Science Friday - "Lost in Math," Alan Alda, A Radical Brain Surgery, New Jersey Floods. August 3, 2018. Part 1

Episode Date: August 3, 2018

For decades, physicists trying to uncover the large and small structures of the universe have been coming up empty—no evidence of supersymmetry at the Large Hadron Collider, no dark matter particles, no new evidence explaining dark energy. That’s the main conundrum in theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder’s book, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray. She talks with Ira about the problems facing physics, and where new ideas could come from. This week, Alan Alda spoke publicly about living with Parkinson’s Disease for the first time since his diagnosis three and a half years ago. He’s known for his work as an actor, author, and science communicator. He joins Ira to discuss his life since his diagnosis. A six-year old Pittsburgh area boy underwent radical surgery in an attempt to treat a seizure-causing brain tumor. The boy’s entire occipital lobe and and much of his temporal lobe were removed—material that added up to about one-sixth of his total brain matter. Now, researchers report that the boy is living a surprisingly normal life despite the missing brain matter.   It’s a common tale. Homeowners affected by flooding receive insurance money and rebuild their homes, only to have yet another flood strike and damage the property again. In recent years, however, New Jersey has modified an open-space program to allow the state to offer buyouts to some homeowners in flood-stricken areas, offering the pre-flood assessed value of the property.  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. Four years ago, a six-year-old Pittsburgh area boy underwent radical surgery in an attempt to treat a brain tumor that was causing severe seizures. Doctors removed the boy's entire occipital lobe and much of his temporal lobe material that added up to about a third of the right hemisphere of his brain. And this week, scientists reported on how the boy is doing

without all that brain matter, and it's really good news, and very surprising news. And here to talk about that and other selected short subjects in science is Annalie Newitts, a science journalist based in San Francisco. She joins us from KQED in San Francisco. Welcome back. Hi, thanks for having me back. This is really an interesting story.

Tell us about the boy and what has happened to him. So this is basically a victory for neuroplasticity, which is a term for how easily the nerves in our brain can regrow. And after he had this radical surgery, within about three years, the right side of the left side of his brain started taking over for a lot of the functionality that was lost in the right side. So the main thing doctors were concerned about was he had lost a part of the brain that does image recognition. So recognizing objects, recognizing faces, taking basically data from our eyes and turning it into. something that we understand. And as I say, within three years, the left hemisphere of his brain was helping him do object and face recognition. So he recovered that ability. So he's almost like a

normal kid again? He's performing, they say, at age-appropriate levels. He's never going to be able to see completely out of the left side of his left eye, but he is able to just turn his head and see. So he has full image and face recognition, which is great. You know, this reminds me of that old story about now we have a new measure of plasticity. It used to be the miner. They got the rod through his head, remember that story? That's right, yeah. And this is just another data point that shows us, at least in children, how plastic the brain can be

and how one part of the brain that we thought was lost actually can be recreated in another part of the brain. That's great news. Okay, let's go on to another amazing brain news. You have a story about a bionic arm. So this is not... Wild story. So this is not just a bionic arm. So I think people have probably heard a lot about brain computer interface arms,

which we're calling them bionic arms. They are controlled by your brain. They pick up neural signals from your body that come from your brain. So some scientists in Kyoto, Japan said, well, if we can do this with someone who's lost an arm and needs a prosthetic, what about if we added a third arm? What would people be able to do with it? And so they brought in 15 people and trained them to use a third arm. which was attached basically to their neck area

and had them do multitasking with it. And eight out of the 15 people that they tested were able to successfully do one task with their third arm, controlling it with their mind, and another task with their two biological arms. They were balancing a ball on a plate with their two biological arms and holding on to a bottle with third arm.

So imagine the possibilities. I'm not going to go there, but I'm just going to say, So they had to learn to think that they had a third arm that they could use. Yeah, that's part of what's really fantastic about this study, is that it's not just some sort of wacky science fictional thing. It really shows, again, how plastic our brains are and how we can learn to function with a third arm

and actually use it to do a separate task. So I could easily imagine this being used in factories because how many times have you wished to have a third arm? Well, now you maybe can have one. Factory is nothing. I can use my car keys on that. Yeah, we can use this in everyday life. All right. Now, I know that you love archaeology stories, and there's one this week about Stonehenge. Tell us about that. That's right. So some archaeologists working in England re-examined some cremated remains that had been found at Stonehenge.

