Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What Nobel Prizes Have Been Proven Wrong?

Episode Date: February 5, 2019

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Professionally, I started at Death World Records. From Mary Mary to Jennifer Hudson, we get into. the soul of the music and the purpose that drives it. Listen to Culture raises us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So you know, the gold standard in science, the absolute pinnacle you can reach in your career, of course, is the Nobel Prize. Once you get one, people think that you can't make a mistake, that you're a genius, that everything you do is fantastic. It's like a stamp that just on your forehead to say. genius.

That's right. But here's a question, okay? So can the Nobel Prize be wrong? I'm gasping at even the idea, there Jorge, that the highest prize in science could ever, ever have a flaw in it. But apparently it has happened a couple of times in history. Even this very top-level prize in science is sometimes awarded erroneously. Can you get the Nobel Prize in Nobel Prize errors?

Can you get a Nobel Prize for podcasting? The Pod Bill Prize. Hi, I'm Jorge. And I'm Daniel. And I'm a cartoonist, and I do not have a Nobel Prize. I'm a particle physicist, and I also do not have a Nobel Prize. I have fewer than won Nobel Prizes. So Nobel Prize is this amazing cultural icon now, right?

Like, it's kind of the name that means you're a genius. That's right. It's covered in the news. You know, whoever wins it is breathlessly described in the New York Times, and it's announced on television. You know, there's really no other prize like it. Like, if you made a list of the most important prizes in science, you'd be like, number one, Nobel Prize.

number 50 would be the next thing, right? There's just like nothing else that even comes close to it. Yeah, it has good brand recognition across the board. Whoever is running that PR campaign has really earned their money. I don't even know how that's happened.

They should get a Nobel Prize for their marketing efforts. It's the gold standard in science, but today on the program, we're going to ask a pretty controversial question. Can the Nobel Prize be wrong. Has anybody ever won the Nobel Prize for something which turned out to not be good science? Yeah, Nobel Oops. Nobel Oops. And I think this is a really important question. We're not

here to run down science, obviously. We're both scientists and we love science, and science is a fantastic way to explore the universe. But we also don't want to pretend that science is always definitive, right? You do some experiments, you make a claim, even if it's backed up, and then later you win the biggest prize in all of human intellectual achievement. It could still be that you're results are wrong. Yeah, it's amazing to think that the Nobel Prize could be wrong, right? Like, you think that it's done very carefully. Right, but like everything else, it's a human endeavor, right? And anything that's done by humans is most likely sometimes going to be wrong, you know? And it's important as scientists that we don't just enshrine results that a Nobel Prize winning as

definite fact, right? We should always keep an open mind because anything we think is true could turn out later to be wrong or could turn out to have been, you know, just seen the wrong way or true in some circumstances but not generally true. And so I think it's very important that we question these things, that we always look back on what our predecessors have discovered and think could that be wrong? Yeah. And so to kind of show you how crazy this idea is, we went out there and asked people, do you think the Nobel Prize can be wrong? Here's what they had to say. I have no clue of that. Uh, yes.

I haven't heard of any discoveries like that, no. Okay, personally. No, I don't. Okay, yeah, yeah, awesome. I know that it's happened before. I don't have any specific examples, but I know it's happened. Okay, yeah. Great.

I don't. Are there many? Not many, but a few. Are they in physics? Why would you think they're in physics? All right, so overall, still pretty good branding, right? Like, nobody thought the Nobel Prize could be wrong. Like, that just seemed unthinkable to some people.

Yeah, it's shocking. remember, you should have seen these people's faces when I asked them that. Really? Yeah, they were like, what? No, come on. The Nobel Prize is wrong? Did they look at you? They think maybe you were one of these science deniers?

That's right. Yeah. And then there's no evolution, and climate change is a hoax, and the Earth is flat. It's a slippery slope, right? I was kind of worried about this episode. It's like, are we going to be bashing on science in the Nobel Prize? No, but there's a huge difference between saying some of the conclusions of some scientists could be wrong. and saying, like, the very foundations of science are flawed, right?

And it's, in fact, it's the process of science to disprove old results that shows you that science is robust. If no discoveries from Nobel Prize winners had ever been proven to be wrong, then you might be suspicious, right? It's like, do you expect them occasionally to make a mistake or for something later to come out? Right. I think my favorite reaction was the woman who said,

oh, I've never heard of that, but I bet if there were, they would be in physics. Why do you go straight to physics? If anyone's going to make a mistake, it's not the literature people. It's not the economics people who are wrong all the time. It's the physics people. It's not the medicine. Yeah, I know it's got to be the physicists.

