well hi everyone and greetings from
Northern Michigan this is Bob the
science guy you know as a YouTube
creator I'm constantly looking for ways
to improve my channel and maybe tweak
the format a little bit and just improve
interest amongst viewers and this is one
such example you know I've spent the
last year looking at the Flat Earth
movement with benign curiosity and
amusement and a couple of observations
I've made first the Flat Earth movement
is basically the pet rock of YouTube it
is something that YouTube allows people
with rather strange beliefs to find each
other and come together as a group and
feel a sense of community and in that
sense of community they have to look to
somebody as a leader so there are
several kind of centers of mass in the
Flat Earth movement Eric Dubay Nathan
Oakley Bob knodel from globe Buster's
these are people that many in this
community look up to you for their
answers in science failing however to
realize that what these people are doing
is basically running a Jerry Springer
style talk show and selling t-shirts
it's very difficult to attack them
directly because like Samuel Rowbotham
in the 19th century they have relatively
little education but they are very good
at making arguments and spouting logical
fallacies and coming up with bizarre
theories to explain away things that
have been well-established in science
for centuries such as the sphericity  of
the earth and gravity every now and then
you will find somebody that hovers
around these centers of masses like
little planets in orbit around the Sun
and they put out things using these
theories that these thought leaders have
come up with that are open to attack now
one such individual is this guy mister
this is an egg sleeping warrior now
while sleeping warrior seems to have
much more importance in YouTube than he
does anywhere else
he's kind of a fun target to look at
once in a while
now one of his efforts was this
particular experiment right here this is
a seventh-grade a science experiment
where you take an egg you put in a glass
of fresh water the egg sinks you put a
little salt into it to increase the
density of the water medium and due to
the rules of buoyancy the egg then
floats there are things like
measurements in units of measurements
and using the proper tools and writing
things down that would normally go along
with seventh-grade science that seemed
to have been skipped with a lot of this
but it was quite amusing and I actually
did a video on this a few months ago but
that's not what we're here for today
we're here for this one so we could have
approached this problem in a couple of
different ways we could have tried to do
it's a radically but that's no effect so
let's go ahead and get a couple of
bowling balls and drum and attack a wire
and see if they're gonna float take the
first one you dump it in and it doesn't
float and then there's another what
looks to be identical bowling ball and
you dump it in the water and it's just
barely floating put the third bowling
ball in there and guess well it floats
even better than the second one
so now people want to know why and you
could go get to one of your physics
professors and say what makes things
float and the answer is density density
density and the answer is density and
you know your physics professor will
tell you it's the weight compared to the
volume and then the question is can you
figure this out so in the next couple of
episodes what we're going to do is we're
going to have a chat with dr. Pinhas
ohto and have him respond to this video
and discuss a few other things related
to science so the purpose of this is
twofold
number one is we are going to put to
rest a number of silly Flat Earth
theories about how things work
everything from y2 corks float to y2
rocks fall and second just for fun we
are going to crush the souls of sleeping
warrior and the rest of the flat earth
community so cue up the music and
let's go
so now I'm joined by dr. Russell Pinizzotto who is contacting us from the wilds
of rural Maine
in the middle of a blizzard with
internet carried on by carrier pigeon so
he wants to go ahead and respond to this
video that he put out when he was
associated with the Wentworth Institute
of Technology was it doctor that's
correct
okay so let's go ahead and turn it over
to him and if you would be so kind tell
us a little bit about yourself dr.
Pinizzotto, some of your background
some of your interests in your
profession excetera well I've been in
higher education for thirty years I've been at six different schools, I retired a few years
ago but I still do interim  placements. I was
Provost which is the vice president for
academic affairs at Wentworth, I have
a PhD in engineering a Masters Degree in
astronomy bachelor's degree in Chemistry
excellent and what kind of engineering
do you do? I did material science- mainly semiconductors
materials also and metals and ceramics
particularly I looked at what's
called the micro structure of material
using electronic microscopy Okay so you're an
engineer that we would go to to
determine whether or not we could use a
new composite material in a aircraft
wing or you know a question about what
kind of material would be best suited
for the job would that be right
Yeah that's pretty much the case and how to process those materials and optimize their properties
kind of a cool thing you know my family
has a lot of engineering in it as well
my father is a mechanical engineer my
grandfather was a hydrologist and a
civil engineer and my brother is a
nuclear engineer so I've got a lot of
engineering genes and I actually have
their slide rules so the reason that
I wanted to (I have slide rules)  yeah you don't
use slide rules anymore they're great we
went to the moon on slide rules and then
statute miles so let's go ahead and kind
of hit what we're here for it today a
few months ago we had a video appear in
the Flat Earth community here on YouTube
that features you giving a talk about
floating some bowling balls in a fish
tank and the big thing about it was they
were using it as a proof that density
rather than gravity is the important
thing when it comes to objects falling
to the earth for example could you tell
us a little bit about that
experiment what you were trying to
demonstrate into whom and in what
setting sure this was a demonstration
for an open house which is that that
where prospective students come and
check out in school today if they would
like enroll after they graduate so
what normally happens in fact is they
get lectured to but I wanted to do a
demonstration instead of just a lecture
well they're like the principles that
Wentworth really believes it is having
students hands-on rather than just
theoretical fashion so my idea was would
do things hands-on on rather than just  in a theoretical fashion
I've done a number of different
demonstrations and in this particular one you
use three bowling balls that look identical and to see if they would float in a big aquarium full of water-
as it turns out use one bowling ball just sank to the bottom, one sort of hovers and other definitely did float.
