Something You Should Know - The Science of Creativity & What You Never Knew About the Periodic Table of Elements

Starting point is 00:00:00 Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey. No, too basic. Hi there. Still no. What about hello, handsome? Who knew you could give yourself the ick? That's why Bumble is changing how you start conversations.

Starting point is 00:00:17 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 many hours of sleep do you really need? There actually is a specific answer. Then, we all like to think creativity is universally wonderful, but it isn't. Creativity is disruptive and even destructive.

Starting point is 00:00:48 And there is a creativity paradox, which is virtually any creation of any meaning fundamentally displaces what came before and wreaks havoc on the status quo. Also, you know the saying, less is more? Well, I have a great example that proves the concept. And remember the periodic table of elements? It must be important. It's in every science classroom. The reason that a periodic table is in all of them is because it is the summary of everything. Of you, everything you can see, touch, interact with, it's in one chart.

Starting point is 00:01:24 And I think that's pretty incredible. All this today on Something You Should Know. At New Balance, we believe if you run, you're a runner, however you choose to do it. Because when you're not worried about doing things the right way, you're free to discover your way. And that's what running's all about. Run your way at NewBalance.com slash running. Something you should know.

Starting point is 00:02:03 Fascinating intel. The world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today something you should know with mike carothers hello welcome to something you should know i've talked before about how how i love my sleep and i i need my eight hours of sleep every night. And most people likely need about eight hours of sleep. That's the general consensus. But I'm sure you know people. I know people who say, oh, I can get by on five hours sleep.

Starting point is 00:02:38 Some people say four hours is all they need. Well, researchers put those people to the test. The volunteer sleepers did their thing in a controlled sleeping environment for two weeks. Those who slept eight or nine hours did just fine on the cognitive testing. The group who slept just four to six hours a night flunked. Their cognitive skills were impaired to the equivalent of being legally drunk. The study found that when we get less than eight hours of sleep at night, our attention span and reaction times are the first skills to take significant hits. Even getting seven hours is not enough.

Starting point is 00:03:20 One hour less per night accumulates to a noticeable sleep deficit. And that is something you should know. For most of us, I think the word creativity carries nothing but a positive feeling. To be creative is to come up with something new and wonderful. But creativity is more than that. In fact, creativity can be destructive. It often is. Creativity is a defining attribute of humans. No other creature contemplates what might be and then sets out to create it the way humans do. When we think of the most brilliant people, they're often people who are also

Starting point is 00:04:05 considered to be very creative. Yet as wonderful as creativity can be, there is also that dark side. You're about to hear a discussion on creativity that is different from other discussions you've likely heard. My guest is Matt Richtel. He is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the New York Times, a bestselling nonfiction and mystery author, and he has a book out called Inspired, Understanding Creativity, A Journey Through Art, Science, and the Soul. Hey, Matt, welcome. Well, thanks for having me, Mike. So first, let's define creativity. What does something have to have in order for it to be a creative idea or a creative thing? The two attributes that are often described are novel and impactful. Novel and impactful. Why do I say impactful instead of useful? Well, you can make a pretty good case that COVID-19 is incredibly creative, but you wouldn't exactly call it valuable. Well, that's interesting because I don't think I would have ever considered COVID-19 as creative,

Starting point is 00:05:20 and I don't think most other people would either. So the coronavirus is one of the most creative things we've seen in a long time. Now, if you say, well, I thought creativity was all good. I'll throw you poison gas and the nuclear weapons, slavery and Nazism. A creation is not necessarily good or evil. It's one of the reasons why creativity can be very scary. Well, I haven't looked at it that way before. I don't think most people look at it that way. You seldom use the word creativity

