Wait, you're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. Shorts from WNYC. The C.
N.P.R. Hi. Can you guys hear us? I think our mic's around, but the gear is not on for some reason.
Except for the guitar amp. Hey everybody, Chad here. This is Radio Lab, the podcast. Good morning everyone.
Okay, so we have just released our latest season of shows. To the radio, I mean it's already on the podcast. But right now, across the country on NPR's stations, our latest season of shows is airing, so last week we had an event, which we want to play for you in this podcast, at this little patch of sand across the East River called the Water Taxi Beach. It's really cool.
You can sit on sand and eat hot dogs and drink beer and pretend you're on the beach, but the skyscrapers are right there. Quite surreal. Anyways, it was sort of a crappy day, weather-wise, so we didn't get too lucky on that account, but we were lucky to have a couple hundred people in the audience, and they might be giants. The music group, on stage with us.
Now, for whatever reason, they might be giants has decided, you know, after a bizillion records a bunch of hits, did they want to make a record for kids about science? We thought, well, science. I mean, come on. That's what we did.
Oh, hey! Oh, hey! Sort of. Well, let me welcome everybody who's raised the clouds and the potential of downpour, which there hasn't been yet, and probably won't be.
No chance. So we decided to, here's the deal. This is the beginning of our fifth season on Radio Lab, so we're going to, we're going to be right now. Last week was the first one, this Friday's the second one, but when we were trying to figure out how to do this, we realized that while we have been like the science people.
You know, at this point we were kind of pros. We were kind of pros. We were kind of pros. We heard that there were these musicians that decided to do, like, they have an album called, yeah.
Here comes science. Never mind that here already is science. So, yeah. So we thought we would invite them just to check them out and maybe put them through the, because we know so much and they apparently know so little.
So that was the thought we had. They're called, they might be giants. The tentative title. And what do you guys want to introduce yourselves?
My name is John Flansberg. This is Mr. Marty Bell around the drums. Ladies and gentlemen.
Marty, I'm John Linnell over here. Do you guys introduce yourselves, by the way? No, we didn't. Chad.
We were just excited. It was more of a calling, really? We were called, can I give you the same answer? No, because eventually that will be true for us.
Well, we have a long history in doing fact-based songs. So that was probably the thing that made us think that was a natural leap to actually doing, you know, tackling some more serious scientific stuff. This is serious scientific stuff. Super heavy.
Super heavy. Could you just play one? I don't just start. You want to set it up though?
Do you want to set up the song? This song is about evolution and it's called My Brother the Ape. Okay. Alright.
Well, I got the invitation that you sent to everyone. Don't your family burn exactly my idea of fun. My Brother the Ape. I received the photo of the scientist.
Oh, he's still in the whole heart. He's wrecked. That's he stars. My Brother the Ape.
I've got you guys. Though I think of all the same here. We'll meet at least. My Brother the Ape.
That was the name of the Giants playing My Brother the Ape off their latest CD. Here comes Science. I have to confess we actually played you that song from their album, not from the last one. It's because we had some technical difficulties with that song in the recording.
So just on that song we're going to go with the album version. Henceforth everything will be live. And I don't know if you caught the lyrics, but it's a song about a family reunion where everybody has invited, including you, your Brother the Ape, your sister the cow, and this brotherly sisterliness. Cause Robert and I have two masters of science.
Well, two wonder. If you're doing like the science, then we could call attention to, why should I, I mean, there's a guy in this audience I think who's a science teacher at high school here in New York. And he wrote us a little note. And I just, you know, it's not like I want to, you know, but.
Publicly embarrasses. He says, you know, in science textbooks the closest that any author gets to a human family relationship is to call the Ape's cousins. Now I don't want to bore you with the subtleties of cladistics. Cholesterolistic by the way is a sort of biological system of representing ancestry.
Yeah. Our ancestors have been separated from other apes for four million years. Most likely the only brother we could claim would be a bipedal standing ape called the Neanderthal, but an ape. Well, let me ask you.
