How do White Walkers shatter swords? Winter is finally here for the Game of Thrones-iverse as are the White Walkers, humanity's fearsome, frigid foes. These magical ice zombies are extremely dangerous to say the least and resistant to conventional weapons, but when faced with cold, hard steel, could they really shatter a sword? Yes. White Walkers may be magical, but the freezing temperatures they bring along in their weapons certainly have something to do with why a normal steel sword would shatter against a White Walker weapon, like it does in Jon's hands during the famous Hardhome battle.
This steel shattering property is also established in the Song of Ice and Fire books. The question is, will a steel sword subjected to extremely low temperatures really shatter quickly or completely enough that they will prove useless against Walker weapons? (shivers) That's better. First, what, if any, is the relationship between the strength of materials and the temperature of those materials? Well, first, let's be more technical. When we say strength, I think what we're really concerned about is how much energy some material can absorb before it fractures or shatters.
This is called a material's toughness. Say a material had a curve on a graph of energy absorbed that looks something like this. On this side of the graph, you can see that not very much energy at all is being absorbed before it fractures and goes past its limit, and on this side of the graph, a lot of energy is being absorbed. Because the toughness of a material has to do with how the material is actually changing shape or deforming under some force or impact, we can call this side of the graph, where not much energy is going into it before it shatters or ruptures or breaks the brittle side and this side the ductile side. We are still, however, missing the most important part of this graph. In general, most materials on a graph of energy absorbed versus temperature get more brittle the colder that they get. And at this point, this is exactly where that transition happens, and it's very important for materials engineering. It's called the ductile-brittle transition temperature because engineers aren't really known for their amazing wordplay.
But I was season one's cool dad, and then I thought, you were gonna. It just so hap-- It just so happens that many different kinds of steels are very sensitive to temperature, making it much more likely for something like a steel sword to fail when frozen. However, swords are much more complicated than just simple hunks of steel, and to know why they are more complicated, we have to go down to the atomic level. Ooh, we're warging. On an atomic level, most metals are structured one of three ways. The two that we are concerned with though are the crystalline lattices of atoms called face-centered cubic and body-centered cubic. In each orientation, atoms are packed in these arrangements, which we visualize with imaginary cubes. What's important about these structures for our use is that the face-centered cubic or FCC structure is more closely packed and therefore better at moving past neighboring atoms.
However, in theory isn't always good enough. I have taken the night's watch, and so, I must stay here at Castle Mostblack, and so, to put this theory to practice, I am enlisting my master of experiments Allen Pan to go beyond the wall. Oh hi Kyle. For our test, we're going to be using liquid nitrogen to cool down this carbon-steel sword. Now, frankly, this is an extremely cheap and crappy carbon-steel sword that I bought off the Internet so if any sword's gonna shatter from getting too cold, it's gonna be this one. Along those same lines, our White Walker here is equipped with a solid metal I-beam as a weapon. We are giving the White Walkers the biggest benefit of the doubt here to see if this sword will break. Let's pour some liquid nitrogen. Oh, it's so cold, so very, very cold. Right now, our sword is very near the boiling temperature of liquid nitrogen, which is like 77 Kelvin above absolute zero.
This is as cold as this sword is ever gonna get, so I say let's just give it a try. Here we go. Oh it's a very, very cold sword right now. Okay. Oh that's very cold. Let's try and do this quick. So if the cold does anything at all to this sword, we're gonna find out right now. Gonna angle it here so that it doesn't bounce back and kill me if it does break. Alright, White Walkers versus steel in three, two, one. (laughs) Something broke off. The hilt on the cross guard on the handle just shattered into two, at least two pieces. The blade is still intact though, but this is looking good. Let's try this again. We'll give it one more good whack here. The blade is still in one piece though. Let's give it a couple more whacks though so that no one can tell us we didn't try. Here we go. That's incredible. Even this crappy carbon-steel is totally okay at cryogenic temperatures. I mean, that's super impressive, maybe not for the rest of this hilt, but this is not going anywhere. So there you go. That's our conclusion. Steel sword, one, White Walkers, zero.
Well it seems that our sword was made out of tougher stuff than whatever Jon picked up at Hardhome. And this may have a lot to do with how actual swords are actually made, all those strengthening processes that we talked about earlier. What can we say though? We don't really know what the sword in Hardhome was made out of or how it was made. And we don't really know exactly how these swords that we bought off the Internet were made, so if these swords are shatterable, they probably aren't going to shatter into a billion pieces. If the temperature does anything, maybe it will crack them into one or two or three. Nice try, Cersei. My sons are on the throne because they're. It's because they're dead. Regardless of what happened to our specific sword, if temperature is going to be a problem during a White Walker fight, we're going to want to make our weapons out of materials that can handle extremely low temperatures.
