Unexplainable - Does garlic break magnets?

Episode Date: September 20, 2023

What would an episode of Unexplainable have sounded like if it had been made in 100 CE? For more, go to http://vox.com/unexplainable It’s a great place to view show transcripts and read more about the topics on our show. Also, email us! [e-mail] We read every email. Support Unexplainable by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hey, Noah. You wanted to show me something? Yeah, something really strange just happened. Okay. It's our 100th episode this week, as you know. And I was looking through our vault of old episodes. Vault. You're looking through our Google spreadsheet.

I was looking through our vault of old episodes, just like scrolling through. And I noticed this tab at the bottom of the Google spreadsheet that I'd never seen before. Do you see that tab? The Library of Unexandria? What is this? Yeah. So if you open it up... Are these episodes?

I think so. I'm not totally. sure, I just came to find you as soon as I saw this. There are thousands of them. Yeah, and look at the dates. October 1879? Yeah. 1,215?

Who made these episodes? Also, how did they record them hundreds of years ago? I honestly have no idea, and I don't have any way of figuring this out. This may be just one of those, like, Magic Narnia situations? Do we know what's in these episodes? I, honest, I don't know. I wonder if you can preview it like we can in our normal Google Doc.

Like, if you scroll over... Sure, try, I don't know, try the 1879 one. Okay, here we go. This week on Unexplanable, can we use this new telephone thing to talk to ghosts? And if we made contact, would we even understand them? That sounds a lot like you. I don't know. A little more nasal than me.

Do you think there's one that sounds like me? I don't know. Try another one. Okay, this one is from 1380. This is so goofy. This week on the show, in the afterlife, are we going to have all the fingernails we've ever grown? And what counts as part of the body anyway? Now, that sounds like you.

Yeah. I would never ask those questions, like ghost telephones, afterlife, fingernails. Do you think, like, I mean, I guess these are just the things that people found unexplainable in the past, right? Yeah, I guess that's kind of interesting. I figured, obviously, like, the answers we get from science would change over time, but it never really occurred to me that the questions would have been so different back then. I wonder if those questions could help us understand how people thought about science in the past, or like how science is shaped by the world around us.

Should we listen to an episode? Oh, I mean, obviously we need a listen to an episode. Which one do you think we should do? I don't know. I mean, it's our 100th episode. Let's just do an episode from the year 100. Does it go back that far? Let's see. We got 1,200, 700. Yeah, here we go. 100 C.E. Ready?

Ready. Okay. I'm Nemo. I'm Bard. It's unexplainable. And Bard, this week, I want to tell you about a mystery that changed the course of world history. Ooh. Yeah, it happened back at the Battle of Actium. Heard of it. Of course. Who hasn't? Yeah, it's, you know, the battle that happened like 130 years ago back in 31 BCE.

Mark Antony and Cleopatra lost to Octavian, who ended up becoming Augustus Caesar and essentially started the Roman Empire, as we know it today. Hail Caesar. So basically, the battle's going down in this straight on the west side of Greece. Octavian ships are at the north side of the strait. Mark Antony's are at the south side. and, you know, there's all this fighting going on. Typical stuff. Typical stuff. But then at one point, this really weird thing happens.

Mark Anthony's ships just stop. They stop moving? They stop moving. They sit there for like three hours. And then when they finally start moving, they're just going really, really slowly. So Octavian could just destroy them all. They were basically like sitting ducks. Was this, like, godly interference?

Like what happened here? Experts aren't really sure, but the best working theory they have has to do with little fish. Little fish? Tiny fish. So you know those fish that stick to the bottom of sharks? I don't know how familiar you are with the undersides of sharks. Yeah, not super. I haven't examined any shark underbellies of late.

That's fine. But basically there are these little fish on the undersides of sharks. they're called Ramora. And they don't just stick to sharks. They stick to ships. And apparently they can slow down ships. Like Ramora actually means delay in Latin. So they're literally delay fish.

Exactly. Okay. And apparently sailors know all about this. They've talked about pulling the fish off the boats, and then the boats start going again. So how, like what, how are they doing this? Yeah, that is basically, the question that I want to get into this week.

