Something You Should Know - The Myth of American Innovation & The Fascinating Physics of Life

Episode Date: October 5, 2020

The power of the human mind is amazing. This episode begins with a fascinating example of that. It turns out that how people feel about the medication they take determines how well it works. Things like cost, size of the pill and number of doses will influence your recovery. Listen and finds out how. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/health/research/05placebo.html There is sure a lot of talk about innovation. Who doesn’t want to be a great innovator? Interestingly though, there isn’t as much innovation going on as you might think and not all innovation is particularly good. Some innovation is actually destructive. That’s according to Andrew Russell, professor of history and the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at SUNY Polytechnic Institute and co-author of the book, The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most (https://amzn.to/30nuPon). After you hear what he has to say, you may think differently about what innovation really means. Sometimes it is hard to fall asleep. Listen as I explain a simple technique that will help just about anyone fall asleep faster on those nights where sleep does not come easy. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/631357/breathing-technique-helps-you-fall-asleep-faster How does your GPS in your car really work? What is 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G mean and what is the difference? Why are there dimples on a golf ball. Why does a balloon stick to the wall after you rub it on your head? The answer to all these questions is : PHYSICS! Joining me to explain all these things and more is Dr. Charles Liu, he is an associate professor at the City University of New York and author of the The Handy Physics Answer Book (https://amzn.to/3cTtxqp) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Today on Something You Should Know, how the cost of a medicine affects how well it works to cure you. Then, innovation. There's a lot about innovation that no one talks about and that we don't understand. Innovation has taken on this veneer of it's always making things better but

there's a lot of examples of innovations that have made things worse. Crack cocaine. It's actually a textbook definition but I don't think anyone would argue that crack cocaine is a positive innovation. Also a simple way to help you fall asleep the next time you're tossing and turning. And physics. It's how GPS works. It's why there are dimples on a golf ball. And how cell phones work.

It's all physics. Physics is fundamentally really cool and a lot of fun. It just happens to be useful and important. It runs our entire modern civilization, really. It's all about curiosity and, gee, how does this work? All this today on Something You Should Know. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives.

So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today.

Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

Hi there. Welcome to Something You Should Know. You know, there's nothing more fascinating to me than the human mind. And here's a perfect example. Is it possible that the more expensive a drug, the better it works? Well, according to a study by the American Medical Association, the answer is yes, and it's not because of what's in the drug. It's because of what's in your mind. Here's how the study worked. Participants were given a fictitious drug claiming to be a new fast-acting painkiller made in China. One group was told the pills cost $2.50 each.

The other group was told they were $0.10 each, and the pills themselves contained no actual medication. The result? 85% of people in the higher-priced group reported pain relief from the more expensive placebo. Only 61% in the discount group felt the effects. Now, there are some other interesting placebo effects with medication. Capsules work better than tablets.

Big pills work better than small. The more doses, the better. And the color of the placebo seems to make a difference. And it's all because people believe these things to be true. And that is something you should know. It does seem that we are obsessed by innovation. Everybody talks about innovation. There are a million seminars and books and podcasts and articles about innovation. There are a million seminars and books and podcasts and articles about

innovation. It seems like everybody wants to innovate something. But is all this desire for innovation really on target? I mean, innovation's great, but the fact is most of us are not and will not be great innovators our entire life. Here's a great example. In a lot of college computer science programs, those programs tend to steer their students to programming and design, very innovative kind of jobs, even though the overwhelming majority of jobs are in IT and maintenance. Andrew Russell has given all of this a lot of thought. Andrew is a professor of history and the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at SUNY Polytechnic Institute.

