Science Friday - Celebrating '2001: A Space Odyssey' And Whales. April 6, 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: April 6, 2018

On April 3, 1968, hundreds of audience members walked out of the theatrical premier of a strange, long, dialogue-sparse science fiction film. Now regarded as one of the greatest science fiction films of all time, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was first met with harsh reviews from critics. Writer and filmmaker Michael Benson, author of the new book Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece, reflects on the film’s 50-year legacy, painstaking hand-crafted special effects, and behind-the-scenes glimpses of its making. The endangered North Atlantic right whale population took a big hit last year with a record number of animals killed by fishing gear entanglements and ship strikes. Now, the declining numbers of right whales has sparked a debate about the impact of Maine’s lobster industry on the dwindling numbers. Humpback whales are known for their complex songs and melodies, but bowhead whales are the “jazz singers” of the baleen deep sea singers, according to oceanographer Kate Stafford. She explains why these whales might have such a diverse songbook.  Plus, why health and science scams are going undetected on Facebook.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski sitting in for Ira Flato. Recently, Facebook has been under scrutiny for helping to spread political misinformation online. What's receiving less attention are the health and science scams being conducted on the platform. When especially harmful practices managed to amass a pretty large following and no one really seems to know how to put a stop to it. Here to tell us that story as well as other short subjects in science is Nitty Suburaman. Science reporter for BuzzFeed News. Welcome back to Science Friday, Nitty. Hi, John. Nice to be here.

I'm glad you're here. Why don't you give us the details of this latest case of misinformation on Facebook? You've been following it pretty closely. Yes. This, among all other scams on Facebook, seemed spectacularly bizarre. And so I spent a couple weeks looking into it. Essentially, a woman from Ohio called Gillian Eppily, with no medical license or scientific background, was proposing a theory that a fermented concoction of substance. salted cabbage juice, made it home, could have these amazing, incredible cure-all properties. And so she was saying that it could reverse any disease like cancer, or it could arrest

aging, or it could even turn gay people straight. And rather remarkably, she had gotten about 50,000 people or more on Facebook in a group, in a private group, to follow her and follow along to her theory. In parallel, though, and as many people as were buying into this, she had also inspired this movement of people who thought that misinformation like this had no place on Facebook and she ought to be shut down. So a group of people reached out and said, she needs to go. Nobody seems to be helping. And so I looked into this Facebook ward that had broken out. Well, let's get into this treatment, some of the concoctions she talks about. You talked to doctors about this. Is it harmful to people from what they say?

They say that it's completely bogus. Cabbage juice cannot have the effects that this woman says it has. And in cases where it allows people or encourages people who should be looking to medicine to treat some of their real illnesses, it takes them down a path that has no benefit, and so it could be harming them that way. Also, fermentation at home needs to be done pretty carefully, and so people who don't do that might make themselves ill by improperly kind of making this concoction, you know, just in their kitchen.

And also a high salt content in a juice like this could be harmful for people with high blood pressure, and, you know, infants or pets, as she was suggesting, people give this use to. So it sounds like it could be bad for people, and it's probably bogus. What does Facebook say about all this, about these kind of activities happening on their platform? So I presented this to Facebook, and they reviewed it, and they said that it was okay to exist on their platform. The Facebook does sometimes take down content or block users, for example, in cases of extreme violent content or nudity, or when

there is somebody encouraging people do harm to themselves. They take that content down. But they pointed out that this didn't fall into any of those categories, and they said that they wanted to be a platform where healthy dialogue could take place. And since there was this discussion and debate happening, they said it was fine. Yeah, and Facebook is going to be in Washington very soon, talking about what their platform exactly is supposed to exist, like an in. regulators might deal with Facebook?

What are government officials saying about all this? So the group of angry people on Facebook, just regular people that I mentioned, they actually took it upon themselves to reach out to a number of federal agencies who are sort of involved in regulating health and science. And so they reached out to the Ohio Attorney General's Office, the State Medical Board of Ohio, because Jilline Apparly lives in Ohio. They reached out to the FDA, to the FTC, and I also made all of those stops in turn.

And it seems like this is a tough question for any agency to really handle. The state, the medical board said they only supervised doctors. And since she wasn't a doctor, this wasn't something that they could handle. The FDA received complaints, but so far has not done anything. The FTC has also received complaints, but hasn't done anything either. It seems to be sort of a tough nut for people to crack, because this isn't a product that she's selling. It's just an idea that seems to have caught fire.

