Fantastic vid, shad! Thanks for sharing your passion with us, it’s highly contagious! As a metallurgy major I must especially praise your approach to providing info on steel structural elements with great visual material to back it. unlike most other vids on yt that touch the subjects yours only made me nod in agreement and not smash my face in disbelief.
This is unbelievably cringe, it's just Shad making assumptions about what is being said but fundamentally misunderstanding that you can't just put words in people's mouths.
As far as cutting a bullet in half, Ballistics Highspeed just cut a bullet in half with a hatchet so that’s definitely not a defining feature of the katana. Essentially any wedge with a greater hardness than lead should be able to do that as long as it’s not so flimsy as to break from the forces exerted in it
as a gun nerd I would point out that bullets (even Fully jacketed ones) are very easy to split in half, BECAUSE UNLESS IT IS AN AP ROUND, IT IS MADE OUT OF LEAD!
Modern military ammo for small arms tends to be steel, because steel is cheaper and some governments don't like the army shooting incredibly toxic metal into the ground for no reason.
@@satannstuff Modern bullets have usually a lead core core jacketed in copper. Steel core ammunition is reserved for military use only. It's not done primarily because of toxicity, but for it's penetrative capabilities and no country (except maybe USA) wants civilians with guns that can defeat body armor. These bullet vs sword tests are done by civilians with sports grade ammo => no steel core.
@@satannstuff There are a lot of steel cased cartridges out there but military bullets that are made with steel being more that just the core and or tip are extremely rare (maybe some sub caliber sabot-ed projectiles). An all steel bullet would likely result in way too high of "shot start"pressures to engage the lands and grooves of the barrel. It would also wear the barrels much too fast even if the round didn't burst the barrel at the start. I imagine that the bullet would have to have the land and groove profile already machined into them before firing or be fired from a smooth bore.
@@satannstuff"tends to" implies the majority. The majority of military ammo is lead core with a full metal copper jacket with a brass casing. No steel in the majortiy of military ammo. The military has some specialty ammow some steel in it, but that is probably your least common ammo used other than incendiary. Tracer would be a more common specialty round than steel core.
When I realized I was 26 minutes into listenning to Shad react and the veritasium video was only a minute and a half in, I knew this was going to be a long ride
This sort of video is one of my favorite things about TH-cam. You can have a big mainstream channel like varitasium talk about something, and then get other perspectives and insights from enthusiasts in the field to get a much more overall balanced perspective on a topic.
Exactly. Why have all that money and make educated content? its better to be a dumb shill and promote stupid takes and missinformation to your audience of millions. Yeah, thats the the standard the needs to be upheld.
That is why they got rid of video replies and dislikes. They don't want big channels being questioned. Topics like this don't matter, but it effects them nonetheless.
@@memoriesofthefuture870 or, with a more realistic view, it’s not possible to make a mainstream video for an average audience that’s barely, if at all, ever been exposed to the topic without generalizing. You can’t go into every bit of nuance and context in a video like veritasiums. Shad took over an hour just to add that nuance and context after the fact. Most people would have tuned out if veritasium did it that way. That’s just the reality of presenting things to a mainstream audience. You guys are so damn cynical about it.
@@heyspookyboogie644you are just making up excuses for people pushing low quality content to straight up lying. Veritasium also did a very deceiving clip for an electric vehicle/ai driven or something like that and he pushed all the lies and missinformation he could. Hes just another paid bot on the internets and people should call him out on his behavior.
The Veritasium video felt like watching a fan interviewing and talking about their idol. It came across almost like an advertisement for the Japanese sword industry.
I don't blame Veritasium too much because he likely is just conveying information the japanese smiths gave him. The point of the video was to learn from the japanese smiths after all. So, if they embed propaganda, it's not like Veritasium has the swordsmith knowledge to recognize it.
Mythbusters cut a bullet in half with a butter knife. Edit. From someone's suggestion in the comments and a little googling the show was in fact Penn and Teller's Bullshit which was later renamed Tell A Lie. Would recommend it to anyone that hasn't watched it.
The metallurgical and architectural features that give a bullet stopping power (soft metal, high velocity, hollow/shatterpoint) are exactly the same features that make it easy to cut with any edge. If a bullet can’t be cut with a butterknife, it probably can’t be cut by much else.
@@realistic_delinquent no bullets are hallow. Hallow point only means that it has a divit in the tip. Same thing with shatterpoint, no bullet has a shatterpoint, they only shatter when hitting something stronger then copper and after hitting a target you can even catch the bullet in the dirt if you shoot the right target.
Never really thought about how when people think about a katana they picture a masterpiece, but when people think about a longsword they picture something mediocre. Japan is scarily good at making themselves look good.
To be fair, cultures tend to have a habit to view foreign works as 'exotic' or novel in some way. For us (I assume you're western) of the Occident, it's only natural to look upon the works of Japan with some wonderment; longswords are dime-a-dozen by our view, but katanas are quite unique. I think this is quite apparent in the inverse, as well, when looking at Japan's fascination with European fantasy in gaming and media
Historically, a LOT more people had longswords than katanas. Sure, there were some extremely fancy longswords, but when we think about the historical katanas that were more a status symbol than a weapon, the quality is undeniably really high.
The last time Shad did an analysis/review/correction video covering a science channel's attempt to highlight a specific sword, that science channel took down the video b/c of how many things they had wrong in it.
@@benm5913It was a SciShow video, I saw it and can't remember the exact wrong claims they made, but I remember feeling it was very wrong while watching it. The Veritasium video didn't feel as wrong, it was more neutral and just explaining the process than making any crazy overhyped claims about the swords.
I find it misleading when he says the most expensive sword is a $105 M katana. It makes it seem like that is reflective of the quality of the sword. That isn't the price of it as a sword. That is its price as a historical artifact. Even a crappy clay pot that is worse than a middle schooler's art project would be worth a few million if it is old enough.
@@FIRE0KING The problem is that many of these swords are in museums so not for sale, to collectors or family who definitely don't want to sell them, so no way of knowing. In general in art and history it is difficult to give a price before the end of the auction, because it is possible that no one is interested, or the opposite and then the prices soar. And there are even sales that are not known to the public. As you say, the fact that it is a sword which was not symbolic, but which was used for battle gives a different value, the position of the person at the time of its use, too.
afaik, the problem with katana being so expensive in Japan is the fact that they can't be made in factories and such, they had to be handmade in a legal tradition way, so it somehow doesn't count as a weapon in Japanese law, naturally it makes each sword expensive. Like, I think you're supposed to see Japanese katana as luxury goods and not particularly high quality, like buying art pieces back home No idea about this part but I assume some part of the cost is taxes, as the katanas are already so deep into law territory to begin with.
@@FIRE0KING You know wikipedia exists? The facts and figures are there. Worth? Depends in the buyer. Heaviest? No. 13ib? No. Also, Mel Gibson wasnt acually Wallace, in case you didnt know.
You got a subscriber out of me. My dad and his best friend have a forge that they've forged knives at for decades (and entered competitions), so it was nice to hear someone talking about the realities of forging and not just glorifying the cream of the crop of a sword type.
Extremely expensive stuff rarely is expensive because of its quality or performance. At that level it’s almost always the lore / history attached to it that makes it valuable. Sorta like a signature on something affecting its value.
The entire diamond industry is a good example of this. We place more value on “natural” mined diamonds, because all of the media and stories used elevate their value and reduce the value of “synthetic” diamonds, even though there is no meaningful difference between the two
@@waylander9265 Diamonds themselves weren't much valued over other gemstones until De Beers began their propaganda in the 1940s. Also, I'll never understand why mined diamonds are more valued when there's no way to determine if it's a blood diamond or not.
@@waylander9265 You pay a premium for the special ingredient: human suffering. It's not a *real* diamond unless it was dug up by malnourished child labourers in the 3rd world.
@@waylander9265 Not even talking synthetic vs natural, I find it strange that we put any value on diamonds at all, beyond their functional value for diamond drills and lab work and such. I get that it's shiny and people like shiny things (much like crows), and I too like shiny things, but to like it that much to spend tens of thousands to millions of dollars on a single shiny rock? I don't get it, and I'm not sure I ever really will.
Such is the way of all forms of art. Rarely will a collector buy a Van Gogh simply because it is beautiful. No, it is because his story is tragic and well known, therefore his work is valuable. Similarly, swords today are not usually bought for their function (and thank goodness for that), but rather their distinction. The history around a katana is highly romanticized worldwide, therefore it is a good sword. Nay! The BEST sword.
Penn and Teller did test the Bulled Slicing Myth in one of their TV Programs. Their Katana (though I don't know how that particular one was crafted) actually could split a 9mm bullet. And so could an ordinary butter knife. Turns out it doesn't take much craftsmanship to split a common lead bullet.
I always love the "can cut a bullet in half" argument. As far as i remember, i think mythbusters busted that myth wide open years ago where they showed that even a butter knife can cut a bullet in half when the bullet is fired at its cutting edge. The bullet is just traveling so fast that any edge will just cause it to just split lengthwise.
I watch "Forged in Fire" and see that many knives and swords are tested by shooting a bullet to its blade. They never fail at splitting the bullets and usually the damage on the blade is minimal.
@@yunusemreselcuk2128 Yea, and many knives on forged in fire end up being pieces of crap because they're made out of some shady mystery steel welded to downright garbage steel from a shopping cart, made in 3 hours.
@@regulus3413If it is in a documentary, people will think that it is true. It is best to avoid using any form of hyperbole in a documentary because people might believe it.
You are so polite. I too like Veritasium but they have a few episodes that are just non-critical regurgitation of accepted wisdom. I started to watch their Katana show and became too agitated to finish watching. Your response is greatly appreciated.
@@JasonJrake Their video on self-driving taxis has come under scrutiny if I remember correctly (for being a bit commercial-like, as opposed to more scientific content the channel usually puts out).
@@Takyodor2fun fact, a bunch of people were paid to make videos on them as it was found out. (They quoted nearly the exact same claims because they were from a meeting/PowerPoint they were all given/shown)
Lol... Shad has completely missed the point of Veritasium's video... It was to highlight the art of Japanese sword making using traditional methods and the cultural value that comes with it... Comparing traditional Japanese swords to the hunks of garbage Shad plays with are like comparing Leonardo Da Vinci's work to his kid's finger paintings... The entire response video is a big of a joke as what Shad is... 🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@maxnaz47 As someone who dabbles in the art of trolling, I hope that your comment is a troll/ragebait and not serious or you missed the point of Shad's video entirely. If you're wondering what the point of Shad's video is, it is simply providing further context into certain points made in the video that could become easily misconstrued (or are outright misinformation) to a general uninformed audience. He also states multiple times in the video his appreciation of Japanese swords for their artistry and cultural preservation.
@@them0stanoying-500 that's just what happens when a channel chooses to make a thumbnail like that which is obviously bait though. And if you start your video with essentially "the best and rarest swords ever made in the entire existence of humanity"-vibes I'll click that little cross in the top right corner because that's just cringe =x especially on a science channel.
@@SyntheticFuture Yeah, you get it. But, it's also because I'm not all that interested in katanas - in part because of the cringe fanboy culture which surrounds them. I see a thumbnail like that, and immediately assume it's fanboy bait, so I don't give it any time.
The problem with veritasium is that this isn't the first time he just blatantly misrepresented or poorly explained something. This is just probably the only time it was a subject you were an expert of. Hes been called out by other experts numerous times.
@@MattWinkler1 exactly! And also they travel FAST. If you could throw a bullet in the air and cut it with a sword like Fruit Ninja, now THAT would be awesome!