And he is co-author of the book, The Innovation Delusion, How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most. Hi, Russell. Thanks for having me. So I guess I first want to know why there is all this talk about innovation. Why are we all so interested in innovation in everything? Sure. So the key distinction that we make in the book is between actual innovation, which is

a thing, a valuable thing, the introduction of new products or new ways of doing things into the world versus what we call innovation speak, which is the word salad that accompanies innovation. So all these terms like lean and agile and design thinking, and this breathless way of talking about innovation, as if it is the cure-all for anything that ails anybody at any time, overselling the promises of what technological innovation has delivered. And you make the case that innovation has actually made us less innovative, that it's actually all this talk of innovation is having the opposite effect. Yeah, we don't assert a causal relationship, but we couldn't help but notice that there's a correlation.

There was an era from the 1870s to the 1970s of really substantial technological innovation. The introduction of electrical power and light, telephone systems, and then digital computers, you know, internal combustion engines, and you could go on and on about the changes that happened during that century. And then some of those fundamental transformations dropped off. And at the same time, just plugging the term into Google Ngram, you see the use of the term innovation really spike, starting in the 1970s and driving through the roof and into the 1990s in the 20th century. And so the conclusion that we drew was that the more people started talking about it, it was just kind of curious that the less we could actually see and

the less that other economic historians have documented. So there was a lot of innovation. People talk even more about innovation, and the more they talk about it, it seems the less there is. Yeah, and maybe it's, you know, trying to will new things into existence. But I think the core message here is that innovation speak has overwhelmed our society as actual innovation has just stagnated. There's been the introduction of the internet and all kinds of digital things. But we're historians of technology, my co-author Lee Vinsel and I, so we take a holistic look at technology. And if you think about the technological systems that surround us and that we depend on, they don't look too different from the 1950s. How so?

One thing that we point out when we give talks is to ask people to take a look around. So I'd invite people listening to look around. In this room here that I'm sitting in, I'm using a wood table. The floor is concrete. The door is made of wood and metal. The glass in the door keeps me warm when it gets cold out. All those things were in place, you know, well before the turn of the 21st century. The big difference is this computer that we're talking through, but even the lines that connect you and I together are products of the mid to late 20th century. So maybe we should define the term innovation. What does it mean? Very good question. So, most people, when they talk about innovation,

usually land at Joseph Schumpeter as their bedrock. Schumpeter was an Austrian economist who taught at Harvard for a long time, and he defined innovation. There's a distinction between invention and innovation. Invention is just coming up with something new, and innovation is the application of those ideas for profit. And so it can include a new product, a new way of doing things, a new way of organizing things. And he's got five different levers for innovation altogether. So a good example is the iPhone. All of the technologies that went into the iPhone had been invented. But the reason why it was a successful innovation and a profitable innovation for Apple and for Steve Jobs was their ability to combine those

different existing elements into something that people wanted to buy. Well, in that definition, you said, you know, it's a new way, but not necessarily a better way. It's just different, right? Yeah. So one of the things that we talk about in the book is that this conflation between innovation and progress. And so innovation has taken on this veneer of, as we discussed in the beginning, it's always making things better. But there's a lot of examples of innovations that have made things worse. One example is crack cocaine. It's actually a textbook definition of what Clayton Christensen referred to as a disruptive innovation. It started at the bottom of the market and moved relentlessly up the market to displace competitors, in that case, powder cocaine.

But I don't think anyone would argue that crack cocaine is a positive innovation for Americans or American cities. And so there's a number of examples here that I think are useful to think through just to shake loose this connection that people have made between innovation and progress. Well, one of the things that interests me is all the emphasis on new and better when, you know, for example, I drive down the road and where I live, they're having all kinds of problems with all the old water pipes underneath the road keep bursting and the water and the roads flood and there's potholes. And, well, I don't know if we need innovation to fix that. We just need to fix it. You're 100% right.

