In this episode of Real Science Radio, we delve into the tragic tale of the Titanic, examining it not just as a story of human loss, but as a vital case study in engineering, design assumptions, and the limits of human perception. Hosts Fred Williams and Doug McBurney offer a unique perspective by comparing Titanic’s fate to that of Noah’s Ark, highlighting the differences in design philosophies and the reliance on divine specifications versus human ingenuity. Join us as we navigate through historical and scientific insights that continue to resonate over a century later. Amidst discussions on the technology
00:00:00 Introduction to Titanic and Themes of Confidence
A moonless night, freezing water, a wall of ice in the dark, more than 1,500 dead, and at the center of it all, one of the greatest symbols of human confidence ever built, Titanic.
SPEAKER 06 :
Scholars can’t explain it all away.
SPEAKER 1 :
Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God. Tune in to Real Science Radio.
SPEAKER 06 :
Turn up the Real Science Radio. Keeping it real.
SPEAKER 04 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country. Welcome to Real Science Radio. I’m Fred Williams.
SPEAKER 02 :
And I’m Doug McBurney, Bible student, science geek, amateur comedian. Fred, it’s great to be back with you talking about real science on Friday.
SPEAKER 04 :
Today marks the 114th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS, which is Royal Mail Ship Titanic, in the waters off of Newfoundland in 1912. The Titanic is often treated like a legend and part of pop culture, but underneath all of that is a very real case study in design assumptions, material science, cold weather physics, risk analysis, and where’s Dwayne, Doug, from last week when you need him, and of course a big one, human pride and overconfidence in man’s ingenuity.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, yeah. And Fred, that last part matters because one of the interesting themes of this story is how people can become overly impressed with their own technology.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, that’s right. And it would only be fitting then to make sure that we look back thousands of years and compare it. To God’s design, Noah’s Ark, which was designed to survive the worst global flood conditions imaginable. And in that particular case, Doug, the thing floats.
SPEAKER 02 :
Fred, only you would think on the anniversary of Titanic, hey, let’s take a look at Noah’s Ark. Everybody knows they’re watching Real Science Radio. They’re listening to Real Science Radio. So we’ve got, Fred, we’ve got the most advanced ship ever. of the early 1900s at the bottom of the ocean, and yet we have a big wooden box from Genesis riding out a worldwide flood and landing safely somewhere in the mountains of Ararat.
SPEAKER 04 :
And that’s why we want to approach this scientifically, not with wild theories, not with the movie mythology, but by asking some good questions. What was the Titanic actually designed to withstand? What was special about the iceberg conditions that night? What do we know about the steel and rivets? And that part’s super interesting. How does cold affect materials? How does calm water affect visibility? And why were iceberg warnings not taken more seriously?
SPEAKER 02 :
All right, so Fred, let’s start with a quick recap for all of our audience members who matriculated in the government schools. Maybe they’ve never heard of either of these historic events. Certainly not Noah’s Ark if you went to government school, you didn’t hear about it there. But when Titanic departed from Southampton, England on her maiden voyage, she was the largest, most luxurious, and said to be the most technically advanced ship ever to sail. It really was an engineering marvel by the standards of the day, Fred. This was not some flimsy vessel. It was nearly 900 feet long, 46,000 gross tons, and among the largest moving objects ever built at that point in history. It had enormous steam engines, a turbine, multiple propellers, wireless telegraph, and Fred, an electrical plant aboard that produced 1.6 megawatts, which would power about a thousand houses even today. That was more power than the average city’s power plant had on board at that time. It had all the comforts that the wealthy classes would want, right? They had Turkish baths, swimming pools, they had a gymnasium. So to be fair, people weren’t foolish to be impressed with Titanic. It really was impressive.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, it was. And sometimes in hindsight, people make a caricature of the past and act like these engineers were bumbling amateurs. And we’ve done plenty of shows on the ingenuity of ancient man on many different shows. And these people, they were not bumbling amateurs. They were highly capable men working at the edge of what was then possible. They were cutting edge technology at the time. The ship had advanced compartmentalization. It had a double bottom. It had remotely operated watertight doors. In one sense, it incorporated a number of very sensible safety features. So the lesson here, again, is not that these were dumb people. The lesson is that even brilliant people can make assumptions that prove catastrophic when reality does not conform with the model. And as an engineer, I can say there’s always going to be some number of corner cases you just are not going to account for. And it takes time to weed out all of the edge cases. A good example that comes to mind to me, Doug, is the improved safety over time of passenger airliners. My wife kind of gets, she’s like, why are you watching those shows? I like to watch those disasters of the past. Yeah, yeah. But they’re interesting to me, where they show all the science behind figuring out what’s happened. But over the decades, it’s become so much safer as they start fixing all of these little corner cases. Right, right. And there’s always going to be these edge cases with engineering.