What we really want is a sword material that pushes back the ductile-brittle transition temperature as far as possible. Forged in dragon fire, maybe this is what makes so-called Valyrian steel so special. It stays tough even when facing frigid foes. Or better yet, Valyrian steel could be like gold or copper in that it doesn't have any real shift to brittle from ductile with lower temperatures. Then, it could stay tough no matter what a White Walker was trying to do to it. This kind of metallurgy would make perfect sense too. When building in environments that have winter arrive more than once every however long it's supposed to have been, human engineers select the materials that are the least likely to go brittle and break. If they are using something like steel for example, they might select A514 steel, which is very tough at low temperatures.
However, when those temperatures get low enough, maybe negative 46 degrees Celsius, then just like the materials in the swords of Game of Thrones, they can go very brittle and fail very quickly. It might just take a single impact and then there is catastrophic failure. Your entire design would be stabbed in the back. Are you trying to get me or not? Man, it's like a real song of. If there is any science to a weapon that can repel a White Walker attack like Valyrian steel, it might be this. Maybe it has such a low brittle transition temperature that not only zombie magic can make it fail, or maybe Valyrian steel is forged out of something that simply does not respond to their killer chill like regular steel might. Oh, the void remembered, oh.
Oh come on, you knew I wouldn't stay dead. So can White Walkers really shatter steel swords like we see in Game of Thrones with their frightening frigidity? Well, based on our theories and our testing of what I think is the best case science-y scenario, it would be very difficult for a White Walker weapon to shatter a human sword in any kind of way like we see in the show. Maybe there's different materials involved or maybe it's just straight up magic. The theory is there, but we didn't quite see it. Still, I think now we know something about swords and snow. Because Science. It's like the you know nothing Jon, it's like a thing that all the people who watch the show. I think technically accurate is the best kind of accurate, and so, when people say, "You're gonna feel the cut "of my cold, hard steel," steel isn't cold.
Metals and steel, you talk about like cold steel cutting into your enemy or something like that, it feels cold but it's not actually cold. If you were to take the temperature of a piece of steel, even a sword, it would not be any lower than the surrounding air temperature. Everything, if it's just left to equalize, everything is at the same temperature. It just feels colder. Why? Well, because it has such a better heat transfer rate than your flesh in your skin, heat from your hand goes into the sword very quickly, so it feels like it is colder. It's the same reason why if you get out of your shower, the carpet and the tiles are at the exact same temperature, but the tiles feel colder. So cold, hard steel, more like, not technically accurate.
Thank you so much for watching, and thank you so much to my friend Allen Pan for helping me out on this video. If you want to see even more testing, not just with steel but with ice and with Pykrete, please head over to Allen's channel at Sufficiently Advanced. You're gonna want to subscribe. If you like anything that I do, you're definitely gonna like what he does. And if you want to follow us and give us suggestions for future episodes, you can follow us on social media at these handles here. Thanks.
This steel shattering property is also established in the Song of Ice and Fire books. The question is, will a steel sword subjected to extremely low temperatures really shatter quickly or completely enough that they will prove useless against Walker weapons? (shivers) That's better. First, what, if any, is the relationship between the strength of materials and the temperature of those materials? Well, first, let's be more technical. When we say strength, I think what we're really concerned about is how much energy some material can absorb before it fractures or shatters.
This is called a material's toughness. Say a material had a curve on a graph of energy absorbed that looks something like this. On this side of the graph, you can see that not very much energy at all is being absorbed before it fractures and goes past its limit, and on this side of the graph, a lot of energy is being absorbed. Because the toughness of a material has to do with how the material is actually changing shape or deforming under some force or impact, we can call this side of the graph, where not much energy is going into it before it shatters or ruptures or breaks the brittle side and this side the ductile side. We are still, however, missing the most important part of this graph. In general, most materials on a graph of energy absorbed versus temperature get more brittle the colder that they get. And at this point, this is exactly where that transition happens, and it's very important for materials engineering. It's called the ductile-brittle transition temperature because engineers aren't really known for their amazing wordplay.
But I was season one's cool dad, and then I thought, you were gonna. It just so hap-- It just so happens that many different kinds of steels are very sensitive to temperature, making it much more likely for something like a steel sword to fail when frozen. However, swords are much more complicated than just simple hunks of steel, and to know why they are more complicated, we have to go down to the atomic level. Ooh, we're warging. On an atomic level, most metals are structured one of three ways. The two that we are concerned with though are the crystalline lattices of atoms called face-centered cubic and body-centered cubic. In each orientation, atoms are packed in these arrangements, which we visualize with imaginary cubes. What's important about these structures for our use is that the face-centered cubic or FCC structure is more closely packed and therefore better at moving past neighboring atoms.
