Radiolab - Gravitational Anarchy

Episode Date: November 29, 2010

A mysterious case of the topsy turvies and a return to the question of what felines feel when they fall.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. Shorts. From W. N. Y.

C. C. Yes. And NPR. Okay. So let's just do something off top of our head. Hey, I'm Jan Aboumrod. I'm Robert Crilwich.

This is Radio Lab. The podcast. The podcast. And on this podcast, this short, we're thinking back to our falling show. Do you want to just briefly describe that show? The falling show was a show just to dwell on the word or the idea of falling. Right. So it included falling in love and falling down, falling over waterfalls in a barrel.

Falling apart. You know a place we didn't really get to go in the falling show, which I'd like to take us now? Hmm. There. Gravity. You know, the force that makes one fall. So no one can really explain why gravity works the way it does. But we all basically trust that it works.

Right. When you put your foot up in the area, you'll hit the ground. Throw a ball up, it'll hit the ground. Yeah. And gravity and you just get along. You and gravity have an agreement. Yes. But we're going to start off with this tale that we ran into,

amazing tale, of a woman who lost that agreement. Oh. This is actually a true story that comes from an essay written many years ago by a guy named Burton Ruchet, who's this great... How would you describe him? Burton Roushay. He was a great essayist, journalism essayist.

Yeah, and this essay was published in 1958 in The New Yorker. And it's kind of an interesting essay because it's essentially one long quote from this woman that Burton interviewed, Rosemary Morton. It reads like a novel, even though it's nonfiction. So we asked an actress who's been in some movies, Hope Davis, to read excerpts from Rosemary's story. The story begins on a normal night, Rosemary's at home with her husband Frank. And everything's fine for the moment. I'd been home about an hour. Dinner was ready and waiting in the oven, and I was sitting at the piano,

not really playing, just amusing myself. That's something I often do at the end of the day. It helps me relax. My husband was in the kitchen, making us a cocktail, which is another Morton custom. We usually have a drink or two before dinner. So everything was quite ordinary and normal until Frank came in with the drinks. I got up to join him on the sofa,

and as I did, as I started across the room, I felt the floor sort of shake. Is that because there's an earthquake going on? Well, in the essay she looks at Frank and she's like, Good heavens, I said, what was that? Frank just looked at. He looked at me, his face was a perfect blank. He made some remark about old buildings, stretching, and settling, and handed me my drink.

So she doesn't really think too much of this, because it was very momentary. Okay. But a week later, she's at work. She's actually in the library, because she's a librarian. She's at her desk. I worked at my desk for about an hour, and it was heaven so quiet, so peaceful. Then I got up to get a book from the stacks or a drink of water or something, and it happened. The floor gave a shake.

It sank. It went down and up. Just one lurch. Maybe a little more pronounced than the first time. And then everything was back to normal. Except for my state of mind. I didn't know what to think. The best I could do was tell myself that this was an old building too.

It was built around 1900. So that was her sense at first, just old buildings. It never occurred to me that there might be any other explanation. I suppose I didn't want it to. But then, over the next few days, very odd things begin to happen. I don't know how to describe it, but I had the feeling that my sense of touch was getting more and more acute, especially in the souls of my feet. I could feel little tremors that other people couldn't.

I didn't tell Frank until the middle of the following week, on Wednesday night, to be exact. By then, I had to. I couldn't keep it to myself any longer. There was something wrong with me. There just wasn't any word for the awful sensations I'd been having. The floor's shaking feeling was only one of them. I don't know how many times that happened over the weekend, seven or eight at least. But even that began to have a different feeling.

At first the floor had moved or sagged as a whole. It still did. Only now I could feel another movement too, a kind of counterpoint. Sometimes it was as if I were sinking into the floor. The room would tilt and I'd take a step and the floor was like snow. It would give under my foot and I would sink. And other times it was just the reverse. The floor would rise up to meet me.

By then, it wasn't simply the floor that moved. When the floor tilted, the walls of the room tilted with it and the ceiling. I mean, the shape of the room never changed. Only its position in space. So Rosemary went to see her doctor. Her doctor sent her to some specialists, and they ran some tests. And then a short while later, she went back to her doctor to get the results. He'd read me their conclusions, and they were all the same.

They even used the same phrase. Impression? Essentially normal. I'll never forget that phrase. Normal. Essentially normal. It sounds so reassuring. So comforting.

But it isn't. At least it wasn't to me. It was terrifying. After this diagnosis, or non-diagnosis, things really take a turn. Fast forward a few months. There were times. in March and early April when I was absolutely certain I was going to die. But my reaction to death was peculiar. I don't remember feeling afraid. All I remember is an overwhelming sense of urgency.