SPEAKER 02 :
Mm hmm. And bringing an engineer’s mind to it, Fred, that this should be a lot of fun. And now this contrast especially is it should be interesting for Christians because the Bible also gives us the story of a ship. Right. But it’s a very different one. Noah’s Ark. It was not a monument to human prestige or luxury. It was a survival vessel. that was built to God’s specifications. And in fact, Fred, in the 1990s, a team of South Korean researchers in naval architecture, they actually studied the arc’s proportions for structural safety, stability, and seaworthiness, sea keepings, they say, in the waves. And their conclusion was that the biblical proportions were extraordinarily well-suited for survival at sea.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, and if I remember that study and others, there’s been others like it. You basically, you could take that tsunami, that really bad one from a decade or so ago near Indonesia, and you could amplify that and you still couldn’t sink. the Ark, based on the dimensions that were given in the Bible. So this thing was definitely very well engineered to survive all kinds of turbulence, which we would have had in a huge, gigantic, global flood. And that is a really striking contrast, Doug. The Titanic represented elite confidence in modern engineering at the time, while the Ark represented humble obedience to God’s instruction. And interestingly, the Ark’s proportions, they were not optimized for speed, beauty, or maneuverability. I’m pretty sure that there wasn’t this elaborate, beautiful staircase in the middle of the Ark that goes up to the first-class cabins. They were instead, they were optimized for stability and preservation of life. And that’s just a very different design philosophy.
SPEAKER 02 :
Right, right. And I remember those compartments were on the Titanic. Those were a big selling point from the structural engineers. The watertight compartmentalization… They were like, hey, even if it floods compartment after compartment, it won’t sink. Fred, the problem was it was designed to survive four, maybe even five flooded compartments from what I’ve read. But the iceberg damaged about six. And worse, the bulkheads didn’t go high enough. So once the water came in, Then the ship’s angle changed, and then it just spilled from one compartment to the other, like if you tipped up an ice cube box.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, and you know, I saw a demonstration on YouTube, a guy who built a replica, and he was actually able to get this replica to sink on the fifth compartment being compromised. And yeah, it just shows you how good of an engineer this Thomas Andrews was to be that spot on. He knew exactly what was going on. He designed the boat, and he knew that, okay, after the fifth one, he knew that it was six. He was like… It’s a mathematical certainty that this thing’s going to sink. I mean, that’s a line right out of that James Cameron Titanic movie. And, you know, we don’t know that he said that, but he would have definitely thought it. He definitely would have conveyed, hey, this thing’s going down. You better get distress signals going out.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, I think Ismay reported in his testimony. the survivor’s testimony before Congress that he did say this ship will sink within one to two hours. The engineer who designed it said, we’ve got one, maybe two hours.
SPEAKER 04 :
He went down with the ship. Yeah, yeah. And I always thought it was interesting, Doug, that if the ship had hit the iceberg dead on, it very likely wouldn’t have sunk. Now, it would have killed people who were in the front, obviously. And also, the other thing, speaking of an iceberg, we’ll talk about the iceberg physics now. When people think of iceberg, they picture something like a floating mound of snow or this floating rock. But it’s not fragile stuff. It’s glacial ice. It’s heavily compacted, incredibly dense. And there’s a tremendous amount of mass or iceberg below the surface. Generally, there’s only about 10% of an iceberg visible above the water. So there’s a much more of it underneath the water.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, yeah. And Fred, you mentioned that if it would have hit it straight on, this is another one of those little factors. It’s really hard to… Had the engineers been thinking it through… They would have thought, well, if we see an iceberg, surely we’re going to turn to one side or the other. So we really need to make the sides really, really strong. But they weren’t thinking through what happened that night. They were just thinking through various possibilities and maybe looking back at the history of how ships had sunk before. It’s just like you have said before, Fred, all models are wrong. Some are useful. And you just can’t model to every little, oh, anyway. But icebergs, Fred, it’s not like a chunk of ice like in the kitchen. A large iceberg isn’t just, it’s not just cold water in a different form. It’s this massive mechanical object. I mean, its size, its rigidity, and the underwater profile you mentioned, that matters a lot. Even if the visible portion didn’t look huge from a distance, the submerged mass underwater, it could reach down and out in ways that make it way more dangerous for a ship’s hull than the observer at the surface might assume. And if you remember, Fred, There had been reports of ice in the area. Conditions had apparently contributed to a more southward iceberg presence more than usual. The hazard was known. Warnings had been transmitted, but then the question becomes… Under those conditions, how easy was it to actually detect the iceberg in real time?
