The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Casting Smell Spells, the Quantum Slap, the Boniest Jigsaw Puzzle

Episode Date: November 20, 2024

Twitch Partner Cheebs joins the show to talk about some mega weird quantum physics. Plus, Jess talks about real-life stinky witch magic, and Rachel lays out a jigsaw puzzle made of bones. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman  Rachel now has a Patreon, too! Follow her for exclusive bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/RachelFeltman Link to Jess' Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Thanks to our Sponsors! This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Get 10% off your first month at: https://BetterHelp.com/WEIRDEST Get cozy in Quince's high-quality wardrobe essentials. Go to https://Quince.com/weirdest for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Get Up to 50% OFF @honeylove by going to https://honeylove.com/WEIRDEST #honeylovepod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Possible. popular science. I'm Rachel Feldman. I'm Jess Bodie. And I am Chebes. Yeah, Cheeps. Cheeps, welcome to the show. Jess, tell us about, as always, you have brought on an incredible guest. Yes. So Cheebbs is a fellow Twitch streamer content creator extraordinaire. I followed Jeeps Forever. Wonderful creator. Also, science and nature enthusiast, would you like to tell the listeners

a bit about the stuff you make? Yeah, absolutely. So I am a, full-time variety streamers, how I categorize myself. I love a wide array of different games, anything from software to Stardoo Valley to the Sims, to streaming myself camping outside on the rare occasion. As just said, I am... Yeah, I love those camping games. They're so silly and so fun. They're hard to put together, so they're like once in a blue moon kind of thing. But they're a good time. I have an undergrad in biology, which is where the... love of science and nature definitely comes from and life just took an unexpected different turn into the streaming career, which was not what I had planned for my future, but such is the case

with many of us streamers. Yes, yes, that sounds strangely familiar. Yeah, I feel like, you know, my impression of streaming is that folks who are really like, this is it, this is what I'm going to do with my life, are not the most interesting streamers. Yeah, yeah, the ones with the weird, you know, curving paths. Yeah. Yeah. Well, welcome to the show. We're so psych to have you. Let's get into it. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, streaming, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was, sort of.

Jess, what's your tease? It's the shortest disclaimer yet. Yeah, I figure it's time to start just assuming people know. Yeah. My tease is I'm going to talk about how you can cast a spell in real life with science. Whoa. Halloween was yesterday, so I'm feeling inspired by something spooky. Absolutely.

My cheese, mine is also a little bit spooky. I want to talk about a bone-based jigsaw puzzle from ancient history. Cheeves, what's your tease? My tease, and I guess it's kind of creepy, if you think about it, you could slap a surface with your hand and have it go right through the surface because of quantum entanglement. Oh man, physics is always boogey to me. I am feeling it's going to get existentially scary.

Jess, I really want to hear about your spells. Great, great. Can we start with you? Of course. Okay, so yeah, like I said, Halloween was yesterday. I'm feeling a little bit of Halloween magic still. Although people are already talking about Christmas. I am strictly a post- Thanksgiving Christmas enjoyer person.

I am as well. Yesterday I turned to Oliver and I said, isn't it crazy that tomorrow is Christmas? I'm not wrong. I mean, it'll feel like it before we know it. Yeah, that's true. Right now I'm in a hot pantry. So I don't, I don't feel very Christmas. I was wondering if you were at the Siam offices or if you were at your house. Did you set up your closet? I did. I have my pantry set up. Amazing. I mean, traffic noise, going to plummet by at least. At least 70%. This is huge. We're cooking with canola. This is big for us. So yes, I've brought you an autumnal story for the show today. I'm going to talk about witches.

I've done a handful of witch stories on this show before. I've talked about... Harry Stiles' third nipple. That's exactly what I was going to say. Cheeps, have you heard about how Harry Styles has an extra nipple? No, I have not heard of this. It has to do with witches somehow? Yes.

