Science Friday - Medium Black Holes, World of Wonders, Warsaw Typhus. Sept 11, 2020, Part 2

Episode Date: September 11, 2020

Why A Medium-Sized Black Hole Is Surprising Physicists If you’re looking for a black hole, they normally come in two sizes. There’s the basic model, in which a large, dying star collapses in on itself, and the gravity of its core pulls in other matter. Then there are the supermassive black holes, millions of times the mass of our sun, that tend to be found at the center of a galaxy. But recently researchers reported that they had evidence for two colliding black holes that created a surprising offspring. Their collision formed a middle-weight black hole, around 142 times the mass of our sun.  Daniel Holz, a member of the LIGO team that spotted the collision, and a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, joins Ira to talk about what the observation means for theories of how black holes form and grow. Against Impossible Odds, The Warsaw Ghetto Stopped A Typhus Outbreak This year marks the 80th anniversary of the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto in November of 1940. The Nazis purposefully tried to starve to death almost half a million Jews, who were kept with little food and water in a space about the size of Central Park.  Theoretical mathematician Lewi Stone of Tel Aviv University has been studying a concurrent public health crisis that happened in the Warsaw Ghetto: a Typhus outbreak. The infectious disease is spread by lice, and can be deadly.  Typhus ran rampant in the Warsaw Ghetto for the better part of 1941. But when the winter rolled around, the expected second wave never came. Researchers have found evidence that public health measures enacted under these impossible circumstances—think public education and social distancing—actually worked. Stone talks to SciFri producer Kathleen Davis about this research, and potential takeaways for 2020’s public health crisis.  It’s Still A Wild, Wonderful World The table of contents for poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s new book of essays reads like a list of evolution’s most fantastic products. The comb jelly, which pulses with rainbow bioluminescence. The smiling-faced axolotl, which can regrow lost limbs and is a star of biology research labs, but is considered critically endangered in the wild. The human-sized corpse flower, which blooms for a mere 24 hours, smelling of dead flesh. It’s also a deeply personal book: Nezhukumatathil says the screaming pink of dragonfruit signals “summertime, pop music, sunglasses balanced on the top of my head, weather too warm for socks.” A firefly’s spark might send her back to her grandmother’s backyard, or “to splashing in an ice-cold creek bed, with our jeans rolled up to our knees, until we shudder and gasp, our toes fully wrinkled.” Even the horizontal eye of an octopus becomes a “door that judges us,” as the oceans become increasingly difficult to inhabit, thanks to humans’ ravages. Science Friday’s Christie Taylor talks to Nezhukumatathil about her experiences in natural wonder, and why in a world of changing climate, rising seas, and burning forests, she finds it important to share her joy in learning about the creatures we share the planet with.  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 Iroflato. You know, you're always surprised to turn up an I didn't know that story. That has a surprising connection to how you're living your life now. Well, that's the case of our next story about the Warsaw Ghetto. 80 years ago, this fall, the Warsaw Ghetto was created where nearly half a million Jews were housed before they were scheduled to be shipped to concentration camps. and even as people were starving to death, they were dealt a deadly typhus outbreak. And now almost 100 years later, researchers are learning about how public health interventions turned this typhus epidemic around under nearly impossible circumstances. Sci-fi producer Kathleen Davis has more about this story. Hi, Kathleen.

Hey, Ira. Why are researchers so many years later now, still looking through this point of history through a public health lens. Well, it's a really fascinating story. So, as you mentioned, almost half a million Jews were imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto. And for the better part of 1941, there was this really terrible typhus outbreak there. You know what typhus is, I would assume. Yeah, it's spread by lice.

Yeah, and it can be really deadly. So typhus was rampant there. But when the winter rolled around, a second wave was expected, but it never came. An expected second wave, you know, sounds kind of familiar. Right. Well, researchers have found evidence that special public health measures that were enacted under these really impossible circumstances worked. And the community was able to get a handle on typhus to keep away the second wave. And there might be some lessons for us here, too, because as I'm sure you have not forgotten, we are going through a pandemic right now. Okay. Tell us the rest of that story.

