Radiolab - It Might Be Science

Episode Date: September 22, 2009

They Might Be Giants just came out with a new album, 'Here Comes Science.' So we invited them to come play with us at our season launch party last week at the Water Taxi Beach in Queens. And then we ambushed them with annoying little questions about science and about the tricky business of turning science into entertainment ... because of that whole, you know, 'getting the facts right' thing.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. Shorts!

From WN-Y-S. C. See? Yes. And NPR. Could you guys hear us? I think our mics are on, but the gear is not on, for some reason. Except for the guitar amp.

Hey, everybody, Chad here. This is Radio. Lab the podcast. Good morning, everyone. Okay, so we have just released our latest season of shows. To the radio, I mean, it's already out on the podcast. But right now, across the country on NPR stations, our latest season of shows is airing and we wanted to celebrate. So last week we had an event, which we want to play for you in this podcast, at this little patch of sand across the East River called the Water Taxi Beach. It's really cool. You can sit on sand and eat hot dogs and drink beer and pretend you're on the beach, but the skyscrapers are right there.

Quite surreal. In any case, it was sort of a crappy day weather-wise, so we didn't get too lucky on that account, but we were lucky to have a couple hundred people in the audience, and they might be giants, the music group, on stage with us. Now, for whatever reason, they might be giants, has decided, you know, after a bazillion records, a bunch of hits, that they want to make a record for kids about science.

We thought, well, science, I mean, come on. That's what we do. Go ahead and talk. Oh, hey, there we are. Sort of. Well, then we want to welcome, everybody. Yes, welcome. The clouds and the potential of downpour,

which there hasn't been yet and probably won't be. No chance. So we decided to, here's the deal. This is the beginning of our fifth? Sixth season, Radio Lab. So we're going to be our beginning right now. Last week was the first one. this Friday's the second one but when we were trying to figure out how to do this we

realized that while we have been like the science people you know at this point we we're kind of pros we're kind of so then we heard that there were these musicians that decided to do like they have an album so yeah here comes science never mind that here already is science so yeah so we thought we would invite them just to check them out and maybe put them through the because we know so much and they apparently know so little, so that was the thought we had. They're called They Might Be Giants. A tentative title.

And what do you guys want to introduce yourselves? My name is John Flansberg. This is Mr. Marty Bellar on the drums, ladies and gentlemen. Marty. I'm John Linnell over here. Did you guys introduce yourselves, by the way? Maybe we didn't. No, we didn't.

Chad. Robert. So, like, how did you handle wander over into this territory? I was going to ask you that. I'm not sure that we ever decided. It was more of a calling, really. You know, we were called... Can I give you the same answer?

No. Because eventually that will be true for us. Well, we have a long history in doing fact-based songs. So that was probably the thing that made us think that it was a natural leap to actually doing, you know, tackling some more serious scientific stuff. This is serious scientific stuff, I think. Super heavy. Super heavy. Could you just play one?

I don't just... Sure. Start, yeah. Do you want to set it up, though? Yeah. Say what? Do you want to set up the song that we're going to hear? This song is about evolution, and it's called My Brother the Ape.

Okay. All right. Well, I got the invitation. That was the Ait might be giants playing My Brother the Ape off their latest CD. Here Come Science. I have to confess, we actually played you that song from their album, not from the live performance, because we had some technical difficulties with that. song in the recording. So just on that song, we're going to go with the album version.

Henceforth, everything will be live. And I don't know if you caught the lyrics, but it's a song about a family reunion where everybody is invited, including you, your brother, the ape, your sister the cow. And this brotherly sisterliness caused Robert and I as true masters of science to wonder. If you're doing like the science, then we could call attention to why should I mean there's a guy in this audience I think who's a science teacher at a high school

here in New York and he wrote us a little note and I just you know it's not like I want to you know but publicly embarrasses he says you know in science textbooks the closest that any author gets to a human family relationship is to call the apes cousins now I don't want to bore you with the

subtleties of cladistics Cladistics, by the way, is a sort of biological system of representing ancestry. Yeah. So our ancestors have been separated from other apes for four million years. Most likely the only brother we could claim would be a bipedal standing ape called the Neanderthal. But an ape... Well, let me ask you, tentative giants. Hold on, my helicopter's coming.

