Radiolab - Super Cool

Episode Date: December 5, 2017

When we started reporting a fantastic, surreal story about one very cold night, more than 70 years ago, in northern Russia, we had no idea we'd end up thinking about cosmology. Or dropping toy horses in test tubes of water. Or talking about bacteria. Or arguing, for a year. Walter Murch (aka, the Godfather of The Godfather), joined by a team of scientists, leads us on what felt like the magical mystery tour of super cool science. This piece was produced by Molly Webster and Matt Kielty with help from Amanda Aronczyk.  It originally aired in March of 2014. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.

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

Yeah. Hey, I'm Chad Abunrod. I'm Robert Krollwich. This is Radio Lab. And what we're going to do in this particular show is we're going to... This is one of my favorites. Yeah. Favorrette.

It should be because you certainly gave it your all. Exactly. I don't know. What do we need to say here? I mean, this is like, this is a little bit of a tussle. We sort of wanted to bring it back because, you know, winter's approaching. Things are kind of heavy right now. We could use a little lightness. So this begins with a very, very successful film editor with, well, you'll meet him in a moment.

Comes to us with an idea with Chad loves, I hate, and things go from there. Perfect. Can you hear us now? Hello, hello? It starts with Walter, my hero. Walter Merch. I'm a film editor and sound designer, and I've been working in film since the late 1960s.

The resume includes, I'm going to make them an offer again with you. The Godfather. Apocalypse now. I love the smell of night pump in the morning. A ton of other films. The thing we're talking about, so you should know,

is one of the more spectacular stories I've ever heard. How did you bump into this? Well, I was in Lyon, in France. Doing a film? Unbearable. likeness of being. This is back in 1986. I was supposed to be there for a week and it wound up, I was there for a month and I ran out of things to read. So I went down the street from the hotel and there was a bookstore. And I was interested and still am in cosmology. So I picked up

a book by the Carl Sagan of France, a man named Hubert Reeves. Hubert. Ubert. Actually, he's French Canadian. He translates as Carl Sagan. Anyway, merch ends up buying Reeves' book, goes back to the hotel, finds a cozy spot. So I was happily reading away, and he was trying to explain with some difficulty, because it's a difficult topic. How did matter condense out of the sort of quark soup that we believe happened right after the Big Bang? and he tried various attempts scientifically, but then he said to give you a sense of the poetry of this moment, the best thing is the story that Malaparte tells.

Who is in Malaparte? Well, he was a journalist, a poet, diplomat, soldier, prisoner, film director, and somebody who got around. Yeah. And speaking of getting around, in 1942, a Milanese newspaper, Corriere de la Cera, sent Malaparte, to report on the eastern and northern fronts of the war. Specifically, the Russian-finish border.

And he had a front-row seat of the siege of Leningrad, the agony of the Nazi bombardment of that city. And it's from there that Malaparte tells his story. So this one day, this was in the winter, Malaparte was posted with the Finnish army who were fighting along with the Nazis, and they were perched just north of Leningrad. On the shores of Lake Ladoga, which is this big lake abutting the city. And on this day, the Nazis bombarded the area around the lake.

This started a forest fire. Everyone ran for cover. Soldiers ran every which way. And in the middle of the forest, there were Soviet horses that were locked up in a stable. And the horses panicked and broke out of the stables. Hundreds of them. And they just started running. Rush them to get away from the fire.

Right. So you have hundreds of horses bolting through this flaming forest. Heading towards the open space ahead, which was the lake. And all at once they burst out of the forest and go barreling into the lake, stampeding one on top of the other as they all get deeper and deeper. Up to their heads. And it is at this moment when they enter the lake that, according to the lake, story, something very weird happens. In the blink of an eye, the lake snaps them shut.

