Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: My name is Jonathan Strickland. I happen to be an
Speaker 1: executive producer with how Stuff Works and I hear radio
Speaker 1: and today it's time to look at another classic episode
Speaker 1: of tech Stuff. Yeah, the show's been going since two
Speaker 1: thousand eight with more than a thousand episodes, and I'm
Speaker 1: pretty sure most of you haven't heard all of them.
Speaker 1: So this one was originally published on February two thousand twelve,
Speaker 1: is called tech Stuff Plays with Plasma and Chris Palette
Speaker 1: and I end up talking about plasma and how it
Speaker 1: works in technological applications. Enjoy courtesy of a little Facebook
Speaker 1: feedback you be and this comes to us from our
Speaker 1: friend Basu, who says, hey, Jonathan, our plasma ray guns possible.
Speaker 1: I'm waiting for the next podcast on this. Well, here's
Speaker 1: our next podcast on plasma reyguns. But before we get
Speaker 1: into the idea of weaponizing plasma, let's talk a bit
Speaker 1: about what plasma is and maybe some common or at
Speaker 1: least more realistic applications for plasma that that we use today. Okay, So,
Speaker 1: so plasma it is the fourth state of matter. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's funny to me because growing up, um, perhaps my
Speaker 1: my school system was narrow minded, although I don't think so.
Speaker 1: We we learned about solids, liquids, and gases. Those were
Speaker 1: the three states of matter and that's all there were.
Speaker 1: And the Brontosaurus was a dinosaur exactly. You know, it's
Speaker 1: probably because I would guess it's probably more because growing up,
Speaker 1: plasma is a little hard to grasp. It's I figured out. Literally,
Speaker 1: I figured out, yes, because if we did heard it hurts. Uh.
Speaker 1: I'll the way I figure the best explanation would be
Speaker 1: look at it from the stance of molecular movement. Okay,
Speaker 1: So with solids, the solids are made up of molecules,
Speaker 1: and those molecules don't move a lot. They are moving.
Speaker 1: So even in that granite table that you might see
Speaker 1: that the molecules within that granite table are actually in motion.
Speaker 1: They're just not moving a lot. You can take it
Speaker 1: for granite that they'll stay put. Yes, And then in
Speaker 1: liquids you have a little more molecular movement, and the
Speaker 1: the actual composition of the matter it acts differently. Right,
Speaker 1: So ice is a solid, water is a liquid, and
Speaker 1: then if you add more energy into the system and
Speaker 1: you create more molecular movement. You can make that liquid
Speaker 1: turn into a gas, and then gas, you've got a
Speaker 1: lot more molecular movement. The molecules aren't as packed closely
Speaker 1: as close together as it would be in a liquid
Speaker 1: or in a solid, and that's when you've got the
Speaker 1: gas form. Well, plasma is the next step. It's when
Speaker 1: you've added even more energy into that that element, and
Speaker 1: this also tends to strip away electrons ionizing that gas.
Speaker 1: So you've got free electrons flowing through the gas that
Speaker 1: an ionized gas, that is plasma. So in a way,
Speaker 1: you can think of plasma is sort of a subset
Speaker 1: of gas, but it's really its own thing because it's
Speaker 1: an ionized gas. Jonathan, it strips away electrons. Are you
Speaker 1: sure well? It pushes electrons way out into the outer shells.
Speaker 1: I was. I was going for the joke there they
Speaker 1: lose electrons. Are you sure? I'm positive? Okay? No. The
Speaker 1: reason why I said that is because literally this week
Speaker 1: phil Plate, the Bad Astronomer, wrote a post about ionizing
Speaker 1: atmosphere conditions and how that creates are the auroras to
Speaker 1: the Aurora borealis and the aurora estrallis, and he had
Speaker 1: written about how it strips electrons away from oxygen and
Speaker 1: then later corrected himself saying, all right, technically that is
Speaker 1: not correct. What really happens is that the electrons are
Speaker 1: pushed to the further energy shells around the nucleus of
Speaker 1: the atom, and when the electrons come back down to
Speaker 1: their natural energy shell, photons are released. And that's the aurora.