Why do you think she went there? Does she know you were a physicist? Like, did you look? Were you dressed like a physicist? I think I look. Well, I mean, that's a question for you, maybe not for me. Do you think I look like a physicist? Like, if you had to pick a physicist out of a crowd,

say that guy over there, he looks like a physicist. I would probably guess poetry or physics. You know, you got the beard, you got the hair. That's insightful because maybe you didn't realize, but I actually do write poetry. Oh, all right. Yeah. Yeah. I should

I recite some of it for you? Yeah, let's just do that for the rest of the episode. Okay, folks, we're switching gears, we're trashing the whole concept of the podcast, we're going into pure poetry. Dan is in trouble with his spouse. He needs to make up some romantic points here. That's right.

I don't know why you're laughing. I'm very serious about my poetry. No, I am not a poet. And this woman certainly did know that I'm a physicist. So that's probably why she guessed. I don't think she was trying to impugn the entire edifice of modern physics. I think she just thought I was leading her on. Oh, all right.

Yeah. Let's start with this question then. If it's possible that it can be wrong, let's talk about how Nobel Prizes are awarded. Do you know what the process is for who gets one, who gets nominated, who decides who gets a Nobel Prize? Yeah, I think the gates of heaven open and the angels sing, and it just sort of descends on this glowing cloud. It says, you, you have won it. Noble himself flies down.

That's right. Little golden wings, you know, and just little hands. Right. I mean, I think people would like to believe that, right? People would like to think that there's something greater, something superhuman, something above us that's like, you know, anointing these geniuses. But in the end, it's just people, right? It's got to be people.

Obviously, there's no other way to do it. Well, it's not just people. It's Swedes, right? I mean, they are kind of heavenly. I don't know how to take that comedy. Not just people, it's Swedes. They're kind of superhuman, it's what I mean. They are angelic.

Oh, I see. You're saying Swedes are basically the best of us. No, it's not just sweets. Okay, so it's concentrated in Scandinavia. But so this is a two-step process, right? So the first step is you've got to get nominated, okay? And to be nominated, you have to be either nominated by somebody on the Nobel Prize Committee or a member of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, or you have to have a Nobel Prize, right?

Or there's like a select group of other people who they will take nominations from, basically like, you know, internationally famous physicists from around the world. Right. So all those Nobel Prize winning listeners. we have out there, you should tell them your name and your address, right? That's right. It's a very select group. And, you know, they've done these studies where they say, like, what's the best way to get a Nobel Prize? Well, it's to have your advisor win the Nobel Prize or, you know, to work for somebody who has the Nobel Prize because then they can

nominate you, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's like the oldest boy of the oldest boy clubs in the world, right? It's definitely a little group of self-reinforcing accolades. Oh. So you have to be, you have to get a novice. So people have to know your work and you have to sort of know somebody in the note. Yeah, exactly. You have to be nominated. So then you're on the list, right? And you're on the list of people they consider. And then, you know, the Nobel Prize Committee, which is a bunch of Swedes and, you know, maybe some other folks from Scandinavia, they get together and they discuss it and they argue about it. And, you know, they solicit input from the people they know. But in the end, it's subjective, you know. Like, how do you compare discovery A versus discovery B? Every piece of research is totally different. It's not like there's some metric you can use to give them points where it's really fair to establish. And even if it were, it's still subjective. It's still like, how important is this?

How groundbreaking is it? How innovative is it? Well, what's the standard? What's supposed to be the standard? The standard is greatest contribution to humankind, right? Yeah, exactly. And I think that those are the words originally in the will, right? But I think more recently the committee is focused on things that are like,

like deep innovations or things that would change the direction of the field, right? Truly like ground-shaking discoveries. And in physics, at least, it's sort of alternated between, like, crazy theoretical ideas that turned out to be correct, even if they haven't really had any impact on humanity, like the Higgs boson, right? If you don't know where the Higgs boson is, you can listen to our whole podcast episode about that. But recently, people won the Nobel Prize for the Higgs-Boson because it was discovered at the large Hageon Collider. It hadn't really had any impact on human. other than you know people hearing about it but it's it's a big breakthrough in theoretical physics yeah

it's a big deal it's a big deal and then sometimes it's something very practical you know like inventing a new technology like blue LEDs that won the Nobel Prize really years ago blue LEDs yeah not the red ones that's a Nobel Prize no not the yellow not the green not the cyan no not the turquoise the blue LEDs you imagine being the discover of the red LED and being like What the, what? Come on. I spent all my time on the purple LEDs. What a mistake.