It just freezes. Suddenly turns to ice. With a bang. It goes from water to ice with this violent snap, and suddenly the horses are entombed. Malaparte writes that even the waves on the lake were gripped in midair and sort of suspended there. Fade out. The next morning, when Malaparte and the Finns woke up, they discovered the forest barn. had burned itself out. And look at that. The lake has frozen solid overnight. And his Finnish friends said, yes, that sometimes happens. And then they look and see, what are those bumps on the ice over there? They go to investigate, and I find themselves in this horrific sculpture garden of horses' heads sticking up out of the solid marble-like floor of ice.

You said hundreds, so hundreds of horse heads... hundreds of horses. These are not going to decay, right? Because it's freezing colds. Those horses stayed there all winter, and Malaparte was there in that region of the world during that winter. And every so often, he and the other soldiers would go and have a smoke, and they'd go into the sculpture garden and wander around looking at this miraculous thing.

to this image of the horses frozen in this lake. This image beautiful and strange and disturbing and profound in some way. Made us wonder. What made me wonder, I should say? I told you at the time. Don't trust this story. It's scientifically impossible. And I keeping an open heart thought, could this possibly be true?

Could there be a grain, perhaps several grains, perhaps a lake's worth of grains of truth to this story? Your mind is like loose like a sieve. Anyway, we've argued about this for a year. Yeah, and you know what? We're going to reconstruct that argument right now and take this uptown. All right. Let's do this. To a real scientist.

To a real scientist. In the course of our argument, we ended uptown to Rockefeller University to meet a couple people who know about ice. So we're going to go play with some super cool ice. Among them, this fellow. I'm Alexander Petrov. I'm the Raymond and Beverly Sackler fellow. Do you ever wonder who are Raymond and Beverly Sackler?

They occasionally almost show up and I almost meet them, but I never have. Yeah. By the way, the Sackler family has recently come into a bit of controversy. We all know that now. We didn't at the time. In any case, Alex, who must be said is an amazing dude, graciously agreed to demonstrate that you can, in fact, create the conditions of that massive lake inside a tiny little test tube. Could somebody hold this sort of in here and I'll get the tube set up?

He reached inside his freezer, grabbed his trusty falcon. Yeah, this is called a falcon tube. Just a plastic tube filled with water. Now, this is not normal water. This is the really nice water? It's very, very pure water. No minerals, no dust in there. It's like super distilled.

And he says, when you take water like that and you cool it down, you can get it far below its freezing point and it won't freeze. Unless that is, you happen to have a horse. You have a tiny horse? here? We have a tiny and we are going to drop that into the Falcon tube and do that. That's going to be awesome. So he handed

us the tube. I'm holding a little vial of super cooled water. What, Alex, what temperature do you think this is that I'm holding? This is minus 20? C. C. C. C. C. When does water freeze and says zero? So it's 20 degrees below

freezing point and it's still water. But not for long, because we unscrewed the cap. Are you filming? We held a little plastic horse over the tube. Countdown or something. Okay, on the count three, guilty. All right, three, two, one. Point for Chad, because the moment that little plastic horse hit the water,

the water slammed into ice. I got excited. Suddenly that little guy was trapped in an ice cube. Oh my God, the horse is frozen. That's amazing. Please remember the horse was plastic, no animals were harmed in this experiment. It is honestly breathtaking. It happens so fast.

Catastrophic ice formation, just like that. Did you hear that seawood, Robert? Say it again. Catastrophic. This is Virginia Walker. And I'm in the Department of Biology, Queens University. Virginia was one of the many people that we called up to ask, like, what the hell? Like, why does this happen? Shouldn't this water just freeze gradually the way that most water does?

You know, at 32 degrees Fahrenheit or whatever? No, actually. So you see, this is why we have to start at the beginning, as Julie Andrews says, a very good place to start, right? All right, so the only reason that water freezes normally at zero Celsius and 32 Fahrenheit is that there's something there that makes it freeze. We call that a nucleator. Sounds like a superhero. Yeah, all right, so it's a nucleator. A nucleator is like a seed, right?