Yeah. Back in the day, if you had an extra nipple, like during the Salem Witch trials, people thought you were a witch because it was to suckle your demon familiar. And by the transit of property, that means that Harry Stiles is a witch. I would love to know who is familiar is like what we do in the shadows where it's like a gearma walking around. Oh, I hope. I hope so. Oh, that would be ideal. So yeah, I just really love witch culture and especially like there's a really rich history of witch culture, especially in America. So today I'm going to talk about smells, which smells and spells. So I found a story written in Atlas Obscura by Brita Agar, I think is how you say their name.

She's a professor of classics at Arizona State University. And she studies both magic and the senses in the ancient world, which like, what a dream that is. I was just saying to someone, ASU, they like, they love their interdisciplinary shit. Do they really? Yeah. Every time. a researcher says what they study and I'm like, oh, la la, they're from ASU.

Oh, interesting. I had no idea. It's so funny because they have such a reputation for being like such a party school. Maybe there's some correlation with that. They can do both. Honestly, as a nerd who loves to party, I get it. So yeah, she wrote this piece about what witches smell like

and how they used scents as part of their magic, or, you know, at least historically, what people thought, people who people thought were witches, you know, how are they cast, quote unquote casting spells. So, you know, you might be thinking that's not very scientific, but consider this. You can't touch or see a smell, but they can affect us emotionally and physically. Is that not magic? It feels pretty magical. Perhaps.

It feels pretty magical. And really, you know, when you think about how people perceive magic and cultures around the world, it is pretty similar. It's kind of this amorphous thing that can change the way someone acts or feels. So I'll give you some examples of how smells were used by ancient magicians and witches throughout history and legend. So back in 200 BCE, Greek magicians used fragrances and a lot of their rituals. So they wrote in scented inks, which really just reminds me of L. Woods. And her scented resume. I was thinking like that's no Dr. Debian, but it's also so L. Woods. It's so L. Woods. Elwood was just casting spells, which she was in law school. And Greek gods were thought to have

smelled really sweet and pleasant. And anywhere they'd go, they'd leave behind this, like, wonderful smell, which just makes me think of Hades, the game. You know, like, not smelling good in that game for sure. Oh, yeah. Like, I bet Greek gods smelled like Aphrodite looks in Hades. She just looks like she smells delicious. If you know, you know. And then consider some ancient Greek literature. So there's the epic poem Argonautica, where the hero Jason is on his quest to get the golden fleece. And, And he enlists the help of Medea, I believe it's pronounced, who is often depicted as like a sorceress or a priestess or a witch. And she uses a lot of smelly magic.

Yeah. Medea, classic, a lady with feelings. Yeah. A lady with feelings. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Medea even puts like the fierce dragon that's guarding the fleece to sleep by chanting spells and then drizzling herbal potions in its eyes. That's a, that's a technique for sure. And the odor of her herbal concoctions is what overcomes the monster in the end. So scent magic saves the day.

Or, you know. That's like me with a lush bath bomb. Yeah. Oh, my God. And then there's also this ancient Roman poet Horace who wrote a few poems, what a witch named Canidia. And she is like way scarier than Medea. She has like scary black teeth and long fingernails that she uses to dig up gray.

And in these poems, she used liver and bone marrow that she like digs up to put into a magical perfume to reenchant her lover who left her. So she's making love potions and stuff. Industrious. Yeah. And we've also got the Iliad where the goddess Hera distracts her husband Zeus from the Trojan War by seducing him. And she does that by perfuming herself with fragrant ambrosia. Zeus falls asleep. doesn't, does not aware that a battle is going on. Finally, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder, which we've talked about on this show, not infrequently, commented that the best perfume was one that made all the men in the area, forget what they were doing when a woman wearing it walked by. So this kind of just makes me think about like patriarchal values and women, a lot of these witch and smells stories, especially way back in the day.