Hold on my helicopter's coming. Let me ask you, did you, when you say my brother the ape, did you mean brother in a cladistic sense? Or was it more in the kind of brother with an ape? My very familiar close associate, the ape.
Well, I guess it's, I mean, in some ways Robert, you actually, I think at one point, in the letter it's, it's, it's where we humans are in fact also apes. So it wouldn't be correct to say my brother. In fact, you could say myself, the ape. You could say not being correct.
That's true. But did you ever, did you ever? In some case it's more accurate. Interesting, retort, giants.
I've got a small technical note about the letter where it says, four million, like it's a... Long time. As everyone who knows who's ever seen a filmstrip, in science four million years is a very short time. Right.
Unless you're watching a filmstrip for those four million years. Wait a second. I'm starting to feel like we're losing this little situation here, Robert. Well, then let me just get tougher still.
or let Aaron say he's in there somewhere. This high school science teacher writes, it might be cozy to believe that we're similar to every other living thing, but we're incredibly distant from moss. So distant, it's difficult to find connections unless you look really, really closely. In fact, I could argue a dehydrated rotifer in suspended animation has more in common with a rock, says Aaron Sand, than with a human.
So what he's questioning here is just, how careful, like you have a science guy, a science guy? Yeah, we actually brought in a consultant to basically fact check the stuff that we were doing. And he was very helpful and he was very supportive. But with his name.
His name was Eric Siegel, he's actually the director of the New York Hall of Science in Queens. Oh, I'll tell you, probably in Calgary. How did that work? Did you play music in the social world?
The internet. You never met Eric Siegel. I've never met him. So he could be the guy who wrote the book about love from in 1960.
Wasn't there an Eric Siegel who wrote a love story? A love story, yeah. I think that guy was spelled differently. Okay, yeah.
You really had to fact check your songs? Yeah, yeah. Was there any moment? 14th album, first time fact check.
That is kind of a new experience for rock and roll, is this fact? Technically against the rules. Do you feel a little less rock and? Well, in rock music, sometimes songs have premises.
Like there's going to be a jailbreak somewhere in this town. And when you hear a song like that, you think maybe that should have been fact checked. I mean, the jailbreak is going to be near the jail or in the jail. You know.
Great song. So what's Eric's really easy? Do you think? Well, he's got a strong liberal arts background, I think.
And apparently he let this, my brother, the eighth thing through. So who fact checks the fact check? Well, well, I mean, there was one experience where we were doing the song, Why Does the Sunshine? Which is a song that we recorded many years ago.
It's actually one of the very first science based songs that we did. And it was a cover from the 50s. And that song is no longer factually correct. Before we de-factify it, can we hear it?
Yes. Can you please? You got the setup? I think it would go something like this.
I think it would go something like this. The sun is a mess of incandescent gas. A gigantic nucleophorus, where hydrogen is built into helium. At a temperature of millions of degrees.
Yo, how it's hot. The sun is not a place where we could live. But here on Earth, there'd be no light. Without the light it gives.
We'd need it, it's like we'd need it. We'd need it's energy. Without the sun, without a doubt. There'd be no you and me.
The sun is a mess of incandescent gas. A gigantic nucleophorus, where hydrogen is built into helium. At a temperature of millions of degrees. The sun is hot.
The sun is so hot that everything on it is a gas, aluminum, copper, iron, and many others. The sun is low. With this unrollable million Earths, we'd fit inside. And yet the sun is only a middle-sized star.
The sun is far away. It's about 93 million miles away. And that's why it looks so small. But even when it's out of sight.
The sun shines night and day. We'd need it's heat. We'd need it's light. The sunlight that we see.
The sunlight comes from our own sun. Atomic energy. The sun is about that the sun is a huge atom smashing machine. The heat and light of the sun are caused by the nuclear reactions between.
Sand. Fake palm trees with neon lights in them. Helicopters that are flying too low. And helium.
The sun is a mass of it. It doesn't cast the gigantic nucleophiles. Where hydrogen is built into helium. At a temperature of millions of degrees.
Thank you. A beautiful song. No doubt. Based on an Irish folk song.