A very strange, potentially dangerous idea. Well, let's move on. It's a fascinating story. I want to hear a bit more about a story you brought to us. Researchers have discovered a dozen new black holes in the center of the galaxy. How are they able to find so many so fast? Right. So the center of the galaxy has this large supermassive black hole.

People already knew that it was there. But they sort of theorized that. this was a great place to find others. But, you know, black holes, they don't do much of anything, so it's hard to spot them. And what researchers have done is they looked for pairs of black holes, black holes that had gravitated towards the center but had snatched a star on their way. And when these two pair up and do this tango, they emit x-rays, which are now visible in observations that like the NASA telescopes are making.

And so they finally decided they would do. look towards the center of the Milky Way. And Lowe, they found the special class of sort of duo black holes, one star, one black hole, and they found a dozen of them. A dozen of them, and maybe lots and lots more out there? They say it's just the tip of the iceberg because these duos are so rare. If they found just a handful of these, there could be up to 10,000 more. We have just about a minute left, but I want to hear about scientists discovering some new dinosaur footprint

from the mid-Jurassic area in a beautiful part of the world that I visited about two years ago or so. Tell us about these dinosaur footprints and where they were found. This was sauropod footprints off the coast of Scotland, the Isle of Sky, and it's windy and, you know, rainy out there, but back in the middle Jurassic,

this piece of land was closer to the equator and home to the ancestors of the titanosaurs. So the long-legged sauropods that apparently mingled with the early ancestors. of the T-Rex. So they found 50 tracks of about trash-can lid-sized prints along with smaller theropod prints, so the theropods being the relatives of the T-Rex. So both of these kind of hung out in marshy waters, and it was really a surprise to see footprints because each fossil, they say, is kind of a miracle. But a footprint, that's really, really cool. That's really cool. I guess I could

have been walking on dinosaur footprints while I was there. It certainly looks like a place that dinosaurs would live. It's all the time. time we have. I want to thank our guest, Nidie Suburaman, who's a science reporter for BuzzFeed News. Niddy, thanks so much for joining us. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO. St. Louis Public Radio News.

Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national importance. The North Atlantic right whale is endangered. Scientists estimate a population of about 450 individuals. No new calves were born this year. And last year, 17 right whales were killed by boat strikes or fishing gear entanglement. In the state of Maine, one of the states in the whales range, this has set off a big debate inside one of its iconic industries, lobster fishing, and what role lobster traps might play in these deaths. Fred Beaver is here to tell us that story.

He's a reporter with Maine Public Radio News and the New England News Collaborative. Fred, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, John. So, first of all, how does the lobster industry play a part in the troubles of the right whales? and how big a problem is it right now? Well, so lobster traps go in the water. The lobstermen keep track of them from buoys that are tied to them by ropes that go down to the bottom. Sometimes one trap is linked to another by rope.

And all off the coast of Maine, you see these buoys floating around, and under everyone is a rope. For a right whale, which is as big as a school bus when it's fully mature, a school bus, a big one. and can weigh 50 tons. It's a maze. Now, the whales tend to stay farther offshore than inshore, and that's a big part of the question right now, is how many of these lobster-trapped ropes and buoys are actually where the whales travel. But there's strong evidence of entanglement by fishing gear. It's hard to say what fishing gear, but some scientist estimate from photographic evidence that as much as 85% percent of those surviving right whales, as you mentioned, there are only 450 left, as many as 85 percent of

them have either been entangled or are entangled. And those ropes, they can cut to the bone, they can cut flesh, they can slow the whales down, make it harder for them to get around, to feed, to get the nutrition they need, and eventually starve. So the stakes are high. What are the current regulations in Maine on the lobster industry to try and protect the whales? Well, most of the regulation of the lobster industry that takes place in Maine is about protecting the lobster and sure that it's healthy and not overfished. It's the federal government, really, that's doing the regulation on the whales. And that regulation goes from southern Florida to the Canadian border, which the whales range all across there.

So the feds back in, I think around 2010, said, okay, this lobster men. And the rope that you use to tie one trap to another, the ground lines they're called, they used to be made out of rope that sort of floated and it would arc into the water. Well, that's a potential hazard for the whales. So they said, you've got to sink that rope. Okay, you've got to have to use rope that sinks and doesn't float up into the water column. More recently, they've required new marking requirements on the rope to try to help them identify if they find an entangled whaled who's hurt or dead, maybe help them find out where it's from.