There was this video of guys shooting an axe with a bullet, and the bullets split very easily with virtually no damage done to the axe, so I kinda figured
To be fair if i had a weapon like that in my country i'd make fairy tales about it :) That being said, The belgains where the bravest people in whole gallia even Ceasar said it :D (yes i'm belgain :p)
Nah, communist Pr department is way better. Japanese culture actually has merit. Communists have failure and nazi grade atrocities and are still revered.
@@AvenEngineer The area was and still is famous for enjoying a good beer. But we also used to be fierce on the defence. Many wars where fought on our fields. The battle fo the golden spurs coming to mind :)
Speaking specifically to cutting the tatami, John Clements once did a video where he explained about the edge geometry being more important in that aspect. He took a blade that could not cut his hand as he ran the edge across it, and was still able to cut the tatami. It took slightly more effort, but not so much as to make it obvious that sharpness was the most important factor in the cut.
Yeah that's the difference between primary and secondary sharpness. The friction from the primary bevel limits you in cutting most things, the secondary bevel is more important for tough or hard things.
Re: 21:35, the reason the Japanese imported superior armor from the Europeans but not superior swords is that swords just didn't matter much by this point in time when trade was occurring; the arms they were importing from Europeans were firearms! So they were importing a lot of firearms, and also armor as seen here (which would provide protection against said muskets), but there was no need to import European swords to replace the katanas as the katanas were always already backup weapons anyway.
I was waiting for this video as soon as I heard the intro to Veritasium's. 15 minutes later, you deliver an hour long response. Now that's customer service!
This is a good time to remind people of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. Which is that if an article/video comes out on a subject you are an expert in you notice all sorts of errors, but then the same source will have another article/video on a subject you know nothing about and you don't stop to think that this one might be just as inaccurate as the last. So this makes me wonder, how accurate are the rest of Veritasium's video if they got this one so wrong?
I can confirm, Veritasium is not to be trusted on Electrical Engineering either xD And as far as I know from Thunderfoot years ago, neither should he be trusted on Physical Chemistry.
Well, the "How electricity really works" sparked a lot of controversy. His "rods from God" one was a train wreck by his own admission. Those are two recent oppsies I remember. Neither one was wrong on a high level. They just had a lot of practical issues and rhetorical problems. Derek seems to be in his element discussing theory, not practice, and easily falls into overhype.
@@absolutechaos13 The electricity one was wrong on every level. Forgetting that magnetic fields have to be induced is getting half of all of electromagnetism wrong.
He's pretty bad. He's very good at giving superficially plausible explanations but some of his content is on a par with documentaries about aliens in ancient egypt, with glaring flaws in logic and methodology on the experimental side and a compete lack of context in his presentation of facts in isolation from anything to compare them to, and a tendency to overhype everything. He's also very murky in the amount of his content that is clearly promotional for a commercial interest, with no indication of whether it was paid promotion or quid pro quo or "access for promotion" type deals, some of that stuff is shockingly biased. He also leans into the whole "THE TRUTH THEY DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW" style of trying to present everything he says as going against the conventional wisdom, even when he's just contorting himself and convoluting the subject to just express the exact same thing as the conventional wisdom.
@@afelias I think I missed that part, or it went over my head. My favorite was him saying that the power they got in their practical test was enough to light up an LED while ignoring the fact that an LED would have just popped because it would then be exposed to 10x rated voltage milliseconds later.
the katana's best feature is that it's a sword you can make with the technology and materials available in feudal japan. in all seriousness, that's a really important feature. once technologies have been figured out, the only real factor deciding what gets used and what not is cost.
exactly. This was Veritasium's whole point of the video while shadiversity totally missed that point and went on with the classical 'Katanas are not actually that good' narrative that we already heard from every other youtuber.
Speaking of appreciating great artistry/skill, I really appreciate videos like this, because I enjoy listening to you talk about a topic on which you're so incredibly knowledgeable. THAT is inspiring in a similar way to the craftsmanship at work in sword making.
Me and my friend that was interested in metalurgy used to joke, "this sword is 10,000 folds of Nippon steel!" "So Basically it's made of really crap material that took forever to turn into something useful"
Lol... Shad has completely missed the point of Veritasium's video... It was to highlight the art of Japanese sword making using traditional methods and the cultural value that comes with it... Comparing traditional Japanese swords to the hunks of garbage Shad plays with are like comparing Leonardo Da Vinci's work to his kid's finger paintings... The entire response video is as big of a joke as what Shad is... 🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@Dobermann89-dr2rc Except no, and people do say that European swords were poorly made. Unwieldy, lumps of iron, barely sharp. The list goes on. And he loves katanas. It’s just that traditionally made ones are kinda garbage in real use. And people overinflated them way too much.
@@EpicRandomness555 I love it when people try to claim that Shad just hates katanas. It was actually brought up in the comments of the Veritasium video by one guy in particular. In reality, it has nothing to do with hatred, or even dislike. I think katanas are pretty sweet myself. The only reason why the HEMA crowd bashes on katanas so much is because they're so notoriously overhyped due to action movies and anime. There's also the general mystique that surrounds Japan, coming from the fact that they actually care about and have actively worked to retain their culture. Japan has so much more respect for their past than most western nations, and the result is incredibly marketable. Look at England and none of our institutions give a crap. You don't see Japan turning all their old temples into flats like we do…
The lack of respect for the Founding Fathers and the God they built America for, is why I'm beginning to hate modern Americans myself. No retention of culture and tradition. We're just supposed to be a "melting pot" of other cultures and peoples who don't care at all about America. It's evil. Nationalism is the reason why Japan has such a strong and respectable identity. I admire that, even if I can't see eye to eye with their religious beliefs. I can get over that, when I see folks standing for what he believes. Unlike the morons of the West who just continue to cater to the terrorists of the Middle East and the so-called disadvantaged groups of the modern liberal minded movements.
@@EpicRandomness555 Problem is Shad definition of tradicional katana is the standards used in the Edo period, a time of peace and katanas were being made with more emphasis on being a status symbol, more than Tool of war, so the performance of katanas following the period suffer from these flaws, such as a narrow spine, small tsuba, shorter blade and being way to light, Shad never addresses these flaws, and believes these are the Japanese standards for a practical sword, which is wrong, swords in the more antique periods were build for war, having a wider spine, complex lamination, more length and being heavier. These are the standards of an actual practical sword for war. Side note: the dispute of "cross guard > tsuba" is irrelevant once you realize the hand guards of both serve a very different purpose in their respective style of fighting.
Hearing someone brag that "This sword can cut a bullet in half!" tells me the person knows little about both swords and guns. (or is banking on the viewers knowing little about swords and guns.)
Even in the Forged in Fire TV show, amateur bladesmiths in the US can make swords that can cut bullets. Their blades are not judged by whether they can cut a bullet, that's just a given, but are judged on the amount of damage that bullet did to the edge.
One thing I learned from my engineering classes is that importance of toughness in materials. Veritassium’s video never discusses the drawbacks that come with the hardness, save the fact that most swords shatter during quenching and even then that’s treated like it just makes Katanas more special. The edges are much more vulnerable to chips and damage, so much so that combat has evolved to fully avoid edge on edge contact with these swords. Don’t get me wrong it’s great to see these craft skills be preserved and treated with respect but the video doesn’t challenge ideas, it just promotes them. It’s like an interview where the interviewer only asks softball questions
To be fair though, katana's have both hardness and softness. The edge is hard and the rest of the blade is soft. I have seen katanas take on horrendous bends in use and not actually break. But they do, however permanently bend. They don't deform and spring back like a rapier or long sword does. You can bend them back into "mostly straight" and keep fighting though so its still better than a actually full hardened blade which would just snap.
The actual greatest katanas had quite intricate laminations (not to be confused with the folding) which were designed primarily to deal with the problem of chipping and bending. It's also why historical wartime katanas typically had an edge bevel over 40°.
@@JathraDH Bending is called 'Plastic Deformation', springing back is called 'Elastic Deformation'. Chain of events on a Stress-Strain graph is Elastic, Plastic, Yield (when it breaks). Yielding can either be axial (been pulled apart), or shear (sideways to the axis, like been cut by scissors or something), shear strength is half of the axial (tensile)strength. Yield is always measured as axial.
This is great to see. I "saw" the Veritasium video an hour after it came out. In reality it got my blood boiling and I typed out a tiny essay to try my best to explain the reality of katanas and European swords while just having the video in the background. They even said that "even something as high quality as iron sand has some impurities" which for an iron source as bad as iron sand is ridiculous. There's even tons of comments with absolutely insane opinions on katanas and European swords such as European swords being generally heavier, thicker and blunt weapons that are used for chopping through armour and focues on blunt damage. I thought we were past the crazy katana fantasy by 2024.
@@DonVigaDeFierro Especially seeing as "medieval sword" can mean one of many different things. I roughly know the weight of an arming sword but I can all but guarantee I don't know the rough weights of every obscure sword type from the entire medieval period.
To sum up all the correct knowledge of katana: 1) So sharp that when put into stream it cuts flowing leaves in half; 2) The more layers the better: average katana has 500 layers, better ones 1500, the best 9000 ( number of layers has to be divisible by 3) 3) It easily cuts off the tank barrel not to mention rifles or machine guns 4) It cuts through european swords and tool steel 5) When it's sharpened it never dulls, because of superior steel properties 6) You can bend real katana 720 degrees and it springs back to shape 7) Jedi used lights swords because they didn't know the secrets of katana making, so they've made a worse ripoff 8) Always forged by the full moon 9) So light that when you're using it you become so fast that you can catch bullets and cut them in half
You can even cut between the atoms of an apple with it, so that the apple doesn't realize it has been cut. (One Punch Man Manga/Anime reference) Also 500 can't be divided by 3...
I really liked the supplementary clips to the explainations and the attention to detail. Small corrections in video over one hour long are not the norm, very nice!
27:58 at this point the original veritasium video is 1 minute and 21 seconds I was worried this video is going to have a part 2. Excellent job on adding accurate context and correcting the mistakes.
23:54 - Smelter lit once a year. This has to do with legal restrictions on making swords in Japan. Few smiths are licensed, they are limited in how many swords they are allowed to make. (I learned this about 20 years ago, so...)
The restrictions on production is for the domestic market. Swords sold abroad do not count towards this limit. Even still, most smiths need day jobs. The smith that used to live near me was a mail carrier iirc.
Wow, honesty about sword making!?! The folks online who talk the loudest and the most about swords, know the least! This video is a breath of fresh air, thank you so very much for posting this!
What makes the Katana special, in my eyes, is not the shape or sharpness. It's the virtually unbroken chain of knowledge that has been handed down from one generation to the next since the 10th century. It's not limited the smithing either. It includes the smelting and polishing as well. All 3 disciplines take a lifetime to learn. If that wasn't enough it requires the wielder to have a high level of skill to use it properly due to it's inherent vulnerability. Dam near any can swing a claymore around without worry of damage. No other sword has these distinctions.
I did some research into it some years back. Tamahagane is also ILLEGAL to export outside of Japan. The only way to get it it to be a master craftsman and basically go through a huge process to request some and even if the decide to let you have some, they will decide how much you can have (probably not even enough to make a decent sword).
Not only is the amount of tamahagane restricted, japanese swordsmiths also simply are limited in the amount of swords they are allowed to make by law. You can't mass produce swords in japan, it is just illegal.
Saying that swords made in Japan are works of art isn't just a snobbish comment, it's just straight-up a fact. They are LEGALLY classified as works of art when they're made with (mostly) traditional technique.
@@nullifye7816 $20 chineseium katanas were going to exist no matter what. The market is there for people who can't tell the different between mall ninja shit and functional swords.
@@nullifye7816 They'd rather let china have that market than let their own art form be degraded within their own borders into a cheap novelty, and I can respect that. You also cannot own swords in Japan that aren't authentic Japanese katana, so the existence of cheap mass produced chinese shit has no effect on them anyway.
the term that I find most fitting is "romanticized". I find that a lot of Japanese craft is romanticized and I say that as someone who really likes japanese culture.