Oh my God. You're a pig blue. No, blue was particularly difficult because of that wavelength. And so there was a lot of interesting innovation along the way. It's not just like, hey, we really needed this technology and they figured it out. There was some interesting physics going on inside the blue LEDs. But in the end, it's political. It's chosen by a committee of people.

Chosen by a committee of people. And people campaign. you know what there are yeah you know this is a group of this is just a community people and they talk and they chat and when the prizes are coming up and the decisions are being made you hear people if you're in the physics community you hear people talking maybe blah should get it maybe blah blah should get it and they and people go around and give presentations and i remember when everybody knew that the higgs boson discovery was going to yield a Nobel prize the following year and people were jostling for position because we knew also that you could only

only give it to three people. So everybody knew Higgs was going to get it. That was for sure. And the question was, who are the other two theorists that were going to win it? Yeah, because there are rules to the Nobel Prize, right?

Like, you can only pick at most three people for a discovery, and they all have to be alive. They all have to be alive, exactly. And there were, you know, there was Higgs, of course.

And then there was a couple of other people, who everybody agrees, make contributions sort of at the same level of Higgs. but then one of them died. So there was sort of like an empty slot. And a lot of folks, a lot of the folks in the theoretical physics community

started going around giving seminars about how important their work was in that era and the contributions they made to the Higgs boson discovery. Because it can be kind of fuzzy, right? Like this idea that discoveries are made by one scientist in a lab yelling eureka, I mean, that's sort of been going away for a while. Discoveries are kind of made in groups

and people contribute little things and little bits here. some ideas, and then the ideas get shaped. And so, like, who actually gets credit for something is getting harder and harder. Exactly. And sometimes it's somebody with a really genius idea. It comes along and just, like, shatters the field, like Einstein, right? There's a crazy new idea.

Other times, it's a bit incremental. And you could say, well, you know, if Bob hadn't done it, then Sally would have done it two weeks later. And if Sally hadn't done it, then, you know, Samantha would have figured it out or something. Sometimes an idea has its time. And it's sort of like the field is slowly rolling. rolling down the hill towards it and eventually somebody's going to figure it out. In that case, it's hard to know. You can't give the credit to everybody.

So they just sort of pick somebody. Or three. They pick three people to win it for a discovery. So why do you think they need to be alive and they can't be dead? Do you know what I mean? I think because then they need to go to that fancy ceremony in Sweden and, you know, wear a tuxedo and give a speech and all that kind of stuff. It's just one of the things in the will. But, you know, they need to be alive when the prize is determined, not when the prize is awarded.

And there was a case of a guy who was awarded the Nobel Prize, and then two days later, he died, right? And so before they could award it to him, he was dead. And there was like a big controversy, but they decided he was alive when we made the decision so he gets to keep it. But he knew he had won. Yeah, he knew he had won. So maybe that, maybe he's holding out for it. He's like, all right, I'm done. Oh, there's definitely cases of that.

You know that, like, people survive to, like, to see birthdays and, like, grandchildren's graduations and stuff. People, like, who are about to die can hold out for, like, one last event. Wow. So if I convince myself that I'm going to win one, I just have to hold out for it. I might live forever. Yeah. Is that what you're saying? Who won the Nobel Prize for cartooning last for him?

I don't remember. I'll be the first one. It must have been Bill Waters. I'll just convince to myself I'll be the first one. And then, you know, I'll live forever. Right. And then you can nominate yourself for every subsequent one, right? Because you'll be the only winner.

I'll just start my own committee of Swedish people. Exactly. I think the point people should come away with is that this is a committee of people and they're humans. And they're influenced by fads and politics. And, you know, they're doing their best to try to find something which is pure, something which will last. Right. But in the end, you know, they're making human decisions. Right.

But they do take it very carefully. They take like a whole year to make this decision, right? Yeah, I think they write all the names on the wall and they pass out the darts and they throw them very carefully. You know, they've been very precise measurements. No, I would love to be in the room and hear like, what kind of arguments are made? Are they like, you know, appealing to, you know, this is more fundamental than that? Or they're just like, hey, you know, Bob really deserves it because he got, you know, his wife left him.

Or like, what kind of arguments are being made? Plus, look how cool this. blue LED looks. I mean, come on. Stop shining that blue LED in my eyes. We'll give them the prize to you. Stop shining at my eyes, yeah. I've actually been in the room. Did I tell you this story? I was in the room where they decide the Nobel Prize in medicine. Not while they were deciding. I just

toured the Karolinska Institute. They showed me the room. Oh, wow. Yeah, wow. It's just the room. That makes me feel like I'm one step closer to the Nobel Prize because I know you and you've been there. Right. And I've been in the room, so. Yeah, and hasn't your work actually been mentioned specifically by the Nobel Prize Committee? This is not a joke. Yeah, that's right.

