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Find out more interesting about natural phenomena!
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00:00You're hiking in the wilderness, looking for a safe spot to set up camp.
00:04All you can hear are leaves and branches crackling under your footsteps.
00:08Some squirrels are running up a tree over there.
00:11But suddenly, something unexpected happens.
00:14You notice something weird in the distance in between the trees.
00:18It kind of looks like a concrete structure of some kind.
00:21Weird.
00:22At this point, you're at least 20 miles deep into the woods,
00:26and there are no nearby towns or villages, as far as you know.
00:30So, you decide to go off the trail with your friends to get a closer look.
00:35But as you get nearer, you realize that it's leading to nowhere.
00:40Hmm, what's it doing here, in the middle of literally nowhere?
00:44And it doesn't even lead to anything.
00:46You put on your Sherlock Holmes cap and investigate.
00:50So, maybe there used to be an old house or mansion here that collapsed over the years.
00:56And the only thing left is a staircase?
00:58But, weirdly enough, after circling the bizarre structure,
01:03you realize there's no trace of any ruins or even foundations.
01:07It's like someone just sliced a staircase off their house, cake-style,
01:12and plopped it here for no reason.
01:14Okay?
01:16You and your friends aren't really into getting a whole lot closer.
01:19Something feels wrong.
01:21The longer you look at this weird structure, the more you feel a super creepy presence.
01:27Something tells you you should probably leave the area as fast as possible.
01:32Some are made of wood, others of brick or stone.
01:35Some look ancient, while others look like they were finished yesterday.
01:39The one thing they all have in common, they all lead to absolutely nowhere.
01:43And they're all found in super-mysterious locations.
01:47One of the most famous ones is in Chesterfield, New Hampshire.
01:51A long, medieval-looking staircase made of stones with Roman arches in the middle of the woods.
01:58It's believed to have been part of Madame Antoinette Sherry's castle.
02:02She was a big singer back in Paris.
02:04The castle dates back about 100 years, and it was later discovered again in 1962.
02:10This time, there was nothing but a staircase.
02:14Another mysterious ancient staircase dates back to 9,000 years ago.
02:19It's in a forest in Italy.
02:21It looks like a series of stairs that lead to a tiny platform at the top.
02:26Now, why go through all the trouble of building the thing if it leads to nowhere?
02:30Well, some scientists think it could have been some sort of ritual tower.
02:35But your guess is as good as theirs.
02:39There's an anomaly in the Indian Ocean, known as the Indian Ocean Geoid Low, or IOGL.
02:46It produces the largest distorting natural gravitational force in the world.
02:51Heavy mineral deposits, many deep-sea trenches, and magma reservoirs disturb the magnetic field in this area.
02:58Earth's gravity changes in different places around the planet.
03:02It allows researchers to look for patterns and figure out what's happening beneath the surface.
03:08Higher gravity fields usually mean denser materials below, and vice versa.
03:14Some scientists believe that the anomaly might be a dent in the planet's mantle that is working its way up
03:19to the crust.
03:21The Niihau Island actually rejects the fruits of today's advancements.
03:27There are no cars in sight since the locals get around on foot or by bicycles.
03:32No wonder their legs have great definition.
03:35They thrive without running water, internet, or shops.
03:39The only school on the entire island is powered by solar energy with a backup generator.
03:44And what's awesome is that it's the only school in the state that's powered by the sun.
03:50Being a resident of the island, the local explains some ground rules the permanent residents must abide by.
03:56If they do break these rules, they can be evicted.
04:01Now, not far from Bangkok, in northeastern Thailand, there's a 75-million-year-old rock formation.
04:08These rocks look like three whales swimming together.
04:11The beautiful design, created by nature, became known as Three Whales Rock.
04:17Millions of years ago, this area was just a desert.
04:20But the land was changing.
04:22Gradually, sandstone got pulled apart by the movements of tectonic plates and erosion.
04:28That's how these spectacular formations were created.
04:31If you decide to explore the system of trails around Three Whales Rock,
04:36you'll find waterfalls and an abundance of fauna and flora there.
04:41Located on Gamal and Gaiden peninsulas, these expansive pit holes were discovered in 2014.
04:47They seem to be still changing and evolving.
04:50The pits grow wider, and people find them more often.
04:54Of course, there's no shortage of theories about how they appeared.
04:58Suggestions range from meteorite impacts to the activity of other civilizations.
05:03But the most common explanation is that methane gas reacted to water molecules after the planet's permafrost started to melt.
05:11This resulted in bubbles of methane bursting through the ice.
05:15The craters could be thousands of years old, but nobody knows for sure.
05:20You're driving to the state of New Mexico, to the small town of Taos.