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, so, Doug, you said, do you remember, Fred? Well, I don’t remember in 1912 because I wasn’t alive, so I don’t know what you’re implying there, but… But I do remember the various movie accounts, you know, like the Hollywood Titanic movie that we referred to earlier. You know, I’ll never let go, Jack. Anyways, regarding visibility, this is where some of the physics, believe it or not, gets really interesting. So on the night of the Titanic struck the iceberg, the sea was unusually calm. And at first glance, that might sound like a good thing. You know, no storm, no giant waves, no high winds. But calm water can actually make iceberg detection harder at night. When there are waves, they break around the base of an iceberg and they can create visible white water. That gives observers a clue even before the full shape is visible. But if the sea is flat calm, that visual signature is largely absent. And to the lack of moonlight… the iceberg becomes much harder to distinguish from the darkness around it. There was no moonlight that night. So you have this eerie combination, a dangerous object, a black night, and no helpful wave action to reveal the threat. You know, next thing you know, there’s iceberg ahead. I need more power, Captain. I mean, they just had so little time. Yeah. So little time. If I recall… I think they had like one kilometer, and the ship barely starts turning at about a half kilometer, and they had no chance of not sidescraping that iceberg.
SPEAKER 02 :
It’s a good reminder, Fred, that human perception is limited. And by the way, Fred, we talk about human perception and vision as if seeing is simple, but it’s not simple. Vision depends on contrast, edges, motion, background illumination, and expectations. And the lookouts, they weren’t scanning a brightly lit harbor. They were peering into the black, cold, dark, trying to detect a dark object against a dark background. with very limited optical cues. And there’s another lesser-known possibility here, Fred. Some researchers have suggested that unusual atmospheric conditions were present that night, and they may have caused a kind of an optical distortion, basically bending light in a way that made it even harder to see until the iceberg was very close.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, so they were operating near the limits of human visual detection. And that ought to affect how we think about the ship’s speed because a vessel moving quickly in a known ice region at night is relying heavily on early detection. And if early detection is impaired, then speed becomes a much more serious variable. Honestly, we’re not even sure that if they had binoculars, would that have made a difference? Maybe, but who knows, Doug? Yeah.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, the bottom line is they did have intel on icebergs in the water, but they steamed ahead full. Apparently, there were scheduling pressures, the prestige of maintaining the progress of the ship, confidence that they had in the ship, confidence in their lookouts. Maybe overconfidence in the conditions it was so calm. Perhaps it was just a combination, Fred. But whatever the psychological reasons, the simple physical reality was this. The faster the ship traveled, the less time they had between detection and impact.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, and that’s another key point for listeners. Speed doesn’t just increase impact energy. It also reduces decision time, as you said. It compresses the whole chain of human response. Detection, recognition, communication, helm action, engine response, ship inertia, turning radius. All of that gets squeezed. So even a few extra knots can make a significant difference in whether you miss the hazard, glance it, or strike it. Yeah, well said. The Titanic, it’s a really large ship with tremendous momentum. Even after the lookout spotted the iceberg and the warning was relayed, the ship could not pivot like a speedboat. It’s not, yeah, it’s not a, what are those things called, PT boats? Yeah, no, no. This thing was huge, especially in its day. I mean, current cruise liners are much bigger, but this is still nevertheless a really big ship. People, you know, they sometimes imagine the steering wheel and instant response, but that’s not how a vessel of that scale behaves. And so, Doug, once the iceberg was finally seen at close range, the available options, they just were constrained by physics.
SPEAKER 06 :
Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I want to look at what the collision actually did, because I know that’s always really interesting. What was the damage? Is there science we can look at behind that?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, because we’ve seen the wreck, right? I mean, there has been some analysis of the damage, right?
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, absolutely. There’s a lot of new interesting stuff. But before we do that, Doug… We need to do our interesting fact of the week.