The video and the comics that you and I made about the Higgs boson, the Higgs boson, the Higgs boson, Explained, which is on YouTube. You can watch it if you want. That video was quoted in the official Nobel Prize poster. So the Nobel Prize folks make a poster every year of the discovery. And so we were mentioned in that poster. Pretty cool. That's right.

At the probably the only time the Nobel Prize Committee will ever cite any of my work, but hey, I'll take it. Or a cartoon, right? Or a cartoon, exactly. You definitely broke ground there. You're probably the only cartoon ever cited by the Nobel Prize Committee. Yeah, but that's another association. So they know who you are, Daniel. Oh, my gosh, yeah.

So I'll just, you know, I'm going to stay up every night and waiting for that phone call from Sweden. Yeah. Don't die. Don't die. That's now my number one reason to keep living is potentially a Nobel Prize. Okay, so that's kind of how they decide who gets the Nobel Prize. And so can this process somehow be awarded to somebody or for a discovery that turned out to be wrong?

And so we have two stories to tell you today of a Nobel Prize gone wrong. But first, let's take a quick break. When your car is making a strange noise, no matter what it is, you can't just pretend it's not happening. that's an interesting sound it's like your mental health if you're struggling and feeling overwhelmed it's important to do something about it

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Listen to Culture raises us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so what's the first instance of a Nobel Prize being wrong? One of my favorites is a Nobel Prize which went to somebody who is definitely a certified genius and made lots of contributions to physics,

but won the prize for something which later turned out to not be accurate. And that's Neal's Boar. And, you know, this strikes close to home for Scandinavians because Boer is Danish and he's like the grandfather of Danish science. And, you know, the Nobel Prize is a Scandinavian, cherished Scandinavian tradition. But Boar is famous for coming up with what's known as the Boar model of the atom. Right. Not the boring model, but the Boer.

Not the boring company. Right. Exactly. He is not the Elon Musk 100 years ago. No, Neal's Boer, B-O-H-R. Yeah. This was in the early part of the 20th century, right, when we didn't really know what atoms were made out of

or what they were structured like, right? That's right. We had recently discovered that electrons exist, right? There were particles, they had negative charge. That was just like 20 years earlier. And then Rutherford discovered that there's a positively charged particle also in the atom. And so we had this concept like, okay, there's some positive charges, there's some negative charges.

How does it all work? We knew the different kinds of atoms. Did we know that they were all the same atom, but just with different numbers of protons and electrons and stuff? No, no, not at all. We just had this table of different kinds of stuff, right? Like these metals and those metals and the other metals, we knew they all weighed different amounts.

And so that was a clue. And we knew that somehow electrons were involved and somehow these positive particles were involved. But we didn't know what the structure was inside there. We didn't know how an atom worked. What did it look like if you zoomed in? And back then, the technology to see inside these atoms was really rudimentary. And so it was a big puzzle.

Like, what is it inside the atom? And how does that explain all the different elements? That was basically the question that was at the top of the list of physics wish list at the time. And so Bohr came up with an answer to that question. Yeah, Bore took inspiration from planets. You know, he said, well, the sun and the Earth, right, that's a system. and the Earth moves around the Sun and they're attracted to each other,

but the Earth doesn't fall into the Sun, right? Because it moves in an orbit. It has enough energy that it's whizzing around the Sun and it doesn't fall in. And so he said, well, that's cool. Maybe that explains how you can have a positive charge and a negative charge inside the atom, right? And have the whole atom be neutral,

but not have the positive negative charge just, you know, collapse and annihilate each other. So he had this idea that the electron is orbiting the positive charge. Like the positive charge would be the sun, and the electron would be the Earth. That's right, because Earth doesn't fall into the sun. We just keep spinning around it.

Yeah, I haven't looked outside recently, but last I checked, we did not fall into the sun. As of the date of this recording. Oh, man, you should get a Nobel Prize for that. As long as we don't fall into the sun before I can collect it. And this is a cool idea, and it's always nice. You know, when you get inspired by one area of physics and say, oh, look, this is the way it works over here.

Maybe something similar works over there. it, when it clicks together like that, it's a wonderful moment in science. When you're like, oh, look, there's something universal, something general, this is a structure the universe likes. We can apply these ideas in multiple places. That's always a nice feeling. And it was a super powerful idea, right? Like it explained the periodic table of elements.