That's this week's unexplainable? That's this week's unexplainable. How can Ramora slow down boats? Is it something particular about the Ramora themselves? Or can these little fish actually teach us something about the fundamental structure of the universe? Okay, so Bard, I wanted to figure out exactly how Ramora, these delay fish, work. So I got in touch with someone who knows all about this kind of thing. My name's Darius Aquifolius. I'm a natural philosopher with a particular interest in questions of physics and the origins of life.

Darius told me that natural philosophers are pretty sure Ramora aren't just like swimming really fast in the opposite direction of the boats. There might be something more fundamental happening here, which has to do with these two major forces in the universe called sympathy and antipathy. So sympathy and antipathy are essentially two sides of the same coin. Antipathies are where things oppose each other. Sympathies are when things work in concert together. Dari said it's helpful to think of like a liar, you know, like a musical instrument. If I have a liar and somebody else plucks a string on their liar nearby, it causes the same string on my liar to vibrate, even though they're across a distance. And this is an example of sympathetic vibration.

Yeah, I've seen this before. You don't touch the second stream, but for some reason, it's also vibrating, even though the first string is vibrating. Yeah, and it's not just music. Like, think about the moon. When at night, the moon comes up, that causes dew to emerge from plants and my laundry that I left out or whatever. So do is also sympathy or sympathetic. Yeah, I mean, it happens because of sympathy. So the moon can bring the dew out of the grass, even though it's far away.

Just like the lyre strings can make strings on another liar vibrate. Okay. Or the clearest example here, honestly, might just be magnets. Magnets attract iron, so there's an obvious sympathy there. And then on the flip side, you have antipathy. So this is... Oh, chariots going by. One sec. So antipathy is when things stop other things from happening.

Water, for example, always puts out a fire. Even in relatively small amounts, it can put out of fire. Or just like garlic in general. is just super antipathetic. It just stops all kinds of things. If I boil it in honey, for example, it's really good for a cough. If I boil it in milk, it can help you with a cold. There must be some sort of power in the garlic, is the thinking,

that causes it to act against a power that's in the body that you want to try and get rid of. It can keep scorpions and snakes away. It literally, it stops magnets, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, the garlic magnet effect. Like, everyone knows that when garlic gets on sympathetic things like magnets, it just totally wrecks them.

Destroys them. But just to get back to the remora that slowed down boats question from the beginning of the episode, are we saying that remora are antipathetic? Like, is that what's going on here? So natural philosophers aren't fully sure here. One idea is that these remora are just naturally antipathetic. They're like garlic. just slow things down. And it kind of makes sense if you think about it, right? Like, they're on

the bottoms of sharks. They suck energy from the sharks. So if they're on the bottom of ships, they would kind of slow down ships. But they aren't really sure if Ramora are just a naturally antipathetic thing in a way like garlic is, or if there's something particular in this connection with boats. I only know of it stopping ships, so it might only have that power. I'm not sure what else it does. Ramora might just work on oceany things like sharks and boats. But it's also possible they're so antipathetic that they might break magnets, just like garlic does. And figuring that out isn't really easy because magnetic rocks like load stones, they're super rare, they're hard to get. So natural philosophers might not be

all that into the idea of putting antipathetic things on them and potentially breaking their magnets. Sure. And we might just not need to test that, right? Like Darius says there's all kinds of things we just accept as obvious without necessarily testing them. I don't need to smash a battering ram into a castle to know what effect it's going to have. Right, right, right, right. But honestly, trying this out and putting Ramora on magnets, it could be worth the risk. Like, if Ramora really are so generally antipathetic that they slow down more than just boats, you know, that could be a super powerful tool.

And it might be worth testing because Darius says that even if things seem to be. obvious, there's always a chance we can learn something new. Any given theory could be proved wrong. I mean, if we go back 400 years, we can see that people didn't understand sympathy and antipathy. Aristotle doesn't talk about it really. Plato certainly doesn't have it. And how that could be the case, I don't understand, but it's not there. The fact that these great natural philosophers had no idea about these basic fundamental forces of the world,

it just makes you wonder a little bit, like, what are the kinds of things that we don't know about how the world works? And so we have to be attuned to new facts coming in. We live in a world where our knowledge, even of other cultures, other societies is growing. Who knows what they've got out there that might challenge us or enrich our scientific theories.