Speaker 1: So that's why I wanted to not do the I'm
Speaker 1: positive off the bat okay okay, Um, you can tell
Speaker 1: we don't we We sort of prepare, but we don't rehearse. Um.
Speaker 1: It's funny too, that that we think about plasmas being
Speaker 1: the fourth state of matter and the way it's uh
Speaker 1: kind of strange because um plasma is far more prevalent
Speaker 1: in our universe, most plentiful state of matter, of all
Speaker 1: matter in the universe, all anything that's not dark matter,
Speaker 1: whether or not that exists isn't isn't totally different subject matter,
Speaker 1: but it's really too many matters. But yes, of all
Speaker 1: the matter that we have observed, plasma makes up. And
Speaker 1: you might think, well, that's weird, because everything I encounter
Speaker 1: tends to be either a solid liquid or a gas.
Speaker 1: I very rarely encounter plasma. Well, that's because you don't
Speaker 1: live on the Sun. I have encountered a couple of
Speaker 1: people who have encountered plasma firsthand, um, more than once,
Speaker 1: because they have been hit by lightning. Yes, and that's
Speaker 1: what I was saying with my quote at the beginning
Speaker 1: of the show. Lightning is something that can create plasmas.
Speaker 1: One of the ways that we can find naturally occurring
Speaker 1: plasma on Earth. The plasma does not last very long. Um.
Speaker 1: But we'll get into that in a second, and I
Speaker 1: would avoid coming into contact with plasma as often as possible. Now,
Speaker 1: there are other plasmas that we encounter. Anything, any sort
Speaker 1: of ionized gas is a plasma. There's some that are
Speaker 1: considered cold plasmas. And by cold, we're talking in terms
Speaker 1: of relativity here, right, you know, it's just it's colder
Speaker 1: than say the plasma you would find shooting out of
Speaker 1: the sun. And then they're blood plasma, right, which is
Speaker 1: totally different, not the same stuff, but like a neon sign,
Speaker 1: that's that's an ionized gas within the k neon is
Speaker 1: ionized within that sign. That technically is a plasma. It
Speaker 1: is just not the same quite quite the same thing
Speaker 1: is what we would find, say a plasma cutter, which
Speaker 1: is kind of what I wanted to talk about, because
Speaker 1: plasma cutter, that's something that's it's a tool that we
Speaker 1: use that can cut through really sturdy, thick sheets of metal.
Speaker 1: And it's really impressive if you ever see one of
Speaker 1: these in action, because you might look at a sheet
Speaker 1: of metal and you think that, how the heck are
Speaker 1: you supposed to shape this so that you can use
Speaker 1: it in various applications like building airplanes. In fact, building
Speaker 1: airplanes is kind of where the idea for plasma cutters
Speaker 1: came into play. Yes, that's that's true. And they plasma
Speaker 1: cutters not only cut through metal, they do it like butter. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like butter. I'll give you a topic. Plasma plasma cutters
Speaker 1: are are really, if you'll pardon my again over simplification,
Speaker 1: really really fancy because not only are they cutting their
Speaker 1: cutting very precisely and they tend to uh basically the
Speaker 1: way they cut through it, they do it uh in
Speaker 1: a temperature so hot that it it steals off the
Speaker 1: metal and prevents corrosion. Yes, um, but again that's an oversimplification.
Speaker 1: Let's get into what's really going on here. Sure, so
Speaker 1: back during World War Two, there was a demand for
Speaker 1: building aircraft very very very quickly. Yes, and that's that's
Speaker 1: kind of a problem because aircraft are very complex, very
Speaker 1: large devices. So that meant that, you know, you had
Speaker 1: to find a new way to go into mass production.
