February 2024: apocalypse physics
What physics would you do in the apocalypse?
Leave comments here!
Link to that comic: https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
Comments (79)
Yes, please do a video about Station Eleven! It is also one of my favorite shows ever, and I am frustrated that no one ever seems to talk about it!
I really don't understand why so many people are fascinated by apocalypse or zombie scenarios. But that's not your fault. But. After an apocalypse, I fully agree with you that on the individual level, the number one concern is anarchy and violence, followed by food and shelter. And if the question is something like: which technologies would be most important to re-master, on a societal level?, I'd say #1 is medicine and the area in highest need of e.g. antibiotics and antimicrobial defense is pregnancy & giving birth. In the middle ages, I think women had about a 50 % chance of surviving giving birth. There are so many things that can go horribly wrong there. #2 is probably heat and shelter, so craftsmanship and logistics for that. At #3, and this is the first real "we need STEM brains for this", I'd put telecommunication, anything faster than letters delivered by foot or via horses. And of course #2 is also something for physicists, chemists and engineers, if you're talking about scaling up supplying heat and power for large numbers of people.
I understood the initial question more like: if you, with your knowledge and education as a PhD physicist, had to coordinate, direct and orchestrate an effort to re-prove and re-observe all the laws and fundamentals and models of physics as we collectively know today, what are the steps that could be achieved much more efficiently now, given 20/20 hindsight of the resulting laws, and knowing which experiments and observations were key to getting us to the present day? But your answer that, in an apocalypse scenario, you would first and foremost fear rape & murder, is a sad truth that still needs to be understood by so many out there. Thank you for saying and repeating it.
Another great book about pandemics: Spillover by David Quammen
so my take on the rerunning the important experiments thing is like... it's not necessary. Either you know the results were legit so you know the science is legit, or you don't know that first hand but trust the scientist so you trust the science is legit, OR you don't believe the science the scientist said without proof. Now assuming the scientist does the clever thing and becomes a librarian and eventually society recovers enough for someone to be like damn it would be handy to know how electromagnetism works (for example) let's maybe read all those weird books with no proof and give that a go seeing as no one else knows and it's a place to start! And then they work. So it doesn't matter if the scientist reproves everything or not, it will get proved over the course of time because as long as the library is well known anyone trying to figure anything out is gonna check it and try out the theory within it. Until new humanity exhausts the knowledge in there. Give it a couple Things Which Work (this motor actually works, this penicillin actually works, we built a shit telescope and everything we see agrees with the stuff in this book) the library is gonna start becoming a trusted source anyway. This assumes there's not enough people that general knowledge gets passed down and new generations grow up broadly trusting "old science" eg because a layperson can reasonably know how to make penicillin and then when it cures their kid the kids gonna be like oh ok we had stuff figured out back then let's just believe it until proven otherwise.
plasma physics...stuff lol. And Librarian was correct. Station 11 was great, but it just kind of landed with a thud.
The Hot Zone was good. Ebola is a lot less scary than something flu-like (or HIV-like) because of the transmission mechanisms. If you want a popular science biology book that's more positive, "The Microbe Hunters" by Paul de Kruif is good. And if you want fiction about scientists, "Arrowsmith" by Sinclair Lewis is contemporary with when de Kruif wrote his book.
OMG I LOVE STATION ELEVEN IM SO GLAD YOU MENTIONED IT
Clothes! While we are all breaking our backs trying to survive on subsistence farming, in the remaining time, we can rediscover the fun of textile production from scratch! Since Bret Deveraux was already mentioned above, he has an entire series on pre industrial textile production, here: https://acoup.blog/2021/03/05/collections-clothing-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-high-fiber/ - none of us will have any time to do much of anything else.
Looking forward to more TV/book recommendations in the future - after this video I went to check out Dr. Stone and Station Eleven and they were really enjoyable, especially the latter!
Curating , i agree - like learning in medieval europe after the Romans
Definitely very happily forgot about rankines until this video. Had to do heat transfer equations in rankine and kelvin so the units would work out.
Your considerations and response to this are completely reasonable! Considering your hierarchy of needs first, food and your safety (esp. as a woman) has always been my thought process with this kind of question too. Can't do physics if you're starving and being assaulted. But also taking on a librarian/knowledge keeper role I think is the most realistic approach. As populations re-grow, new generations can continue research themselves. Priority one should be maintaining and passing on as much previous knowledge as possible so that the new generations don't have to start completely from scratch. Teach the teachers?