Okay, that was different. Kind of the same, weirdly? Yeah, I mean, it sounded like an unexplainable episode. Just, you know, all the science was kind of wacky and fish-centric. Just be sure. A couple of fish can't slow down like a whole fleet of boats, right? Yeah, I feel pretty confident they don't. I also feel pretty sure that garlic doesn't stop magnets from working.

But, you know, like, I also feel like Darius and these ancient natural philosophers, they weren't just saying these things randomly. Like, they did seem to have real justifications, and they did seem to be thinking through these questions systematically, like scientists do now. I see that. I see sort of how they're systematically thinking through things. But I think what I still want to understand is, like,

what does their sort of rational working through the arguments teach us about ancient science or just about like science overall. You know, I do actually know a guy who studies ancient science. Do you want to talk to him? Like, just ask him these questions? Yeah, how about this? I'll call him up and I'll tell you what I find out in a minute. Okay.

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Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. When I see a solar eclipse like the one I went to last year in Hawaii, I think, oh no, is the moon eating the sun? Because I'm a caveman. That's the way I think. Okay, Bird, we're back. Here we are. And it's been a journey.

So want to just maybe recap the couple thousands of years we've covered so far? So we heard an episode from the year 100 CE. about a lot of things, but I guess like garlic making magnets not work and fish slowing down boats. And it's all because of like sympathy and antipathy. Sure. And then I was wondering one, like, what? Like why would people believe something like that?

And also sort of what does it tell us about the past? And then you said you knew a guy who might be able to explain all that for us. and then you said you would tell me all about it after the break, and now it's after the break. Yeah, amazing summary. So I went and talked to this professor named Darren Lahou. I'm a professor of classics and a professor of philosophy at Queen's University, and my research specialization is ancient science and medicine. Wow, he sounds both perfect and a lot like Darius Aquifolius. Yeah, weird coincidence.

but Darren essentially studies what kinds of questions people used to ask themselves in the past. So, like, why do Ramora stop boats? Things that might seem weird or even kind of out there today. Right. So we had a long conversation that I'm going to play for you. And I found it really fascinating because he told me that, you know, despite how weird they might sound on the surface, there's a ton we can learn when we analyze these kind of ancient questions. You know, one of the things that is interesting to me is to ask why I believe.

in the science I believe in. And what's interesting is when you go back in time to a world where a lot of what they believed about nature is, from a modern point of view, false. And yet they had really good reasons for believing it. What does that say about my own good reasons for believing in modern science? And at the same time, how much of the science I believe in now is still going to be true in 300, 400, 500 years. If I treat history as a great big experiment, I have to say maybe not much. I don't know what it'll look like, but the fact that everything I believe about the universe could

be wrong at some fundamental level is kind of humbling. And so I find looking at old science and science that we would now say is really very wrong. Looking at how that becomes plausible when you think your way into it is really revealing of my own understanding of science and my own fallibilities. Yeah, so the thing that really stands out to me more than anything is this discussion of garlic. As part of this weirder discussion of Ramora stopping boats, we learn that, oh, it's just obvious. It's taken for granted that garlic stops magnets from working. Does that idea sound ridiculous to you on the surface? Is that a ridiculous idea? It made me laugh out loud the first time I read it. Okay. And I've always had this kind of general operating principle that the things that make

me laugh should be looked into more seriously. It's a good principle. There's always some truth hiding in there. Yeah. And then I thought, wait, how do I know that's wrong? Hmm. And, you know, I immediately, well, I know how magnets work, and I have a sense of what garlic is and, you know, what its applications are and so on. It's got nothing to do with magnets. Sure. So it's a dumb idea. Right. And then you say, okay, why does Ptolemy or Plutarch think that getting garlic on your magnets is going to negate them? And why do they think it's so obvious? Like, that's the part that grabs me. Exactly.

