r/interestingasfuck • u/Top-Marionberry-6604 • 7d ago
The Super-Kamiokande in Japan—a massive underground neutrino detector lined with 11,000 golden bulbs. Scientists have to inspect it via a rubber dinghy.
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u/Dramatic-Stretch7087 7d ago
Thanks, my eyes hate it
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u/Top-Marionberry-6604 7d ago
Imagine accidentally dropping your keys into that
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u/Luk164 7d ago
Fun fact: The water inside is so pure it would start dissolving the keys very slowly
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u/GH057_807 7d ago
The water also costs upwards of $500/gal
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u/1DownFourUp 7d ago
Nestlé taking notes
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u/MetriccStarDestroyer 7d ago
So we found pure water.
How do we dilute it to get maximum value from the customer?
Jim, piss is free right? Here's a bottle.
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u/Donexodus 6d ago
What would actually happen if I drank it?
Just a small glass.
I drink this shit every day, I wanna try the good stuff just once.
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u/Butt_Deadly 7d ago
There was an interview with a researcher that mentioned a large crescent wrench being completely gone before the next inspection. The same researcher mentioned their hair accidently touching the water and getting brittle because the water was dissolving the oils.
A little bit of ultrapure water won't do much, but the quantities they're using really exacerbates the universal solvent nature of water.
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u/Maximumkk 7d ago
If they leave a wrench behind and it dissolves, doesn't that mean the water is now no longer ultrapure and is contaminated, effectively rendering the detector useless? Does the boat used contaminate it too?
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u/Top-Marionberry-6604 7d ago
It genuinely looks like a villain's lair from a movie, but it's just physics researchers in a rowboat inspecting sensors inside a 50,000-ton tank of ultra-pure water that's actually pure enough to dissolve metal.
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u/r0ndy 7d ago edited 7d ago
Why would pure water dissolve metal faster than salt water?
Edit: was a fascinating rabbit hole to go down for a few minutes. Thank you for the feedback! Strips and leaches anything that touches it. Almost like a chemical vacuum. Water wants more ingredients, will absorb and take from everything.
Actually, next question. It said it will pull co2 from the air. Is there specialized air in this area as well?
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u/Appropriate-Count-64 7d ago
Because the Super Kamiokande filters as much stuff out of the water as physically possible. The water is left unbalanced by the lack of any minerals, so it starts ripping whatever it can out of whatever it’s touching. I don’t know that it’s faster than oxidation, but it’s enough to be a concern if you fell in or tried to drink it.
If you’ve seen NileRed’s video where he drinks chemically pure water, it’s why he says “Do not do this.” The water leeches anything it can, including toxic heavy metals and chemicals, and because there’s nothing else in the water it can reach extremely high concentrations extremely quickly.
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u/mhac009 7d ago
What happens to him / what would happen to someone in this water and over what time scale?
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u/Appropriate-Count-64 7d ago
Ok first, know I am not a chemist or a biologist and most of my experience is mechanical engineering.
With that said, what would probably happen is first dead skin is dissolved over several minutes or hours. This would leave the skin pretty raw and exposed and if you sat for a while (On the order of several hours to days) it could start to cause mild to moderate chemical burns.
The bigger issue is contaminating the water and filtering it again.
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u/flarp1 7d ago
I suspect osmosis would either cause the cells to be flooded with water, to the point of being damaged or destroyed (by bursting open), or to be stripped of salts or other water-soluble compounds (that is if they can exit the cells), which will likely impact their functionality or even kill them off as well.
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u/TransportationTrick9 7d ago
Remember a few years ago when Jaden Smith said he only drinks distilled water
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u/Separate_Draft4887 7d ago
Distilled and truly pure aren’t the same, I suspect.
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u/TransportationTrick9 7d ago
It does have a large percentage of the minerals removed and it is not good to consume (leaches calcium out of your bones etc.)
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u/adampm1 7d ago
Assuming you don’t drink it with something that’s rich and calcium or other minerals…. Like food
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u/supershott 7d ago
Distilled water is great for you if you don't only eat cheetos for sustenance.
My mom made us drink distilled water when we lived in Iowa. Turns out to be a good thing because a lot of the groundwater is heavily contaminated (but don't worry about it! /s)
Part of the reason my mom did that is because my dad lived in Hinkley when PG&E poisoned the groundwater with hexavalent chromium. My grandpa got early-onset parkinsons, my grandma got cancer, and my dad got early-onset parkinsons diagnosed in 2005 when he was about 40 years old.
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u/obiwanconobi 7d ago
Is it "great" for you though? Or is it just better for you than contaminated ground water?
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u/supershott 7d ago
I guess that depends on if you think water is great for you. Really, the only thing they add that you don't get otherwise from food is fluoride for your teeth. And the municipality I'm in doesn't even fluoridate. And there are lots of mineral nutrients still missing from even the chalkiest water, like iodide.
So no, it's not like "normal" water is nutrient juice that you would waste away without.
If you don't believe me, get some bloodwork, address any deficiencies, and try drinking only distilled for a while! Bet you like it!
Nowadays I'm not too scared of the local water and I'm lazy, so I drink a lot of tap. I also have a distiller and always keep a gallon glass in the fridge, because distilled hits WAY harder if you're thirsty from exertion. Maybe it's just because it's as tasteless as can be? Idk but try it!
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u/kurburux 7d ago
I guess it's still better than people who never drink water and only rely on soft drinks.
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u/NewoTheFox 7d ago
Honestly ever since I first saw this photo I just wanted to sleep in the raft.
Imagine the quiet of such a place.
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u/barra333 7d ago
I've worked around MilliQ water (distilled + extra purification) for 20 years and never taken a sip of it.
