Time Warp (2008) s01e00 Episode Script

Pilot

"Time Warp" is using special new cameras to virtually bend time and to finally see what our eyes are missing.
Our equipment makes the invisible visible and the ordinary extraordinary.
Even something as simple as "pbht" looks totally weird in slow motion.
I'm Jeff Lieberman, a scientist and engineer at M.
I.
T.
I specialize in using the latest video techniques to create spectacular images and open up a whole new visual world.
Today, we'll try to see how a singer's voice can shatter glass.
We'll discover the amazing dog tongue.
It uses an unbelievable twist to drink.
And ultimate fighter Kenny Florian will punch out his trainer so we can really see the damage a punch can do with time warp.
Kenny Florian is one of America's top ultimate fighters.
When he's sparring, it might not look like he's hitting all that hard or that his punches are doing much damage, but some of Kenny's opponents don't know what hit them till they wake up on the canvas.
How does Kenny knock someone out with just one punch? He's coming to the "Time Warp" lab to show us how by hitting his trainer in the face.
We're gonna discover the real power of an ultimate fighter's punch and its impact on the human body.
Matt, you got to meet these guys.
This is Kenny Florian.
He's lightweight contender for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and this is Mark DellaGrotte, his trainer from Sityodtong Academy.
I saw this guy fighting, and we got to slow this down, see what's really going on.
So, if you guys are ready, if you can get in your equipment, and we'll set up the lights.
All right? Thanks a lot.
Gonna help me with the background? Absolutely.
Here in the "Time Warp" lab, we are loaded with gear to help us slow down things that happen too fast for the human eye to see [Gunshots.]
or for normal cameras to pick up.
[Gunshots.]
This is the Edgerton Lab, where some of the most amazing early experiments were done to film things that are otherwise beyond human senses.
In the old days, they used film, but now we can do even better with ultra-high-speed digital video cameras recording onto special hard drives.
Normal video cameras shoot 30 pictures a second onto tape and we miss a huge amount between each of these 30 pictures.
We call these pictures "frames.
" Between frames 2 and 3 on this shot, the "Time Warp" cameras capture at more than 650 additional frames.
Now we're gonna reveal a world that has been locked in time.
Doing a little heavy-duty cleaning of the lens.
We can record at 20,000 frames a second.
I think we're good to go now.
Fire in the hole.
321.
[Gunshot.]
Fast enough to capture a speeding bullet.
And plenty fast enough to reveal the true impact of a fighter's punch.
Mark has agreed to be Kenny's human punching bag.
The "Time Warp" cameras show it's not only Mark that takes the hit.
Shock waves radiate back from the point of impact into Kenny's arm.
You can just see, obviously, that you're hitting the pad, but you can imagine what type of effect this would have on the face or the body.
LIEBERMAN: Well, maybe we should try that next.
FLORIAN: Sounds good, Jeff.
Let's do it.
I am ready to go if we want to start.
Okay, so, we're gonna need to actually open you up and switch so that we can see your chest toward the camera.
That seems great.
Let me see where you're gonna impact.
Okay, let me hear how you're gonna cry.
- [Chuckles.]
-Ugh! KEARNEY: All right, that's gonna be great.
All right, everyone ready? Ready to go.
Okay.
One is good for now.
I don't want to have him take too many.
Let's see if maybe we need to hit a little harder.
Ooh! That is great.
And in the cheeks.
You went from totally placid to very unhappy in about two frames.
See my cheeks, as well.
I can't even look at your chest.
All I can look at is your expression.
It's like the shaking in the cheeks takes over this peacefulness.
He's still recoiling right now.
-We'll have to see your face.
-Hey, I'm next.
[Laughter.]
Okay, let's try one in the softer tissue of the abdomen.
Can we see where that punch is gonna land? KEARNEY: That's gonna be good, I think.
That looks pretty good.
Um, purely in the name of science, we're gonna see the vibrations spreading in both directions.
If we could lower your pants a little bit and try to catch that, if you're comfortable with that.
-You mean me? -Yeah, all of you.
[Laughs.]
Whenever you're ready.
The shock wave from the punch spreads and penetrates Mark's body.
This is how punches do damage.
LIEBERMAN: How'd it feel? DELLAGROTTE: Uh, not great.
[Laughter.]
I would imagine that your insides are being tossed around, same as the surface -- the surface area.
It's probably not good for you.
LIEBERMAN: Do you feel, at the end of a day of training, getting hit -- do you feel certain organs, certain things, messed up from that? Um, after some fights, you will actually excrete or defecate blood in some circumstances.
Wonderful.
This happens because of the impact to your body.
Your body undergoes a lot of trauma from an impact like this.
This shock wave ripples through Mark's torso.
UFC fighter Kenny Florian is in our "Time Warp" lab, about to punch his trainer in the face.
Can Mark take the hit and do it without blinking? The one thing you told me on the phone was that you train your students to never blink or else they'll miss something in a fight.