Starting point is 00:05:51 in a negative context in conversation. It's always, oh, look how creative that is. It's how wonderful that is. I start with a premise that we are an intensively creative period and that lots of us laud creativity and say we want it. And many of us experience great joy when we have it. But there's a twist, which is if you look at the research, there are real stumbling blocks to our own ability to be creative that come from how we actually feel about it. So can I tell you about the subconscious bias test that will reveal something curious about ourselves or certainly curious to me? So these scholars, they said, well, we all, just like you said, Mike, we all profess to love

Starting point is 00:06:40 creativity. Who doesn't want to be creative? Who doesn't want to hire creative people? And in the end, all of those things are true, except for this. The scholars asked, do we actually feel about creativity the way we say we feel? And they ran a subconscious bias test. They took the study subjects and said, how do you feel about creativity? And everybody said, oh, we feel wonderful. They ran the subconscious bias test. And what they discovered is that people have associations between creativity and vomit, toxins, poison, and other terribly disruptive and scary ideas. Well, that doesn't sound right at all to me. It sounds, it doesn't sound- You think I'm making it up?

Starting point is 00:07:25 Well, I'm not saying that, but it does, it doesn't seem that, that people would, why would they say that? Toxins? Yes. So, so this, exactly. So this is what's so illuminating about the subject and why it is so vital to understand if you have any interest in being a creator, or if you wonder why you stop yourself, creativity is fundamentally disruptive and even destructive. And there is a creativity paradox, which is virtually any creation of any meaning fundamentally displaces what came before and wreaks havoc on the status quo. So I talk a bit about Elon Musk. Here's a guy who has revolutionized.

Starting point is 00:08:12 I use that word very sparingly, but he has revolutionized the car industry. That has been big trouble for the status quo. And it has been big trouble and contributed to big trouble for all those people who work in the fossil fuel industry. And I'm not making a political statement here at all. Every creation of meaning displaces something else. It is very scary when we create something that's effective. Well, maybe sometimes, but I mean mean look at the arts a place where a lot of creativity happens and if somebody paints a masterpiece it doesn't destroy a previous masterpiece it's just it's just another masterpiece well you might say that but it but it is destructive on a business and

Starting point is 00:09:02 economic level and in fact one of the great anecdotes of this book came from Bono. And he's talking the day after an album called, what was it? A Beautiful Day wins a Grammy. And he tells this venture capitalist, who's a friend of mine, who told me the story and I confirmed it with Bono's people. He said, you may think we created a great album, but what we really did was realized that we were becoming obsolete because technology was changing the kind of music people liked. The subwoofer had become really vital and was affecting what people like to listen to. And so we built an album to take into account bass differently. And that is why this album succeeded. We were made obsolete by music,

Starting point is 00:09:53 or almost made obsolete by music. Music people thought was better or newer or fresher or more creative. And we had to come back. Being creative is just something humans do. I mean, we eat, we breathe, we create things. That's what we do. But the process of creativity seems elusive in a lot of ways. It's very hard to say, okay, I'm going to sit down and be creative. It doesn't work that way. It's elusive. is mind wandering. So we understand now through pretty modern science that when a creator or anybody, I hesitate to use the word creator because I believe that everyone is creative fundamentally. It's just whether people give themselves permission and the tools to create. But what happens inside the brain is when your mind wanders or when you are not necessarily focused

Starting point is 00:11:06 on a particular task is that ideas begin to bubble up. They bubble up from your subconscious. They bubble up when you're in the shower. They bubble up when you're on a run. They bubble up when you're not necessarily thinking about something. And then only then do they go through the rigors of the analytical stage where you decide whether that idea has any merit. But here's the challenge with that. Mind wandering is harder than it sounds. We do it all the time, but the research will show that when our mind wanders, people feel unhappy. And that's because mind wandering often leads people to feel like they're being unproductive or they should be worrying about something. So instead of allowing themselves