But the publishing still comes through for the original authors. What do you get the text? And the text is from the colliers encyclopedia, the Golden Book encyclopedia. I'm sure that information is available online.
Literally word for word from me. Well, the opening lines of the song, which is sort of don't, is the word scansion? They don't have any metric. The sun is a massive incandescent gas which I get to nuclear furnace.
Where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees. Is the opening paragraph describing the sun in these active media. And most of the song is actually pretty much actually correct. It turns out.
Which part is wrong? In the part where John was talking about sand. That was wrong. And in the spoken word part right there, it lists what the sun is composed of.
And basically, evidently, the sun is composed of two things and not much else. And it's a long list of things that are very marginal. That was one thing that Eric pointed out. We actually completely rerecord the song confident that after 15 years of performing in front of the drums that this song was actually, factually fine.
And that seems like that. That is an assumption. Tonight there's going to be a jailbreak, my friend. Somewhere near this town.
But just so I understand what was wrong with that song that you're just saying, it's the part that he didn't say. Well, there was one other major problem with the song which actually only came to light after the song was written, which is that the sun is in fact not a mass of incandescent gas. Oh, that was the real problem. Well, it was assumed, you know, this is like many things in science which is it's an ever-changing, ever-evolving world.
The sun is not gas. The sun is plasma. The sun is a mass of incandescent plasma? Is that the...
It could have been that. So what did you just change the word? Well, we actually, we'd already finished the video, so it was too late. And the video was really good and it was made by this crazy, wonderful animator in Canada.
And she actually makes everything like on her, like totally handmade. So basically she would just start, she would be crying for three months. Why did she have animated gas and she would think that? No, no, no, it sounds like beautiful puppets and stuff.
It was personal. So we wanted to save that project. So we actually, we just fixed up the little bit of the lyrics that we could to make it slightly more accurate. And then we did what in the proud tradition of country, western acts, we actually did an answer song to our own song.
But before we get to the answer song, what little changes could you make to a real bopper? Like the sun is not a mass of incandescent. I mean, you had to put not or you could find something right with plasma. What else is there but as asthma?
Me asthma. I say me asthma. Cazba? Cazba.
The song that we came up with, which was prompted by a recording engineer who was actually just listening to us having a free range grumble session about this whole dilemma. He said why don't you just write a song called the sun is a mass of incandescent plasma? He just said that. He's really smart.
Wow. He says stuff like that. He's a Berklee college music grad. He's got perfect pitch.
It's very intimidating. It's not as plain as everything, right? Yeah. So you're writing an answer song.
So we've written an answer song to ourselves. That's just kind of a way to redeem ourselves within the scientific community. We're not just like sloughing off the facts but also not losing, you know. So for those of us who are not entirely familiar with the concept of answer song and answer song is where you say you stupid, stupid, stupid person who is also singing this song right now, you were wrong then and now that he said it right, I'm in?
Kind of thing. You must be listening to more rap answers songs. I was going to say that's more like in the rock, the rock, sand, rock, sand kind of. This isn't about like a beef that we have with ourselves.
Well, it sounds like it isn't a way because you have a beef with your former selves. It's like an East West plasma. Glass. Black feud.
Glass. Whole gas. Maybe we should hear your answer song. Sure.
Yeah. Right. We're experimenting with becoming haters here. Right.
But what kind of a song would finish with? Forget that song plasma, exclamation point. They got it wrong. That thesis has been rendered invalid.
What? We got the publishing on the second song. So we're really pushing it out. Yeah.
We got a problem with that. You know, my thing is, OK, and this is perhaps an appropriate question to ask on a sunless day, such as this. But I'm not sure I really understand the sun any better now. Oh, you understand it.
Oh, yeah. It is. Well, I didn't even know what plasma was when we started writing. What does it mean?
Asma. What does that mean? Asma is like a fog with a slightly noxious quality. You only know that because you looked it up earlier.
Yeah. That's not really nice. You know. With a slightly noxious quality?
I didn't know about that either. Apparently, it's something like a toxic. I thought it was just like a mess. A mess.