You know, they're painting these like ancient sorceresses and witches as like tempteresses. you know, and it's it's not the men's fault. It's the witch's fault. And, you know, even today, like, this is, people, people are quick to put the blame on women, especially when it comes to money and sex and that kind of stuff. And stories about magical sense encode these ideas, too, especially like fears about the dangers of sexually learning women, yada, yada. And it said that women who used perfumes and cosmetics could seduce men into behaving in ways they would not choose to if they were in their right minds, which, like, to make, just kind of sounds like another way to victim blame back in the day. Yeah, totally. You know, I don't know for sure as I am not a classic scholar, and this was a very, very long time ago. But, you know, it sounds very dangerously similar to the discourse around like, don't want to get cat called. Don't wear that outfit or don't wear the perfume. Like, you know, it's not the perfume's fault that you were violent. Come on now.

But what is it, you know, bringing it back to science for a moment. What is it about smell that is so powerful compared to other senses? And there is some neuroscience to back it up. So when you experience like any sense, for example, like let's say there's a delicious, warm, autumnal apple pie sitting in front of you. If you were to look at it or pick up a fork and cut into it, those visual and tactile signals would travel from your eye or your hand to a part of your brain called the thalmus. And the thalmus, it's basically like air traffic control. So it's like deciding where to send those signals to your brain. probably to your hippocampus for memory or the amygdala for emotional processing.

But with smell, so let's say you smell the apple pie, that signal skips the thalmus and goes straight to the amygdala and the hippocampus or, you know, wherever else in your brain. So it's thought to be a much, it's right there. It's right there. So it's thought to be like, you know, it's it's much more direct, I suppose. It might explain why smells trigger memories like much more quickly and so vividly. and it can explain how smells can influence our moods more intensely like, you know, these like they did in these witch stories. So finally, I'll bring us back to the modern day.

I think a lot of folks myself included consider witch stuff to be largely like reclaimed in a sort of feminist way. It feels like I find it empowering. And, you know, for sure, like lighting a candle, picking out a perfume. Like it can affect my mood and my mindset or a lush bath bomb, you know, all of these. things. It's our own little witchcraft. It's like I'm casting my own little spells when I light my Trader Joe's Honeycrisp candle on my living room coffee table. And yeah, it's really fun also to decide which perfume to wear. It's kind of like it gives me the confidence to step into a different

persona a little bit. Like if I want to feel extra hot, I wear my favorite scent, which is Lelabo another 13. And if I want to feel extra hot, I have a little solid perfume. Have you guys seen the glossy AU solid perfume? Yes. It comes in a little clam. Michelle, if you see it at Sephora, you have to pick up the packaging because it's like metal and heavy. It's so nice. Non-spon.

I mean, Glastier, please hit me up, but non-spon. It's lovely. And it's solid perfume, so I just like put it on the ends of my hair. And that just like a witchy ritual as well. And it gives me confidence. You know, it's my little confidence spell. So anyway, smell magic is real and you can cast it. The end.

I love that. That's wonderful. I mean, the scent. the sense of smell is so powerful. This is a really silly example, but my doc, he stinks. Objectively, that little man smells bad, but I love the smell of his stints so much, and it puts me in a good mood. We did a whole, somebody did a fact on that here about why we love like our stinky, well, what's it? Stinky pets or stinky partner?

Amanda was like, why do I love sniffing my cat? Yeah. I said just getting a big old whiff of, yeah. I said this to my partner as well. I was like, you know, I think one of this, like, I know that I love you because when you smell bad, it smells good to me, which is, am I. But I was on this show, Burn Before Reading, that is hosted by some weirdest thing listeners. It's a great show. I definitely recommend checking it out. And I did an episode where the premise of the podcast is great. It's that you're reading. or just talking about sort of like embarrassing writing from your past in this very like wholesome, you know, I love that way. And I talked about an essay, uh, that got published in, I guess the Atlantic. I don't remember if it was actually the Atlantic or one of the other sites under the Atlantic umbrella back

when I was interning at Quartz, which was owned by the same company at the time. And it was literally about like, I stopped dating this guy and I think about how he spelled so good. It's like humiliating because I did it in this guy for like 24 hours and like six months later he was, you know, just another dude I knew. He's a nice guy. There's nothing wrong with him. But that was the embarrassing part of the article was that I had really been like, why doesn't he want to date me and why does he smell so good? He had his own little potion going. He smelled so good.

