Alan's Silliest Question | QI
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This clip is from QI Series Q, Episode 9, 'Quizmas' with Sandi Toksvig, Alan Davies, Sara Pascoe, Johnny Vegas and Josh Widdicombe.
The audience member returning Sandi's card and receiving a hug, that's be a treasured moment.
That was a pa or crew member or "elf" I believe.
Alan's Silliest Question | QI 1058am 24.12.24 sandi likes to hug, it would seem, unless she's trying to scale the person...
Johnny Vegas - ever so deceptively and disarmingly intelligent.
The man is amazingly intelligent.
2:32 His name is actually Jumbo, Jr. Dumbo was the mean nickname the mean elephant gave him because of his big ears.
I suppose I watched that film a bit too much in my youth.
Thank you! I am not the only one!
Nothing better on this Earth than QI!
Then you would LOVE the QI elves' podcast No Such Thing as a Fish
Johnny Vegas killing it again.
Johnny's science gives Gyles's anecdotes a run for their money....
"Elephants Can't Jump" would have been a very different film.
'White Elephants Can't Jump' is the basketball sequel I never knew I needed.
@@VancouverAvatar Featuring Air Bud as the coach, obviously
And he still would've been taught by African American crows on how to jump.
@ordelian7795 Disney isn't allowed to show that cartoon anymore.
@@John_Smith_60 It's a good thing I dont give a crap about Disney. It's an awful company ran by the worst of people this Earth has.
Alan Davies is so wonderfully funny and silly.
I need a Sandi hug...
Four kinds of elephant, actually; they forgot Timothy Olyphant.
There's a fifth kind, even if some people think it's irrelevant. (Thanks to the Marx Brothers for that one.)
@@shankarsiv "The Fifth Elephant" is also the title of the 24th novel in the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett.
@@grndkntrl 🤦🏾♂️I can't believe that I forgot that! It was the first Discworld novel that I read and I was hooked.
Johnny is correct that the center of lift being in the head would be a challenge for elephant flight
haha, so his comment wasn’t so dumb after all
I love Johnny Vegas so much
Sandy: “there’s no gravity”
Stephen Hawking’s ghost: “imma haunt this b’s house tonight”
Such a strange phenomenon. Johnny Vegas says so many ridiculous things that when he says something reasonable (relatively), like how the ears would effect flight by being in the front, the default response is dismissal. Mind you, depth isn't really the solution, but at least the line of thinking wasn't complete nonsense. He did it before with "If sound is only a sound when you hear it, than how can it have a speed". Which was spot on, but he was completely dismissed.
There actually *is* gravity in space. The fact there is weightlessness in space is because you’re essentially in constant free fall.
Think of orbit as something falling and missing the ground.
Yes, came here to note this too. And by “space”, they mean “in orbit around the Earth”.
Your definition for orbit is how unpowered flight is achieved, according to Douglas Adams 😅
@4231jerome except according to Adams you have to do it accidentally, by being distracted at the last moment before you hit the ground.
Gravity is everywhere. There's technically no such thing as zero gravity. Things only appear to float, because as you say, they are in constant free fall. Although, according to general relativity, they aren't actually falling, rather they are moving through curved space with the right velocity to avoid hitting the Earth without escaping its gravitational pull.
@@lilymarinovic1644 absolutely, I’m glad to find another hhgttg fan.
It’s no so much that you’re *missing* the ground, more that you’re *forgetting to hit the ground* . .
I always found this concept hilarious, that gravity basically requires your consent
I mean, they do transport elephants by aeroplane.
So I'd say the wingspan of a suitably large cargo plane - capable of transporting an elephant - is what you'd need to make Dumbo fly in real life and Dumbo's ears can be whatever size they want to be. Indeed, he could have no ears at all and the plane would still be able to transport him by air.
The question didn't specify that he had to fly by his own power, right?
This is QI, not Taskmaster.
I can understand why you got them mixed up: the entire cast save for Sandi have been in both.
If both animals were sitting on the floor of the spacecraft as it went up, would the centre of mass of the elephant reach the point of weightlessness first? Or would it be based on the lowest point? so that if the mouse was on a table then it would become weightless first. Or would the spaceship and its occupants be considered to be part of a closed system and therefore it would all happen at pretty much the same time? It seems a bit more complicated than I first thought and so is a really good QI question in my opinion.
In the gravity gradient we have there's really no difference.
