This Podcast Will Kill You - Special Episode: Electricity

Episode Date: March 29, 2022

While last week’s episode covered ample ground when it came to lightning strikes, there is so much more to the world of electricity left to explore. Fortunately, there’s a bonus episode for that! This week, we’re joined by a familiar voice, Dr. Timothy Jorgensen, whose previous appearance on the podcast (see Ep 53 Radiation: X-Ray Marks the Spot) helped to lay out the basics of radiation. In this bonus episode, Dr. Jorgensen, Professor of Radiation Medicine and Director of the Health Physics Graduate Program at Georgetown University, returns to the pod to help us dig deeper into the vast topic of electricity. His latest popular science book, Spark: The Life of Electricity and the Electricity of Life, gives us much to talk about, from how electricity works to the difference between direct and alternating current, from electric fish to ECT, and beyond. As an accomplished science writer, Dr. Jorgensen also shares some insights into using storytelling as a teaching tool and advice for those who may want to become better science communicators themselves. Tune in wherever you get your podcasts! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh, and this is This Podcast Will Kill You. Welcome back, everyone. I'm very excited that you're joining me for this latest bonus episode in our mini-series of bonus episodes that have been coming out for the past few months. Just as a refresher, I'm putting together these bonus episodes as a way to hopefully accomplish two things at once. First, I get to explore in more detail some aspect of what we covered the previous week, helped along by an expert guest, of course, and second, I get to then ask that. guest all about their experiences in their career, what they like about it, how the field could be improved, any advice they may have for people interested in a career in public health or disease research or science communication, and so much more. It's been such a fun journey so far, and I'm especially looking forward to this week's episode, which I think may be our most electrifying yet. Last week, Aaron and I covered lightning strikes.

especially what happens to your body if you are unfortunate enough to get in between the lightning and the ground. And if you haven't listened to that episode yet, you should definitely check it out before listening to this one, because in it we cover a lot of the basics of lightning and some of electricity, and I think it'll really help to provide a background for what we'll be talking about today, which is more about electricity. In our lightning episode, we talked mostly about, well, lighten. how it forms, the biological impacts of lightning on the body, and some differences between getting struck by lightning and getting electrocuted through other ways. But what we didn't really get into

in any great detail was how electricity in general works. For example, what is voltage, what is amperage, what's resistance, what's the difference between them and why do they matter in understanding electricity. And also some of the other ways outside of getting struck by lightning that electricity and biology can intersect, like fish species that can generate their own electricity for stunning prey, or how modern electrotherapy is done. And part of the reason why we didn't cover these things on a regular season episode was because we can't cover everything. We have to put at least some boundaries on how much we can talk about in a single episode. But it also comes down to the fact that the principles of electricity, they're complicated, and they can be difficult to

understand. And understanding them well enough to be able to explain them in an accessible way to someone else, now that takes a whole other kind of skill, one that my guest for this bonus episode has in abundance. Dr. Timothy Jorgensen might be a familiar name to you, especially if you've listened to our radiation episode before, which features a short interview with Dr. Jorgensen in which he walks us through exactly how radiation works. Or maybe you read his book Strange Glow, all about the science and history of radiation. Well, as it turns out, Dr. Jorgensen recently wrote another fantastic book called Spark. And this one is all about how electricity works, the ways in which our understanding of electricity has changed throughout history, what it has

taught us about biology so far, and what it could teach us in the future. So who better to bring on to help us gain a better understanding of the ins and outs of electricity. In this bonus episode, Dr. Jorgensen and I are going to explore Amperage versus Voltage, how the human body uses electricity, some of the modern applications of electrotherapy, and so much more. And since Dr. Jorgensen is such an accomplished science communicator, I wanted to take the opportunity to pick his brain on how you go about writing a book on such a wide topic and still manage to make it fun and accessible, ways in which grad and med school training could incorporate science communication, and advice for those interested in becoming

science communicators. I am super excited to dive in, so we're just going to take a quick break here, and then I'll let Dr. Jorgensen introduce himself. Dinner shows up every night, whether you're prepared for it or not. And with Blue Apron, you won't need to panic order takeout again. Blue Apron meals are designed by chefs and arrive with pre-portioned ingredients so there's no meal planning and no extra grocery trip. There, assemble and bake meals take about five minutes of hands-on prep. Just spread the pre-chopped ingredients on a sheet pan, put it in the oven, and that's it. And if there's truly no time to cook, dish by Blue Apron meals are fully prepared. Just heat them in the oven or microwave, and dinner is ready.