Speaker 1: And so there were different experiments being done about new
Speaker 1: means of welding materials together. And uh, some folks discovered
Speaker 1: that if they used a gas and inert gas fed
Speaker 1: through an electric arc, so they create an electric arc
Speaker 1: between a couple of electrodes and they shoot gas through
Speaker 1: that arc, that they could create a very effective welding tool. Now, um,
Speaker 1: so that was sort of the basis of the plasma cutter.
Speaker 1: Now this was not used to cut. This was used
Speaker 1: to weld, so welding different sheets of metal together, yes, exactly. So, uh,
Speaker 1: but that that started the foundation. What happened was in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties some engineers figured out that they could
Speaker 1: actually increase the temperatures of this this uh, this plasma
Speaker 1: by speeding up the flow of gas and by controlling
Speaker 1: the diameter of the nozzle. So if they decrease the diameter,
Speaker 1: they're they're making it, you know, narrower, and they're increasing
Speaker 1: the flow of gas and they're pushing it through this electrode.
Speaker 1: It would actually increase the temperature quite a few orders
Speaker 1: of magnitude. And this is where the idea of using
Speaker 1: this to cut through metals started to come into play.
Speaker 1: And uh, technically, the typical plasma cutter uses the sheet
Speaker 1: of metal that it's cutting as part of a circuit.
Speaker 1: So you've got to think about the parts of a
Speaker 1: of a plasma cutter. You've got an electrode inside of it,
Speaker 1: that's what that's what's providing the the the charge. You've
Speaker 1: got the cutting gas that is inside of it. This
Speaker 1: is the the inert gas that's going to be passed
Speaker 1: through this electric charge and superheated to plasma. And then
Speaker 1: you've got a controlling gas that's around that that actually
Speaker 1: is used to help concentrate the flow of the cutting gas.
Speaker 1: It's it's so you've got the nozzle that's helping concentrate
Speaker 1: the flow, and if you've got a second gas that's
Speaker 1: also sort of pushing against that cutting gas, keeping it
Speaker 1: nice and tight. And then once you put the the
Speaker 1: plasma cutter against the piece of metal, then that creates
Speaker 1: a circuit. The shock from or the charge from the
Speaker 1: electrode goes to the metal. The metal has sort of
Speaker 1: a positive charge to it the and and we know
Speaker 1: that the negative wants to go to positive, so the
Speaker 1: electricity hits the metal. The gas flowing through the nozzle
Speaker 1: is ionized, becomes plasma and superheats and actually turns metal
Speaker 1: into into molten material at the blink of an eye.
Speaker 1: And that's when you can just start cutting through it
Speaker 1: like it was as Chris said. But yeah, when you're
Speaker 1: reaching temperatures of thirty degrees fahreneit that's se degrees celsius.
Speaker 1: That's pretty hot. And when we're talking about increasing the
Speaker 1: flow of the gas, we're talking this this gas is
Speaker 1: flowing at a rate of around twenty thousand feet per second.