And they did what's called stable isotope analysis on them, which allows you to see what kind of chemicals. that the person was exposed to in water and in plants as a child. So it tells you where those bones came from, where the person lived when they were a kid. And what they discovered was that 10 out of about out of about two dozen people were not local to the area of Stonehenge, that they'd been buried there and had very likely been cremated and had lived and died in whales far, far to the west of Stonehenge. So they did this fantastic chemical analysis, which, again, is new in archaeology, but then they also were able to analyze the burned wood with these remains to find out that they'd come from this forested area in Wales. So the thing that's exciting about this isn't just like, wow, okay, Welsh people are buried at Stonehenge.

It also just gives us a much better sense of how widespread worship was at Stonehenge or how widespread its influence. was in the area. If people were coming all the way from Wales, Stonehenge clearly did have, you know, it was part of a culture that was spread all across Western England. So that's a really interesting new window on that time of history. Finally, a theory about why Homo sapiens are still around, but other hominins are not. We about lasted the other ones, right? We did.

And it's a perennial question in anthropology. Why did Homo sapiens stick around when, you know, Homo Neanderthal instance? Neanderthals didn't, the Denisovans didn't, a lot of other hominins did not. So there's a new theory now coming out of the Max Planck Institute, which is where a lot of study on human evolution is being done. And they think that it's actually not because we were so good with our tools or that we had fancy language, because now we know that Neanderthals likely had language as well. It's just because we're really good at being what's called a generalist specialist species. which is a very odd combination.

Usually a species is either a generalist, like, say, Argentine ants, which can live anywhere, or a specialist like, say, tree sloths that can only live in a very, very specific kind of tree. So humans can do both. We can go to lots of places and then specialize. So we can go up into the mountains. We can go into the tropics. We can be on the coasts. We can be in deserts and the Arctic.

And then specialize in those areas. And partly we're able to do this because, humans help each other even when they're not kin. We form groups that are a collection of different family groups and help each other. So we're both this weird thing called specialist generalists, but we're also weird in that we tend to help people who aren't in our family group to get into that kind of specialist mode. So basically, it's not because we're fancy with our language.

We're just really good animals. We're good at adapting. Well, that's very positive news these days about people. Yes, we're good at. something. We help each other out. We can act together. Yes, we can come together in mutually beneficial ways. Thank you. Thank you very much, Annalie. Thanks. Have a good weekend. Annalie Newett's science journalist based in San Francisco. 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 significance. You know, it is a common story, a hurricane or other major storm. There's flooding, property damage, a flurry. of insurance claims, and then people rebuild in the same place, and it all happens again until the next storm. But as coastline shifts and climate changes, is it time to break that cycle? Jen Schwartz, senior editor at Scientific American, joins us to talk about how in some cases New Jerseyans, for example, are letting nature recover its landscape. Welcome, Jen.

Hi, thanks for having me. Senior editor at Scientific American, and you can find a link to her Scientific American story at Science Friday.com. So how does this program work? Give us an idea. So the idea is that if your house is routinely flooded, there are funds in New Jersey for the government to buy out your house at its pre-storm value.

Then the house is demolished. And in New Jersey, it means that the land becomes open space, so you can never rebuild on it, and that's forever. So the concept here is how do we get people and property permanently out of harm's way and also not have all these insurance claims coming in and bankrupting our national flood insurance system. People are taking advantage of this opportunity. Very few, but in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, a community in New Jersey actually kind of came together to really push this forward in a way we haven't seen before.

So is it sort of turning into a ghost town where you have empty buildings of people who moved out? It's not quite like that. It's actually just a neighborhood like any other. there's also a misconception when we think about sea level rise. We either think about sandy beaches or we think about, you know, cities like New York and Miami that are so vulnerable. But this is just one corner of a neighborhood that's built on low-lying land. And so after being flooded three years in a row, a lot of residents had just had enough. And so it's really just becoming restored open space.