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order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E-com slash this podcast to get free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash this podcast. My name is Tim Jorgensen. I'm a professor at Georgetown University. I direct a program in health physics, and I'm a professor in radiation medicine and also biochemistry in the medical school. And I've written two books that are targeted for a general audience. The one is called Strange Glow, the story of radiation, and then my most recent book is Spark, the life of electricity and electricity of life. And I'm happy to be here. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. I am really excited to ask you a bunch of questions

about electricity. So I loved your latest book, Spark, and I thought it was a fascinating and brilliant way to tell the story of electricity through this lens of biology. What made you want to write this book? And how did you decide on the format that you used? Like, how did you decide what to include or what not to include? So this book is an outgrowth of my previous one. So I had written the previous book about radiation. And in writing that book, I had included an explanation of radiation, but I also had mentioned some things about electricity.

Scientists who work in radiation have one foot in the electrical world and one foot in the radiation world because the two disciplines are connected. and I had mentioned some things about electricity in those books. So I got some questions about electricity too. So the book was quite successful and the publisher was interested in me writing another book, but I didn't want to write another radiation book. I thought, I've said all I can say about radiation. So my wife said, well, people seem to be as interested in the electrical part as of the radiation. Why don't you write something about electricity using the same style that you did for the radiation stories. And so I thought about that for a while, and I thought, that sounds like

a pretty good idea. And the strategy of the book is you tell the story, a human interest story, something that will get people interested in finding out what happens. And the story, usually something that happens in that story, something technical happens in the story. And you have to break the narrative of the story and explain to the reader the technical thing so they can keep following the story. And then you go a little further. And then I call it a the Trojan horse strategy. By the end of the story, they've learned about Helen of Troy, but they've also learned about how to build a wooden horse as well, you know? So the idea here is that the person will kind of absorb a lot of technical information passively, but also they'll

remember that technical information because it's in the context of a story. So there is so much ground that we could cover here in our discussion of electricity and so many different aspects that we could focus on. But if we're going to talk about even just one area of electricity, it's probably best to get a baseline for how electricity actually works. In our episode last week, Aaron went through the basics of how lightning forms, but can we get even more general? Can you explain what exactly electricity is and what the difference is between voltage, Amperage and resistance? So electricity, as we now know, which was not known when it was first discovered,

electricity is the flow of electrons. atoms have a nucleus and they have a cloud of electrons around them. And some atoms hold on to those electrons very tightly, but others like metals have a very loose grip on some of the outer electrons. And so they can jump from atom to atom. And when you get a flow of these electrons going in a particular direction for some reason, that's an electrical current. So some things are good at shuffling electrons down to the next guy. And those are conductors like copper wires are good. And other things like wood and plastic are not so good with moving their electrons along. And so those are insulators. And rather than just categorize things in terms of insulators and conductors, we could think of things as everything has some potential to be a conductor, but some are bad conductors and some are good conductors. And the reason that they are bad is because that they have a property called resistance. So resistance is the, just as it means, it's resistant to the flow of electrons.

Now, a lot of people like to describe electricity in terms of a flow of water. And it's, for historical reasons, people thought that electricity was a fluid. And so it made sense to describe things as a flow of this invisible fluid. So if we wanted to make an analogy with water and we wanted to make that analogy with a garden hose, for example, the voltage would be the pressure at the tap. So if you have good pressure, you know it when you open the tap. The water comes out very forcefully. That's the voltage. If you have low pressure, the water just kind of dribbles out.

The amperage is the representation of how much water flows out per unit time. So how fast you can, how many buckets you can fill us a minute? That's the amperage. And if you had to describe the resistance, you could say that as you turn the valve and you start to close it, you start making the hole smaller and smaller for the water to pass through, you increase the resistance to eventually at the point you shut it off. So if you wanted to compare electricity to water, I think that's a good analogy, a water faucet in the flow of water. And so what influences each of these principles of electricity?

