Radiolab - Escapescape

Episode Date: March 19, 2021

As we hit the one year mark since the first U.S. state (California) issued a stay-at-home order to prevent the spread of COVID-19, we put out a call to see if any of you would take us to your secret escape spot and record audio there. And you astounded us with what you brought in.  In this soundrich, kaleidoscopic episode, we journey around the planet and then, quite literally, beyond it. Listen only if you want a boatload of fresh air, fields of wildflowers, stars, birds, frogs, and a riveting tale involving Isaac Newton and a calm beyond any calm you knew could exist. This episode was produced by Matt Kielty and Lulu Miller, with production support from Jonny Moens and Suzie Lechtenberg.  Special thanks to: Lynn Levy, who went on to host the space-a-licious series, The Habitat, and edit (among other things) the powerful and beautiful new podcast Resistance. Merav Opher, an astronomy professor at BU, who now directs the SHIELD DRIVE Science Center which is studying the data collected by the Voyagers at the edge of the heavens, or--err, the “heliosphere” as the scientists call it. Edward Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World Ann Druyan, one of the creators of the 1977 Golden Album traveling on the Voyager probe, has recently released a new series on National Geographic,  “Cosmos: Possible Worlds” A.J. Dungo, who submitted a postcard while surfing, is author of the mesmerizing graphic novel, In Waves, a memoir about surfing and grief. Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate.   

Wait, you're listening. Okay. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From WNYC. You're listening. Do you guys know why I've gathered you here today? No idea.

Well, I know only in the meta sense that you've got another crazy thing that you're thinking about. I don't know what though. Well, as maybe you know, or just can like feel in your soul, we're about to hit a year since the first state California issue

did stay at home order. What did it was that? That's March 19th. So that's coming up. Yeah, yeah, it is coming up. Well, yeah, and I think most people, like the claustrophobia, I think, is just hitting a new high.

And so as I was stuck, I just started fantasizing. I just started wondering like, what escapes people have in their lives, you know? You know mental escapes? Mental, but I honestly, I was wondering more physical. So I put out a call just to see like, will you take us? Have you found a safe escape? Will you take us there? And did people send you stuff?

Yeah, I radio love. Hello radio love. Hi. We were flooded with responses. Right now I'm in my greenhouse. From all over the planet. Costa Rica, watering my plants. I live in Zimbabwe. I'm looking out into the garden.

The sun is setting. People called in from every single continent of us that are on our Spain. Santiago Chide. Except one. Nairobi, Kenya. We did not get Australia, but we got... Hello. And Arca.

Giving on our German icebreaker. Someone left us a police card from the middle of the wettel sea. Seeing some icebergs passing by. Oh, damn. And she actually was like, I'd come here to do climate research. And usually this is the claustrophobic part of my life. Because it's only 100 people on board. Now the entire story kind of spoke because now it's everybody back home being isolated

while we can spend kind of a normal life at sea. It's just beautiful, it's currently midnight, she's still kind of the sun at the horizon. There was a rainbow in Tokyo. It's really pretty and the field of wild flowers in North Carolina. It's like seven or eight feet high. They sit in the air. I love the smell of citrus. And a quiet room in Nigeria.

The walls have been dehydrated, blood dried, my favorite color. And it's midnight. Noise of insects outside, kind of here then. I feel safe. I feel this space belongs to me. You know when this tape started rolling in, I just kind of stopped everything I was doing

and just fell into it. Oh, you're escaping your homework, basically, it's a sound like. Yeah, I mean, it was just so nice to be transported. I'm sitting in my backyard under the apricot tree. Yeah. Just so many places. I'm sitting on the floor of my living room,

surrounded by my three best friends, my dogs Benjamin, Bear, and Brody. Mmm. Isn't that lovely? Yeah. Should we just listen to this for like the next 20 minutes? Oh my god, yes. Okay, I'm gonna have to step in here because you guys were getting too excited about sound of all this.

Oh fair, fair, fair, but I think what I'm trying to show or what really struck out to me was just the range. Hi, my name is Paris France and right now I am sitting on my balcony. It feels amazing out here, the wind is blowing, the cars are making too much noise. Of like how many different ways people found escape. It's 5 o'clock in the morning and I've been unloading grocery trucks and strangely it's been a source of calm instability throughout the entire pandemic. I'm in a kind of den that I've made for me and my newborn baby. I am in the end of ten that I've made for me and my newborn baby. I am in Machikin' Goop.