I talked to Dr. Louis Stone. He is a professor of theoretical biology at Tel Aviv University. He's based in Melbourne, Australia. He's one of the main researchers behind this study. And in my conversation with him, he started off by explaining what it was like to live in the Warsaw Ghetto. Let's put it this way. It was an area of 3.4 kilometers squared. Within that area, there was close to half a million people, 450,000 people. So you can imagine that's like Central Park with half a million people. On top of that, there's these huge problems that they were being starved out by the Nazis. And on top of that, there was this huge typhus epidemic that was developing early 1941, and which is what my paper is about.

And so you say that the typhus outbreak became a big problem at the early part of the year. How badly did it hit this community? So there were two phases. The first phase was starvation. So initially, when the ghetto was opened in late 1940 and early 1941, almost zero food supplies. Every person had 200 calories per day, and that was it, if they were lucky. And the goal was to starve the population out initially.

And refugees came in in January, February, because they continually concentrated people into the Warsaw Gets. ghetto. And with that, some typhus came in and ignited the epidemic. Now, the two things work together, starvation and typhus, they seem to feed off each other and enhance each other. And within a month or two, there was something like 5,000 people per month dying. So the typhus itself built up, and by October it reached a peak. One could say that in a year, about 100,000 people contracted typhus. That was the estimate of the time, which in 3.4 kilometers squared is quite a lot of disease going around.

And so the Warsaw ghetto was hit hard, as you say, in sort of the better part of 1941. And then what happened when winter rolled around? Okay. The curious thing was, winter, everyone was expecting the epidemic to get even worse than it was. and it was already very bad. But strangely, in late October and November, the epidemic started to die out in short. This was hardly noticed because people were too busy just trying to survive,

and we don't have the modern surveillance that we have today. I was sitting on this status set for quite some time, and I had to ask myself, why was the epidemic dying away just when winter was beginning? it's very unusual because typhus especially accelerates in the winter. So that was the big question that initiated this study. And so in this study, you found that public health interventions were taking place within this community. Can you walk us through what kind of interventions you found?

So it turns out the Warsaw Ghetto had a large number of really professional doctors and specialists from the Warsaw Hospital. All the good scientists were dumped into the ghetto. We even find in the ghetto that there was a Nobel Prize nominee, Ludwig Hertzfeld. It's a very famous bacteriologist and scientist. So there were these amazing doctors. They had few resources. There were major limitations.

But what they could do, they did. And number one, they ran very serious educational programs. So there'd be lecture courses and seminars open to the public on epidemiology, on sanitation, on hygiene. These lectures were drawing maybe 900 people at a single shot. That was one thing. Now, as well as lecturing about it, they tried to instill it into the population that they have to keep hygiene practices and sanitation. And so this was enforced in many different ways as much as it could be. and people were shown how to get rid of life.

People were shown how to isolate and keep it a distance. Now, there wasn't social distancing or face masks as we know it, but people knew that this was a disease that you would catch by contact. So every diary you read, people are trying to keep away from each other or avoid getting on the streets because they know this is a disease you catch in contact. So while you were doing this research,

you mentioned a little earlier that the were diary entries that you had found. What other types of evidence did you come across that proved that these interventions were happening at the time? Okay, so we have the records of the ghetto itself, the famous Ringle Bloom archives, which is many, many documents that were kept. And before the Warsaw Ghetto was completely destroyed, they buried these records in milk cans underground and they were dug up after the war. So we have many, many records of what went on. We also have survivors records. There are many of them. And we also have the records at the trials where some of the key epidemiologists gave testimonies. So all of these give us a picture

of what happened. Now, I don't want to give the complete wrong impression. We can't be sure that these interventions necessarily curtailed the epidemic. but it's the only sensible thing that we could come to. I think one of the big contributions of our paper was that we built a model, a mathematical model of the epidemic, and it seemed the only possible way to explain this curtailing of the epidemic was that there must have been some intervention of some type that caused it to go down,

because what the model told us was, under natural conditions, it was impossible to fit the data with a model, with an epidemic model. The only way you could do it is if, say, 70% of the population got infected, but we know that 70% of the population didn't get infected. So something really had to dampen the epidemic in November 1941. At the same time, we know that there was this huge effort. I mean, there were only two things on people's minds in the lead up to November. One was food and two was how to get rid of this epidemic. So there was a huge, huge effort.

to try and do anything to get rid of it. So despite the success for the Warsaw ghetto beating typhus, I want to be clear that this story probably doesn't end happily for a lot of the people who lived here. Is that right? Yeah, very few of the people, in fact. So we can say that of the 450,000, maybe 100,000 people died during 1941 and early 1922. And then some 260,000 people were then shuttled off to the death camps to Treblinka in a matter of five or six weeks. So it's a huge destruction and genocide.