And I think the reason they think it's so obvious is that they've classified these objects as having a certain kind of property that turns out to be quite closely related. So magnets are sympathetic to iron. They draw iron in towards them. Garlic is used in ancient medicine quite widely as a kind of antipathetic agent. It cuts through certain kinds of humors. It repels certain kinds of things. And so it's got this push-away quality to it. A magnet's got a drawing-in quality to it.

And so you can immediately see that since they're the same kind of thing that work in exactly opposite ways, you maybe shouldn't put them together because you'll have some kind of negation or reaction or something. Yeah. And I guess it's so obvious there's kind of a limited desire to even test it, right? Yeah. I don't know how many lodestones are kicking around in people's houses. and things in antiquity, but I don't imagine there's a lot of them. They're probably reasonably rare and therefore reasonably valuable.

And, you know, if I've got something nice that does cool things and I show it off to my friends, I don't want to break it. How do ideas like this that seem so unquestionably obvious end up totally changing? Like whether we're talking about garlic and magnets or just, you know, big ideas in general? I tend to take a case-by-case approach to this to look at sort of specific. context where it might have happened. But a more general approach is something like what you see in Thomas Coon, who talks about scientific paradigms, which are sort of overarching ways of understanding or explaining the things that go on in the universe. We could be explaining why rocks fall,

and we could be explaining why the moon orbits the Earth, but the explanation for it in Aristotle is a different paradigm than the explanation for it that I would give now. But slowly over time, there are little questions that are annoying, that we can't quite fit into the theory. And at first, we patch that up. This happens with Ptolemaic astronomy. And Ptolemy? Ptolemy is the greatest astronomer before Copernicus. And if you look at the way that the Ptolemaic system worked, where the Earth is at the

center of the universe and all the planets are orbiting around it, that works fine. But over time, you start noticing little problems, little problems, little bits that aren't easily explained necessarily. you have to kind of fudge things in order to make it work. And eventually those become so intolerable that people throw the whole system away and start again. So Copernicus says, no, let's try putting the sun at the center and moving the earth around it. Now, that's a really, there are going to be people pulling their hair out over this when I say this, because it's really too simplified what I've just done. But it gives you an idea of how Coon's theory is supposed to work.

Yeah, the idea is that little problems are in the background. We ignore them for a while. And eventually these little problems get too loud to ignore. and we have to question our basic assumptions. That's it. So is there anything like that today, like places where we have little problems that we might eventually need to pull the whole rug out and sort of change paradigms? I mean, one of the things that we have, you know, one of the big examples I always go back

to is just the fact that we've got in modern physics, one kind of physics for little tiny things and an entirely different kind of physics for great big things. And we can't join the dots between those two. sets of theory. That would be quantum mechanics and general relativity? Exactly. You know, if we're looking at the ways in which electrons behave or photons behave, we go to quantum mechanics, but if we're looking at the way planets behave, we run to general relativity,

and we don't have anything to bridge those two sets of explanations, which as a historian, you look at that situation and you say, either we're going to come up with something really interesting that brings the two things together, or we're going to come up with something really interesting that just gets rid of those two things and has a completely different explanatory framework. But in the meantime, we're just waltzing along with these two different things that don't talk to each other and acting as though there's not really a deep-seated problem there. Yeah. I don't know. Is there anything about the current way we do science that might make it less likely to have to rethink some of these major aspects of our worldview?

Like, we're not exactly running around talking about garlic and magnets anymore. We have a, I mean, modern science is amazing. But at the same time, I don't think we're doing anything qualitatively different from what ancient scientists we're doing in the ways in which we investigate questions. And we can disagree on this. I mean, I have arguments with this among my colleagues, but I don't think we've got anything new going on here. I think we still are using the basic tools of logic, basic tools of empiricism. We're testing different variables. We're isolating variables, you know, all of those approaches are there in the ancient sources. And when you're teaching the history of science, as I do, one of the main things that you have to counter, something you

have to fight against is a general sort of feeling that students have or people in the general public have that in antiquity the solutions were simpler, that people were thinking in simpler terms or something like that. But if you dig into Ptolemaic astronomy or Aristotelian biology, any ancient science, these things are elaborated. by really smart people as fully as they can elaborate them. These theories were really, really deeply complex, even though they're very different from what we now have. It's not that they're simple.

