My $60 million science experiment | Mark Rober

**Modupe Akinola** (0:00)
Do you remember that one teacher in college or high school, or even elementary school, who had an unnatural ability to captivate a classroom? A teacher who made every topic feel like something you wanted to know more about, no matter how far away it was from your own lived experience? For me, one of those teachers was the late, great J. Richard Hackman.
I was lucky to take his course on the Social Psychology of Organizations, sophomore year in college, back when I was 19 years old. What I remember about him most of all was his boundless energy, the way he traveled back and forth across the classroom, asking questions, telling stories, and just listening to students so intently. Professor Hackman was a pioneer in the field of social and organizational psychology. It felt a little ironic to be discussing this topic because so many of us undergrads hadn't yet worked for one second in a big organization. But somehow, he was able to communicate the dynamism of what that's like and all the moving pieces that go into the churn of a workplace. And we were totally hooked.
Beyond our curriculum, Professor Hackman became my thesis advisor and showed me what can happen when you capture someone's attention. I mean all these years later. And look at what I study, organizational behavior and social psychology. He was a huge part of that.
I'm Modupe Akinola. This is TED Business, a podcast from TED. Our speaker today, Mark Rober, knows a thing or two about the attention economy. A former NASA engineer, Mark is now an incredibly popular YouTuber with millions of subscribers. And underneath all the wacky fun of his high-concept videos, he's sneaking in essential science lessons to young viewers. In this talk, he shares his tips for a new kind of science curriculum and how to hide the vegetables for everyone's benefit. Then after the talk, I'll ask you what your favorite teacher taught you.
And now, Mark Rober takes the TED stage.

**Mark Rober** (2:26)
I want to start off tonight with a two-step experiment. For step one, I've got a two-liter bottle here. It's half-filled with liquid nitrogen. That's negative 320 degrees Fahrenheit. It's violently boiling off into a gas. Just like boiling water does on a hot stove, because of this freezing cold liquid nitrogen, the nice, comfy air in this room is super hot. But here's the catch. The gas form of nitrogen occupies 700 times the volume of the liquid, so you've got to be really careful as it's turning into a gas. You don't trap it in a small container, like if the lid was screwed on top here. So then for step two, I'm going to go ahead and screw the lid on top.
And when I do, if everything goes according to plan, the contents of this bottle should experience what we refer to at NASA as an energetic, spontaneous, rapid disassembly. It's going to explode. All right, here we go. Put that on. Okay, now this is going to be... Oh, you know what? Might as well throw these on top.
This is going to be real boring until it's not. If you don't like loud noises, cover yours. But according to my calculations, things could get real interesting here in about 3, 2, 1
I said 1 I'm just kidding. It's really impossible to actually calculate exa...

**Modupe Akinola** (3:54)
Whoa!

**Mark Rober** (4:00)
Let's go!
How's your jet lag now?
All right. My apologies to my friends in the front row. You should be warned, it will get worse before it gets better. I'm like Science Gallagher up here.
So a lot of people look at that and be like, oh neat, the ping pong balls exploded. But what actually happened is so much cooler, because as more and more of that nitrogen turned into a gas, those gas molecules got more and more crowded as they pushed back on the plastic molecules comprising the walls of the 2-liter bottle. And then eventually, the pressure got so great, it got so crowded, the walls of the 2-liter bottle lost the game of molecular red rover, and all the gas came rushing out. But where could it go? Because it can't go down or to the sides, trash can is too thick. Therefore, the only option is to go up, and since all the ping pong balls are in the way, they just happen to go along for the ride. But here's the really cool part. This is exactly how cannons fire cannon balls. It's how Nerf blasters fire Nerf darts. It's how T-shirt cannons fire T-shirts. And for my friends in the front row, it's how straws fire spit wats. I'm just kidding.