A mess. No, it's apparently the new song is just as completely misguided as the original. It's not a measma of anything. So it's a fourth state of this is like, but it's a fourth state of matter is correct.
That part is a fourth state of matter. Not gas. That's the first state, not liquid, not solid. So it's something else.
It's like a fourth one. Yes. So that's the answer. But what is the fourth state?
Well, I can give you a little quick explanation. Solid, the molecules are packed tight. They don't move. Yeah.
Liquid, they're over there. They're super amorous. Gas, they're moving very freely. And with a plasma, apparently they're so free that the electrons have been cut loose from the nucleus.
And that's what makes it. So it's like a gas on steroids. It's a gas on steroids. No, that does nothing for me.
No. I guess the truth is the song, the Sun's Mass, the Condescence Gas was not incorrect by the scientific standards of 1960 when it was written. It's just as we learn more, our theories and ideas have to evolve. But in making fact-based rock and roll, you're stepping into this sort of scientific revision of that.
So you're going to have to keep doing this. There's going to be a fourth answer song, fifth one. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, don't do a song about Pluto. You did do a song about Pluto. Yeah. Actually, it also has a question mark in the title.
Yeah. But it doesn't actually commit to whether Pluto is or isn't a planet. Right. See, that's what you can do.
You can say, and other stuff. You can finish the sentence. We can't say, and other stuff. But even when we think we've got it right, you want to tell them?
Yeah, we have just so that we can play both sides for a second. We had a situation in our current season. I don't know if anyone here has heard the Stokestissi show. Okay.
Well, there's a moment in the Stokestissi show. Just to give context, Stokestissi is a wonderfully Latin-ate word that essentially means chaos, randomness. And so we were exploring the chaos and randomness in biology, in cells and in genes. Because apparently, if you look at genes, they're incredibly noisy and chaotic little things.
You expect them to be very ordered. Because we are ordered. We wake up in the morning. Our hearts beat regularly.
Our brains function for healthy, more or less in a predictable way. We wake up at the same time most days and we go to sleep at the same time. So up here, we're very ordered. But down there, it's quite noisy.
So the question is, how do you go from noisy bottom to ordered top? We put that question to a very smart science reporter, Carl Zimmer. And he said, actually, what may happen is the body engineers its own noise filters. And I thought, filters.
Oh my God, I could do something with that. I could call a friend. We could do a whole filter demonstration. So this is what resulted in.
And I played this very thing about to hear. It's just four minutes. Carl Zimmer in the studio just to make sure it was scientifically accurate. And this is what happened.
I'll just give you an example from my world. This is the honest to God's truth. I have a friend named Lily. Hey, Lily.
Hello, Dad. Tell me what you're holding in your hands there. In my hands, I have two audio tapes. Lily just recently called me up.
She said, I've got these two cassette tapes. They're really old. I think they were made in the 70s. I'm on Found in the Metraatic.
And they're of my grandmother. One's labeled Mima Singing. Singing. Singing old slave songs and old hymns.
And the little one's grandmother died last year. She was 99 years old. Wow. And they were really close.
Yeah, very close. So she's got these tapes. She wants to hear them. The problem is, if you put it on for three minutes, you get annoyed.
And there's that weird, like, it's too noisy. I'm just going to go down. She wants to know if I could do something about it. Yeah.
So real quick, here's what I did. I put it into a computer. I launched an EQ program. Found a bass noisiness, which was around 600 hertz.
Dialed that down. Like so. Then I found the high frequencies, which are around 2000 hertz. Dialed that down.
Ah, now as a final step, I just kind of located the voice around 1000 hertz and dialed it up. Okay, so it's not a flawless process. I mean, now she sounds like she's coming out of it well. But for the first time, you can hear her voice.
I don't know. This is the first time I'm hearing the song. It seems like she's describing the night that my grandfather passed away, talking about the doctors telling her that my grandfather's passed. And then she's describing, putting a fern in his hand and she said it should be a rose.