Together with the notion that something being made (mostly) by hand in a very lengthy process somehow magically improves the quality by an order of magnitude. It's funny, the work ethics of japanese are also often held in very high regard. Some of my colleagues spent 6 months in japan in their phd period (chemistry) and found that the japanese students were in the lab from morning till night. Yet it's not like they got more done than we do in 8 hours...
Like many things in Japan, it's about the tradition and artistry of the process more than the quality of the end product, which may be better or worse than their contemporary counterparts from around the world. The problem comes from the mystification of the end product, which is both a result of foreign fascination and locally spread propaganda that served to maintain power and/or value. I don't mean to shit on Japan. It's a fascinating country and I've visited dozens of times because I love the place, but it can be a little infuriating how some people put anything Japanese on a pedestal.
but shad you don't understand. They're upkeeping the oldest tradition known to any craftsman: ALWAYS declare your methods to be the best in the whole world and proven by time and experience
As an amateur bladesmith, I can confirm that there is never one single way to make a sword, at least in the day to day work. Look up how to make a simple knife, there are a hundred ways to forge a blade. Some are better, some are preference, and others are tradition. Techniques change, and that goes for any type of knife or sword. To say that the techniques haven't changed for centuries is entirely inaccurate. In fact, the legend of how the katana was created is literally about the smith changing his techniques to make a better sword.
Well, they did say "virtually unchanged" and then show a permanent graphite(I'm guessing) tatara with electric air blowers and the smith using a power hammer to forge the sword.
Very true, it always reflects the times, what was avaible and known or needed, good examples can be Yakut knives which were important for butchering and carpentery but iron was scarse as well as good blacksmiths or high demand for weapons in times of war resulting in lower quality versus piece periods where time was put into excellent crafts, that can include special items for wealthy people which would demand the best they could have. Looking closely into it we might found good examples of demand driven designs as well, like in WW2 when weapons shifted from highly produced machine milled parts into rivetted sheets etc.
@@WwarpfirewW Absolutely. Your mention of WW2 really drives the point home. E.g. the commonly known "Fliegerschwert", or, officially, "Offizierschwert", turns from nickel/silver or plated fittings in 1935 into aluminium fittings by 1940. Same goes for many personal blades & bayonets. It's actually very interesting that, while firearms are pushing the boundaries of technology in times of significant conflict, blades are rather reduced to pure function, becoming a historic reflection of momentary necessity. By that same token, a katana was merely a very useful tool in times of war & thereby object/subject to practical & economic consideration. In times of peace, it became an idea, a legend. A warning. Makes sense.
Now that was a solid opener. You made it clear that you respected the channel and their content and subscribe to them and that you had something to offer about this particular topic but otherwise really appreciated their work. 👏👏👏👏 I love that you came with respect but also made sure to be clear that you had concerns and questions about the things they stated and then proceeded to lay them out with very clear reasoning. Well played👊
People should do their own research instead of trusting a random person who, although has personal experience, doesn't cite their sources in the description. (Check this video's description).
I was expecting this video the moment I saw Veritasium's video. As I said in a comment there, even a dull butter knife can split a bullet in two if it is made of steel.
Lol... Shad has completely missed the point of Veritasium's video... It was to highlight the art of Japanese sword making using traditional methods and the cultural value that comes with it... Comparing traditional Japanese swords to the hunks of garbage Shad plays with are like comparing Leonardo Da Vinci's work to his kid's finger paintings... The entire response video is a big of a joke as what Shad is... 🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@LurkerDaBerzerker They clearly have put no thought behind their understanding of swords, so it follows they put no thought in their reply/spamming behavior.
@@flamewingsonic They claimed in another comment before yours that they are unsubscribing, yet they continue to spam the same comment. It's crap on the wall, but I suppose it's still support for Shad.
So far, 30 minutes in, there hasn't been a single thing said in Veritasium's video that was wrong... All i've seen is Shad making huge assumptions about implied information that was never said or implied... An absolute garbage response video that is absolutely not warranted or needed... Definitely unsubbing...
Thank You for talking about impurities. The amazing part of the Katana was the fact that the Ancient Japanese had pretty poor grade materials but through very hard work folding the steel many many times they were able to get a very high performance from questionable materials. To say the purity was amazing was a slap in the face to these people. If the steel purity was incredible they would not have needed to work and fold the metal thousands of times. The metal workers ingenuity and commitment is the reason the traditional Katana was incredible. It is like the difference from buying a IKEA table and assembling it vs carving a table from a fallen tree with only hand tools.
The Veritasium katana video was just a continuation of the western fetishisation of Japanese culture. We adopted the word "origami" as though the Japanese invented it. It literally means "folding paper" and existed in China long before it existed in Japan. Same for "Bonsai" - China were doing this before Japan. They are an older culture. Then you have "umami" - another word we have adopted that has magical, indefinable qualities simply because it's Japanese. The fact is, Japan is no more magical than other countries, we have just decided to have it represent our fetishised view of what we want Asian culture to be, ie "orientalism".
its nice to see you are so fast shad. that video as of writing is only 17 hours old and yours is almost an hour old soo you watched the video and 16ish hours later you have a video on it. now i can watch 2 videos in one
I mean, it isn't a bad video at all. It covers the process. The historian they have clearly states that it is the best sword they could produce with the tech and metal and such they had, for the purposes they wanted. The point of the video is to cover the making of the sword from start (the iron sand) to finish (final product) and some of its properties. And it does that, about as well as it could in the time frame they had, while explaining how/why some of the stuff was done. And, yes, it doesn't cover other things, like how it doesn't spring back, because not spring steel, nor does it really touch on that whole "best sword they could produce" bit, and what that means. It would definitely be a better video overall if it placed the sword and its design into historical context. If there is a weakness to the video, it is in things like the bullet slicing (which a butter knife can do) and hyping up the expensive aspect (the 105m sword is a mix of historical value plus economic boon years, while these hand made katanas are expensive, because, well, they are made by labor intensive processes... that guy sharpening/polishing for a month isn't doing it for free). Statements that are factually true, but will lead to the common person watching the video to draw the wrong conclusion from the data provided. It could have used a bit more of the historian guy, overall. But still nice to see the process being done similar to how it was then, by people keeping the tradition mostly alive.
There was the ceremonial way to do things, then there was the "just get the job done" way of doing things. I remember reading that in Europe it was common for Nobles and Knights to buy a sword from one sword maker that made really good swords, then take it to another to get the "flare" added from craftsman.
*Takes one look at the thumbnail.* Anyone that has A: enough money to pay 105 *MILLION* dollars for a sword, and B: is stupid enough to pay 105 *MILLION* dollars for a sword, deserves to be fleeced for that money.
That sword wasn't purchased for that price because it was an uber sword. Most likely, it was for historical significance (and probably coupled with it happening during boon years). Like if Excalibur were real/around (and without any mystical powers, of course) and up for auction, just imagine how much it would go for...
Great video :) Yeah, a lot of the corrections were calling out deliberate implications, but that is not meant as a detraction of the video. Also really enjoyed a bit of a brush-up on my knowledge about steel :) (My class about it was long enough ago that I confused the 2.08% point of the steel diagram with the optimum of 0.83% Carbon xD)
This was great. I watched every minute and learned a lot. Its sad how much some big channels are relying on a quick sensationalised piece instead of actual education.
As someone that studied crystalography (but tapped out at the advanced courses and metallurgy) and geology in general I can go a step deeper than Shad on that topic ^^ For starters, Veritasium is not correct about the origina on the iron rich sand. They described the most common origin of Banded Iron formations and where most iron deposits come from. Japan is mostly vulcanic, very little metamorphic rock from marine sediments pushed up high enough that errosion could give you any sediment, much less iron rich sand. There is Banded Iron in Japan, but that one is from a vulcanic origin. It's highly ironized ground/phreatic water (phreatic means below groundwater level, sometimes below sea level) that is heated up, is pushed up and concentrates the iron while cooling down. It is still happening in famous japanese hot springs today (just extremely slowly, as everything in geology). You also have iron righ vulcanic rock, which is a much worse source since it not only has lower iron conentration but the iron is also fixed in the crystaline structure, meaning you have to break up the minerals, not just getting rid of the low iron stuff around. You need higher temperatures and more time to do that. Depending on the purity in the deposits the sands came from the quality of the ore sand varies. Even the best quality iron deposits are still minerals that are mostly iron but not just pure iron oxide. You will also always have other minerals in the sand (thiner layers of iron bands bound to other minerals that stayed with the broken down pieces or other minerals of similar weight). So you need to do a few steps to get rid of the unwanted stuff even before prebaking. Another thing that people often get very wrong is how much material is not reacting just because the temperature is high enough for a reaction to happen. Think of boiling water. 100°C is the temperature to vaporize water. But a lot of water is evaporating before you get to the temperature and (larger amount) water isn't exploding into vapor the moment it reaches the temperature. The same is true for minerals. They start to break down if you change the temperature (pressure and catalysators like the presence of water) outside of the range in which they are stable. But the reaction is only on the surface of the mineral that get's actually exposed to the change. This is the reason why the furnace is burning so long, holding the temperature, before they can get the iron out. And even after many hours a lot of material was simply not exposed enough to the right conditions to break down, much less to depose. Ironically, high iron concentration can lead to minerals being trapped inside mostly iron, not getting exposed to the temperature enough to break down or to leave the material it is trapped it. This is very common in the natural slow metamorphosis of rocks, which you can see under the microscope. You can see the structures of formerly existing minerals by the shapes of minerals that didn't break down and new minerals crystalizing inside the space the mineral that broke down left, often something with a different composition as some elements left, while others stayed and formed something different. The same thing goes for the impurities inside the iron. Some elements are similar enough to the iron that they won't leave as easy, some get trapped and some simply form different minerals with the iron (often breaking down and re-forming multiple times, depending on the conditions and the chance they move somewhere else). And this kind of phenomenons go on through the process. Hammering the metal does "squish" the impurities, as long as they didn't form a strong enough crystal structure (which the heat and pressure, introduced by the hammer should prevent), but as soon as the material cools down they start forming new crystals. The speed and uniformity in which the material cools down dictates what crystal structure is formed and how big the crystals get. Quenching forces a very rapit crystalization, with many smaller crystals, which are the grains. This is still a simplification. The thing I want to get across is that there are certain boundries of stability for different minerals/crystal structures to form and different impurities interact with all of this in a different way. The specifics about ferite etc get much too complicated (even for me as I wasn't able to grasp the specifics of metallurgy and higher crystalography myself) and are problematic to bring across in such a video. I personally think it's even questionable to go there at all because those names are actually just definitions of a range of content and crystal structure, which do have different physical properties, but it's not very helpful to use them so loosely instead of an expression which tells you something about the properties. Like mild steel or saying the hardness of the material or something like that. It's always a range because even in modern steel you can't perfectly control the purity of which specific material you get, so it's just getting needlessly muddy.