Yeah, and even more so, it explains something that people have been puzzling over, which is why atoms give light only in certain wavelengths. If you get atoms hot, you know, they will give off light. They will glow. But if you look at the glow, if you look at the wavelengths of light that come out, they don't glow in every single color, right? It's not like they glow totally white, where every single color in the spectrum is represented. Different kinds of stuff glow with different colors.

So you get these lines where hydrogen has a few different colors it will shine with, and helium has a different set of colors. And that was a puzzle. People are like, why is that? What is it about hydrogen that makes it only glow with these colors? and helium glow only with those colors. Right. The cool thing about Boar's model was that it explained it.

And he kind of gave the, basically, he kind of invented the icon for science, right? Like the, whenever you see anyone talking about science or, you know, branding science, they always use this little model of the atom where it's like a little dot in the middle and these hula hoops with little electrons in each one. That's right. The way to go straight for the cartooning implications of Boers' discovery, right? That's deep in your mind. No, but you're absolutely right.

That is like the icon of science, especially in movies, especially when you have mad scientists bent on destroying the world. They always have a company whose icon is like that bore model of the atom, right? Because that's somehow like powerful and dangerous. Yeah. And the cool thing about this model is that it explains why those atoms give off different color light. And that's that the electron has these orbitals, right? The electron can orbit hydrogen, and it can only do it in complete wavelengths, right?

So the electron wiggles as it goes around. And so it has various energy levels because it needs to wiggle either five times or it needs to wiggle six times or seven times. It can't wiggle like five and a half times. And so it has these specific orbitals that it can go around the atom in and then it can jump between one and the other one. The color of the light that it gives off reflects the energy of the light that's sent out, which comes from the energy difference of those electron orbitals. Right. If the gas gets hot, the electrons move up in those orbitals, and then when it cools down, they jump down, and they give off a certain frequency of light. And so people had measured these spectra, and they had all these equations that described the spectra, and there were these patterns that nobody could explain.

And so then Bohr came up with this model, and with just a few lines of mathematics, he was able to predict those equations. And his model perfectly described a lot of the spectra that we saw, which was amazing. It was like a big open puzzle in physics, and he was able to predict. He came along with this cool idea that was beautiful because it reflected what the planets were doing and it also explained the experiments we were seeing and it made a lot of sense. And so it was just very quickly, very popular. Like for all practical purposes, it was true. Like this model described what was going on inside of the atom as far as they knew. Exactly.

I mean, as far as people had tested at the time and as far as it had probed at the time, it was true. Like it worked. It made sense. It predicted experiments. what else could you ask for from a theory, right? And so, of course, he won the Nobel Prize for it. Right. But it turned out to be wrong.

That's right. It turned out to not be what's actually happening. So there's a couple of problems with BOR's theory. One is it's not what's actually happening, right? So that's a problem. Problem number two is that it violates quantum mechanics because electrons don't actually have these, orbitals. And problem number three is that it didn't work for more complicated atoms. You know,

it worked really well for hydrogen. Really? But once you get into multi-electron atoms, it didn't really work. And so it seemed really promising, but then as we dug deeper, it turned out it didn't work. Okay, so let's dig a little bit into that first one. So it violates quantum mechanics. What does that mean? Yeah. Well, quantum mechanics tells you that electrons don't have classical trajectories. I mean, a classical trajectory is something where you know the position and the velocity of a particle, right? Like, you throw a baseball up in the air, you know where it is, and you know its velocity. And that allows you to predict where it's going to go. And we naturally think of everything as having a location and a velocity, right? Like, everything is

somewhere at a certain time. That's the way you like to think about stuff. But electrons don't act that way, right? They don't have a path where they say, I'm here, and then I'm here, and then I'm here, and that I'm here. Instead, as you can learn about if you listen to our podcast about the universe being random, they just have a probability distribution, right? They're like, I might be here and I might be there. And when you ask them, where are you? Then they'll say, okay, I was here, I was there, I was over here. But they don't travel in between those locations, right? They just have these probability distributions. So the idea that it's going around in like a clean orbit is just wrong because nothing really at that level,

at that smallness, goes in that such a perfect little loop. I know. And it's a shame because that was one of the beautiful things about his theory is that it mirrored the planetary dynamics, right? But it turns out that part's pretty much the most wrong part, right? That electrons don't move in these circular orbitals. And it's not even just that their motion is a little fuzzy, right? Their motion is not circular.