And you tell the story of one resident. What was her decision process like? She was fascinating because she was someone who looked at. at a situation of being flooded over and over, of looking at the results and effects of climate change and saying, is there a better way to be resilient rather than building, rebuilding or building higher? And so she thought about it based on the concept of, how can I seize some form of agency in an uncertain future with rising seas?

And she got all of her neighbors together, and it was very difficult, and there was a lot of pushback. But ultimately, they sort of got to know each other even better as a neighborhood and as a community and pushed for this. And that's really how they got all of this to occur as well as it did. And they were paid a fair price? Yeah, the idea is that, you know, that's always tricky, right? What is the fair price? But, you know, from the government perspective, giving a pre-storm value to your home, maybe you're going to get more in that way than if you're trying to sell a house that is routinely flooded. Of course, we've seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, for example,

there's a lot of exploitation around real estate with desperate people who can't afford to stay leave. And so is this something that can be replicated in other states, other places? The idea is that it can be, but that it takes a lot of local coordination. There have been a lot of failures when it comes to buyouts. But as we have seas get higher and the rate of sea level rise accelerates, this is going to be a problem that a lot of communities are dealing with. So if you deal with it on a local level, with the residents, with the town, with the state, there can actually be a lot done. It's going to take a lot of planning, a lot of cooperation. A lot of planning. A lot of people there. Yes. And a lot of grassroots activism.

Thank you, Jen. Thanks for having me. Jen Schwartz, senior editor at Scientific American, and you can find a link to her Scientific American story at ScienceFriday.com. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, you know, we're still waiting for a lot of answers from physics. You know, where are all those particles who are supposed to find it, the large hydrant collider, how come we can't unite all the different physics? One of our researcher thinks the problem may be in the math. The math may be, well, physicists may be stuck with looking for math that's

too beautiful, too elegant. We'll talk about it when we come back with Sabine Hasenfelder, who is author of Lost in Math How Beauty Leads Physics astray. She'll be with us after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Irafledo. When the large

Hadron Collider opened in 2010, physicists had high hopes for what it might help us discover. By 2012, the world's most powerful particle accelerator had already proven the existence of the Higgs boson. But physicists were hoping it might also detect other particles, help determine the nature of dark matter, or explain how gravity might fit in a unified model of physics.

It's 2018, and we are still waiting for all or some of those answers. My next guest, a physicist herself, reports that it's getting harder to justify the work. Not because the answers aren't out there, she says, but because we're not chasing the best theories, just the most mathematically beautiful, elegant, and simple ones. She says the real answers, the real answers may not conform to mathematical standards of beauty, and we won't find them until we let go a bit and embrace some messier ideas. Sabine Hassanfelder is a research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany,

an author of the new book Lost in Math, how beauty leads. Physics Estray. She joins us by Skype, and you can read an excerpt of the book on our website at Science Friday.com slash beauty. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for having me. You start the book with a pretty bleak picture of physics as it stands. Give us a play-by-play of the discoveries that you think are missing right now. Yeah, so this is a story which has been going on basically since 40 years. We've been searching for an explanation for what dark matter is made of, some kind of particle for which we have built detectors, but we haven't found anything. You just mentioned that we have also had high hopes that the Large Hadron Collider would see new particles. This has not happened.

Actually, we hoped that we would see them already at previous colliders. People have also hoped that we would find evidence of some new unified forests that would have the effects that would have the effects that, protons decay, and we've looked for this, but we haven't seen it. We've also tried to find for some evidence that dark energy is some kind of fear that hasn't happened. We've been discussing for a long time about the foundations of quantum mechanics that a lot of people are unsatisfied with, but nothing really has changed there. So I really have this feeling that we're stuck there. Let me give out the number because a lot of tweets have come in. I want to get our phone audience.

In 844-8255, 844-724-8-255, you can tweet us at Si-Fri. One big example, as you mentioned, it's a large Hadron Collider. Physicists are still waiting for these particles. And you say the problem is the beautiful math. What do you mean by that? What constitute beauty in physics and math? And why is that getting in the way the need to have to have that? Yes, it's actually peculiar.

