Science Friday - ‘3 Body Problem’ And The Laws Of Physics | In Defense Of ‘Out Of Place’ Plants

Episode Date: April 1, 2024

Particle accelerators, nanofibers, and solar physics: The science advisor for the Netflix adaptation breaks down the physics in the show. Also, in her new book, Jessica J. Lee looks at how humans have moved plants around the globe–and how our migrations are intertwined with theirs.How ‘3 Body Problem’ Explores The Laws Of PhysicsLast week, Netflix released its adaptation of the Hugo Award-winning sci-fi book The 3 Body Problem by Cixin Liu. It follows the journey of several scientists, from the Chinese Cultural Revolution to the present day, as they seek to understand why their fellow researchers are dying and why their scientific results no longer make sense. Along the way, they discover an ultra-advanced VR game and a dark secret that suggests we might not be alone in the universe.Guest host Arielle Duhaime-Ross sits down with the show’s science advisor, Dr. Matt Kenzie, an associate professor of physics at the University of Cambridge, to talk about what exactly the three body problem is, why he gave the actors physics lessons, and what he hopes audiences take away from a show focused on scientists.In Defense Of ‘Out Of Place’ PlantsThe new book Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging unpacks how we think about the migrations of both plants and humans, as well as how those ideas shape our perceptions of what we call “non-native” or “invasive” plants like giant hogweed or English ivy.Dispersals traces the history of how we moved plants around—including cherry blossoms, mangoes, and soy—and asks: What does it mean to be a plant out of place? And how does the migration of plants mirror our own?Guest host Arielle Duhaime-Ross talks with environmental historian and author Jessica J. Lee about Dispersals and what we can learn from the histories of plants.Read an excerpt from Dispersals at sciencefriday.com.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

We are quick to villainize what we call non-native or invasive plants, but context is important. How did a plant get to be where it is to be called a weed, to be called invasive? And what was our role in that? It's Monday, April 1st, and you're listening to Science Friday. I'm sci-fri producer Rasha Arredi. If you're gardening this spring, you might be trying to pull out non-native plants like English ivy or Japanese honeysuckle and losing. As pesky as those plants might be, they also have really, rich histories that explain why they're out of place, and that history mirrors our own.

We'll unpack this later, but first, the mind-bending physics behind Netflix's adaptation of the three-body problem. Here's guest host Ariel Doom Ross. Last week, Netflix released its adaptation of the Hugo Award-winning sci-fi book, The Three-Body problem, written by novelist Tsoshin-Leo. It follows the journey of several scientists from the Chinese Cultural Revolution to the present day, as they see. to understand why their scientific results no longer make sense. Along the way, they discover an ultra-advanced VR game and a dark secret that suggests we might not be alone in the universe.

Someone or something is targeting scientists. They're gone after our best and brightest. There's someone behind everything. Just have to dig. Just a heads up to talk about the science in the show. We do have to reveal some minor spoilers, but we'll try to limit it to the first few episodes, and I swear the show is still worth watching. Here to tell us more about the science behind the three-body problem is the show's science advisor,

Dr. Matt Kenzie, who is an associate professor of physics at the University of Cambridge. Dr. Kenzie, welcome to Science Friday. Hello. Thank you so much for coming on the show. So, Matt, the book and the show include some pretty complicated physics concepts. You know, we're talking about particle accelerators, which you work with. nanofibers, astrophysics. When you were asked to be the science advisor, what was your reaction? Well, I was kind of excited, really, to get involved in the project. I mean, it's a little bit

different from my day-to-day job, which is, you know, as a particle physics researcher. And I really kind of enjoyed the book or the book series and lots of the kind of concepts that explores and concept kind of beyond science in sociology and so on. So I guess, yeah, I was pretty excited to get involved and to see how they were going to try and put this kind of epic novel series onto the screen. That's really nice to hear. Had you read the book before, you know, before you were even asked to be an advisor? No, I hadn't, actually. But when I first got contacted by Dan and David, the creators of the show.