I didn't know this, but it turns out water almost always needs a seed in order to grow ice. Because it turns out water by itself is not actually that good at remembering how to become ice. That is Aaron Pettit. She is a glaciologist. At the University of Alaska Fairbanks. And what she means is that when water cools down, the molecules start to slow their movement. They get a little bit closer together. And at that point, they want to all hold hands and become ice. But the water molecules don't quite remember very well how they're supposed to be.

organized. They're like, wait, do you stand here and I stand here? How do we do this again? They need to be shown what combination of angles work the best to create a nice, stable structure. What they need is, say, a speck of dust. That's the nucleator. If you throw in some dust into otherwise pure water, now they have a guide. Because ice can start to mimic whatever the shape of the dust particle is. But what happens is that the water molecules start to form a cage around the dust particle. And that cage shape is very similar to the shape they need to make ice. And suddenly they're like, oh, that's how we do it. So in a sense, the dust particle is reminding the water molecules how to freeze. Well, no, I don't think of it like that. Virginia says it's actually not quite so

gentle. Really what's happening is the dust particle is forcing the water molecules into the right shape around it. It's like a, it's like a command. It's nothing about memory. It's, it's a, it's a physical thing. They just get jammed in there. Wow, this is just like Julian Andrews, like a Nazi. So then these ice... Let's start at the very beginning. Stop! In the beginning! Okay, so if, as we just learned, water needs a catalyst, a nucleator in order to freeze,

doesn't this at least raise the possibility that that Finnish Russian lake had reached a super cool state? Along come these horses, and they were the nucleators. Maybe they had dust on their hair or whatever. I don't know. But whatever it was, it started a chain reaction. Ice spread outward from these horses, shot across the entire lake, and froze the whole damn thing at once. If you'll excuse me for just a second, because this is like a turreting, like, impulse I have. Excuse me. Now we can continue.

Hold your horses there, Krallwitch. We're going to take a break, and we'll continue this meaningless tussle in just a moment. This is Alicia Bridges calling from Saskatoon in Saskatchewan. 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. Okay, so, Jad, Robert, Radio Lab. Before the break, we posited what I thought was an interesting theory. Robert, not buying it.

We'll get to your skepticism in a moment, but I want to talk a little bit more. about nucleators for a second. Because when we were talking with Virginia, she told us something kind of cool. We asked her like, what else nucleates ice? Like we learned about dust, but what else can do it? Okay.

So the best nucleator is ice itself. She says if a little bit of snow falls into some water or a little bit of ice forms in the water organically, the water molecules will rush around that and bam. If you don't have ice, what is the second best thing to nucleate this ice? happens to be bacteria. Turns out, she says, there are three different kinds of bacteria

that can generate these special proteins. Big honking proteins. That can instantly turn water into ice. In fact, when we were reporting this story, a video started circulating on the internet that showed a scientist taking a bottle of water, squirting a little bit of this bacteria in, and then the thing just shocked into ice.

And the cool thing is, these bacteria are actually plant pathogens. plant killers. So you've probably seen grass growing in your backyard or whatever, and it can be all covered with frost. But then, you know, the frost can melt and it's still green. Yeah. But if those bacteria are present... She says they'll spit out their proteins onto the plant, which generates these ice crystals.

The ice crystals... Then slice the plant open. And expose the inside of the plant and the bacteria say, hmm, yummy. Here's lunch, and they eat the inside of the plant. It's a good strategy. But that's not the cool part. Virginia says she has also found these proteins in bacteria that don't kill plants. So that made me think.

Made her wonder why. Like, why would they need to make ice? And that's when it occurred to her and a few other researchers. Maybe it's about transportation. Exactly. What? Well, think about it. These bacteria are just sitting on these plants.

