Radiolab - The Radio Lab

Episode Date: May 26, 2017

15 years ago the very first episode of Radiolab, fittingly called "Firsts," hit the airwaves. It was a 3-hour long collection of documentaries and musings produced by a solitary sleep-deprived producer named Jad Abumrad. Things have changed a bit since then.   Today, with help from our long time Executive Producer Ellen Horne, we celebrate our 15th birthday by surprising Jad and Robert in the studio and forcing them to look back on a time when “Radiolab” was just that: a lab for experimenting with radio.    Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate.    

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Oh, okay. You're listening to Radio Lab. On New York Public Radio, WNYC. Now, now. Okay.

On New York Public Radio, WN.C. Okay. On your public radio. W.N.Y.C. Keep listening. Okay, so the other day, should we say who we are? Yeah, I guess we should. Okay, Jad.

Robert. Radio Lab. Okay, so the other day, Sorin called us into the studio. There they are. And there was a giant human-sized rodent sitting in the engineering seat. Very large rodent. It was very familiar to us because it was a puppet head that we had toured with. Who is that under that big shooting?

Well, that's the question. That is the question. Maybe you guys should guess or something. Oh my goodness. Is this Ellen? Oh, my goodness. Oh, my God. Happy for birthday, Radio, Love.

All right, so the story is, the reason that Sorin got Ellen to surprise us is that somewhere around now is the 15-year, crazy to say it, 15-year anniversary of making Radio Lab. 15 years. I know. We have some tape for you guys. Oh, there's more? We brought you. Besides just your presence? Well, I think, yeah, I mean the presence.

I mean, it seemed like you ought to have someone around who knew you when, you know? Okay. I brought your presence with my presence. So we sort of settled in. We didn't really know what was going on. And then Horn did something truly evil. She somehow, I don't know how, probably the archivist help, got her hands on the very first one. No.

This is my nightmare. The very, very, very. I had hoped these tapes and that would never surface, but she found them. They were on BitTorrent for a second, and I thought they had disappeared, and I was like so happy, but then... Roll tape, roll tape. You ready? It's so good. Okay.

Let me roll tape. Here we go. 2002, very first one. Oh, God, don't start talking. Please make the CD crash right now. Every radio producer has this idealized image in their head of you. Oh, God. Maybe you're sitting on the couch, drinking coffee, staring out the window.

Maybe you're the person who's driving and you pull over to really concentrate on a story. Whatever the case, that image in the radio producer's brain of you, the listener, that's why they make this stuff. It's a lonely thing. They don't get paid much. They look around these heavy recorders and mics, and they look, frankly, silly in those headphones they have to wear. But it doesn't matter as long as you are there to listen to what they make. WNYC is about to embark on an experiment.

We're calling it the Radio Lab. I love that, The Radio Lab. What we're going to do is take great documentary radio and stories of different sizes and shapes, colors, from different places all over the planet, from different times even, and we're going to mix it all together, like this. Whoa. Survive and to find a way too much to go. A big brew of people and places.

but it'll take two hours and 59 minutes to get through all of it. Two hours and 59 minutes. Do you hear that? Two hours. It's a three-hour show. It was a three-hour show. And was that every week, by the way? Every freaking week.

Every week. 8 to 11, every Sunday night. So they were giving you a huge hunk of airtime. A huge hunk of airtime where no one was listening. Chad Adam Rod here. I'll be your host is not the right word. Curator, guide maybe. How about DJ of documentary?

Oh, shut up. Really? That's terrible. That doesn't work at all. All right, I'll stop it. Every moment of that was wrong. Every moment. I have to explain.

The show was just super different back then. The idea of it back then was to just take all of these documentaries from around the world and smash them together. But what would end up happening is that I would line up three or four things and I would have like a 20-minute hole, which I would start to experiment in. those spots were what the show grew out of. Well, so that was in 2002, and then I met you the following spring. Wow, a whole year later. The whole year later. So there's a year worth of that.