SPEAKER 02 :
I thought I heard you going that way. That’s why I was trying to come up with an interesting question. All right, Fred, the interesting fact of the week. Okay.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay. Here’s the interesting fact of the week. Why did the Titanic leave behind shoes and clothing, but no bones?
SPEAKER 02 :
No bones? No bones. So you’re saying when they found the wreck in 1985, they located shoes and clothing, but no bones.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah. And the areas where they thought, okay, the bones would have been there. It’s not like the shoes. Okay.
SPEAKER 02 :
Wow. I mean, the obvious, the only obvious thing I can think of, Fred, is that sea creatures ate the bones.
SPEAKER 04 :
I can maybe give you a partial credit for that one because… So you’re partially right, okay? Okay.
SPEAKER 02 :
It’s just, it’s not going to be fish, is it?
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, so I’m very trigger happy with the orange little button here. So basically, so deep sea scavengers, you know, like tiny crustaceans and amphipods, They’re going to strip away the soft tissue very quickly. I mean, I’ve got in my saltwater tank, I’ve got a cleaner crew, they’re called, like snails and clams and whatnot, and they clean your tank. Same thing in the deep sea. You’ve got cleaner crews, like these crustaceans and amphipods. They’ll just demolish whatever soft tissue’s around. And they do it, literally, they can do it in just days. But that’s not really what… got rid of the bones. And that’s why I was very happy to hit the orange button here. So basically over time, the chemistry of the deep ocean finishes the job. So the water is slightly acidic and low in the minerals needed. to preserve bone. So it actually pulls calcium out of the skeleton. There’s an imbalance of calcium carbonate. So we could get into all kinds of chemistry here. But basically the bones just slowly dissolve. And, you know, I saw one analogy. It’s like… If you’ve got a cup of coffee with a lot of sugar in it, you put more sugar. The sugar doesn’t really, the extra sugar doesn’t dissolve right away because there’s already sugar in the coffee. But if you put sugar in coffee that doesn’t have sugar, the sugar is going to dissolve pretty quickly. So in an environment in the deep sea like that, that is lower in calcium carbonate, the surrounding chemistry is just going to want to absorb calcium. you know, those bones. And so it doesn’t take long. I mean, it’s not days, it’s longer, but it’ll definitely pull the, you know, pull the calcium out of the skeleton over time.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, Fred, that’s interesting. That brings up another interesting Bible fact. I know in the Bible, God says at the end, he’s going to bring up all the dead from the sea, even though there’s not either bones aren’t even there. So that’s pretty impressive. Yeah, yeah, definitely. All right. Now, let’s get back to the Titanic. Okay, yeah, so I’m going to take a partial credit on that in that some creatures might have been responsible for some of that. Okay, I’ll take whatever I can get, Fred. But let’s get to this. You know, there’s this persistent myth. In fact, it’s what I thought, Fred. was that this iceberg just ripped a giant gash through the side of the ship, you know, like a knife opening up a can. But that’s not really the best understanding anymore, is it?
SPEAKER 04 :
You know, the evidence suggests the damage was more like a series of smaller openings and deformations along the hull seams. over a stretch of the forward side. So that distinction matters because it changes how we picture the flooding. It wasn’t necessarily one huge open wound. It was a distributed failure across multiple points, enough to admit water into several compartments that you referred to earlier, this new technology of compartments in the ship that was supposed to make it unsinkable. So for the ship’s design, that was exactly the kind of multi-compartment flooding scenario that it could not ultimately survive.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, so we see again, Fred, basically a theme of cumulative failure. A lot of disasters, not one spectacular break. They’re the accumulation of several smaller failures together across the threshold of time. And each breach… Pretty modest in and of itself, but in combination, they become lethal.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, and I know Dwayne would be just chomping at the bit if he was around for the Titanic to be doing his failure analysis. Yeah, so distributed damage can be especially dangerous because it affects multiple safety zones at once. If all the damage had been concentrated in one place… The flooding would have been contained, but by extending damage across too many compartments, the collision defeated the ship’s compartment strategy. So in a sense, the pattern of the damage mattered as much as the size. And I just, you know, this designer of the Titanic, I can just imagine when he’s designing it, he’s probably not thinking, you know, what are the odds of something scraping along and taking out everything? All these compartments on one side because he’d probably even be thinking maybe even a – I don’t know if they even invented torpedoes back then. But hitting something, you just kind of picture, okay, something rams into it. It’s not going to sink. But you think of these scattered holes down the front side of the ship that just gets to that fifth one and then the sixth one. It just makes it impossible to stay. Yeah.