Yeah, he had you under his spell. Oh my gosh. It's so true. But yeah, I did talk a lot in there about like, you know, why sense are so evocative. to us and how humans don't have pheromones in the way other animals do, no matter like what people try to sell you on the internet. But that doesn't mean we're not super susceptible to smell. To me, it's like the the pheromone thing is kind of a red herring. Like, yeah, we don't make pheromones that we know of that people can detect. But that just means you get to just pick what

random thing you smell like that is going to drive people nuts. And that's really powerful. Yeah, absolutely. Totally. I like to smell. like a swamp witch. I have a bunch of different from alchamia and Oh yeah, I've seen that brand. And yeah, just like I love weird, grassy. Earthy. Oh, I love that.

Yeah, I love that. Yeah. Well, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts. Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? And talking about mood.com, they have an incredible line of cannabis dummies and a lot more, and you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code weirdest. I'm not a smoker myself, but I do love the occasional weed gummy to, you know, help me go off to Dreamland. And I can't have one right now because I have a new kit. And,

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This is a treatment of all those topics from the point of of a scientist, available on Spotify, or wherever you get your favorite audiobooks. No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs and help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now, Hank's has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365 copilot.com slash work. Okay, we're back. And I'm going to talk about this bony jigsaw puzzle. Oh, yeah.

So this story starts back in the 1970s in part of Belgium. And researchers were tooling around this second century Roman cemetery. So in Belgium, but, you know, the Romans spread out at that time. And they found a body, as you might expect, in a cemetery. And it had this bone pin, like a pin made of bone that was like very Roman, very typical of the second century. And they were like, you know, easy peasy. That's what this is. A body from a member of the Roman Empire buried in the second century. It ended up in a museum in Belgium.

Case closed. Except, no, case not closed, case wide open. Recently, researchers started to be like, there is something weird about this skeleton. First of all, it was curled up on its side, like on its right side with its legs tucked up. And in the second century, the Romans were not bearing people that way. They were generally flat on their backs. So that was one sort of red flag. But then also, they were like, the bones don't really match.

They're a little miscellaneous. For example, looking at the vertebrae, they were like some of these look like they're from an elderly person. Some of them look like they're from an adolescent in terms of the state of the vertebrae. And then there were like the femur, they said, looked like it didn't fit the pelvis. So researchers were like, let's investigate. That's so creepy. Yeah, there is something a little creepy about this. And they knew that they had all of these tools that were not available to archaeologists in the 1970s.

And they were like, we're going to do a full radiocarbon dating on this so that we know when all of these bones are from. And we're also going to analyze their DNA. And of course, as we've talked about on Rearist thing, a bunch, analyzing ancient DNA is really hard. DNA degrades. So first of all, the conditions have to be right for there to even be DNA to study. but we weren't good enough at analyzing DNA to study really old DNA until quite recently. So there was reason to hope that we would learn stuff that had not been possible to learn back in the 1970s. But kudos to the scientists who were like, we're not just leaving the skeleton sitting in the museum.

There's something up with this skeleton. Something is a foot. Yeah, exactly. Something is a foot. Something is a femur. The femur doesn't belong there. A. You set them up and knock them down, Jess. Yeah.

Sure enough, they found that the dates did not match and the DNA did not match. This skeleton actually contained bones from seven different people. And just having a grave with multiple people in it, not that unusual, as you can imagine. but this had been a like really well articulated skeleton. These bones had been put together with enough anatomical accuracy that in the 1970s, researchers had been like, yeah, that's just a person. That is one person. And that's interesting. You know, what's up with that?