Now that we know more about how electrons move, there are all these weird shapes that they move in, you know, as the atoms get more and more complicated they have all these petals and S and D and P waves and for those of you who know chemistry, you know that electron orbitals can get very complicated. They look more like clouds, right? Yeah. Like little balloon

clouds. Yeah. So you can't say an electron is moving in an orbit the way planets move in an orbit because electrons are fundamentally just really different kinds of things than planets or even rocks, right? But could you say that kind of his model was conceptually

generally right? You know, like maybe they're not traveling in a perfect circle, but it's a good analogy for what's actually happening. Yeah, and that's a fair defense of him, right? It's like saying, well, was Newton wrong? No, I mean, Newton's theory didn't generalize, but it predicts

the way apples fall from trees, and it predicts the way things move through the air. And so Einstein came along and generalized it and showed where it would break down, but, you know, to a reasonable approximation, it was correct. And everything we do in physics is only correct up to some point.

There'll always be something we discover, which shows us that it's wrong in some regime or very high energy or very high mass or something. And so it's a fair point to say, like, look, given the data at the time and our understanding of the time, it worked. And it explained what we observed. And so there's nothing wrong about it. It's just improved later. But my problem with Bohr's model is that it fundamentally misses the mark because it imagines the electrons are moving in these classical orbitals, and they just really don't. The real problem with Bohr's model is that it just doesn't work as the atoms get more complicated. You have more than one electron in there, it just doesn't work.

It doesn't describe the data. It's amazing for a model which is conceptually and fundamentally wrong that it worked so well. It's like it's incredible that it predicted the results of experiments perfectly, even though it was wrong. To me, it's like an amazing coincidence. But the funny thing to me is that that's what most people think of when they think of an atom is the Bohr model. Yeah, and I think that's what most physics cartoonist. it's keep drawing and perpetuating this incorrect idea. I'm putting that one on your plate, right?

Yes. That's right. Before we keep going, let's take a short break. Have you ever wished for a change but weren't sure how to make it? Maybe you felt stuck in a job, a place, or even a relationship. I'm Emily Tish Sussman, and on she pivots, I dive into the inspiring pivots of women who have taken big leaps and their lives. and careers. I'm Gretchen Whitmer, Jody Sweeten, Monica Patton, Elaine Welterah. I'm Jessica Voss. And that's when I was like, I got to go. I don't know how, but that kicked off the pivot of how to

make the transition. Learn how to get comfortable pivoting because your life is going to be full of them. Every episode gets real about the why behind these changes and gives you the inspiration and maybe the push to make your next pivot. Listen to these women and more on She Pivots. Now on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you you get your podcasts. When your car is making a strange noise, no matter what it is, you can't just pretend it's not happening.

That's an interesting sound. It's like your mental health. If you're struggling and feeling overwhelmed, it's important to do something about it. It can be as simple as talking to someone, or just taking a deep, calming breath to ground yourself. Because once you start to address the problem, you can go so much further.

The Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the Ad Council have resources available for you at loveyourmind today.org. I don't write songs. God write songs. I take dictation. I didn't even know you've been a pastor for over 10 years. I think culture is any space that you live in that develops you. On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us podcast, I sat down with Warren Campbell, Grammy-winning producer, pastor, and music executive to talk about the beats, the business, and the legacy behind some of the biggest names in gospel, R&B, and hip-hop. This is like watching Michael Jackson talk about thoroughly before it happened.

Was there a particular moment where you realized just how instrumental music culture was to shaping all of our global ecosystem? I was eight years old, and the Motown 25 special came on. And all the great Motown artists, Marvin, Stevie Wonder, Temptations, Diana Ross. From Mary Mary to Jennifer Hudson, we get into the soul of the music and the purpose that drives it. Listen to Culture raises us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so that's the first story of how someone got the Nobel Prize wrong. Tell us about the second story.

So the second one is Enrico Fermi. Enrico Fermi, also a staggering genius of science. And the last thing I want to do is besmirch his legacy because he made so many important discoveries and contributions to physics. But he played an important role in the discovery of nuclear fission, but he didn't realize it. So this is in the 30s when people are understanding radiation and trying to figure out, like, can you break the atom or what happens if you hit this atom with this particle? And, you know, this is just a few years before the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb and nuclear energy.

And he was trying to understand, like, what happens when you shoot a slow neutron at uranium? He was trying to get uranium to capture another neutron. He was trying to make something heavier than uranium. Like to absorb it. Yeah, to absorb it, maybe have it turn into a proton. He didn't really understand how it worked. And so they had this beam of neutrons, and they would slow them down by passing them through a lot of wax. The idea is that, like, if you slow it down, then maybe as it passes the nucleus,

has a better chance of sort of getting grabbed and held in there. He's trying to build a bigger atom. Yeah, yeah. They call them trans-uraneum elements, which is a pretty awesome name for a band. Like, just throw stuff at it so it sticks and it gets bigger. Yeah, and you try to gently toss neutrons at the uranium atom, so they stick rather than flying by really fast. And, you know, he got something to work.