What we're living through right now with the COVID-19 pandemic obviously is not directly comparable to what was happening in the Warsaw Ghetto with typhus. But it does seem like there might be lessons that can be learned in terms of how successful it seems, they were at harnessing public health interventions. Do you think that there are takeaways here for us in this modern time? As you said, COVID is a very different disease. COVID is a virus. Typhus is a bacteria. But having worked with epidemics for decades, we always go back to previous pandemics or epidemics and try and get lessons on how to handle the next one. So yes, definitely intervention measures were helpful and always will be helpful in epidemics. I mean, these are things we learn from epidemic and pandemic after epidemic. There's no doubting about it. And another thing

that sticks out to me about this situation is that, I mean, these people were living in impossible circumstances, but they were still listening to their epidemiologists and to their public health experts. I would imagine that that plays a role in this as well. Exactly. I mean, they had immense respect for their doctors and medical system. And I think it's really outstanding that even under this barbaric and diabolical regime of the Nazis, it was possible to run such a humane and highly professional health system, which probably has no equal in history of medicine under such extreme situations. So the ghetto really did build itself an amazing medical system and the people appreciated it.

Unfortunately, due to lack of resources, there weren't many medicines and equipment. But the doctors, you know, they would be going to people's homes, chasing up patients and working 24-7. That's so amazing. We have unfortunately run out of time, but I would love to thank you for. joining us today, Dr. Stone. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Dr. Louis Stone, a professor of theoretical biology at Tel Aviv University. He is based in Melbourne, Australia. SciFri producer Kathleen Davis. Wow, that was really powerful, Kathleen. Yeah, it's a really informative story. I think that learning about how people in the past dealt with

disease, especially under really terrible circumstances, it can really help us think about our modern situations a little bit differently. Thanks, Kathleen. Thank you. We've got to take a break. And when we come back, something completely different, a cosmic mystery, black holes that are baffling scientists. Stay with us.

We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Hi, can I help you? Oh, you say you're looking. for a black hole? Well, you have come to the right place. What size are you looking for? I've got your basic model here. It's a big star collapsing in on itself, and the gravity of its core pulls in other matter, making it still more massive and more attractive. Now, right here

is your supermassive black hole, millions of times the mass of our sun. That's the kind of black hole that tends to be found at the center of a galaxy. Oh, you say you want the middle-sized one. Yeah, I know, like the Goldilocks size. Well, I just so happened to have one that came in today because researchers just reported that they have evidence for colliding black holes of the middle size, a middle-weight black hole, maybe 142 times the mass of our sun.

And that was surprising. Oh, now you want to know more. Okay, joining me to talk about that finding and how it changes what we know about black hole formation is Daniel Holtz, professor at the University of Chicago, and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, and a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. Welcome back to Science Friday. Thanks for having me.

It's so great to be back. Did I get those sizes, correct? Yeah, yeah, that's right. We've got a whole panoply of black holes, and the ones right in the middle, these Goldilocks black holes, what we call Intermediate Mass. black holes are somewhat mysterious. Let's talk about that because this was published in new papers. What did LIGO see or detect here?

So LIGO detected what we affectionately call GW-190-5-21, where 1905-21 is just a date, May 21st, 2019. And on that date, our detectors were on, and we heard a thump. and that thump corresponds to two quite big black holes by our measure. The larger black hole was 85 times the mass of the sun, and the smaller black hole was 66 times the mass of the sun, and those black holes orbited each other and merged and emitted gravitational waves, and we detected those gravitational waves. Now, why were people so surprised about this black hole?