But the thing is this isn't the first time that's happened. There have been a couple other incidents of finding like bones arranged into something resembling a, single skeleton. There were some excavations around like 2009, 2010 in like some Scottish Isles that found basically several burials where remains that came from like different times and different people had been sort of put together as if they were one body. And there was another instance of this in in Scotland as well. But it's still not, it's not common. And it is something that like begs the question why. And researchers don't have a good answer for that. And like I love this kind of archaeology story because it's the kind of thing that like we almost certainly will

never know why. Like the sort of evidence that would have to emerge from somewhere to be like, this is it. This is this is the definitive explanation for why they put these bones together like this very unlikely to. I want to know. It's so weird. I know. And that is frustrating, but I feel like it's also really cool to be like, all we can do is speculate. And like, you know, archaeologists will like come up with stories to try to explain it. And anyone who says they are certain about or even like quite sure about why this was done is that that's a sign that they're not a great archaeologist. What's really fun is that we can just like put together different explanations for why this may have been. And as I've talked about a lot on weirdest thing, it would be a huge mistake to try to come up with some unified explanation for why several graves around the world have skeletons put together. Almost certainly different stuff was going on in different places at different times. But yeah, there's something extra weird about this particular grave. So the DNA analysis showed that there were these seven unrelated individuals.

They spanned different generations. They probably were between like 4,200 and 45. 500 years old. But the skull, the radiocarbon dating on it was not conclusive. But when they analyzed the DNA, they found that it belonged to a Roman woman who was like very closely related, relatively speaking, to some other people buried in a Roman cemetery like 100 kilometers away. And that was 1800 years ago. So we're talking about like most of the skeleton is around 40, 200 years old. And then the skull that's in there and the pin that threw them off initially that made them be like, this is just, you know, your standard second century Roman grave. That was

1800 years ago, give or take. So yeah, who knows? I've seen researchers, you know, sort of spitball on why people might put the bones together in the first place. My mom, a physician, was like, it must have been for medical training. And I'm like, I think that's very speculative, mom, and you're not an archaeologist, but listen, it's a fair, it's a fair guess. It's like one of the schoolroom, or classroom skeletons that just got buried. Yeah, yeah. I don't know how much anatomical training they were doing like 2,000 years ago in the Roman Empire. But maybe, maybe that's what this was.

I've also seen some researchers say like maybe this was sort of a symbolic thing to like combine people from different lineage. as like a way of saying like we are all now one people. This is like the symbolic grave that unifies our people or even that like maybe there was something that actually related these people to one another and there was some symbolic reason for putting them in a grave together even though they did not die at the same time. Or it could have been like a prank like we truly don't know. I think that's, you know, we have this bias to try to assign like higher meaning to things. people did in ancient times when like truly it could have just been somebody messing around.

Who knows? There was not a lot to do at that time. And the skull being, you know, from like 2,000 years later, the researchers behind this new study were saying, you know, maybe Romans like found this grave and had inadvertently destroyed the skull that was in it or maybe it was skullless and that bothered them. But like, yeah, it's possible that for whatever reason they were like, we're putting this here. I don't know. Something about it kind of reminds me of somebody like, like making a graffiti tag being like, oh, I like what they did here. I'm going to add my signature. But again, we simply won't know. But the researchers behind this study and similar studies looking at, you know, composite graves of multiple bones, always reiterate like this is just a

reminder that people were doing complex and varied things with their dead, that like, there are so many rituals that existed that we just have no record of. And that's just really cool. You know, people have always been doing interesting things for their funereal rights. And I just, I love this study. Obviously, it's a little spooky. The researcher was like, don't call it a Frankenstein that's disrespectful and that's fair. But I will call it a spooky friend who I respect immensely. Yes. Exactly. A whole pile of spooky friends who I respect immensely. But yeah, that's my fact for today. Pretty short. I want to know why. I know. I know. That's the why just isn't there. That's what makes it so fascinating and probably will never definitively be there. But I had no idea that this was a thing