And by the time I met you back in New York, you were so sleep deprived. Okay, so we reminisced for a little bit, and then we started talking about the moment when Robert got involved, which is the moment I'll never forget. So, you know, I was trying to fill one of those 20-minute holes. I had done an interview with a memory researcher, and it was just one of those science interviews that now are super familiar with where the scientist is using all this Latinate words, and I couldn't figure out what she was saying,

but it still seemed interesting. I just couldn't understand it. And so Robert and Ellen and I had breakfast one day at Kitchenette. It was our foundation restaurant, that's what we go to for breakfast every week. And we were sitting there, and I was like, I got this interview, I don't really know what to do. It's about memory, and here's what I think she's.

saying. I think she's saying something about how memories are never the same. You're always constantly remaking them. And then you just like snapped into this thing where like suddenly you were playing this like all these characters. And Ellen and I were like, oh my God, let's just go into the studio and have him do that. You want to hear a little taste of the time? I'm sort of curious. This is this is one. So this is like we later did the memory and forgetting it's a podcast, but this is pre, this is before that. It's a different earlier. 2003, I think. You're listening to Radio Lab on New York Public Radio. Public Radio Radio.

Public Radio W. N. Y. C. I'm Chad, I boom-rah. This is Radio Lab. We're coming up on the Kitty Hawk Centennial, the 100th anniversary of the first human-powered flight. It's in a couple weeks. And I was looking at the picture today. No, you weren't.

The Wright brothers, you know the one. Orville's on the plane. It's just taking off. Wilbur is running alongside. They're on a beach. The beach is deserted. It looks really, really cold. And I'm looking at this photo.

Really? And even though it is the most published picture in the history of pictures. Where did they come from? Even though I have anyone who's ever been born has seen it 100,000 times. I couldn't help but be wowed. I mean, look at what they did. They got that crazy box into the air. A couple hundred feet, or whatever it was, it wasn't...

That graded distance, but look at us now. We can fly over the Atlantic in five hours, a few hundred dollars. And that is not what we're going to talk about today, because my real question is, how is it we can do all that, and still not understand some very basic things like the common cold, that's the example it's always given. What about memory? What about memory?

Is that what you're talking about? That was such a good intro. What about it? That was a minute 30. Wow. So sort of like, like, well, here's a pogo stick. I'm going to jump on it 50 times.

But what about tissues? That's such a random way to get in? Do I eventually talk about Kitty Hawk, or was that just ugly random? No. But let's go a little bit further forward so we get to hear Robert. It involves creativity.

This clip actually begins with a reading from theater director and actor, Simon McBernie. You have to literally. remake it every time, every memory that you remember is different because it is remade in the very present that you remember. In other words, in order to remember, you need the imagination. Simon McBurney, performing a monologue from his play, Mnemonic for the show Studio 360. And with me in the studio to explore these ideas a little further is Mr. Robert Crowich from ABC News.

Hi, Robert. Hi. You've reported on this, right? I have. I never actually have met Simon McBurney, but that thought that he has at the very end, that in order to remember something, you need an active imagination. I think that's kind of understating it, really, I think. Understating it, how so? Well, let's just take the situation we're in right now. Okay.

I'm sitting here in front of you. We're about, what, three feet apart or something like that? Yeah. So when you look at me right now, it takes actually the light that's bouncing off my face a tiny bit of time to read. your retina, but by the way, I arrive upside down and to have your brain write me. It takes a little bit of time for the sound of me, this sound, right now, you think, but the sound has to travel at 750 miles an hour from me to you. Okay. It has to enter that ear that you have.

It has to travel through those hairs that you've got in your ear. It has to turn into electricity. It has to go to the place in your brain where sounds lie. And then the touch of me, if I were to touch you right now, would have to travel electrically to your brain. That would take a little time. Got it. And the smell, let's suppose I put some licorice in my mouth.

The smell of the licorice coming out of my mouth, that too would have to travel all the way to your nose, up your nose, into the place where smells lie. And then your brain has to take all these parts and pull them together into this, this thing that you think is going on right now. Wait, let me get the straight. You're saying that this moment,

and this one, and this one. and this one yes are hopelessly lost so when people say you know you have to live in the moment this isn't the moment the moment already

just happened or to put it another way it's a memory everything everything is a memory wow so let's say we want to ponder

this moment this one you say has already happened before it even had a chance to become this moment but let's say we want to remember it later What do we do?