Well, there are a number of reasons. One is we've detected quite a few black holes at this point. We've detected maybe 14 binary black holes that we're coughing about, and then there are many more that we're still analyzing. All of those are less massive. The most massive component of those binary black holes is usually comes in at around 50 solar masses. So far, from that set of detections, it seems like there's a limit around So then suddenly getting one at 85 is kind of a surprise. There are also theorists in this game, and the theorists have said that there should be no black holes between about 55 and 120 solar masses. And so that's a very, you know, strong prediction from astrophysical theory. So the fact that these two things, the observation so far, and the theory gelled, was, you know, something very, very satisfying for scientists like myself. You know, we have our theory, then we go and do the observations, and everything fits. And then along comes this 85 solar mass black hole colliding,

and that doesn't fit. That's not supposed to be there. So that's why, you know, this is a very interesting and exciting event and somewhat disappointing. Exciting and disappointing. Does this mean you have to go back to the drawing board about how black holes form? Yes. So we've got to add to the story or change the story. We're not sure exactly what's going on now. The simple story, which is that you have a star, the star, in this case, maybe two stars, each star collapses and makes a black hole, and then those black holes merge. So the stars are orbiting each other, then you end up with black holes orbiting each other, and then the black holes eventually merge,

that story can't account for what we've just detected. So we need a more complicated story. We think that a star, when it collapses and makes a black hole, that a star can't make a black hole this big. So either we're wrong about that, which means our understanding of stellar evolution and stellar death, that there's really a fundamental problem there. And that could be the case, and that's exciting,

but would really have to go back and understand where things are wrong, and that involves a lot of nuclear physics, a lot of stellar astrophysics. There's a lot of science there, and something might be wrong there. So that's one option. Or maybe that's not the way these black holes are being formed in the first place. Maybe, for example, the black holes are being made out of smaller black holes, and then the smaller black holes find each other and merge and make larger black holes, and then that process repeats itself.

And so this big black hole, the 85 solar mass black hole, is actually made out of two smaller black holes. If you were a betting man, which one, which explanation would you put your money on? Well, so I've worked quite a bit on the stellar case, you know, where it's just two stars and the black holes aren't made out of smaller black holes. people might expect me to bet there. And I am tempted to, to be honest, what I'm doing is trying to come up with maybe even crazier explanations. And my current favorite explanation is actually something I've just been working on with a student at University of Chicago, a graduate student Maya Fishba. And we've just finished a paper where we say, maybe the black holes aren't in this mass gap in the first place. maybe what's really happened is that there's a black hole, the more massive black hole is even

more massive. And if it's at 120 solar masses, then it's big enough that once again we can form it from stars. So I'm going with the even more extreme hell Mary where we save our theory by making the bigger black hole huge. And in that case, we're okay. I like that. Go where no physicist has gone before. Exactly. Desperate times called for desperate measures. Just wondering what the new collision would sound like or look like if you compared it to the original collision sound we've all heard a few years ago, that chirp. Was it like a hundred times louder or was it a different kind of sound altogether? So it's a different sound and it's not the volume. Actually, this one was slightly softer. The first detection was really

loud by our standards. This one isn't quite as loud, but what makes it absolutely distinct is that it's much lower frequency. So while the others, you know, like the first detection, and then we had that binary neutron star detection, those sound more like real chirps that you can hear and goes, whoop. This one is really just a thump. It's a boom. Very short thumb. Boom. It's a fraction of a second. It lasted about 10th of a second in our detectors and then was gone. Now, does that sound itself then give you some weight toward one theory or the other? Well, what the sound tells us is that it was two unusually massive black holes by our standards.

That's really what that sounds. Because it's so low frequency and so short, it tells us, boy, these are big, but it doesn't give us any additional detail. We've been analyzing it hoping to tease out some information, for example, if the black holes are spinning and how they're spinning, each black hole can spin like a top. And by testing whether they're actually spinning and the relative orientation of the two tops, of the two black holes as they merge, that gives us information about how they're formed. And so if we can get that information, that'll help us figure this up.

I'm wondering how you come up with numbers for the sizes of these black holes, like the 85 number. how do you estimate how big the black holes involved were? So it's really by analyzing this, the sound very carefully. What we do is we analyze the frequency and the way that frequency evolves. And so we only get a few cycles. You can think of it as we're only measuring the last few orbits before the black holes crash into each other. But the gravity is very strong there.

These are extreme objects, the most extreme objects in physics, and they're going around each other at close to the speed of light. And those last few cycles before they crash into each other give us a lot of information. And so by analyzing those carefully, we can figure out the masses. But as I alluded to before, we don't get the masses really pinned down that well. We know the final mass quite confidently, and that's at something like 140 solar masses. So above this magic 100 solar mass delineation between what we call stellar mass black holes and intermediate mass black holes. We know the final black hole is above that, but the individual components we don't

constrain as well. And they might be kind of in the middle, or as I mentioned, they could be further apart. that's harder to get from the data. So what do you need to know? What kind of data? What kind of theory that predicts the data? What kind of information? Do you need to have to pin down which option that you mentioned before is correct?