And what happens is the wind comes along, blows up this little bacteria into the upper atmosphere. blows them literally up into the clouds. They're not particularly cold hardy. So now they have a situation. They do not want to be all the way up there. They've got to get back down to the earth. And unless they hitch a ride on those horses that you keep talking about,

they're so light. They might not come down to Earth. So what they do, she suspects, is they use the plant trick. They spit out these proteins into the cold, wet cloud, which galvanizes the water molecules around them to form. A snowflake around their body. So now they've got this little hovercraft that they can use to coast on down. If they make ice, they can get back down,

and they can get back down in a different place and start a new colony of bacteria somewhere else. And so by this way, they get dispersed around the whole earth. Think about that the next time it's winter and it snows. Apparently, if you melt each snowflake, you'll find a little bacteria. inside it. You're saying all of them?

All the snowflakes? I haven't looked at every single snowflake. Of course. But it makes perfect sense, doesn't it? But that's a very, very cool idea. Yeah. I suddenly like the Bacteria movie a hell of a lot better than the horse movie. So at least I, you know, and it at least has a shot of being true.

Yeah, the horses. So when we were reporting this story and talking to Aaron Pettit and Virginia Walker and a bunch of other scientists. When we asked them, could an entire lake have flashed frozen in an instant trapping all those horses? Uniformly, the answer that we got was, no. Did you hear her no there? Did you hear the sound of it? It seems somewhat summer. Let me ask it to a different way. Would you say absolutely not? Or is it just a kind of a gentle no? I'd say that's an absolutely not. Okay. Because as Aaron told us, when you're talking about freezing an entire lake? Well, you've got a lot of problems to consider first. The process of

freezing actually is a source of heat itself. Because like when water molecules form bonds to make ice, that's a lot of activity. And activity produces energy. And now that's going to make things a little bit warmer. Not to mention the fact that horses are warm-blooded animals, so they also would slow down the process of freezing. Also, the water would never have been pure enough to super cool in the first place. Because there's too many things in the lake that would provide that initial nucleation. Plants, organisms, dirt. Damn it.

Did somebody actually see this? What is the actual evidence that? No. Nobody saw any of this as it actually happened. When we told Walter Murch what the scientist told us, in typical Walter Murch fashion, he was icy calm. And he reminded us that he never told us it was true, that Malaparte. a often mixed fact in fiction, and that the real reason he was attracted to this story

was because it offered a metaphor for cosmology. Right. The beginning of the universe. Really? I mean, if you'll excuse me for a small bit of skepticism, now Walter thinks it's true for the universe? Metaphor, metaphor. Even so. Even so.

Come on. What does he mean? Here's what he means. And if you're a physicist listening right now, just turn off the radio. We're just talking among ourselves here. Right. So you can think of it in one of two ways, right?

The first is that idea of supercooling that we saw at Rockefeller, where under the right circumstances, water can cool down way below its freezing point, not freeze, and then all of a sudden... And it can suddenly do that, which we saw at Rockefeller in the test tube. Now, according to Jan 11... Professor of physics and astronomy. Barnard College, Columbia University. The metaphor holds because that bizarreo flash freezing phenomenon actually happened repeatedly, she says, in the moments after the Big Bang.

Yes. Super cooling is definitely something that happens in the early universe. She says right when the universe got its start, it was still small, like the size of a grapefruit. Inside that grapefruit, it was extremely hot. Back then, it was probably a million trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion. A million trillion, trillion, trillion. trillion times. Ten to the 32 times hotter. But as the little grapefruit began to expand, the temperature started to drop, and it dropped and dropped to a point where the universe should freeze,

so to speak, but it didn't. And it's waiting and it's waiting to freeze, and you're like, what's happening? Why aren't you freezing? Then suddenly, there it goes. Phase change. So, go ahead. Okay. I don't know exactly what you're saying, but keep going. All I'm saying is there's a lot of phase changes. Some of them were super cool. Don't worry about it. Okay. There's another parallel, which I think is actually even more interesting. It has to do with those seeds we talked about. So if you go back to the grapefruit. Okay.