And I have had the same experience just yesterday, actually. Nailed the pothole pretty good. One of the ironies here is that there's no magic in any of this stuff to take care of and fix the things that we rely on. These are generally known problems. What's stopping us is inattention. So people seem to have this tendency, maybe a natural tendency to focus on the new shiny object and take what's around them for granted. And resources follow attention. So we see politicians or certainly investors or people in the private sector really eager to go after the new latest thing. We see this phenomenon. This is the Silicon Valley phenomenon. This is the digital economy. And one consequence of that is that we don't get as much investment or support for things like potholes or water systems that are poisoning us or sewer systems that are making us

unhealthy. So it's, you know, you pay attention to one thing and you lose sight of the other. That's a big problem. I'm speaking with Andrew Russell. He is a professor of history and author of the book, The Innovation Delusion, how our obsession with the new has disrupted the work that matters most. Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural.

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There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Andrew, it does seem today that there's a very tight connection between innovation and technology, that that's where innovation really lives is technologically, and that, you know, innovating a new way to do the sewers. It's not very exciting. It's again, it's like you said, the shiny object, but it ignores so much of everyday life because it's so shiny. Yeah. So there's, you've identified two problems there. One is, um, I think, think, a way that we've come to talk about technology or tech in the current

shorthand. It's just dominated by software and digital things, when in reality, technology has a much deeper and longer meaning. It includes all of the things that I was talking about earlier, concrete, steel, glass. But it's really just a way that humans mobilize material things to meet their needs. So one of the things that we try and accomplish and that, you know, people in our field of the history of technology try and accomplish is just to think more holistically about technology. So, you know, that's a big challenge. But I think, you know, we can meet the challenge by just pointing out to people their everyday experience. And so that's that kind of leads me to the second thing that your comment brought out, which is that we know some of these

things from our own individual and daily experiences. Say as a homeowner, I know that if I just keep buying new tools or new gadgets for around the house, I'm not paying as much attention to the things that I really need to do, like maybe fix the roof, keep the lawn tidy, patch holes in the driveway, and those sorts of things. So routines for maintenance and repair and fixing things aren't foreign. They're very familiar. It's just sometimes we need to be reminded of them and to catch them before it really catches up with us. It does seem though that because everybody's looking at the shiny object, the new gadgets and all, that that's an opportunity for the roof repairer and the driveway fixer guy, that there are real opportunities there because no one's paying attention to it.

Yeah, I think that's right. You know, and I've had the experience, I don't know if you have, that it's awfully hard to find people these days to work on things like that. Some people, my neighbor the other day was saying he thinks it's a COVID related thing because so many people are stuck in their homes now that they're seeing all the deferred maintenance around the house and trying to hire a plumber and electrician or get someone to fix their roof. But the data shows that the problem existed before the pandemic. And young people are increasingly being steered into professions like software engineers, where they think all the glitz and glamour is, and being steered away from the trades and other sorts of jobs where there's actual need, there's actual demand. So there's a

structural problem here, which does present itself as an opportunity for contractors and roofers and all kinds of professionals working in those fields. And so what are some of the trends you're seeing? You just mentioned one that, you know, people are kind of steered away from IT and computer maintenance, where that's really where the need is, because they're steered over here to innovate and create new shiny things. But what other kind of trends like that are you seeing, if any? that is happening in the fields of engineering and computer science, where students and young people are drawn to those fields through the allure of innovation or building the next new app, for example, or starting a new company. But the data show that software workers and people in computers in general, and this is consistent over five decades, spend 60 to 80% of their time on maintenance, not actually building new things. And so there's a mixed

message going out to young people. And that feeds into the second trend that we've seen across a number of fields, which is burnout. So people who are in maintenance roles in any number of fields, whether it's software maintenance, nursing, we consider teachers to be maintainers of knowledge and facilitators of young people learning. They're certainly fulfilling maintenance roles. Those professions experience chronically high levels of burnout, and that harms everybody. It harms the product, it harms them, obviously, and it harms communities. And so what are we supposed to do with this? I mean, when you shine a light on it, now what? about putting innovation and maintenance into balance. Because the core of the issue, we think, is that there's too much emphasis on innovation and we're neglecting maintenance and upkeep and care as a result. So first, you know, we're not saying get rid of innovation. We're not

neoludites. We're saying let's think about this in a more holistic and balanced way. So, you know, and that thought process is only a first step. Other than that, there's really two big things. The first has to do with status and respect. And we need to do a better job as a society of paying respect to the people who care for us and maintain us. So that's, you know So that goes for all the professions I mentioned, as well as any number of service or manual labor professions. It's valuable work, period. Now, when you respect those people and value those people, a society should naturally compensate those people better and therefore make their lives a little bit easier.