Some people found it by hiking far, far away. There's wood fires in the distance that you can kind of smell. And others found it by simply turning their head one inch to the left. My name's Riannon. I'm talking to you from Hampshire and England. I'm sitting in my home office, my desk faces right out the window, but I don't look at it as often as I look to my left, which is where my aquarium sits. I bought my aquarium a few weeks before my dad went into hospital and unfortunately he never came out.

It's been quite difficult to sit here every day in front of my laptop and talk to people through a screen and pretend like things are reasonably normal. Being able to turn and look at this aquarium, full of plants, bright blue shrimp and see an entire world that is so detached from ours, but still such a part of it. Helps me identify that I also feel detached, but apart from the world, and that's okay. Coming up, a story of escape at an almost unimaginable scale. Stick with us. Hi, this is Lupe from Ulus, Texas. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding

of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.Sloan.org. Science reporting on Radio Lab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simon's Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. [♪ Music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing in background, sounds of the music playing today, a landscape of Escapes and Escape, Escape, if you will. And as we were putting all this together, I started thinking about this old Radiolab piece,

a real beauty that takes you far, far away. Hey, I'm Chad Abel-Marrad. I'm Robert Krollwich. This is Radiolab and today we offer you Escapes. This piece that I'm thinking about is actually. This is Radio Lab and today we offer you an escape. This piece that I'm thinking about is actually a duet of stories. It was inside a whole episode on Escapes. And it starts inside the mind of one man and then catapults out of it

to the farthest place a human-made thing has ever traveled. Yes, I hear you booming. It comes to us from writer Ed Dolnick and actually begins when Isaac Newton was himself hiding out from an infectious disease. Around 1665 Newton is at Cambridge. He's a student. And Cambridge is hit by the plague. They send everybody home because although nobody understands how the disease works, they know that if people are crowded together, they tend to to all get it. So everybody go your separate ways.

This is a kind of an enforced summer vacation. Right. And he's like 19 or 20 at this point. It's 21, 22. Okay. Newton goes home to his mother's farm. Mom is like, cool. Now you can help me on the farm, but...

He says, uh, no. Because he has a plan. He'd brought some books home. A bunch of texts books. And he locks himself in his room. And sets himself not only to having mastered all the science that had ever been done, but to plunging on ahead of everyone else on his own, motivated by this religious faith

that everything in the universe was set up by a god who wanted someone to crack the code. Newton believes he's the one doing what was he doing in his room. I mean, was he sitting there in like with a thousand giant textbooks? All that's known is that he did this. He just went into his room and came out with, what we're about to talk about.

He came out with how gravity works, how light works, how rainbows work, how the tides work, and then having done all this summer, he did all this. Yeah. What did you do on your summer vacation, Jack? I know Mike, my summer. I am, I learned how to fold sheets like Marines do. Which I thought was pretty good too.

Right. So after having one flash of inside after another, Newton now sets his mind to one of the great problems of all time, which for our purposes we will call the problem of the moon. And just to set this up. What everybody before Newton and Galileo thought is there were a bunch of ordinary things here on Earth, like rocks, and they behave in the ordinary way that we know. You know, pick a rock, let go.

It falls. And there are a bunch of much more different, mysterious, elegant, perfect things in the sky. Like the moon, which doesn elegant, perfect things in the sky. Like the moon, which doesn't fall, it just floats there. So one could conclude that the moon has its own separate set of laws. There are one set of laws that work here on Earth, and another set that work in the heavens. And there's no reason it should be the same set of laws, and any more than New York's laws should be the same as Paris's laws.

Kinda makes sense, actually, heavenly Things float, earthly things fall. But then here's where the problem begins. Newton and a bunch of people at that time had gotten a hold of this newfangled thing called a telescope. And one of the things they saw was that the moon wasn't this mysterious heavenly body that they seemed. It was a big rock, a regular lumpy potato-wish rock. Uh-oh.

People were like, hmmm. But Newton being, of course, Newton thought, now wait a second. If the job of a rock is to fall, and if the moon is just another rock... Why doesn't it fall down? Exactly so. What's it doing sitting up there night after night? Good question. And it's at this point that Newton sitting in his room or wherever he was we can imagine makes a crazy mental leap he thought back to a little thought experiment that Galileo had come up with which

Initially might not make much sense the connection but it pays off and here's the setup You've got someone standing in a big field with a gun that he's about to shoot. And next to that person with his gun is a person holding in his hand a bullet. So you've got a person holding a gun and a person holding just a bullet side by side. And the bullet in the hand and the bullet in the gun

are exactly the same height above the ground. And now somebody says, ready, aim, fire. And at the instant he says fire, the man with the gun shoots that bullet horizontally. And at that same instant, the man next to him holding the bullet in his hand, opens his hand, and the bullet drops. So there's one bullet sipping along and then falling, and then the other one just falls. Right. We shoot the bullet out of the horizontal gun, and we drop the bullet from right next to the gun. At the same time. Yeah, both bullets will hit the ground eventually.