I found out when I was interviewing people for the book, the theoretical physicists more or less agree on what they mean by beauty. So it has typically three ingredients. The first one is probably the ones that most people are familiar with is simplicity. So a good example for this is string theory, which pretty much everyone has heard of these days. So it's the idea that everything is made of strings. So, you know, that's an idea that is so simple that I can, formulated in a few words, but of course it doesn't stop there, you know, because this assumption, even though simple, has a lot of consequences that lead to very surprising insights. That's why people are so convinced of string theory. And this discovery of surprising insight is something

that is often referred to as elegance. And that's something that is not only specific to string theory, but it's also something that theoretical physicists admire, about general relativity, which is simple in its formulation, but it has a lot of interesting consequences, like it leads to black holes and gravitational waves and maybe warm holes, who knows. So we have simplicity and elegance. And then there is a third criterion that is called naturalness,

which is something that most people are not so familiar with. It's basically a sense of decent proportion. You don't want things that don't really fit together in size. roughly speaking. So concretely this means if you write down a theory in a mathematical form, you do not want it to contain numbers that are either much smaller or much larger than one. Do you think, for example, in string theory, that, I mean, we haven't gotten any, you talk about the need for evidence in science, and in your book you talk about scientists sort of poo-pooing evidence as the necessary ingredient to do science these days.

Is string theory, should we let it go? Has it become more of a religion now, since we don't have all that evidence we need? It kind of depends on exactly what you're talking about. So string theory is a big field where a lot of different things are going on. So the reason that string theory originally attracted so much attention was that theoretical physicists thought it would be a candidate for a theory of everything that would unify all the four now fundamental forces that we know. And on that account, things are not going well, let me put it that way.

But it turns out that string theory has other uses in other areas of physics, like for example in condensed metaphysics. And that's really a different thing entirely that really I'm not touching on in the book. I'm concerned with this search for more fundamental laws of nature, for the theory of everything, for the grand unification, you know, that kind of thing. If we did not require, excuse me, if it didn't require the beauty that you talk about, what other alternative ideas could we come up with that would be worth investigating? Yeah, that's the interesting question, of course.

You know, I want to know. I want to know what would they come up with if they gave up on this insistent that the laws of nature have to be beautiful in this specific way. So, you know, I'm not a seer. I can't tell you. But I think that it's problematic that so much of the effort in these fields is focused on recovering the specific sense of beauty. You see, these theorists are basically dictating nature what it's supposed to do. And I think that just doesn't make sense from a scientific perspective.

We should look at what the evidence tells us and then try to describe it. Let me go to the phones, 8447-4-8255. Monica in Michigan. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thank you for taking my call. You guys have actually kind of touched on my question already. I'm a biologist, and it just sounds like you're implying that we should move forward from the notion that the most parsimonious answer is the most correct.

And if that is the case, if that is what you are saying, I just wonder how us as scientists, how we should move forward and continue to try to answer the questions that we have in science. If parsimony has gotten us this far, and the most simple answer being, or the most beautiful answer, has gotten us this far, how do we move forward from,

you know, parsimony no longer being as valuable as we thought it was? Good question. Dr. Hassamfelder? So, first, I want to be clear here that when I talk about beauty or parsimony, I don't mean this in a comparative way. So if you have two theories that explain the same, you pick the one that is simpler, you know, the one that doesn't require as many assumptions, that that is perfectly scientific procedure.

What I think is going wrong is that theorists try to construct theories that are simple, period, you know, that have as many, as little axioms as possible. And there is just no good rationale for why this should be the case. You know, why should a theory with fewer axioms describe nature any better than a more complicated theory? It's not something that we know should be the case about the fundamental laws of nature. We don't know that they should be getting simpler. But your question was, well, what else could we do? Well, I think that we should focus on what are good scientific problems. You know, if you have a theory and you don't like it because it's not pretty enough, that's not a scientific problem.

