# TEDx: The Pokédex Doesn't Make Any Sense

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Tom Rocks Maths
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOTOMGhVnS4
- **Дата:** 17.05.2026
- **Длительность:** 14:50
- **Просмотры:** 3,583

## Описание

Oxford and Cambridge Mathematician Dr Tom Crawford explains why the Pokédex is the perfect tool to learn mathematical modelling. Recorded live at TEDx Habs Elstree February 2025. 

Thanks to Habs Boys School for recording and editing the video. 

Dr Tom Crawford teaches undergraduate Maths at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge - Robinson College.

Produced by Dr Tom Crawford at the University of Oxford. Tom is Public Engagement Lead at the Oxford University Department of Continuing Education: https://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/profiles/tom-crawford

For more maths content check out Tom's website https://tomrocksmaths.com/ 

You can also follow Tom on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @tomrocksmaths.

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## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOTOMGhVnS4) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

I'm today going to tell you all about Pokemon, about the Pokedex, but also how thinking about Pokemon, and in fact any video game or fictional setting, how thinking about it from a mathematical perspective can actually help you to understand it and to learn some interesting things. What does it mean uh to be a Pokemaniac? Well, other than again wearing this t-shirt in public, it also means that you likely read the Pokedex. Pokedex is your encyclopedia in the video game. Uh it looks like this. It contains the information about all the Pokemon creatures. It will tell you their height, their weight, and you get little stories about them as well. I remember, you know, I was uh six getting a Game Boy Pocket for Christmas, tiny little black and white Game Boy Pocket, and playing Pokemon Red uh for the first time. And I obviously enjoyed the game, but I was actually more interested in learning about all of the Pokemon. So, this is scrolling through the original 150 Pokemon entries. You see uh various pictures of those creatures. And there were 150 in generation one, but by the end we actually end up with 1,025 fictional creatures, Pokemon. Uh and again, being the Pokemaniac, I have read all 1,025 entries. But not only did I read all of their entries, I was actually mathematically analyzing them subconsciously in my brain. I'm going to show you some of the most interesting things uh that I found out, and show you why I think the Pokedex doesn't make sense. Uh so, the first one uh is a Pokemon called Wailord. And Wailord is a giant whale. Right? It looks like a whale. It even says in its description that it is a float Wailord Pokémon. So, it clearly lives in the ocean. It describes it breaking through the surface of the water and crashing down on ocean. Uh and then if you look at the um cartoons, the anime, again, it clearly lives in the ocean. It is meant to be a whale creature. However, when I saw the preview of the trailer, maybe some of you spotted this. There was something not correct about and I will show you what I mean in just a moment because the numbers, the maths, it just doesn't actually make sense. It doesn't add up. And the key thing is actually related to the size of Wailord and its weight. So, this creature lives in the ocean. And so, what does it mean to live in the ocean? It means your density is similar to that of sea water. So, if you look at this chart showing the density of various creatures that live in the ocean, density is mass divided by volume. So, it's in kilograms per meters cubed. So, the ocean has a density there of 1,030. So, then if you look at a human, me, and this is how we are representing humans, uh the density of humans is 985. So, what this means is we as humans, we sometimes float if we increase our density by breathing in air, and we sometimes sink if we breathe out and lower our density. So, again, our density is very similar to the density of the ocean. Um then if you look at something which lives on the bottom of the ocean, uh so, a crab, it has a density higher than 1,030. It's in 1,200s. That's why crabs live on the bottom. They sink cuz their density is more than that of the water. Um and then if you look at actual whales, um so, sperm whales are about 950, uh and the humpback whale is about 1,032. So, all of these creatures that live in the ocean have a density close to 1,000. That's the key thing to keep in your head cuz we're going to work out the density of this Wailord Pokémon which apparently lives in the ocean. So, it should have a density of about 1,000. So, to work out the density we need to know the mass and the volume. Now, the mass of Wailord is given in the Pokédex. As I said, it lists this uh this information. So, the mass is 398 kg. So, it's pretty heavy. Um and then we need to know its volume. So, we need to work out what is the volume, how much of this whale do we have? Now, unfortunately, there isn't a formula for the volume of a whale shape. Um so, we're going to have to approximate. So, I'm going to claim that it's about a cylinder. Uh and we're going to do some mathematical modeling pretending our Wailord is a cylindrical shape. We can now work out its volume. So, the Pokédex tells us the length of the whale is 14 and 1/2 m and has a radius there of 2. 9 m. So, we can work out the volume using our formula pi times the radius squared times the height and that gives us 383