Rope degrades over time, so it's a difficult task. They've also forced boats to slow down when they're in whale migration lanes, and boats that are fishing more in those whale lanes, they're making them put more traps on a single vertical rope to a single buoy, again, trying to reduce the amount of rope that's in the water by some estimates since 2010, about 25,000 miles of rope, a floating rope have come out of the water. There's that much less out there. Well, and I just have to cut in, Fred, because you just have about 30 seconds.

I mean, I assume that the lobster industry is pretty worried about this. Yes, the lobster industry is worried about it. There's some skepticism that the whales really are interacting. There's more research going on around that. Meantime environmentalists are bringing a federal lawsuit under the Endangered Species Act, trying to get the federal government to act and act quickly to impose new regulations. regulations, maybe even ropless means of tracking your traps. Well, we'll be following that, both the right whale and the lobster industry.

Fred Bever with Maine Public Radio News and the New England News Collaborative. Thanks so much, Fred. Thank you, John. After our break, we're going to be talking about whales on a different sort of note. I'll look at the songbird of the sea, the bowhead whale. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski in for Ira. If you've ever watched a nature show, you're probably familiar with what a whale call sounds like,

Those deep echoing sounds and high-pitched chirps are the song of the humpback whale. But there's another whale with a more complicated repertoire. My next guest calls them the jazz singers of the ocean, the bowhead whale. Her team put a hydrophone down and recorded the songbook of these deep sea singers for three years. And they heard quite the concert down there. Their findings were published this week in the journal Biology Letters. Kate Stafford is an author on that study. She's also principal oceanographer at the Applied Physics Lab at the University of Washington.

Kate, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much, John. I'm very glad to be here. And we're glad to have you here. So tell us about the bowhead whale, first of all. It's not a species that many of us have heard about. No, it's not. And I would have to say that the bowhead whale, at least in my opinion,

and I confess to being biased, is a superlative whale in many ways. It's the only large whale that lives year-round in the Arctic. Bowhead whales can live 200 years long. which is really remarkable. Wow. They've got, they can break through a foot and a half of ice,

and they've got both the thickest blubber and the longest baline of any whale. So they do sound superlative. Well, before we talk much more about the whale, let's hear one of the recordings that you captured. I really want to hear this. Let's hear what these whales sound like. So, Kate, what are we hearing there?

So what you're hearing is one of 184 different songs that my colleagues at the Norwegian Polar Institute and I recorded on a hydrophone, which is an underwater microphone, that we put out in Fram Strait for three years. And the song that we're hearing there is quite a bit different from what we are used to hearing from humpback whales. Tell us a little bit more about that. It seems as though these songs change quite a bit over time. They do.

So, John, as you said earlier, we really know quite a bit about humpback whales. Of all the large whales, only the bowhead and the humpback whales sing really elaborate, complex songs. Whales like blue whales and fin whales also sing, but their songs are much simpler. And humpback whales, all the males in a single population will sing the same song within a breeding season. And that song might change through the season, but everybody seems to adopt those changes. And then in the following year, they'll sing something different, but they will often, incorporate phrases or notes that they used the year before. With bowhead whales, not only are they singing many, many different songs within a year, of all the data that we've looked at and listened to,

we have never heard the same song or the same phrase between years. That's so interesting. So you would think, if you listen to birdsong, for instance, that you would have a song that would allow other birds to know. that you're around or identify yourself as a certain species. And you say that other whales sing about the same song. Why do you think it is the bowheads are so, I don't know, improvisational? Boy, that is a really good question, John, and it's something that actually does keep me up at night. So my co-authors and I have some theories, but what I've been thinking about a lot lately is,

I think the environment is what has driven why bowhead whales are so variable. So this is an animal that sings in the middle of winter under the polar night, so 24-hour darkness, and 95 to 100 percent sea ice concentration. So it's cold, it's dark, and it's ice covered. And maybe in that environment, singing and producing variable songs is the best way to get your message across. Bowhead whales don't have to identify themselves as a bowhead whale in the Arctic because they're the only large whale there. in that environment perhaps with thick ice cover overhead allows the song I assume to sound pretty good

I don't know maybe it's it's like me when I go into the stairway and all the sudden I sound like frank Sinatra is it something like that well that's one theory but of course it depends upon the quality of the ice overhead but we do think that having that nice ice might make for a beautiful almost concert effect Are baleen whales the only types of whales that sing? As far as we know, yes. They're not the only types of whales that make sound. All marine mammals, and all whales, of course, make sound.