Well, it's interesting at this. What's going to happen is you're going to take the touch, the sound, the smell, and everything that's in your brain from that moment, which is all sitting lodged in different places, and you're going to reassemble it, pull it back together again. Now, here's the interesting thing. If 20 minutes from now, you are really hungry, then the licorice, remember the licorice part of our discussion? Yep. The licorish part will somehow loom a little larger because you want to eat or chew something. How you're feeling in the moment that you're remembering has a lot to do with what you remember. So for example, let's just take a simple phrase like Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water.

Right. If you want to recollect that phrase, let's suppose you just had a wonderful thing with Jill. Now, when you think of the rhyme, when you reassemble it, Jack and Jill went to water. It'll go, Jack and Jill. went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Wait. See, the Jill thing is so... Okay, I got you.

Or suppose that instead, you've just come from an extraordinary hike where you have gloriously climbed a spectacular hill. So now you hear the thing, and when you reassembled this time, Jack and Jill... You think Jack and Jill went up the hill... To fetch a pail of water. I see, the hill. Now the hillness has got all the emphasis.

Yeah, I got it. So you're always... remembering differently each time up depending upon how you feel. This reminds me of something. Here, let me play you this interview clip. Every time you recall something, you're doing so. I mean, it's amazing to me that at such an early point, the business of deconstructing puzzles,

which I guess is a lot of what we did, took on this very particular quality, like this kind of razzle-dazzle of anything could happen in the next second. I don't know who's going to say the next thing, But there's something beautifully organic about it when it's done. Yeah. So today we're celebrating 15 years of making Radio Lab. Coming up after the break, we're going to play the first thing we ever podcasted.

It's not something you can get on iTunes because it fell off iTunes a long time ago. But we're going to play you the first. This is Lisa Kenny calling from San Diego. 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. Hey, we're back. So the first episode we ever podcasted,

I don't know if it was literally the first, but it was among the first few, was an episode about time. I do remember playing it to my wife, who I was always scared because she's in your Times reporter, and I thought, oh, she'll never like this kind of thing. And she came out of the kitchen,

and she said, I really like that. And immediately I called to me. I called me. And you were like, you were whispering, you were like, Damar likes it. Yeah, it's one of the early moments

where like maybe this will work. Again, this is something that fell off our podcast for eight years ago. So probably very few people have heard this. You're listening to Radio Lab. On New York Public Radio. Public Radio WNYC. You know this music.

Trust me, you've heard it your entire life. The reason you can't recognize it now is because the composer, born in 1770, intended for this moment, the one you're hearing, to last two seconds. Like that. However, had he been a whale, Beethoven might have written his ninth symphony this way.

Changes that, for us, would take an instant, would transpire over minutes, and a movement might last six hours. That's, in fact, what this is. Beethoven's 9th Symphony digitally stretched from its normal 60-some-odd minutes to last an entire day, 24 hours. And if you sit for the entire 24-hour duration of the piece, as people do from time to time, you realize that this music is not simply slower. The slowness unlocks something in the original.

Maybe it was there all long and we couldn't hear it. We'd play with the meter. The music is mostly about meter, after all. And the music has a different story to tell. A secret, perhaps. Locked up inside the routine, change the routine, you make new discoveries. That's what we'll do this hour. We'll look at time so closely.

We'll discover new things about it. This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Aboumrod. My guest tonight for the next hour to help me wrestle with time is the science correspondent, Robert Crowicz, of ABC News, Nova, and Nightline. How are you, sir? I'm very well. I like this bathing and bathing. Toven thing you've got going on here. It's cool, right? Yeah. Actually, at the end of the program,

we will be dropping in on a performance that happened recently in San Francisco, where people listen to it over the course of an entire day. A day? A day. So, wear first. Let's begin with a guy who I think you'll find, well, he thinks very deeply about time. In fact, in a very gentle kind of way, you could say he's time obsessed. You've heard of the neurologist Oliver Sacks? Sure, the man who mistook his wife for a hat. Yeah, right. And awakenings. So I was over at his house This is me actually over at his house right now And he told me this story

I don't know whether this is relevant I had an odd experience some years ago In fact in 1993 When I got a A message from my publisher Which they had sent out to various of their authors For their 21st birthday Their Jubilee

Asking if we would like to select a year From the previous 21 years And write about it When I got this message, I thought, well, why don't I choose 1992, which was the first of the years. And it's a year which is very vivid and important for me, partly because it was the year in which my mother died, partly it was the year in which I completed awakenings. And these two events were coupled in some ways. I was actually in the car when I got this message.