and I used the terminology that they had different density which is true for the bowling balls because they
all have the same overall volume but they
didn't weigh the same
The one that sank weighed about 16 pounds the one that barely floated was 11 pounds and the
one that floated really well was 8 pounds so it was a very quick demonstration, the way I set
this up was I had one of the prospective
students come up and say can you make this bowling ball float?
and I handed him the 16 pound ball or her in some cases
And when that person would put it in the tank of water it just sank to the bottom
Then I said look here's a student from Wentworth, let's see if they can make a bowling ball float.
and I'd call up one of our students and give them the 12 pound ball.  They'd put it in and it would barely float
and finally I said
here's what happens when you get your PhD and I would pick up
the lightest one and it would float fantastically well.  It was kind of a joke and the kind of
demonstration that they would remember and that was the whole point when they this auditorium full of
a thousand people they would be talking
about it and maybe be talking about it when they went home.
So again using the word density was just a short hand
Because I didn't want to go into all the details about the buoyancy,
and weight and the acceleration of gravity and the relative densities and all those kinds of things
Unfortunately the Flat Earth people picked that video up
and without talking to me about it, took pieces that I believe are out of context
and decided to use it for their own purposes
That's something Iwanted to ask you about so again this was not an instructional period in a
classroom this was a presentation that
said basically look at the cool stuff
you'll learn here at this Institute and
this is our approach to things.
We have something similar in medicine we call it
see one, do one,  teach one and then if
you grow up to become a surgeon you know the bowling ball doesn't float you can
actually levitate it with the power of your personality
but that's why I became an
internist I'm not quite able to do that
yet but you know I'm working on the
forehead to do it
so basically here's the here's the
take-home that I got from this
You were demonstrating Archimedes principle
which says primarily that the buoyant
force has to do with the amount of water
that the object displaces reducing its
weight by the same amount so if the
object weighs less than the water it
displaces it'll float if it weighs more
it'll sink and if it weighs the same as
the water it displaces it'll just remain
neutrally buoyant is that pretty right
That's correct yes
that's all right now
it's not limited to just changing the
density of the bowling ball is it you
could take say that 11 pound bowling
ball or an egg and put it in water and
it would be neutrally buoyant or even
sink but if you added say some salt to
it and increase the density of the fluid
the amount of fluid that it displaces
actually goes up relative to the fixed
weight of the egg or the bowling ball
and you can make it float just by
dumping some salt in there and changing
the density of the fluid it's in right
Ah Yes, but that would be a much more difficult demonstration in front of 1000 people but your could change the density of the fluid.
and by the way you would check the
density of the fluid with a device
called a hydrometer and not a
parts-per-million meter right? Ah parts per million meter
I guess we could relate it back in some
complication that's certainly not the
best way to do it you would use a hydrometer like in the old days measure how much acid was in the battery
in you car would be the best way to recommended test, that is true.
Ok well thanks. In fact I've done some measurements for the
water quality people here and we do
want to measure the salinity of the ocean water and we
use PPM meters and hydrometers to do that
Okay
oh that's fair enough now I think one of
the big problems that we have is this
confusion between density and
buoyancy the difference of course is the
density would be an intrinsic property
of a piece of material and buoyancy is
the interaction of the density of an
object with an accelerating force and in
most cases here on earth that would be
gravity 9.81 m/s^2 downward correct
Ah yes so when we are talking about floating something
you have to look at the forces that are involved
there are two forces one force results in
weight and that's the force due to
Gravity.
So when gravity acts on this mass you get weight.
So as you said on earth it is 9.8 m/s^2 
times whatever the masses and that gives
us the weight of an object.  If you move that object
so there was a different accelerating
force that was different from gravity it would weigh a different amount.
But on the earth's surface that's the weight were usually dealing with
when we put something in water say to see if it floats
there is what's called a buoyancy which is a force
that is upholding
and that force is related to the amount of water displaced like you said
the weight of that object is the other force
so those forces have to be in balance
So in the bowling ball case they had the same volume
but they didn't have the same weight so
when you put the 16 pound bowling in the water it displaced that much water for the volume
but that would 
not at the time generate sufficient
buoyant force could allow it to float.
But at the other extreme the 8 pound bowling ball
When it displaces that amount of water it wasn't under water yet
when it displaced that amount of water (8 pounds) equal to its weight
and so it floats
Ok, so let's explore this just a little bit
more would your bowling ball experiment
have worked in an area with no
gravitational acceleration such as space
or a hyperbolic flight the so-called
vomit comet
NO ... like I said there are two forces there that we have demonstrated.
One is the downward (sinking) force due to GRAVITY.
The other one is the buoyant force, so without gravity there are not two forces to put into equilibrium.
And so that experiment would not work
either in the vomit comet or the space station.
there's well guys I've got another
twenty minutes worth of interview with
Dr. Pinizzotto, so I'm going to go ahead
and hold off here for now
Tomorrow we're going to talk about whether or not this
density tower will work
In the absence of gravity. What do you think?
We're also
going to discuss the differences between
Einsteinian and Newtonian gravity and
whether or not one invalidates or
supersedes the other and how science
approaches the difference between the two.
So join me in this fascinating
interview as we continue tomorrow.
This is Bob the Science Guy signing out from
Northern Michigan
hey make sure you hit
that like and subscribe button down
there and hit the bell icon so that you
know when the next episode comes out
we're going to do this tomorrow and then
we're going to finish up with Dr. Pinizzotto on Friday.
and he has some choice words for sleeping warrior
Take care guys
you