Because for them, sound is actually the most important sense. Sound travels much further underwater than light done that use sound to navigate, to find food, to find mates, and to communicate. So for all whales, sound is really important. and for some baleen whales, singing appears to be a really important reproductive display. And can you explain briefly how exactly they make these beautiful sounds? I mean, what are they singing out of? That is another really good question.

We don't think they're singing out of their mouth. For the baleen whales, at least, we believe that they are cycling air between their lungs and this organ called a laryngeal sac that hangs off their trachea, and maybe very similar to the way in which a bagpiper might expel air from the bag through the chanters. We think that whales are recycling air between their lungs and the florential sac. But we don't know. Wow, circular breathing, just like a jazz saxophonist. So you say this keeps you up at night.

So what more do you want to know about the bowhead whale and its beautiful songs? What haven't you learned yet that you're looking for in your work? Well, the research that we've been doing, as so much scientific research does, has led to a lot more questions than answers. So because they're doing this behavior in the middle of winter, in the ice, in the dark, you know, we don't know whether individual animals have their own song or whether groups of animals have their own songs or whether individuals change their songs within and between years. and although we have good evidence from humpback whales and blue whales and fin whales and other mammals and birds and frogs that it's males that produce this song, we're not, we don't know for certain that it's Bowhead males sing. I suspect they do, but we don't know. We've run out of time, but I thank you for bringing us these beautiful songs. We'll listen to more and think more about them. Kate Stafford is a professor of oceanography at the University of Washington in Seattle. Kate, thanks so much. Thank you, John, and enjoy the songs.

In April of 1968, 50 years ago this week, theater goers were greeted with a science fiction epic like none they had seen. It's the dawn of man and a humanoid ape named Moonwatcher throws a bone into the air. It's then the not-too-distant future. It's on the moon, and we found the first eerie evidence of intelligent life outside of Earth. It's 2001, and our most advanced artificial intelligence has gone on a killer, spree while an astronaut named Dave travels further than any human has ever gone through a mysterious wormhole. Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, 2001, a space Odyssey, written in collaboration with the great

author Arthur C. Clark, was the product of four years of planning and came a year and a half late from when it was supposed to in millions of dollars over budget. It hit theaters 50 years ago, and it's still tops critics' lists of the greatest American films. Here to celebrate and help pull back the curtain on how 2001 came to be. It's Michael Benson. He's a filmmaker, an artist, and author of the new book, Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clark, and the making of a masterpiece. You can read an excerpt from his book and see some of behind-the-scenes photos from the set of 2001 on our website, ScienceFriiday.com slash 2001. And of course, we do want to hear from you. You saw 2001 when first appeared in theaters. Did you come to it later? Give us a call. Our numbers, 844-724-8255. That's 844-Sai Talk, or you can always tweet us at SyF. Frye? Well, Michael, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for being here. Hey, it's great to be here. Thank you. You know, I love this film. I've always loved this film. It's one of my favorites. I saw it first as a kid on television. They used to cut them down and they looked really pretty terrible. Then I saw it as a teenager on the big screen and it blew my mind. And now as an adult, I just

watched it the other night on HD at home. I find it hard to believe that people walked out of the premiere. What happened? Yeah, well, you know, the original screenings were for invitation-only audiences of rather entitled and older representatives of the media elite and cultural elite. And they simply weren't quite ready. There was a generational divide going on in the late 60s. You have the avant-garde culture, rock and roll, you know, all kinds of, all manner of experimentation. And the initial audiences, as I said, were mostly older entitled people, and they just didn't get it. You know, that's one thing.

And other is, the initial cut was 20 minutes longer. than the one we know. And that's because the visual effects took so long to finish that Kubrick himself didn't see his own film from beginning to end until he showed it to the top MGM brass. And then he had only two weeks between that screening and showing it. It's amazing. Well, what was science fiction on screen like at the time back in 1968 outside of this film? What could people have expected of a science fiction movie at the time? Well, the received wisdom about sci-fi pre-2001 is that it was all kind of little green men stuff and kind of kitsy, and that's largely true. But you had masterpieces coming out of France, you know, like Alphaville by Godard, which is, you know, the antithesis of 2001 in that it's very low budget, but very innovative, you know.

And Chris Marker, you know, had La Jette, which was only still. And that was sci-fi, and that predates 2001. So I wouldn't say that there's nothing good before 2001. 2001 was a totally different creature because it was a big budget Hollywood spectacular, and yet Kubrick turned that into this abstract images first, words, very secondary art film, you know, with a big blockbuster budget. And some of that budget went into the zero gravity scenes, some of the amazing work, especially at the beginning of the movie, but then, of course, it continues on through.