I picked it up on a car phone and I was driving up to Canada and I had a tape recorder with me so I spoke 1972 aloud and by that time I thought well why stop why don't I do 1973 as well

by the time How long did 72 take Did you get to Montreal or were you still? No 72 probably took about half an hour Well by the time I got to the Canadian border I was up to

1987, and I did in fact make an extra loop so that I could compete things. However, it turned out that the most recent years in the late 80s and the 90s, I did not apparently have such detailed memories of, and they seem subjectively shorter. So time, I guess we all know this, is a very plastic thing. It's swollen and rich some of the time, and it's like flaccid and e-other-time. But because Oliver is so inquisitive, such an investigator at heart, all his life, he's looked inside things. And beginning when he was 10, 11, 12, he wanted to get inside time. I had lots of boyish interests.

And, you know, these pre-adolescent interests, you know, they all took a beating when I became an adolescent. But one of them was chemicals, and I had a chemistry laboratory. One of them was photography, and I had darkroom. and cameras, and one of them was plants, and in particular, my mother was very fond of ferns, and the garden was full of ferns. I love the way in which the curled-up fiddleheads or croziers of ferns would unfurl, and it was almost as if time was sort of rolled up inside them, as if time itself unfurled, but one couldn't actually see this. They would perhaps take a day or two to do this, and I wanted to see it.

It made me think of these Christmas things one would blow and these paper trumpets which would unfold. And so I set up my camera on a tripod and at least in the daytime I couldn't take pictures at night, I didn't have a flash. Then I took a series of pictures every hour or so of the fern and then showed these rapidly

by putting them together in a flick book. And this way then what took a day or two or several hours to happen, was compressed into several seconds. So the compression of time photographically fascinated me. Us too. If Oliver Sacks can make a baby fern unfurl, Robert, how about this? Radio producer Tony Schwartz can do the same thing with his baby niece. What?

Except in sound. Oh. Here, spout up for your appreciation is Nancy Schwartz, from birth to age 12 in two minutes, 12 seconds, exactly. Jack and Jill went up such a pail of water Jack fell down and broke And Jill came tumbling Say daddy and about what you got about Santa Claus can't bring you can crawl

If you have to make him house broken If he makes really in the apartment You have to slap him with a newspaper then if he doesn't do it again, he's half-broken. What do you think of the Russians sending the dog up in the satellite? Well, I hope he doesn't get hurt, but if he does, I'm sure they'll send up a medical satellite. In school, we each had to do a report on someplace,

and I'm doing a report on Hawaii, and we're taking notes and doing research. This summer we're going camping, and in the month of July, this summer I'm going to... For the whole month of July, the summer I'm going to go to Brownie Sleepaway Camp. It's all girls. You'll mess my hair, and it's very special for tonight. It's just the way I want it.

It's a page boy with a high top, and that's the way I like it. I'm taking guitar lessons, and that's fun. I take drama lessons after school, and that's great. And I've been working on the school newspaper, or I might be editor next year, and I've been discovering boys. You know what that is? That is, if you were a parent, what you've just heard is a parent clock. Huh, a parent clock.

That's kind of cool. Because the kid gets older, you can't deny the fact that you must be getting older, too. When your son has hair on his legs, I'm pissed. I thought, oh, man, I'm getting old. But this is true. This is how the whole world works, I think. It's a, everything is a clock, I guess. Yeah.

