80% of light speed, I.e Quasars. So the inertial forces would cause a powerful elliptical shape in these as the gravitational forces fight to keep the density to the maximum fermion density.
So to redefine, a none spinning neutron stars are the roundest object in the universe, and any spin in a object so dense would create stretching as it keeps its density.
Oh, I realy like space stuff
Honestly the roundest thing in the Universe, is the observable Universe.
I'm a bit disappointed in humans... Surely we can make something rounder
We actually have
Really? What is it?
Domen Bremec the standard for the modern kilogram. I believe it is a sphere of pure silicon
They are developing a new standard which is a sphere that according to above comments only deviate by 0.000000117720923% at its highest point. There's a short youtube video about it that I've seen and it's really cool, search for "1 kg sphere" if you want to see it.
Tortoise King Cool! Thanks
If they are too far away for us to see them, how do we know how small or round they are?
Math. Everything is math. Look into it all yourself, it's actually bewildering and beautiful.
Phil reminds me of how much I miss Never Mind the Buzzcocks.
I was gonna go with "a non-moving liquid mass in zero gravity".
i know... karl pilkingtons head. !
Funfact: Due to the earths unroundness, you'd «loose» the equivalent of 1.5-2 pounds if you traveled from Norway to the equator. The difference in gravity is about 1%.
The Earth/snooker ball fact really has blown my mind
My understanding is that it's actually not quite true. It's based on an interpretation of the rules. They allow for object balls to have pits that are deep enough for this to be true, but it's been said that with that interpretation, some pieces of sandpaper could qualify as an object ball.
Photographs of the balls at microscopic levels seem to indicate that they're much much smoother
"Is it a speaz helmet?"
I thought it'd be the event horizon of a black hole that was the roundest.
NoobLord My guess is that it is impossible to have a completely non-rotating black hole i.e a Schwarzchild black hole which would be perfectly round.
However, as all stars will have some amount of angular momentum the black holes will have some amount of spin and this spin, much like on the earth causes it to have the of an oblate spheroid
Even so Nuetron stars themselves often spin, at ridiculous speeds as well, and they don't become oblate spheroids.
zxxz996 True and having read the article about the star apparently it is to due with its extremely weak magnetic field, though I couldn't say how this contributes to its extreme sphericalness
An event horizon isn't an actual thing though its just a point in space.
An event horzion is a sphere and very much a "thing", the singularity at the "centre" of a black hole is a point if thats what youre getting confused about
How did they measured the neutron star?
Ross noble looks like a vampire from the volturi 😂
Why are ball bearings called bearings? They have no bearings. Roll one and watch.
MrOrange You're probably being funny but they are called bearings as they bear the weight of some other part.
the thing the metal balls ride in is a ball bearing.. the metal ball is called a bearing ball, the rest is called the bearing race.
While the quasi-scholarly discussion from the commenters is heartening for its lack of rancor, I long for the joys of a bygone era where "deez nuts!" sufficed as an answer for every question postulated...
u wot m8?
ur mum
r/iamverysmart
69 likes, deez nuts!
GATIM
I find myself saying "huh." a lot whilst watching QI
A single crystal sphere of Silicon 28 is the roundest thing that we know of. Because neutron stars have to conserve the angular momentum of their previous star they spin really quickly, and the centrifugal force makes them like "an oblate spheroid".
FALSE!!!!!!
Neutron stars are both rotating **bloody** fast, and have an ***obscenely*** strong magnetic field.
Both of these act to distort its shape, you average Neutron star is *LESS* round than a ballbearing.
* When I say they are rotating fast, I actually need to put several hundred asterisks around that word.
The fastest known neutron star has an equatorial rotation speed of 0.24c
That's a quarter of LIGHTSPEED.
Its rotating so fast that you need to resort to relativistic equations to get an sort of accuracy on the surface gravity. It actually distorts time by its rotation.
* When I say their magnetic field is strong, the same modifier applies. Magnetic field can reach 10^11 Tesla.
Which is more than 4 quadrillion times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field.
**This magnetic field, being whipped around at 0.24c (you didn't think magnetic and rotational poles are aligned, did you?) is strong enough to actually rip atomic nuclei apart.
They are very smooth though. So their "fact" is about 1/100th true
Isn't "the universe" or "the observable universe" the roundest thing in the universe?