Let me ask you, did you, when you say my brother, the ape, did you mean brother in a cladistic sense? or was it more in the kind of brother with an A kind of sets? My very familiar close associate, the ape? Well, I guess it's, I mean, in some ways, Robert, you actually, I think at one point, in the letter, it's specified that we humans are, in fact, also apes. So it wouldn't be correct to say, my brother. In fact, you could say myself the ape. You could say.

And not be incorrect scientifically. But did you ever, did you ever? is more accurate. Interesting retort, giants. But also, I've got a question about... I've got a small technical note about the letter where he says it's $4 million like it's a long time.

Long time. But as everyone who knows who's ever seen a film strip, in science, four million years is a very short time. Right. Unless you're watching a film strip for those four million years.

Wait a second. I'm starting to feel like we're losing this little situation here, Robert. Well, then let me just get tougher still. Keep getting. Your ponies in there somewhere. This high school science teacher writes, it might be cozy to believe that we're similar to every other living thing,

but we're incredibly distant from moss. So distant, it's difficult to find connections unless you look really, really closely. In fact, I could argue a dehydrated rotifer in suspended animation has more in common with a rock, says Aaron Sand, than with a human. So what he's questioning here is just how careful, like do you have a science guy? I mean, a science guy? Yeah, we actually brought in a consultant to basically fact-check the stuff that we were doing.

And he was very helpful and he was very supportive. What was his name? His name was Eric Siegel. He's actually the director of the New York Hall of Science in Queens. Oh, so you're probably in pedigree. So how did that work? Did you play the music and then sent you? The internet.

Oh, you never met Eric Segal. I've never met him. So he could be the guy who wrote the book about love from in 1960s. Wasn't there an Eric Siegel who wrote... Oh, Love Story. Love Story, yeah. I think that's spelled differently. Spelled differently.

Oh, okay. E-R-C-H. So you really had to fact-check your songs? Yeah, yeah. Was there any moments... Fourteenth album, first-time fact-checked. That is kind of a new experience for rock and roll. Yeah, it's technically against the rules.

Yeah. Do you feel a little less rocking? Well, you know, in rock music, you know, you sometimes songs have premises like there's going to be a jailbreak somewhere in this town. And when you hear a song like that, you think maybe that should have been fact-checked. I mean, the jail break is going to be near the jail or in the jail. You know. Great song. Crazy words.

No facts. Was Eric really easy? Do you think? Well, you know, he's got a strong liberal arts background, I think. And did he ever, like, apparently he let this my brother the ape thing through. Who fact checks the fact check? Well, well, I mean, there was one experience where we were doing this song, Why Does the Sunshine? Which is a song that we recorded many years ago.

It was actually one of the very first science-based songs that we did. And it was a cover from the 50s. And that song is no longer factually correct. Before we defactify it, can we hear it? Yes. Can you please? You got the setup? Okay.

I think it would go something like this. I think it would go something like this. The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic. nuclear furnace where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees

yo ho it's hot the sun is not a place where we could live but here on earth there'd be no life without the light it gets we'd need its heat

we need its energy without the sun, without a doubt, there'd be no... The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace, where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees. The sun is hot. The sun is so hot that everything on it is a gas, aluminum, copper, iron, and metal. and many others The sun is large

The sun were hollow A million Earths would fit inside And yet the sun is only a middle-sized star The sun is far away It's about 93 million miles away And that's why it looks so small Even when it's out of sight The sun shines night and day

We need its heat, we need its light, the sunlight that we see. The sunlight comes from our own sun's atomic energy. Scientists have found that the sun is a huge atom smashing machine. The heat and light of the sun are caused by the nuclear reactions between sand. Palm trees with neon lights in them. helicopters that are flying too low and helium the sun is a massive

gas, so gigantic nuclear furnace where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees a beautiful song, no doubt, based on an Irish folk song but the publishing still comes through for the original authors.

Where'd you get the... And the text is... I believe it's either from the Collier's Encyclopedia or the Golden Book Encyclopedia. I'm sure that information is available online. Literally, word for word, from the...