He shot these slow neutrons at uranium, and he got something out, which was definitely not uranium. And so he thought, oh, look, I've created trans-uranium elements. I've done it. And he won the Nobel Prize for that. It turns out he had not created trans-uranium elements. I mean, he even, like, named this new element, which he had not created to much fanfare. But it turns out what he had done was he had. he had discovered fission. He had broken the uranium atom into two.

Oh, so he shot these things at it and it started behaving differently. So he thought, hey, I did what I thought I was doing, but actually he broke uranium. Yeah, instead of making something heavier, he made things lighter, right? So he just turned uranium into barium and krypton, right? Uranium breaks up into two smaller, lighter elements. And that's fission. And that's hugely important. And that's like really consequential. And that triggered like the nuclear age.

And, you know, people who came later who won the Nobel Prize for Discovering Fission were definitely worked on the shoulders of Fermi. So, I mean, it was really important work. But it's like he thought he discovered A. Turns out he discovered B. But he took credit for A and he got Nobel Prize for A when, in fact, he had discovered something else totally different. But the Nobel Prize committee at that time thought that he had done it. That's right. Like they looked at his data.

They looked at what he had done. And he said, yep, yep, he made a bigger uranium. He should win the prize. Yeah, that's right. They gave him the Nobel Prize for discovering transuranic elements, but he hadn't. He had, of course, done something really important, but... So how did they figure out that he had not done it? Well, people came along later, and Lisa Maitner and Otto Hahn, and they actually figured it out.

They're like, try to reproduce it, and they had more details, and they studied what came out of the experiments, and they realized, oh, this is not something heavier, this is something lighter. And so the follow-up work revealed that what had happened was something totally different, and even more interesting, even more consequential, right? So that's the thing about this discovery is that he was wrong, but he was also wrong about how important it was. He underestimated how important it was.

He undersold it and still got a Nobel Prize. But even though he basically did it first, he didn't get the Nobel Prize for Fission for the thing he accidentally did. Like, you have to do it on purpose to win the prize. It's a secret rule. Secret rule, you have to do it on purpose. You don't have to do it on purpose,

but you have to recognize that you've done it. A lot of Nobel prizes were awarded for things people did accidentally and discovered, like, oops, you know, like the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation, totally an accident. But then they recognized what they had done and wrote a paper about it, and then they were given

the Nobel Prize for it. You have to pretend you did it on purpose. There you go. That's the rule. I'm sure that's somewhere in Alfred Nobel's will. Yeah, I'm sure there's a Swedish translation to what I just said. Exactly. Okay, Google, translate Jorge into Swedish. in real time.

Okay, so can you imagine being the scientists who basically are just trying to like replicate what this Nobel Prize project and then you figure out that it's wrong? Yeah, I know. And Fermi was a, you know, he's staggering. It was a huge figure in physics at the time.

He was well, he was famous and internationally respected. And so, you know, disagreeing with Fermi or going up against Fermi or claiming that Fermi was wrong is it's a pretty big deal. I took some guts. So they must have been pretty confident it in their data. Wow.

So, yeah, that's a pretty kind of a big error in the Nobel Prize committee. Yeah. Yeah, I think looking back, they probably wish they had waited a couple of years to give that Nobel Prize. Yeah, exactly. Although, you know, Fermi certainly should have won a Nobel Prize for something. For something. Okay.

So it's not like it's unjust that he wins a Nobel Prize. It's not like he's undeserving. It's just not really for what they actually gave it to him for. Right. They don't feel that bad. No, I don't think they feel too bad. Having Fermi be one of the Nobel Prize winners. No, I think it feels pretty.

pretty good. It's sort of like Einstein, right? He won the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect, explaining this tiny, weird little thing. He never won the Nobel Prize for relativity. He didn't? Right. General relativity or special relativity, no. Why didn't they give to him? Nobody won the Nobel Prize for that. I don't know. It's just like, it's the idiosyncrasies of the Nobel Prize committee, you know? They didn't think that was worth it. And then later they gave it to him for the photoelectric effect, which is like sort of like making it up to him, you know? It's sort of like Al Pacino getting the lifetime Oscar.

even, you know, like, well, we should have given you the Oscar for this one, and we didn't, and so here you can have this other one. Well, that's why the Oscars have that Lifetime Achievement Award, right? Yeah, that's the Oops Oscar Award, right. Oops, we still like you. This should be a lifetime achievement Nobel Prize. Okay, so those are two examples of a way you can get the Nobel Prize wrong, meaning that you make a discovery, but then later it turns out to be,

not quite right. But we were talking earlier that there's other ways in which you can get the Nobel Prize wrong, right? Yeah, the other direction, which is you can fail to give it to people who are clearly deserving of it, right? And that's, you know, almost as big a mistake in my view. Yeah, there's lots of examples of people who were kind of, who were known to be crucial part of the team and the discovery, but they, for some reason, didn't get it.