SPEAKER 02 :
afloat yeah yeah yeah and that that brings us now fred to one of the more scientific aspects of the whole story the materials people often assume hey steel is steel as if all steel behaves always the same but that’s not how material science works you know especially in cold temperatures right
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, you know Superman, the man of steel. He had his kryptonite. Well, steel has its kryptonite. And so the steel used in 1912 was not identical to the modern shipbuilding steel. Its material composition, manufacturing methods, impurity levels, and toughness all matter. And one of the key concepts here, Doug, is… Brittleness at low temperatures. A material that performs adequately in warm conditions may behave much more poorly in cold conditions, especially under impact loading. Rather than deforming plastically and absorbing energy, it may crack or fail more abruptly.
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh, yeah, yeah. And from what I understand, some analyses of steel that was actually recovered from the Titanic indicated that it had properties that made it less tough in icy North Atlantic conditions. Less than modern steel would be. There’s issues like higher sulfur and phosphorus content. compared to what you’d want today. And the material was more susceptible to brittle fracture.
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s right. And I want to play a quick video from Yale Labs on this very thing.
SPEAKER 01 :
The sea water was 28 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 2 degrees Celsius. These temperatures are colder than freezing. Now, had the Titanic been in slightly warmer waters, the metal would have been ductile. So a collision with the iceberg would have caused a dent or a buckling, sort of like you would see in a car accident. But at those frigid temperatures, the metal acted like it was more like an eggshell. Now let’s look at this behavior in action. I want to show you how you can drastically change a metal’s properties based on the temperature it experiences. Now this is not exactly what happened to the Titanic, but you’ll see a drastic effect. Here I have a bobby pin. It’s made out of high carbon steel, and it’s very, very flexible. Let’s see what happens when I heat this up and then cool it very quickly. All right, let’s do that. I’m gonna heat it to red hot with this blowtorch, and then we’re gonna quench it in the water. Let’s see what happens. See, it’s red hot. Quench it in the water. Now, let’s see what happens if we pull this apart. Wow, that took almost nothing.
SPEAKER 04 :
So for those listening on the radio, she took the bobby pin and just easily pulled it apart, didn’t have to do anything. I mean, it just shows, Doug, how brittle it was. It’s fair to say that the materials were less forgiving under cold impact conditions than in modern marine engineering. We’ve gotten better at metallurgy and all this stuff. And then, Doug, you have the rivets. They were really critical, some of which they may have been wrought iron with slag inclusions and varying quality. And if those fasteners fail under stress, plates can separate or distort more readily. I saw one YouTube video. It’s kind of like a zipper just coming apart and ripping apart all those rivets bursting out.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, and that’s fascinating, Fred, because now the story becomes more nuanced. It wasn’t that the iceberg sliced cleanly through the hull, you know, like a razor. It may be that the collision caused these seams to open, to pop open, rivets to pop, you know, local failures. And then they propagate through the brittle metal in a piecemeal way, which is exactly the sort of thing a layman would not imagine, but Fred, an engineer or a material scientist, would appreciate that.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, and I wanted to expand a little bit more on this point about materials. So people sometimes think as though steel is practically invincible, but as we’ve shown, steel has environmental limits. And in the Titanic’s case, cold made the whole materials and rivets less forgiving under impact. And if you recall the World Trade Center investigations, Doug, I found that really interesting. They found that at very high temperatures, steel experiences major loss of strength and stiffness. And this came from NIST. And that thermal expansion also played a major role in failure behavior. So I wanted to show this next video. And this thing went viral. And it shows exactly what steel does at very high temperatures to, again, give a picture of how steel behaves. at the different varying temperatures. So let’s take a look at this video.
SPEAKER 05 :
And I want you to see something very interesting. Going to the forge. It’s very hot, but not melted. Obviously it is not melted. I put this in the oven. Now watch this. I’m going to take my pinky finger, my pinky finger, half inch solid steel. Check it out. It’s a freaking noodle. Your argument is invalid. Get over it.
SPEAKER 03 :
Hey, we’re running out of time in this broadcast, so go to our website to catch the rest of this program, realsignsradio.com.
SPEAKER 06 :
Scholars can’t explain it all away. Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God.
SPEAKER 1 :
Tune into Real Science Radio. Turn up the Real Science Radio. Keeping it real.