Well, the opening lines of the song, which sort of don't... Is the word scantion? They don't have any metric... The sun is a massive incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees

is the opening paragraph describing the sun in the Zoclopedia. and most of the song is actually pretty much factually correct, it turns out. Which part is wrong? In the part where John was talking about sand, that was wrong. And in the spoken word part right there, it lists what the sun is composed of, and basically it's evidently the sun is composed of like two things and not much else, and it's a long list of things that are very marginal.

That was one thing that Eric pointed out. We actually had completely re-recorded the song confident that after 15 years of performing in front of drunks that this song was actually factually fine. And that seems, I mean, that seems a last... That is an assumption. Tonight there's going to be a jailbreak, my friend, somewhere near this town. But just so I understand what was wrong with that song that you just sang, it's the part that he didn't say. Well, there was one other major problem with the song, which actually only came to light after the song was written, which is that the sun is, that the sun is, in fact, not a mass

of incandescent gas. Oh. That was the real problem. Well, it was assumed, you know, this is like many things in science, which is that an ever-changing, ever-evolving world. Wait, the sun is not gas? The sun is plasma.

The sun is a mass of incandescent plasma? Is that the... It could have been that. So what did you just change? Do you just change the word? Well, we actually... We'd already finished the video, so it was too late. And the video was really good and it was made by this crazy,

wonderful animator in Canada. And she actually makes everything like on her, like, it's totally handmade. So basically, she would just start, she'd be crying for three months. Why? Did she have animated gas? No, no, no. It was just, like beautiful puppets and stuff. It was personal. So we wanted to save,

we wanted to save that project. So we actually, we just fix up the little bit of the lyrics that we could to make it slightly more accurate. And then we did what in the proud tradition of country Western acts, we actually did an answer song to our own song. But before we get to the answer song, what little changes could you make to a real bopper? Like the sun is not a mass of incandescent. I mean, you could either put not or you could find something to rhyme with plasma. What else is there but my asthma?

Miasma. I say miasma. Casbah. Casbah? A sun is a casba. The song that we came up with, which was prompted by a recording engineer who was actually just listening to us having a free-range, you know, grumble session about this whole dilemma, is he said, why don't you just write a song called The Sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma. He just said that. He just said that. He's really smart. Wow.

He says stuff like that. Is he a scientist? He's a Berkeley College music grad. He's got perfect pitch. It's very intimidating. That explains everything, right? Yeah. So you write an answer.

So we've written an answer song to ourselves. That's just kind of a way to redeem ourselves within the scientific community to show that we're not just like sloughing off the facts, but also not losing, you know, one eighth of our video books. So for those of us who are not entirely familiar with the concept of answer song, an answer song is where you say, you stupid, stupid, stupid person who is also singing the song right now, you were wrong then and now let me set it right, amen kind of thing. You must be listening to more rap answer songs than. I was going to say that's more like in the rock. The Roxanne, Roxanne kind of... Yeah. This isn't about like a beef

that we have with ourselves. Well, it sounds like it is in a way because you have a beef with your former selves. It's like an east-west plasma... Gas. Feud. Gas. That whole gas.

But maybe we should hear your answer song. Yeah. Okay. I'd say well. Ready, fellas? The sun's not simply made out of fire. Forget what the past. It never morphs into some supernovae but collapse.

We're experimenting with becoming haters here at this performance. But what kind of a song would finish with? Forget that song, plasma exclamation point. They got it wrong. That thesis has been rendered invalid? We get the publishing on the second song. So we're really pushing it on. We got a problem with that other song.

You know, my thing is, okay, and this is perhaps an appropriate question to ask on a sunless, sunless day such as this, but I'm not sure I really understand the sun any better now. Oh, you understand it. It is a... Well, I didn't even know what Plasma was when we started writing the song. Like, what is miasma? What does that mean?

A miasma is like a fog with a slightly noxious quality. You only know that because you looked it up earlier. That's not really nice, you know. With a slightly noxious quality? Yeah, I didn't know about that either. Apparently it's something like a toxin. Oh, I thought it was just like a sort of a mess. A mess.