How much of a departure was that the visual effects the people were seeing in 1968? A total departure. But having said that, there were films that influenced Kubrick that were really obscure. So there was a Canadian film called Universe. It was a CBC production, black and white, if you can believe it. It's about the universe depicting nebulae and galaxies, but they shot it in black and white. I guess they were saving money. But the material there was very beautifully done, and the visual effects guy behind it, Wally Gentleman, was hired by Kubrick.

and he worked on 2001 at the beginning. And he used these tanks of liquids filmed at high frame rates under bright lights, paint thinner and so on. And you drop ink or paint on top of the paint thinner and you get galactic, you know, star clusters exploding and these kinds of things. We're way before digital effects, of course. So that's how they, they, Kubrick was very influenced by that film. And then there was a Russian film out of Petersburg, I mean, then called Leningrad, by Pavel, Clushanzev, and it was called the Road to the Stars. And Clushanzev on a very low budget,

hung actors in spacesuits from cables and filmed them from directly below and produced very believable zero gravity, spacewalk sequences, you know. And Kubrick definitely saw that film, and he was absorbing everything. That guy was something else. He just absorbed everything.

He saw everything. He read everything. He definitely saw that film because it was in, It was in Oscar, it was in Oscar contention as a short, the Russian submission, the Soviet submission one year. So he was taking in a lot of these films, experimental and otherwise. I'm John Dankowski. This is Science Friday from PRI, Public Radio International. And we're talking with Michael Benson. He's the author of a new book.

It's called Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clark, and the making of a masterpiece. The big takeaway from me, of course, is that I guess I just, assumed that this film was sprung fully out of the mind of Arthur C. Clark and realized by Stanley Kubrick in his way. And then as I read your book, I realize these guys are kind of making it up as they went. Can you just explain a little bit for people who don't understand how this was coming together, this epic, really on the fly? It was absolutely amazing. It's not very normal, to say the least, to have a big budget film and be improvising the way they were doing it.

Kubrick seemed to have a lot of it in his head. There was never a final script. He kept on changing his mind about what he wanted to shoot, and you would think that that would lead to utter chaos, you know. But in Kubrick's mind, he was really quite a character. And what ended up happening is the film got inexorably more refined. And, you know, he caught stuff that shouldn't be there. and tossed it and was rewriting throughout,

rewriting the night before the shooting something. I've got a great quote in my book where Tony Masters, the fantastic synographer, you know, art director and sonographer for the film who was responsible for a lot of these kinetic effects of the centrifuge turning

and camera effects and so forth. You know, I've got a great quote from him where he said the art department was suicidal. Every night we would, you know, every night we would talk about what we're doing the next day and every morning we'd come in and Stanley would say, no, we're not going to do it that way. We'll do it another way. That's got to be terrible to work with. I want to go to Jonathan,

a news calling from San Francisco. Jonathan, go ahead. You're on Science Friday. Thank you so much for having me on. Thanks for writing this book and talking about 2001, one of my all-time favorite movies. A lot of people are confused about the ending of 2001. I've always felt that it's perfectly clear what happens to David Bowman in the end because Arthur C. Clark explains it in his book. And if people want to know why the ending makes sense and why Kubrick was so faithful to the book, they can just read why they were so faithful to the book in the movie.

They can just read the book to really understand the ending. Thanks very much. Thank you very much. So the book, I suppose, Michael, has all those loose ends tied up. But the book was being written at the same time. Well, yeah, in fact, it was all in parallel, and there were ideas going back and forth, that sometimes Clark was upset because Kubrick hadn't made a decision so he couldn't write the

next section and sometimes vice versa, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, John, I really appreciate that question because it allows me to quote a Clark statement from, I guess it was early summer 68 when he said after his book came out, which was a little after the film came out, his book came out. And he said, well, for those who are still confused about 2001, I recommend read the book, see the movie again, and repeat as often as necessary. You know, it wasn't just Arthur C. Clark. It wasn't just Stanley Kubrick, but you've got these great stories of people like Gary Lockwood, who plays Frank, one of the two astronauts, coming up basically on his own with one of the plot devices