The reason that electricity flows is because there is a over abundance of charge. There are more electrons in one place than there are in another place. And so the electrons, because they're all the same charge, they repel one another and they want to spread out. And so if there's a place that they can go to where there is less of a density of electrons, that's where they will go. That's how things start. So for example, the earliest electricity that we knew about was static electricity, and people produce static electricity by rubbing two materials together. It started out with rubbing amber with wool. So what's happening there is when you rub these two things together, the electrons from one thing are being scraped off and moving

onto the other thing. With wool and amber, that transfer is extreme. And so now the charge builds up, and the electrons on the amber will now try to jump to the wool, and that's basically what's going on. And it doesn't have to be amber and wool. Amber was hard to find and expensive. So people found out that if you rub glass with silk, you got the same thing. And so the first generators of electricity were simply to make a glass sphere with a crank on it, attached a silk pad so it rubbed, turn it as fast as you could, and then bleed the electricity. electricity off of the glass. The first genera's electricity, really static electricity machines that

work just by rubbing things together. So you mentioned that there are bad conductors and good conductors. What makes something a good or bad conductor? Like, why? Like, why is wood a bad conductor versus copper wire? So most of the good conductors are metals. And it has to do with how available the electrons are to move. So the electrons that are close, closer to the center are very tightly bound. But if they have a cloud of electrons and some in the outermost shell, they're only weakly attached. And if these atoms are right next to each other, as they are in metal, they're set in almost like a crystal lattice form. It's very easy for these electrons to just move to their next neighbor. And so electrons can just flow, particularly if they're

being pushed by excess charge on one end, they'll just push down and the charge will just move to the other end. Things like plastics, they don't have these weekly held electrons. Most of their bonds are covalent bonds that are not involving these weekly charged electrons. And so they tend not to conduct electricity. Can you walk me through the difference between direct current and alternating current? And what are some of the practical implications of the difference between the to and how were they used in different settings? The story of alternating current and direct current is a very interesting one because it involved a war between Edison and Westinghouse about which type of current was going to be

the standard for the United States for power transmission. As most people know, Westinghouse won that war and all of our current, our household current now is alternating current. So what is it? So direct current is when the electrons are moving in one direction only. And in alternating current, they move in one direction and then they move back in the other direction. And they do this very fast, 60 times a second. And they're both electric currents, but they have some advantages. The alternating current has a tremendous advantage in terms of being able to transmit power great distances.

And the reason for that, the simple explanation is that the easiest way to transmit power great distances is at high voltage. You can transmit both types of power, direct current and alternating current, at high voltage. And when I say the best way, the way that loses the least energy to heat, you don't want to produce a lot of heat. All that heat is just wasted energy. So you do it at high voltage because the only, other alternative low voltage, you have to push it with so much amperage, and amperage is what drives the heat. You can do both of them. Both types of current can go at high voltage. The problem was, at Edison's time, was that you don't want to bring high voltage into the house. Nothing in your

house can use this high, very high voltage. It has to be stepped down. And there was a way to step down alternating current at the point of use with local transformers. But there was no way at that time to step down direct current. So if you wanted to use direct current in your house, it had to be transmitted at low voltage. And that caused a lot of problems. And it was not possible to transmit it more than a mile that way. But if you use alternating current, you could transmit it at high voltage, very efficiently, and then drop it down to appropriate voltage for household use when it got to its location. So this is what the basis of the war was. And so it lives with us to this day. Interestingly enough, in the 1940s, I believe, someone invented a way to step down direct current.