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOTOMGhVnS4&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

m cubed. So, if we now work out the density, remember it's the mass divided by the volume, we actually get an answer there of about one. Now, remember, to live in the ocean your density needs to be about 1,000. So, not only is Wailord so low in density that it would float on the surface of the ocean cuz that's certainly less than the density of the ocean. There's no way it could actually dive in the water. It's actually so light, so low in density, that it's actually less than air. And so, more accurately, it would float into the sky like the giantest balloon. Again, [snorts] the Pokédex doesn't make any sense. You have a whale that's a slice of an ass that apparently lives in the ocean. So, somebody at Nintendo at Pokémon didn't do their math, do their calculations to check what's happening with this Pokémon. There were plenty more. So, going back, also we've got Pokémon HeartGold. It's a Pokémon called Blaziken, which is a fire chicken, I believe is its name to these. And they claim that this Pokémon can jump over a 30-story building. So, a 30-story building is about 100 m. So, I thought, again, let's analyze this. Does that feel reasonable? So, this Pokémon is human-sized. Okay, so you can see there it got 6-ft tall and weighs just over 100 lbs. So, it's approximately human-sized. So, what I thought was, let's look at what is the highest ever jump recorded by a human. So, I actually got a video of this. So, this is Darius Clark. He's a basketball player in the United States. Set a new world record jump there of 1. 27 m, which is quite frankly incredible, but it's not 100 m. Apparently, this Pokémon can jump. So, then I thought, well, maybe it's to do with gravity. So, if on Earth we have a human that can jump 1. 27 m with gravity strength of gravity of 9. 8, then if we actually want to jump 100 m, we can reduce gravity and see how weak the gravity have to be for a human to jump a 30-story building. Again, if this Pokémon is able to do that. So, we want to work out what is this unknown amount of gravity. So, in order to do that, we actually going to divide through those two numbers to get 78. And then if we divide gravity by that, we need a gravitational strength of 0. 125. So, to make gravity weaker, you go to a smaller planet. None of the planets are small enough. So, then you think, "Okay, what about moons? " So, if you look at the strength of gravity on the moon, the one that's orbiting the Earth, that's about 1. 6. So, it's still about 10 times too big. So, you actually have to go all the way out to Saturn. One of the moons of Saturn, it's about 500 km across. It's called Enceladus. And it has a gravity which is weak enough that a human, you or I, could go to this moon and jump 100 m into the air just using our human-sized legs. So, I think it's actually more likely that Blastoise can live on Enceladus, the moon of Saturn. The only problem is it's very cold. It's actually -198° C. So, our fire kicking would be frozen solid. And so, we wouldn't actually be able to jump even if it were existing in empty space. There are a couple of more examples. Um just to sort of go through these ones quickly. So, we've got Rhydon, one of the original Pokémon. It's like a rock rhinoceros. Um which apparently can destroy a skyscraper by running into it. Um so, here is a skyscraper being destroyed. Um this is actually being blown up with I think 1,000 tons of TNT. Um but it's spectacular, isn't it? So, the tiny building collapses. Um and this is apparently caused by this cute little guy. Um but again, I just want to actually show you the Pokémon's a scale. It's only 3 ft tall. So, it would actually be this tiny little dot that you can't see. I had to add the arrow to point out the scale. So, yeah, that tiny little dot apparently could cause the level of destruction you've just seen in that video. Again, it doesn't feel very believable. It doesn't really make sense. Um Bewear. So, there's a clearly a man inside of it. is a cute bear Pokémon, as you can see, but there's a warning. There's a reason it's called Bewear. It's telling you beware of this Pokémon. It tells you that it will try and hug you, but don't let it do that because that force could shatter your bones. Now, I looked up so you don't have to how much force it takes to shatter a