Starting point is 00:11:50 to mind-wander, they direct that thinking. They take a bottom-up process that leads to creativity and make it a top-down directed process. So are you saying that creativity only happens when you're not trying so hard? Writers and physicists who are studying in this piece of research reported that 20% of the time they came up with a really good idea, they were thinking about something else or doing something else. They were not focused on the task at hand. And what he said is, your question was, is that the only time it happens? The answer is no. But what he said to me was, which was just a wonderful quote, he's like, how many things

Starting point is 00:12:44 can you be great at when you're not actually trying at them? And creativity happens to be one of those areas where sometimes the less you try, the more you get those ideas to surface. There's a really wonderful anecdote about Salvador Dali and Einstein who had something in common. They would sit down to take a nap, and they'd put something heavy in their hands. And as they nodded off to sleep, the thing would fall out of their hands, and they would sometimes discover that they had come up with an idea during what the researchers call a hypnagogic state, somewhere between awake and asleep. We're talking about the science of creativity,

Starting point is 00:13:27 and my guest is Matt Richtel. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, and his book is called Inspired, Understanding Creativity, a Journey Through Art, Science, and the Soul. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast-streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit FlyPorter.com and actually enjoy economy. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train

Starting point is 00:14:16 testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals, be careful along our tracks, and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. So Matt, very often in these conversations about creativity is the advice of you've got to come up with a lot of ideas. That step one of the creative process is to come up with a lot of ideas. But then you've got to decide, well, are they any good? That's a really great question. And I just want to say that my favorite version of that story came from Judd Apatow,

Starting point is 00:15:06 you know, the comedic director. And he's one of the creators I had a privilege to talk about. He told me about the writer's room for TV comedies. And all these people come up with ideas and they throw out ideas and throw out ideas and throw out ideas. And then the writer's room collectively just destroys them. They just, it's like a, it's like a whiteboarding session in the cruelest room that ever existed. And a little bit, what the reason I wrote about that was it explains a little bit, it's kind of a metaphor for the neurobiology of creativity. When you create, you come up with these ideas and then almost instantaneously, you begin to run them over the rigor of your analytical brain. And so I would say to your question, Mike, or your observation, your fine observation,

Starting point is 00:15:58 is that what happens is as a team, a society, or an individual comes up with these, they get vetted actually pretty naturally. A lot of them are thrown out on their face. Sometimes, and I think this is a really interesting piece of this, sometimes a creator who believes very profoundly in the idea that's come forth must really fight. And the reason that person must really fight is for the very reason we described in the beginning, is that the status quo has a huge amount of value to a lot of people. Yeah, I think that's really important. And also, this idea of fighting for your idea. When I think of great ideas, there's often somebody or a group of people behind it that have a story, that they fought for their idea. And the fighting for the idea may be just as important as the idea.

Starting point is 00:16:58 Because how many times have you heard somebody say, oh, yeah, I thought of that same thing five years ago, but I just never did any. Yeah, I never fought for it. I never did anything with it. And it's the people who fight for their ideas that make them happen. To create something where something didn't exist before takes an enormous amount of energy. It takes persuasion. It takes getting off the couch. It takes passion. Pick your word. But that's the experience you are having. And it helps explain how these roadblocks get overcome. And fundamentally, going back to your question, how you choose the one that works. That's the one that feels like that. Sometimes it seems that creativity, you know, it's kind of looked down upon as frivolous. You know, being creative for the sake of being creative, you know, painting a picture or molding a lump of clay or doing something that some people would call creative, other people would call a waste of time. But there must be a benefit to it.

Starting point is 00:18:06 The science will show that when you allow yourself to experience these creative states and to create in whatever format you see, you are happier. Now, why is that? Well, one of the studies that I really, really appreciate was actually done by the same guy who did the toxins research. When people express creative ideas, they feel unburdened. Sometimes even, Mike, they feel unburdened of a secret they have that they feel is shameful or secrets that they have without even sharing those secrets specifically. What creativity does is allow you to express a piece of yourself to the world and it feels unburdening. And there are other studies that show that when people create something, they experience happiness in their lives. So it's not

Starting point is 00:19:00 merely for the end point, It's for the process. Just as people have asked over the years, you know, what is art? You can also ask that about creativity. I can create something that feels creative to me. I could paint a picture. I could, just something that's creative. You might not think it's creative, but it's creative to me.