05:262% of the locals hear a strange buzzing in the air every day.
05:30Some residents believe the sound is somehow connected with technologies used by guests from other galaxies.
05:38Also, there is a theory that something sinister lives in the town.
05:42They say Taos is cursed.
05:45An evil spirit or a phantom punishes people for something their ancestors did in the past.
05:51Scientists still can't explain the nature of this sound.
05:54Another theory says it's caused by unusual acoustics of the location,
05:58while others think the buzzing is a hallucination.
06:02Some can hear it because everybody talks about something,
06:05and our minds create an illusion of the sound that doesn't really exist.
06:09The sound isn't the same for everyone, either.
06:12For some, it's a low hum.
06:14For others, it's more of a buzzing sound.
06:17But this is not the only place where you can hear the strange noises.
06:21It's called the hum, and people worldwide claim to have heard it.
06:26Some dwellers of a small village in Scotland describe it as a low, thick hum.
06:31While some residents of Florida heard a similar sound, too.
06:35It's not exactly known where this phenomenon appeared.
06:38But the first time the media started talking about it was in the 1970s in England.
06:44Also, there are written records of a mysterious buzzing dating back almost 200 years.
06:50According to some estimates, only about 2% of people on the planet can hear the hum.
06:56Perhaps their ears pick up some low-frequency waves, or the reason is something else entirely.
07:01Maybe, maybe, just maybe, they hear humming because the person doing it doesn't know the words to the song.
07:09Yeah, that joke is also 200 years old.
07:12A volcano in Indonesia spews bright blue lava and produces electric blue and purple flames.
07:20This phenomenon occurs because the volcano has some of the highest levels of sulfur in the world.
07:26You can also know you're near it by its foul stench.
07:29But I digress.
07:32And when sulfuric gases interact with scorching hot air and get lit by the molten lava, they turn blue.
07:39You can also find the world's largest acid lake inside this crater.
07:43Yep, it's a real stinker.
07:47Underwater rivers and lakes are called brine pools for a reason.
07:51High salinity makes the water in them denser than the seawater around.
07:55That's why it sinks to the bottom, forming rivers and lakes.
07:59Those have waves of their own, and these waves can sometimes lap up against the shorelines.
08:05If you went down there in the submarine, it would easily float on the surface of a brine pool.
08:10But without a submarine, swimming in such a lake would be too risky.
08:14They contain too much toxic methane and hydrogen sulfide.
08:18Yeah, I'd pass on that too.
08:20But hey, be my guess.
08:22Cave of Crystals in Mexico is home to the world's most unique crystal formations.
08:27Thanks to super-rare conditions in the cave, crystals there grow to unbelievable sizes.
08:33The air inside is incredibly humid.
08:36The water contains tons of minerals that boost the growth of the milky white giants.
08:41Some of them are longer than telephone poles.
08:45Cylindrical snow donuts occur when a wind gust starts to roll some snow across a snowy area, as if making
08:52a snowball.
08:53If it was a real thing, it would eventually become too heavy for the wind to move.
08:58But a snow donut's center is hollowed out.
09:01This happens because its inner layer is too thin and is blown away when the donut is formed.
09:07This makes the thing lighter than a snowball.
09:10That's also why it rolls further.
09:12Unfortunately, snow donuts are rare because they need very precise conditions to appear.
09:17The Danikil Depression in Ethiopia is probably one of the most bizarre-looking places you'll ever see.
09:25It's dotted with neon-colored hot springs, lava pools, and vast salt flats.
09:30You've got to be especially careful there.
09:33Toxic gases are swirling over hydrothermal fields, and many pools are super acidic.
09:39So, don't go swimming.
09:41Until at least 30 minutes after lunch.
09:43Just kidding.
09:45And finally, there's nothing mysterious about 28,000 rubber ducks found in the sea in 1992.
09:52That's when a ship transporting bath toys got lost in the ocean while traveling from Hong Kong to the U
09:58.S.
09:59Some of these ducks are still floating in the ocean several decades later.
10:03They've been spotted in South America, Alaska, Hawaii, and even Australia.
10:09And they make bath time lots of fun.
10:12Ooh, rubber ducky.
10:13Seriously, how could a grain of pollen change the world?
10:17Well, it sure did.
10:20In 1827, Robert Brown, England's premier botanist before Charles Darwin, was studying the pollination of plants when he noticed something
10:28strange going on under his microscope.
10:30A grain of pollen was jiggling around in a drop of water.
10:35Brown curiously watched the grain of pollen through his microscope for a long time.
10:38And it never stopped jiggling.
10:41It kept shaking and shuddering.
10:42There was no pattern to it at all.
10:45Just random, continuous zigzag jiggling.