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOTOMGhVnS4&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 14:00)

human bone or shatter a human spine is 3,000 Newtons, which is actually equivalent to crushing a car at 30 mph into a brick wall. So, as cute as this Pokémon may look, again, apparently when it gives you a hug, it's the same as being in a car wreck. So, as cute as it might look, avoid this Pokémon at all costs. There are plenty more that I'd like to show you from the 1,025, but I wanted to end with a final example, which is my favorite of the lot because this is the most ridiculous, the one that makes the least sense of all of these Pokédex entries. And that is a Pokémon called Magcargo. Now, Magcargo, according to Pokédex, as you can see, is a 3-ft tall snail made of fire. And it tells you there in the description that this Pokémon has a temperature of 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit. So, I thought, well, what is the hottest thing in our solar system? It's the sun. So, the sun is half as hot as this 3-ft tall snail. So, we have a 3-ft tall snail that's two times hotter than the sun. So, I give this as a more accurate representation of the situation. Everything is on fire. But not only is everything on fire, the Pokémon is actually going to be giving out a lot of energy. So, it's going to be releasing energy just as the sun releases energy. Right, we are alive because of the sun. That is So, you know, it's really hot all day and releasing energy and we can calculate how much energy it is actually releasing. So, the formula we're going to use is something called the Stefan-Boltzmann law and it tells you that the energy is equal to a constant C, that's just a base number, multiplied by the temperature to the power four, multiplied by the surface area of your object. So, we know the constant C, it doesn't change. We know the temperature is 18,000° F. What we don't know is the surface area. So, last time we used to know the volume of a whale and I said, "Let's pretend this is a cylinder. " So, now I don't even think this thing is a cylinder. We're going to approximate it to work out surface area. I'm going to play that it's more like a sphere and then we can use the formula the surface area of the sphere. Um and I just wanted to sort of do a brief pause at this point because there is a joke, very famous internet between mathematicians and physicists about assuming animals are spherical. Um so, after it's assuming that they're all spherical penguins. So, physicists are trying to model the world and they say, "Well, let's pretend the penguin is a sphere and then we can work out its surface area. " Just like you were doing here with the snail and with the Pokémon. Um and then I Googled the phrase spherical penguin and found this. And then I scrolled further down the page and found this one. Um this is to say that I think this is a great about the reason. I think a spherical penguin and there's no spherical stater. It's completely reasonable. Um so, assuming it is a sphere, we can work out the surface area, 4π times the radius squared, which gives us a value about two. And when we plug in the numbers, we get that our Pokémon is outputting 1,200 MW of energy. Now, 1200 megawatts, who knows what that means? So, let's compare it to something. So, if you look at the entire power output of the United Kingdom, that's 65,000 megawatts. So, basically, this two-foot-tall snail, if we were to locate 53 of these Pokémon around the country, we've have solved the energy crisis. This is apparently how ridiculous this Pokémon is. But, not only is it giving out energy, it has to absorb energy. The energy has to come from somewhere. So, as a final thought, in order to output this amount of energy, how much would you have to feed your snail-shaped Pokémon? So, you would have to feed it 1,267 Mars bars every second to create this amount of energy that's going to empower the entire country of the UK. So, to go back to my initial point, um the Pokédex doesn't make any sense, but I, for one, this is the reason I actually fell in love with this game, and it actually taught me how to model the world, how to use maths to make sense of the world. So, it's no wonder that I'm a Pokémon maniac. Thank you very much. —

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/52244*