The data show that that people doing maintenance work are really struggling to make ends meet. And it could also entice more people to get into those fields and make the contributions that we were talking about before. So, you know, those people are less stressed out and we can find more and more willing, more energetic people to do the kinds of work that need to be done. And the interesting thing is that we've seen this play out with COVID and with the pandemic in this notion of essential workers. I don't know about your neighborhood, but in my neighborhood, we've had signs up for months now, some of them hand-painted by elementary school children. Thank you, essential workers. Thank you, nurses. Thank you, you know, so on.

And that's great. So that helps the status angle of things. What it doesn't help is the compensation angle of things. What it doesn't help is the compensation angle of things. And it's going to take commitment over the long term, not just a one-shot thing or even a few months thing, to really make those changes that are needed. Why, if what you said earlier is, you know, it's sometimes hard to find those people to fix the driveway or fix the roof. Why isn't supply and demand fixing the compensation problem? Boy, that's a good question. You would think that it would. And in some cases, compensation in some of those professions isn't too bad. So nurses, for example, starting salaries for nurses,

I think are in $50,000 or $60,000, which is pretty good. But I think what's happened is the status issue really pushes people away from those professions. So, you know, it's all too common to hear parents say, I really want my son to be a doctor, or I really want my daughter to be an engineer. And for whatever reason, as part of a kind of long cultural heritage of our society, you don't hear them saying as much, I want my daughter to be a welder, and I want my son to be a nurse. So I think, you know, some market forces are helping a little bit, but it's certainly not universal. And I think there's a role for government to step in as well, state, local, and federal government to say,

we value these workers. And we've seen some of this with the HEROES Act and some other actions at the federal level, but clearly there's more that needs to be done. Well, I've noticed, well, I can think right off the top of my head, where I take my car, this independent shop where I take my car, this guy is so busy. He is, I mean, to get an appointment with him is weeks out because he does really good work. His prices are not cheap, but they're fair, but he's so good. And I'm sure his parents never thought, oh, I hope Johnny grows up to fix cars and change the oil. This guy's making a fortune. Yeah, someone pointed out to me a while ago, there's reason why you see these people who are contractors or who own paving or trash companies driving really nice trucks.

So they do make out pretty good in some cases, you know, if you run the business right. And you're, you know, you do, I think the point is that those people are successful because they've paid attention precisely to the sorts of things I'm talking about. They're reliable. They pay attention to the little things. They're not drawn away to the new shiny object. They're not thinking, oh, I'm going to make a bunch of money as a day trader or an app developer. And they just stick to it. You know, why more people don't do that is a really good question. We're trying to actually do some research on this question right now. We're working with a psychology professor to build some surveys and to try and get answers to some of these questions. You know, why do people neglect maintenance?

And why do people get steered away from professions that are perceived to be lower status because they're doing more routine work? I think that's, don't you think that's exactly the answer? Yeah, you know, people, it depends, you know, and that's why I think we need more research. In part, yeah, people do like to do creative stuff. But, you know, back to what I was saying before, if you ask a computer science major who thought they were going into it to have the tools to start a new company and they're actually working at a help desk or just filling like debugging tickets in an open source platform, you would think that they'd look back at their choices and wonder what kind of bill of goods they've been sold. Well, but and also, I mean, at a cocktail party, you know, people don't want someone to say, so what is your what does your son do? Well, he's in maintenance. Yeah, you know, it's a there's an image problem. We're, you know, working to fix it. At one point I joked, so the book that we've got has a broken light bulb on the cover as an indicator of something wrong.

