If you’re not caught up with this fun series, don’t worry! I’ve got a playlist with every episode for your binging convenience: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLT0Yu8PbCUCM&si=C5RPK9GkWDeyW3pb

This series might be a hard one for some people to keep up with, but PLEASE see it through to the end. It is such a fascinating concept and I don’t think I could watch anyone else play it at this point.

35:07 this part is a little weird because hydrogen-4 only exists for 10^-22 seconds, In that instant light can't even travel a nanometer. It was very recent that we learned that it was a real thing and not just 'random neutrons smashed together inside particle accelerator'.

Also funny seeing tyler learn about beta minus decays for the first time. Wait until he learns about beta plus decay where protons split into a neutron and antimatter electron, which is actually the main source of radiation in bananas!

The reason the second is defined by cesium Is because cesium is the element we use for atomic clocks. Why define something by the halftime of some random element when the clock is going to be counting the cesium oscillations anyway.

Tyler we redefine units of measurement all the time. It could be that their second was close to the half-life of Helium 4 so when they had to make a formal definition that’s what they chose. We did something similar. 1 second per ISO is the reciprocal of the transition frequency of Caesium 133.
Edit : Lmao it literally came up immediately after

Missed opportunity to call the metor AlienRock

Tyler: 36:35 "Doesn't feel like that's how reality works..."
stuff I was doing in high school

This series is so awesome. I'm glad it's continuing.

With the question of why their second is based off that unstable isotope, I believe maybe it’s not and that’s them either creating a whole new unit of time for a general understanding between them and us, OR they found a universal constant (the half life of that isotope) that was the closest to whatever they had initially relatively deemed a second to be.

I recently completed this game and it's absolutely beautiful beyond the puzzles. I implore anyone who hasn't already played the game to jump ahead of Tyler and play through it yourself.

It is 100% worth every cent it costs.

Glad this series isn't being sidelined for OotSS, love this game and your play through!

53:47 Isotopes ending in "m" are metastable. This is mostly an abuse of notation, because isotopes typically have different atomic weights (using cobalt-60):
Cobalt-60m decays into Cobalt 60. The difference between them is that Cobalt-60m has a massive amount of extra energy in the nucleus, which makes an otherwise stable isotope unstable. By ejecting that excess energy in the form of gamma rays, the isotope stabilizes without changing its chemical properties like alpha and beta decay do.

Now, since this was in the context of clocks: metastable isotopes can't be used as a stable reference, because actually measuring gamma rays is almost impossible.

Our way to arrange the periodic table was literally come up with in a dream, so it's probably not the only way.

With how in-depth this game is, it reminds me of how they hid a “real world” problem in a video game in stargate universe.

The choice of units like second could just also be arbitrary and designed for clear universal communication and have no relation to the alien native units

You cannot imagine my delight at watching Tyler puzzle out the concept of pegging time to the universal concept of nuclear decay, an event I was waiting for the entire time.

Tyler: "I don't think that's how reality works"
Me, who learned about radioactive decay in high school: 😒

Tyler still using Google instead of the reference tab in the game...

"i didn't mean to cheat by looking at chapter title"
bond equation

1:01:16 it's actually roughly 1.8 meters, because alienlightseconds is times 0.8066

I feel a lot of people missed the fact that the frequency being transmitted by the meteorite is based on their second, which we've just learned how they calculate their second. So we actually knew their second from the first team meeting