Yeah. No, it's apparently a mess with attitude. In other words, the new song is just as completely misguided as the original. It's not a miasma of anything. So it's a fourth state of, this is like, but it's... The fourth state of matter is correct. That part is actually correct. Fourth state of matter.

Not gas, that's the first state. Not liquid, not solid. So it's something else. It's like a fourth one. Yes. So that's the answer. But what is the fourth state? Plasma.

I can give you a little quick explanation. Solid, the molecules are packed tight. they don't move. Liquid, they over there, they swim around. A gas, they're moving very freely. And with a plasma, apparently, they're so free that the electrons have been cut loose from the nucleus.

And that's what makes it. So it's like a gas on steroids. It's a gas on steroids. No, that does nothing for me. I guess the truth is the sun's massive incandescent gas was not incorrect by the scientific standards

of 1960 when it was written. It's just as we learn more, our theories and ideas have to evolve. But in making fact-based rock and roll, you're then stepping into this sort of scientific revisioning that happens. You're going to have to keep doing this.

There's going to be a fourth answer song, and a fifth one. Yeah. Yeah, don't do a song about Pluto. You did do a song about Pluto. We did do a song about Pluto. Yeah, actually. It also has a question mark in the title.

Yeah. Well, we wrote, there's a song on the science record that enumerates the planets, but it doesn't actually commit to whether Pluto is or isn't a planet. See, that's what you can do. You can say, and other stuff. And a lot of lines, you can, like, finish the sentence. We can't say, and other stuff.

But even when we think we've got it right, you want to tell them? Yeah, we have, just so that we can, you know, play both sides for a second. We had a situation in our current season. I don't know if anyone here has heard the stochasticity show. Okay, well, there's a moment in the stochasticity show. Stochasticity. So just to give context, we were exploring, stochasticity is a wonderfully latinate word that essentially means chaos, randomness. And so we were exploring the chaos and randomness in biology and in cells and in genes. Apparently, if you look at genes,

they're incredibly noisy and chaotic little things and you expect them to be very ordered. Because we are ordered. We wake up in the morning, our hearts beat regularly, our brains function, you know, if we're healthy, more or less in a predictable way. We wake up at the same time most days and we go to the... sleep at the same time. So up here, we're very ordered, but down there it's quite noisy. So the question is, how do you go from noisy bottom to ordered top? And we put that question to a very smart science reporter, Carl Zimmer, and he said, actually what may happen is the body engineers its own noise filters. And I thought, filters. Oh, my God, I could do something with that.

I could call a friend. We could do a whole filter demonstration. So this is what resulted in. and I played this very thing you're about to hear. It's just four minutes to Carl Zimmer in the studio just to make sure it was scientifically accurate and this is what happened. I'll just give you an example from my world. This is the honest to God's truth. I have a friend named Little Wing Lee.

Hey Little Wing. Hello, Dad. Tell me what you're holding in your hands there. In my hands, I have two audio tapes. Little Wing just recently called me up. She said, I've got these two cassette tapes. They're really old. I think they were made in the 70s.

A mom found a minored attic. and they're of my grandmother. One's labeled Mima sings. Singing. Singing old slave songs and old hymns. Now, Little Wings' grandmother died last year. She was 99 years old. Wow.

And they were really close. Yeah, very close. They used to call me little Mima when I was a kid. So she's got these tapes. She wants to hear them. The problem is that you put it on for more in three minutes, you get annoyed. And there's that weird, like... It's too noisy.

It was kind of a little bit of that. Yeah. She wanted to know if I could do something about it. Yeah. So real quick, here's what I did. I'd put it into a computer, launched an EQ program, found the bass noisiness,

which was around 600 hertz, dialed that down. Like so. Then I found the high hiss frequencies, which are around 2,000 hertz. Dialed that down. Ah, now, as a final step, I just kind of located the voice

around 1,000 hertz, and dialed it up. Okay, so it's not a flawless process. I mean, now she sounds like she's coming out of a way. but for the first time you can hear her voice. I don't know. This is the first time I'm hearing this song. It seems like she's describing the night that my grandfather passed away, talking about the doctor's telling her that my grandfather has passed,

and then she's describing putting a fern in his hand, and she said it should be a rose. and I'll let goodbye The thing that's applicable here is that we started with this and then just by bringing certain frequencies down and others up we ended up with this This might be how it is in the body That you've got this noise all the way in the bottom

These genetic circuits which were spitting out messiness But somehow just on top of that are other genetic circuits Which are cleaning it all up Giving it a shape Wait what Is that not right? Not quite. Damn it.