10:48He couldn't figure out why.
10:50Robert Brown tried diligently to figure it out.
10:53Brown tried changing the temperature of the droplet that the pollen grain was suspended in.
10:57He cooled it.
10:58The pollen grain zigzagged less.
11:00He heated the water droplet.
11:03Brown wrote a paper about it, and none of the scientists who read his article could figure it out either.
11:09The mysterious, invisible cause of Brownian motion defied a solution.
11:14Science was stumped.
11:16An explanation was offered.
11:17Some scientists suggested that the energy of the water was making it move.
11:22But there was no proof.
11:24Proof is essential for science, or else everything is just science fiction.
11:28And since no proof could be given for why the pollen grain continued to jiggle around, scientists decided to just
11:35forget about it.
11:36The pollen grain was too tough for them.
11:40For 75 years, science more or less ignored the unexplained problem of the grain of pollen zigzagging around, until Albert
11:48Einstein took particular notice of it.
11:50There must be some explanation for these pollen grain dancing this jitterbug dance.
11:56I'll just put a glass of water on my desk, add a few grains of pollen from the flower, and
12:02see if I can figure out what is happening.
12:04Invisible phenomena can be fundamental, gravity, magnetism, and whatever it is.
12:11Ah, but what if it's not some invisible energy that we physicists have never heard of before?
12:17The simpler, the better, I always say.
12:20Maybe the pollen grain is not dancing.
12:22Maybe it's being pushed around and shoved here, thereby something too small to see, even in a microscope.
12:31Ah, let me think.
12:32To make a physical formula, I will first need to decide what I want to solve.
12:38If I can predict the distance the pollen grain will move, I can calculate its invisible pusher's strength.
12:45But since the motion is random, my prediction must be relative to all conditions.
12:51Everything is relative.
12:53Aha!
12:54I am beginning to see a formula coming into view on my forward view screen.
12:58Ah, they don't have view screens yet, but they will.
13:02Oh, where is my pencil?
13:05Aha!
13:05This is what I have come up with.
13:08Isn't it lovely?
13:09Flashing his brilliant genius at combining a large variety of physics formulae, Einstein showed that a particle which was moving
13:16randomly when suspended in water, the pollen grain, obeyed statistical laws of motion dependent on the viscosity of the water,
13:25the temperature of the water, the distance the particle moved,
13:28the mass, the mass and size of the individual pollen grain, its velocity, and the duration of the time of
13:34motion.
13:35Einstein's novel statistical approach to fluid mechanics enabled a computational reduction to yield a figure for the mass of a
13:43single H2O water molecule, and eventually for the hydrogen and oxygen atoms.
13:50Brownian motion was solved, and Einstein opened the 20th century to the world of the atom.
13:56The overlooked, jiggling, trivial grain of pollen pointed the way to the proof of atoms.
14:01That grain of pollen deserved a Nobel Prize.
14:06Statistical analysis of random events has become an essential tool in various scientific applications.
14:11With an understanding of Brownian motion, random fluctuations, science can finally get a quantitative grip on weather phenomena, game theory,
14:21traffic flow, stock market fluctuations, even human cell function, to name just a few applications of Einstein's statistical theory.
14:28All thanks to a tireless grain of pollen.
14:32And yet, there was still another oddity that science had chosen to forget about that caught the intense attention of
14:38Albert Einstein.
14:39The planet Mercury was doing something that nobody could explain.
14:43Over 200 years before the dawn of the 20th century, Sir Isaac Newton published his Universal Law of Gravity.
14:50It really should be called Newton's Theory of Gravity, not a law, because Einstein was going to supplant Newtonian gravity
14:57with his new theory of gravity.
14:59As soon as Einstein could figure out the unexplained mystery of the planet Mercury's orbital peculiarity,
15:05Newton revealed the formula for gravitational attraction between two masses.
15:10With Newton's mathematical explanation of gravity, science now knew why the planets orbited the Sun.
15:16In contrast, before Newton, science only knew that the planets orbited the Sun, but didn't know the why.
15:23Astronomers after Newton jumped merrily into recalculating the orbits of the known planets according to Newton's theory of gravitation
15:31and checking their calculations against careful observations of the planets with telescopes.
15:36Except that the planet Mercury wasn't cooperative.
15:40As I'll explain after a brief digression, Mercury wasn't precisely obeying Sir Isaac Newton's mathematical formula.
15:47In the early years after Newton, the 1750s and beyond, there were only six known planets, the visible planets Mercury,
15:56Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
15:59No additional planets or asteroids had at this time been yet discovered by telescope.
16:04And then, something genuinely unusual occurred, for which science still has no explanation.