And this is David Beniof and Dan Weiss, who ran Game of Thrones and were also the showrunners for three-body problem as well. Right. We threw back and forth a couple of questions and ideas, and then they started asking me for a bit more feedback. And at that point, I thought it would be a good idea to actually read the book. And then I crashed through the whole trilogy in a couple of weeks. I got really, really into it. Wow. Okay.

So I got to ask, once you actually started your role as science advisor for the show, did you worry about having to teach the show writers and actors to talk about this stuff accurately? Yeah, I wouldn't say I worried too much. I mean, the creators of the show are really smart guys. But I did do a kind of physics 101 or physics crash course kind of right at the beginning. And I had a couple of days around the time they were doing the kind of read-throughs of the scripts with some of the cast. And they kind of asked various different questions about not just the science in the show, but I think about scientists and how we kind of would approach problems or how we would think about certain scenarios. What were some of the actor's reactions to getting these physics lessons? Yeah, I was kind of varied. It was interesting seeing some of the actors kind of not really believing that certain elements of the science could even be possible, you know, let alone kind of realistic. Right. I mean, some of this stuff is really mind-bending, right? Like, for instance, the three-body problem, right? The name of the show is a famous concept in astrophysics. And I want to ask you about that. I want to know what role does this?

this problem play in the show? And if you could actually explain it, that would also be great. Yeah. So, I mean, as the title suggests, it plays a pretty significant role. In essence, the three-body problem, or the n-body problem, is where you have any number of objects more than two that are all exerting a significant force on each other. And in that scenario, if you know their initial velocities and their starting positions, you can then use the equations of motion to tell you exactly where any of those bodies will be at any point in the future. But once you have three bodies or more, you now cannot solve that equation. So the introduction of a third body kind of throws everything out of whack and makes everything hard to predict. Yeah. So if you could imagine

us living in a three body system or a system with three similarly sized stars that are all kind of similar distance apart, so they're all exerting a similar size force on each other, then you end up in completely chaotic orbits. You do not know when the year's going to end, when the day's going to end. You have no concept of seasons. So that's the three-body problem. And of course, this plays a really significant part in the show. What role does the three-body problem play in the show itself?

Well, essentially something that our physicist characters get exposed to fairly early on is this kind of virtual reality game. And you go into this virtual reality world, and it seems to be on another, kind of planet or in some kind of different planetary system. And there is very erratic behavior of the sun, or as it transpires, suns in this system. And eventually, the characters kind of work out that this planet goes through these kind of shocking chaotic eras where the planet will melt or the planet will freeze. And essentially, what our characters work out is that this game is set in a system with three sons. Right. So in this game, they're on a planet. There's also a species,

I think that's living on this planet, which means that that species would be living in highly variable conditions, right? Like apocalyptic on a highly irregular basis. Right. So that species does very well not to become extinct. Right. It depicts what living on a planet in a three-body system would actually look like, right?

And you had to advise the show on how to translate that for the screen. What details did you decide to include to get that experience of life across? I mean, we talked about things like, you know, There's going to be three different suns, and sometimes they'll be very close to the planet, sometimes they'll be very far away. And so you can have so many different kinds of sunset and sunrise, right?

You can have a sun that appears very quickly and then plummet's away, or you might have an incredibly slow sunrise that lasts many, many Earth days. And of course, then you can get anything in between where you have two suns rising. So it's a perfectly temperate day, and then the two suns kind of line up near each other. and it suddenly becomes incredibly hot, or they then both disappear and it becomes freezing. And at the studio, they had this whole massive stage, which was kind of surrounded on three sides by this huge screen,

essentially banks of LED lights covered by a sheet that must have been 10 metres high and 40 metres long or something. And it meant they could just emulate this environment in the most incredible way. So these scenes you see that are set in the game have these effects. where you have double sunrises or low sunrises. Yeah, so it was kind of fun to imagine what these would look like and the color spectrums that you get out of that.