Starting point is 00:19:26 So is it creative if no one else thinks so? Another terrific insight. And I would say that part of what we've been colored by is whether something makes money. Being creative is not the same thing as being creative in such a way that other people need to buy or like it. That's not your problem. Creativity has its own value to you. And if you are lucky, it may have a bigger value. The last thing I want to say on this point, Mike, is it's easy to underestimate the value

Starting point is 00:20:03 of a creation in the moment that it's created. I remember from this wonderful review I read and put in the book about the first impressionist painting. I think it was called Impressionism by the critic who skewered the first impressionist painting because he said, there's nothing here. It's just leaving me with an impression. It stinks. It would go on to be one of the most famous paintings of all time. So what do we know about creativity just in kind of the ABCs of it? Like the more creative you are, the more creative you are. And other words, the person who comes up with 100 ideas is going to be more creative than the person. Yes, yes.

Starting point is 00:20:50 Einstein was famous among creativity scholars not for having great ideas, for having immense numbers of ideas. And what creators, the people whose creations you often see are people who came up with lots of ideas and didn't censor those ideas. And some of them worked and some of them should have been burned at the stake. And who best to evaluate your ideas? You? It depends how well you know the medium. So I think if I was going to come up with a podcast, I'd run it by you. If I was going to come up with a book, I'd trust my gut for a while. If I was going to come up with a song, I'd run it by some of my songwriting friends. I think it depends how much you know

Starting point is 00:21:38 the medium with the caveat, Mike, that sometimes our gut really is pushing us forward. There's a point where you really do understand that you have something. With my first book I wrote in 2003, to this point, I kid you not, I had no interest in writing a book. It never occurred to me. In fact, if you'd asked me about my colleagues who wrote books, I would say that just gives me hives. Who could write that many words? And I was sitting in a cafe one day and my mind was wandering. And I had this idea. And the idea went like this.

Starting point is 00:22:16 A guy is sitting in a cafe and he sees the hand of a beautiful woman put a note on his table. And by the time he looks up, the woman is gone. He didn't get a good look at her. The cafe is crowded. The note is folded. He picks it up to follow her to the door. And when he gets to the door of the cafe, he opens the note and it says, get out of the cafe now. And the cafe explodes. And he's sitting in the rubble outside the cafe and he's thinking about the note. And it's not because of the warning, it's because of the handwriting. It belonged to his girlfriend who died five years earlier. And that idea occurs to me, Mike, and I'm like, I need to know what happened.

Starting point is 00:23:06 And I started writing. I sold that book to one of the most esteemed publishers in New York. I had an idea. I couldn't stop. It felt pure and it worked out. What are a couple, just from since you've looked at all this research about creativity, one or two things that would surprise people or people would find interesting or even better useful in the creation of whatever they're creating? Studies show that you need not be a genius and certain IQs over even like 140 become ultimately hindered in some of their creativity. If you have average IQ, that is sufficient. So that is one and not that IQ is the measure of intellect.

Starting point is 00:23:58 And I know that's a little bit a subject of conversation, but that's where the studies have been. You don't need to be a genius. Average intellect will do. And then I guess the other thing is that I would just say, repeating, perfectionism is the enemy of creativity. Every time you stop yourself creating because you realize you found a flaw or a problem or it doesn't feel exactly right, you are actually shutting down the creative process. And I would urge people to give themselves a little more compassion because there is a fluidity to this and working through those moments is vital. Well, as I said in the beginning, this was not the discussion you typically hear about creativity. You've really kind of unlocked some of the mysteries of what creativity is and how it works.