Hi! Your librarian aspirations reminded me of A Canticle for Liebowitz. You probably know it already, but if not... Also, there was a great radio adaptation in the '80s (I think?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz?wprov=sfla1
Your asides are the best. :) It's a fair answer and not a cop-out at all.
My cats name is lil biscuit and I call her lil b so when you said do you guys know little b I immediately said out loud to no one “of course I do”
+1 for loving the topic. It's an immerse feed for thought. - I enjoyed random apocalypse advises like growing potato, finding your community (and also your purpose, although performing Shakespeare is not my bread) and considering practice always beats theory in practice. The good stuff is definitely there. - Time traveler's alternative history was a new genre to me. To me it seems possible that the Industrial Revolution could have happened much earlier like in the ancient Rome or even in Mesopotamia. Food was plenty, the situation was stable, they had some opportunities. But people knew too few. I don't think calculus is the critical ingredient for industrialization (but rather other things like rule of law, not believing in supernatural and being open-minded and doing everything for profit and so on). I also don't see the point in elevating a group who will rule indefinitely because the competitors are so much behind, except that's a cool plot for a fancy novel. - I have the feeling that in an apocalypse scenario applied chemistry is more important than physics. - How about Foundation. When the dark ages come, one needs to develop Encyclopedia Galactica in a calm and defendable place, which nobody ever finds without a very bogous math that allows to predict the future which just won't work because of chaos theory. - I also like the subtext that being too narrowly focused in theoretical physics makes you probably the first to go, and also that it's never explicitly stated. True dedication is not always healthy.
Regarding the steam engine: You wouldn't be able to build one in 1300 regardless of whether you know the governing equations. One of the major reasons why steam engines were only beginning to be used in the 1700s was not because people didn't know you could build something like this (the Aeolipile used the expansion effect of steam in 200BC), it's because they weren't able to build something to sufficiently small tolerances (e.g. a piston which is really tight in a cylinder). If you just want something that spins, you can still do that decently easy, but if you want to use it to power something, your tolerances have to be a lot tighter such that the steam actually pushes the high-resistance piston rather than just pushing past it. If you want a machine that kicks you into the industrial revolution, the thing to pick is a lathe. You can still power it using a water wheel and its something sufficiently simple that you can both create it in the 1300s and convince other people that it is a good thing to build. Once you have that getting a steam engine running is significantly easier since building something like a crank shaft or piston to reasonable tolerances becomes a lot more tractable. Am I overthinking a fun little video? Probably.
Brett Devereaux had a really interesting article on why the Roman Empire never had an industrial revolution, in which he made a pretty compelling argument that the factors that caused people to not only invent but also *appreciate the usefulness of* the steam engine were so contingent that they probably could not have caught on any earlier than they did: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ *Deriving* the ideal gas law or maybe recreating some of the early electricity experiments would probably be something within reach of a single physicist thrown back in time, though. But I think even then you run into the issue Angela brings up later where you end up being that weird historical footnote of the guy who wrote down Boltzmann's constant a hundred years before anybody even knows who Boltzmann is.
thanks for finally making me watch Station Eleven.
A biologist here with some back of the envelope calculations. The population of the United States is about 330 million people, of whom approximately 7 million are scientists or engineers (https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20201/u-s-s-e-workforce). If we had a pandemic that killed 99% of the population, the U.S. population would be reduced to 3,300,000 people and only 66,000 scientists or engineers. I will focus on Massachusetts, where I live and where Angela lives (13:33 in the video). The state’s population of 7,000,000 would be reduced to 70,000. This was the number of people living in Massachusetts and Maine in 1700 (from https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/colonialbostonpops.pdf; at that time, Maine was part of the Massachusetts colony). In Massachusetts after the pandemic, there would be only 1,400 scientists/engineers left, who might all migrate to Cambridge, a technology hub where Harvard and MIT are located. However, I don’t think this is enough people to do any sophisticated science, so I think that most would end up working on agriculture, medicine, and education just to feed, care for, and educate the population. I loved this video because it made me think about things. Station Eleven is a very good book, and another is The Earth Abides by George R. Stewart.
Earth Abides is good, but I found it to be somewhat depressing and I couldn't finish the last couple of chapters. I wasn't able to relate to the characters' hopefulness of the future when I read it, but that might be just me. I really like The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham, which has a very similar premise as Earth Abides, but more "cosy". He also wrote Day of the Triffids and The Chrysalids which were both on Angela's shelf, and all three of which are stories of different forms of world catastrophes.
