Science Friday - Using Sound To Unpack The History Of Astronomy

Episode Date: February 14, 2024

Looking into space can be pretty daunting. How do we make sense of the vast expanse above our heads, the millions of stars we might be able to see, and the billions more we can’t?Now, what about listening to space? That’s the task that Sam Harnett and Chris Hoff gave themselves, for their series “Cosmic Visions.” They’re the team behind “The World According to Sound,” a podcast that’s brought our listeners close to the sounds of science over the last few years.This new series takes listeners through the history of astronomy and the study of the cosmos, from ancient Babylon to the Hubble Telescope. Harnett and Hoff join guest host John Dankosky to talk about why different ways of knowing are helpful for scientists, how images of nebulae share a striking resemblance to photos of the American West, and what their favorite space sounds are.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

What can we learn about the history of humanity through the sounds of space? These ideas that were from 500 years ago, 1,000 years ago, really can, like, change your perspective on these truths that you thought you knew. It's Wednesday, February 14th. Happy Valentine's Day. And happy Science Friday. I'm sci-fire producer, Deep Peter Schmidt. How do we make sense of staring into the vast expanse above our heads?

The millions of stars we might be able to see in the billions more we can't? Well, listening to the sounds from the stars, might help. A recent podcast series from the World According to Sound dives into the sonification of space data through the history of astronomy, through ancient Babylon to the Hubble telescope. Guest host John Dankoski sits down with the podcast two hosts to find out what they learned and how it made them see the universe in a different light. Sam Harnett and Chris Hoff, welcome back to Science Friday. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. So let's start with the idea behind this project. It's part of a podcast about the humanities

Now, science and humanities are often on different sides of the table, or at least different sides of the campus. How did you think about telling space stories through this lens? Well, I think that's the point is that they shouldn't be on different sides of the table, really. I mean, that was the impetus for the project, which is, for some reason, in our society, science and the humanities have been split. And the point of the projects is to show that they really are unsplittable if you look at

the history of science. Now, we're going to be hearing some of the space sounds you were working. with in just a minute, but maybe the both of you can take me through how you decided on the stories about the history of astronomy that you wanted to tell here. Yeah, we actually had some help from the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center there called the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, and they have people in the humanities and astrophysics there that kind of helped us create this list, and then we kind of paired it down to what we wanted to do. But really, it became clear to us that we had to sort of do, you know, a kind of expansive history of it. And like starting, you know,

know, from ancient times and going up to the modern times to really show this evolution of like how the humanities were intertwined with astrophysics, you know, since the beginning of the written record all the way up to now to 2024. And I'd add that, yeah, the goal was the pick stories throughout history that showed different ways that major scientific breakthroughs came about and to show that science doesn't happen in one way. Again, I think there's a trend to sort of separate humanistic thinking from scientific inquiry and really they're but they're also, you know, everything from philosophy and religion to literature and art has all been part of the story of the history of astronomy. Yeah, and this whole idea of ways

of knowing, this is actually something we've explored quite a bit on the program as well over the years. It's this notion that this Western ideal, this academic version of how we might look at something as broad as the cosmos, this isn't the only way people have been looking at it throughout the, you know, centuries and centuries. Right. In the Dante episode, here you have this Italian Renaissance poet in the 14th century, you know, writing about God. And the way he describes the universe is eerily similar to the way scientists in the 20th century

started observing the universe through telescopes. This is an excerpt from the divine comedy. The narrator has just come out of purgatory and he's gazing up at the heavens. Everywhere he turns, he feels like he isn't looking out. outward at space, but instead inward, back in time, toward the same point, the beginning of creation. God. This description of the universe is remarkably similar to what would be observed in telescopes

some 600 years later, just replaced God with the big bang. Now at first that seems just like a crazy coincidence, just a quirk. But actually, the reason that the two are so similar is because cosmologically speaking, if you're trying to conceive of a universe that is not infinite, but there's nothing outside of it, the only way to do that is to curve space. And modern telescope shows that space is curved. And Dante, in his imagining of the universe, also curved space. So that kind of coincidence between two things, you know, a highly religious poet in the 14th century and modern telescopes,

they're kind of sort of dealing with the same problem. I think one of the most beautiful ideas in that episode, though, is flipping the notion of what we're looking at when we look into space. When we started this segment, I talked about, you know, the difficulty of looking into space and comprehending what you're seeing. And the way that a lot of modern society thinks about space is we're on Earth, we're looking up at what's out there. But you use this Dante example to really tell a beautiful story about how in ancient times, people, People had this notion really flipped. Yeah, I think that sort of idea of perspective is also essential to this series, right? It's sort of, to me, even still, even after like having worked on this episode for hours and hours and hours, this notion of thinking that when you look out into space, you're not looking out.