that really drives the center of the film. They couldn't figure out how to make a plot device, and the actor just came up with it on the fly. Yeah. Well, so, by the way, Kubrick, one thing I learned about Stanley Kubrick is he was a jazz. drummer. Yeah. And he played a lot and he had a drum set. Christian, his widow, told me that he had drums, you know, at their home, and he would play all the time. And a jazz drummer or any kind of jazz player knows how to listen to the other people in the band. You know, he was like the leader of a band, and he knew how to listen to his talented, you know, collaborators. And I've got a great

quote from Kubrick. He said, never let your ego get in the way of a good idea. And, you know, he had so many of those good ideas. I want to hear more of them when we come back. We're talking with Michael Benson. He's the author of a brand new book. It's called Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clark, and the making of a masterpiece. We're celebrating the 50th anniversary of one of my favorite movies, maybe one of yours as well. You can join us 844-8255. This is Science Friday. I'm John DeNosky. We're celebrating the 50th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick's 2001 of Space Odyssey. It appeared in theaters this week in 1968, although it was so strange and new in some ways that Hundreds of audience members at the time walked out of the premiere.

A lot of people didn't like it at first. Now, of course, it's a masterpiece. I'm talking with the author of a brand new book about Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark and the making of this masterpiece. His name is Michael Benson. He's the author of Space Odyssey. If you've got questions for us or some of your favorite scenes from the movie, we'll get to some of those. 844-724-8255.

That's 844 SciTalk, or you can tweet us at SciFri. You were talking about how Kubrick would listen to his collaborators, and he'd listen to people who were just hanging around the set, including some of the actors, at the same time, he put some of these people in some really precarious positions. I mean, you tell stories about people almost dying on the set, including one stuntman who almost asphyxates himself. Yes, well, so that's Bill Weston, and I was very fortunate to have an interview that a collaborator of mine named Dave Larson conducted with Mr. Weston a year or so before he passed.

And this is a stuntman who worked with all the major directors, and he was in everything. You know, you name it, and he was in it. He was in a lot of Bond films, et cetera, et cetera. And at the end, he said that the film he was most proud of being and was 2001, despite the ordeal that Stanley put him through, because he just respected the integrity, the artistic integrity of the director. And the story in question is, you know, he was dangling from a wire in a space suit that was hermetically sealed. And they had a little oxygen bottle, not a big one. one, a little one, in the backpack, you know, feeding into his helmet. But the carbon dioxide,

there was no place for the carbon dioxide. He was exhaling to go. And so he gradually became more and more, you know, poisoned by carbon dioxide. And he asked Stanley at one point, you know, Stanley, I've got to punch some holes. Can we punch some holes in the back of the helmet so I can get a little air in there, please? You know, and Stanley said, no, no, no. I'm afraid light might leak in. We can't do that. You know, so he had to live with that. And then there was another incident where, you know, he, he, he, he, he, loaded out of the space pod in his suit, you know, on a wire, which was hidden because the camera was directly below. And he wanted to have two wires because he was a little bit nervous about it. You know, he's 30 feet above a hard concrete floor, you know, no net. And Stanley said,

no, one wire, I'm afraid there will be a shadow of the second wire, you know. And so Weston had to live with that. First time he did, he tried it, that that single wire, which was made of multiple strands started pinging, you know, it started separating. And in fact, the strand that whipped forward because of high tension being released cut a handle off of his front jetpack thing, you know, which fell and hit a camera assistant on the side of the head and he had to be hospital and taken off to the hospital. So Weston, you know, I mean, stuntmen do that. They're called stuntmen for a reason. Sure. They brave a lot of danger and hazard. and so on. But, you know, there's a great story in my book where after Stanley says, no, you can't punch those holes, you know, he arranged a signaling system. There's no intercom. And he arranged a signaling system. That means Weston in his spacesuit arranged a body signaling system that if he extended his arms in a kind of crucifix position, it meant I am, I need to be taken in soon. And if he did it twice, it meant really now.

And he was hanging up there in one of the first shots, you know. And he was counting backwards as he got more and more hazy and groggy because of the carbon dioxide. And then finally he did it twice. And he distinctly remembers hearing Stanley say, well, somebody coming up to Stanley saying, we've got to bring Weston in. And Stanley saying, no, no, no, I didn't get the shot yet, you know. And then he passed out. And they brought him in, of course.

And then when he came to, and this is a guy who had served as a mercenary in South Africa. This is not somebody you want to mess with. He was furious. He went off to find Stanley, and Stanley had fled the studio and didn't come back for a few days. Uncompromising as a director in so many of those ways. But then in other ways, kind of compromising, the monolith, this beautiful black monolith that is so iconic now, wasn't supposed to be black. it's part of really a compromise that he had to make. Yeah, although that's an interesting point you make.