However, in theory isn't always good enough. I have taken the night's watch, and so, I must stay here at Castle Mostblack, and so, to put this theory to practice, I am enlisting my master of experiments Allen Pan to go beyond the wall. Oh hi Kyle. For our test, we're going to be using liquid nitrogen to cool down this carbon-steel sword. Now, frankly, this is an extremely cheap and crappy carbon-steel sword that I bought off the Internet so if any sword's gonna shatter from getting too cold, it's gonna be this one. Along those same lines, our White Walker here is equipped with a solid metal I-beam as a weapon. We are giving the White Walkers the biggest benefit of the doubt here to see if this sword will break. Let's pour some liquid nitrogen. Oh, it's so cold, so very, very cold. Right now, our sword is very near the boiling temperature of liquid nitrogen, which is like 77 Kelvin above absolute zero.
This is as cold as this sword is ever gonna get, so I say let's just give it a try. Here we go. Oh it's a very, very cold sword right now. Okay. Oh that's very cold. Let's try and do this quick. So if the cold does anything at all to this sword, we're gonna find out right now. Gonna angle it here so that it doesn't bounce back and kill me if it does break. Alright, White Walkers versus steel in three, two, one. (laughs) Something broke off. The hilt on the cross guard on the handle just shattered into two, at least two pieces. The blade is still intact though, but this is looking good. Let's try this again. We'll give it one more good whack here. The blade is still in one piece though. Let's give it a couple more whacks though so that no one can tell us we didn't try. Here we go. That's incredible. Even this crappy carbon-steel is totally okay at cryogenic temperatures. I mean, that's super impressive, maybe not for the rest of this hilt, but this is not going anywhere. So there you go. That's our conclusion. Steel sword, one, White Walkers, zero.
Well it seems that our sword was made out of tougher stuff than whatever Jon picked up at Hardhome. And this may have a lot to do with how actual swords are actually made, all those strengthening processes that we talked about earlier. What can we say though? We don't really know what the sword in Hardhome was made out of or how it was made. And we don't really know exactly how these swords that we bought off the Internet were made, so if these swords are shatterable, they probably aren't going to shatter into a billion pieces. If the temperature does anything, maybe it will crack them into one or two or three. Nice try, Cersei. My sons are on the throne because they're. It's because they're dead. Regardless of what happened to our specific sword, if temperature is going to be a problem during a White Walker fight, we're going to want to make our weapons out of materials that can handle extremely low temperatures.
What we really want is a sword material that pushes back the ductile-brittle transition temperature as far as possible. Forged in dragon fire, maybe this is what makes so-called Valyrian steel so special. It stays tough even when facing frigid foes. Or better yet, Valyrian steel could be like gold or copper in that it doesn't have any real shift to brittle from ductile with lower temperatures. Then, it could stay tough no matter what a White Walker was trying to do to it. This kind of metallurgy would make perfect sense too. When building in environments that have winter arrive more than once every however long it's supposed to have been, human engineers select the materials that are the least likely to go brittle and break. If they are using something like steel for example, they might select A514 steel, which is very tough at low temperatures.
However, when those temperatures get low enough, maybe negative 46 degrees Celsius, then just like the materials in the swords of Game of Thrones, they can go very brittle and fail very quickly. It might just take a single impact and then there is catastrophic failure. Your entire design would be stabbed in the back. Are you trying to get me or not? Man, it's like a real song of. If there is any science to a weapon that can repel a White Walker attack like Valyrian steel, it might be this. Maybe it has such a low brittle transition temperature that not only zombie magic can make it fail, or maybe Valyrian steel is forged out of something that simply does not respond to their killer chill like regular steel might. Oh, the void remembered, oh.
Oh come on, you knew I wouldn't stay dead. So can White Walkers really shatter steel swords like we see in Game of Thrones with their frightening frigidity? Well, based on our theories and our testing of what I think is the best case science-y scenario, it would be very difficult for a White Walker weapon to shatter a human sword in any kind of way like we see in the show. Maybe there's different materials involved or maybe it's just straight up magic. The theory is there, but we didn't quite see it. Still, I think now we know something about swords and snow. Because Science. It's like the you know nothing Jon, it's like a thing that all the people who watch the show. I think technically accurate is the best kind of accurate, and so, when people say, "You're gonna feel the cut "of my cold, hard steel," steel isn't cold.
Metals and steel, you talk about like cold steel cutting into your enemy or something like that, it feels cold but it's not actually cold. If you were to take the temperature of a piece of steel, even a sword, it would not be any lower than the surrounding air temperature. Everything, if it's just left to equalize, everything is at the same temperature. It just feels colder. Why? Well, because it has such a better heat transfer rate than your flesh in your skin, heat from your hand goes into the sword very quickly, so it feels like it is colder. It's the same reason why if you get out of your shower, the carpet and the tiles are at the exact same temperature, but the tiles feel colder. So cold, hard steel, more like, not technically accurate.
Thank you so much for watching, and thank you so much to my friend Allen Pan for helping me out on this video. If you want to see even more testing, not just with steel but with ice and with Pykrete, please head over to Allen's channel at Sufficiently Advanced. You're gonna want to subscribe. If you like anything that I do, you're definitely gonna like what he does. And if you want to follow us and give us suggestions for future episodes, you can follow us on social media at these handles here. Thanks.
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