that has been found to have been to have happened ever. I mean, either. I'm, that's, I, yep, I want to know why, but I will accept that I will never know why. I like the theories too. That's, it is fun to speculate. Theorizing is very, very funny. Yeah, yeah. I think there's, there's something really satisfying to me about, like,

researchers having to admit at the end of the day, this could have just been somebody being weird. Messing around. Yeah. Yes. person doing a weird thing. Yeah. And again, I think it's like, it's so important to remember that that is always possible because we have this tendency to be very like, ah, the ancient times.

What was the spiritual significance? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And some people are people. Yeah. Teens did pray. Yeah.

Or like the equivalent of your weird neighbor. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We're going to take one more break. And then we'll be back with one more fact. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes.

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So, when I was getting my undergrad in biology, I hated physics. Like, my least favorite. I just couldn't understand it and it made me so mad that it was so important in our day-to-day life and it was so beyond my understanding. So this topic is coming from a very surface level understanding of these things,

which is good because I think that's the best way to explain it in like a concise manner of 10 minutes. Okay, so we are going to be diving into the mind-bending world of quantum mechanics a little bit, but primarily focusing on the phenomenon known as quantum entanglement. So both of you like look at a surface nearby, just like a flat surface. There is a non-zero chance that at some point with you slapping your hand,

your entire hand could go through the solid surface. So this concept challenge is not only your understanding of reality completely, but leads us to some bizarre ideas, including possibility that if you, you know, slap to surface, your hand could just go right through it. So what is quantum entanglement? as a whole. So let's say, okay, you have a pair of dice that are somehow linked in a special way. When you roll one dye and it lands on a six, the other die instantly reflects that outcome, no matter how far apart they are. In quantum mechanics, entangled particles behave in a similar

manner. When two particles become entangled, the measurement of one particle state, whether it's spin, polarization, or a different property, it will instant, determined the state of another particle, even if they are light years apart. So like, this might be a word analogy, maybe potentially not allowed to be on the podcast, but it's like when you and her friend are hanging out and you're like, hey, we should maybe eat this fun little treat at the same time, so we're on the same page no matter what. So it hits at the same time. Kind of like the same thing, but not really.

So for some historical context on how this came to be, this concept. puzzled many physicists, including Albert Einstein. He famously referred to the entanglement as spooky action at a distance because it seemed to defy the classical ideas of locality and casuality. Einstein, along with his colleagues, presented this paradox questioning whether quantum mechanics could provide a complete description of, like, our physical reality. And they argued that if entangled particles could communicate instantaneously, then quantum mechanics must be incomplete

in some weird way. That's like saying a lot with to me not really saying anything at all. So to get into the mechanics of quantum tunneling a little bit further, this phenomenon describes how particles can pass through barriers that according to just classic physics

that we know and love, they shouldn't be able to cross. Picture a ball rolling towards a hill. Classically, if it doesn't have enough energy to reach the top, it rolls back. But in the quantum world, there's a probability that the ball would simply tunnel through the hill to the other side, just through it, despite not having the energy to overcome the barrier. Okay, now let's go back to the slap, the idea of the slap. Let's entertain this wild idea.

If you slapped a solid surface, in the quantum realm, there's an extreme, tiny super small chance that your hand could just quantum tunnel through that wall or whatever you're slapping. This isn't something that like you should just sit at home and just like slap until it goes through. Although there are TikTok accounts of people doing this. It's like day 100 day 400 of slapping a surface to see if my hand goes through it. Oh, that's awesome. So for macroscopic objects like human hands, the probability of this happening is virtually zero because the effects of quantum tunneling are significant only at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. But it's like fun to entertain the idea. I mean, there's like a non-zero chance. So you're saying