But when they do, they'll be far apart. And Galileo's riddle was, which of those bullets hits the ground first? Well, I mean, that's... Everybody would know that the one that would hit the ground first and the one that you just dropped because the other one has to go all that way. So this is a hard real, and the answer is,

well, wait, why is it such a hard real? Because I would think that the bullet you drop is just gonna hit first. The gun's gonna go all the way. No, those two bullets both hit the ground at the exact same instant. Really? That's an experimental fact.

The bullet from the gun and the bullet from the fingers lands at the same time. Yes, this bullet that shot horizontally, it doesn't go like Wiley Coyote running off a cliff. It doesn't go straight straight straight straight and then fall. It's curving as it goes. And the thing that causes it to curve as it goes, of course, is gravity. It's the same gravity that is pulling the bullet that you drop. Same gravity, same pull, same speed. So counterintuitively when you drop a bullet and it falls for this long, when you fire the gun, it'll also fall for that long. Even though it ends up a mile away. See, that was Galileo's riddle.

And that's as far as Galileo took it. Newton looked at that and he said something smart. First thing he said is, okay, this field, let's not pretend that this is some perfectly flat field that goes on forever. No, we're on the earth, and the earth is round. And what round this means is that the ground curves away below horizontal. So really what's happening is that as the bullet

is shooting across the field and falling to the earth, the earth at the same time is very gradually curving away from it. Now of course most guns, you know, they don't shoot the bullet very far and at that short distance, the field is still pretty much flat. But here's what Newton thought, what if you could find just the right gun that could shoot that bullet not just across a field But across like thousands of miles and what if as it falls that bullet curves down towards the earth in just the same way As the earth is curving away from it in this scenario the bullet that we've shot

Will keep falling and falling and falling but the earth keeps falling and falling and falling away from the bullet. So the bullet falls forever, the earth curves forever, the picture never changes. So the bullet then does what? The bullet is in orbit. Hundreds of years before Sputnik and other satellites Newton has invented the satellite. And on top of that he said, when we see rocks like the moon that are not falling, the reason we think they're not falling is because we misunderstand. Really just as the gun launched a bullet on Earth and it goes and never falls, God who was presumably a terrifically strong pitcher, launched the moon around the Earth at just such a rate that that would continue in its circle around us forever. This is a perpetual dance.

The partners are bound together, but they never come close and they never break up either. It's this endless round. From which there is no escape. What this does, what Newton did, is take the moon out of the domain of poets and musicians, the golden orb and this kind of thing. And last so it, to the same rules that we use here on Earth. In other words, what he showed is in a very real way. There's no separation between us and the heavens. The same set of laws does govern everything.

It's one universe and I've explained it all. We once you figure out the laws of gravitation, then you can send spacecraft to Mars, Jupiter. Saturn, anywhere. Out there. If you're a radio lab listener from Wayback, you might recognize that voice. That's Androian. Hi. One of the first stories we did actually, I interviewed her about working on the famous Golden

Record. You remember this? Sure. So the idea at the time was to put this record on the Voyager capsule, send it in the space, and on the record would be all of these sounds it represented, you know, us. A kiss. A mother's first words to her newborn baby. Oh, come on.

I don't think we're good. Mozart. Ah. In any case, Anne was the one who was in charge of choosing all the sounds to put onto that record. She and Carl Sagan worked together on that project, and here's the thing. We stopped our story as the rockets took off, but obviously that was just the beginning of the story, and the Voyager capsules right now are about to make a kind of escape that

Newton could have only dreamed of. Okay. The record thing. And our producer, Lume Levy, has been... Oh, sorry, I just turned my headphones up way too late. Has been following the story? Uh, ow. Yeah, just turned it up.

Yeah. Okay, so you can pick it up where we left it. Okay, so like in the point of the mission wasn't really to deliver this record, it was to go out and look at all the planets in the outer solar system. So starting in 1977, these two little spaceships, two spacecraft, fourager 1 and 2, went racing away from Earth, snapping pictures. And so every time Voyager would reach another planet,

you know, all of the Voyager people would get together. Go into the imaging room and see the pictures come from the outer solar system. Do you remember seeing them? I remember as a child saying, life magazine. You know, I was seven when Lvoidja was launched, so. This is Mirav. I'm Mirav Ofer, professor at Boston University.