But, you know, I have an early comment from Kubrick to Clark from 64, early 65, where they had this idea of having featureless black pyramids riding in open limousines down Fifth Avenue in a ticker tape parade. And it was kind of a joke. But the featureless black thing was obviously, you know, it was kind of in their lexicon. and when they had a problem with the clear plexiglass monolith, which didn't look right to Kubrick, Tony Masters, who was really, you know, innovative.

And he was also like a jazz musician. He could improvise quickly. And he said, Stanley, let's just make it black. Then nobody will know what it is. And Kubrick said, yeah, let's do that. They made it black, but of course, he was fastidious. He didn't want any fingerprints on it because you wouldn't get fingerprints on something from space.

I want to go to a phone call here. Phil is calling from Davis, California. He's got a good question about another important scene we haven't talked about yet. Hi, Phil, go ahead. Hi, I'm a retired biology professor, and I used to use a clip from the iconic clip of the bone being thrown in the air and turning into a spaceship. And to me, that summed up the whole of human evolution into the tool user,

and I would show it to my students and ask them what it meant to them. And it was very interesting. Thank you for sharing that story, and I'm sure the students got something out of it. I remember when I first made that connection as a student. Tell us more about how that developed, the dawn of man, Michael. Well, by the way, that particular match cut, it's not a jump cut, it's a match cut, because the bone matches in some ways the angle of the spacecraft that it cuts to. I asked Dan Richter, who played the lead man ape,

the one who has this epiphany when he's holding a bone and realizes this could be used. in ways that I hadn't anticipated and learns how to use it as a weapon, ends up throwing it into the air. I asked him how he thought Stanley got to that moment. And he said he wasn't sure, he wasn't absolutely sure about it, but he had, he believed he knew his personal, and Dan was there the whole time, of course. He told me a story about how when they were, they were shooting, initially shooting Dan, getting excited as he realizes the bone can be used as a weapon.

Dan, you know, knocked a rib bone from the skeleton he was smashing and it flew up into the air. And he said to Stanley, oh, I'm sorry. Like, he thought it was a mistake. And Kubrick said, no, no, that's good. Go with it. And by the way, Dan could communicate with Stanley through the mask of the man ape suit without any motion being visible on the mask, which is interesting. Because they were shooting without live sound. So Dan and Stanley could communicate with each other during the eight-man scenes while Dan was acting, which is also something I learned that's interesting.

Anyway, the point of my story is Dan thought that that spinning of the bone up into the air, which he did, he thought was a mistake. And Stanley said, no, go with it. It looks good. That might have been the origins of this idea of how to cut between four million years in the past and 2001. You write that Kubrick and Clark, quote, took the complex, sometimes haunting, sometimes magnificent truths revealed by modern science, polished them and used them as a window to view the human condition within a staggeringly vast universe. Viewing the human condition, how do you see it viewing the human condition? Because it is a movie with so few humans in it and there's so little human emotion, which is fascinating. Well, by the way, I would say that Moonwatcher exhibits emotion, but that's a proto-human.

And it really is about our position not just in space but in time, as in our position on the timeline of evolution, you know. I believe that when it comes to the people being relatively emotionless or quite emotionless, and, you know, I wrote the other day in the New York Times that they became component, they were sort of component parts of their machine. They had become component parts of their machinery, and within the first week of the film coming out, people were already saying that the Hal 9,000 computer was the most human character in the film. Well, I think that was obviously, Kubrick didn't do anything that wasn't intentional, very rarely anyway, at least in his professional work. And that was very intentional. So, Kubrick was telling us something about our relationship to technology. And, you know, and I believe he was, you know, I mean, this film is very relevant. today because of what's going on with AI, for example, you know.

Well, let's actually play a very famous clip about AI. This is where Hal has betrayed his human comrades. And it's an example of our anxieties about artificial intelligence. Here's that famous scene where Dave comes face to face with this new side of Hal. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. What's the problem?

I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do. What are you talking about, Hal? This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it. Just like the science fiction of the day, who's very different from 2001, the character of how the robot is very different from the way robotics or artificial intelligence was portrayed if at all. Well, you know, one thing that I found fascinating about 2001

was the extent to which it was an R&D process. I mean, those guys, I mean, Kubrick and Clark, each of them were just absolutely serious about constantly educating themselves, researching everything. They had, for example, Marvin Minsky, the co-founder of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and an early pioneer in artificial intelligence as an advisor. And so their presentation of Hal was exceedingly well informed. They always went to the top people. And, you know, you choose your field, design, computers, what have you. They went to the top people and they, you know, took very seriously what they were told. So, you know, it wasn't, let's make something that looks good and plausible and get the film out.

It was really, let us, let's create something that is, it's rock solid, a rock solid projection that is utterly plausible and will stand the test of time, you know. And I think they brought it off. Is there any truth to this story that Hal H-A-L is actually just a shift of the letters I-B-M? Well, now that story was both Kubrick and Clark said that is absolutely not the case. But my theory about that, if you're interested in hearing it, is that there was a kind of subliminal, you know, slipping of the letters by one letter. But having said that, Marvin Minsky suggested the acronym. So he said it should be heuristic algorithmic. And then they, I don't know if Minsky himself said that's HAL and let's just call him how,

or if they heard heuristic algorithmic and said, okay, it's how, you know, I just don't know. But the chances of it being a coincidence are pretty, you know, pretty high or pretty, pretty low. Yeah. And so I think it might have been subliminal. It might have been subliminal. I'm John Dankowski. This is Science Friday from PRI Public Radio. International. And we're talking about Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clark,

in the making of a masterpiece. Michael Benson is the author, and he joins us here. Well, we heard one, very famous Halsey, and I want to hear the other one. And this is where Dave knows that it's the only way he will survive, is if he disconnects Hal. It's incredibly chilling. Let's listen. Will you stop, Dave? My mind is going. I can feel it. I have to say, Michael, that is one of the saddest, and for my entire life of watching this movie, most emotional moments. And here it's a homicidal computer that destroyed all the humans on board, but you feel so much for him. Oh, yeah. And by the way, I first saw the film when I was six. My mom took me in 68, and I was six, and that scene absolutely transfixed me.

I mean, it was absolutely a combination of horror and awe. But I agree. You know, that scene also, I actually had the privilege of asking Arthur C. Clark if he wrote it. And he said, of course I wrote it. Who do you think wrote it? You know, and I said, well, Arthur, the reason I asked you that is it seems so much more Kubrickian than Clarkian, you know, this kind of chilly intensity. And so I subsequently, you know, and I didn't push the point because he wasn't going to explain it to a whippersnapper like me, you know, 30 years later. That's when I met. I actually first met him in the year 2001. But I said, subsequently learned that it was really, you know, like a lot of good collaborations. It was a, it was a collaboration. I mean, it was like a lot of good collaborations. One party wrote the music, the other wrote the, you know, the lyrics in a way. So, so, so, Christiane Kubrick told me that it was Arthur's idea that an intelligence, an artificial intelligence can feel and can feel pain and can feel emotions, you know, and fear and so forth. And then it was, it was her husband, Stanley,

who wrote the actual words. What is the movie about in the end, in your mind, after all this time spent with it? What is the movie about, really? I think the movie is about the evolutionary story of the human race from pre-human primate to contemporary homo sapiens with all of our weird problems and our aggressions and our Cold War face-offs, et cetera, et cetera, and then our rebirth into. a successor species, you know. That's one way to look at it. You know, it's also about our position, not just in time, but in space,

you know, in this staggeringly vast expanse because it really conveys something about the scale of the universe. The book is Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clark, and the making of a masterpiece. And the author is Michael Benson.

Thank you so much for sharing all of this research with us because it is truly one of the most fascinating films ever made, and I feel like I learned so much more than I knew before, so thank you for that. Well, thanks so much for having me on. It was really fun to talk about it. One last thing before we go. Please join Ira on April 9th at the Green Space here in New York City to talk about one of his favorite subjects, The Orchid. There will be special guests to Mark Hatchadorian of the New York Botanical Garden and Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief. There will be drinks and food. You might even get to take open an orchid from Ira's personal collection.

You can get your tickets today at ScienceFriday.com slash events. That's ScienceFriday.com slash events. Charles Bergquist is our director. Our senior producer is Christopher and Taliatta. And our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, and Katie Heiler. We had technical and engineering help today from Rich Kim, Sarah Fishman, and Jack Horowitz. We're active all week on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all social media. If you've got a smart speaker, you can ask it to play Science Friday, whatever you want.

Every day is now Science Friday. You can email us. The address is SciFriott, Science Friday.com. Ira is back next week. In New York, I'm John Dankoski.