Something weird happens when you keep squeezing

This is a syringe filled with water. I have closed this end so that he cannot escape. And no matter how hard I push... Nothing really

happens

. I can't compress it. Even if you put this inside an industrial hydraulic press... a machine that can push down with thousands of tons of force... the volume would only decrease by about 1%. But what if they squeezed it even harder? What would happen if this water were subjected to extreme pressures in the Earth's core? Or inside the Sun? What would happen to him? The answer is

something

really strange. Something that physicists are only beginning to understand.

In many ways, this is truly a new field. We just don't fully know the rules yet. It is a completely new regime of matter. Trying to understand these extreme pressures and the way they warp physics as we know it. Let's take a journey down. We will begin our journey here on the surface at atmospheric pressure. How much pressure is that exactly? How does it compare to, say, the pressure of my phone in the palm of my hand? Well, the weight of the phone, about two Newtons... is spread over about 100 square centimeters. This is how pressure is measured: a force distributed over an area.

The pressure of the atmosphere hundreds of miles of air above me... pulled down by Earth's gravity is 500 times stronger. It's like the pressure my phone would put on my palm if Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson were balanced on top of it. But since the air can flow freely... it also pushes The Rock upwards with the same pressure. Every phone-sized part of my body is being pressed inward by the equivalent of The Rock's weight. Of course, all the structures and fluids inside my body are pressing back and I am so used to this balance that I don't even notice it.

Before leaving these familiar conditions, I'm going to grab a few things to take with us. One gram of hydrogen, one gram of sodium... and one kilo of water. We know exactly how these substances behave on the Earth's surface. But what

happens

when

we start to squeeze? Just ten meters of seawater adds another atmosphere of pressure. 27 floors down... we passed the single-handed diving record. And a little deeper... we reach ten atmospheres. Now let's go deeper than the deepest dive. There is a mass of fish. They look like depressed jelly on the surface, but down here, the pressure

keep

s them in shape.

One kilometer further down we reach 100 atmospheres. The types of pressures we got with that giant hydraulic press. Sperm whales can dive to this depth...and their hinged ribcages fold inward so the bones don't break. Here, the Titan submersible was crushed... and here is the destination they never reached. Somehow we are still passing fish. And now we have reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench... and 1000 atmospheres. Now we are faced with the pressure of a telephone with a herd of elephants balanced on it. Let's review the samples we brought. Our balloon of hydrogen gas has shrunk to the size of a large marble.

But both our solid sodium and our liquid water haven't changed much. They are barely compressed. Why is that? Well, the hydrogen molecules had a lot of space between them. Room to shrink. But sodium and water were already very tight. Not even the pressure down here can overcome the electrostatic repulsion between the molecules. It's not strong enough. But let's move on. Each meter of rock builds up under pressure almost three times faster than water. The temperature is also rising. Upon leaving the crust, we reach 10,000 atmospheres. In the mantle, temperatures exceed 1,000 degrees Celsius and part of the rock begins to melt.

This is where many diamonds are formed. The carbon is compressed into a tight crystal. As we enter 100,000 atmospheres of pressure... the rock is further compressed, forced back into its solid form. Our sodium, meanwhile, has melted... and our hydrogen bubble is also liquid. Compressed in a small transparent globule. The water is changing too. It is being crushed so much that it is forced to become solid. But not the hexagonal crystals that appear on the surface. Instead, it is a tighter cubic lattice. Scientists have found this variation of ice, Ice-VII... trapped inside diamonds. As we approach the Earth's core, we pass 1 million atmospheres.

That's the equivalent of a tanker truck balanced on a phone. This is the threshold that we are leaving to the world and that physicists fully understand. This is where the external forces are more or less equal and begin to overwhelm the internal forces. The crushing pressure is beginning to overcome the electromagnetic forces that

keep

water molecules apart and maintain their shape. The behavior that results from being in these extreme conditions is quite strange. How is matter studied in conditions that normally only exist deep in the Earth? That was the goal of creating the Center for Matter at Atomic Pressures.