There are a number of things. One is we'll continue to analyze this data and we'll try to tease out as much as we can from this particular event. But the main thing is our detectors will, right now our detectors are off, but we're going to turn back on in just over a year and we'll be at increased sensitivity. And this is both the LIGO, the two LIGO detectors and the Virgo detector. And soon we'll have the Cagra detector in Japan joining our network. And eventually we'll have another LIGO detector in India joining our network. And all of these will be even more sensitive and will detect many more binary black hole collisions. And if we detect many of these, and they all seem to look the same, it'll be a clue, yes, you really have these black holes in this mass gap where they shouldn't belong.

They're just there because we'll detect enough of them that as a population will be able to infer these properties. And if we don't detect them, then we know that this was kind of a one-off and maybe it's something else. We don't know. We have to wait and see what we get. I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In case you just joined us, we're talking with Daniel Holtz about the weird world of black hole physics and some strange new discoveries. You know, from the way you talk and from other. astrophysicists I've talked about, the real joy is in the hunt, isn't it, in finding these things?

Yes, absolutely. So, you know, we're constantly, and we have, I'm sure you write this, we have a whole system, our cell phones, and the second something happens, we get pinged, and we all run to our computers and look at what it is, and is this an event, and if so, what are its parameters, and is it exciting, and should we trigger optical telescopes to do follow-up and, you know, all this. And this has just been the way we are for the last few years, where we just were constantly waiting for the next thing to come into our detectors so that we can, you know, learn something new. And this is, you know, we've been very fortunate. The universe has just been throwing black holes our way.

And it's been absolutely fascinating. Are you saying that you could turn. an optical telescope, let's say, like the Hubble or something else onto that spot and try to get an image of it? Yes, so that's exactly what we do. And of course, for black holes, no light comes out. And so you probably don't expect to see anything. But who knows, maybe black holes aren't completely black, which would be, you know, the discovery of the century. Or maybe, you know, Black holes have other stuff around, and when the black holes merge, that stuff gets really hot, or the black holes end up plowing through another star that's nearby.

You can imagine scenarios where there's light, or maybe in some cases you're not observing black holes, but you're observing either one or two neutron stars. Neutron stars definitely are expected to emit light, and with the discovery in 2017, which is what I would say is probably the most exciting discovery we've made so far. This was of two neutron stars colliding. In that case, we pointed telescopes and we did see light, including the Hubble. We pointed essentially every telescope in astronomy pointed at this object because everyone was so excited about it.

And we saw a lot of light. We saw a gamma-ray flash. And then we saw just a bunch of optical light that came up. And then much later we saw radio. So light in the radio band. We saw light across the entire frequency that light comes in over a period of weeks and months. And that was amazing. Now, I should say for this particular event, for the one we started the show with, this very massive event,

some people pointed telescopes because there are groups that point telescopes every time we have an event just in case. And this group called the Zwickley Transient Factory, ZTF, saw something a few weeks later that they say may be associated with the binary black holes. It's very speculative, but they saw an active galaxy, what we call it an active galactic nuclei, an AGN. They saw this galaxy get bright. it kind of put off a flare. And they say, we think that flare may be associated with the black holes because it's kind of in the same direction and kind of at the same distance. Just so that people don't think this happened yesterday.

I mean, this collision. This happened in a galaxy far, far away many, what, billions of years ago, right? Yes. Yes. This is very, very far. This is 5 billion parsec, so it's something like 15 billion light years away. So it occurred when the universe was much, much younger. In fact, we usually measure distance by this quantity called Redshift,

which tells us the relative size of the universe. And the universe was about half the size it is today. The observable universe was about half the size it is today. the observable universe was about half the size it is today when these black holes merged and emitted the gravitational waves in the first place. Well, it sounds like you have Christmas in September here, Dr. Holtz. Yes, it's really, it's been remarkable that, you know, just that this event has happened. We're all just still, you're struggling to understand what it's telling us.