@ "Hammering the metal does "squish" the impurities, as long as they didn't form a strong enough crystal" anyone reading the post above or even watching the video, search for the following: For the undying 9/11 JET FUEL ARGUMENT / purgatoryironworks / Dec 15, 2015
Which is ironic is *I'm actually living on an old roman iron smelting site* where we can find big chunks of slugs just one meter below the surface. Whenever we have to plant a tree, we have to dig until we pass a layer of iron slug everywhere. Just a few years ago, I dug out a piece of 40 cm / 30 cm / 30 cm of empty iron slug I exposed on a brick wall in the garden. It was more 50 cm / 40 cm / 30 cm but I break it in three pieces to remove it by hands. 😧 And we know the romans used a similar technique a few hundred years earlier than Japanese with Tamahagane. So yeah, we knew that in Europe long before them. *We just had much more abondant and purest iron to collect* which why this type of bad smelting was not well considered, left behind for better smelting techniques and never passed on the next generation. No cultural value was attached to this type of smelting. I literally live on the proof that Tamahagane is (to say the least) a snobbish dated technique kept alive in Japanese culture nowadays. 😅
"We just had much more abondant and purest iron" . Europe is mediocre as far as iron ore is concerned :) Japan is a chain of volcanic islands, they have all the resources they need in quantities large enough for them to even export if they chose to mine lower purity ores. Those ore sands have serious ore deposits upstream, and because the mountains are volcanic they have copper, gold, silver, lead etc. They are importing ore right now because very high purity ores can be sourced from other places and it is cheap to ship the ore by sea by sea. What they lack is enough resources to sustain world domination ;-).
@EmilNicolaiePerhinschi Japanese iron supply is very low quality. They are able to export it because of modern techniques to make it more pure. I think you missed the point.
@@Krytern they have plenty of iron, and the quality of the ore counts only for cost. They are importing ore from Brazil or Australia like everybody else :) because compared to Australian ore every other ore is low quality. Even UK is importing coal and iron ore now, despite having a lot of it themselves, only somewhat more expensive. The point is they exaggerate everything, even in their eyes they are the best at everything, everybody else is a loser.
@@EmilNicolaiePerhinschi they dont have a lot of iron. which is why you rarely see metal nails in traditional japanese woodworking, and their woodworking tools contains little iron. Japanese is very good with their marketing and comes off as "masters" at traditional crafts even when a lot of their stuffs are just made in china.
Knew this was coming, for real this might be my favorite sword ever, but I don't get why there's so much misinformation about it, it's just a cool sharp piece of metal that cuts, like any other sword can, nothing magical about it
Ninja and Samurai movies of the 80s and 90s. If you think about it. That tachi in the video is the most expensive sword ever sold partly because of the western misinformation that contributed to its world-wide fame, which is hilarious.
Other people watching this: I like hearing about the history of the katana Me: Oh so that's how you can find iron ore I'm going to put that in my video game.
I've barely watched a Veritasium video for at least 2 years now. If it's not a straight-up pure explanation of a math concept or its history, it's probably not good - especially any field-trip / experiment type stuff. There's a lot of wasted time in the videos and other TH-camrs covers the topics in a much more comprehensive and educational way. Nice to see a Shad video pop up to confirm it's still happening, and I know I'll surely learn more here.
Yup, more and more inaccuracies, questionable statements and things that are plainly wrong over the years. Sadly it shows that Derek is not a scientist, but a "science communicator"
@@christiannorf1680 And it seems you're right, according to his Wikipedia entry, so, thanks for the contribution. It seems I misremembered him having more technical experience and background, but apart from whatever his degrees taught him, even starting with his Ph.D. the focus has been on education.
Glad to see someone else make this point. I used to watch Veritasium's videos then noticed it was devolving to basically History channel levels of nonsense. Presumably his research staff has just degraded in quality, probably getting away from his areas of knowledge, and it is just a "I F'ing love science!" show, with no concern for whether the claims are true, contested, or anything. A shame really, but very common.
It is for entertainment not accuracy sadly. I think he counts on Wiki to much and should reach out to others like when Physics Girl did a video with him to correct a previous video, which he did not take down.
My trust for veritasium videos is definitely in the toilet, they always had an air of sensationalism to them but it's a pattern where people have to actively debunk these wildly inaccurate sponsored fluff-pieces that feel more like watching an ad on TV than a video educating you about a subject. I think he's definitely a good example of someone talking with confidence making people trust them even if they're just talking out of their rear end.
I stopped watching Veritasium a few years ago. He made some really entertaining pop culture science videos. But there were a couple that got some pretty heavy backlash. And then it seemed like every other video he made a crucial mistake in either his research or assumptions. Like the speed of electricity, or him lying with manipulated statistics. I just couldn't trust that I would get real information, which is kind of important when you claim to be a channel with a focus on education. So I'm not surprised that another video has gone up that Shad has the knowledge to tear apart.
Same. I feel the view chasing and clout of being a big youtuber, the financial incentives of sponsors and hanging around with people from certain sociopolitical circles (who also have the carrot of clout and financial incentives), have skewed some of the information presented in his videos. Not saying Veritasium is bad for doing this but as a "science" channel it is disingenuous if you know full well what you are presenting is not factual or only selectively true.
Exact same deal. I subscribed after watching a few interesting videos of his, then unsubscribed again because every video he made about any topic I have even basic knowledge of was glaringly wrong, and even the ones I didn't know as much about had basic logical flaws and were often outright misleading in the presentation of the things that were factual to a point where I could spot it without expert knowledge. Making mistakes when you step outside your zone of expertise is one thing, but failing to learn from that and continuing to repeat the same pattern: that's someone who just wants the ad revenue and sponsorships to keep rolling in: he's not a science educator, or even a talented enthusiast - he's just another media company churning out monetizable content.
I’m will to accept that the speed of electricity thing is more a victim of gross oversimplification than an intentional attempt to mislead (although the decision to oversimplify it so much is obviously his). What was the statistics thing? I missed that controversy.
I don't really like veritasium. Because the complaints you have are complaints people have about nearly every single video. So there's a trend of commonly incorrect and somewhat misleading information. It seems almost deliberate to me (for the sake of sensationalism). I find it annoying.
A lot of the katana worship just boils down to aesthetics. It reminds me of the Walther PPK, which has a lot of fanboys because of James Bond. There may not be a more beautiful and perfect looking handgun in existence, but as a concealed carry or just general use weapon, there are many, many better choices on every conceivable criteria, especially today
Lol this video showed up next to shads giants sword video in my subscriptions feed. I immediately thought lmao shads going to have a good time with this
I just watched the video and though, waait a second something is not right here and wouldn't you know it, 7 minutes later I see Shad's video! Looking forward to this one!
Question. In the Veritasium video , they say that the sword's curvature come from some kind of tension distortion between the hard edge and softer core. Is that true ? Could you elaborate please Shad' . Thx
It is; Building it didn't cost the most. What some collector pays to own something isn't indicative of how much it cost to make. Cost to own and cost to build are not the same, and only a fool can't tell the difference.@@bairnonessie
I get your argument and there seems to be quite some information missing in the Veritasium video but your title suggests that the Veritasium vid is mostly wrong while in fact its almost completly correct and there ist some stuff that was worded misleading and very few intresting details are actually missing Edit: good vid but why have a mean clickbait title instead of building on the other vid in a positive way
Fantastic vid, shad! Thanks for sharing your passion with us, it’s highly contagious!
As a metallurgy major I must especially praise your approach to providing info on steel structural elements with great visual material to back it. unlike most other vids on yt that touch the subjects yours only made me nod in agreement and not smash my face in disbelief.
Metallurgy sounds like a badass major
Sure, it's a wonderful video of Shad whaling on strawmen.
This is unbelievably cringe, it's just Shad making assumptions about what is being said but fundamentally misunderstanding that you can't just put words in people's mouths.
Shad mainlining the copium defending Veratasium here
@@vyvianalcott1681 did you not pick up the grandiose propaganda of the Veritasium video?
As far as cutting a bullet in half, Ballistics Highspeed just cut a bullet in half with a hatchet so that’s definitely not a defining feature of the katana. Essentially any wedge with a greater hardness than lead should be able to do that as long as it’s not so flimsy as to break from the forces exerted in it
I believe mythbusters or some other show cut a bullet in half with a butter knife 😅 it doesn’t even have to be much of a wedge
Not to forget forged in fire that did that more than once with different swords
its simple physics. object A moving high rate at object B, object B is harder, and much thinner, object A splits.
@@jhu7399 GLORIOUS AMERICAN SHEET STEEL, STAMPED ONCE, FOLDED ZERO TIMES!
@@vanillaicecream2385incredibre, incredibre I say!
As soon as I started watching veritasium’s video my first thought was “ooooh Shad’s gonna have something to say about this.”
Same 😅
that's what I thought
1000% lol
Same
to be fair, i was about 23 secs in before that thought occurred
as a gun nerd I would point out that bullets (even Fully jacketed ones) are very easy to split in half, BECAUSE UNLESS IT IS AN AP ROUND, IT IS MADE OUT OF LEAD!
Modern military ammo for small arms tends to be steel, because steel is cheaper and some governments don't like the army shooting incredibly toxic metal into the ground for no reason.
@@satannstuff Modern bullets have usually a lead core core jacketed in copper. Steel core ammunition is reserved for military use only. It's not done primarily because of toxicity, but for it's penetrative capabilities and no country (except maybe USA) wants civilians with guns that can defeat body armor.
These bullet vs sword tests are done by civilians with sports grade ammo => no steel core.
@@satannstuff There are a lot of steel cased cartridges out there but military bullets that are made with steel being more that just the core and or tip are extremely rare (maybe some sub caliber sabot-ed projectiles). An all steel bullet would likely result in way too high of "shot start"pressures to engage the lands and grooves of the barrel. It would also wear the barrels much too fast even if the round didn't burst the barrel at the start. I imagine that the bullet would have to have the land and groove profile already machined into them before firing or be fired from a smooth bore.
@@satannstuff"tends to" implies the majority. The majority of military ammo is lead core with a full metal copper jacket with a brass casing. No steel in the majortiy of military ammo. The military has some specialty ammow some steel in it, but that is probably your least common ammo used other than incendiary. Tracer would be a more common specialty round than steel core.
@@satannstuff Steel bullets would ruin the rifling real quick. They are still lead, but with a steel penetrator rod./
When I realized I was 26 minutes into listenning to Shad react and the veritasium video was only a minute and a half in, I knew this was going to be a long ride
This sort of video is one of my favorite things about TH-cam. You can have a big mainstream channel like varitasium talk about something, and then get other perspectives and insights from enthusiasts in the field to get a much more overall balanced perspective on a topic.
it feels like every few videos people are correcting him. I guess that's a good thing
Exactly. Why have all that money and make educated content? its better to be a dumb shill and promote stupid takes and missinformation to your audience of millions. Yeah, thats the the standard the needs to be upheld.
That is why they got rid of video replies and dislikes. They don't want big channels being questioned. Topics like this don't matter, but it effects them nonetheless.
@@memoriesofthefuture870 or, with a more realistic view, it’s not possible to make a mainstream video for an average audience that’s barely, if at all, ever been exposed to the topic without generalizing. You can’t go into every bit of nuance and context in a video like veritasiums. Shad took over an hour just to add that nuance and context after the fact. Most people would have tuned out if veritasium did it that way.
That’s just the reality of presenting things to a mainstream audience. You guys are so damn cynical about it.
@@heyspookyboogie644you are just making up excuses for people pushing low quality content to straight up lying. Veritasium also did a very deceiving clip for an electric vehicle/ai driven or something like that and he pushed all the lies and missinformation he could. Hes just another paid bot on the internets and people should call him out on his behavior.
The Veritasium video felt like watching a fan interviewing and talking about their idol. It came across almost like an advertisement for the Japanese sword industry.
It was.They were invited to take part...
Ya, seemed like they were invited to see that operation and then came up with a video around it rather than the other way around.
To me it sounded like a Fanboy hyping up a Popular subject
I don't blame Veritasium too much because he likely is just conveying information the japanese smiths gave him. The point of the video was to learn from the japanese smiths after all. So, if they embed propaganda, it's not like Veritasium has the swordsmith knowledge to recognize it.
@@Benw8888
That is true
Mythbusters cut a bullet in half with a butter knife.
Edit. From someone's suggestion in the comments and a little googling the show was in fact Penn and Teller's Bullshit which was later renamed Tell A Lie. Would recommend it to anyone that hasn't watched it.