there's a chance. It could happen. So I mean, this topic obviously causes some implications for our understanding of reality at large. It goes beyond technology. They challenge our understanding of reality itself and it raises philosophical questions about the nature of space and time. If two entangled particles can affect each other instantaneously, does that mean information can travel faster than light? I don't know. And what does that say about our perception of the universe at large? So like, in conclusion, quantum entanglement is a striking reminder of how intricate and strange our universe can be and it forces us to reconsider the fundamental rules that govern reality. And we while you're probably not going to slap your hand through a wall,

the interplay between entanglement and quantum tunneling illustrates how bizarre the quantum world truly is. And you could probably sit here and talk for five hours and not even scratch the surface of quantum mechanics. But it's fun to entertain the idea of it all. Totally. I love this stuff. Have you played Alan Wake 2? Yes.

This makes me think that. Okay. Yeah. But still, it's so cool and interesting. It makes me think of all of that. And listeners, if you haven't played that game, you should play it. It's so good. And Rachel, you should play it too. I've heard good things. I haven't played it. But I have a confession about physics, which I almost never confessed to people, which is that technically I never had any physics classes because I had like physical science in middle school, you know, the sort of like, you know, very basic like police systems kind of stuff. And then I only did two years of high school before I went to college. And that was. bio and chem. And then I actually think maybe I just took chemistry twice in high school because I switched high schools. But anyway, then in college, I did environmental science as my major. And I would just like, I was like, I bypassed physics. I was like, it's not technically required. No thing to you. But then that really came back to bite me in the butt because like when I was working at the Washington Post and I had to cover the Nobel prizes, which means like waking up at like 4 a.m.

and, you know, churning out an article about something you've had no heads up about neutrinos one. And I was like, great. And, you know, I have learned a lot about physics. And I think learning how to learn about science is a skill that applies to any field of science. And I've done a lot of, you know, reading to catch up. And now I'm sort of comfortable writing about physics. But yeah, no, sitting on my couch at 4.30 in the morning being like, neutrinos, great. I really was like, wow, this is, this was entirely preventable.

I could have taken but one physics class in my higher education. Alas. So lesson to you children. Yeah, I was going to say, you know, I don't even know how much physics class taught me about neutrinos. Yeah, that's fair. But I was like, oh, do I even know what a subatomic particle is? I did. But it was really easy at that moment to be like, I messed up.

I messed up. And it's just so interesting to think how much we don't know about the world we live in. Yes. You know, there's so much going on. And I'm just so aware. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. So true.

Agreed. Even the smartest people are like, with like with the quantum stuff, they're like, oh, there's a lot of stuff going on probably maybe that is really weird. That doesn't make sense. We know. Quantum physics. It's a lot of like, this could happen.

This also could not happen. We don't really know. That's basically all of quantum physics. Yes. Which, another good movie, Interstellar. I love Interstellar.

And your stellar really, I feel like hits home the fascination for quantum mechanics at large. Because it's like, it then goes into this. other dimensions that, you know, some physicists like Albert Einstein have confirmed to be true. We just can't perceive these things and how quantum mechanics plays into that. And like, you know, you could go on tangents of like, oh, you know, the ghosts or spirits that people see is that just,

are those, you know, dead people or are those people in another dimension that we can't perceive? Who knows? My friend Ryan Mandewellam, who's been on the show a couple of times, now writes about quantum stuff for IBM and has has a physics background and but like loves loves talking about quantum physics and they are one of the weirdest people I know so yeah tracks right how is Brian Brian I miss them yeah right's good I need to I'm actually I'm going to try to get them back on the pod soon so huge chiefs thanks so much for coming on it was great getting to chat with you would you remind folks like where they can find all of your content yeah for sure thank you for me. This was so fun. I mean, I would love to sit here and talk about these things for another two

hours. Like, it's just, it's just so interesting. You can find me at Twitch.tv slash Cheebbs. And then my other handles on Twitter and Instagram are Chillbo Baggins with a Z. The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Faltman, along with Jess Bode, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore Thing.

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