I mean, I understand this perfectly on a personal basis that people would like to work with theories that are beautiful. But from a scientific perspective, there's the kind of problem that you should be focusing on is if there is some kind of inconsistency either in the theory itself so that it's internally has eternal contradiction or it's actually inconsistent with data. There's a tweet from Nathan who says,

this reminds me of something Stephen Weinberg once wrote that if you want to actually make progress in science, you go where things are messy. Did you really say that? Well, that's interesting. So, Stephen Weinberg is one of the people who are interviewed for the book, and he has an interesting point of view in that he's trying to make an argument that our reliance on beauty is actually based on experience,

because arguments from beauty have been useful in the past. So this is why I think, at least that was my impression, that he doesn't see a problem with relying on the sense of beauty that in particle physics, for example, is very strongly built on using unification and symmetries. And this is certainly something which Weinberg has exalt him in himself, right? So I'm not sure what he might mean with. You should go where things are messy. Well, yeah, we're not quite sure the quote either. Sometimes people hear things and might not be exactly like it was said, but you never know. You even say, though, that Einstein used beauty to guide him. Was he wrong in that case?

No, I mean, searching for beauty is certainly a strong personal motivator, and you see this documented in a lot of the scientific history that it was very important for people to proceed in their work. But you also have to see that the actual reason, you know, we know this in hindsight, that Einstein made progress with that, was that he had a good problem to work with to begin with. Like, for example, think of general relativity. We already spoke about this. He had his theory of special relativity, and that theory just is not compatible with Newtonian gravity. So he had an actual strong contradiction that he was trying to solve. And yes, if you look at his letters and the interviews he gave, he was talking a lot about the beauty of that, and it's also a theory that we still consider beautiful.

But he was also really working on solving a good problem to begin with. And that's just currently no longer the case. So what area of physics do you think would be ripe, the most ripe for using theories that are not beautiful, pretty, satisfy those? I'm not sure what you mean. I'm trying to narrow down a wide field where you're talking about all of physics. Is there one area of physics, either cosmology, particle physics, where would be most ripe? There are a lot of interesting ideas that are not so beautiful, but might be useful to look into. Oh, I'm not talking about all of physics.

I'm talking about the foundations of physics in particular, where we're trying to find really new laws of So in other areas of physics, this reliance on beauty is not as pronounced, basically because people don't have the need. They have closer contact to experiment. And that guides the theory development in what I think is a healthy way. But in the foundations of physics, you already mentioned this earlier, data has not really been coming in that has been of much use in the guidance of the development of new theories. And then the theorists start to rely on, um, lofty ideas like beauty. Amira Plato, this is Science Friday from WNYC

Studios. Talking with Sabine Hassanfelder, author of Lost in Math, how beauty leads physics astray. Let's go to the phones to Alexander and San Antonio. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hello, I wanted to ask Dr. Hossensfelder. In my experience is a physics student, university, I've largely

all my professors and the community that I've encountered often have, they have very similar opinions on strength theory and similar, there is something around beauty. They're very opposed, and they feel that a lot of them are dead ends. So why do you feel that this is so prominent in the community still if there's so much backlash against it? Well, probably because there's not enough backlash against it. So it's curious that you would be saying this. actually most of the feedback that I've gotten from physicists did not come from the communities

that I was writing about, but from physicists in other communities who basically said, yeah, I've meant to say this for a long time and I'm glad you said it. So, you know, in hindsight, it's good to know that I'm not the only one who has this perspective. But the way that science is organized right now, it is possible. I mean, the evidence shows it that you have a community of a certain size, like it is the case, with string theory, that basically becomes self-supported. It keeps on continuing to work because there are sufficiently many people, so it attracts sufficiently much interest, and it attracts a sufficient amount of funding. And there's just no reason to stop it, so it just keeps going. You also mentioned that in reading in your book,

that you were sort of a new generation of physicist who has had to just adopt the old ways, and you're not happy with that. Yes, so there's certainly this aspect of experience that I was mentioning that Weinberg talks about. There's certainly truth to this. I mean, the generation before me of physicists who have seen the completion of the standard model of particle physics, they have seen that these criteria of beauty actually work. You know, they are realized in the standard model. The standard model has a lot of symmetries.

It is natural. General relativity is elegant. So it's there. So it's perfectly reasonable that they would try to continue using the success and try the same thing again. And that's exactly what they did starting in the 80s. Okay, but that was then. So now we're not in the 1980s. There's a lot of time that has passed a lot of bridge under the water.

And I think that at some point you have to reconsider. these criteria and ask if they are actually working. And I think the answer to this is clearly no. We've tried to use them for 30, almost 40 years, and it's not working. Yeah. That's interesting. And you think that make way for the younger physicists might be an answer? Well, actually, yes.