We'll do all the fundamental physics to be able to understand matter in these really different types of conditions. CMAP is based at the University of Rochester... and they have a tool that helps them create extreme pressures. The huge Omega EP laser that fills this giant room. This is the installation schedule. Scientists around the world queue for months just for the chance to blast a small sample of matter with a laser beam. And how do you feel before this? Incredibly nervous. You spent a year planning, crossing T's and dotting I's... just to get to this point. The film director connects to the intercom and says: Five... four, three... two, one.

Shot 39607 is now complete. That was it. During that split second, a million atmospheric pressures were momentarily created in the next room... the same pressures that exist deep within the Earth. How does a ray of light do that? Let's go over it again. Just much slower. The laser beam is born in these machines in the basement... and is directed through a maze of lenses and devices that shape and monitor it. As it bounces through these huge tubes... it is infused with more power until it is as wide as this opening: about 18 inches wide. Then run towards the target camera that is hidden behind this tangle of equipment.

This is a visual representation of the target camera. And the target is right in the center. They're really like the tip of a pin... on the tip of a pen, just absurdly small. The goal is a small, inedible sandwich with a sample of whatever substance researchers are interested in in the middle. The laser light is focused downward to reach this first layer which explodes into a superheated ionized gas. And that plasma flies off the surface like a rocket. Ahat creates this buildup of pressure which forms a shock wave. And that shock wave travels very quickly through the material.

The last layer acts as a window allowing the passage of the electromagnetic rays generated during the experiment. And then around it, you have these spaces to place different cameras and other tools that we use to measure the various things that interest us. If you look through this window... you can see a couple of these sensors moving into place. In 2017, researchers placed a bit of Ice-VII sandwiched between two diamonds... in the target chamber. As the shock wave passed through it... the pressure in the ice soared above 2 million atmospheres and its atoms rearranged. The oxygens formed a dense network... while the hydrogens could diffuse freely through it.

It was Ice-XVIII, four times denser than normal ice... and capable of conducting electricity almost as well as metal. For a few billionths of a second... the laser had recreated the conditions inside the Earth. Speaking of which, let's get back to our trip. As our water begins to turn into Ice-XVIII... our mass of sodium is undergoing its own transformation. Under these pressures, scientists have seen it become transparent. Now, what could explain this? Well, metals like sodium are shiny because they have lots of free-flowing electrons that can absorb and then retransmit the light we see as a reflection.

What happens

when

you apply pressure is that you're

squeezing

the electrons out of their atoms... and stuffing them into these localized pockets. Trapped like this, the electrons cannot interact with the light... and so it just passes through. We have reached the center of the Earth... but that is not the end because we can continue towards the pressures found within larger plants. Tens of thousands of kilometers beneath the surface of Jupiter... Physicists believe that hydrogen will undergo another change and become a brilliant conductor of electricity. It is believed that much of Jupiter is made up of this metallic hydrogen.

We think that high energy density materials completely reverse the periodic table, so that your metals become transparent and your transparent materials become metals... and all these gases become solids... And the universe still maintains pressures higher. The center of Jupiter receives more than 10 million atmospheres, about the highest pressure the Omega laser can create. And now we plunge into the sun... where pressures increase to more than 100 billion atmospheres. The island of Manhattan balanced on a telephone. We have seen extreme pressures that overwhelm the forces that keep molecules apart. But here, inside the Sun, they can overcome the glue that holds atoms together.

Here, individual hydrogen nuclei can be used to form helium... a process that releases energy. This is nuclear fusion: the fundamental source of all energy in our solar system. The reaction at the center of each twinkling star. If we could somehow recreate this process on Earth and keep it running... we would have an almost unlimited source of cheap, clean energy. And researchers around the world are using giant lasers, including the Omega... to study this possibility. All of this is a relatively new frontier in physics. Scientists still have many questions about the rules for how different elements and substances act and interact under different conditions... and how that might influence the evolution of planets... and their ability to support life.

They will continue to tease out those unknowns... one split-second experiment at a time. Hold me tight... Hold me tight... Come together/ Increase the pressure It feels so bad/ but it feels so good... Break me/ Then you complete me... You want a diamond/ take your time And keep trying 'cause I'm just another coal. I'm just another coal!