Was about to comment that.
I know Penn and teller did that I didn't know Mythbusters did that
The metallurgical and architectural features that give a bullet stopping power (soft metal, high velocity, hollow/shatterpoint) are exactly the same features that make it easy to cut with any edge.
If a bullet can’t be cut with a butterknife, it probably can’t be cut by much else.
@@realistic_delinquent no bullets are hallow. Hallow point only means that it has a divit in the tip. Same thing with shatterpoint, no bullet has a shatterpoint, they only shatter when hitting something stronger then copper and after hitting a target you can even catch the bullet in the dirt if you shoot the right target.
@@xxbeastmode-sh3iv there is so much wrong with your statement that it's really hard to know where to begin. Also, the word is "hollow."
I love how respectful and educationa your critiques are. Kudos for you maturity, levelheadedness and for the very interesting contet. 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👌👌👌👌🔥🔥🔥🔥
Never really thought about how when people think about a katana they picture a masterpiece, but when people think about a longsword they picture something mediocre.
Japan is scarily good at making themselves look good.
Because the west hates itself. Why are there no great modern knight stories and epics?
yeah especially because they are still kinda nazi racist...
I think the typical long sword in Medieval Europe would not like these special oakshott swords that he mentions
To be fair, cultures tend to have a habit to view foreign works as 'exotic' or novel in some way. For us (I assume you're western) of the Occident, it's only natural to look upon the works of Japan with some wonderment; longswords are dime-a-dozen by our view, but katanas are quite unique. I think this is quite apparent in the inverse, as well, when looking at Japan's fascination with European fantasy in gaming and media
Historically, a LOT more people had longswords than katanas. Sure, there were some extremely fancy longswords, but when we think about the historical katanas that were more a status symbol than a weapon, the quality is undeniably really high.
The last time Shad did an analysis/review/correction video covering a science channel's attempt to highlight a specific sword, that science channel took down the video b/c of how many things they had wrong in it.
Which video was that?
@@benm5913It was a SciShow video, I saw it and can't remember the exact wrong claims they made, but I remember feeling it was very wrong while watching it. The Veritasium video didn't feel as wrong, it was more neutral and just explaining the process than making any crazy overhyped claims about the swords.
th-cam.com/video/pdp-Xo7YhnE/w-d-xo.html
@@Tesserex Yep! It was their video about Damascus steel.
th-cam.com/video/pdp-Xo7YhnE/w-d-xo.html&t
😉
I find it misleading when he says the most expensive sword is a $105 M katana. It makes it seem like that is reflective of the quality of the sword.
That isn't the price of it as a sword. That is its price as a historical artifact. Even a crappy clay pot that is worse than a middle schooler's art project would be worth a few million if it is old enough.
Above all, this tachi is worth 105 million, because the sword belonged to Fukushima Masanori.
What's William Wallace's great sword worth?? It was the biggest heaviest sword wielded on the battlefield wasn't it? Like 13 lbs or something?
@@FIRE0KING The problem is that many of these swords are in museums so not for sale, to collectors or family who definitely don't want to sell them, so no way of knowing.
In general in art and history it is difficult to give a price before the end of the auction, because it is possible that no one is interested, or the opposite and then the prices soar.
And there are even sales that are not known to the public.
As you say, the fact that it is a sword which was not symbolic, but which was used for battle gives a different value, the position of the person at the time of its use, too.
afaik, the problem with katana being so expensive in Japan is the fact that they can't be made in factories and such, they had to be handmade in a legal tradition way, so it somehow doesn't count as a weapon in Japanese law, naturally it makes each sword expensive. Like, I think you're supposed to see Japanese katana as luxury goods and not particularly high quality, like buying art pieces back home
No idea about this part but I assume some part of the cost is taxes, as the katanas are already so deep into law territory to begin with.
@@FIRE0KING You know wikipedia exists? The facts and figures are there. Worth? Depends in the buyer. Heaviest? No. 13ib? No. Also, Mel Gibson wasnt acually Wallace, in case you didnt know.
You got a subscriber out of me. My dad and his best friend have a forge that they've forged knives at for decades (and entered competitions), so it was nice to hear someone talking about the realities of forging and not just glorifying the cream of the crop of a sword type.
It like saying "this is the most expensive banana to ever taped to a wall"
Love it 😆 I’ll steal that one!
@HENTAICOMBO
Username _doesn't_ check out? 🤔
did you know a banana has more genes than a human being ? it's embarrassingly true !...
Extremely expensive stuff rarely is expensive because of its quality or performance. At that level it’s almost always the lore / history attached to it that makes it valuable.
Sorta like a signature on something affecting its value.
The entire diamond industry is a good example of this. We place more value on “natural” mined diamonds, because all of the media and stories used elevate their value and reduce the value of “synthetic” diamonds, even though there is no meaningful difference between the two
@@waylander9265 Diamonds themselves weren't much valued over other gemstones until De Beers began their propaganda in the 1940s. Also, I'll never understand why mined diamonds are more valued when there's no way to determine if it's a blood diamond or not.
@@waylander9265 You pay a premium for the special ingredient: human suffering. It's not a *real* diamond unless it was dug up by malnourished child labourers in the 3rd world.
@@waylander9265 Not even talking synthetic vs natural, I find it strange that we put any value on diamonds at all, beyond their functional value for diamond drills and lab work and such. I get that it's shiny and people like shiny things (much like crows), and I too like shiny things, but to like it that much to spend tens of thousands to millions of dollars on a single shiny rock? I don't get it, and I'm not sure I ever really will.
Such is the way of all forms of art. Rarely will a collector buy a Van Gogh simply because it is beautiful. No, it is because his story is tragic and well known, therefore his work is valuable. Similarly, swords today are not usually bought for their function (and thank goodness for that), but rather their distinction. The history around a katana is highly romanticized worldwide, therefore it is a good sword. Nay! The BEST sword.
Penn and Teller did test the Bulled Slicing Myth in one of their TV Programs. Their Katana (though I don't know how that particular one was crafted) actually could split a 9mm bullet. And so could an ordinary butter knife. Turns out it doesn't take much craftsmanship to split a common lead bullet.
Any modern steel with a wedge shape can split a bullet.
For lead is not exactly known for its hardness ... 😎
I always love the "can cut a bullet in half" argument. As far as i remember, i think mythbusters busted that myth wide open years ago where they showed that even a butter knife can cut a bullet in half when the bullet is fired at its cutting edge. The bullet is just traveling so fast that any edge will just cause it to just split lengthwise.
I watch "Forged in Fire" and see that many knives and swords are tested by shooting a bullet to its blade. They never fail at splitting the bullets and usually the damage on the blade is minimal.
@@yunusemreselcuk2128 Yea, and many knives on forged in fire end up being pieces of crap because they're made out of some shady mystery steel welded to downright garbage steel from a shopping cart, made in 3 hours.
Its called hyperbole.
I believe Penn and Teller also did a video cutting a bullet in half with a butter knife.
@@regulus3413If it is in a documentary, people will think that it is true. It is best to avoid using any form of hyperbole in a documentary because people might believe it.
This is an amazing reaction video, I didn’t know I needed. Thank you for putting in the time to do this. The referral link is a nice touch too.
He shouldn't have sent his backup guy to get all the good footage and info
You are so polite. I too like Veritasium but they have a few episodes that are just non-critical regurgitation of accepted wisdom. I started to watch their Katana show and became too agitated to finish watching. Your response is greatly appreciated.
What are some other examples that are overly charitable to the topic?
@@JasonJrake The katana video is one 😅
@@JasonJrake Their video on self-driving taxis has come under scrutiny if I remember correctly (for being a bit commercial-like, as opposed to more scientific content the channel usually puts out).
@@Takyodor2fun fact, a bunch of people were paid to make videos on them as it was found out.
(They quoted nearly the exact same claims because they were from a meeting/PowerPoint they were all given/shown)
@@JasonJrake About 80% of the content he has made after the first 2 years of the channel.
I noticed several mistakes in Veritasium video, so I was hoping hat someone in the community would address them.
Now here is Shad to the rescue.
lets be real here, shad is always the first to complain about inaccuracies
I wonder how much of the info used for the script was provided by the team at the facility that have them access.
Lol... Shad has completely missed the point of Veritasium's video...
It was to highlight the art of Japanese sword making using traditional methods and the cultural value that comes with it...
Comparing traditional Japanese swords to the hunks of garbage Shad plays with are like comparing Leonardo Da Vinci's work to his kid's finger paintings...
The entire response video is a big of a joke as what Shad is... 🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@maxnaz47 As someone who dabbles in the art of trolling, I hope that your comment is a troll/ragebait and not serious or you missed the point of Shad's video entirely. If you're wondering what the point of Shad's video is, it is simply providing further context into certain points made in the video that could become easily misconstrued (or are outright misinformation) to a general uninformed audience. He also states multiple times in the video his appreciation of Japanese swords for their artistry and cultural preservation.
I will bet anything the part about the bullet was written in the first 10 seconds specifically to hook the viewer into watching a 25-minute video.
I distinctly remember snickering at that original thumbnail but never watching it.
This video was bound to happen.
My "oh god another katana worship" radar went off when I saw that. I like Veritasium a lot but videos like that one are just cringe 😅
That’s kind of an arrogant way to take in information though. It’s always good to watch the video before you come up with a full opinion on it.
@@them0stanoying-500 that's just what happens when a channel chooses to make a thumbnail like that which is obviously bait though. And if you start your video with essentially "the best and rarest swords ever made in the entire existence of humanity"-vibes I'll click that little cross in the top right corner because that's just cringe =x especially on a science channel.
@@SyntheticFuture Yeah, you get it.
But, it's also because I'm not all that interested in katanas - in part because of the cringe fanboy culture which surrounds them.
I see a thumbnail like that, and immediately assume it's fanboy bait, so I don't give it any time.
The problem with veritasium is that this isn't the first time he just blatantly misrepresented or poorly explained something. This is just probably the only time it was a subject you were an expert of.
Hes been called out by other experts numerous times.
It’s just like game theory all over again
?
@@them0stanoying-500 game theory is exactly like this
Veritasium, SciShow, MinutePhysics -- almost all "big science" channels on youtube are terrible and should be ignored.
@@isodoublet sure bro
I got about 10 seconds into the Veritasium video before I got excited knowing Shad was going to respond.
"it can cut a bullet in half." Bullets are made of LEAD, Veritasium. SOFT, MALLEABLE LEAD.
same
@@MattWinkler1 exactly! And also they travel FAST. If you could throw a bullet in the air and cut it with a sword like Fruit Ninja, now THAT would be awesome!
There was this video of guys shooting an axe with a bullet, and the bullets split very easily with virtually no damage done to the axe, so I kinda figured
Cool you’re a dork
Some people think filling animals with helium is wrong...
I don't judge. Whatever floats your goat.
i can't help but think about the gigantic inflatable pigs pink floyd had lol
Thanks Gallagher
🤦
😂😂
……….
The Japanese cultural PR department is second to none.
To be fair if i had a weapon like that in my country i'd make fairy tales about it :)
That being said, The belgains where the bravest people in whole gallia even Ceasar said it :D (yes i'm belgain :p)
Nah, communist Pr department is way better. Japanese culture actually has merit. Communists have failure and nazi grade atrocities and are still revered.
Korea is catching up very very fast
@@gerbo8018 Your people were busy with the woodwinds. 🎷
@@AvenEngineer The area was and still is famous for enjoying a good beer.
But we also used to be fierce on the defence. Many wars where fought on our fields. The battle fo the golden spurs coming to mind :)
Speaking specifically to cutting the tatami, John Clements once did a video where he explained about the edge geometry being more important in that aspect. He took a blade that could not cut his hand as he ran the edge across it, and was still able to cut the tatami. It took slightly more effort, but not so much as to make it obvious that sharpness was the most important factor in the cut.