By the way, that was Nancy grows up. An audio flipbook recorded and arranged by the great radio producer Tony Schwartz, thanks to him and to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, and also to you, Mr. Robert Crowicz, for joining me today on our program to talk about time. So here's my question. If we've got an example of what you just called apparent clock, you've got other kinds of time, you know, like personal time, getting out of bed time, going to sleep time. Most of existence, really, time was measured by, oh, it's lunchtime, it's wake-up time,

It's time to milk the cow time. Events or task time. Tasks times. How do we get from task and personal time to clock time? Now, that's interesting. Let's go back to the 1800s, and imagine a guy will call him O'Oltan Treboigen. Zoltan Treboigan. Living in Sandusby, Ohio.

And suppose Zoltan wants to know what time it is. Okay. So if Zoltan walked into, say, Bigsby's Tavern and asked, Mr. Bigsby, could I trouble you for the time? It's right in front of you. You see this clock here. It's built by my nephew, not the smartest boy in the world. It says 33 minutes past the hour. Is that right?

Of course it's right. However, if Zoltan, instead of going into the tavern, had he gone at the exact same moment into the bank building? How can I help you, sir? I wonder if you could show me the time. Three minutes past the up. Is it right, though? Yes, it's right.

Or, at that very same moment, suppose instead of going to the tavern of the bank, he'd gone to the hotel. Can I help you? Could you tell me the time, please? Yes, of course. My timepiece here says... Oh, is that silver? Silver style, actually. It's 19 past the hour.

So at the tavern, it's 33 past the hour at the hotel 19 past the bank, three past. What time is it really in Sandusky? That's the question. The answer is, there was no official time in Sandusky. What do you mean there's no official time in Sandus? There wasn't any, not in 1850. The government didn't have a time. Really?

All there were were clocks. So in Ohio, in the 1850s, you'd have as many times as there were clocks in the town. So there was no reason, when you think about it, to synchronize. If your clock and my clock were four minutes or ten minutes different in Sandusky in the 1850s, who cares? Until... The railroad changed everything. Once the railroad came in, if Zoltan wanted to take... I don't know.

Uh, how about the 303 to Cleveland? Okay. If you wanted to take the 303 to Cleveland, how would he know when it was 303? Oh, I see where you're going with this. If he went by the bank's clock, he'd arrive a half hour ahead of time. If he went by the hotel clock, he'd arrive in the nicotine. Wait, wait, wait. And if you went by the taverns clock...

Oh, no. Wait! So, for the sake of their business really, the railroads created railroad time and began putting up clocks of their own. Makes sense. And because the railroads were so important, I mean, the tavern would have to get its beer deliveries from the railroad. And I guess the banks would have to get their cash from the railroad, and the hotel would have to get their guests from the railroad. So gradually, railroad time becomes everybody's time. So what happened to local time?

Well, local time disappeared. Really? Yeah, if local time means that when it's noon in Sandusky, the sun is directly over your head, by 1880, that wasn't true anymore. Oh. The railroad had instructed Sandusky that from now on, its noon would be 20 minutes later so that it could fit into the railroad schedule. Wait, so they moved noon over 20 minutes? Yeah, and they were protests about this. I put it to you, ladies and gentlemen, who owns noon in Sandusky?

We do. We do. We did. So in all seriousness, people fought against this? They rebelled against the railroads? Oh, there were time wars in certain towns where part of the town would go to railroad time, but the other part would determinedly stick with what used to be local time, and they'd have different times in the town.

Wow. It's almost like it was a personal freedom issue or something. Yeah, because time in a way represents your own identity, and they didn't want to give up their identity to the railroad, not at first. But in the end, Sandusky, and then every other town eventually conformed to railroad time, and that is how time became standardized, time became zoned, time became clockwork, reference? When you ask somebody, what time is it? They don't say, you know, oh, it's bedtime or it's lunchtime. They don't look up at the sun. They look at a clock, a standard clock, and the

real roads did that. Every tick of the clock is time won or lost. Every 60-minute sweep, every 12-hour tour of those relentless hands is turning out carload lots of time. There's an interesting connection to explore here, and it has to do with horses. Horses? Horses. You mentioned railroad companies. It just so happens that the owner of the biggest railroad company, Leland Stanford, you know, as a Stanford University.