Well, we've run out of time a week ago on for and I would like to pick this up somewhere in the future. You'll come back and talk to us more about one. You know more about it, right? Yes, I hope so, and I'm sure we'll detect other things along the way. Thank you. My guest has been Dr. Daniel Holtz. He's a professor at the University of Chicago

and the Cavilley Institute for Cosmological Physics, member of the LIGO scientific collaboration, and I want to thank you again for taking time to talk with us today. And good luck. Happy hunting. Thank you so much, Ira. It's always a pleasure to be on your show. We're going to take a break and let me come back, a writer who wants you to look outside your window and find wonder in the natural world. From exhalotals to whale sharks to the not-so-humble firefly.

Stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. I can understand how in a global pandemic with visions of people losing all they have to fire, wind or flood, how it may feel hard to find joy right now. But my next guest wants to give you something else to think about. For example, did you know that a narwhal's tusk is actually a tooth? Or that a firefly spends most of its life as a worm-like larva? Or how about the vampire squid, which uses mucus instead of ink to foil its predators? Science Friday's Christy Taylor dove into these and other natural miracles, with the author of a new book that praises the wonders of the world,

even in the face of environmental threats. Take a listen. I don't know about you, but these days I'm getting a lot of joy for my garden. It's not very big, but we've managed to grow giant sunflowers, sprawling zinias, and even huge basil plants, which also have flowers right now. Every morning, there's a crowd of fluffy, hungry bumblebees and so many other pollinators, some of which, I've never even seen before. It gives me this small sense of wonder and discovery in a period that feels, at times, relentlessly difficult.

And so I was really excited to see a new book of nature writing across my desk. It's beautifully illustrated, singing praises of everything from dragon fruit to fireflies to a golf ball-sized frog that, I kid you not, dances something a bit like a can-can in defense of their territory and quest for a mate. Here to talk more about all these things is the author of that book. poet and essayist Amy Nizuka Mataddle, author of World of Wonders, in praise of fireflies, whale sharks, and other astonishments. She's also a professor of English at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.

Welcome, Amy. Hi there, so happy to be here. I wanted to start, actually, with basically the key word in your book, which is the word wonder. It feels like one of those words we all know the meaning of, and yet it can be maybe something we feel very differently. So how do you describe it? Yeah, you know, I think for me,

the word wonder is more of like getting that urge to be curious about something other than yourself. You know, one of the roots of the word wonder I discovered is actually the same as the root of the word of to smile. So I just love that. So the way I look at it in my own kind of definition is getting curious about the world and discovering something that makes you smile. Well, and starting with the joy, I really love the way that you write in this book. Take dragon fruit. You say it's a fruit for a time of year when everything you touch feels like it could give you a blister and a bit of wild burn. When you write about fireflies, you're talking about the firefly as a tender and electric dress in flight. It is like a loud laugh. I don't know if I've seen or heard more exclamation points in a piece of writing about nature. Is this how you encounter every bee and butterfly? You know, I mean, that's just kind of, I had to, I had to fight for a lot of those exclamations in a fun way. My editors were so fantastic, but that's kind of who I am as a person. And I didn't want to lose that on the page.

I mean, I'm still that six-year-old saying, look, look, and you don't ever say look with a period. You know, you say with an exclamation. You know, staying with the exclamations, but also fireflies, you write twice about them. They're this memory from your childhood, but then you're also writing about. an experience with your own children. And you say, like, in that spark of the fireflies light, you see slowdown and tenderness. I guess what I'm saying is I love this metaphor a lot. And it feels so universal in some ways like, you know, anyone can go outside tonight and have the same experience of, you know, that slowdown, that tenderness, memory. Is that what you're going for,

giving people an experience that they can have sort of ubiquitously? You know, I hope, I really hope that there's something in this book for everyone to be kind of reminded of what it's like without screens. You know, and I love social media. I love screens. But I wanted to kind of come back to the Firefly because it's a moment that for my own children who are tweens now, you know, it's a chance for them to ask me questions that they wouldn't normally ask. it's a chance for them to be a little bit more vulnerable. And it's a chance for me to let down my guard a little bit as well, too. And I think we could all use a little bit of that these days.

That fits very well with my next question, actually, because you've also had some experiences that seem really unique in terms of your encounters with the natural world. And I'm thinking about the essay you wrote about meeting a whale shark. Yes. You know, whale sharks are my favorite, favorite shark. And that has been my bucket list to be out snorkeling with them. My experience ended up being more complex than I thought.