Yeah that's the difference between primary and secondary sharpness. The friction from the primary bevel limits you in cutting most things, the secondary bevel is more important for tough or hard things.
All that matters is force. Sharpness only reduces the force needed.
Re: 21:35, the reason the Japanese imported superior armor from the Europeans but not superior swords is that swords just didn't matter much by this point in time when trade was occurring; the arms they were importing from Europeans were firearms! So they were importing a lot of firearms, and also armor as seen here (which would provide protection against said muskets), but there was no need to import European swords to replace the katanas as the katanas were always already backup weapons anyway.
We all knew Shad was going to make a reply video to Veritasium
I was waiting for this video as soon as I heard the intro to Veritasium's. 15 minutes later, you deliver an hour long response.
Now that's customer service!
This is a good time to remind people of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. Which is that if an article/video comes out on a subject you are an expert in you notice all sorts of errors, but then the same source will have another article/video on a subject you know nothing about and you don't stop to think that this one might be just as inaccurate as the last.
So this makes me wonder, how accurate are the rest of Veritasium's video if they got this one so wrong?
I can confirm, Veritasium is not to be trusted on Electrical Engineering either xD And as far as I know from Thunderfoot years ago, neither should he be trusted on Physical Chemistry.
Well, the "How electricity really works" sparked a lot of controversy. His "rods from God" one was a train wreck by his own admission. Those are two recent oppsies I remember. Neither one was wrong on a high level. They just had a lot of practical issues and rhetorical problems.
Derek seems to be in his element discussing theory, not practice, and easily falls into overhype.
@@absolutechaos13 The electricity one was wrong on every level. Forgetting that magnetic fields have to be induced is getting half of all of electromagnetism wrong.
He's pretty bad. He's very good at giving superficially plausible explanations but some of his content is on a par with documentaries about aliens in ancient egypt, with glaring flaws in logic and methodology on the experimental side and a compete lack of context in his presentation of facts in isolation from anything to compare them to, and a tendency to overhype everything. He's also very murky in the amount of his content that is clearly promotional for a commercial interest, with no indication of whether it was paid promotion or quid pro quo or "access for promotion" type deals, some of that stuff is shockingly biased.
He also leans into the whole "THE TRUTH THEY DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW" style of trying to present everything he says as going against the conventional wisdom, even when he's just contorting himself and convoluting the subject to just express the exact same thing as the conventional wisdom.
@@afelias I think I missed that part, or it went over my head. My favorite was him saying that the power they got in their practical test was enough to light up an LED while ignoring the fact that an LED would have just popped because it would then be exposed to 10x rated voltage milliseconds later.
the katana's best feature is that it's a sword you can make with the technology and materials available in feudal japan.
in all seriousness, that's a really important feature. once technologies have been figured out, the only real factor deciding what gets used and what not is cost.
exactly. This was Veritasium's whole point of the video while shadiversity totally missed that point and went on with the classical 'Katanas are not actually that good' narrative that we already heard from every other youtuber.
Speaking of appreciating great artistry/skill, I really appreciate videos like this, because I enjoy listening to you talk about a topic on which you're so incredibly knowledgeable. THAT is inspiring in a similar way to the craftsmanship at work in sword making.
Me and my friend that was interested in metalurgy used to joke, "this sword is 10,000 folds of Nippon steel!" "So Basically it's made of really crap material that took forever to turn into something useful"
I knew right away when I started watching Veritasium's video that you'd have things to say about it
Lol... Shad has completely missed the point of Veritasium's video...
It was to highlight the art of Japanese sword making using traditional methods and the cultural value that comes with it...
Comparing traditional Japanese swords to the hunks of garbage Shad plays with are like comparing Leonardo Da Vinci's work to his kid's finger paintings...
The entire response video is as big of a joke as what Shad is... 🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@maxnaz47 And how is _any_ of that relevant to my comment?
Normies: "Katana great, best metal and craftsmanship, pure perfection!"
Shad: *Stares knowingly in cross guards and spring steel
@@Dobermann89-dr2rc Except no, and people do say that European swords were poorly made. Unwieldy, lumps of iron, barely sharp. The list goes on. And he loves katanas. It’s just that traditionally made ones are kinda garbage in real use. And people overinflated them way too much.
@@EpicRandomness555 I love it when people try to claim that Shad just hates katanas. It was actually brought up in the comments of the Veritasium video by one guy in particular. In reality, it has nothing to do with hatred, or even dislike. I think katanas are pretty sweet myself. The only reason why the HEMA crowd bashes on katanas so much is because they're so notoriously overhyped due to action movies and anime.
There's also the general mystique that surrounds Japan, coming from the fact that they actually care about and have actively worked to retain their culture. Japan has so much more respect for their past than most western nations, and the result is incredibly marketable. Look at England and none of our institutions give a crap. You don't see Japan turning all their old temples into flats like we do…
The lack of respect for the Founding Fathers and the God they built America for, is why I'm beginning to hate modern Americans myself. No retention of culture and tradition. We're just supposed to be a "melting pot" of other cultures and peoples who don't care at all about America. It's evil. Nationalism is the reason why Japan has such a strong and respectable identity. I admire that, even if I can't see eye to eye with their religious beliefs. I can get over that, when I see folks standing for what he believes. Unlike the morons of the West who just continue to cater to the terrorists of the Middle East and the so-called disadvantaged groups of the modern liberal minded movements.
@@EpicRandomness555 Problem is Shad definition of tradicional katana is the standards used in the Edo period, a time of peace and katanas were being made with more emphasis on being a status symbol, more than Tool of war, so the performance of katanas following the period suffer from these flaws, such as a narrow spine, small tsuba, shorter blade and being way to light, Shad never addresses these flaws, and believes these are the Japanese standards for a practical sword, which is wrong, swords in the more antique periods were build for war, having a wider spine, complex lamination, more length and being heavier. These are the standards of an actual practical sword for war.
Side note: the dispute of "cross guard > tsuba" is irrelevant once you realize the hand guards of both serve a very different purpose in their respective style of fighting.
While we were out partying, this guy studied the blade.
Fascinating! Glad I am getting your videos recommended in my feed again after a few months where you never showed up.
Hearing someone brag that "This sword can cut a bullet in half!" tells me the person knows little about both swords and guns. (or is banking on the viewers knowing little about swords and guns.)
well cheap swords break? so yea...
Especially coming from Veritasium, that knows pretty well about physics.
Even in the Forged in Fire TV show, amateur bladesmiths in the US can make swords that can cut bullets. Their blades are not judged by whether they can cut a bullet, that's just a given, but are judged on the amount of damage that bullet did to the edge.
@@JimmyYYK9241
Honestly, yeah. _That_ makes sense.
@@ivoryas1696 Also they only did that once. On the episode where the challenge was to make a katana. it was expressly done as a nod to the myth.
One thing I learned from my engineering classes is that importance of toughness in materials. Veritassium’s video never discusses the drawbacks that come with the hardness, save the fact that most swords shatter during quenching and even then that’s treated like it just makes Katanas more special. The edges are much more vulnerable to chips and damage, so much so that combat has evolved to fully avoid edge on edge contact with these swords.
Don’t get me wrong it’s great to see these craft skills be preserved and treated with respect but the video doesn’t challenge ideas, it just promotes them. It’s like an interview where the interviewer only asks softball questions
To be fair though, katana's have both hardness and softness. The edge is hard and the rest of the blade is soft. I have seen katanas take on horrendous bends in use and not actually break. But they do, however permanently bend. They don't deform and spring back like a rapier or long sword does. You can bend them back into "mostly straight" and keep fighting though so its still better than a actually full hardened blade which would just snap.
It still lets the edge chip and the whole blade bend, and stay bent.
The actual greatest katanas had quite intricate laminations (not to be confused with the folding) which were designed primarily to deal with the problem of chipping and bending.
It's also why historical wartime katanas typically had an edge bevel over 40°.
He did say that a percentage shatter, watch it again.
@@JathraDH Bending is called 'Plastic Deformation', springing back is called 'Elastic Deformation'. Chain of events on a Stress-Strain graph is Elastic, Plastic, Yield (when it breaks). Yielding can either be axial (been pulled apart), or shear (sideways to the axis, like been cut by scissors or something), shear strength is half of the axial (tensile)strength. Yield is always measured as axial.
This is great to see. I "saw" the Veritasium video an hour after it came out. In reality it got my blood boiling and I typed out a tiny essay to try my best to explain the reality of katanas and European swords while just having the video in the background.
They even said that "even something as high quality as iron sand has some impurities" which for an iron source as bad as iron sand is ridiculous.
There's even tons of comments with absolutely insane opinions on katanas and European swords such as European swords being generally heavier, thicker and blunt weapons that are used for chopping through armour and focues on blunt damage.
I thought we were past the crazy katana fantasy by 2024.
Somewhere in a corner of a dojo between a salon and a Little Ceasar's, Ashida Kim is ferociously pleasuring himself
Chopping through armor 😂😂😂
I'd say 99% of people have absolutely no idea how much a medieval sword actually weights.
I think I know the comment you're talking about. Orange profile picture, sol in the name? I was in that exact threat correcting him.
@@DonVigaDeFierro Especially seeing as "medieval sword" can mean one of many different things. I roughly know the weight of an arming sword but I can all but guarantee I don't know the rough weights of every obscure sword type from the entire medieval period.
To sum up all the correct knowledge of katana:
1) So sharp that when put into stream it cuts flowing leaves in half;
2) The more layers the better: average katana has 500 layers, better ones 1500, the best 9000 ( number of layers has to be divisible by 3)
3) It easily cuts off the tank barrel not to mention rifles or machine guns
4) It cuts through european swords and tool steel
5) When it's sharpened it never dulls, because of superior steel properties
6) You can bend real katana 720 degrees and it springs back to shape
7) Jedi used lights swords because they didn't know the secrets of katana making, so they've made a worse ripoff
8) Always forged by the full moon
9) So light that when you're using it you become so fast that you can catch bullets and cut them in half
@simonx760 this is how
sharp they are
So sharp even chuck norris gets cut just by looking at it
This is all correct, I know all of these things from anime
You can even cut between the atoms of an apple with it, so that the apple doesn't realize it has been cut. (One Punch Man Manga/Anime reference)
Also 500 can't be divided by 3...
@@NeuroticNOOB First one. Congratulations :D You win a katana.
I really liked the supplementary clips to the explainations and the attention to detail. Small corrections in video over one hour long are not the norm, very nice!
I see I’m not the only one in the comments that saw Veritasium’s video and immediately wanted Shad’s reaction
You're not alone
lol you know someone actually understands a topic when their statements come with a string of caveats and aren’t just a sound bite.
Considering how much I have loved these swords over the years, it is wonderful to hear these nuances regarding the katana discussed. Good stuff mate.
27:58 at this point the original veritasium video is 1 minute and 21 seconds I was worried this video is going to have a part 2. Excellent job on adding accurate context and correcting the mistakes.
This is so great!!!!!! What a wealth of knowledge I watched the Veritasium video and then was SO EXCITED when this video came out!!
23:54 - Smelter lit once a year. This has to do with legal restrictions on making swords in Japan. Few smiths are licensed, they are limited in how many swords they are allowed to make. (I learned this about 20 years ago, so...)
The restrictions on production is for the domestic market. Swords sold abroad do not count towards this limit. Even still, most smiths need day jobs. The smith that used to live near me was a mail carrier iirc.
Man, Shad ranting about the Katana again took me back to a happier time. Thanks Shad and Co. Keep up the good work.
Density of sand 1.52 g/cm3
Density of magnetite 4.89 g/cm3
80% magnetite by mass is less than 40% by volume. Assuming I did my math right.