Like this notion that you're looking in towards something is really hard to comprehend if your entire life has been spent, you know, thinking in this opposite way. So I find, yeah, that like kind of getting back to these ideas that were from 500 years ago, 1,000 years. ago really can like change your perspective on these truths that you thought you knew. Well, and that's dealing with something like the universe, right? Like we think, oh, modern science, we have all these telescopes, we have all this technology, advanced physics. But the universe is still incomprehensible. Like we still, you can't wrap your mind around it. It's impossible to wrap your mind around it. You need metaphors. You need analogies. You need ways of thinking and interpreting that the humanities and art are very comfortable with. And again, I think the Dante

example is a great one. The average medieval man in Europe. And so, some ways had a more accurate understanding of the structure of the universe than a modern person today. Because when we look out into the space, it's very difficult to not feel like we're staring out into the void and to really think, oh, we're looking back in time at the beginning of it all, which was the common conception of Christians in the Middle Ages. So this idea, right, that like we're more advanced in certain ways, but we're dealing with some of the same problems and we're thinking about things in, you know, some of the same ways that people have done since the beginning of time. I think another important way that you can make something as vast as

space comprehensible is to put it into some sort of terms that we might understand. And this is where a lot of the sounds that you use come into play. One of the episodes in the series is about gravitational waves and black holes colliding. It's actually sounds that we've played on Science Friday in the past from your podcast. Let's actually listen to that sound here. What I love about that sound is, well, first of all, it's such a like a whimsical, almost absurd sound for such an incredible cosmic event, right? I mean, you have two black holes colliding and it makes a makes this whoop. But what I love about that sound is it's not just, you know, a kind of a stunt to get attention. Like there's actual scientific information encoded in that sound. And that sound

actually helps scientists who are working on these problems have some kind of reference. Like the auditory, it's like some kind of like sort of way of envisioning this thing that is really not envisionable. Right. And without the sound, they actually wouldn't know some of those thing. So it's sort of an interesting situation where the sonic information, you know, embedded in this phenomenon actually tells them something that that they wouldn't know otherwise. Well, I think they could know it, but it's not immediately graspable. Yeah. I think it's more that this is so immediately obvious, like the oscillating ones versus the regular ones. Like they just know immediately, oh, this is a, this is an X black hole and this is, right. And it just gets to that

point that, you know, you think of astrophysicists as, you know, these highly, rational, you know, they're doing math and everything is very, you know, concrete. But they as well need to think in metaphors and analogies. They need to use the ways of knowing from the arts and the humanities to approach their subject. I mean, science never has been and is not divorced from that kind of creative imaginative thinking. And that, you know, one of the scientists that we interviewed in that episode, he talks about it frankly, saying, I can't, you know, really say that I understand this stuff, conceptualize it. You know, he needs metaphors. And just to be clear, the sounds that we heard, this is, it's a representation, it's the sonification of data.

This isn't actually the sound of two black holes colliding because we don't know what the heck that actually sounds like. Maybe you can explain exactly what the scientists are doing to create the kind of goofy sound that we hear. So what's wild about these sounds, first of all, it is the data, it is the actual gravitational waves, which are ripples in space time. When two black holes collide, they happen to generate gravitational waves. that are in the same frequency as sound waves in the human range of hearing. So they don't change the frequencies. They just shift it from gravitational waves to sound waves.

So what you're actually hearing is the two black holes colliding in real time. And this is actually how fast it takes for the two black holes to swirl around each other, you know, about the speed of a blender and come together. The only change that's happening is that the sounds are being translated from gravitational waves to sound waves. So you have an episode called Picturing the Universe that's about the story of the Hubble Telescope. And of course, with a launch of the James Webb Space Telescope and some of the amazing images we've seen over the last year or so, a lot of people have maybe forgotten a bit about how groundbreaking Hubble was. What drew you to the story of the Hubble telescope? We came across at one point that there's this person that had a whole theory of, you know, outer space looking like American Western landscapes.

Like that just blew, I mean, that was just like clear to us. Like, oh my God. I mean, and this has been around for 15, 20 years, this woman's theory, Elizabeth Kessler at Stanford University. If we think of the famous pillars of creation, the background is blueish green. These clouds of gas and dust are yellowish and brownish. So they look sort of like Buttes in the desert southwest, kind of rising up from the bottom of the frame. Kessler is talking about the famous image from 1995, taken of the Eagle Nebula. It really does look like something out of Monument Valley or Arches National Park.

Familiar, yet otherworldly. The Pillars of Creation was created by Jeff Hester and Paul Skowen, two American astronomers. These men, along with the other image processors on the Hubble Heritage Project, seem to favor saturated colors and high contrast. They turn the raw data from Hubble into images that resemble the majestic desert rock formations. And it struck me that these astronomical images resembled landscapes and not just any landscapes, but a particular set of landscapes,

those that depict the American West in these kinds of very romantic ways that emphasize the sublimity of that scene, that emphasize a kind of size and scale and drama and majesty of those landscapes. But it's like, it makes a lot of sense. And we spoke to her and she's is really convincing and really articulate about this idea that, yeah, like most of the pictures that Hubble takes, it's of data that isn't in the electromagnetic spectrum that, like, humans can see. And so if that's the case, then we're all making interpretations about it.