So little time, so little done, so much I wanted to do. I dragged Frank to the theater more than once. And I never thought of refusing when he suggested the Philharmonic or the Metropolitan. My response to music had never been so complete. I spent hours listening to records. I'd play some old favorite, like, Beecham conducting Haydn's London Symphony, and it was amazing. It seemed to me that I could hear the inner structure

more clearly than ever before, so the idea of a dinner and a concert wasn't at all unusual. My only mistake was to take that dresser, for underground passage. It was raining and I was in a hurry, but even so I should have realized. When I did, it was too late. The passage was jammed with commuters, shoving and pushing and surging toward me,

but I didn't dare turn back. The floor was beginning to wobble, and I knew if I tried to swing around, it would tip me head over heels. All I could do was go on. do was go on. The traffic was still all against me. People kept looming up, towering up. They came charging at me like giants. And then I felt something right out of a nightmare. I was almost at the end of the passage when I felt the movement change. It was as if someone had pulled a lever. There was a little jolt. And the floor was moving, very slowly, backward, down the passage. I was walking on a

treadmill. Only for a minute, though. Then I reached the stairs. I drove myself up to the lobby and collapsed in a chair. I was jelly. From early April. I began to move in a different world. I was conscious of a new dimension, a new plane. I had a new relationship to space. My legs, my arms, my face, my whole body felt different. It had no permanent shape. It changed by the minute. I seemed to be completely at the mercy of some outside force, some atmospheric pressure. I was amorphous. left leg would seem to lengthen, or my right arm, or my neck, or one whole side of me would double or treble in size. And yet that doesn't fully describe it. There were times when the force seemed to be the rotation of the earth. I would have the feeling that I was vertically aligned with the Earth's

axis. I could feel a sort of winding movement start up inside me. Then one of my legs would begin to shorten, as if it were an anchor being drawn slowly up by a winch. The other leg would dangle. After a minute, the winch would shift. It would engage the dangling leg and just as slowly bring it up to match the other. It feels like some kind of a nightmare cartoon of some kind. Yeah. So what is it, what is wrong with her? Well, after months of this, at the end of the essay, she does finally learn that this condition she had, has a name. My trouble was a disturbance of the internal ear called labyrinthitis.

Labyrinthitis. The suffixitis meant inflammation. Swelling. So the meaning of labyrinthitis as a word was simply an inflammation of the oral labyrinth. But you know, I think people in science and medicine love to give big fat names to I don't know. Well, actually this condition you should know goes by another name. What? vertigo

oh that's why I liked the story because like I didn't know I mean like I always thought of vertigo like from the movie yeah

like you're on a stairs and you're like woo yeah like it's just a thing with heights you know like that's what it was

in the Hitchcock film but what Rosemary Morton goes through in this story it's like seems way deeper and at some point in the essay she actually refers to her situation as a case of gravitational

anarchy that's an interesting phrase I kind of like. Well, does she get better? Yep. It's impossible to say exactly when it all ended. But I think it was Frank who really sensed it first. It was after dinner one night in late August,

and he suddenly smiled and remarked that I must be feeling much better. I asked him what he meant. You never look scared anymore, he said. It's very mysterious, but her vertigo just went away. Poof. Without explanation for the coming

and no explanation for the going? Some things just don't have explanations, Robert. But they have wonderful sound design. And that's Radio Lab. No explanations? Pretty sounds. I'd buy it taking to that, Mr. Jekers. I'm crazy for sound design.

Speaking of not knowing anything. A few weeks ago, on this very program, we decided to take up the question of falling. You know, falling in love, falling apart, all that. And one of our topics, which we did with the great, I have to say this now with a certain fierceness because of what's about to happen, with the great journalist, David Quamman, we were talking about falling cats. And just to summarize, the whole thing started for David, and therefore for us, when he read this study written by two vets. Wayne Whitney and Cheryl Melhoff, who worked in the mid-tenth,

Veterinary Hospital. And they noticed that in Manhattan... There were a lot of cats falling out of windows, high windows, falling off ledges, falling off roofs. When they looked at the data, they found something a little strange, that cats who fell on the first two fifth floors were lightly injured. Which makes sense. Cats that fell from the 10th floor up, they also didn't get hurt so much.

Which doesn't make sense. It's cats who fell from the fifth to the ninth floor. Those were the ones. that really got banged up. We thought this was super interesting. I mean, like, why would a cat falling 42 floors not get hurt more than a cat falling nine floors? It doesn't make any sense. And David gave us what we thought was a very plausible answer, but it was one that made a lot of listeners go.

Hmm. I'm not buying it. Like, right, and that guy, that's Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, frequent guests. I laid out the general idea of the program for it. I mean, we said they had, I don't know, was it, six how many cats? Oh, boy. I don't remember. Hundreds of cats.

I don't think it was hundreds, but it was, no, no, it was hundreds. Only hundreds of cats? You want a bigger number? No, I'm just hundreds. Yes, that's a lot. They kept a careful sort of record. Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait. It's hundreds of cats who fell and were taken to the vet.