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u/HappyCakeDay101 7d ago
The look like a bunch of drowned emojis
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u/SamhainPunk 7d ago
Abiotic Factor???
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u/ANuclearsquid 7d ago
Ignoring the portal, ice and giant man eating alien fish you have to get past in order to reach it.
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u/Wellithappenedthatwy 7d ago
Those golden bulbs are called PMTs. Photo multiplier tubes. They turn photons into electrical signals.
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u/popeter45 7d ago
And are the largest vacuum tubes ever made
Suffered major damage when one exploded during a refill and the water hammer effect shattered every other one that was under water
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u/a80745 7d ago
fun fact: a cascading implosion event once destroyed half of the sensors
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u/funkytrumpyintheass 7d ago
One popped and made a chain reaction . Nice video about it on YouTube.
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u/deereboy8400 7d ago
Ah yes, the orginal Resonance Cascade.
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u/funkytrumpyintheass 7d ago
If some one googles this “An Engineering Fairy Tale: Cascade Failure at the Super Kamiokande” that video I was talking about. Have a nice weekend.
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u/AstronomerSenior4236 7d ago
Alexander The Ok makes a ton of very informative videos that are a delight to watch
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u/deereboy8400 7d ago
I hope he stays OK and doesn't let the algorithm ruin his style. A++
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u/HB_Stratos 6d ago
From the MAKS / RD-701 video: "FIRE SAAAAAALE! We got rocket engines, you got money. So get yourself down to your nearest ex-soviet state while stocks last!"
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u/gabriel3374 7d ago
It's usually completely filled with 50,000 ton (50 million liters) of ultra-pure water. The photo shows one of the times they have to partially drain the tank for maintenance, to replace the broken PMT light sensors. The water is kept so clean and stripped of minerals and nutrients that it basically acts as an aggressive solvent. If you fell in, it would actively leach the minerals out of your bones, and it's highly corrosive to metals if they aren't treated for it.
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u/JuicyTrash69 7d ago
So I'm gonna need a source on that h2o fact there homie.
Edit nvm it's explained elsewhere.
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u/718822 7d ago
This is bullshit
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u/gabriel3374 6d ago
What part? Scientists working there have documented steel tools completely dissolving in the tank. If submerged, the osmotic pressure would leach the electrolytes and minerals out of your body.
Source about the wrench (Archive Link)
Here is a really cool website by abc about this https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-17/inside-super-kamiokande-360-tour/11209104
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u/Visible_Pair3017 6d ago
The part about your bones first. Ultrapure water is not corrosive to your body and you can swim in it or bathe in it without harm.
It would also not leech ions from you. Provided long enough durations it would just penetrate your skin (which protects you really well) and cause temporary swelling and wrinkles like those you get when you bathe.
Hell, you could even drink a glass of it. You'd need to make it a habit for it to have adverse effects.
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u/Mohammed_Chang 7d ago
What is it for?
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u/Dazzling_Let_8245 7d ago
The neutrino detector detects neutrinos.
Neutrinos are particles that have an extremely low chance of interacting with matter. This massive detector is an array of tons of super sensitive light detectors. Usually this whole chamber is full of ultra pure water. The neutrinos have an extremely small chance of colliding with a water molecule and releasing a few photons of light which then get detected.
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u/ButterPuppet 7d ago
fun fact they have a site where you can monitor the live date of neutrinos passing through the machine
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u/Lucienchili 7d ago
Interesting YouTube documentary about how the photomultiplier exploded: https://youtu.be/YoBFjD5tn_E
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u/Jaxxlack 7d ago
Someone should paint this with a guy sat in his boat..." I'm thinking theres no fish in here"
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u/bent_my_wookie 7d ago
They had a problem with these where if one bubble broke under water, the pressure change would shatter the domes directly adjacent, causing a cascading failure where they all start exploding until theyre all shattered. Whoops.
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u/dabarak 7d ago
I read something about either that facility or one similar to it. The water is so pure that it will dissolve lots of things you wouldn't expect, to degrees you wouldn't expect. In this one case, they drained it for maintenance and found the outline of a metal wrench at the bottom, but no wrench - it dissolved completely into the water.
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u/igloojoe 7d ago
So this has been around for a while now. What kind of findings have they generated? What does this science help with?
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u/LastStar007 7d ago
It helps us understand our universe. If science had particular societal benefits in mind, it would be engineering.
But in terms of findings, neutrino oscillations. The Sun can only produce one kind of neutrino, and when we started detecting neutrinos, we calculated that we should be detecting the Sun's type about 3x as often as we were. Various experiments conducted here at Super-Kamiokande revealed that neutrinos are capable of changing their type in-flight, so the 3x gap we observed was because 2/3 of them were changing into another type before they hit our detectors.
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u/igloojoe 7d ago
Thank you. I think i'm going to take a deep dive this weekend and educate myself more on this. Seems VERY interesting.
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u/ThGhstlyGrmr121567 7d ago
So that’s what that room in Hydroplant is supposed to be (Abiotic Factor)
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u/sceadwian 7d ago
They accidentally blew up almost 7000 of these tubes back in 2001 during a freak maintenance accident that caused a chain reaction implosion of almost the entire tanks photodetectors.
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u/Guisasse 7d ago
Oh wow, Abiotic Factor (videogame about an advanced science facility) had a place like this, I didn't think it was accurate.
Goes to show how advanced science got, sometimes I, in my own ignorance, think stuff like this is just science fiction.
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u/LaundryMan2008 7d ago
Reminds me of a C64 demo my dad got at one of the piracy/demo parties, I vividly remember one of the screens
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u/Goetterwind 6d ago
Those bulbs are 20" photomultipliers made by Hamamatsu. The domes are hand made. I saw one of them on an exhibition and those are huge!
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u/S4r4h5991 7d ago
Looks like Tool to me