So I do think that, at least in my sample of, younger physicists that I have spoken with, there is a more, well, I should say maybe a less romantic sense. People are much more pragmatic. And part of the reason, interestingly, is also because they have grown up being used to using numerical calculations. You know, they are very good with putting things on a computer. And I have this impression that for them, beauty is not so relevant anymore. So I think that's a good development, but still it will take a long time until these people

will really be able to set research directions. So if we rely on this, we might have to wait another 20 years to see some progress in the foundations of physics. So I'm kind of hoping we could get there a little bit earlier.

All right, we're going to, we'll come back and conclude our interview with the Sabine Hustenfeld. Maybe we'll talk about, you know, one of the continuing reasons why this research goes is because that's, you go where the money is, right? We'll talk about that. Sabine Hassenfelder is author of Lost in Math, how beauty leads physics astray.

She'll join us after the break, and hopefully you will tell our number 8447-248255. You can also tweet us at SciFri. Stay with us. We'll be right back. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking this hour about, oh, the big questions in physics that still remain unanswered, and whether this is a realm of science that needs new ideas

and a new approach. Sabine Hussendfelder is author of Lost in Math, How Beauty Leads Physics Astray. Let's go to the phones. A lot of people still want to talk about it. Let's go to Jack and Fort Lauderdale. Hi, Jack. Hi, how are you doing?

Hi, there. Go ahead. Now I have a new book I have to read, apparently. So I'm just going to say this, and then I'll go away and listen to the response. So I think human nature plays a part of this. An elegant solution, obviously, if you're a physicist, you have to be published.

The elegant solution is easily defensible. A complex solution or theory has lots of variables and degrees of freedom is very difficult to defend, and people sometimes need a defensible argument and more complex it is, the more adverse they are going to be to produce something. And so I want to go away now. Thank you. Okay. Dr. Hassanfielder, what do you think?

I totally agree with that. couldn't have said it any better. So, but, but so that, he's, he's sort of noodling around the idea that it's, it's about the money, isn't it? To get money to do the research, you need a more elegant, more beautiful theory? Well, you know, someone joked to me somewhere ago that any discussion about any topic in academia eventually turns to a discussion about funding. So I think there's probably some truth to this. because the reason is that, of course, funding is important, you know, because without money, we can't continue to do our research.

And it is certainly true that some theories are just easier to defend than others. They are more popular. You know, if you have a theory that is beautiful, that appeals to others, that's something that attracts more attention. And now the way that academia is organized right now, the more attention your research gets, the more citations your papers get, the better it looks, because that's the criterion that is used to decide whether your work is important. It's how popular it is, how many people use it in their own work.

So if you have a simple, I'll like an idea, people are going to point to it, and it's been published. Isn't it getting more difficult because of the kinds of theories we have and the questions we have to ask, to actually make the devices. I know there's always a great divide between the theorists and the people have to make the experiments to prove those theories. Isn't that getting wider

because we have to spend a lot more money to find out whether it's true or not? Yes, that's certainly the case. I mean, it's just that the simple things have been done already. So it becomes increasingly harder to probe new theories. This is why we now have to build

huge telescopes or large accelerators. And of course, it takes a lot of time to build them, and it takes a lot of money. So, yes, you would expect progress to slow down. So that's a natural expectation. But still, I think you have to ask the question, are we doing the best we can?

And I think the answer to this is clearly no, because either way you turn it, relying on beauty is not a scientific approach. So what keeps you going? If you've written a book about beauty and physics and it's getting pushed back and you think this is not the approach that we should be taking,

what joy do you find in doing this? Well, I generally derive joy from the prospect of discovery. I want to know more about nature and I don't really care all that much if the theory is mathematically beautiful in a specific way. I really think this is a very misleading and bad criterion.

One of the reasons is, for example, that it has been the case in various circumstances in the history that a theory that was originally ugly or was considered ugly was later considered beautiful, sometimes just because people's perception of beauty change, but sometimes also because we learned to reformulate the mathematics. Interesting. This is a great book, Dr. Hustenfeldar, and thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you. Sabine Hassenfelder, author of Lost in Math, How Beauty, Leads Physics, Astray. Alan Alda has had many roles in life on stage, television, and in the movies. More recently, is a teacher of communication at the Allen Alda Center for Communicating Science.