We don't get a lot of shows that feature this many scientists. In particular, this show has a ton of women researchers, which is really nice to see. Is there anything you hope people will take away from the way these researchers are portrayed in the show? Yeah, I mean, I hope it can be inspirational on some level, but the fact that there are a lot of female scientists in the show is great. There is also a lot of scientists from different ethnic backgrounds,

which I think is also good. And frankly, realistic. Yes, exactly. I mean, I think that was a question that I was asked quite early on by the creators, saying, do you think people will really buy that these people are physicists? And I said, well, I thought that they were physicists, because, you know, I think that the kind of the stereotype is someone who is quite, reclusive and not very good at communicating, et cetera, et cetera. But the reality is that, you know,

you have to be able to communicate. And the people who are successful tend to be quite good at communicating. And I think also the fact that the characters are kind of inverted commas quite normal, okay, right, you know, one of them's a kind of a bit of a Jack the Lad, one of them's a bit quiet. There are two that sort of have an ongoing romance, but it's not that serious. And they're sort of this old group of really close friends. I think that draws a lot of parallels with with my experience. I said I found that perfectly, perfectly plausible, basically. Yeah, that's a very nice thing of you to point out. By the way, this is somewhat off topic, but I was told that you grew up in a film and TV production family. I think your dad worked

on Game of Thrones. Yeah, that was, yeah, that's right. That's kind of how I got the job, I guess. My dad was the director of photography on the second series of Game of Thrones. And so I went out to the set and at the time I was part of the team looking for the Higgs boson and I think yeah I met Dan and David and they kind of indulged me to some sense and I talked to them for half an hour about particle physics probably but then I didn't hear from them then for I don't know how long a long time I mean my my dad has been dead for 12 years now so it must have been 12 14 years later or something that they then reached out to me they were kind of putting the show together realized we could do with some advice from a particle physicist.

But yes, that was how I got into it, but it's still pretty different from what I normally do. Right. Well, it does sound like that, you know, makes you the perfect candidate. Dr. Kenzie, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us about this show. No problem at all.

Dr. Matt Kenzie is an associate professor of physics at the University of Cambridge in the UK. This is Science Friday. I'm Ariel Dumas. I'm filling in for Irafledo this week. Unpacking how we think about the migrations of both plants and humans, and how those ideas shape our perceptions of what we call non-native or invasive plants, like giant hogweed or Japanese honeysuckle.

A new book called Dispersals on Plants, Borders, and Belonging traces the history of how we moved plants around, and asks, what does it mean to be a plant out of place? And how does the movement of plants mirror our own? Jessica J. Lee is an environmental historian, and the author of dispersals. She's based in Berlin, Germany. Jessica, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much for being on the show. Jessica, what inspired you to write this book? I think, honestly, the question at the core of this idea of, you know, how do we think about plants out of place, plants that push at our understandings of what it means to belong? It was a question that had been sitting with me for many years before I started really writing the book. I was

hiking in the mountains in central Taiwan. And I'd stopped on a trail because I had encountered just a scent, actually. I didn't even know what plant it was coming from, but it smelled like almond cookies or like baked goods in some way. And I was like, what, what is this? I searched and found these flowers that were growing on the mountain side. Took a photo because I didn't know what they were. And I went home and looked it up. And it was Chinese knotweed, a particular variety of it that grows in Taiwan that is native to Taiwan. And I dug into it a little bit more and then, of course, learned that it is considered a, you know, a pretty severe invasive in other parts of the world. And something about, I think, the beauty and poignancy of the encounter I'd had with it and this