16:10In the late 1760s and early 1770s, two German astronomers published a simple numeral series that located the orbital paths
16:19of all the known planets, and some unknown ones, too.
16:23Johann Daniel Tidius and Johann Ehlert Bode published this mathematical rubric.
16:29Add the number 4 to each of the following numbers in this progressive series.
16:330, 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, 96, 192.
16:39Then divide each sum by 10.
16:42Voila!
16:42You get the orbital paths of the planets in the solar system in astronomical units.
16:47The distance from the Earth to the Sun is considered one astronomical unit.
16:52It's a useful approximation, and is a convenient standard of measurement.
16:56Earth is the third planet, so you take the third number of the series, 6, add 4, and divide by
17:0210.
17:03You get one astronomical unit, called an AU.
17:06Let's try Jupiter.
17:08That's number 48 in the Tidius Bode series.
17:1148 plus 4 equals 52.
17:14Divided by 10 is 5.2 astronomical units.
17:17And that's exactly where the orbital path of Jupiter lies from the Sun.
17:21Does it work for Saturn, too?
17:24Let's try it.
17:2596 plus 4 equals 100.
17:27Divided by 10 equals 10 AUs from the Sun.
17:3110 times farther away from the Sun than Earth.
17:33That's where Saturn orbits.
17:35The Tidius Bode law works.
17:37The pattern is correct.
17:40Astronomers quickly noted a number between Mars and Jupiter, one after Saturn.
17:45The Tidius Bode rubric inspired William Herschel's search for and discovery of the planet Uranus in 1781,
17:52and the discovery of the first asteroid, Ceres, in 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi.
17:58That's a strangely accurate little numerical progression.
18:01The Tidius Bode law is being used today to predict the location of Saturn's moons, Uranus' moon system,
18:08and even to indicate the location of exoplanets around other stars,
18:12even though no one knows why it works.
18:14It looks like a good mystery for a young new Einstein to solve.
18:18But I digress.
18:20What's that about Mercury?
18:22Mercury was doing something that didn't compute with Newtonian gravity.
18:26The perihelion point of Mercury's orbit,
18:29that's the place where a planet is closest to the Sun,
18:32was moving forward a little bit every year.
18:34It was noticeable and unaccounted for by Newton's gravitational formula.
18:39Unless there was another planet in the inner solar system affecting Mercury's orbit.
18:44The search for a planet inside Mercury's orbit had begun.
18:48Calculations of its potential orbit were distributed worldwide.
18:52And the name was already picked out.
18:54Vulcan.
18:55Telescopes worldwide searched the skies at dawn and sunset,
18:58looking for Vulcan near to the Sun.
19:01But no planet inside Mercury's orbit was ever found.
19:04Vulcan just didn't exist.
19:06Sorry, Mr. Spock.
19:09Science was stumped again.
19:11The anomalous precession forward of the perihelion point of Mercury's orbit
19:15remained a mystery without an explanation for over 50 years.
19:19Until one day, when Einstein was having coffee at an outdoor cafe
19:23with his co-worker at the patent office in Bern, Switzerland.
19:27Michele Beso had been a classmate of Einstein's and would be his lifelong friend.
19:32I don't like things that don't add up.
19:35Neither do I, Albert.
19:37The forward precession of Mercury's perihelion point doesn't add up.
19:41Please, give me the sugar.
19:43Well, it's not Vulcan.
19:45Ha ha ha ha.
19:47No, it's not Vulcan.
19:48But what is it?
19:50Albert, you keep trying to solve all your problems with physics.
19:54Why don't you take an engineering approach?
19:57How do you mean?
19:58If you look at the solar system as a physical construction, there could be an answer.
20:04Okay, Michele.
20:06I am following you.
20:08If I trace my finger around the rim of my empty coffee cup, the pathway is circular.
20:13But if I stuff this napkin into the cup and make a cone, like this, then an elliptical orbit inside
20:19the cone will tend to process forward.
20:22My gosh, space is not flat.
20:26Waiter, bring Michaela another cup of coffee.
20:28You are going to have to do a bunch of new calculations, Albert.
20:32Ach, yeah.
20:33I've got to be going.
20:35Waiter, hold that cup of coffee.
20:37See you later, Michaela.
20:39Ha ha ha.
20:39Okay, Albert, good luck.
20:42When Einstein published his special theory of relativity in 1905, he credited Michaela Besso for his invaluable contribution.
20:50Just recently, the letters that Michaela Besso and Einstein exchanged in the years before Einstein published his general theory of
20:58relativity in 1915 were sold at auction for $13 million.
21:03You might want to keep safe those letters and texts from your best friend.
21:07They might become valuable someday.
21:09They might be with me.
21:10I'll see you later.
21:11Let's do it.
21:11…
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