And so it wouldn't be such a big issue today, but we live with the legacy of the technology of that period. How do these principles of electricity, amperage, voltage, resistance, and the type of current, how do those things relate to the overall risk of injury or the severity of injury for humans if someone comes into contact with electricity? To oversimplify things, voltage is what causes the pain. If you want to be a fence, electric fence to keep a bear out of your yard, you want something that has very high voltage, but very low amperage. It's the amperage that kills, not the voltage. So things like tasers and electric fences and even static electricity shocks that you get by rubbing your feet on the carpet, this can be like 50,000 volts. And you feel. it. Why don't you ever die from a carpet shock? Because even though the voltage is very high, the amperage is very low. So you need amperage to kill. You can even make electricity less damaging

but interrupting the current flow, interrupting the amperage. And that's how it works on an electric fence. Okay, so alternating versus direct current danger. The truth is, that they're both equally dangerous. And they're different enough that an all else being equal comparison isn't possible. But it doesn't really make much difference because they're both dangerous and they should both be respected equally. So in our discussion so far, and also in last week's episode, we've largely been talking about electricity in general or what happens when someone comes into contact with electricity. But now I want to shift to talking about some of the ways that humans and other animals interact with electricity. So how does the human body use electricity?

The chief use of electricity in the body is to operate the nervous system. And in Spark, what I tried to show is that neuroscience and electrical science developed together. The first ways of detecting electricity were feeling it, you know, getting shocks like from Amber, or getting it to have some effect on a living thing. And frog legs were very, very popular. If you touch something and the frog leg moved, then you knew that it had electricity in it. It's because the electricity has the ability to stimulate muscles and nerves that it causes that kind of movement. So during the course of history, people used the effects on the body, either animals or human bodies, to measure and detect electricity. And likewise, people use electricity to figure out what was going on in the

human body. So these two sciences kind of leapfrog over one another. And when there was an advance in electricity, it allowed further advances in neuroscience. And when there was an advance in neuroscience, it told us more about electricity. And this is basically the understanding to this day. It comes right up to the point now where we're implanting computer chips in brains to stimulate different, electrically stimulate different areas of the brains in an attempt to cure diseases or power artificial limbs with thoughts. And so we've come to the point where we now have brain machine interfaces that convert electrical

signals into neurological signals and vice versa. And so, and that has all been aided by knowledge about electricity, but also knowledge about computers. And also an exploitation of the fact that our nervous system works kind of like a computer and that it sends binary signals. So when you shock a nerve, the amount that it's shock doesn't go up and slowly down, it sends out a bunch of signals called action potentials, or which are commonly known among neuroscience, as spikes. And so if it wants a bigger signal, it sends more spikes, which is very analogous to what a computer does with its binary language.

You know, it's on or off, on or off. Nerves are like sending signals are not, on or off, on or off. And so this is conducive to these two systems being merged together through these brain machine interfaces that actually work both ways. You can write information from the computer now into the brain, activating particular cells, and the same interface can pick up electrical signals from those cells and tell the computer what the brain is doing.

So this is something that started out with shocking yourself with static electricity and frog legs. And right up to this day, we're looking at brain machine interfaces and how they can be used to alleviate disease, and pain and suffering. I want to talk a little bit more about some of these modern applications of electrotherapy. What do we know about why or how these modern therapies are effective in treating things like epilepsy, certain types of depression, and Parkinson's disease?

So deep brain stimulation is used primarily for Parkinson's disease. Parkinson's disease is a disease where people have tremors. in their hands or legs, and these can be quite severe. And there was a surgery that partially relieve this for people. There's a part of the brain deep in the brain. And physicians found that if you ablated, you removed one half, one side of this brain part that you could relieve the tremors on the other side of the body. So you couldn't do both sides of the body because you couldn't eliminate the organ entirely because that would cause all kinds of other problems. But they could give people relief on at least one side of their body using this technique.

And they were using electric probes during the surgery to try to stimulate and find this particular tissue that they were going to cut out. And when they used the probe, they found out that using the probe alone eliminated the tremors. So the next thought was, maybe we don't have to cut this out. Maybe we can just stimulate it and eliminate the tremors by permanently planting an electrode in it. And that way, we could control how much electricity, we control how much we're going to reduce the tremors, and we can remove it in the future if it presents a problem and the patient is no worse for where. So electrical stimulation for treatment of Parkinson's with these deep brains,

stimulation became a panacea, basically. And now there are many, many people who are benefiting from this. And it definitely works. The person had tremors, and now they don't have tremors. Exactly why it works is up to debate, but it definitely works. And there are other similar stories for treating depression, for example, with electroconvulsive therapy. That also works. And so more and more diseases are being treated. Now, epilepsy is being treated with electrodes on the vagus nerve. And these things work. Then they've been shown to work by a randomized clinical trial, but we don't really know exactly. There are many theories, and we're getting closer and closer to a better understanding of how the nervous system works by using these therapies. But nobody really understands how they work.