Science. Literally what happened is we played that piece to Carl and he didn't quite, we did that later, but he was sort of like, well, it's not really that way. And we looked at each other with an absolute terror because I'd spent three days working on this. And it turned out to be completely wrong. So then we said, well, all right, what are we going to do? So we'll run the problem and then do our answer song. And that's pretty much what we did.

Okay, so to close the performance, we thought we would spring one on They Might Be Giants. You know, see if we can catch them off guard. Because we have musicians here, we were kind of curious. Did you guys take requests? Yeah. We can play the songs so we know how to play. Well. Because we have a line.

We have a line that we just thought, I mean, one of the problems about doing this for a living is you can't just do the science. You've got to kind of give it beats and kind of make it sing. and we thought we would go look for certain phrases that are so dense that they almost defy beats, defy musicality. So we're going to show you. What a perfect invitation for a song. So, Jed, you want to read this phrase?

Sure. It's, we were wondering if this could be musicified in any way. Quantum decoupling transition in a one-dimensional Feshbach resonant superfluid. Quantum decoupling transition in a one-dimensional feshbach resonant super fluid

so we thought we were thinking like at quantum decoupling it sounds kind of like maybe a breakup song here so you could dramatic possibilities

you could get sad you know quantum decouple do we need to hold it for you while you got it I got it you guys ready hey Marty Beller

you want to help us help us out of you stare at me stare at me ready quantum decoupling transition

in one-dimensional Feshbach resonant Super That is kind of the beatnik The beatnik approach What if it were sad

Sad? You want sad? Yeah what if it were like a breakup song? It's a decoupling. It's decoupling. If it's quantum decoupling transition into a one-dimensional Feshback Reson Super Bowl. Guys, hit me with some sad. transition in a one-dimensional

test of algorithms and superfluid what if it were like what if you were to kind of emphasize the wait wait that was good that was pretty amazing bring the beat back

what about the quantum like it's neither here it's nor there it's just probability what about that could you do something that's quantum you want to do this one okay that means you guys have to We'll provide the actual music.

I'm waiting for Chad to go, yeah, but what if it was... What about fluid? No, forget. You know, I thought we worked pretty fast before. Yeah, yeah, that's true. We've been wasting a lot of time. All right, so, okay, let's just bring it down to sort of respectable dialogue again. Now that you've wandered into this thorny neighborhood of science,

I'm just curious, like, how has that been for you? Writing songs about things that are completely outside ourselves is actually very fascinating. I think we were a little bit nervous that we were going to be sort of stirring the pot in the fact check department. And that's... From the YouTube comments that we received so far,

I think we'll be moving over to Friendster now. Did you have any red state moments? I'm just curious, I mean, evolution is being... Well, there are songs about evolution. acknowledge that evolution is and that's a problem for some people. We should, should we say

goodbye and then put them on the final thing? Sure. No, when should you want to do? I don't know. What do you guys want to do? Do you want to play any other song or? I don't know. You got any other ideas for song? Do you have... Yeah, we have another song prepared.

It's actually it's about the elements. Oh. Like the elements, the chemical elements. Oh, the chemical. The periodic elements. It's like rain and wind and fire.

Not those kind of elements. Okay. Yeah. Well, there you have it. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. I want to thank they might be giants for appearing on stage with us. Understormy Skies, their new album, Here Comes, Science is out. Our New Season is out.

I want to thank Michael Rayfield for making the whole thing happen. Aaron Sands, the high school science teacher for rightness that letter. And thank you for listening. And, of course, on the subject of thanks, Gotta say Radio Lab is funded in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Sloan Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. I'm Chad Aboumrod. Mr. Kay is not here with me at the moment, but he is always here in spirit,

and he says bye too. And we'll catch you in two weeks.