Is that what we're gonna see? That's correct.
Let's hope we see that on the high-speed stuff.
Yeah, at least the teacher can be following the teachings.
So, I'm gonna give you a last spritz so we can maybe see some droplets come off of you when you get hit.
-Ah, oh.
- [Laughs.]
Just kidding.
I think we're ready to go.
You guys all ready? Yes, sir.
We still in frame? There we go, right there.
Perfect.
All right, whenever you guys are ready, take it away.
Am I going -- Just go? Just once, and Matt will get it.
I'll take the first one.
That good? All right.
Good? [Laughs.]
Was that a good punch, or did he pull up? I took force off of the punch.
You kind of have to a little bit, you know? So, that was the lighter end? If he lets in full -- Yeah, you can see that impact is probably sufficient.
-And that earlobe still -- -Look at that earlobe! Look at my eyes.
They actually cross.
They stayed open the whole time! You went crazy immediately.
They do.
They actually dilate for a second.
Let's check that out again.
Our super-slow-mo reveals Mark does keep his eyelids open, but with the jolt to his brain, he loses control of his eyeballs.
There's a frame where your nose is basically a letter "C.
" The punch snaps Mark's head so quickly that his nose gets left behind.
KEARNEY: We're going frame by frame on this one.
Yeah, we got to go slow through this.
Oh, wow.
[Laughter.]
That's great.
I wouldn't even know who that was in this room.
Wow, your ear, man.
FLORIAN: This is great.
This is the first time I get to hit you and not get hit back.
Don't hit me later, all right? So, how much softer than a normal fighting hit would you say that is? I've been hit pretty hard by Kenny, and that wasn't as soft as you guys think it was.
[Laughs.]
You can see, too, that when using a boxing glove -- This is a traditional 12-ounce boxing glove.
It's got quite a bit of a padded surface on it.
What the UFC uses is a Ouano glove.
It's a four-ounce glove, basically, which is very minimal protection.
I would not want to be taking this punch.
I don't want to be switching places with you anytime soon, not with that look right there.
DELLAGROTTE: That's called the 1,000-yard stare.
[Laughs.]
Here, it's like the million-yard stare.
Yeah.
Our cameras reveal how Kenny's punches shake Mark's brain and body and make him lose control of his eyes, even when he's able to see the blow coming.
Mark is awesome.
He can take a punch directly to the face and not blink.
I'm not about to let Kenny Florian punch me, so to see if I can not blink, I'll take a water balloon to the face.
And Matt has reluctantly agreed to help make that happen.
So, Matt, whenever you're ready, give me the best you got.
Okay, on 3.
1 2 I didn't blink.
I definitely didn't blink.
[Laughs.]
I don't believe you.
No, I absolutely did not blink.
Wow.
That covered my entire face before it popped.
Nice.
Oh, I like your hat.
[Laughs.]
It looks very nice.
I would say you blinked, and then you really blinked.
LIEBERMAN: That is a quick shower.
When something is flying at your face, the body's natural reflex is to blink, so it takes real discipline and training not to blink.
It's not that easy.
Gives you an appreciation of what Mark was able to do.
[Vocalizing.]
Jamie Vendera is famous for using the sound of his voice to destroy wine glasses.
[Vocalizing.]
They seem to simply explode.
But what's happening? I know the sound waves broke the glass, but I couldn't see how, so I'm gonna use our slow-motion camera to see what we were missing.
Instead of singing, I'm gonna use a speaker and a tone generator.
I have to find the natural vibrating frequency of the glass.
I have to match this tone.
[Ding!.]
[Tone modulating.]
[Ding!.]
That's it.
This is the exact tone to make this particular glass vibrate.
[Tone continues.]
When the tone is loud enough, the glass will shatter.
I can feel the glass shaking, but I can't see it.
If I add a straw, then it's more obvious.
So, what's happening here? The straw gets tossed side to side, but I can't see why.
Let's record it while I crank the volume.
[Volume increases.]
All right, I took 10,000 frames per second, and I took one second.
If I were to play back this whole video, it would take 8 minutes to get through.
Oh, this is amazing.
What felt like the whole goblet vibrating is actually the rim bending back and forth 337 times a second -- the same rate as the sound waves.
If I draw in the sound waves, you can see what's happening.
One wave comes out of the speaker and pushes the side of the wine glass.
The glass bounces back just when another sound wave pushes it again.
If the timing or frequency of the sound waves is exactly right, the motion will build until the glass breaks.
Wow.
So, as we would expect, the speaker breaks the glass nearest to it, and immediately we see a crack that goes all the way around the whole bottom of the frame.
I'm gonna play that back again.
This is where the initial fracture happens -- right nearby the speaker.
And in about 3 frames, and this is .
0003 of a second, we see this crack go along the bottom where the glass gets thicker and come right back up to the top where it's thin.
So, if we follow that a little more, this piece has just fallen off, but it doesn't, in some sense, even know that it's fallen off from the rest of the glass.