Like you said in your book, electricity has taught us so much about how the human body works. And in a similar way, several animals have revealed a great deal about how electricity works. For example, one of my favorite stories of electricity involves Volta finding inspiration in the torpedo fish to design this first true battery, which is the story that I told in the episode last week. But what I didn't go into was how exactly these fish generate electricity. So would you mind walking us through that? So these fish generate electricity. very similar to the way our neurons do. And as opposed to rubbing things and getting static electricity that way, or in a battery, you have an electrochemical reaction that's generating the electricity.

In a neuron, neurons do it a little differently. What they do is they take charged ions. ions are molecules that in solution that are either positively negatively charged, what neurons do is they are able to pump these ions from inside to outside. What they do is they produce a charge differential between the inside and the outside by pumping ions in, probably positively charged ion ins and pumping them out. And what they do is they make a difference in charge between the inside and the outside. And as I said earlier, whenever you have a difference in charge, there's a potential for electrical flow. And so what happens is the neuron is able to open up gates to release all this charge that it has previously segregated.

And that institutes an electrical signal, which stimulates the next neuron to do the same. the next neuron that do the same. The next, and that's basically how our nervous system transmits electrical signal by segregating charge and then releasing it. And these fish, you mentioned the torpedo fish, their electric eels, they all do it the same way. They have an electrical organ that specifically is a overdeveloped part of their nervous system. These cells are specialized in doing this to extreme extents. And so these cells, they're called electrosites, achieve huge voltages by doing this ion pumping thing.

And then the fish at will can release all that charge in one sudden burst to shock its prey. And that's basically how it's used. Now, they don't have enough current to kill their prey. So generally, what they do is they shock prey to stun it and then they attack. And that's how these fish do. And it was the inspiration of these fish that caused Volta to investigate ways of making electricity. He wanted to make an artificial electric organ. When he did get something to work, he thought he had discovered the way that fish and make electricity, but he had not.

He had found a different way to make electricity, and that's through electrochemical reactions. And so it's a fundamentally different process, but it's something that's very much in the electric, do something that's very much akin to what our everyday cells do. So fish don't just use electricity to shock prey. There are also many species that have electroreception abilities rather than electrogeneration. Can you talk about how these fish sense electricity? The concept of an electrical field is a very difficult one. And the first person to even suggest there were such things was Michael Faraday. And when he first proposed this to people that there were electrical fields, he got a tremendous

amount of criticism. And he backed off. But he was absolutely right that there can be an electrical field between any positive charged electrode and any negative charged electron. So the way you can think of this, and you may have seen this when you were a kid, if you had a bar magnet and you spread iron filings on a piece. of paper over the bar magnet, you'll see that there's lines that kind of loop out away from the magnet and back to the north and south poles of the magnet and produce this kind of like a spider-webby

effect around the magnet. And people had known about this forever and no one could explain it. And the reason for it is, is that magnets have a magnetic field around them. So that's what they look like. Well, electrodes have an electric field, which is something similar to that. It's harder to see. You can see it. If you put chemicals on a piece of wedded filter paper and some like dye chemicals that are charged between two electrodes on a piece of filter paper, you can see the dye start to make the same kind of lines that you would see on a magnet. So that's an electric field.

And fish use this. The fish is an electric field's head is positive. and its tail is negative. So you have a separation of charge, and so you have an electric field around the fish, just like you do around a magnet. And the fish is able to sense interruptions in that field. Many of the fish, particularly in South America, these fish, the electric eels live in these very murky, muddy waters where their eyesight, they can't see.

In fact, most of them have very small eyes because they're almost worthless to them. And so they're using their electric field to find prey and navigate. And they can sense this interruption in the electric field. So they're using it in two ways. They have the electric field that's on all the time. And then they have this ability to release electricity in huge amounts and shock the prey. So they're getting double duty out of this electric field. And so that's something else that Faraday discovered.