Speaker 1: Know how many meters per second? That is courting on
Speaker 1: my fingers about six someone's been reading how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com. Excellent article. We do have an article on
Speaker 1: how plasma cutters work at how stuff works dot com,
Speaker 1: which is it's a good thing to read about. And
Speaker 1: if any of this sounds familiar to you, guys, then
Speaker 1: you've been listening to tech stuff for a really long time,
Speaker 1: because we did do an episode ages ago about plasma
Speaker 1: waste converters and what a plasma waste converter is. It's
Speaker 1: a really cool application of this technology. It's essentially using
Speaker 1: a device similar to a plasma cutter, a plasma torch
Speaker 1: to create this incredibly super hot ionized gas in order
Speaker 1: to liquefy or gasify trash. So, depending upon what the
Speaker 1: trash is made out of, it will either turn into
Speaker 1: a gas because you know what's the plasma is applied
Speaker 1: to it, or it will liquefy. Uh So essentially car
Speaker 1: carbon based uh lment. It's anything that's carbon based within
Speaker 1: the trash is going to gasify, uh and everything else
Speaker 1: liquefies and um it's you can use that gas depending
Speaker 1: on on what you're producing. You can actually use that
Speaker 1: gas as fuel, and the liquefied stuff, once it cools,
Speaker 1: turns into stuff that looks kind of like obsidian. In fact,
Speaker 1: I have I haven't a sample of that because when
Speaker 1: I did the article, I visited a engineer at Georgia
Speaker 1: Tech who gave me a sample of this solidified waste
Speaker 1: which looked like it was a volcano rock, which essentially
Speaker 1: is what it is kind of so anyway, that's another
Speaker 1: interesting use of plasma technology. Chris and I will continue
Speaker 1: our discussion about plasma in just a moment, but first
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Now
Speaker 1: let's kind of talk a little bit about the concept
Speaker 1: of plasma weapons. So we had our our listeners specifically
Speaker 1: asked us, like our plasma ray guns possible? Um In
Speaker 1: a word, no, at least not without today's technology. And
Speaker 1: there are a lot of different reasons for this. One
Speaker 1: of those is that um plasma, if you were to
Speaker 1: generate plasma at a at a temperature that would be
Speaker 1: considered weaponized. So we're talking about you know, hot hot
Speaker 1: plasma UM. You have the problem of heat dispersing too quickly,
Speaker 1: so the the ionized gas would lose a lot of
Speaker 1: energy as soon as it leaves wherever wherever you're generating it. Right,
Speaker 1: so at the point of generation, it's going to be very,
Speaker 1: very hot. So if I were point blank right up
Speaker 1: against you and I pushed a weapon against you and
Speaker 1: I pulled the trigger, then yeah, you're gonna get cut
Speaker 1: in half, or you're gonna have a whole drilled through you. Essentially,
Speaker 1: But if you're you know, twenty feet away, this ionized
Speaker 1: gas is gonna be losing energy at a very fast rate,
Speaker 1: and as it loses energy, it's going to revert back
Speaker 1: to a regular gas, and you can't really get it
Speaker 1: to travel very far. And it also disperses. So if
Speaker 1: you were to have this ionized gas come out of
Speaker 1: the end of a ray gun, it's not gonna be
Speaker 1: a ray or a beam, right, It's not gonna move
Speaker 1: forward in a concentrated beam. It's going to disperse hour
Speaker 1: it's gonna bloom. So in that sense, you also don't
Speaker 1: really have much of a weapon because the further away
Speaker 1: the person is, it's it's just like a shotgun in
Speaker 1: a way. You know, a shotgun shoots shot and that
Speaker 1: shot spreads as it goes out, So the further away
Speaker 1: someone is, the less concentrated the impact will be right, right, So,
Speaker 1: same sort of thing, except even on a bigger scale,
Speaker 1: because we're talking about individual atoms here, not just uh shot,
Speaker 1: And so that's another problem. Um, there are various ways
Speaker 1: of getting around this. If you had a gun that
Speaker 1: somehow could create an electrical charge all the way down
Speaker 1: to wherever your target is, it could ionize the gas
Speaker 1: immediately around the electrode. But in that case you're talking
Speaker 1: about some sort of superpowered taser. Yeah. Now, if you'll remember,
Speaker 1: if you think of it as as the plasma cutter,
Speaker 1: you'll remember that in our discussion on how it worked,
Speaker 1: just a moment ago, UM Jonathan was pointing out that
Speaker 1: the metal that's being cut requires uh IS is basically charged.
Speaker 1: It's part, it becomes part of the circuit. So if
Speaker 1: you were shooting at something five feet away, for example, UM,
Speaker 1: it's going to be very difficult. I mean, you can't.
Speaker 1: You have no circuit. You can't you don't have a circuit. UM. Also,
Speaker 1: you'll remember that Jonathan was talking about the gas that's
Speaker 1: on the outside of the pressurized gas that is used
Speaker 1: to cut UM, that's controlling the the cutting of the
Speaker 1: plasma cutter. Without that UM, it's exactly what Jonathan says,
Speaker 1: you don't have a real way to control it. And
Speaker 1: you might say, well what about lightning, Well, lightning it
Speaker 1: forks it's not controlled. UM. So yes, lightning can can
Speaker 1: travel a long distance, but it also it's a charge.