"I don't like sand. Its rough, coarse and has less density than magnetite"
- Anakin Skywalker
Wow, honesty about sword making!?! The folks online who talk the loudest and the most about swords, know the least! This video is a breath of fresh air, thank you so very much for posting this!
What makes the Katana special, in my eyes, is not the shape or sharpness. It's the virtually unbroken chain of knowledge that has been handed down from one generation to the next since the 10th century. It's not limited the smithing either. It includes the smelting and polishing as well. All 3 disciplines take a lifetime to learn. If that wasn't enough it requires the wielder to have a high level of skill to use it properly due to it's inherent vulnerability. Dam near any can swing a claymore around without worry of damage. No other sword has these distinctions.
I did some research into it some years back. Tamahagane is also ILLEGAL to export outside of Japan. The only way to get it it to be a master craftsman and basically go through a huge process to request some and even if the decide to let you have some, they will decide how much you can have (probably not even enough to make a decent sword).
Not only is the amount of tamahagane restricted, japanese swordsmiths also simply are limited in the amount of swords they are allowed to make by law. You can't mass produce swords in japan, it is just illegal.
Well, there are only so many dread spirits who can inhabit the blade of a katana at a time!
Saying that swords made in Japan are works of art isn't just a snobbish comment, it's just straight-up a fact. They are LEGALLY classified as works of art when they're made with (mostly) traditional technique.
Haha, literally legislating the Chinese katana industry into existence. GG Japan
@@nullifye7816 $20 chineseium katanas were going to exist no matter what. The market is there for people who can't tell the different between mall ninja shit and functional swords.
@@nullifye7816 They'd rather let china have that market than let their own art form be degraded within their own borders into a cheap novelty, and I can respect that. You also cannot own swords in Japan that aren't authentic Japanese katana, so the existence of cheap mass produced chinese shit has no effect on them anyway.
the term that I find most fitting is "romanticized". I find that a lot of Japanese craft is romanticized and I say that as someone who really likes japanese culture.
Together with the notion that something being made (mostly) by hand in a very lengthy process somehow magically improves the quality by an order of magnitude.
It's funny, the work ethics of japanese are also often held in very high regard. Some of my colleagues spent 6 months in japan in their phd period (chemistry) and found that the japanese students were in the lab from morning till night. Yet it's not like they got more done than we do in 8 hours...
Yep.
@@christiannorf1680why work hard when you can work smart
The Veritasium Video was my understanding of Japanese swords before I found Shad.
Like many things in Japan, it's about the tradition and artistry of the process more than the quality of the end product, which may be better or worse than their contemporary counterparts from around the world. The problem comes from the mystification of the end product, which is both a result of foreign fascination and locally spread propaganda that served to maintain power and/or value.
I don't mean to shit on Japan. It's a fascinating country and I've visited dozens of times because I love the place, but it can be a little infuriating how some people put anything Japanese on a pedestal.
This doesn't surprise me in the slightest considering Veritasium's track record
but shad you don't understand. They're upkeeping the oldest tradition known to any craftsman: ALWAYS declare your methods to be the best in the whole world and proven by time and experience
And it's great PR, but it isn't "the oldest tradition" by any stretch.
Wood fired pottery would beat it by quite a bit.
@@DH-xw6jp i think you missed the joke
@@bigmitchy4026 yes, yes I did.
And re reading I think I found it.
Thanks and lol (it is a good one when it isn't miles above my head haha)
As an amateur bladesmith, I can confirm that there is never one single way to make a sword, at least in the day to day work. Look up how to make a simple knife, there are a hundred ways to forge a blade. Some are better, some are preference, and others are tradition. Techniques change, and that goes for any type of knife or sword. To say that the techniques haven't changed for centuries is entirely inaccurate. In fact, the legend of how the katana was created is literally about the smith changing his techniques to make a better sword.
Well, they did say "virtually unchanged" and then show a permanent graphite(I'm guessing) tatara with electric air blowers and the smith using a power hammer to forge the sword.
Very true, it always reflects the times, what was avaible and known or needed, good examples can be Yakut knives which were important for butchering and carpentery but iron was scarse as well as good blacksmiths or high demand for weapons in times of war resulting in lower quality versus piece periods where time was put into excellent crafts, that can include special items for wealthy people which would demand the best they could have. Looking closely into it we might found good examples of demand driven designs as well, like in WW2 when weapons shifted from highly produced machine milled parts into rivetted sheets etc.
@@WwarpfirewW Exactly.
@@WwarpfirewW Absolutely. Your mention of WW2 really drives the point home. E.g. the commonly known "Fliegerschwert", or, officially, "Offizierschwert", turns from nickel/silver or plated fittings in 1935 into aluminium fittings by 1940. Same goes for many personal blades & bayonets.
It's actually very interesting that, while firearms are pushing the boundaries of technology in times of significant conflict, blades are rather reduced to pure function, becoming a historic reflection of momentary necessity.
By that same token, a katana was merely a very useful tool in times of war & thereby object/subject to practical & economic consideration. In times of peace, it became an idea, a legend. A warning. Makes sense.
Wow, an hour+ long response from Shad just a few hours later, who could have seen that coming
Now that was a solid opener. You made it clear that you respected the channel and their content and subscribe to them and that you had something to offer about this particular topic but otherwise really appreciated their work. 👏👏👏👏 I love that you came with respect but also made sure to be clear that you had concerns and questions about the things they stated and then proceeded to lay them out with very clear reasoning. Well played👊
People should do their own research instead of trusting a random person who, although has personal experience, doesn't cite their sources in the description. (Check this video's description).
I was expecting this video the moment I saw Veritasium's video. As I said in a comment there, even a dull butter knife can split a bullet in two if it is made of steel.
Lol... Shad has completely missed the point of Veritasium's video...
It was to highlight the art of Japanese sword making using traditional methods and the cultural value that comes with it...
Comparing traditional Japanese swords to the hunks of garbage Shad plays with are like comparing Leonardo Da Vinci's work to his kid's finger paintings...
The entire response video is a big of a joke as what Shad is... 🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@maxnaz47 Just gonna spam the same reply everywhere, huh?
That's a shame.
@@LurkerDaBerzerker They clearly have put no thought behind their understanding of swords, so it follows they put no thought in their reply/spamming behavior.
@@flamewingsonic They claimed in another comment before yours that they are unsubscribing, yet they continue to spam the same comment.
It's crap on the wall, but I suppose it's still support for Shad.
As Tom Scott said: 'Why you can't trust me.'
We all make mistakes 😅
Maybe valid were it not for how overproduced the video is
I miss Tom already
So far, 30 minutes in, there hasn't been a single thing said in Veritasium's video that was wrong... All i've seen is Shad making huge assumptions about implied information that was never said or implied... An absolute garbage response video that is absolutely not warranted or needed... Definitely unsubbing...
@@maxnaz47 Goodbye, don't let the door hit you on the arse, oh, and thanks for continued support of the channel through comments.
someone must have pissed in your cereal, and your ears. clearly you didnt even watch the video lmao goodbye !@@maxnaz47
Thank You for talking about impurities. The amazing part of the Katana was the fact that the Ancient Japanese had pretty poor grade materials but through very hard work folding the steel many many times they were able to get a very high performance from questionable materials. To say the purity was amazing was a slap in the face to these people. If the steel purity was incredible they would not have needed to work and fold the metal thousands of times. The metal workers ingenuity and commitment is the reason the traditional Katana was incredible. It is like the difference from buying a IKEA table and assembling it vs carving a table from a fallen tree with only hand tools.
The Veritasium katana video was just a continuation of the western fetishisation of Japanese culture. We adopted the word "origami" as though the Japanese invented it. It literally means "folding paper" and existed in China long before it existed in Japan. Same for "Bonsai" - China were doing this before Japan. They are an older culture. Then you have "umami" - another word we have adopted that has magical, indefinable qualities simply because it's Japanese. The fact is, Japan is no more magical than other countries, we have just decided to have it represent our fetishised view of what we want Asian culture to be, ie "orientalism".
Really great vid - and great added info. Thanks😊
Precise, honest correction without being nasty or condecending. Respect
its nice to see you are so fast shad. that video as of writing is only 17 hours old and yours is almost an hour old soo you watched the video and 16ish hours later you have a video on it.
now i can watch 2 videos in one
Paintings that consist of several cross-hatched lines can also be sold for many millions of dollars. Does this mean that they are outstanding works?
I saw the Veritasium thumbnail and said "I'm not going to watch that video, it will just make me mad" 😂
I mean, it isn't a bad video at all. It covers the process. The historian they have clearly states that it is the best sword they could produce with the tech and metal and such they had, for the purposes they wanted. The point of the video is to cover the making of the sword from start (the iron sand) to finish (final product) and some of its properties. And it does that, about as well as it could in the time frame they had, while explaining how/why some of the stuff was done.
And, yes, it doesn't cover other things, like how it doesn't spring back, because not spring steel, nor does it really touch on that whole "best sword they could produce" bit, and what that means. It would definitely be a better video overall if it placed the sword and its design into historical context. If there is a weakness to the video, it is in things like the bullet slicing (which a butter knife can do) and hyping up the expensive aspect (the 105m sword is a mix of historical value plus economic boon years, while these hand made katanas are expensive, because, well, they are made by labor intensive processes... that guy sharpening/polishing for a month isn't doing it for free). Statements that are factually true, but will lead to the common person watching the video to draw the wrong conclusion from the data provided. It could have used a bit more of the historian guy, overall.
But still nice to see the process being done similar to how it was then, by people keeping the tradition mostly alive.
Can I just say I'm so happy you're still around doing what you do
Your tone in this video is much better than the title. Good video 👍
There was the ceremonial way to do things, then there was the "just get the job done" way of doing things.
I remember reading that in Europe it was common for Nobles and Knights to buy a sword from one sword maker that made really good swords, then take it to another to get the "flare" added from craftsman.
there are so many european examples of highly specialized industries.
@@mugnuzduh
*Takes one look at the thumbnail.*
Anyone that has A: enough money to pay 105 *MILLION* dollars for a sword, and B: is stupid enough to pay 105 *MILLION* dollars for a sword, deserves to be fleeced for that money.
That sword wasn't purchased for that price because it was an uber sword. Most likely, it was for historical significance (and probably coupled with it happening during boon years). Like if Excalibur were real/around (and without any mystical powers, of course) and up for auction, just imagine how much it would go for...
to preserve the piece?
This is a culture that regularly pays $1million+ for a fish.
@@Axterix13 "That sword wasn't purchased for that price"
You should have stopped there.
@@realistic_delinquent 🐟
My only comment on the veritasium video was “Shad has entered the chat”
LMAO!
Great video :)
Yeah, a lot of the corrections were calling out deliberate implications, but that is not meant as a detraction of the video.
Also really enjoyed a bit of a brush-up on my knowledge about steel :)
(My class about it was long enough ago that I confused the 2.08% point of the steel diagram with the optimum of 0.83% Carbon xD)
This was great. I watched every minute and learned a lot. Its sad how much some big channels are relying on a quick sensationalised piece instead of actual education.
As someone that studied crystalography (but tapped out at the advanced courses and metallurgy) and geology in general I can go a step deeper than Shad on that topic ^^
For starters, Veritasium is not correct about the origina on the iron rich sand. They described the most common origin of Banded Iron formations and where most iron deposits come from. Japan is mostly vulcanic, very little metamorphic rock from marine sediments pushed up high enough that errosion could give you any sediment, much less iron rich sand. There is Banded Iron in Japan, but that one is from a vulcanic origin. It's highly ironized ground/phreatic water (phreatic means below groundwater level, sometimes below sea level) that is heated up, is pushed up and concentrates the iron while cooling down. It is still happening in famous japanese hot springs today (just extremely slowly, as everything in geology).