As a grown-up, she became part of the Voyager team. All the pictures that you know as a kid, you look at the books and just say, what, how, napton, look, how jupiter look. You know, just complete revelation. Saturn. The image of know, just complete revelation. Saturn. The image of Saturn. Technicolor.

Pink and like reddish turquoise color. Yellow. And those rings. Just spectacular. They could see active volcanoes on one of the moons of Jupiter. Finally, that vision of Neptune. Oh, this like blue jewel. Really blue. It's all came from Voyager. We had no idea how they look like a blue jewel. Really blue.

It's all came from Voyager. We had no idea how they look like before Voyager. Neptune was the last big cool planet and it was the last thing they were supposed to photograph. After that, the cameras were going to be shut off to save energy. But Cal's second convinced them to turn on Voyager back to Earth and take a final picture. So on Valentine's Day, 1990, one of the ships slowly rotated so it was facing back to Earth and It snapped a picture. One last picture

Describe it. So it's mostly empty. It's pretty dark. You can see sort of streaks of light coming from the sun. And then you honestly wouldn't notice it if it wasn't pointed out to you. But down in one corner kind of suspended in a sunbeam. There is a very small dot blue, a pale blue dot. That was us. In Carl Sagan's words, everyone you ever knew, everyone you ever loved, every superstar, every corrupt politician, just everyone in all of history, everything is some total. Think of the rivers of blood that have run so that one indistinguishable group could have momentary domination over a fraction of that pixel.

It was one of those really rare images. Every single day I hear from people who take that pale blue dot. So deeply to heart it was a complete reframing. After that, the commas were turned off. But here's the thing. The ships kept going. Going. Going. Drifting through the darkness. Drifting through the darkness. Going. Going. Going. Going. Even though they weren't taking pictures anymore, they were using, like, their other senses, little instruments that detect, like, how many particles are around, what the temperature is. So they were hurtling through this empty space, really fast, measuring, sending that data back,

and scientists like that off were there listening, and waiting. To for what? Was not clear. But they knew at some point these capsules would get to the edge. The edge of what? The solar system. The solar system has an edge. I thought it was just a big spiral. It has an edge. It's like a bubble.

See, the sun has a wind. Every star has a wind, but the sun has its own wind. It blows out through the solar system. It's very fast and can be between 400 to 800 kilometers per second. Anyway, it blows out from the sun, past all the planets, and it keeps everything else out. Oh, so it's like blowing up a balloon? Yeah, exactly. The wind gives it a shape.

Right. So these little things are cruising out towards this edge Wherever it is scientists don't quite know where it is or what it is. The guys in the control room are like ping in the ships And like hey, what's what's up? What do you see? The ships are like nothing. How about now? Not much No nothing and how long before they actually see something? 14 years. Oh, man. that's like driving through Kansas, but like a million times worse.

But, there comes a day, end of 2004, where they stop listening for a little while because the antenna, not only has so many antennas and they have to use them to listen to everything. So for a little while, the Voyager team's like, okay, you guys over there can use the antennas, we're going to lunch. Yeah, I mean, it's not like anything's happening.

Nothing's happening anyway, it's been 14 goddamn years. Knock yourself out. You guys, it's cool. And they come back a few hours later, start listening again. And it's happened very sudden. Everything is totally changed. Really? All of a sudden?

Boom. The speed of the wind dropped from around 380 kmph to 100 kmph. Instantly, like just all at once. And then everything out there started to get messy. Very turbulent. Much more turbulent than before. Particles are also behaving a very different way. So, behaving a very different way.

And the fields are very weird. The fields. The magnetic field. So, just like the sun has a wind, the sun has a magnetic field as well. The field starts at the sun and then curves out in this kind of graceful arc through the solar system. In the how the sun rotates, it creates what people call by loving a skirt. You know how like a skirt will flare if you spin around real fast?

That's apparently kind of what this field looks like. But way out there, it seemed like the skirt had started to fray. Maybe tear a little. Threads had broken off and seemed to be floating around on their own, not connected to anything. So what does this all mean? I mean, if the fields are breaking down and the wind is dying down, and you said the wind

is what actually creates the space of the solar system, does this mean we're out? No. I kind of thought that was what was happening, but no. It's not out, and it's not quite in. It's in the edge of the bubble. It's in the edge. Yeah, but it's not like a little thin edge. It's a thick edge. So the edge isn't just a little line that you cross at the place. Yeah. And while we listened, the two voyagers ships moved through this edge

for several years. Then something very interesting happened, that the wind on Vajawan stopped. Like completely stopped? Yeah. So now we're out? No, no. completely stopped. Yeah. So now we're out? No, no. I mean, this is what people thought. But the other measurements like temperature and number of particles, the magnetic field, doesn't tell us that we are out of the bubble. Nature surprised us again. So now we think there's a place at the edge of our solar system. Right, at the edge, edge of the edge. That's utterly still, no wind at all. A pause. People are calling it a stagnation layer.