Yeah, and I think one of the biggest examples is Vera Rubin. She's an astronomer who everybody credits with making huge contributions in establishing that dark matter is a thing, right? She's the one who went out and made careful measurements of how galaxies are rotating and really proved that there's huge blobs of invisible matter in these galaxies. And so she's a huge figure in astronomy, and dark matter is one of the biggest discoveries ever. But she never won the Nobel Prize for it, right? And she's passed away now, so she can't.

And it's pretty widely acknowledged that that was because of, you know, gender bias on the committee and in the field in general. You know, this is a field of men, and the committee is mostly men. And in the history of the physics Nobel Prize, only a few have ever been given to women. That's terrible. It's shameful. A lot of these names you sent me of people who should have gotten the Nobel Prize are, were female. They're women, right? Rosslyn Franklin.

Yeah, exactly. Rossin Franklin. You know, she's the one who made that amazing X-ray pictures of DNA, which Watson and Crick basically stole and then used to claim the discovery of DNA for which they won the Nobel Prize. And then she died due to radiation just a few years later. So they really stood on the backs of her hard work. They stole her data and won a Nobel Prize.

That's really embarrassing. And there's other examples. You know, there's Jocelyn Bell. She was a graduate student, and she discovered pulsars. The problem is that her advisor got the Nobel Prize for it, and she didn't. And she was the one out there doing all the work, I know. How did they justify that? You know, at the time, I think they just thought it would be demeaning to the Nobel Prize

to give it to a graduate student or something. Wow. It makes no sense. To me, it's really embarrassing. That's terrible. But in some karmic justice, she won the Breakthrough Prize last year, which is great. And she donated, like, there's more than $2 million in prize. money. She donated all that money

to supporting women and underrepresented minorities in science. So, like, she's really a stand-up kind of person. Oh, that's awesome. And that's bigger than the money you get from the Nobel Prize. Yeah, exactly. I think the breakthrough prize is trying to buy its way into cultural relevance by having

more money than the Nobel Prize. All right. Well, again, we don't want to bash the Nobel Prize or science. It's still the most awesome thing to learn about the universe and to know what's true and not. And we know that the committee out there is doing its level best

and they've made a lot of excellent choices and the folks that they have elevated Nobel Prize winners are almost all entirely deserving. Even those for whom the prize was incorrectly awarded, they're still deserving. And so we commend them for doing their best. But of course, it's a human endeavor. And science

is a human endeavor. And sometimes we make mistakes and one of the best things about science is that it's self-correcting. We go back and we look at these things and we understand them better and we make improvements. Just like this podcast, We hope to get better and better every time. Yeah. All right.

Well, thanks, everyone for listening. See you next time. See you next time. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge. That's one word.

Or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorpe.com. When your car is making a strange noise, no matter what it is, you can't just pretend it's not happening. That's an interesting sound. It's like your mental health. If you're struggling and feeling overwhelmed, it's important to do something about it. It can be as simple as talking to someone,

or just taking a deep, calming breath to ground yourself. Because once you start to address the problem, You can go so much further. The Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the Ad Council have resources available for you at Love Your Mind Today.org. I was diagnosed with cancer on Friday and cancer free the next Friday. No chemo, no radiation, none of that. On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us podcast,

I sat down with Warren Campbell, Grammy-winning producer, pastor, and music executive to talk about the beats, the business, and the legacy behind some of the biggest names in gospel, R&B, and hip-hop. Professionally, I started at Deathwell Records. From Mary Mary to Jennifer Hudson, we get into the soul of the music and the purpose that drives it. Listen to Culture raises us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The U.S. Open is here, and on my podcast, Good Game with Sarah Spain. I'm breaking down the players, the predictions, the pressure, and of course the honey deuses,

the signature cocktail of the U.S. Open. The U.S. Open has gotten to be a very wonderfully experiential sporting event. To hear this and more, listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain, an IHeart women's sports production in partnership with deep blue sports and entertainment on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of IHeart women's sports network. This is an IHeart podcast.