And this week, he stepped into a new role as a public figure diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Ellen Alda is a friend of the show. He's also here to talk about it. He's got a new podcast, Clear Plus Vivid. Welcome back to Science Friday. The plus sign is supposed to mean and. Oh, and I'm such a nerd. I look at the plus sign.

I say it's a plus. Yeah, it's clear and vivid, and I love it. I'm having such a good time. I'm interviewing such wonderful people. And just in the course, in the middle of all of that, I thought it would, I better, I've been talking on television, a few times lately about clear and vivid, didn't let people know that the podcast exists. And I noticed my thumb twitching a little bit. And I thought, it's clear that I got some

neurological thing here. So after three and a half years of, it was three and a half years ago that I was diagnosed. And I didn't see any reason to talk about it. But now I want to make sure that if it's talked about, that I can get the story out my own way, which, which is a positive way. I'm a little concerned, and I can tell what the culture thinks about Parkinson's because I hear it coming, and I have a special ear open for it.

And I can, I feel very, very strongly that it's not a good idea to assume if somebody that you know gets, or if you get a diagnosis of Parkinson, It's not a good idea to think, oh, that's it, everything is over. And that's what a lot of people think. Oh, my God, oh, I'm so sad. That's so terrible.

And then they're thinking of the worst case scenario. And most people are many people anyway. I don't know what the figures are. But many, many people have years to go. And it's a progressive disease, but you can slow the progress. It doesn't go right to the worst possible outcome. And if you don't get it early, If you're in fear of talking about it or acting on it or, you know, declaring to another person like someone who can give you physical therapy and that kind of, or maybe a group that you have to go to where you're in a room full of people and you're kind of opening up on that part of your life.

If you postponed because of that, because of the cultural bias against Parkinson's, then I think it's not a good idea. you don't slow down the progress. And it's not the end of everything for most people, I think. Now, that's not to say that there aren't families suffering with severe cases of Parkinson's, and that's painful. But that picture doesn't have to be the one that guides us when you get a diagnosis. You said that you've had it three and a half years. Why now talk about it?

Well, as I said, I started to see my thumb twitch. on television. And I figured it was only a matter of time before somebody puts out a sad story about me, you know. And I think it's much more important to get out a story. Here's a guy who's been living with it for three and a half years. I've acted during that time. I get up in front of audiences and give talks. I'm helping with the All Descenter for Communicating Science.

I'm doing my podcast. I'm having the best time. It's a hit. Isn't it great? I'm so excited about it. I'm glad for you. Yeah. And you're still active?

You're still playing, I understand you play tennis? Well, see, it's not just that I'm still active. I deliberately do these things because they're important to slow the progress of Parkinson's. I play tennis. I try to play tennis singles twice a week. Better than I could. I take boxing lessons three times a week. Boxing is particularly good for Parkinson's.

And I marched to John Phillips Susa music, and I juggle. I saw that. I saw the video of you juggles. How long did it take to learn how to do that? Well, I learned when I was a kid. And I'm getting back to it now, and I count the number of times I can keep the ball in the air. So I got up to 24 times. but I made a GIF so that it looks like I'm juggling forever.

I saw that. If you can't do it, make a gift. You have to start spinning those plates now. I heard you say that you were prompted to get tested from reading something in the Times. Yeah, that's a wonderful example of communication, which, as you know, I'm obsessed with. Jane Brody wrote a column where she quoted two doctors, I guess they're neurologists, who found that among their patients, having dreams in which you act out the dream while you were asleep,

you physically acted out, is very often a sign before any other symptoms show up that you might have Parkinson's. And so I noticed that at least on one occasion, actually several occasions, but one example was I had a dream that I was being attacked and I picked up a sack of potatoes and threw it at the attacker. And in actuality, I was throwing a pillow at my wife.

I also fell out of bed twice in one week during that period. So when I read that column, I thought, I may have this, and I want to know if I got it. And I went to a doctor, and I said, I want a brain scan. And he examined me, and he said, why do you want a brain scan? You don't have anything. And I said, well, I think I might, and I want to know if I've got it, because I want to take action. I want to do something because I've read that there are things you can do.