Close to a black hole, though, that's what 'spageggitifaction' is
Only for very small black holes.
Weightlessness wouldn't become apparent unlike the rocket's engines stopped. So the gradient wouldn't be relevant, even at the imperceptible difference between between the two centres of mass.
While the space craft is going up, it's under acceleration from the rocket motors, and if the elephant was standing on a set of scales, its weight would increase under the acceleration of both the rocket motor and the earth's gravity. They would not feel weightless until the motor shuts off, allowing them to be free to fall back to the earth under the acceleration of the earth's gravity. Hopefully the rocket provided the crew with sufficient sideways velocity to counter their downwards attraction towards the ground, before it shut off.
Technically Sandi was wrong anyway as a more massive object will feel the pull of gravity from further than a less massive object
I always wondered if Dumbo's ears grew in relation to his body or if he "grew into them", so to speak. Like how with dogs and teenage boys their paws/ hands and feet grow first and then the rest.
Three types of elephant? That's one for each moon!
Maybe this week
In space, nobody can hear your elephant trumpeting, mostly because it'll be dead cos they forgot that elephants need air too... :P
Thanks,.
That ear measurement doesn't take into consideration the magic feather though!
Vegas' argument was dismissed too quickly. Surely it's about surface area, not just length. If the ears were twice as wide, they'd only need to be half as long, no?
It depends. For straight level flight, that sounds reasonable, but odd things happen to the airflow and the patterns of lift when a plane starts to turn.
Also, subsonic and supersonic flight have very different characteristics. For example, Concorde's delta wing couldn't be a simple triangle because that didn't produce enough lift at low speeds. If you look at a picture of Concorde from the right angle, you can see that the leading edge of the wing is not straight. Its angle relative to the airflow is more acute close to the fuselage and less so in the outer portion of the wing.
And that's just about exhausted my knowledge of aircraft design . . .
no, ads!!! it's JOHNNY vegas, not sky vegas!!!
It matters how you throw, Alan.
Technically the mouse will have negligible gravity before the elephant due to the nature of how gravitational force is calculated but the difference would be miniscule
One of the most famous escapades carried out by elephants was Hannibal's invasion of Italy by crossing the Alps. Sadly, the species that was involved, the North African elephant, became extinct due to overexploitation in the 4th century AD.
Maybe a baby elephant would have ears that big making Dumbo slightly believable but he'd drown into them 😂 out grow the ability to fly
I'm not a physicist or something (and I was terrible in physics in High School), but force of attraction grows linearly with the mass of the objects - so presumably, for the same force of attraction to be felt by both the mouse and the elephant, the elephant would have to be 200,000 times (ratio of their mass) further away, wouldn't it? In either case, the weightlessness is felt due to constantly falling by going fast enough, and not due to distance from earth.
We're talking about acceleration due to gravity, which is unrelated to the mass of the accelerating object.
To be fair they didn't specify where exactly in space they would be.
The elephant does indeed feel a stronger force of attraction to the Earth. But it also has more inertia holding it back.
The extra inertia and the extra force balance out, and so the acceleration (which is what we feel as weight), is the same for both the elephant and the mouse.
> In either case, the weightlessness is felt due to constantly falling by going fast enough, and not due to distance from earth.
The feeling of weightlessness is caused by being free to move under the influence of gravity - usually known as "falling". The 'going fast enough' bit refers to orbiting the earth, which is where an object has a 'sideways' velocity such that it never hits the earth while falling, but also never leaves the earth's gravitational influence.
Your math isn't correct because the mass of the objects is then divided but you are correct about the principle, however this difference would be negligible since the masses are so small compared to things like planets
For the question ‘how big would dumbo’s ears need to be?’
It seems Adam got it completely right!
He said each ear extends 30ft.
And when sandi gave the answer she said the total wingspan of the ears would need to be 60ft!
Surely an elephant can jump in a low gravity environment.
A gerald is a person who does various tasks for an elephant 🐘. Almost everyone has heard of an elephant's gerald.
That took me a moment.
With a green and yellow basket, right?
I know American guests are rare, but I'd love to see Hank Green on the panel.
What about if they are flappy like a birds
Thought there was an Asian elephant specis that closely resembled the African kind, with larger ears.
But what if its Nelly the elephant?
Dumbo flies like bees do. Science says bees should not be able to.
Unwatchable
Well get your face out of the mirror. Or get a mask
@zapkvr no one asked you