Right? He was really into speed, and he owned a really fast horse, and the horse's name was Occident. Oxygen. I remember that. Story goes, this horse was the subject of a gentleman's bet. Well, there was no gentleman's bet. It's a myth. Stanford, so far as we know, was not a betting man.

That's Rebecca Solnit. Now, she wrote a book about this called River of Shadows, and the focus of her book is the solver of the bet, or whatever it was. It was an argument. There's no evidence that there was money on it. In any case, this argument among Stanford and his railroad buddies sent it around the following question, when a horse gallops, do all four of its feet leave the ground at once? What do you think? I don't know. It's not a question I would frankly ever ask anyone, but... Well, at the time, it was a big question, because they had no way of knowing, because horses moved faster than eyeballs can see.

So Leland, Stanford wanted to prove that a horse had all four feet off the ground at one. one time, and he was recommended to try Moybridge as the photographer to capture this. Along comes Edward Moybridge, the photographer. If he could take a picture of the horse at exactly the right instant, he could see whether all four feet were off the ground and solved the bet. Here's the problem. Cameras in those days were very slow. A fast exposure would be maybe a second or several seconds. Mojbridge was going to push photography to suddenly be able to capture motion in a 500th of a second. Otherwise, you just got blur.

Blur. Imagine that first step out of the world of the blur. Moibridge had stretched a wire across the racetrack and attached it to the shutter mechanism on his camera. Oxygen the horse gallops by, trips the wire, which freezes the horse, mid-galop, steals him right out of the flow of time.

Except Mojverage doesn't just take one photo, he takes 24. See it placed. 24 cameras in a line one after the other with 24 trip wires stretching across the racetrack. And the horse tripped every one. 24 frozen, unblurry running horses. So what did they see? Well, the pictures formed a series of a horse running, and some of those photos showed Oxenon

yes, with all four feet off the ground. So the camera here unlocks a secret. Let's just see something you could never see before because this camera essentially it stops time. Exactly. Meanwhile, says Rebecca Moybridge became fascinated with learning more secrets of time. Secrets locked inside basic human movements. A leap, a splash, a walk, a pirouette. Wow, how mundane. But they're so enchanted when you really pay attention to them.

Moybridge had photographed rushing water. He was obsessed with water in his landscape pictures. So he obsessively has people pour water, splash water, pour water over themselves, pour pictures of water, pour water into glasses. splash water out of basins, bathe in water. And you can see all these droplets frozen in midair. There's one particular photo, Robert, where you see a sheet of water suspended in the air hovering over the splasher. Kind of like a ghost. Hmm.

Oh, wow. Anyhow, take all those frozen moments and align them one after the other and play them back, and you've got flow again. Albeit artificial flow, which we call movies. Movies are good? Yeah, yeah. But the next time you're feeling stressed out And you say to yourself, I'm stressed,

I need to go to a movie to relax. Well, you should know that the technology that made the movies is exactly the thing which sped up the pace of modern life, which stressed you out, which led you to go to the movies. What does that mean? What do you mean by that? Well, one of the first ways movies were used was to film factory workers doing repetitive tasks

and then find out how to make those tasks more efficient. So if I were pushing the levers maybe too slowly, is this... Right, they would find the guy who did a... the right way, film him, slow the film down, and then use that to teach everyone else. And then when World War II came, this was not just now in the cause of efficiency. This was a life or death matter because this is how you beat Nazis. All the scientific devices of chronology are machines manufacturing time.

The tool that in our hands means victory. And our hands must be as relentless as the hands of our plots. Or there's a whole other way to think about this. Time can be a weapon in battle, or it can be the most sensuous and subtle and natural thing in the world. And I learned about this from a book by Jay Griffiths called A Sideways Look at Time. Let me just take a stop here at clocks, even though you don't like clocks, because there's so many cool clocks in your book.