And he called me up and said, boy, you got it. And your reaction? My reaction was I had to tell my family and calm them down because everybody tends to think, oh my God, this is the worst thing that can happen. And it may turn out to be a terrible thing. Everybody's got a different flavor of this. disease. It seems that no two people have exactly the same version of it. So I may turn out to have a terrible version of it, but I'm going to hold it off as long as I can. It's reality.

You know, you've got something you have to do. For me, it's a puzzle to be solved. And I'm not going to spend all my time talking about it publicly. I talked about it. once on CBS, you got an email to me right away. Get in there early. And in a moment of weakness, I said yes. But I can't be Mr. Parkinson's. I have to do other things. But on clear and vivid, the podcast,

I think I might deal with it on one episode because there are a lot of communications questions about this, how you deal with your family, how you deal with the people who work with you, and that kind of thing. and how we all regard it, it would be helpful, it would be healthier for people if we didn't regard it as such a catastrophe at first, right off the bat. I'm Ira Flater.

This is Science Friday from WNIC Studios, talking with Alan Alda, who is a – he's got a new podcast, clear and vivid out. And you say, is this going to be your last interview about this? You say you don't want to become the voice or the face. of Parkinson's disease and talk about it all the time. That's right. Go on and with the rest of your life. Yeah, and I haven't even got the time to do it. However, I am going to be talking to morning television shows in Australia and the United Kingdom

about the podcast in the next few weeks. So this will probably come up. I can't avoid it's coming up, you know, in an ordinary interview because I do want people to know about the podcast. but I'm not going to make a I'm not going to I can't show up and give speeches about it and that kind of thing I have so many others I'm a wash with things to do you look great I mean thank you thank you I you know would have never known that you you know that it's obvious you don't have an advanced case of Parkinson's right right and you know you're very active and and that's the way and you are being proactive in saying I need to do these things that's an interesting point

I hadn't heard before. Well, it turns out that the sooner you do something, the better. That's why it was good to know about, and I'm glad to have helped spread the word about the acting out of dreams, which I think is also called REM sleep disorder. Wow. So I would like to seem, and I think to some extent, judging by what I see on Twitter, there has been a response to this disclosure I made, which is helping other people focus on some of the useful facts about it.

And you know, you are the best person to talk about it because you now have the best part of your life now is being a communicator. It's so much fun for me to find out more about it and to see, and here's an example. You're right. This is an example of communication because one of the great things about good communication is if you make it personal, it sticks better. Right. People hear it and they internalize it because we're very.

such social animals, I think. And so here's, instead of saying, the facts are early detection is good and exercise therapy is important. Instead of talking in generalities, I've told a personal story, and I think that may help. It does help. And it helps us to communicate with you and thank you for taking time to come in and talk about it. I'm glad I got my phone call on always.

You were pretty quick. You answered it right away. It was great to hear it. Well, it's because I like you. That makes one. See, it makes one person. Alan, thank you very much. Thank you.

Good luck. And stay in touch. Alan Alda, who is hosted the new podcast, clear and vivid. And, of course, he is also head of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. Thanks again, Alan. One last note, here's your weekly reminder. The Science Friday Book Club continues. It's a reading of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time.

You can learn how to participate. Ask your Physicist. questions and more on our website. Go to Science Friday.com slash book club. What's the best way to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Hawking's A Brief History of Time? Why not a time traveler

cocktail party? Yeah, well, I'm going to have games, talks, activities, even to build your own time capsule station. So you're going to join us on August 21st at Cavia. That's a club in New York City. Info at tickets available again at ScienceFriety.com

slash book club. That's August 21st at Caviat in New York City reading Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. We're going to have a great, great time talking about it and having hoisting a few with everybody who comes. That's about all the time we have for this week. Charles Berkwurst is our director, senior producer Christopher and Talia Atea. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Hailer. Our intern is Lucy Wang, and we had technical engineering help from Rich Kim and Sarah Fishman. Also, we are active, of course, all week.

On Science Friday, you can ask your smart speaker to play Science Ride wherever you are. Every day is Science Friday now. And, of course, you can leave us all kinds of messages on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. We'd love to talk to you. I'm Ira Plato in New York.