There's nothing simple about any of this. And then I guess the lesson is, if we don't just say, ha, ha, these questions were dumb, we can see how seriously ancient scientists took them. There were just these really different bedrock assumptions about the world, which eventually changed. Yeah.

And it's not like we're definitely going to have one of those pull the rugout moments today. But if we look at ancient science, we can see that it's at least plausible that we might have to question some of our assumptions, even if we're really confident. I would agree with that wholeheartedly. I think about one of the Hippocratic texts called On Ancient Medicine, where the author of that text is it's pretty clear, because we're able to do so much and so successfully, our theories of medicine must be right. And this is the fourth century BC. I mean, I don't think that guy was good at healing people. If I had a choice between my doctor and that person, I'm not choosing that person for pretty much any of my ailments, I don't think.

And yet we have this example of somebody who was really wrong and thought they were right. And so we can't be nearly done yet. There must be some really interesting and major changes to come still, even though we seem to have it pretty well. Yeah. But that, you know, anybody would have said that. at any time in the history of science. And at any time in the history of science, there's going to be more knowledge after you

than there is before. Right. That's absolutely true. It's a nice way to put it, too. I mean, anybody who was ever doing any kind of science at all was always at the cutting edge of modernity. They were the newest thing. As soon as they put their pen down to paper, it was the newest thing being written on

the subject. It was the latest, most modern, you know, cutting-edges stuff. That's true of us. That was true of Ptolemy. And that part of it gives me what I think would be really healthy for all of us, a deep epistemic humility, the feeling that I get when I look at ancient science and see how they are so proud of what they have. And then I'm so impressed by what we have as society is to remember that, as you said, there's so much more future ahead of us than you can imagine.

And who knows, I mean, it would be amazing if we could just see what's going to happen 500 years from now, I think. It'd be incredible. Darren Lehu is the author of What Did the Romans Know? Which gets much deeper into questions like, why did Romans think that garlic breaks magnets? He's also very good at pretending to be a Roman philosopher, and we are very grateful to him for bringing Darius Aquafolius to life. Do you know how much magnets cost?

You would just wreck them. I haven't tried running a bulldozer into a super collider either, but, oh, I'm out of character. This episode was produced by Noam Hassamfeld and me, Bird Pinkerton. It was edited by Brian Resnick with help from A. Hall and Meredith Hodnott, who manages our team. We had sound design and mixing from Christian Ayala and music from Noam. Serena Solan checked our facts, and Manding Nguyen is not stuck in the year 100C.E. And there is no need to rescue her.

Thank you so much to Claire Bubb and Candida Moss for being so generous with their time. and advice on this episode. And thanks to all of you for listening to our show. We literally would not have made 100 episodes without you. If you have a question from the history of science that you think reveals a lot about the past, please email us at Unexplainable at Vox.com. We would love to hear from historians of science, either amateur or professional. And if you're not a historian of science, but you want to tell us what you made of this episode

or of our other 99 episodes, we'd also. really love to hear from you. We got an email the other day that reads, quote, I find myself inspired to go study science, learn and work hard, and conduct my own research one day. This instills in me dreams for my future, of being one of the scientists' podcasts like yours call, or being someone to discover a long-held mystery.

I can't explain how much this means to me, end quote. And honestly, like, I can't explain how much emails like that means. to all of us. They make making this show worthwhile. This podcast and all of Vox is free, in part because of gifts from our readers and listeners. You can go to Vox.com slash give to give today. And Unexplanable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll be back next week with our 101st episode, and the week after that, with our 102nd. And maybe we take a week off.

And then week after that, and the week after that, and then week after that, and then week after that, Let me capture that. Let me capture that. I'm NH-3-000. I'm Bill Gianna Electronica, and this week on Unexplainable. One of the most important breakthroughs of the 26th century has finally allowed us to ask what might be the most important question of all. Who is our universe?

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