Cool clocks. First of all, there's a spice clock. Yes. We're used to clocks, which you can see when it's really dark, and you can see that you've just woken up at 235, and you really didn't want to wake up at 235. But, of course, for a long time, you know, in the night, you don't have a way of seeing what the time is. And so somebody invented a spice clock, so you could taste your way through the night. So there would be maybe kind of, you know, cinnamon for about 1 o'clock and turmeric for 2 o'clock. So you're sitting there in bed and you sniff the time. Oh, you could taste it.

How about the clock of birds? This is the Kaluli people. Oh, yes. Now, this is lovely. The Kaluli people at Papua New Guinea, they have what they call a clock of birds, and that certain birds like the New Guinea friar bird and the hooded butcher bird,

when they sing in the mornings, the children are taught to understand that that's a signal to get up and leave and, you know, get out of the house. When those birds sing, their late afternoon calls, that's a signal to the children to go back home. The forest in the central hinds and Papua New Guinea. I've been there as a very, very difficult place to be in once it's dark

and that children would need to know at what time to start heading for home. Now how about it's 1751 and Carl Linnaeus, famous categorizer of everything. Yes, made a flower clock. What do you make? A flower clock so that you could see by the blooming of... different flowers, what time it was. Something that blooms in the morning and then folds up, like a morning glory would be there in the morning and then in the evening and evening primrose would come out.

But these are all plants that open for an hour or two and then close. So if you're walking by and you see a blush of, let's say, pink, then you know, oh, it must be in the morning. Or if you see a blush of purple, oh, it must be lunchtime or whatever it is. Yes, exactly, exactly. That's, by the way, very good gardening to be able to do that. Yes, isn't it, isn't it? And connected to that, there's also in the Andaman forests, in the Andaman Islands and the Indian Ocean,

that people have a scent calendar, which I found the most beautiful idea, because what it was is a way of kind of describing the months by the sense of certain fruits and flowers. Time is everywhere in nature. One of the things I wanted to do with the whole book was to say, you know, we think of time being to do with clocks. In fact, for most of the world, for most of history, time has been absolutely. embedded in nature in some beautiful ways. Thanks, Robert.

You're all, thank you. I'm Chad Abumra. Robert Krupp, and I will be back in a moment. You're listening to Radio Lab. On New York Public Radio. Public Radio W&M. Y, C. So that was a chunk of the first thing we ever podcast.

It was a show about time. And it's in honor of our 15th birthday. And because there's, it's funny, Robert, like there's, we just looked at the, at our RSS feed recently, which. SS is, um, it's a, I don't know what it stands for. It's the thing that like feeds iTunes. So when you go on iTunes and you see all the episodes, you sort of see what, what's there. And there's some limit that's, that iTunes places on the number of items that you can have in the feed. Oh. And there, I think it's like 100 or 150 or something. And we realized like 150 early episodes have fallen off the feed. Oh, really? Yeah. So if we were a backlist, like at Random House, that would be like Hemingway and Fitzgerald have fallen onto the floor. Exactly.

So like this huge number of old episodes have fallen off. And I started looking at that list. And on that list are some episodes that are weirdly relevant now, a whole bunch that are just completely not relevant. And I was like, you know, I think I want to pull some of those back into the flow. Yeah, I do. And because it'll give us a chance to sort of just reframe them and really think about that. them and update them and sometimes the science gets old and needs to be updated, but sometimes the science gets refreshed by something that's happening in the real world.

Yeah. Something, it gets on a certain urgency. Yeah, so what the plan would be is maybe, you know, in the coming months, we would go way back for us, which is like 14, 13, 15, 12 years back, and resurrect things and throw them out and see who wants to take a smack at them now and whether things have changed. Yeah. And whether they're more interesting or utterly wrong now? Yeah, or wrong in a fascinating way.

Yeah. Yeah. That's the advantage of getting old. That's true. That's true. You can play with your memories. Exactly. And not be a rabbit.

There you go. All right. Well, that was something. Something. Jenner. I'm running. Thanks for listening. Yeah.

We'll be normal next time. Yeah. Hey, this is Liza, and it would be unlike me to pass up a staff credit. Radio Lab is produced by Jad Abramrod. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Sorn Wheeler is senior editor. Jamie York is our senior producer. Our staff includes Sam and Adler, David Gable, Tracy Hunt,

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