Starting point is 00:24:55 I appreciate that. I've been speaking with Matt Richtel. He is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the New York Times. And the name of his book is Inspired, Understanding Creativity, A Journey Through Art, Science, and the Soul. And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Matt. I really enjoyed this. Hey, Mike, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure and a blessing, and I really appreciate it. This is an ad for better help. Welcome to the world. Please read your personal owner's manual thoroughly.

Starting point is 00:25:27 In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual. That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more. That's BetterHelp.com.

Starting point is 00:25:51 Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years.

Starting point is 00:26:22 She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast.

Starting point is 00:26:56 The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you recall in high school or maybe college science class, particularly chemistry class, somewhere in that room, in that classroom, hung a large chart, the periodic table of elements. And come to think of it, that's a lot of classroom real estate to give over to a chart. So it must be important. Yet, at the time, you may have thought, why do we have to learn this stuff? We'll never use this in real life. Well, here to quarrel with that statement, and explain why that chart means more to you than you may realize,

Starting point is 00:27:40 is Katherine Harkup. She is a chemist and author. Her first book was an international bestseller called A is for Arsenic, and her latest book is called The Secret Lives of the Elements. Hi, Catherine. Welcome. Thank you very much for inviting me. Hello. So why was that big chart of elements, the periodic table of elements. Why was that so prominently displayed in my chemistry class? of everything. It is the reduction of everything, of you, everything you can see, touch, interact with. It's in one chart. And I think that's pretty incredible. So why are the elements on that chart in the order that they're in? As they were discovered,

Starting point is 00:28:38 you just add them to the chart or is there some other organization? No, there is an awful lot of very carefully constructed organization to the periodic table. So you can read a periodic table like you read a book from left to right. So if you start in the top left corner, you start with the lightest element, which is hydrogen, and then as they get progressively heavier, you move left to right. And when you hit elements that have similar properties, you start a new row. So that's how the periodic table builds up. It's essentially from lightest to heaviest,

Starting point is 00:29:18 but then it's also organized within similar characteristics like family groups. And explain why you find it so fascinating, why the elements tickle you, why is this so interesting to you? I find it incredible that everything I interact with can be made from such a small number of component pieces and how those components interact with each other and what they bring to molecules, materials, I find fascinating. Just the periodic table itself, how it is brilliantly organised into these family groups and how you can almost pick out personalities for these elements. To me, looking at a periodic table is like looking at a family photograph, an extended

Starting point is 00:30:13 family photograph, and picking out cousins and brothers and sisters and parents, etc. Well, I wish you had been my chemistry teacher because you make it sound so exciting and interesting, and I don't remember it being exciting and interesting. But I do remember, if I remember correctly, I do remember that the number of elements on the periodic chart, I can remember them being like 102 elements or 104 elements, and now it's... 118 and will there likely be more or or have we found it all oh i think there's more out there to be found it's not going to be easy um but yes there is more out there to to be found and every atom is constructed of the same three basic components, electrons, protons and neutrons. And as you keep adding more protons, you create a new element. So in theory, you just keep adding more and more protons and you create more and more elements. It's slightly more tricky than that in practice, but that's the underlying theory.

Starting point is 00:31:21 So at the moment, we're up to 118 protons, but who knows how far we can get? It all depends on the technology and the machinery that people use to produce these elements. Well, that's interesting. I always thought that the elements on the periodic table were naturally occurring, that these were the things in the universe that naturally occurred that make up everything. But you're saying that potentially, at least on paper, you could make an infinite number of elements and put them on that chart. New elements, so beyond 118, they will be created in laboratories. They are usually not stable enough. All of these protons bundled together, they're rather heavy and unwieldy.

Starting point is 00:32:12 So they tend to fall apart quite quickly. So they have to be forced together temporarily and studied as quickly as possible before they disintegrate again into smaller, lighter elements. So you think it's unlikely that somebody will dig up something in their backyard and go, hey, look what I found, a new element. That's not likely to happen. That seems very unlikely to happen. There are theories about there are certain magic numbers of protons that might be super stable, but we haven't found them yet. They should be fairly obvious as substances were they out there, but we haven't discovered them yet.