All of the glass was shaking at about 300 hertz -- 300 vibrations per second -- and this piece is still doing that.
You can see the corners of the glass still flexing as if they were influenced by the speaker, but the speaker is way too far away now to have that influence on this piece.
It just has the leftover inertia, and we see that in all the pieces here -- even along the top edge of this glass.
This piece of glass is not resonant at that frequency anymore, so it can't get energy from this speaker, and all that we see shaking is the leftover energy from what the speaker gave it in order for it to break.
So, if you thought that glass couldn't bend, think again.
Time-warping changes the way we see the world because it makes the invisible visible.
I'm gonna show you exactly what I mean with another balloon trick.
The human brain and normal television cameras are just not that good at picking up what's going on around us.
Even if we slow regular video pictures way down, we still miss out on a lot of things.
See if you can spot something amazing when I explode this balloon.
So, Matt, we're gonna catch this with a normal camera as well as a high-speed camera.
Are both cameras ready? The normal camera's ready.
I am arming the high-speed camera now.
Ready? 321.
Got it.
Our regular video camera takes 30 pictures each second, and I'm gonna analyze each image to see if we can spot the trick.
I printed out every picture our normal video camera took in just one second.
As we follow the action, about halfway through the second, we can see one frame with the balloon completely full, and in the next, it's already popped.
No matter how much I slow down the video, we still only have these 30 pictures to work with, and all I can see is that between images 16 and 17, the balloon burst.
The regular camera just can't tell us any more about what's really going on, and I know that we're not seeing what really went down.
We missed the best part.
What happened? This is what happened.
Our super-slow-motion camera took 32 pictures between these two frames and between every two frames.
Look what we couldn't see before.
Warping time by taking 1,000 pictures a second instead of just 30, we can see the truth.
There's a second balloon hidden inside the first.
You know, I tried hard to see that with my naked eye.
I did not see the second balloon.
Well, even both of us knowing that there was a second balloon -- It's just impossible to see that fast.
This is 60 times slower, and we still barely see it.
Our cameras run so fast that they can capture way more info than a normal video camera or our own brains.
That's the magic of time-warping.
Dog owners think they know everything about their dogs, but even drinking water can be more interesting than they would ever imagine if they would only see it in slow motion.
I asked dog trainer Breslin Benya to come by the lab so we could take some videos of her dog.
All right.
So, what kind of dog is Tayla? Tayla's a 4-year-old Belgian Malinois.
That's great.
Let's get her right up on the table.
Most people have a misconception about how dogs use their tongues to drink water, so before we do any tests, I want to ask you, what do you think it is? I think that the dog puts their tongue in the water, the tongue forms a bowl, and that's how they lap it up.
A lot of people think it's a bowl, and a lot of people think that the tongue just goes straight in and creates a big splash when it comes out and pulls water with it.
So, soon, we'll take a look at that.
But, first, why don't we do some tricks with Tayla and see if we can get any hints about how the tongue works in a dog? Ready? All right, that looked great to me.
-Did we get enough? -KEARNEY: Yep.
Okay, let's take a look at that.
You're probably not used to seeing her act that slowly.
BENYA: Wow.
LIEBERMAN: There she goes.
I was about to mention that she looked really cute, and then 30,000 teeth appeared and I changed my mind.
She's got almost no tongue use in the catch.
I'm surprised.
I thought she'd actually catch it on her tongue and use that to bring it in her mouth, just like a baseball glove.
No real clue from watching that trick, but after Matt got me with that water balloon, it's only fair he has to take one for the team, as well.
So he's got to help with another clue.
What's a human look like when drinking like a dog? It looks like Matt's a better cameraman than a dog.
-Gotcha.
-It's going up my nose.
I think that's the most efficient way you can get it.
Of course, everything goes up my nose.
If he didn't drink out of a cup, he'd probably die of thirst or drown.
Okay, so, let's see how a real dog does it.
This is what we came here for, so let's look at what your dog looks like when she drinks.
So, Tayla, whenever you're ready, you want to take a drink of water? What do you see? It seems as though she's throwing the water into her mouth.
I think she is, and it's almost exactly what you said, but with a twist.
BENYA: It is.
It seems like it's almost the reverse.
Instead of being a bowl on the top of her mouth, on the top of her tongue, it seems like she's creating a bowl underneath.
I've seen, you know -- At the shop, we see dogs drink a million times a day, and I would've never been able to catch that.
The dog's reversed slurp just shows how surprising things can be when we change the lens of time and how we can really see and understand our world I'm always looking for ordinary things around me that might look extraordinary in slow motion.
Pbht! [Laughs.]
I got a new balloon! I'm always looking for things that might look extraordinary when we twist time.
It's amazing what we can find out when we focus our "Time Warp" cameras on even the most ordinary parts of life.
If you've got things that you're desperate to discover or stuff that you think would just look cool, then send your requests to me, Jeff Lieberman, and we'll time-warp them.

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