At one point I joked that we should write a book about maintenance that had like the abs of Cristiano Ronaldo or some famous athlete on the cover to show that, you know, to illustrate that maintenance is sexy. Hard work is sexy. You know, it's a tough topic for exactly that reason, because of the perceptions. Well, in many ways, this is an image problem, right? I mean, people want to be the creator, the innovator. I want my son to grow up and be a surgeon or some very highfalutin sounding profession. And at the cocktail party, you know, what does your son do? Well, he's in maintenance. It just doesn't have the right ring. You know, we will concede that's a tough nut to crack at a cocktail party, especially when people are moving and shaking and trying to impress.

But there's no better time than the present to really cut through the fog of the buzzwords and think about what is really important. Well, and not only you, but guys like Mike Rowe talk, the importance of hard work, dirty jobs. Not everybody needs a college degree. And I think it's an important conversation to have. Andrew Russell has been my guest. He's a professor of history and the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at SUNY Polytechnic Institute and author of the book, The Innovation Delusion, How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most.

And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks for being a guest here today, Andrew. Appreciate it. Awesome. Thanks, Mike. It's fun talking to you. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun

facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, I'm Simon Jack. And I'm Sing Sing. And together we host Good Bad Billionaire, the podcast exploring the minds, the motives and the money of some of the world's richest individuals. Every episode, we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money. And then we judge them. Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire? Good, bad billionaire from the BBC World Service. Listen now, wherever you get your BBC podcasts. When I think of physics, I think of physics as the science or the study of how things work, of how matter interacts with other matter and people and time and space and all of that.

And when you dig under the surface, it's really interesting and it's important to understand some of this. One person who is really into physics is Dr. Charles Liu. He is an associate professor at the City University of New York and author of the Handy Physics Answer Book. Hey, Charles, welcome to Something You Should Know. Oh, thanks so much for having me, Mike. So clearly you love physics. And interestingly, I've known a couple of other physics professors and they're very passionate about it. Physics is fundamentally really cool and a lot of fun. It just happens to be useful and important.

It runs our entire modern civilization, really. But even all kinds of science in general, it's all about curiosity and, gee, how does this work? And when I was younger, as a kid, I was like, how does this work? And I just had a chance to go find out. And as life went on, I realized that in high school, and then in college, and then in graduate school, and later, it's like, you can actually make a living asking questions and trying to figure out the answers and sharing that with people. And that's really all it was at the beginning. So to prove your point that physics is cool,

give me something just as cool as you can make it about physics that either I may not know or I probably forgot from high school. Well, okay. I am an astronomer, technically astrophysicist, so I think a lot about stars and galaxies and things like that. One of the really coolest things that has direct relevance to us here on Earth is that if the sun happened to just disappear in an instant. It would take eight minutes before we would even know about it, before the gravity difference would affect us, before the light would suddenly go dark. Our world and our universe is so spread out and so widely distributed that things take time to go from one place to the next, whether it's energy or matter

or people or anything like that. And so that time lag creates all kinds of strange and interesting things like the general theory of relativity, which we use when we're working on our GPS, or supermassive black holes colliding, things like that. So when I hear the word physics, I immediately think of like high school physics, like motion and inertia and momentum and those kinds of things. The physics you describe in high school, yes, indeed. It's objects that are colliding, hitting each other, baseball hitting a bat, things like that. But then we get into things like magnets and electricity. And here now you have particles that are so small that we can't see them. And yet they contain and

can transfer so much energy that they can light up the world at night. And then we realize that these little particles, electrons, are just one kind of many other kinds of particles that build up all of matter and energy. Put them all together, you start dealing with things like heat and light, and then objects aren't just going in straight lines, they go around in circles, so you have rotation. From that you get orbits, you get disks, and it just gets more and more complicated as time goes on. Those little tiny bits, the quantum mechanics starts to explain the motion of the microscopic universe.