And if that's the case, human beings are interpreting this based on something. And like, if you're an American, you're going to interpret it based on stuff that you know. And maybe if you're Japanese, you would interpret it on stuff that you know. But the point is, Americans are making these decisions. And it's just, to me, that's just such a delightful idea. And I think, you know, the deep idea of that episode is everything in science is filtered through social perceptions, metaphors, analogies. The way that we envision things and think about things, we're drawing on human bias. Yeah.

Sorry to interrupt, but human bias. I mean, that's like a major, that's what interpretation is. It's essentially human bias. Right. Well, and you can't get away from interpret. You know, interpretation is part of the whole process. And here's a very clear example of, you know, these pictures from space, which are so iconic. They're an interpretation of data that are then put into an image that makes sense.

And I think that that is like a very powerful part of that episode is realizing, oh, these images could have looked different. They could have been different colors or the, you know, zoomed down. out to different degrees if they were made in a different culture. And to be like, oh, that's playing out in science all over the place, you know, and how we decide to depict images and what analogies and metaphors that we use to try to convey something. What are the big things that each of you learned in this whole process? Because I'm sure you learned it off a lot about the history of astronomy. But I mean, what are some real takeaways for each of you that you say, yeah, I understand this a little bit better than I did before? Huh. Well, that's a good question.

I mean, I would say that on a fundamental level, it is that it hasn't been this steady forward progress of ideas towards a better understanding of the universe and that the understanding of the universe is really, it requires all these different ways of knowing. And you can't get a picture of the universe just through one way of knowing. I think that was the premise at the beginning and it became more clear as we went through of like, oh, wow. You know, you can't wrap your head around this without thinking about it in lots of different ways. And in terms of science, I mean, there's tons of stuff that I did not know or I had. had learned but had forgotten. For me, the episode we did about the Mayans and their use of zero was real illuminating. Just again, thinking of zero as a concept that was something humans didn't always have and it had to be invented and zero has different meanings in different cultural contexts and zero, the way zero allows for certain kinds of math that allow for certain kinds of understanding. That's a story that I did not know well. That was, you know, kind of blew my mind. I'd say that, I mean, I've always had a lot of respect for science. And this project kind of just taught me that, yeah, you know, it is an extremely useful and, like, important tool.

But it's definitely not the only game in town when trying to make sense of the world. Maybe one of the other thing I'd add that, oh, that I didn't know that was also thought was really wild is I didn't know how many, you know, scientists or how many people who made great discoveries about the universe had really kind of wacky ideas or wacky approaches to their work. I think of, you know, like Johannes Kepler. I remember learning about Johannes Kepler in an astronomy course, you know, this towering figure of European astronomy. And, you know, he wrote this fantastical science fiction story about a trip to the moon with a damon. I mean, I didn't know that story, you know. So this idea that, you know, a lot of these great thinkers were just thinking in all these really different ways was something I learned throughout the project. I have just one last thing for both of you.

Your final episode in the series is called Sounds of Space. And you say that there's a lot to hear in outer space if you change the way you listen. So I don't know, what are your favorite space sounds? You've gotten a chance to listen to a bunch of these things. What are just some sounds that you really love? Yeah, well, some of these things won't be space sounds, but I love the sound of Dante's Inferno being read by an Italian person. I love the sounds of comet dust hitting a probe.

That's actually been captured. That is a very nice sound, which is in the space sounds episode. I really like in the final episode, right, it's a montage of all this different electromagnetic radiation that's been translated into sound. And there's a ton of stuff in there. But I like the pulsars, like the spinning pulsars that make this little blip sound. Again, this is data. That's data that's being translated into sound sonified.

And I like, there's also the pulse of the Earth's magnetic field that has been sonified. That's really fun. to listen to. But really, I think the deep throb of cosmic background radiation. I mean, it's just there. It's everywhere in the sky. And it's just this static that pervades everything. I think that's like, you know, the sound itself is not that spectacular, but the concept behind the sound. It really kind of, yeah. There's a lot of big concepts and a lot of big sounds in this series. It's called Cosmic Visions. Sam Harnett and Chris Hoff are the creators of the world according to sound. And this new series is part of a humanities project called Ways of Knowing. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts.

And we'll have links to some of the stories from the series on our website, Science Friday.com slash sound in space. Sam and Chris, always good to talk with you. Thanks so much for joining us. I appreciate it. Definitely. It's a pleasure being here. And that's all the time we have for today. Lots of folks help make the show happen, including Annie Niro, Emma Gomez, Charles Bergquist, Daniel Johnson, and many more. Next time, we'll find out how design prints principles can help communities adapt to global crises. For now, I'm sci-fi producer D. Peter Schmidt. Thanks for listening.