Starting point is 00:32:56 And I think it is unlikely that people will'll be found in maybe the depths of space or even more likely inside nuclear reactors or laboratories. That's interesting that perhaps out in space, there may be things that we can't even imagine. Yes? Oh, very possibly. Yes, there's all sorts of things out there that I'm sure we've not quite got to grips with. Things like dark matter, which I am by no means very knowledgeable about at all, still cause scientists to scratch their heads. So who knows what wonders are still out there to be found? I must ask you, do you have a favorite element? And if so, what is it and why? It's phosphorus because it's the best. Every chemist has a favorite element and they'll all probably tell you something different.

Starting point is 00:33:51 But unless they tell you it's phosphorus, they're wrong because phosphorus is great. It has all sorts of wonderful historical stories behind its discovery, its use. And I spent a long time studying it at university. So I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with phosphorus, but it's the best. Well, dive in and tell me a little bit about it. What's so fascinating about it? Oh, it has simply the best discovery story of all elements, in my opinion. So phosphorus was the first element to be discovered in modern times. So it was discovered around 1660s. And it was a man called Hennig Brand, who was an alchemist, basically, he was looking for gold. And he decided to look for gold for whatever reason in his urine.

Starting point is 00:34:50 So he collected an awful lot of his own urine and did experiments on this urine in an attempt to find this precious metal. He wasn't successful. He had a very unpleasant time, I imagine, carrying out his experiments. All these buckets and buckets of wee, he left to stagnate until there were little worms growing in them. He boiled them down, he heated them up, he separated out all of the constituent parts. And eventually he found a white waxy solid, which obviously wasn't gold, but it was interesting to him at least because it glowed in the dark, which was very, very unusual because it also, it didn't get hot when it glowed. It just glowed with an eerie kind

Starting point is 00:35:33 of green, pale greenish light. So he named it phosphorus, which means light bearer. And yeah, that was the beginning of element hunting in the modern era. After which many more elements were discovered? Yes, there's a particular rash of elemental discoveries about 100 years after Hennig Brand, the late 1700s, early 1800s. Lots of elements were added to the periodic table. It went from a few, a handful of elements to dozens in a matter of a few decades, simply because new technology, new techniques became available and people could start to split up material in interesting new ways and probe matter

Starting point is 00:36:22 for what it was made of. And when new elements were discovered, is it because people were trying to find them or is it that they just were doing something else and they stumbled on and, hey, look what I found? Oh, it's a bit of a mixed bag. I think there's quite a few people who stumbled upon stuff in rocks or minerals or some compound that they are examining. And they thought, that's a bit odd. That doesn't behave like other things I've investigated before. And they get curious. It's always the unusual or the unexpected that sparks a scientist's curiosity. So they would probe deeper and they would try and split it apart even further until it became obvious that it was nothing but itself.

Starting point is 00:37:13 Other people have been rather more practical about it and rather more concerted and methodical in their approach. People like Humphry Davy realized that there are a whole series of salts that likely contained different metals, but these metals were not known. So he systematically went through and tried to split apart these salts, and he added two elements to the known list in two weeks. Which were? Sodium and potassium. Salt? Yes, salt, salt. What about hydrogen? It sits there at the top of the list. It's been there forever. Is it interesting or is it just hydrogen? Oh no, it's fascinating. Hydrogen, like you say, it has been there forever

Starting point is 00:38:01 since the beginning of time almost itself, created in the Big Bang. But hydrogen is it's not like anything else in the periodic table. So I said earlier that elements are constructed from three things, electrons, protons and neutrons. Well, most hydrogen doesn't have neutrons. So it's just electrons and protons. It's very, very small, and it doesn't really behave like other elements in the periodic table. So it's a bit of an oddball that the fact that it makes up 75% of all matter in the universe means that possibly it's the rest of the periodic table that but the odd ones out. 75% of the universe is made up of hydrogen?