And weird things start happening. Suddenly we can have cell phones. Suddenly we can have satellites orbiting in space. And suddenly we realize that there are black holes out in the universe where the gravitational distortion around them is so great that once you enter their sphere of influence, you can never come out. That's where all the physics gets very, very exciting. So let's talk about some of the physics of everyday life, and a good example, I guess, is the reason a golf ball has dimples. That's all physics, right? Think about how a ping pong ball travels. Compare that to how a golf ball travels.

A ping pong ball doesn't have dimples, but it's very hollow and it's very light. And so it's affected by air in a particular way. Now, when you have a golf ball, say, that was smooth, you would send it through the air. But again, it would be affected by the air that it's traveling through in a very straightforward way. If you add dimples, all of a sudden, the airflow has been changed. And a ball can travel literally much, much further. And not only that, when you want to curve a golf ball and you want to slice it, well, you don't want to slice golf balls usually, right? But if you want to drop something just in the location,

golf ball dimples actually help you do that. So these little tiny things, these little dimples in the golf ball, make the sport of golf that much more interesting. Wait, so if I were to drive a golf ball that had no dimples, exactly the same as I drove one that did, what would I see different? First of all, the golf ball wouldn't lift as high. If you're hitting a golf ball with a slight backspin, what happens is that the air that goes over the top of the ball moves in a direction opposite to the motion of the ball. And so it creates a pressure difference that lifts the ball higher, that allows it to go further. Another thing is that without dimples, the flow of air around the ball is very, very smooth.

It creates a kind of a wake behind it, the same way that a boat going through a pond might also create a wake behind it. So that actually will drag the ball and make it travel less far. When you have those dimples, they break up the air layer, so you reduce the drag. And then you have this extra lift that happens. So the golf ball would go much farther with the dimples than without. Why aren't we supposed to put metal objects in a microwave? The way a microwave oven heats food is that it sends radiation at a specific wavelength

that causes the water molecules in your food to vibrate very, very fast. That vibration and rotation causes heat to be released. And so you wind up heating your food that way. You're literally changing the energy in the radiation into heat energy and increased temperature in your food. That radiation, when it comes in contact with metal, will wind up creating sparks. And so if you have an electric charge running inside your microwave oven, eventually you could damage the oven, or you could blow out the motor, or you could even start a fire. But when you put that compact disc in there, it's sufficiently small and isolated. if you just watch it for just a few seconds, all the metal that's sort of in the disk winds up sparking and arcing, and the disk is destroyed, unfortunately.

But it's kind of like a firework show inside a microwave oven. So here's a question, and I find this really interesting, because I've asked people to explain the difference, because we hear in commercials all the time about the new 4G, 3G, and nobody knows what it means. But companies brag about it as if we do, but I have no idea what it really means. This is one of those things where I think people like using jargon in marketing and just to confuse us, right? Yeah, what is 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G?

The G just stands for generation. So what generation wireless network are you using? It's not actually a specific technology necessarily shift, although there are lots of different improvements going forward. But the generations basically show you what or how much signal can travel through the wireless system at any given time. So early on, the first cell phones, you know, the ones that go in your suitcase, right? Did you ever own one of those? I didn't own one of those, but they were big.

They were first-generation devices. You could only make voice calls, right? Eventually, you could have digital signals, which wound up with 2G. And then 3G came out around 20 years ago. And that was the sort of generation that made wireless takeoff, going forward with all of our iPods and wireless phones and so on. And about 10 years ago, we got up to 4G, and these are broadband networks, and these allowed us to do things like watch videos on the screen of our phones.

And so 5G is supposed to be coming online now. There are some places. This is such a dense and fast way of moving wireless information that you can cover something like a million wireless devices per square mile. Okay. And that's 10 times more than 4G can currently support. So it's not some newfangled technology that can affect us in some unusual way, you know, cause cancer or things like that. But instead, it's just a demonstration of how much more wireless computing we can do. So 4G was about one-tenth the speed of 5G, 3G was about one-tenth the speed of 4G, and so on.