I just thought I'd be able to be within a foot away from them and be changed. And that was that. And la, la, la, I'll go on with my life. I came out of that experience. I mean, I was the last one in the locker room changing out of my wetsuit. And I cried a little bit, you know. And I think that's important to share that as much as I was so grateful for the experience, and I know it's a research aquarium.

I know that they're doing such good conservation work there. But I also felt so sorry and realized when I see this creature as big as a school bus, as fun as it was, they need to be in the ocean. And I wanted to show that it's not an either-or. You have to just disparage aquariums and not like them at all and not find any value. I wanted to show that I absolutely am where I am because of aquariums and because I was able to have access to animals and zoos, but I also realize it's not always the best place for an animal as big as the whale shark,

you know, as much as I love them. Amy, could you read to us from your book? Sure. This is from my essay of the vampire squid. As if that wasn't enough to shoe away a predator, the vampire squid discharges a luminescent cloud of mucus instead of ink. The congealed swirl and curlicue of light temporarily baffles the predator who ends up not knowing where or what to chomp, while the vampire squid, whooshes away, meters ahead. It's as if you were chasing someone and they stopped, turned, and tossed a bucket full of large, gooey, green sequins at your face.

I wished I was a vampire squid the most when I was the new girl in high school. We had moved around for so much of my childhood, but the most difficult move I ever made was between my sophomore and junior years. I went from sophomore class president to a little no one, a gal who tried out for the tennis team, not because I had any interest in the sport, but because at practice at least I didn't have to be alone. I ate lunch in the library. I ate lunch in a stairwell hardly anyone used. Once I ate lunch, my sad peanut butter and jelly sandwich, while standing up in a sandwich, while standing up in a library. scratched and marked up bathroom stall. To pass the hour, I read the often vulgar, sometimes funny graffiti scrawled on the stall door, just so no one could see I had no one to talk to. Oh, that's gorgeous. And throughout the book, including in this essay about the vampire squid,

you're weaving your encounters with the natural world in with your experiences, especially in your childhood of being alone or of being the only Asian-American. face in a new town. Was nature a refuge? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Nature was a refuge for me, but also reading about nature. I did not go to South America to see the Potu, but reading about it, the language and the vocabulary, being outdoors, I know that that's a very privileged thing to say. I know many of my black friends don't feel safe outside, and I know that many people don't have access to the outdoors. But for me, I wanted to showcase that it was a place of great, I don't know, just a place of safety and magic. And also it was a place where I could exhale a little bit.

For example, the catapalpa trees never asked me what I am. Excuse me, are you Portuguese? Are you Aztec? These are some kind of crazy questions I would get asked just while shopping at Target. But I could just kind of be myself. And in that learning to be still and observe the plants and animals, I just felt like just such a connection and so full of peace where my otherness was not called to question every single time I walked out into the forest or onto a prairie, you know.

So yeah, it became a place where I didn't have to always be camouflaged. Well, and this book is such a joyful reflection of that. And at the same time, as you just said, and we've talked about this on the show before, racism has long excluded people of color, especially black people, from outdoor spaces. Do you have hopes for that changing or mandates for the people who have power to change that? Yeah, you know, I mean, I do have hope that white people in particular are going to take a look in the mirror. And, you know, I'm not black. I'm not white, though. So I guess what I would gently just say and offer up to white folks in outdoor spaces is that look around the next time you're out.

The next time you're out birdwatching, the next time you're out fishing, if you don't see anybody out there that looks like you or even moves around in the same ability as you, that should be kind of a red flag at this point. It's 2020 and we're out here. So that means you're participating in an area or a park that has not been probably welcome to others. And I would gently just say, you know, what can you do to make that a more welcoming, inclusive space? it kind of just bewilders me how very well-meaning white people will say, well, I, of course, I'm not a racist. And yet they'll participate in the outdoors. They'll participate in camping. And not once occurred to them that they haven't seen a brown person that whole weekend. You know, it doesn't occur to them.

