Titan Implosion Explained with a Soda Can

Its amazing and terrifying to be able to see what Hank Green meant by "they ceased being biology and rapidly became physics"

Now imagine your beer can isn't made out of a material which undergoes plastic deformation but instead a material that can only fail by shattering.

Mythbusters did an excellent video showing what happens to the human body at extreme depths. They made a cadaver out of pig parts and put it in an old diving suit with a metal diving helmet. When they shut off the equalizing pressure in the suit, the entire cadaver was horrifyingly squeezed up into in the diving helmet. And that was only at around 90 meters, not even 3% of the depth of the Titanic.

If that soda can was Titan, the beer can was Pisces III. The latter was a DSV that got stranded on the bottom of the sea for a time, but the worry there was running out of oxygen because the main hull held just fine. The crew of two later got rescued on the verge of running out of air.

It's amazing how you can actually see the water level get lower when the can sucks all the liquid in, all in less than a second, you gotta love physics

I think the most damning indictment of Stockton and Oceangate's hubris is just how short every video explaining what happened is

The experiment Kyle demonstrated is far more effective at explaining the catastrophic failure of the sub than any CGI recreation of the disaster. The implosion of Titan was a tragedy that could have been avoided had the physics been respected when designing the vessel.

The thing I found quite interesting about the sub disaster was the fact the time taken for the sub to implode was less time that it takes for an electrical impulse to reach the brain. Meaning the people that died could well have had the fastest and most 'painless' death in history.

The Artemis Fowl books had a similar metaphor. "Like a soda can in the hands of a giant who was immensely strong and didn't like soda cans."

I think it is really clever how you created this video about safety, and your instructions for the experiment is a perfect example of complete safety protocols.

I’ve been trying to imagine what this would’ve looked like from outside the sub. Since carbon fiber shatters, the implosion must’ve been like a reverse frag grenade. 🤯

the reaction at 8:05 then the processing of what just happened was just great. im quite sure kyle already knew it was going suck in a lot of water, but didn't realize it was going to do with such force that the reaction force ripped the steel can away from the tongs.

Kyle Hill is probably my favorite science teacher since Adam Savage.

I love the barely contained rage you can see behind Kyle's eyes as he describes the incredible amounts of ineptitude that went into allowing something like this to happen.

There's an episode of Behind the Bastards about Stockton Rush. I cannot stress enough how often this man, in interviews and on camera said "ahhhh, it's probably not that bad. Safety shmafety". He was quite literally asking for it, and was going to get someone killed eventually. As the old saying goes, "regulations are written in blood".

So Kyle, when are we going to get a mini episode about why water can instantly start and stop boiling? I know you stopped yourself b/c you were starting down a rabbit hole, but I wanna see where in Wonderland that hole comes out.

I think the best thing that illustrates this is actually those videos of sea creatures being instantaneously sucked into undersea pipelines when they get too close. The pressure difference is so great that they basically just vanish into a hole they could never normally fit into.

This explanation AND the experiment was amazing to show how disastrous that submarine was.

I love Kyle. Ive seen people joke about this but Kyle isnt just doing this for views. You can see he really cares about the how and that there is no valid reason for why this was allowed to happen is frustrating.

1:48 I have so much anxiety this invoked the same feeling as having a dream about missing/forgetting about an important test. Also I feel so seen with the anger behind kyle’s eyes because that’s exactly how I feel. By a narcissistic billionaire being greedy, a 19 year old boy who ONLY went to please his father lost his life in a fraction of a second. I have trouble feeling sympathy for the billionaires, but that one boy needs to be remembered as more than one of five in a tin can Edit: his name is Suleman Dawood and he was a student at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. I should’ve included this in my first comment