Speaker 1: We know that the ground and the clouds are charged differently.
Speaker 1: Essentially a circuit. It's certually the only last a moment.
Speaker 1: But you know it's not so if you had if
Speaker 1: you somehow arranged it so that everyone on the enemy's
Speaker 1: side war of particular suit that should positively charged clothing,
Speaker 1: so that I could use this negatively charged electra to
Speaker 1: create a circuit between me and you that I can
Speaker 1: vaporize you, that would be great. M So, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a little tricky. Um. Yeah, there are a lot of
Speaker 1: other issues with this, but there that's not the only
Speaker 1: way to weaponize plasma. That's you know, that's if you
Speaker 1: were to have a gun, like in the Halo universe.
Speaker 1: In the Halo University, aliens have plasma weapons and they
Speaker 1: shoot these kind of blobs of energy, which you know,
Speaker 1: essentially it's like uh, blobs of of superheated gas and
Speaker 1: they travel as if it were a solid projectile and
Speaker 1: uh it's like little sunlits. Yeah, these little energy weapons
Speaker 1: that can do massive amounts of damage, particularly literally to
Speaker 1: your shields, right against shields. So yeah, supercharger plasma pistol
Speaker 1: and then immediately switched to your regular pistol. It's in
Speaker 1: a great way of anyway. So that's just not viable
Speaker 1: right now. The equipment we would need to create plasma
Speaker 1: is much larger than what you could have in a
Speaker 1: handheld gun, and you just wouldn't have those results. But
Speaker 1: that's not the only way. There are other ways. Like
Speaker 1: there's an example, there's a weapon that's been worked on
Speaker 1: by the US government over the last few years called
Speaker 1: a pulsed energy projectile weapon or PEP. Now, this creates
Speaker 1: a it uses it uses a very high powered um
Speaker 1: laser style weapon. So it's not a plasma weapon at
Speaker 1: its at its source, right, it's just create it's just
Speaker 1: firing off energy. It's an energy weapon. And the idea
Speaker 1: is that when the energy contacts something solid, then it
Speaker 1: creates a plasma. It actually excites the material that it
Speaker 1: contacts with and that's what creates the plasma. So the
Speaker 1: plasma is not contained within the weapon. UH and it's
Speaker 1: it's just it generates as soon as the ray hits
Speaker 1: something solid and then at that point what happens is
Speaker 1: the plasma that's generated quickly starts to expand because the
Speaker 1: energy from the ray is continuing to hit it. Okay,
Speaker 1: So that expanding plasma creates an electromagnetic magnetic pulse, and
Speaker 1: this pulse is geared to UH kind of short circuit
Speaker 1: our pain receptors, and the idea is that this weapon
Speaker 1: would either or paralyze you. It would just make all
Speaker 1: you know, your muscles contract kind of like a massive taser,
Speaker 1: or would paralyze you with pain. You would feel so
Speaker 1: much pain you would be incapable of doing anything else.
Speaker 1: This is the pain ray that people have talked about,
Speaker 1: and UH there's a lot of concern in the international
Speaker 1: community that such a device would be used not to
Speaker 1: stop a riot, but rather as a divisive torture, to
Speaker 1: to really torture a person if you were trying to
Speaker 1: interrogate them. And of course the whole torture thing has
Speaker 1: its own issues beyond just the technical but that is
Speaker 1: a way that people are weaponizing Plasma's just not using
Speaker 1: plasma as a direct weapon. It's just part of the weapon.
Speaker 1: We have a few more points to make about plasma
Speaker 1: before it's all said and done, but before we get
Speaker 1: to that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor.