classification, the language used to describe it, I couldn't hold the two things together. And I thought, this is, this is bizarre, right? How do you make sense of something that has these, I think, pejorative terms attached to it, these negative connotations, when in certain contexts, they're so beautiful, they're so enchanting. And I just, I sort of sat with that question for a couple of years. I think for myself as a migrant who comes from three generations of migrants, as a mixed race person, a lot of that language felt uncomfortable to me. And I didn't really know how to touch it for a long time until eventually I thought, okay, this is something I need to start unpacking. What do we mean when we call a plant out of place? And how does that resonate with

how we speak about people. You know, we really do hear over and over that non-native species are bad and that they're ruining our gardens and forests out-competing local flora and causing these cascading effects across our ecosystems. So how did you tackle that and balance that concern, which is, you know, a real concern with an appreciation of these plants? I think the big thing for me is not it's not questioning those impacts, right? I'm not making an argument that is in favor of, I think, denying the negative impacts of certain species. I think for me, it's about getting away from a language that wholly villainizes a plant that very often is a plant that we've picked up and moved, that we've brought as an ornamental or we've hauled around,

you know, in ballast waters through our shipping industries. And just saying, what if we had better language for how to describe these plants, but also just told richer stories where we understood the agency of those plants, the agency of humans in creating those situations, if we understood and sort of wrote back into the story, the richness and fullness of what those plants do in their home environments and the resilience that they have. And, you know, in some situations really begin to also ask questions about potential positive impacts that there could be in some places. You really drive home throughout the book that context is important. You use the example of giant hogweed. Can you tell me about that? I wanted to write about giant hogweed because I was living in the

UK for part of when I wrote this book and I've lived in the UK a lot in my life. It's very often seen as you know, the most dangerous plant in Britain. It's the sort of most offensive, most egregious weed. And it really is a plant that you want to avoid. It causes phytochemical burns that can, you know, cause problems for years after contact with the plant. So it's definitely one that you don't question that there's a problem with it. And it really thrives in abandoned plots in disturbed ground. But one of the reasons I really wanted to look at it was this history of it. It was brought over to Britain as an ornamental plant. It was actually a prized Victorian garden plant until it jumped the garden wall. There's that phrase from a historian named Harriet Bitfo that it's like,

you know, plants are okay until they sort of misbehave, right? until they leap over the wall. And I really wanted to sort of explore that. But then to say, these plants also aren't staying in place, right? So we have giant hogweed cast as this villain at the moment. But actually, as the climate changes and becomes more unstable, it needs to move. It's not actually doing that well where it is in the UK and is going to be moving northward because it needs colder winters. And so there's this part of me that, I don't know, I'm really fascinated by this idea of a plant we've moved, villainized, and now because of anthropogenic climate change also needs to move again. By the way, I had no idea that part of the USDA's founding mission was to

import new seeds. How does that affect what kind of crops we grow here in the U.S. now? So in the book, I spent a bit of time diving into the history of the USDA's plant acquisition program and one plant explorer, to use their term, named David Fairchild. And, you know, he brought over essentially hundreds of thousands of accessions, seeds primarily, that, you know, were desirable for U.S. agriculture. His work and the work of his department in terms of plant acquisition has been described as just transforming ecosystems entirely in the U.S. And if you think about it, like the huge amount of things that we grow, that we eat regularly from citrus fruits to soybeans to mangoes to loads of vegetables, they come from abroad and they were brought from

abroad, many of them through the 19th and 20th centuries. There's more really good USDA information in this book. For instance, you talk about mangoes as migrant fruits. Why did you name them that way? I wanted to capture this idea that mangoes first off, we don't have an exact location for where they originated, but broadly, let's say, in South Asia. And then they moved across Asia. So they begin with migration. They move with people because they're so valuable. But then when the USDA acquires them, they're brought to Florida to the plant breeding program there. And pretty much every supermarket variety of mangoes that we have today, the ones that are, you know, they're designed to travel well, they all originate from those plant breeding programs in Florida. And I don't know,