That's right. That's a different number. Right. Okay. The ones who died didn't probably get taken to the hospital. Nor the ones who survived without need of medical care. Well, it's too bad. Well, by the way, if your cat fell from the 40th

floor, wouldn't you take them to the doctor? If it stands up and does the jig, no, it's fine. Cats have nine lives. So this is a highly biased data set among all cats that fell from a window. Granted, but of the cats who fell, or rather these vets noticed a particular cat. No, of the cats who fell and were taken to the vet. So I'm betting that the high floors, most of them just simply died. And you don't take a dead cat to the vet. I mean, you might, but why? All right. So you started with completely biased sample. So I try not to spend much brain power analyzing flawed data. Okay. We can deal with that. Okay, that's our guy in the fight. That's David Quaman. Clearly, Dr. Tyson, he's a smart guy. But Tyson is missing the point, I think. The point is,

within this admittedly biased sample, there's a really, really interesting pattern that begs to be explained. And that is, among the cats that have fallen and have gotten, injured somewhat, the ones that fell five stories got injured worse than the ones that fell 25 stories. Why? And that's an interesting question. No matter how many cats die, there's still this interesting skew in the injured cat population. That's not going away. And he's saying your data set is incomplete. And what I say in response is it's a very interesting data set, and let's try and understand it. Incomplete or not? All data sets are incomplete. What is he study? He studies physics. Yeah.

Does he study stars, distant stars? Distance stars. He's actually an astrophysicist. Oh, okay. Well, he's looked at a few stars. And he's drawn conclusions about him based on what he's seen. Well, wait, let me back up. If your data, though incomplete, suggested something that made sense, given the laws of physics,

then you'd have less urge to question it. But you're telling me something that conflicts with my understanding of physics 101. Well, we haven't yet told you. We're going to tell you. We're going to tell you now. Let me tell you in a miniature. No, no. So you invent an...

You invent... You can't give it. We haven't done it yet. I feel an invention coming. So the invent... Well, what we would call a perfectly reasonable interpretation, but what you might call it an invention, goes as follows. So the cat falls out of the 42nd floor window, let's say, and it begins to accelerate.

So for one, two, three, four, five floors, it is accelerating. And then something happens around nine floors where the... whole of gravity gets balanced out by the push of the air against its belly, and it hits terminal velocity. Which in regular words, it continues to drop at the same speed. Yeah, so then it's at cruising speed. After the cats hit terminal velocity, and the sensation of acceleration was gone, they relaxed. They sort of stretch out like a flying squirrel, and then they hit the ground, belly flop.

And you're saying that because they hit the cruising speed and then relax into the flying squirrel, the impact is less? Yes. There's no obvious reason to me why a cat at terminal velocity is more relaxed than a cat in free fall. You're essentially in free fall, you're weightless. You're weightless.

Your speed actually doesn't matter while you're weightless. You don't even know what your speed is. What do you mean? You're speeding up, so things are changing. No, no, if you're speeding up, it is an unnoticeable phenomenon. The cat is as weightless,

the moment they leave the window as they are, as they approach the terminal velocity speed, Do you have a cat, by the way? No, but I've explored the behavior of cats under the laws of physics in my youth. Nothing violent, but just I'm learning physics. Shall we probe this? Or shall we discreetly look away?

So the cat freaks instantly when there's no ground under it. It gets its legs underneath within a fraction of a second. After that, now you're trying to go psycho on the cat. say, oh, well, it's thinking about its fall and it's free. It's in accelerating, then it's in terminal velocity. It's already legs pointed down at that point. Well, the part about you are essentially weightless when you're falling, whether you're accelerating or not, is something that he's more likely to know about than we are. And I give him credit for that. On the other hand, he's a physicist. He's not an animal behaviorist, so he really doesn't know any better than we do

what a cat thinks or what a cat feels. Probably there are a lot of cat owners out there who could help us as much as this brainy, brainy physicist. So maybe we should ask our listeners. But ladies and gentlemen, do not approach this as an experimentally addressable question. Do not throw your cat

out of a window. No, do not do that. We will come and arrest you if you do that. That's one of the things that makes us kind of a tricky, opaque, intractable question. So here's what we suggest. that you go to your cat, if you have one. If you speak cat, just ask them. Tell me, is accelerating

different from just gliding to the ground? Do you know the famous cat jelly toast experiment? No, what's that? So a cat always lands on its feet. A slice of jelly toast always lands jelly side down. So you strap jelly toast to the back of a cat

thinking they might cancel each other out. And so there's a research paper on it that says you take the cat with the jelly toast strapped on its back and then you toss it and it falls and then it stops

and then it hovers above the ground and decides which way to land? No, no, it doesn't land at all because it can't know which way to land because the jelly toast is fighting the urge to land on its feet. That's a well-known experiment in the Journal of

Irreproducible results. Where such a result belongs. Gary, let's get out of here. Thank you to Neil deGrasse Tyson. Small D. Small D. The director of the Hayden Planetarium. Thank you to David Kwan. Big D.

Big D. And thank you, Robert. Thank you, Chad. And while we're giving thanks, thanks to Burton Roushey. Well, he's not alive anymore, but you can find his story essentially normal in the awesome book. Medical Detectives, which was published in 1984 by Dutton, our sincere thanks. Thanks to actress Hope Davis and to Sarah Montague and Ellen Horn for directing Hope in the studio. And thanks to Tim Howard and Douglas Smith for the scoring help with that piece.

And lastly, thanks to you for listening. Hi, this is Caitlin Selby. And oh, it's Shelby. And we are Radio Lab listeners from Peterborough, New Hampshire. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. I love radio lab. End of message.