But I think nationally, the conversations have been occurring. And we've seen just this past summer with an African-American birdwatcher in Central Park, how dangerous it could be when white people in particular are quick to judge who belongs outside and who doesn't. Growing up, I'm a child of the 80s and I never saw any Asian American on TV, movies, music videos, ever outside, just even outside walking. If I did see an Asian American in a movie or a TV show, they were the science, you know, computer nerd. And that wasn't me. So for the longest time I got in, you know, and I read, I was that girl in the floor of the library, just reading, reading, reading about the giant squid or the secret life of ants. I never saw books that featured anybody who looked like me either. So who gets to tell stories of the outdoors and which stories get published, which stories get bought and taught

in classrooms if you're an educator? Why is your syllabus only filled with white people? These are questions that you can start asking yourselves that make a big, big difference later. Yeah. Just a reminder that this is Science Friday and I'm Christy Taylor. We're talking to writer Amy Nizukumetottle about her new book about finding wonder in the natural world. I do want to pivot slightly to one of my favorite essays or lines in this book is when you write about octopuses, which is the horizontal slit of an octopus's eye is a door that judges us. And you go on to talk about the ocean being uninhabitable in the long run. And over and over again, you're touching also on the damage and loss.

natural spaces. How do you put wonder and loss like this side by side? Oh, that's such a good question. Yeah, you know, I think they kind of do go side by side. I mean, I think Rachel Carson has this great quote, and I'm going to butcher it, but the gist of it is, the more we get to know about the plants and animals that inhabit this planet, the less appetite we have for destruction. And I think that's so apt in 2020, like once you get to know names of trees and birds that they're not just a tree, but they are a, you know, a cypress tree or a catapalpa tree, once you get to know the names of the birds that are there, the names of creatures that you're swimming with, I think that becomes contagious. And I think it makes you want to protect them a little bit. At the same time,

you also know that we're so far advanced in destroying this planet. Hopefully people find that wonder is contagious, that, oh, if you get to know about these 30 plants and animals that makes you want to learn more about these animals or other animals or other plants or insects, it's easy to pull a blanket over your head and say, forget it, there's nothing I can do, who am I, I'm just one person. I get that. I totally get that. At the same time, you don't have to give up. You know, there's still so many miraculous and amazing, gorgeous, scary, bizarre, funny-looking creatures to know out there. And we have to fight for them because who else will? Who else will? What is giving you wonder during this pandemic? What gives me wonder is it's hummingbird

season here in Mississippi. Oxford in particular is one kind of landing spot before the ruby-threaded hummingbirds make their way from the eastern seaboard. It take their last gulps of sugar water and nectar and then they make that giant, giant flight over across the Gulf of Mexico. And so we're swarming birds right now. And it's like top gun out there. We just have a couple bird feeders, but it's, I had to kind of stop. It took my breath away just from thinking, I don't know if I'll see these. Even tomorrow, something happens about like one day and then they're just gone.

It goes from a top gun scene to just nothing. And it's the silence and the stillness. So a little bit of that. Wonderment makes me sad, but it also makes me excited and happy that I've been helping them in my small way, giving them some sugar water and planting flowers that they would drink up so they have energy to make it home and then come back hopefully next year. I have one favor to ask, which is that a little bird told me you can make cardinal noises or you can talk to cardinals. And by that I mean you fessed up in your book.

Oh my goodness. Well, Science Fridays is there's so many. amazing, talented, wise ornithologist out there. So please don't write Christy, angry letters. It's the nerdiest party trick ever. So the birds actually come to you. They come to me and the proof is in the pudding. So this may not be an official correct one, but the words that I use are hurdy-gurdy. So don't be mad at me. I'm just, I'm just the messenger here. And two or three cardinals will always come over to see what's going on. So here we go. Hardy, gertie, gertie, gertie, gertie, garty, garty, garty, hurdy, hurdy, hurdy, hurdy, garty, hurdy, hurdy, garty, hurdy, garty, and it's just so, that's what I do, and it sounds crazy, but, and I'm sure I'm probably saying something offensive in cardinal language. They're coming over for a fight.

They've come over to either argue or to have a conversation about the day, yeah, anyway, it's, I'm sure it's not official at all, but it works for me. there you go. All right. You heard it first ornithologists. Thank you so much, Amy. This was an amazingly fun conversation. Oh, this is such a blast. Thank you. I so appreciate it. Thank you so much. Amy, you're so welcome. Amy Nizucoometadal is a poet and essayist and author of the new book, World of Wonders, in praise of fireflies, whale sharks, and other astonishments. We have an excerpt of the book on our website. It's all about ribbon eels. Go to sciencefriday.com slash wonders. And for Science Friday, I'm Christy Taylor. And that's all the time we have this hour. If you missed any part of this program, or you'd like to hear it again.

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