COULD A POKE BALL EXIST? - Pokémon Science

I do not own Pokemon or PokemonGo. The footage used in this video was used in accordance to fair use laws and regulations.

How far Would you go for Pokemon? In this video we talk about the Pokeballs from Pokemon Go. Could a Poke Ball exist?

PBS Spacetime video:    • The Real Meaning of E=mc²  

✖ Be sure to Subscribe! -http://www.YouTube.com/MTR702?sub_con...

✖ My Twitter -   / mikeinhd  
✖ My Graphics Channel -   / @moboxgraphics  
✖ My Instagram -   / mikeinhd  

✖ Music by Epidemic Sounds
Mans Billner - Earth Worms
Jack Elphick - Street Beats
Gunnal Johnsen - Drops

Ahhh PokémonGo, the game that brings nerds from all walks of life outside for the first time. In the game, Poké Balls are mysterious spherical cases that have the ability to trap Pokémon.

The word trap is used very lightly here and can mean a number of different things. It might turn the Pokémon's mass into energy, which would be a lot. And by a lot I mean 500 quadrillion Joules or the amount of energy the earth receives from the sun in a whole hour. Or in terms of us nerds know, about 36 trillion gallons of Mt Dew and 28 trillion pounds of Doritos.

If you’ve seen videos or read blog posts about Poké Balls, you’ve likely come across someone saying, “the mass is converted into energy, blah blah blah”. This is false. There is no mass to energy alchemy going on here because mass is simply a property of energy. E equals M C squared doesn’t tell you how much energy mass has, it tells you how much mass energy has. That’s why Einstein originally wrote it like this. I know this is probably either mind blowing or mind numbing depending on what you thought you were getting into when you clicked on click bait title, but stick with me. If you have two IDENTICAL clocks, but one is ticking and one is not, the ticking clock actually has more mass more. All of the potential, kinetic, and thermal energy within actually adds to the mass of the clock through E equals M C squared, but because the speed of light is so fast and it’s being squared, the extra mass recorded is extremely tiny. For more on this, check out this awesome video by PBS SpaceTime.

Now that we have that fallacy out of the way, we can look at Poké Balls more as mythical objects and less like physics breaking, animal killing killing machines.

In a previous video we talked about how humans could respawn, and in that video the question came up about what makes YOU, you. This is still one of the mysteries of life, but there’s no indication that if a Pokémon were to be broken down into its fundamental particles, that it could be reorganized into a living, breathing Pokémon once again.

Assuming you could reorganize the atoms back into the original form and it would be a living, breathing Pokémon once again, how could you store the whole body into a Poké Ball? What if you could break down the body into water and non water components. This was immediately reduce the amount of volume a Poké Ball would need to be. When revitalizing the Pokémon, just add water. It isn’t the most elegant method, but it would work right… right?

Here’s the problem, the amount of information you need to store the location, type, and state of every atom contained within a Pokémon would not only be a lot, it would be infinite. Atoms are made up of subatomic particles in a universe that is non-deterministic and probabilistic. In layman terms, basically you can’t know exactly where an electron is, only the probability of where it could be. Even if you were 99.9999999% sure where every electron was, in a Pokémon like Pikachu with 40 septillion atoms, the chance of you getting every atom correct is virtually zero. No literally, when you type this into almost every mathematics program you get zero. But for those curious, it’s one over ten to the sixteen quadrillion. You have a better chance to win the lottery a million times straight, get a thousand royal flushes in a row, then get attacked by a Rampadash, then you do to reconstruct a Pokémon in the non-deterministic universe.

What if the Poké Ball, is made of antimatter, and it annihilates the matter like the the Deathstar did in my previous Star Wars videos. With that maybe it could…. You know what, no. I’m done. When you’re having to use real life physics to explain a planet destroying death ball to explain how a Poké Ball works, I think you’ve gone too far.

Listen, I love PokémonGo as much as the next, hell as much as everyone, but the Poké Ball cannot, will not, ever exist in the known universe. It just can’t be done. Which is why, I believe that not only is Pokemon World not Earth it isn’t even a planet in our universe. It exists in a universe that has a different set of rules and a different set of physics!

Workstation:
Intel i7 4790 @ 3.60GHz
PNY GeForce GTX 770 w/ 4Gb ram
32Gb DDR3 @ 2400GHz
500GB Samsung Solid State HHD
2TB HDD
MSi Z97-G55 Motherboard