Starting point is 00:38:50 I believe so, yes. Well, and oxygen seems like an important one. Yeah, it's certainly important to us. We don't do very well without it. So oxygen, yes, it's a bit of a double-edged sword, oxygen. Why? Because it's quite reactive. So that reactivity means it can release a lot of energy when we react it with something in our bodies, such as sugar, to release energy and carbon dioxide and water. But it also means that it doesn't always react precisely when you want it to.

Starting point is 00:39:26 So it can also be quite damaging. This is why our body goes to quite extraordinary lengths to capture oxygen from our lungs in our red blood cells and transport it very, very carefully to where it's needed rather than letting oxygen just diffuse randomly through our body, it is escorted to where it's needed so that it doesn't go off and do damage. When you look at something like water, which we all know is hydrogen and oxygen, H2O, but on some level it seems that water is like its own element. It's very simplistic. It's very elemental. It's just plain old water, but there are actually two things required to make water. Are there other things that we think of as pretty elemental but are actually a combination of elements? Well, there are many combinations. The fact that you highlight water is very appropriate. For thousands of years, water was assumed to be an element. And it wasn't until

Starting point is 00:40:35 1800 that it was discovered to be made up of two things, hydrogen and oxygen. When water was split apart into its component pieces, this was mind-blowing. This reduced this fundamental, this pure substance to a combination, a mixture like anything else that chemists and alchemists had studied before. So it was a real mind shift in how people looked at the world and looked at elements in their own right. So when elements combine, they bring their characteristics, but it's actually the combination of elements that transform into something completely different. So hydrogen and oxygen are both colourless gases, but water is liquid. It's still colourless, but it has very, very different properties. You would never mistake water for oxygen or hydrogen, but it is nothing but those two things combined. So there are lots

Starting point is 00:41:40 of other combinations. If you mix hydrogen, oxygen and carbon in the right proportions, you get alcohol, the stuff that gets you drunk. If you combine carbon and hydrogen in the right proportions, you get petrol or gasoline. It's just knowing the combinations and the arrangements of what contributions these different elements can bring to a molecule to make all the substances that we interact with. When you say that when you combine these things, when you combine oxygen and hydrogen in the right proportions, you get water, but nobody does that, right? Is it really a case of these are what they're made of if you pull them apart, but you can't really put them together? You can put them together. With water, no one really bothers because there is an abundance of water. There is no need for us to do it.

Starting point is 00:42:39 Although if you've heard of hydrogen cars and fuel cells and things like that, they do combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce energy and water as a byproduct. So it's a potentially very clean fuel. So in certain circumstances, it's useful. It's just that we have plenty of water around us. We have no need to make it. When it comes to things like, I don't know, pharmaceuticals or dyes or plastics or objects that we find useful in our day-to-day life, but they don't occur in nature in any case or perhaps in sufficient quantities, chemists can take elements, combine them into useful materials that we then go out and use. So you mentioned this a moment ago, and I've never understood this.

Starting point is 00:43:31 As you say, hydrogen and oxygen are gases. When you combine them together, you get a liquid. It's wet. How does that happen? I don't get it. Where does the wet come from? Oh, you have hit upon the trickiest question. Water, even though we are so familiar with it from every moment of our life,

Starting point is 00:43:53 water is weird stuff chemically. So you are absolutely right. By all kind of common sense, it tells us that a combination of hydrogen and oxygen should just be another gas. And actually it should be. So if you combine hydrogen and sulfur, which is very similar to oxygen, you do get a gas, you get hydrogen sulfide. Water is weird and unique because of how the hydrogen and oxygen interact. The oxygen is very selfish, so it will suck negativity away from the hydrogens and concentrate it. So a water molecule looks a bit like a teddy bear's head. You have the oxygen, which is the head, and you have two little hydrogens, which are like the teddy bear's ears.