But isn't there some big concern about 5G? Yes. The concern about 5G is not actually the concern that sometimes makes it into popular media, like it can cause disease or it can somehow injure you, right? 5G is a little more complicated in its concern in that because you can support so many devices, you can put wireless signals into just about everything, not just your phone, not just your thermostat, not just your, say, computer-powered or Internet-powered speaker, right?

Oh, you know, please turn on my phone or please turn on this. You can put a wireless link in your refrigerator. You can put a wireless link in your light bulbs, for that matter, in your lights. And with all of that Internet connectivity, the security of your systems becomes a challenge. Somebody standing outside of your house, for example, with the proper equipment could actually damage or otherwise affect negatively your home devices or your security. You can sometimes liken wireless communications to having a big hole in your wall.

If you put a door there, you can lock the door. But if there are a hundred holes in your wall, then do you have to put a lock on all hundred doors? Or do you have to make sure all your windows are always closed? So it's the matter of so much information being available all the time that we have to think about making sure that all this stuff is secure. But in terms of whether or not it'll harm us or deform our brains or something, that's not going to happen. This is not a scientific concern. What's the physics behind when you rub a balloon on the wall it sticks? When you're rubbing a balloon, what you're basically doing is changing the balance of electrons. More electrons or fewer electrons wind up on the balloon than your hair, for example. And so then you is changing the balance of electrons. More electrons or fewer electrons

wind up on the balloon than your hair, for example. And so then you build up this static charge. And then when you put it up against the wall, that difference in how much electron density there is on the balloon compared to the wall can create a force that holds the balloon to the wall, defying gravity. If you think about how powerful gravity is, and how it always keeps us held down to the earth, even if we jump up, we still eventually land back down unless we have a rocket or something.

Having those balloons defy gravity just because you rub it in your hair for a few seconds is a small demonstration of just how powerful electricity is. I know a lot of people say that it drives them nuts when they hear their voice recorded because it doesn't sound like it on the recording as it does in their head, and why is that? Sound is a kind of wave that travels through objects and media like air, water, or bone. So when I listen to myself talk, the sound that's coming from my vocal cords isn't just going through the air out of my mouth into my ears. It's also going up my throat. It's going into my jaw, into the rest of my skull, into my sinus cavities.

And it's creating this sort of resonant tone, and it's sending extra tones into our ears from the other direction. So we always sound a little bit more sonorous and resonant when we talk to ourselves. When you talk into a microphone, all the microphone is hearing is what's going out of your mouth and into the microphone. So when you hear it back, you're getting an incomplete translation of what you have just produced. So it's kind of cool. It's kind of depressing sometimes, though. I listen to myself and I go, whoa, that's what I sound like.

And then I try to sound a little bit more like this, and it still doesn't work really, but it's kind of fun to try. But in fact, that's how you sound to other people. Actually, it's even a little bit more complicated than that, because when other people listen to you, their ears are also getting your other tones and so forth. The microphone, as you know, is an electronic device that doesn't pick up all the frequencies. So sometimes those microphones, unless they're really, really, really good, only pick up

a small fraction of all the frequencies that actually are emanating from your voice. So a person listening live will actually hear more subtlety in your voice than hearing through a microphone or even hearing you on a recording. And so that's something to keep in mind too. So even though you may sound not quite as good to yourself through a microphone, other people may be hearing you a little bit better than you're hearing yourself. You know, it's hard to imagine driving a car without a GPS system. You'd feel kind of, I don't know, lost or disconnected. But it wasn't all that long ago that cars didn't have them.