Inside, it's very, very hot. You've got this wash of energy, and this energy is uniform, right? It's all the same thing. Spread evenly everywhere the same. But then as things cool, you begin to get these tiny fluctuations. Little variations in temperature and density. Where it's a little bit hotter and denser in one point. Than another, we're talking about clumps.

Like maybe we're here, there's a little bit more matter and heat than over there. And these are our seeds. See, I don't think that you're describing seeds like I understand seeds. Seeds are little things, little things that attract other stuff. No, no, but these behave just like seeds. Because as the universe cools down and expands and begins to add all these, new forces and all these new particles. Gravity. Electron, photons,

atoms. Those little bits of variation from the beginning are still there and now they're growing bigger. Because now we have gravity, right? So little concentrations of stuff are now attracting more stuff and then more stuff and then more stuff and as the universe expands they expand until ultimately

those little blips have become these massive objects. Amazingly, the largest structures that we know about in the universe have their seeds in these tiny fluctuations. Does that mean when you go on a Star Wars kind of voyage? So you're in your spaceship and you're going at some incredibly high speed. You're rushing through the universe and you see huge clouds of gas with nurseries for stars

and you leave them and you go to a galaxy and then another galaxy. There's a galaxy over here and a galaxy over there and a galaxy over here. You're saying that these massive structures, walls of galaxies, neighborhoods of stars, that's going to, are reflections of a very early moment when something went in the initial broil of stuff. These beautiful structures that you're describing are like the snowflakes around the little bit of dust. So does that mean that the empty spaces that we see when we gaze at the current universe are actually filled with something that hasn't cooled yet or that isn't visible to us or is working under a different rule?

Cool. If I can hijack your question, I can say we might not have seen the last of the phase transitions. Our universe is absolutely continuing to cool. Is it really? Yeah. It's cooling down? It's very cold right now. We have this dark energy driving the universe to expand at an ever-accelerated rate, and it's conceivable that in the future that energy will endure some phase transition, and it will go away or decay to something else in this new state of matter. It might do something different to the future. evolution of the universe.

So we might have a phase transition in our future. Huh. Suddenly, I... Hello. Hello. We have many people to thank who helped us on this particular podcast. Totally. Producers Matthew Keilty, Molly Webster.

Woo! Also, Amanda Aroncheck. Atish Bacha for sure at Marine Boudot. These super cool people at Rockefeller University. Absolutely. Jeannie Garbarino, Philip Kidd, and of course Alexander Petrov. Thanks also to Jeffers Sandstrand. Inger Herberg, Mark Martin, Martin Truffer, Mark Tuckerman, and Jason Wexler.

And sincere thanks to all the listeners from Facebook and Twitter who helped us translate Russian and Finnish books. Oh, and certainly last but not least, Walter Merch for being my hero. Chad loves you. I love you. And more importantly, he released a book translating Malaparte from Italian to English, which is where we got the story of the horses falling in the lake. It's called The Bird That Swallowed Its Cage, the Selected Ritings of Curzio Malaparte. All right. So that's us saying. Oh, oh, wait. One more thing. One more thing.

Go to our website, RadioLab.org. And you can see videos we shot at Rockefeller of water turning into ice in a flash. Supercooling right in front of your eyes. It's amazing. RadioLab.org. I'm Jed Abumrod. I'm Robert Powitt. Thanks for listening. This is Stephanie calling from Bushwick, Brooklyn. Lab was created by Jad Abamrod and is produced by Soren Wheeler.

Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Maria Matasar Padilla is our managing director. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, David Gable, Bethel Hapty, Tracy Hunt, Matt Kilty, Robert Crowicz, Annie McEwan, Latif Nassar, Melissa O'Donnell, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Amanda Aronchick, Shima Olii, David Fuchs, Nygar Fattali, Phoebe Wang and Katie Ferguson. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris.