Science Friday - Extreme Heat, COVID Delta Variant, Poe’s Science. July 2, 2021, Part 1

Episode Date: July 2, 2021

The Alarming Impacts Of Extreme Heat This week, the Pacific Northwest was hit by a record breaking heat wave, with temperatures rising as high as 116 degrees Fahrenheit in Portland, Oregon. Experts say of all the extreme weather events brought on by climate change and heat waves stand to do the most damage to the environment, infrastructure, and human health. Umair Irfan, staff writer for Vox, joins Ira to share more about the alarming impacts of such extreme heat. Plus, as record-breaking heat becomes more common, air travel may get more difficult. And physicist Rhett Allain explains why airplanes have trouble getting off the ground as the temperature rises.   How Alarmed Should You Be About The Delta Variant? It’s been six months since the first variant of COVID-19 raised alarm bells around the world. Now, a particular variant seems to be spreading rapidly: the Delta variant, first identified in India, and now the dominant strain in many countries, including the United Kingdom. In the United States, the variant makes up more than 20% of cases. South Africa, Australia, Germany, and other countries are re-imposing limits on travel and daily life. And Israel, where more than 60% of people are vaccinated, has reinstated mask requirements. In fact, the World Health Organization is recommending that all fully vaccinated people continue to wear masks as this variant spreads. What does that mean for you? Virologist Angela Rasmussen helps take the temperature of the Delta variant and other COVID-19 news—including promising results on the Novavax vaccine, clues about long-lasting immunity from Pfizer’s mRNA shot, and more.     How Edgar Allan Poe Exposed Scientific Hoaxes—And Perpetrated Them “Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door!Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door! Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.” When you think of Edgar Allen Poe, poems like “The Raven” and “The Telltale Heart” may pop to mind. But throughout the poet’s life, he was absolutely fascinated by science. His love of subjects like astronomy and physics—along with the tragedy that followed him throughout his life—informed his poems and essays. Through this work, Poe may have also had an impact on science itself. Poe’s scientific life is investigated in the new book, The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science. In many ways, it explains, Poe’s scientific fascination was a product of its time. He grew up in the early 1800s, which was a time when a widespread thirst for knowledge was beginning to flourish. Poe loved to expose scientific hoaxes, while simultaneously perpetrating them himself. And his self-proclaimed magnum opus, a largely unsuccessful venture, was a nonfiction essay about the nature of the universe, called “Eureka.” Author John Tresch joins Ira to discuss Poe’s life, legacy, and works. Tresch is professor of history of science at the Warburg Institute in the University of London, based in London, England. 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 Ira Flato. A bit later in the hour, Dr. Angela Rasmussen joins us to fact-check the news surrounding the Delta variant. But first, the Pacific Northwest was hit with a record-breaking heat wave this week, with temperatures rising as high as 116 degrees Fahrenheit in Portland, Oregon. And experts say, of all the extreme weather events brought on by climate change, heat waves stand to do the most damage to the environment. infrastructure and human health. Here to tell us more about the alarming impacts of such extreme heat is Amerifan, staff writer for Vox. Welcome back, Omer. Thanks for having me, Ira. Nice to have you. It seems like the whole country was experiencing a heat wave this week, but as I said, the Pacific Northwest and Canada was really hit hard. The numbers are staggering. At least 79 people are confirmed dead from the heat wave in Oregon. And the new

New York Times is reporting hundreds of heat-related deaths in British Columbia. What happened here? Well, we saw a lot of heat records being broken across the Pacific Northwest. And as you noted, you know, this is remarkable because this is an area that normally doesn't see this kind of heat. And that's part of why the impact has been so great. What we saw here was essentially a very large high-pressure system that settled over the area and allowed heat to accumulate.

And we saw heat records being broken, you know, by whole degrees. You know, typically heat records are broken by fractions of a degree, but some of them were beat by six, seven, eight degrees Fahrenheit. And this heat also comes after another heat wave across much of the southwestern United States. And across Canada and the Pacific Northwest, we've seen, as you noted, hundreds of people dying. And like, there's the one case in point is this small town in British Columbia called Lytton where 250 people normally live. And it broke heat records three days in a row. And then after that, it experienced a fire that basically burned down the whole town. It reached temperatures of 121 degrees Fahrenheit, which is hotter

than Las Vegas has ever gotten. And it's 1,000 miles north of that city. So it just shows you just how unusual the temperatures have been and how high they've gotten. The temperature and then the destruction by the fire. I heard about that. That's an incredible story. And also the news this week has put a new term for that high pressure system, a heat dome, right? Yeah, that's right. I mean, one thing to remember is that heat waves are a distinct meteorological phenomenon. You know, it's not just that temperatures are going up in the summer. What happens is you have a column of air that's pressing down over an area, this high pressure system or an anti-cyclone.

And as that air sinks, it compresses and heats up and it traps the heat that's closer to the ground acting as, as you said, a heat dome. And when that happens, it also squeezes away moisture so clouds and air precipitation don't form. And what that means is that the sun has an unobstructed line of sight to the ground. And then this heat dome sort of acts as a greenhouse within a greenhouse leading to higher and higher temperatures rapidly accumulating, especially in the summer where days are long and nights are short. And then you suddenly are in triple-digit temperatures. And then this is further exacerbated across much of the West this year by an ongoing megadrought. So the moisture that would typically be in the ground to help it cool off, you know, the same way that sweat cools off the body, that's not there.

And so there's nowhere else for this heat to go except into the ground and into the air. One of the other things that we saw this week was fire starting to ignite in the wake of these heat waves. You know, there was actually an event in Western Canada where fires started creating these plumes of clouds, pyrocumulus clouds, and those clouds actually generated lightning strikes that helped ignite more fires. And so you ended up in a situation where you had sort of this feedback loop of heat and fire igniting even more fires. And you mentioned speaking of shorter nights this time of the year that in your report, that there's little relief from the heat at night, right, when typically temperatures should be dropping a bit. Right. You know, one of the most distinct signals we see with climate change in addition to seeing more frequent and intense heat waves is that nighttime temperatures are rising. You know, the lows are actually rising faster than the highs. And that has huge consequences for human health because without nighttime temperatures dropping off enough, people have less relief from the heat. And so that leads to a larger accumulative heat exposure. And that's associated with more severe.

outcomes from heat, things like heat exhaustion and heat stress and other health maladies that are worsened by just being in warmer weather for longer time. Are people out there who are experiencing these heat problems they never had before? Are they considering this sort of permanent, the new normal for them and something that they have to prepare for? I mean, certainly that's on a lot of people's minds. Yes, frequency and intensity of heat waves is going up, and the cooler regions of the planet are actually warmering faster than the hotter region. So people living at northern latitudes

are seeing a larger change, a larger differential from their typical average than people even closer to the equator, even though the temperatures in, say, the desert southwest of the U.S. may actually go higher. And that does mean that people need to start to adapt. One is that, you know, people have to be more aware of things like heat stress and understand the warning signs of heat exhaustion and other kinds of heat-related illnesses, but infrastructure also needs to be upgraded and adapt. And, you know, we've seen with the heat wave this week somehow where all these failures are starting to occur. You know, you have power lines that can't transmit power as efficiently. We've seen roads buckling. We've seen water systems starting to leak. And all this can add up to a disaster that ends up being

much worse than any individual component. That's true because I saw this stunning photo this week where the heat had melted one of the power cables in Portland's streetcar system. Yeah, that's right. You know, the power system is one of the things that's most severely stressed by this. On one hand, you have a huge demand spike because of people switching on their air conditioners and trying to cool off. And then on the supply side, you know, power systems, the power generators themselves are stressed. There are power plants that actually have to shut off when water temperatures get too high

because that water is too hot for them to cool off with. And then the power lines themselves become less efficient in transmitting electricity. So you have both a supply crunch and a demand increase. And, you know, we actually saw on the East Coast in New York City where they sent out an alert asking people to turn down the power just as temperatures were rising because they were concerned about outages being spurred by this. And so this is something that is going to be a problem across the country, but is especially acute in places like the Pacific Northwest that don't see these kinds of heat spikes. And one other thing to note is that, you know, in an area like Seattle, that's the least air conditioned metro area in the U.S. fewer than half of the homes there have ACs, and the ones that do have ACs are not usually up to the task of cooling triple-digit temperatures. So it has to be adapted, not just for simply cooling

off, but being able to cool off from these very high extremes. Yeah, you know, I know that President Biden's infrastructure plan is making its way through Congress. He's talked about this, and people have talked about, well, when you talk about an infrastructure, you have to take into effect that there is climate change. There's a climate crisis going on, and you need to prepare for these kinds of situations as a result of that. Yeah, that's right. You know, you have to think about both adapting to climate change and mitigating it. So you don't just want to reduce greenhouse gases, but you also have to understand that the world that you're going to be living in is going to be drastically different over time. You know, things like power infrastructure, power lines and power plants,

those have to be built to withstand decades of use. And in those decades, you know, we're going to be expecting temperatures continuing to rise. We're going to expect power demand continuing to rise as well. And we need to be able to compensate for that and start building for those stresses now. Otherwise, you know, we'll be seeing more failures in the future. Thank you, Omer. Interesting stuff as always. Umair Irfan is staff writer for Vox. With temperatures in many places in the triple digits, can it get too hot for planes to fly? My next guest says yes. Reda Lane is an associate professor of physics at southeastern louisiana university and a popular dot physics blogger at wired science blogs. Ret, welcome back to science Friday. Thank you. Let's get right into this because I remember

reading a piece you wrote back in what, 2017, a heat wave back then describing how it can get too hot for airplanes to take off. Tell us why that is. I mean, I was surprised too. I saw that and I'm like, what, that's weird. But it is true. When the weather gets too hot, some of these planes can't take off. It has to do with the way that planes fly. When the plane wing flies and it's tilted at some angle, it collides with these molecules, right? These then change momentum.

And because they change momentum, they push on the wing. So if you think of a plane wing flying and just pushing through the air and deflecting these air molecules down, this produces an upwards thrust on the plane and it explains how the plane can fly. I like that that way better because it's more fundamental physics. It's more physics. It's like a rocket chip. Air goes down, plane goes up. It's exactly like a rocket ship.

That's right. So what happens when the air gets too hot then? Well, when the air gets hot, you know, what is hot air? We like to think of temperature as associated with the motion of the particles in the air, the nitrogen molecules and the oxygen molecules. And as you increase the temperature, these molecules move faster and faster and faster. And when they do that, they spread out.

So you decrease the density of the air when it's hot. And it doesn't always feel that way, but that is true. There's lower density air with higher temperature. And that means there's fewer of these air molecules to collide with the wing, and you get lower lift with lower density air. You could compensate for that by flying flying.

faster, but that would take a longer runway. And then that's where we get into a safety issue for some planes. They don't have a long enough runway to make sure that they can get to takeoff speed. And so you just have to wait until it gets cooler before you can take off. Yeah. Someone told me that a lot of flights into Las Vegas in the summer are morning and evening because it's not so hot. If it's too hot in the middle of the day, then a lot of these planes just don't have the safety clearances to take off. You know, I didn't hear any reports of mass groundings of airplanes this really hot week we've been having. Do you expect this to happen sooner or later?

Oh, yeah. As we deal with hotter and hotter temperatures, you have an option of either changing planes. Some planes can take off with that or getting a longer runway, but both of those aren't really easy to change real quick. It's easier just to ground the plane and wait until it's safe to fly again. You know, we always hear about the unexpected consequences of climate change and what things are going on about.

plants and heat and hurricanes, but we never think about affecting the airline industry. Right, and we depend on that a lot. In general, we fly a lot and we travel a lot by plane because it's a lot quicker than cars, and then it is a problem. So we need to address climate change, but we probably also need to address airline travel. It's not necessarily always the best mode. High-speed trains wouldn't have this problem. I'm with you on that one. Let's see if we can get more of them to cross the country. Yeah, I'd like that too. Yeah, well, thank you for explaining us the physics of flight, Red. Oh, thank you. Red Elaine is an associate professor of physics at southeastern Louisiana University and a popular dot physics blogger at Wired Science Bloggs.

We're going to take a break, and when we come back, the delta variant is spreading. Is it time to bring back masks, get more people vaccinated, all of the above? We'll be back to fact-check your feed after this break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. It's been six months since the first variant of COVID-19 raised alarm bells around the world. Now one variant above all others seems to be spreading rapidly. I'm talking about the Delta variant, first identified in India, and now has spread to more than 80 countries. South Africa, Australia, Germany, and other countries are reimposing limits on travel and daily life. and Israel, where more than 60% of people are vaccinated, has reinstated mask requirements.

In fact, the World Health Organization is recommending that all fully vaccinated people continue to wear masks. And Los Angeles County advised everyone to wear masks indoors in public places, even if fully vaccinated. What does that mean for you? Here to help us take the temperature of the Delta variant and other, COVID-19 news is Angela Rasmuzan, research scientist at Vito InterVAC, the University of Saskatchewan's Vaccine Research Institute in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Welcome back. Thanks for having me back, Ira. We've talked about the variants before, but this Delta variant is really making the rounds. I mean, the dominant variant of the virus in many countries, the 20% of cases in the U.S., that variant,

Do we know why it's so contagious? So we really don't. It could be that people are remaining contagious for a longer period of time. It could be that the virus is better at binding its receptor, ACE 2 and infecting cells. That's called infectivity. It could be that the virus is just making more virus and shedding more infectious virus, thereby increasing the odds that you will be infected if you're exposed to somebody who is infected as well. So we really don't know, but to me, the epidemiology data is quite clear that this virus does spread

quite easily, particularly among unvaccinated or partially vaccinated people. And for that reason, it is rightfully a big concern. And we still don't know if it's more likely to cause serious illness. That's something that I think is very, very difficult to try to figure out with epidemiologic data. human populations and populations of unvaccinated or partially vaccinated people are going to be different in every community and in every place where the Delta variant might be spreading. And if you end up seeing an increase in people going to the hospital relative to other variants, it could be just that different people are getting infected, people with other risk factors, but because it's infecting more people, it appears that it is more pathogenic or virulent.

So that's something that still remains to be seen. and there are studies trying to get to the bottom of this. But to me, the take-home message for everybody is really clear. You should get fully vaccinated because full vaccination does provide strong protection against the Delta variant. And I think that's what we're seeing in Israel, where the vaccination rates are high. There are a significant number of their cases in vaccinated people, but they're not serious illnesses. That's exactly right. So this is one thing that's really frustrating about some of the media coverage about this. People talk about all these breakthrough infections happening in fully vaccinated people, but they don't mention that the people who are actually

in the hospital are largely unvaccinated or partially vaccinated people. The people who are fully vaccinated may test positive for the virus. They may have transient abortive infections. And this actually normally happens with many other vaccines that are very, very effective. But the vaccines are holding their own against the Delta variant, and that is that they are protecting people, even people with breakthrough infections from becoming seriously ill, from going to the hospital and from dying. So what should people do? They've heard the WHO.

Should I keep my mask on? How should I make that decision? Well, you know, I think this is something that we're all sick of wearing masks, and that can't be underestimated. Masks can be uncomfortable, especially in a hot, weather, but masks are a relatively easy non-pharmaceutical intervention to apply. Certainly, they're a lot better than closing down businesses or telling people to stay home. Many of the breakthrough infections and vaccinated people, in a few cases, there has been evidence of secondary

transmission. Now, this is probably much lower, again, than would occur in unvaccinated people, but to just protect yourself, as well as try to protect your community around you, especially especially those people who aren't yet fully vaccinated, a mask is a relatively low-cost way to do that and just add one more layer of protection. And on top of all of this, the Delta variant has its own variant, which is being called Delta Plus. Something to keep an eye on or to be worried about? I mean, it's definitely something to watch because Delta Plus has an additional mutation that's been characterized in some other variants. We don't know, however, the effect that this is having in Delta, We don't know if it's going to be any worse or potentially even any better or just the same as Delta.

So it's one to watch, but there's no reason to get extra worried about Delta Plus. And that's a good point to move on to my next point because we're now seeing studies and results by Moderna and Pfizer that their vaccines are found to be effective for much longer periods of time and against these variants. So there's a couple studies there to unpack. And in one, I think we have very clear data that the Moderna and Pfizer-MRNA vaccines are holding up really well against all of the variants. So people who've been fully vaccinated, you're two weeks past your second shot, have really exceptional protection against both infection, but importantly against severe disease from any of the variants that we've seen so far. In terms of the long-lasting immunity, that was a very small study, but it was a very exciting study too. It followed people after they'd been vaccinated and actually took samples from their lymph nodes. And the lymph nodes are where a lot of the business of the immune system happens. That's where your B cells will differentiate into specialized B cells that are really good at producing antibodies for a really long time. That's where immunological memory is generated.

So this study looked in 14 people over time in their lymph nodes. And what it found was a type of of B cell called germinal center B cells, which are really important for immunological memory. And for many other vaccines, those cells tend to persist for about four to eight weeks. In this study, people still had those germinal center B cells going strong after 15 weeks. In addition to that, they also have a type of B cell called a plasma blast that is a B cell that's really basically a neutralizing antibody factory. So that really bodes well for long-term protective immunity. if these cells are in people's lymph nodes being active long after the vaccine has been cleared,

that does suggest that people will have long-lasting immunity. But unfortunately, the only way to determine how protective that immunity is in the real world is really just to wait and see. So we do need to have more research. Do we think at this point that people might require booster shots? I think one of the things that's going to be really helpful in that is defining what are called correlates of protection, which we still have. haven't been able to do. Normally, this is something that happens in the course of a phase three

clinical trial or just after a vaccine has been approved and released on the market. And that's basically finding a convenient laboratory measure to assess whether or not the vaccine is going to be protective. Because these vaccines were put onto the market before we had a chance to do those long-term studies. And I think that was the right move because obviously it was beneficial to get the vaccines as soon as possible. Now that a lot of people have been vaccinated, we will be able to do that. And certainly so far, it looks like neutralizing antibodies, unsurprisingly, may be a good correlative protection, although that research is still in progress. So once we do have that, we should be able to know by testing if people's immunity is starting to wane.

The other way we would potentially identify that is if a lot of vaccinated people start getting COVID, particularly if they start getting symptomatic COVID and ending up in the hospital. But fortunately, that's not happening in vaccinated people right now with any of the variants that are circulating, including Delta. So it doesn't appear that right now, anyways, we do need to start thinking about boosters for all of the vaccines. I'll have to keep an eye on that is what you're saying. On a more complicated note, both the mRNA vaccines, I'm talking about Pfizer and Moderna,

have been linked to a heart inflammation condition called myocarditis. The CDC has updated its fact sheets about both vaccines to note that this is a small risk, but also increases after the second dose. So, Angela, how serious is this side effect? Well, this is something that seems to predominantly be affecting younger people who are getting the mRNA vaccines. And so far, you know, myocarditis can be serious. There have been a few cases that have ended up in the hospital.

And to put this in perspective, I mean, everybody's going to have their own risk tolerance. Everybody's going to have their own risk benefit analysis. But in my mind, the risk of having severe myocarditis that needs to be hospitalized is much higher from having COVID than it is from getting the vaccines. So my risk benefit analysis would say that the risk of myocarditis from a vaccine is much lower than the risk of myocarditis from COVID or the, or the many other serious potential side effects of having COVID. So I would still get the vaccine and recommend it for my kids too. Let's move on to another vaccine that has some promising clinical test results. I'm talking about the Novavax.

It's a much more traditional vaccine than the MRI ones, right? I mean, it's akin to the whooping cough vaccine. Could that make more people feel safe taking it, knowing that? I think it really could. and the Novavax clinical trial results were incredibly encouraging. It does seem to be a very effective vaccine as well. It's what's called a protein subunit vaccine. So it is actually making the spike protein before it goes into your arm.

What's new about this is it actually uses a different protein expression system that's derived from moth cells. They can make quite a bit of protein. They've coupled it with a compound that stimulates your immune system and makes vaccine responses more effective, it really does appear that it works very, very well. I think for a lot of people who are unsure about the MRNA or the adenovirus vector technology might feel more comfortable getting a protein subunit vaccine because, as you pointed out,

these have been used for the accellular pertussis vaccine, they've been used for the hepatitis B vaccine. Most people are familiar enough with those vaccine technologies that they might feel comfortable taking that protein subunit vaccines are very temperature stable and they're easy to transport. So I think the Novavax vaccine is also going to be really huge for vaccinating other parts of the world where it may be more difficult to bring the mRNA vaccines in particular. And NovaVax has pledged more than a billion doses to the Global COVAX program. Yes. And that's going to be absolutely crucial because

with the clotting issues that have come up, these are still very rare side effects with Johnson and Johnson and with AstraZeneca, a lot of people in other countries have rightly wondered if they are getting the short end of the stick. Why aren't we getting these great mRNA vaccines that wealthier countries are getting? And I think that having a very effective vaccine that is not on an adenovirus vector platform will do a lot for global vaccine confidence, as well as just for getting the vaccine out to the rest of the globe. And it's hard to see this from the U.S. where now we have so many vaccines that vaccines are expiring on freezer shelves that, you know, there are parts of the world where people have not been vaccinated against COVID. They have not gotten access to those vaccines, including health care workers, including high risk people. So I think that it's absolutely crucial to get this vaccine out as soon as possible because a pandemic is by definition a global public health crisis.

we need to make sure that we're vaccinating the world. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I want to wait into a discussion that's been happening about where the virus came from. We mentioned a few weeks ago that President Biden had ordered an investigation into the origins of COVID-19. And now we're getting some pushback against the idea that this was created intentionally in a laboratory someplace. In China, pushback coming. from some very well-known scientists? Yeah, so this has been a really contentious topic,

and it's really unfortunate. A lot of times what people do need to understand is that most of the time, it takes a long time to figure out where a virus came from. In many cases, even though we know where some viruses come from, we still haven't actually proved it. And Ebola is a great example of that. We know that it's transmitted by bats.

We know that it's carried by bats. there is natural reservoir, but we don't even really know what species, and we've never isolated live Ebola virus from a bat. We've only just started basically isolating sequences of Ebola viruses from bats. Ebola came onto our radar in 1976, so it's been around for almost 50 years, and we still don't have a solid answer, definitive answer on that virus's origin. But nobody thinks it came from a lab, obviously. So the situation, with COVID or with SARS-Coronavirus 2 is that the first outbreak that was observed was in Wuhan, China, where there is a major virology institute where they were working on bat

coronaviruses. And we know that these Sarbeco viruses, that's the subgenus, that SARS-Coronavirus is in the SARS-like coronaviruses, is normally in the wild in bats. We also know that it can infect a number of different intermediate species. And SARS-Coronavirus 2 is, also quite promiscuous in terms of the number of other species that it can infect. So there's a lot of different possibilities, including the possibility that it came out of a lab accident. I think everybody does agree that analyzing the genome of this virus suggests that it wasn't a biological weapon. In my opinion, I think that a natural origin remains the most likely, but it's true that we have not ruled out the possibility that it could have come from a lab.

But I think one point that I'd like to make here, Ira, is that people have been talking about this lately as though these are equivalent possibilities, nature or the lab. In my opinion, as a virologist, looking at the genome, looking at the number of other species that this virus can infect, the weight of the evidence points toward an animal natural origin. And one of the reasons for that that we can look at and see in real time is that this virus was not properly adapted to human hosts. That suggests that it was a very, very recent spillover event that still doesn't exclude, again, a lab exposure, but that does suggest that this virus was in no way pre-adapted or passage to make it more effective as a human pathogen. And the evidence for that

is right in front of our eyes. It's the variance. The reason why variants are emerging is because this virus has spread through the human population to the point that now it is beginning to evolve and adapt to us. If this virus was pre-adapted or if it was already being passage through human cells or being developed into a human pathogen for research purposes, not even necessarily for malicious purposes, we would see those variants in the first viruses that were circulating, but we have not. So I think that it is important to investigate all potential origin hypotheses, and as I said, none of them have been ruled out. But in my opinion, again, I think that the natural origin hypothesis is by far the most likely. Well, I think that's a good place to stop. You have

certainly filled us in on a lot of questions we've all been having in our own minds. Thank you, Angela. It's always pleasure, Ira. Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a research scientist at Vito InterVAC. That's the University of Saskatchewan's Vaccine Research Institute in Saskatoon. And we have to take a break. And when we come back, exploring Edgar Allan Poe's lifelong fascination with science. This is Science Friday. I'm I, My Rofletto.

Leave my loneliness unbroken. Quit the bust above my door. Take thy beak from out my heart and take thy form from off. my door. Quote, the Raven, Nevermore. When you think of Edgar Allan Poe, poems like the Raven and the Tell-Tale Heart come to mind, right? But what you probably don't know about Poe is that he was absolutely fascinated by science. His love of subjects like astronomy and physics informed his writing throughout his life, and conversely, Poe may have had an impact on the science that came well after him. This is all covered in a new book by my guest, John Tresh. John Tresh is author of

The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Forging of American Science. He's professor of history of science at the Warburg Institute, University of London, of course, based in London, England. Welcome to Science Friday. I'm really glad to be here. How did you discover this about Poe, who, you know, none of us know anything about it. Were you a post scholar and then looked into this? No, I was an enthusiast. I'd been read the scary stories that Poe wrote by my mother when I was a kid and read him in junior high again.

And again, in college, when I learned how influential he was for a lot of poets and authors afterward. But it was really one book, one collection by Harold Beaver, the science fiction of Edgar Alan Poe, which I borrowed from a friend. And that's when my eyes were really open to how widely his interest ran. and how deeply involved in the sciences of his time they were. And that collection had amazing set of footnotes, but there wasn't a single book that tied all of Poe's enthusiasms together.

And so I began my research to try to figure out just where Poe fit in the landscape of all the different sciences that were coming into being at his time. And I've spent a while writing that and the book is the result. Well, let's talk about the book and where he fit in, because in many ways, you write about post fascination with science was a product of his time. I mean, he grew up in the early 1800s, which was a time where you write, a widespread thirst for knowledge was beginning to flourish. What was going on at that time that got people so interested in learning about how the world worked? Well, there's a lot of things happening in the early 19th century

with science. And some of them are really contradictory, but there's two big strands of his historical development. One is that there's a huge flourishing of interest in science from everybody. There's the Lyceum movement, which involves people going from town to town giving popular lectures in different cities in the Lyceum halls that grew up in lots of American cities. And these were lectures on everything. Some of them were religion, some of them were literature, but a lot of them were science. And they had a lot of experiments, displays, demonstrations, a lot of speculations about astronomy, about chemistry, about biology, lots of very hands-on science like phrenology, but also collecting like botany. So there was a real general thirst

for knowledge. And that was accompanied by a whole lot of new publications. There was a kind of media explosion of new publications in this time, lots of new journals and magazines, and a real hunger for knowledge. At the same time, lots and lots of people would play in to that hunger by kind of having fun with it, by publishing hoaxes or frauds or forgeries, taking advantage of people's belief. So that was one thing that was going on, this kind of very wild and unregulated popular science. But along with that is another development that's very important for the development of modern science, which is a number of very well-trained experts saw what was going on in these popular sites and worried that there wasn't any kind of authority over all of that information being produced.

it was impossible to know who to trust, who were the actual reliable scientists who tested their findings who had really studied what they were studying with great care. So that group of scientists got together and tried to put together new institutions at a national level in the U.S. that would be a kind of judge and jury over what counted as true. And those scientists went on to found the American Association for the Advanced Military Science and the Smithsonian Institute and other national institutions for science. So on the one hand, this kind of wild development of new interest in science, and on the other hand, an attempt to really bring it under control in new national institutions.

And Poe was really part of both of those movements. So tell us, how did he get caught up in this new movement or both of these movements? Well, he had a very hard life, as you'll know, if you've read any of the biographical sketches. I mean, it was really quite tragic. He was raised in the south in Richmond and was adopted or was raised in a foster family by a very rich man, John Allen, and expected that he would inherit that wealth. But he was kicked out of the house without being adopted and then had to make it on his own and really experienced a great poverty at many points in his life, really to the point of starvation. He decided to earn his living after having gone through the army, having spent time at West Point, which is the military academy where he got a great education in mathematics. decided to earn his living as a writer. And that was not necessarily from a financial point of view,

the best decision, because it was really hard to earn his keep that way. But he wrote and read everything that he could. He was publishing constantly in the popular press, in magazines, newspapers, journals, of all sorts. And that meant publishing his poetry, publishing his short stories, but also becoming one of America's first science reporters. So he had a journal in Philadelphia. He worked at Burton's magazine, and there he had a column that was a chapter in science and arts, which was basically inventorying all the new discoveries and all the new inventions in science and technology, and kind of evaluating it on the basis of his own experience, having worked in the Army as an artificer, somebody who makes telescopes and makes munitions, but also at West Point, and just his really voracious reading.

So he's really part of that explosion of popular science, but he's also, in a lot of ways, aligned with those science reformers, who wanted to try to regulate and nationalize science to kind of create a national framework. He thought it was very important to create a national framework for science and for literature. And that's where he really wanted to contribute in particular by trying to argue for a more objective criticism in literature. So science even influenced the way he thought about literature, that it was possible to have a detached view on literature, but he also wrote a great deal of material that was reporting on and even contributing to the science of his time. the science of his time. And that brings me to this question about why then do we know him for all of

his literary, his poetry, writings, and not for any of the science work that he did? Why did that not last as well as the poetry did, I guess, is what I'm asking? Well, we don't really know many of the popular science writers of the early 19th century. And there's a sense in which science really kind of doesn't leave much of a trail on the popular side of things. You know, there are a few famous names that we get, like Faraday or Darwin, who are contemporaries of Poe's, but the kind of mass publications of science, not so much. And that's really where Poe was to a large extent. That said, he wrote a very popular textbook on collecting shells or Conchology, which was sold in popular lectures, which gave people a guide book for collecting

and classifying the different shells you could find along the seashore. And that was a real contribution to science of a popular sort. At the end of his life in 1848 he wrote another much more ambitious work called Eureka, which was an explanation of the material and spiritual universe. And this was a cosmology, a kind of history of the world that borrowed from astronomy, biology, physics, chemistry of his time, and a lot of the philosophy of science of his time, he thought that this would transform philosophy and science, but it really didn't have much of an impact in his lifetime. It didn't have very many readers. It was by the 1840s a little too far out, a little too freewheeling for the kind of science that was now being regulated and controlled

by the new institutions that had shown up in this period. So in a way, the fiction and the poetry that he wrote was much more in keeping with what later scholars thought of and later audiences thought of as proper literature and poetry, whereas the science was a little more out there, a little more spectrally. And yet he thought Eureka was his most prized piece, right, above the Raven or the telltale heart? Definitely. He thought that it would revolutionize science. And he wanted his publisher to print 50,000 copies. He only, ultimately, the publisher did 500 copies, and even those didn't sell out. But he said very explicitly in Eureka that he was writing for people who would read him after he was dead, not for the people of his time.

And in a way, the reception after he died has been much bigger. There have been many appreciations over the years. Paul Valerie, a poet in France in the early 20th century, were a very long piece showing the connections between what Poe had done and what Einstein was doing in Valerie's life. Poe was said that space and duration are one, that space and time are actually equivalent, anticipating a lot of ideas in relativity.

And there's even also a very good argument to be made that the people who founded the Big Bang theory, Alexander Friedman and George Lemitre would have known Poe's work Eureka through either Valerie or through Po himself. So there's a really strong possibility that even though Poe wasn't recognized much as a scientist during his time, his major scientific theory, Eureka, had an influence on the cosmology that we now take as the one that explains the universe today. From what I've read, and I'm not a scholar on this, you never hear Einstein or any of the cosmologists quote Poe as someone who came up with these original ideas. No, that's true.

And Einstein even read Eureka. Someone who, a biographer of Poe, sent him the work. He read it twice. The first time he was very enthusiastic and thought that Poe had really hit on a lot of anticipations of what Einstein and others would say. The second time later in Einstein's career, he was much more skeptical. So, no, Einstein is not a huge Poe fan. But Alexander Friedman, who did come up with the Big Bang, saw Dostoevsky and

as his major authors, the ones he preferred the most. He never explicitly cited Eureka, so at the moment, unfortunately, it's just at the level of conjecture. But to me, it's hard to imagine that he didn't read that. And in some way, you know, have it in the back of his mind when he was coming up with his own theory. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with John Tresh, author of Reason for the Darkness of the Night.

He is based in London. We're talking about Edgar Allan Poe and his work in that book. Poe became a bit of an agitator in the science, as you write. He loved to expose hoaxes of the time, but also perpetuated science hoaxes himself. That's right. What do you think of that part of his life? Well, I think it's wild. I mean, Poe is an extremely varied author. He has so many different voices, so many different genres, so many different positions that he writes in. That's part of what makes it hard to recognize the scientific side of his work, but also to really make sense of his work at all. He's constantly contradicting himself.

He's constantly pointing out the flaws of other authors, the imperfections in their writing, the imperfections and their arguments, but he's also satirically making fun of his own styles and his own writings and his own arguments. So frequently he'll say something that he himself contradicts in a later work or even later in the same story. And in a way with science, the same thing is true. On the one hand, he's really promoting new movements to nationalize science. He's a big supporter of the expedition to the South Seas, which is really the first scientific expedition or really large scientific work that the U.S. government sponsors.

And he writes to support it and its proponents very early on. And his novel, the narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, is an imagination of what that expedition might run into when it gets to the South Pole. But he's also writing his work on contiology, doing the science reporting, championing all the inventions and new discoveries and theories of the period. But then also, he writes works like the balloon hoax, which says that a balloon has crossed the Atlantic for the first time, a hot air balloon. So it's transatlantic flight, and people in New York bought up that paper in great numbers, and we're very excited to hear about this development, but it turned out it never happened. Likewise, he wrote some interesting hoaxes based on the popular science of mesmerism, which we now think of as hypnotism,

him said talking about how a man who was dying of consumption was hypnotized on his deathbed and then kept physically alive for seven months while in the mesmeric trance. And that story also turned out not to be true. So I think he took a great deal of pleasure in pushing people's beliefs, taking what they already knew, and taking them just a bit further into the realm where it wasn't quite true or wasn't quite possible to know what the facts in the case were. And he just loved those kinds of jokes and experiments and hoaxes, just as much as he enjoyed showing how other hoaxes were terrible frauds or terrible forgeries.

So the title, the forging of American science, has two senses in that way. On the one hand, it's about the project to build and ground these new institutions that will put science on a solid footing. But it also shows how that's completely bound up with these forgeries, these frauds, and hoaxes that are so much a part of the popular science of the time and so much a part of Poe's own writing with relation to science. You know, we all love the darkness that Poe has in his literary work and his poems. Does that darkness creep into any of his other writings outside literature, maybe to his

writings about science or anything else? Definitely, because he's got a very complex and somewhat contradictory understanding of knowledge. He certainly believes that it's possible to arrive at reliable facts and theories about the natural world. But he's also very insistent on the limits of observation or empiricism or induction. He thinks that those are useful tools, but they shouldn't be taken for the final word or the final story about everything in the world. He's very skeptical about human capacity to make sense of nature as a whole. And he sees nature as, on the one hand, full of amazing heart.

harmonies and aesthetic unities, but on the other hand, cut through with a kind of darkness, with a kind of chaos or the tendency towards destruction. Just as he sees that in his own mind and in other people's minds, there's amazing constructive possibilities in the human mind and all kinds of capacities of benevolence and love. But on the other hand, there's a self-destructive streak, what he calls perverseness, that leads him and other people to do the thing that's exactly against their own interests. And he sees that same kind of self-destructive impulse running through the universe as a whole. And in Eureka, that shows up as the history of the universe expanding and constructing and growing

and then rapidly collapsing, crashing, crashing in on itself in the kind of fiery destruction. So, yeah, there's a lot of interest in faith and belief in what science and knowledge can do, but also a sense of the darkness running through our own minds and through the universe as a whole. John Tresh is author of The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science. He's Professor of History of Science at the Warburg Institute in the University of London, based in London, England. Fantastic book, a great read for everybody, I would suggest it.

Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you for having me. Great to talk with you. You can read an excerpt from the Reason for the Darkness of the Night on our website, ScienceFriety.com slash Po. One last thing before we go. You might remember a story we aired last summer about the beautiful spiral corkscrew shape

that sperm cells make when they swim. According to our guest, Dr. Hermes-Gadhaa, the study published in Science Advances was retracted in May this year. All five authors, including our guest, agreed with the decision. Finally, a warm welcome to new listeners in Mendocino, California, on KZYX. Welcome aboard. It's great to have you.

Charles Berkwurst is our director. Our producers are Christy Taylor and Kathleen Davis. Our intern is Emily Zhang. Our senior producer Alexa Lim. John Dan Koski is our news director. BJ Leideman composed our theme music. This week we say a teary goodbye to sci-fri producer Katie Feather. Katie was behind some of the most curious and creative segments we've had on this show.

Katie is not only a skilled producer, but a wonderful person. We will miss her wit and good humor, and we wish her all the best. That's about it for this hour. Have a happy and safe fourth. I'm Ira Flato.