Speaker 1: There are ideas of creating UH plasma to act as
Speaker 1: an antenna because they can be much more efficient than
Speaker 1: metal antennas, and or even use them in anti missile
Speaker 1: systems where the idea would be that if you had
Speaker 1: missiles coming in, you could fire beams up into the
Speaker 1: upper atmosphere ionized part of the upper atmosphere so that
Speaker 1: when missiles were passing through them, they would detonate and
Speaker 1: not land and hit you. Um. So those are ways
Speaker 1: of weaponizing plasma. That's not not quite the same as
Speaker 1: having a a cool ray gun. You know, you're Q
Speaker 1: thirty five space modulator or whatever it's called. I'm sure,
Speaker 1: I'm sure someone's gonna write in so they know it
Speaker 1: was a Q thirty two space modulator. Sorry, that was
Speaker 1: the obsolete person I thought I've upgraded. Yeah, it's also
Speaker 1: hard to imagine something that shot plasma that would, you know,
Speaker 1: stop at a certain person. It would, it would shoot
Speaker 1: through schools, it would see really it would, yeah, if
Speaker 1: it if it were really a superheated gas um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, if you were to find some way to
Speaker 1: control it so that it maintained its integrity and could
Speaker 1: travel best distances, then what would stop it from shooting
Speaker 1: through whatever it was you hit and then going moving on.
Speaker 1: I mean, it would lose energy every time it contests.
Speaker 1: But if you're talking about superheated, if you're talking about
Speaker 1: temperatures that that rival the temperature of the sun. Um,
Speaker 1: it's gonna take a while for that to to lose
Speaker 1: enough energy for it to If you could keep it
Speaker 1: concentrated like that, it would take a while for it
Speaker 1: to lose enough energy for it to stop. Which just
Speaker 1: reminds me of the documentary Real Genius where they fire
Speaker 1: off the laser and it goes all the way through
Speaker 1: the entire laboratory and shoots through the head of a
Speaker 1: statue on the quad. Yeah. So anyway, Yeah, that's that's
Speaker 1: the basis for the whole idea about plasma weapons. I
Speaker 1: think I'm not going to go so far as to
Speaker 1: say they're impossible. It's just that with today's technology they
Speaker 1: are not really possible, And it may be that they
Speaker 1: could be possible but not practical. Yeah, it'll it may
Speaker 1: very well be that by the time we could create
Speaker 1: a plasma weapon, something even scarier is out there. So um, yeah,
Speaker 1: it'll be interesting to see if there's there are further
Speaker 1: developments in attempting to weaponize plasma technology. But really, when
Speaker 1: it comes down to it, it's very useful tech for
Speaker 1: things in manufacturing and and like I said, waste management
Speaker 1: or potentially in waste management. There are very few plasma
Speaker 1: waste converter facilities out there. There are only only a
Speaker 1: couple in the United States, and there are a few
Speaker 1: in Japan and UH and that's about it. But but
Speaker 1: they have the potential to really change the way we
Speaker 1: deal with waste. I mean they could. They could actually
Speaker 1: help reduce landfills because most of them have capacity so
Speaker 1: great that they would be able to serve not just
Speaker 1: the community on a daily basis, but also take uh
Speaker 1: garbage that has already been dumped in the landfill and
Speaker 1: start using that as well. So every day it would
Speaker 1: be using a little bit more of the landfill as
Speaker 1: well as taking care of all the daily trash that
Speaker 1: was generated by the population, plus possibly creating energy as
Speaker 1: a result through uh through using fuel. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: it's a it's an attractive prospect, but it also requires
Speaker 1: quite a bit of an initial investment. So anyway, this
Speaker 1: look is going to be a short episode. So hey, guys,
Speaker 1: UH you're welcome. I hope you guys enjoyed that episode
Speaker 1: about plasma. It's always fun to revisit these old topics
Speaker 1: that Chris and I did back when we were young
Speaker 1: and naive and only had a vague notion of what
Speaker 1: podcasting was all about, whereas now I have a slightly
Speaker 1: less vague notion. If you guys have any suggestions for
Speaker 1: future episodes of tech Stuff, please please write to me
Speaker 1: and let me know what those might be. The address
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