He actually got himself in electric eel. He attached it in a pan, and he didn't have any electronic instruments at the time to measure this. He started moving his finger at various spots around the electric eel and felt different strengths to his finger and concluded that electric eels have electric fields just like any other two electrodes would. That is just so fascinating. I feel like we could absolutely keep going down rabbit holes to explore more of the world of electricity, but instead, let's take a quick break here, and then when we get back, I want to know all about your research background and your experiences as a science communicator.

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Offer ends three-two. Welcome back, everyone. Before the break, Dr. Jorgensen and I got into some of the background of how electricity works, what we know about some modern electrotherapies, and other adventures in the science and history of electricity. But for this next part, I want to turn more towards the field of science communication. In addition to being a science writer, you're also a professor at Georgetown University. Can you talk a little bit about your educational journey? How did you become interested in this field? I have most of my career been a researcher in radiation sciences, specifically the sciences that relate to health. And radiation, as most people know, is used to both diagnostically to identify diseases. Everyone's been in for a chest

x-ray. And they also know it's used therapeutically to treat cancer. And it can also cause cancer. And so I was interested in all those aspects of radiation. And so I started out my career, I had a PhD in radiation sciences from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. And then I started to specialize in radiation being used in radiation therapy and how to best use it, how to sensitize tumor cells to therapy. So it would be more effective, more curative. And so in particular, I studied how radiation damages DNA, because that's the mechanism by which it kills cells, and how cells can resist that by repairing their DNA. So that was my professional journey. Later on, I got more interested in how radiation causes cancer, because it's also through a mechanism of damaging DNA.

but this type of damage kind of leads to mutations in cells and causes them to transform to be cancer cells. So most of my research career, I worked on those two aspects of the problem. As I've aged, I've done less and less research and more and more teaching, which seems to be the fate of many professors. So now I teach a head of a program in health physics, which is a, master's degree program at Georgetown that teaches people how to get into the radiation protection profession. And those people work in hospitals, but they also work at nuclear power plants. They work in the nuclear regulatory commission. So to implement practical measures to help protect people from the bad effects of ionizing radiation, while at the same time

enhancing its value in terms of therapy and diagnosis and things like that. I think, fell into writing for the public accidentally. When Fukushima happened back in 2011, being a radiation expert, I was asked by television stations to come on and in real time explain what the risks were to the workers and the surrounding population and the long-term risk of this catastrophe that happen at Fukushima. Because of that, people, when they had a radiation question, they googled it, my name would often come up. And so I was constantly getting phone calls and emails about people that were concerned about LeChester X-ray or, you know, eating tuna with radioactivity in it or whatever. And I was happy to talk to these people, but some of their questions were more complex than could be

answered in five-minute telephone conversation. So I was kind of looking for some kind of book or other resource that I could push people to that explained radiation in layman's terms. So something that was not full of jargon and complicated scientific concepts. There are plenty of books out there, but they either tend to be textbooks or they tend to be books with an agenda. So if you pick up a book that says nuclear power, the power to save the world, you know it's going to be a pro-nuclear power book, or if you pick a book because there's nuclear power, the power to kill everyone on Earth, then you know it's not. You know, you don't even have to read the book, you know. So what I wanted to do was write a science-based book without an agenda that enabled people

to make their own decisions about the risk levels and whether they were acceptable to them. So I tried in the book not to say, well, radon is, is, is, dangerous or radon's not, I tried to explain to them what the risk levels were and let them decide whether or not they want to worry about it. And so I did that for all the different radiation issues that I had received questions about. In doing that, I realized how much a disadvantage people who want to get scientific information, what a disadvantage there are. Because if they go to journals unless they're a scientist, they can't understand what's written in the journals. And much of the lay press has an agenda. The media tends to see as every issue is a black and

white situation where they find an expert who'll say one thing, an expert will say another thing. And so everything is like this little debate. So that's why I wrote the book. And that's how I got into it. I didn't. It was an accident, purely an accident. How do you feel your experiences as a science communicator have influenced either your teaching style or how you approach learning? In terms of my teaching style, I try to do the same thing in teaching. I try to convey technical information, but also I try to tell a story, usually not to embed it within a story, but to tell a story that illustrates the point. You know, I try to make the information, not just scientific information in itself, but show

how, why, why should I care about this? So I think that that's, uh, it's affecting me in the classroom outside. And the way I like to gather information is, is that I like to, I read a lot and I read on a variety of topics. I'm currently on a book about concrete. And believe it or not, it's one of the most fascinating books I've ever read. And then before that, I was reading a novel. So I think that, again, by reading both fiction and nonfiction and every, I try to find something that I don't know anything about. And often you find connections to other things.