Station Eleven is what real science fiction is all about. Thanks for putting it in the video so more people discover it. BTW, Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain was the one that first terrified me.
"acollierastro Meets Dr. Stone" is the crossover episode I didn't know I needed!
acollierbiblio should be the name of the book channel. Just a suggestion for the pivot
okay, i have completed a viewing/CC+AD assisted of Station Eleven on MAX(HBO), and loved it .. ten episodes, one multi-threaded story with two major timelines ("before" and "after") with about 10 major characters, complete arc, well written, well acted, well produced .. i can add my whole-hearted recommendation .. Angela's synopsis in her video, about 7:20 to 11:00 is great, pretty much without spoiling anything the commercials/trailers don't already give .. there's an HBO podcast as well, but it says it discusses differences to the book, so I'll read/listen to the book next .. I =do= recommend that Angela (eventually) do some kind of additional something on it, but am not sure what the best format might be (like maybe even an interview with the book author) .. I've never tried/done a watch party, but am going to research that a bit, as I do think I'd love to watch it again, so if anyone is potentially interested in that, or has watch party tips/advice, respond so to this message, i guess
I love watching your thought process as you answer these questions honestly. The "I would have an amazing lab!" version of an answer would not be satisfying, in my most humble opinion.
The moment you mentioned the natural constant i thought "hey that's e right?" but i dont know exactly why. maybe i heard it in school, 20 years ago? i guess it is called that because of the natural logarithm?
Same! I learned it as the “natural number”
In a similar vein, I really enjoyed How to Invent Everything https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/ it’s a practical guide for the stranded time traveler. 🤔
The Last Librarian would be the name the show :D
making the petition to change the word "product" to "multiplicative"
I enjoy the 1632 series of alternate history books, aka the Ring of Fire series, where a small West Virginia town in 2000 is sent back in time and across space to 1600's Germany. They don't even try to recreate 20th century technology, but rather try to establish a steam era base of technology. It is more focused on characters, action, and society than technology, but if anyone is curious the first book of the series, just titled "1632", is available from the Baen books free library.
What if experimental physicists are just too polite and easy going to reveal their animosity towards theoreticians?
I tried watching station 11 and after episode 2 I had to stop since I just despised the characters and found how they behaved to be completely perplexing and unrelatable. I'd still be genuinely interested in your opinion on it though! all the critics were raving about it so clearly there was just something I didn't get from it that everyone else was but yea, I would be fascinated by your take as a scientist considering the show was so focused on the arts
It gets worsebetter
Great video! As an electrician, I have to fully agree with your assessment of our value. 😆
As a software developer, I would of course build gigantic mechanical computers. With Angela working on glass and steam engines, we'd have a Steampunk world in no time.
there's an anime with a similar-ish premise to love theoretically (at least from what you said about it) called "science fell in love, so i tried to prove it," about two physicists who realize they are in love with each other, but decide they need to use science to prove this first. it's absurdly cringe and over the top, but probably a lot more fun than love theoretically lol ty for the video, looking forward to the next ones!
Less "scary in a detailed plausibility" way and more "scary in an evocative and covering human societal reaction" way, the first quarter, third or so of The Stand also does a nice pandemic run.
After the apocalypse I'm going to try my hand at being a mutated cannibal.
Can I be a henchman? You can have 1 arm and leg, i need the others
Not on topic... but cute hat ;)
Angela rocks!! I would like to add making spectroscopy possible with Stone Age tools. It can require just a simple cave that allows controlled sunlight through a lens. The lens could simply be made of water like the very first microscope or like Angela would want a piece of glass. Gr8! Peace ☮️💜
1 guy to run CERN... hahahaha. !!!, Angela was off the cuff with that comment. Gr8! Peace ☮️💜
The Going Back in Time romance is a thought experiment I've been doing since I was young. It helps develop and invent a solid educational basis. It drives more study down different paths of knowledge such as history/chemistry/math/metallurgy etc. Gr8! Peace ☮️💜
Wonderful video! Typically, I don't like watching post-apocalyptic (and especially pandemic post-apocalyptic) shows because it feels like they hit too close to home. But since Mackenzie Davis is in this show, and she's amazing, I'm definitely going to watch it.