Starting point is 00:44:44 And the ears are quite positive, and the teddy bear's ears. And the ears are quite positive and the teddy bear's head is quite negative. So you get lots of water molecules clumping together connected by this positive negative attraction. And it's that clumping that makes water a liquid and makes water wet because it wants to stick together rather than bounce around as a gas. Talk about aluminum or or as you say in the UK aluminium because it seems very common a lot of things are made with aluminum but it wasn't always so common. Aluminium when it was first discovered or first purified because it was so difficult to extract from its compounds because aluminium is very reactive. It desperately, desperately wants to react with oxygen.

Starting point is 00:45:34 So prizing it away from oxygen is quite the feat. So the first few samples of pure aluminium were incredibly rare and incredibly expensive. So Emperor Napoleon III of France, to impress his guests, had aluminium cutlery. Not gold, that was kind of ordinary. He had aluminium cutlery. Now, if we had aluminium cutlery today, I think we'd assume that this was the cheaper end of the range, but it was absolutely top-notch back in the day. The Washington Monument, to cap this monument, they wanted something very, very special and very precious. And so the Washington Monument is capped with a tiny little pyramid of aluminium, which was put on display in Tiffany's because it was so precious. And today, putting a lump of aluminium on display in Tiffany's sounds ridiculous. It's simply because manufacturing

Starting point is 00:46:39 techniques have become so much better that we can use it and not even think about it. We throw cans away without too much thought. But a few hundred years ago, even less, it would have been unthinkable to just toss away this precious, precious metal. And is that little pyramid still on top of the Washington Monument? As far as I know, it is. It's rather decreased in value in the intervening years. Yeah, I would imagine so. Well, you know, chemistry was not my favorite subject in school, but you've really made the topic come to life here. This has been really fun.

Starting point is 00:47:18 My guest has been Catherine Harkup. She is a chemist and author. The name of her book is The Secret Lives of the Elements, and you'll find a link to the book in the show notes. Appreciate it, Catherine. This was great. Thank you very much. I'm sure you've heard the expression that sometimes less is more, and it is the theory that was in play when Jerry Seinfeld decided to end his TV show after nine years, even though he was promised millions of dollars if he would do a tenth season.

Starting point is 00:47:53 Jerry said he always loved the Beatles, and when everything ended for them after nine years, he, as a fan, was left wanting more. Jerry said that ten years sounds like a long time, and since the nine-year thing worked so well for the Beatles' staying power, it helped him make the decision to pull the plug on his TV show after nine years. Jerry also used guitarist Mark Knopfler as an example, too. Jerry said it's what makes him such a great guitarist. He doesn't play quite as much as you want him to. You want him to play more, but he doesn't. And that's what makes you love it. So, less is more. And that is something you should know. If you thought this was an interesting

Starting point is 00:48:40 episode, you probably know someone else who would think it was interesting. So please share it with someone you know. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney? Do you love top 10 lists? 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. The parks, the movies, the music, the food, the lore. There is nothing we don't cover on our show. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games,

Starting point is 00:49:16 and fun facts you didn't know you needed. I had Danielle and Megan record some answers to seemingly meaningless questions. I asked Danielle, what insect song is typically higher pitched in hotter temperatures and lower pitched in cooler temperatures? You got this. No, I didn't. Don't believe that. About a witch coming true? Well, I didn't either.

Starting point is 00:49:37 Of course, I'm just a cicada. I'm crying. I'm so sorry. You win that one. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Contained herein are the heresies of Redolph Buntwine, erstwhile monk turned traveling medical investigator.

Starting point is 00:50:02 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.

Your Ad Here

Something You Should Know - The Science of Creativity & What You Never Knew About the Periodic Table of Elements

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.