And so I think it just, the scientific web is, you know, as I said earlier, radiation is very much linked to electricity. My latest thing is that I discovered that electricity is very much linked to sound production. And so I'm reading a lot of books about sound now. And so that's the way I approach information is from a variety of different angles, you know. Something that Aaron and I hear frequently, especially lately, and I'm sure you do too, is that recent events have shown just how much the world needs science communicators. Do you feel as though graduate students and medical students should be trained in or are being trained well enough in this style of communication?

So I'm so glad that you asked this question. I am so glad because I have something that I've been preaching about this. So the answer is no, they are not trained in this. And in fact, they are trained in a way that is counterproductive to communication. So what I mean by that is we train scientists, young scientists, to write scientific papers. Scientific papers are written in jargon, but worse than that, they're written in passive voice. Now, if you take any English class, anything about communication, they'll always tell you, never use passive voice. But yet, scientific papers are generally only written in passive voice, but it makes for terrible communication.

It makes for awful reading. So I want to make a plug for the Allen Alda Center for Science Communication at State University of New York at Stony Brook. This is a center that is specifically devoted to allow scientists to learn the techniques to communicate better with the public. They run seminars and workshops. They'll come to your university and offer workshops where they, they try to get scientists to talk like normal human beings. And I think that's extremely valuable. And we need to do more of that. So, yeah. So what advice would you have for someone who wants to learn more about science communication as a career or maybe someone who is in grad school or med school and just

wants to become better communicators themselves? Often people talk about your elevator spiel. So imagine you get on an elevator and someone and ask, so what do you do? You know, and you have to explain it by the time you get to the 10th floor or whatever, you know, I think that no matter what you do as a scientist or anything else for that matter, that you should be able to come up with a story, basically a, you know, a five-minute story and tell it so that somebody who doesn't know anything about that walks away. And so that's an interesting thing that that person does, you know. I need to find out more about that.

So I think you have to start by saying, why does this interest me? And you identify the point. This interests me because of X, X, X, X, X, and then write yourself a story that includes X, X, X, X, when you tell that. And other people will become interested, too. So I think that people can do that all the time, you know, and talk less among scientists and more with the public and try to refine their elevator talk, so to speak. and I think there'll be a lot of rewards on both sides.

So I've got one last question for you, and that is, what is the next book or project that you would like to work on? Well, I would like to work on something. I don't know what, but I mentioned sound earlier, and I realized in writing electricity book that I really don't know much about sound, and it's extremely interesting. when I consider something that would be good to write a book about for me, it's got a three-legged stool. It's got to be something that's some type of physical science, because that's my background. It has to be like a physical science.

It has to be health related because that, again, is my stick. I'm in a medical school and it somehow has to impact health. And then lastly, it's got to be really good stories because I have to come up with, you know, somewhere between 13 and 17 entertaining stories that have the breadth that I can embed the technical information that I want to get out. And so I'm, I've been reading a bunch of books about sound and listening to podcasts about sound. And, you know, if it turns out to be a book, that's great. But if it doesn't, I'm just enjoying learning about sound because it's, it's something that I, I hadn't.

really thought much about before. And so who knows? You know, maybe in a couple of years, I'll be on your program talking about my sound book. But it is a very, it is a very, very interesting field. Dr. Jorgensen, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today. I had such a fun time exploring more about the basics of electricity. Like, I feel like I finally have a good grasp on how it works, and also chatting more about some fascinating stories in the world of electricity. And if you want to learn more about electricity, I highly recommend checking out Dr. Jorgensen's book, Spark, the Life of Electricity and the Electricity of Life. And we'll post a link to the book on our website, this podcast will kill you.com.

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