I do nuclear physics so nuclear power? Basically just different fuel for a steam engine.
https://imgur.com/2YtUzpe
I remember the first handwashing guy to seriously propose it was ignored, scoffed at, and had a nervous breakdown and was committed to an insane asylum where he maybe died. He noted that women who gave birth using midwives, who washed their hands, had a lower mortality than women who gave birth using doctors, who didn't, and often went from eating lunch or performing an autopsy to delivering a baby. This would've been sometime in the 1800s. My thing would be safety glasses because lots of workers over the years were blinded in incredibly preventable accidents in factories or whatever skilled trade they did
Regarding the steam engine, it's my understanding that steam engines—and the Industrial Revolution in general—were only made possible/practical because the conditions were right. By that I mean coal. Coal mining was only possible because of accessible coal deposits and the canal network that transported the coal around England, and the workers who worked in the mines and dug the canals by hand (imagine just waking up and digging ditches all day; we have it so good!) could only do so because of improvements in agriculture that allowed them to do other work (the "finding food" problem), and so on and so forth. Trying to introduce the steam engine early probably wouldn't work because lack of knowledge wasn't what was holding it back—access to resources was the problem. It's hard to climb the ladder of innovation before it exists. The same would be true in an apocalyptic scenario. I think you were on the right track with introducing germ theory because that's not a problem of resources. Washing your hands is a simple thing that would have far-reaching effects. And I like your idea to develop glass and of becoming a librarian, because access to glassware is one of those necessary conditions, and once the "finding food" problem is solved you're not starting from scratch because you have a manual to follow.
I completely agree with the steam engine and the resources part. This is a case where I feel people don't have good intuition of history, e.g. understanding the extreme scarcity of medieval ages. How would one own the required amount of steel when iron is so scarce that it is a job to poke the earth with a stick looking randomly for iron ore, because it's like gold? How could one produce the steel with the necessary quality and then machine it with millimeter precision? Even if someone pulls that off and builds a water pump for a noble house, well, bringing water there is probably a middle status job because it's much better than working in agriculture, so luddites would suddenly appear. I'd say the highest chance for selling an invention is probably as a weapon, something like dynamite. Once it's demonstrated, people would learn the related chemistry very eagerly, but in an age where people live in a strict caste system and the sign of being smart is recalling long texts verbatim from latin one never could get into the position of demonstrating anything unless his talent equals the renaissance masters like Leonardo and Michelangelo.
I for one would love a QFT video! And I loved as much of Station Eleven as I saw, but episode three or four hit me too hard, and I took a hiatus. Maybe I should go back to it.
It was a rough watch. But also so good.
I won't be disappointed with the video critiquing the romance novel since I enjoy videos that rag on bad things. Jenny Nicholson has some entertaining videos where she does that.
It seems like a younger person asked this question because physics would be a pretty low priority in an apocalypse beyond basic retaining simple physics like gravity or something. The anime seems pretty cool tho. I was wearing airpods and didn't hear the planes, maybe if I had my better headphones on I would have but I don't think it is as distracting as you'd imagine it to be
I'd perform dog snuggling physics in the apocalypse. Limited resources, no cats allowed
Also, this might get me shot if I attend another library conference, and I hope it goes without saying, but librarians are the Sheldonian Oompa Loompa's of academia. I can say that because I work in public libraries and have no academic writing responsibilities as part of my job description. Which is to say, the academic librarians have no reason to take me seriously. There. That should make sure I have no more public library conference planning responsibilities too. If they want to invite me to the buffets still, I'd be happy... I think I'm rambling now
just had to say: I don't think we're a "just get to the answer" type of audience? At least I'm not.
I hope you find other physicists and jump start the relearning, so humanity can get back to YouTube Music levels of tech as soon as possible. We will need to hear Strawberry Fields, so we can remember that nothing is real. https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=10LSq_J5ol4&si=44xTYa2GdLOwCN_j
Haven't watched the video. But that won't stop me from commenting. (This is not tongue-in-cheek.) For a long time I've thought that the US gov't should make a book that says: Starting from beach sand, how do you construct a 4004 microprocessor. This is so, after the next dark age, the new civilization could shave 100 - 1000 years off of returning to a high-tech civilization. Reasoning: almost any technology I can think of can be looked at and approximately understood. But if you took a modern CPU back even to 1950, nobody would believe such a thing was possible. They might have trouble imaging what it was. But that's what they will dig up in the ruins: it'll be a mystery. Telling them how to make the simplest microprocessor will make the fancier ones plausible if not easy. Waddaya think?