And there is a big discussion why this layer exists and how thick it is. And by how thick it is, she means when will it end? Because once we get past this, so has anything ever crossed this boundary before? No, this will be the first man-made object to leave any star. And Voyager is like right there smelling, touching that boundary. You know, you only do those things first once.

Like your first kiss. And your first taste of alcohol. Your first time driving a car. The first time you see the ocean. These things open up a whole new world. First time out of the solar system. So when is it gonna freaking happen? It might have happened while we were talking. Yeah! We're thinking from now, any moment now, next couple of months or three years from now, four years from now. It's close.

Every day I open my Google Alert for Voyager, and I look and see, did it happen today? Do you remember? If it happens before the show goes out and we repest, yeah. Every day. It's the first thing you do in the morning? Oh. All right. Like the third thing. This is Lula now. So it's been nine years since that piece first aired and Muraf did it cross over did it did it did

It was 25th of August 2012 The Georgia one crossed Wow, so it was just a one month after that What's really really close and what it is fine? So it's still it It's still? Yeah. All the particles that come from the sun disappeared. It's really like an edge. And then you're entering to the realm of interstellar medium that is the stuff that comes from other stores.

If you could put it in sound, you will see the lot of turbulence. And then when you cross the edge, it's much quieter. Oh, so it did find an even deeper quiet? Right, right. Yeah. I do really like to just think about and imagine that little spacecraft out there floating in the stillness in that silence. While we hear on the pale blue dot, I'll try to carve out our own little escapes. Hi. My name is Catherine and I'm from the wet and rainy Seattle, Washington. And my place to escape is running. I'm surrounded by a blanket of snow that is so glittery and bright.

Some winter ice swimming. Andrew, what are we doing? You be brimming. Oh there's kayakers coming. I'm standing in a stream. If I get really close, I can hear the water bubbling under the ice. I am at the clear wash. I always like the sound of the water.

I have actually found it to be very relaxing. I'm soothing white noise. I'm in Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C. I'm sitting on a rock, in Toronto, and this is where I come with my one-year-old daughter to look for street cars. Anything coming Frankie? There's two! I am out here with the chickens to escape the chaos inside my house. I do feel that pizza home. I'm in a kind of den that I've made for me and my newborn baby. It's almost very safe to just be the confines of your home.

She's asleep next to me. I'm sitting on the floor of my living room surrounded by my three best friends. My dogs Benjamin, Bear, and Brody. My old boy Benjamin snores on the floor beside me. I'm sitting in my home office, which is where my aquariums. I'll just watch my little beta fish. Foot of palms, bright blue shrimp, and listen to the hammeth's water filter.

It's kind of like a, a void noise. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but it's kind of just like this buzzing. And all the cars coming back and forth. As you can hear, there's some birds looking at it into the garden. The smell of the earth, the sun is setting. The smell of trees. There's actually a rainbow out that I can see. I'm escaping. I'm currently walking.

Doom's growing up and down the street. My family. I'm escaping here. I'm escaping. We're escaping. Life. I'm escaping the fact that I'm currently ghosting my own therapist.

What am I trying to escape? Escaping my mind. I'm in my own bubble. I don't have to think about anything. Take a deep breath. Look around. It helps you realise that you don't have to be a part of everything that is going on around you. Alright, hands are getting cold. That'll do it, friends. Thank you to all the people who took time to take us to their place of escape.

Even if your piece didn't make it in, I promise you, we listened, we salivated, we felt gratitude. This episode was produced by Matthew Kiltzy with production support from Johnny Moons and Susie Lektonberg. Big shout out to Lynn Levy, we miss you Lynn! For production and reporting on the Voyager piece, special thanks to AJ Dungo, Kira F. Johnson, Ravenna Konegg, Diana Sugg, and Alan Gafinski. Bye!

Hi, this is Spencer, calling from Beautiful Barry Vermont. Radio Lab was created by Chad Evan Rodd and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Move a Miller and Latif Nasir are our co-hosts. Suzy Lektenberg is our executive producer. Dylan Keith is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Kusik, David Gabel, Matt Kilti, Annie McEwan, Sarah Curry, Aryan Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster.

With help from Shima Oliai, Sarah Sandback, and Karen Leone. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly and Emily Krieger. you