The thing that's applicable here is that we started with this. And then just by bringing certain frequencies down and others up, we ended up with this. This might be how it is in the body. That you've got this noise all the way in the bottom of these genetic circuits, which were spitting out messiness.
But somehow just on top of that are other genetic circuits, which are cleaning it all up. Giving it a shit. Wait, what? Is that not right?
Not quite. Sorry, I'm sorry. Literally what happens. We played that piece to Carl and he didn't quite end.
We did that later. But he was sort of like, well, it's not really that way. And we looked at each other with an absolute terror because I'd spent three days working on this. And it turned out to be completely wrong.
So now we said, well, what are we going to do? So we'll run the problem and then do our answer song. And that's pretty much what we did. So we said, OK, so to close the performance, we thought we would spring one on They Might Be Giants.
You know, just see if we can catch them off guard. Because we have musicians here, we were kind of curious. Do you guys take requests? Yeah.
We can play the songs that we know how to play. Well, because we have a line. We have a line that we just thought, I mean, one of the problems about doing this for a living is you can't just do the science. You've got to kind of give it beats and kind of make it sing.
And we thought we would go look for certain phrases that are so dense that they almost defy beats, defy musicality. So we're going to show you. What a perfect invitation for a song. So, Jad, you want to read this phrase?
Sure. We're wondering if this could be musicified anyway. Quantum decoupling transition in a one dimensional feshbok resonant super fluid. Quantum decoupling transition in a one dimensional feshbok resonant super fluid.
So we thought we were thinking about a quantum decoupling. It sounds kind of like a break up song here. So you could get the side, you know. Quantum decoupling.
So if you hold it for you, why you got it. No, I got it. You guys ready? Hey, Marty Beller, you want to help us?
Sir me. Dump decoupling transition in a one dimensional feshbok resonant super fluid. That was kind of the beat make. The beat make approach.
What if it were sad? Sad. You want sad? Yeah, what if it were like a break up song?
It's a break up. It's decoupling. If it's quantum decoupling transition into a one dimensional feshbok resonant. Guys, hit me with some sad.
Mentional feshbok resonant super fluid. What if it were like, what if you were to kind of emphasize? Yeah. Wait, wait, that was good.
That was pretty amazing. Bring the beat back. What about the quantum? It's neither here nor there.
It's just probability. What about that? Can you do something that's quantum? You want to do this one?
Okay, that means you guys have to provide the actual music. I'm waiting for it to go. Yeah, but what if it was fluid? No, I thought we worked pretty fast before.
We could actually. We can actually. We can wait some more time. All right, so let's just bring it down to the respectable dialogue again.
Now that you've wandered into this thorny neighborhood of science, I'm curious how is that been for you? Writing sounds about things that are completely outside ourselves is actually very fascinating. I think we were a little bit nervous that we were going to be sort of stirring the pot in the fact check department. And that's from the YouTube comments that we received so far, I think we'll be moving over to Friendster now.
Did you have any red state moments? I'm curious. I mean, evolution is being a... Well, there are songs about evolution.
We acknowledge that evolution is, and that's a problem for some people. Should we say goodbye and then put them on the final thing? No, I don't know. What do you guys want to do?
Do you want to explain that? I don't know. Are you going to have other ideas for song? Yeah, we have another song prepared.
It's actually about the elements. Oh, like the elements, the chemical elements. The chemical elements. The chemical elements, like rain and wind and fire.
Not those kind of elements. Yeah. Which makes some days and every living is mostly made of four elements. I are complicated but made of elements like goodbye ain't standard music.
They ever shake day. Well, there you have it. Hope you enjoyed this podcast. I want to thank They Might Be Giants for appearing on stage with us.
Under stormy skies, their new album Here Comes Science Sit Out. How many season is out? I want to thank Michael Rayfield for making the whole thing happen. Aaron Sands, the high school science teacher for Rightness, that letter.
And thank you for listening. And of course on the subject of thanks, got to say, Radio Lab is funded in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation. I'm Chad Abum-Ron. Mr.
K is not here with me at the moment, but he is always here in spirit and he says bye to you. And we'll catch you in two weeks.