I wonder what the most durable material you could start printing Wikipedia out on to would be. Maybe limit by view counts to make it smaller. Cache a few copies around the world.
https://www.verywellfit.com/the-potato-diet-pros-cons-and-how-it-works-5186769 :-) Also, no plane. The standard non-standard unit of length is the snoot. Swallowing 1 magnet is okay as long as you stay away from electromagnetic field, ferrous metals, and other magnets until it passes
Did you mean smoot?
In a way your answer of being a librarian reminded me of “A canticle for Liebowotz” which is about restoring human knowledge after an apocalypse. I found it very interesting but it’s not without its flaws and can be quite depressing.
Thanks for the rec! I am trying to read 12 classic scifi this year and I just added that to my list!
I think several of the other commenters had the same reaction as I did. I watch your videos because I like the way you respond to things. In this case I don't think the question selected presented a realistic scenario, if there is an apocalypse, the population will have been so reduced that there won't be a critical mass of people who can be physicists, so attempting to carry on with physics research would not be helpful. What would be helpful is the creation of a set of documents that could be used by future generations to start the process of recovering physics when there is a critical mass of potential physicists. As you said the biggest challenge would be finding the time to do anything besides getting enough food to eat and enough shelter to not die in a New England winter.
I did hear the planes but it's not really out of line for long form content. I'm super sound sensitive so if it didn't bother me you're probably fine.
I'm on a tablet so I don't have great speakers, but I don't think I heard a single plane on the audio.
Great video! I honestly love how "practically minded" you took the questions and I think it makes a much better discussion about way science happens. The time travel portion reminded me of this video about time traveling to medieval europe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aSdFrPnlRg. I think even in the time traveling case I would still want to just try to write down everything I know because I think there's so many things that we know that we take for granted like PV=nRT, atoms, germs, or math concepts like vector spaces, complex numbers, groups, etc that are the result of years of development. Even if I can only somewhat remember my high school chemistry class, I still know a whole lot of information that other people smarter than me (if I could get them to listen) could test, use, and expand on. This is similar to your point about physics education being "simplified/consolidated" over time, but I think depending on when you arrived you could be like Euler and influence/start a lot of different fields just by knowing and writing down an undergraduate physics and math curiculum. Even if you are not good at rigorously deriving some specific subject like topology or Diff EQ, even something "simple" like fourier series would have a lot of applications and could help speed up other scientists/mathematicians work.
I think your idea is correct. Get as much information as possible - preserve it, and teach as much as possible. It is not like this has not happened before. We have lost knowledge many times, from the dark ages, to the library of Alexandria, to ancient Central America empires. So, if one would get past needing to eat, and not being killed, preserving current knowledge and passing it on is so important. Leave measuring zero to future generations. And electricity to the electricians, that’s some voodoo shit right there.. cheers
I know this comment is half a year old, but I really have to address this one piece misinformation, specifically because of its intimate relation to white supremacy. To be clear, I'm not saying you're a white supremacist. But I am saying that white supremacists love this lie, and you've been lied to. We haven't lost ANY knowledge in the library of Alexandria, at least none that would be worth mentioning in this context. The myth of the library of Alexandria having been burned down and thus priceless ancient knowledge being lost is nothing more than a myth. There were multiple fires in the library, but it had been in constant decline for decades before that, so even during the first fire it was already a mere shadow of its former self. And even if it had burned down at its peak, the very nature of how the institution operated would've meant that very little of actual value would've been lost. Here's a set of two companion videos that address this problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4WU8gqrgsQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxwaSMfD8ho Also, the Dark Ages never happened. That's not a thing.
I think the levels are already better in the aside on little-b and part 2 (from minute 40 or so). Also, I did not notice (or remember, at least) any planes.
One thing though, you have increased the gain/boost or something on your mic lately and the sound gets distorted as it caps out. It would be great if you lowered it again so it doesn't do that!
Yeah, I noticed the same in this video and the Faraday video. It was fine before.
No need for shorter videos! It is great!
Yes, please. Do a video on the Station 11 show!
Wow, I just checked the link make sure this worked and man is this long. I will do a better edit next time.
For me, long is fine, extemporaneous is fine. You should do what you think is right, but at 15 minutes in, I am enjoying this a lot.