something about this, it really fascinates me. You know, I live in Germany. I go to the supermarket here and admittedly the mangoes are not great at the supermarket in Germany. But I think of this, this fruit that originated in India perhaps and, you know, moved eastward across China through Southeast Asia and then is picked up and brought to Florida, bred to be, you know, a reliable, you know, transportable variety like Tommy Atkins, which is what we often find in the supermarkets here. And that's what I encounter. Something about that story for me is it's so resonant with what it means to be a migrant. My father's from Trinidad, right? Trinidad has a huge, Indian population. So mangoes are incredibly important for our culture. And, you know, the mangoes

that we get in Canada just really don't cut it, right? So all fruit in Canada. I think fruit in Canada ruined fruit for me growing up. Oh, boy. No, okay, I will say Ontario peaches rock, right? Oh, well, that was the one exception. And I still can only eat peaches in Ontario. Apologies to Georgia. Apologies to everywhere else in the world. Ontario peaches are the very best. We're on the same page about that one, yeah, for sure. You also write about seed banking and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the most famous seed bank. And you said something about it that really struck me as quite different from what I've heard about it before. You talked about sort of looking at it through an imperialist lens. Talk to me about that. Yeah, I mean, I didn't want to pick out Svalbard too particularly

and too specifically, but it felt really symbolic to me because I think it's the seed bank that many of us know. You know, we call it the doomsday vault. While I was working on the book, was actually a researcher on a project at the University of Cambridge that was looking at crop breeding histories, plant transfers, food crops in particular over the past hundred years. And a number of the researchers I was working with were specialists in seed banking. And it was a really fascinating thing for me because I think I went in with this very optimistic idea of what seed banking was, that it was, you know, it was this hopeful thing that we do for the future. And I hadn't really unpacked, Number one, the ways that seed banking itself actually has loads of problems, simply from the fact that, you know, seeds, they're extracted, they're banked, but then they also aren't viable forever. They have to be grown out, which means so that we can re-harvest the seeds, which means we're kind of banking copies of copies of copies at a certain point. But then beyond that, this question of extracting a seed as germplasm from its context, it forgets the fact that plants have knowledge cultures that go with them.

They have a land race in particular that belongs in a certain valley in a certain place, you know, stewarded into existence by, say, indigenous farmers in one place. When you extract them from that knowledge, what do you lose, right? The seed alone is not the whole story. Right. No, absolutely. There's a whole environment that allowed it to become, you know, what it is today. Attitudes, entire cultures.

Absolutely. And, you know, one of the things that I also touch on is a lot of current research saying, okay, when we're also extracting seeds from their environments, from in situ environments, right? So ex-situ seed banking is like taking them and putting them in cold storage somewhere like in Spalbard. When you're taking them out of that context, as our climate is changing, we're also losing the ability, the opportunity for those seeds to adapt with us to the changing climate. So we're kind of banking old seeds that will not be caught up with how the climate has changed. That's interesting. So if the word invasive is too, maybe a little too negative or too narrow, what should we call these plants instead? Yeah. So I think one of the really exciting things have,

like has been in recent years proposals for new terminology, whether that's novel species, even just as simple as saying introduced species. I'm really interested in the idea of like local as a term. But what I have found most exciting is sort of in parallel to this, for saying, okay, we've had this framework of invasiveness that is kind of pejorative, and it's led to a lot of research that looks at negative impacts of these species. But what if instead we looked for positive impacts of species that are introduced to places and just tried to sort of start anew from there? So that for me, I think, is a really exciting possibility in terms of what's being proposed to rectify this. I really appreciate that. Jessica, thank you so much for

joining me. Thank you for having me. Jessica J. Lee is an environmental historian and the author of Dispersals, joining us from Berlin, Germany. To read an excerpt from the book, head to sciencefriady.com slash dispersals. That's it for today's show. Lots of folks help make this show happen, including Felissa Mayors. Kathleen Davis. Jordan Smudjick. Charles Bergquist. On tomorrow's episode, why approving new Alzheimer's drugs has been a rocky road. Join us. I'm CyFRA producer, reading.