And it really is fascinating how GPS works. So can you explain that, please? Well, GPS stands for the Global Positioning System, and it was developed for military purposes in the 1990s, but it was so useful for everyday life that it's been declassified since, and of course now it's a big part of our lives. As long as you have a couple dozen satellites that are orbiting around the Earth, at any given time, your GPS device can send out a signal to those satellites, and they come back and broadcast to you basically exactly what time it is on their receivers, what position they think they are. And then from that, the computer, your GPS system triangulates two or

three or more signals and allows you to know within actually just a foot or two of where you are on the surface of the Earth. It's a real triumph of engineering and the basic physics of the general theory of relativity. So my image of physics, and I think this is the image a lot of people have, is that there isn't a whole lot new, like we've nailed physics, the heavy hitters in physics like Galileo and Newton and Einstein, you know, they've come, they've gone, they're long since dead, and we don't hear a lot of new things about physics. It is true that Galileo and Newton and those heavy hitters did amazing things hundreds of years ago. They established what, say, 99% of what we do in daily life is like, right?

They understand now, like when we walk, what happens? When we move, what happens? When we turn on a light switch, what happens? Our lives are being continually enriched and increased by things we don't know. One thing I like to tell people is that it's good to know stuff, but it's better to want to know stuff. Because every time we are not satisfied with what we already know, but keep pushing the boundaries, the more we learn.

I'll just give the example of quantum computing. A quantum computer right now is in its infant stages. We don't know at all if it will become practical in the years and decades to come. But if it does, it will make all the 5G and the GPS and the waves and stuff look like we were standing still. Imagine how our lives would change if we understood that. There's things about the universe we're still just barely learning. Just within the past few years, we figured out that black holes,

when they smash into each other, they create ripples in space and time. Things that are warping our reality all throughout the universe. And if we started to really know how space and time behave in a real fundamental way that right now we just are barely scratching the surface of, imagine our ability to travel to distant worlds or even to go from here to, say, a relative's house instantaneously.

All the things that you see, for example, on Star Trek or Star Wars or things like that, they all, if they ever could exist, have to be imagined first. And then you take the knowledge that, say, Galileo and Newton figured out centuries ago and mix that with modern questioning and asking what these things are, what they could become, and then it'll wind up being reality someday, I hope. One of the most empowering and courageous things that we can say to ourselves and to others is very simply, I don't know. And when we do that, we open ourselves to the possibilities of the future,

which are so exciting and so much fun. Well, it's like you said at the beginning. It's really all about curiosity. I mean, if you want to know how something works or why something did this instead of that, the answer is very often physics. And it's really interesting to dig deep. Charles Liu has been my guest.

He is an associate professor at the City University of New York and he's author of the book The Handy Physics Answer Book. And you'll find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. If you ever have trouble falling asleep sometime, you might want to try to remember

the 4-7-8 technique. It's a breathing method that is meant to combat anxiety, restlessness, and the other enemies of a good night's sleep. The actual technique is quite simple. Just inhale for four seconds, hold your breath for seven seconds, and exhale for eight seconds. 4-7-8. Just like counting sheep, measuring out your breaths gives your brain something to do so it isn't obsessing about your hectic day or the day ahead. Taking slow, deliberate breaths has also been proven to reduce stress. In humans, deep breathing has long been central to mindfulness practices like yoga and meditation.

The 478 breathing technique functions as both a distraction from your thoughts and a way to combat any anxious sensations that could be keeping you awake. And that is something you should know. If you like this podcast, you really should subscribe. Subscribing is easy, it's free, and then you never have to remember to come back and get episodes because they are delivered right to you. You most likely are listening to this podcast on some kind of platform

like Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn, CastBox, wherever, and there's a subscribe button, pretty obvious subscribe button. You just push it, and you're a subscriber button, pretty obvious subscribe button. You just push it, and you're a subscriber. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced.

She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan.

Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Contained herein are the heresies of Rudolf Buntwine, erstwhile monk-turned-traveling medical investigator. Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favored children. The heresies of Randolph Bantwine, wherever podcasts are available.