You also have iron righ vulcanic rock, which is a much worse source since it not only has lower iron conentration but the iron is also fixed in the crystaline structure, meaning you have to break up the minerals, not just getting rid of the low iron stuff around. You need higher temperatures and more time to do that.
Depending on the purity in the deposits the sands came from the quality of the ore sand varies. Even the best quality iron deposits are still minerals that are mostly iron but not just pure iron oxide. You will also always have other minerals in the sand (thiner layers of iron bands bound to other minerals that stayed with the broken down pieces or other minerals of similar weight). So you need to do a few steps to get rid of the unwanted stuff even before prebaking.
Another thing that people often get very wrong is how much material is not reacting just because the temperature is high enough for a reaction to happen.
Think of boiling water. 100°C is the temperature to vaporize water. But a lot of water is evaporating before you get to the temperature and (larger amount) water isn't exploding into vapor the moment it reaches the temperature. The same is true for minerals. They start to break down if you change the temperature (pressure and catalysators like the presence of water) outside of the range in which they are stable. But the reaction is only on the surface of the mineral that get's actually exposed to the change. This is the reason why the furnace is burning so long, holding the temperature, before they can get the iron out. And even after many hours a lot of material was simply not exposed enough to the right conditions to break down, much less to depose. Ironically, high iron concentration can lead to minerals being trapped inside mostly iron, not getting exposed to the temperature enough to break down or to leave the material it is trapped it.
This is very common in the natural slow metamorphosis of rocks, which you can see under the microscope. You can see the structures of formerly existing minerals by the shapes of minerals that didn't break down and new minerals crystalizing inside the space the mineral that broke down left, often something with a different composition as some elements left, while others stayed and formed something different.
The same thing goes for the impurities inside the iron. Some elements are similar enough to the iron that they won't leave as easy, some get trapped and some simply form different minerals with the iron (often breaking down and re-forming multiple times, depending on the conditions and the chance they move somewhere else).
And this kind of phenomenons go on through the process.
Hammering the metal does "squish" the impurities, as long as they didn't form a strong enough crystal structure (which the heat and pressure, introduced by the hammer should prevent), but as soon as the material cools down they start forming new crystals. The speed and uniformity in which the material cools down dictates what crystal structure is formed and how big the crystals get. Quenching forces a very rapit crystalization, with many smaller crystals, which are the grains.
This is still a simplification. The thing I want to get across is that there are certain boundries of stability for different minerals/crystal structures to form and different impurities interact with all of this in a different way. The specifics about ferite etc get much too complicated (even for me as I wasn't able to grasp the specifics of metallurgy and higher crystalography myself) and are problematic to bring across in such a video. I personally think it's even questionable to go there at all because those names are actually just definitions of a range of content and crystal structure, which do have different physical properties, but it's not very helpful to use them so loosely instead of an expression which tells you something about the properties. Like mild steel or saying the hardness of the material or something like that. It's always a range because even in modern steel you can't perfectly control the purity of which specific material you get, so it's just getting needlessly muddy.
can you marry me?
@ "Hammering the metal does "squish" the impurities, as long as they didn't form a strong enough crystal"
anyone reading the post above or even watching the video, search for the following: For the undying 9/11 JET FUEL ARGUMENT / purgatoryironworks / Dec 15, 2015
thanks for taking the time to share your knowledge.
@@leoSaundershe can, but will he?
I bend my arthritis knees before you
Which is ironic is *I'm actually living on an old roman iron smelting site* where we can find big chunks of slugs just one meter below the surface.
Whenever we have to plant a tree, we have to dig until we pass a layer of iron slug everywhere.
Just a few years ago, I dug out a piece of 40 cm / 30 cm / 30 cm of empty iron slug I exposed on a brick wall in the garden. It was more 50 cm / 40 cm / 30 cm but I break it in three pieces to remove it by hands. 😧
And we know the romans used a similar technique a few hundred years earlier than Japanese with Tamahagane. So yeah, we knew that in Europe long before them. *We just had much more abondant and purest iron to collect* which why this type of bad smelting was not well considered, left behind for better smelting techniques and never passed on the next generation. No cultural value was attached to this type of smelting.
I literally live on the proof that Tamahagane is (to say the least) a snobbish dated technique kept alive in Japanese culture nowadays. 😅
"We just had much more abondant and purest iron" . Europe is mediocre as far as iron ore is concerned :)
Japan is a chain of volcanic islands, they have all the resources they need in quantities large enough for them to even export if they chose to mine lower purity ores. Those ore sands have serious ore deposits upstream, and because the mountains are volcanic they have copper, gold, silver, lead etc. They are importing ore right now because very high purity ores can be sourced from other places and it is cheap to ship the ore by sea by sea.
What they lack is enough resources to sustain world domination ;-).
@EmilNicolaiePerhinschi Japanese iron supply is very low quality. They are able to export it because of modern techniques to make it more pure.
I think you missed the point.
@@Krytern they have plenty of iron, and the quality of the ore counts only for cost. They are importing ore from Brazil or Australia like everybody else :) because compared to Australian ore every other ore is low quality. Even UK is importing coal and iron ore now, despite having a lot of it themselves, only somewhat more expensive.
The point is they exaggerate everything, even in their eyes they are the best at everything, everybody else is a loser.
@@EmilNicolaiePerhinschi they dont have a lot of iron. which is why you rarely see metal nails in traditional japanese woodworking, and their woodworking tools contains little iron. Japanese is very good with their marketing and comes off as "masters" at traditional crafts even when a lot of their stuffs are just made in china.
Knew this was coming, for real this might be my favorite sword ever, but I don't get why there's so much misinformation about it, it's just a cool sharp piece of metal that cuts, like any other sword can, nothing magical about it
Because it's mostly weebs who spread this misinformation. It's made in japan therefor good.
Sword: 😶
Sword, Japan: 😱
Because anime, Japanese mysticism, and weebs with a severe case of dunning kruger.
Ninja and Samurai movies of the 80s and 90s. If you think about it. That tachi in the video is the most expensive sword ever sold partly because of the western misinformation that contributed to its world-wide fame, which is hilarious.
Hollywood anti European culture propaganda and lies. The Uthbert is SUPERIOR.
Love the video.
A lot of in depth info about metallurgy and how it affects the sword. That's my type of thing.
Other people watching this: I like hearing about the history of the katana
Me: Oh so that's how you can find iron ore I'm going to put that in my video game.
I love to see how Shad struggle to be polite, full of respect and careful to say things and in same time try to explain very complex topic.
Mhm, it's quite fun to watch these videos peko.
I've barely watched a Veritasium video for at least 2 years now. If it's not a straight-up pure explanation of a math concept or its history, it's probably not good - especially any field-trip / experiment type stuff. There's a lot of wasted time in the videos and other TH-camrs covers the topics in a much more comprehensive and educational way.
Nice to see a Shad video pop up to confirm it's still happening, and I know I'll surely learn more here.
Yup, more and more inaccuracies, questionable statements and things that are plainly wrong over the years. Sadly it shows that Derek is not a scientist, but a "science communicator"
@@christiannorf1680 And it seems you're right, according to his Wikipedia entry, so, thanks for the contribution. It seems I misremembered him having more technical experience and background, but apart from whatever his degrees taught him, even starting with his Ph.D. the focus has been on education.
Glad to see someone else make this point. I used to watch Veritasium's videos then noticed it was devolving to basically History channel levels of nonsense. Presumably his research staff has just degraded in quality, probably getting away from his areas of knowledge, and it is just a "I F'ing love science!" show, with no concern for whether the claims are true, contested, or anything. A shame really, but very common.
It is for entertainment not accuracy sadly. I think he counts on Wiki to much and should reach out to others like when Physics Girl did a video with him to correct a previous video, which he did not take down.
My trust for veritasium videos is definitely in the toilet, they always had an air of sensationalism to them but it's a pattern where people have to actively debunk these wildly inaccurate sponsored fluff-pieces that feel more like watching an ad on TV than a video educating you about a subject. I think he's definitely a good example of someone talking with confidence making people trust them even if they're just talking out of their rear end.
I stopped watching Veritasium a few years ago. He made some really entertaining pop culture science videos. But there were a couple that got some pretty heavy backlash. And then it seemed like every other video he made a crucial mistake in either his research or assumptions. Like the speed of electricity, or him lying with manipulated statistics. I just couldn't trust that I would get real information, which is kind of important when you claim to be a channel with a focus on education. So I'm not surprised that another video has gone up that Shad has the knowledge to tear apart.
Same.
I feel the view chasing and clout of being a big youtuber, the financial incentives of sponsors and hanging around with people from certain sociopolitical circles (who also have the carrot of clout and financial incentives), have skewed some of the information presented in his videos.
Not saying Veritasium is bad for doing this but as a "science" channel it is disingenuous if you know full well what you are presenting is not factual or only selectively true.
100% I went through the exact same thing
Jup me too.... it seemse like he is missing very important details. Knowing only half is the most dangerous.
Exact same deal. I subscribed after watching a few interesting videos of his, then unsubscribed again because every video he made about any topic I have even basic knowledge of was glaringly wrong, and even the ones I didn't know as much about had basic logical flaws and were often outright misleading in the presentation of the things that were factual to a point where I could spot it without expert knowledge. Making mistakes when you step outside your zone of expertise is one thing, but failing to learn from that and continuing to repeat the same pattern: that's someone who just wants the ad revenue and sponsorships to keep rolling in: he's not a science educator, or even a talented enthusiast - he's just another media company churning out monetizable content.
I’m will to accept that the speed of electricity thing is more a victim of gross oversimplification than an intentional attempt to mislead (although the decision to oversimplify it so much is obviously his). What was the statistics thing? I missed that controversy.
katanas are like diamonds. not really spoken of or desired until someone started telling everyone how great it is
I don't really like veritasium. Because the complaints you have are complaints people have about nearly every single video. So there's a trend of commonly incorrect and somewhat misleading information. It seems almost deliberate to me (for the sake of sensationalism). I find it annoying.
That channel is the absolute tip top pinnacle of the Dunning Kruger bell curve
A lot of the katana worship just boils down to aesthetics. It reminds me of the Walther PPK, which has a lot of fanboys because of James Bond. There may not be a more beautiful and perfect looking handgun in existence, but as a concealed carry or just general use weapon, there are many, many better choices on every conceivable criteria, especially today
Glock has entered the chat
Lol this video showed up next to shads giants sword video in my subscriptions feed. I immediately thought lmao shads going to have a good time with this
I just watched the video and though, waait a second something is not right here and wouldn't you know it, 7 minutes later I see Shad's video! Looking forward to this one!
Does this still apply when I've upgraded my Katana to Level VII?
Question. In the Veritasium video , they say that the sword's curvature come from some kind of tension distortion between the hard edge and softer core. Is that true ? Could you elaborate please Shad' . Thx
Yes! Wanted to hear Shad’s take on this 👏
Kept getting his video recommended. Something told me not to watch. Good to know that gut feeling was on.
Sells a pokemon card for billions of dollars: "This makes this card the most expensive pokemon card ever built!"
NFTs be like
Is it wrong though?
@@bairnonessieOnly in pedantry.
It is; Building it didn't cost the most.
What some collector pays to own something isn't indicative of how much it cost to make.
Cost to own and cost to build are not the same, and only a fool can't tell the difference.@@bairnonessie
I get your argument and there seems to be quite some information missing in the Veritasium video but your title suggests that the Veritasium vid is mostly wrong while in fact its almost completly correct and there ist some stuff that was worded misleading and very few intresting details are actually missing
Edit: good vid but why have a mean clickbait title instead of building on the other vid in a positive way
You are the human embodiment of the 'Actually' meme :P ..... here for the algorithm. Good luck brother in fighting for your channel! :)