Desperately Seeking Symmetry

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Subject to change.

Hey, I'm Latv Nasser.

This is Radio Lab.

And today we're bringing back a classic episode from way back in the Jadd and Robert days.

It starts with an ancient parable, winds its way through a brain scanner, a trick mirror, and a disastrous high school prom night, and somehow ends with the Big Bang.

Here it is.

Wait, you're listening.

You are listening

to Radio Lab.

Radio Lab.

From Ren Lab.

W-N-Y-C.

Rewind.

So you're going to identify the Washington place because I can't remember what you're doing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, three, two, one.

Ready?

I am ready.

But we should tell the audience that we're going to start this, not in our usual studio spot.

Not here here, where we're sitting now.

Here.

Just to explain, this is the Shakespeare Theater in D.C.

Recently, Robert and I were there in front of about 800 folks just trying out some material for the show.

Beginning with this story, which comes from Plato, actually by way of Aristophanes, it's a 2,400-year-old story.

Breaking news, in other words.

Yeah, and it goes like this.

Once upon a time, he says, people were not born separate from each other.

They were born...

entwined, kind of coupled with each other.

So there were boys attached to boys, and there were girls attached to girls, and of course boys and girls together, in a wonderfully intimate ball, and back then we had eight limbs.

There were four on top, four on the bottom, and you didn't have to walk if you didn't want to.

You could roll, and roll we did.

We rolled backwards and we rolled forwards, achieving fantastic speeds that gave us a kind of courage.

And then the courage swelled to pride.

And the pride became arrogance.

And then we decided that we were greater than the gods, and we tried to roll up to heaven and take over heaven and the gods' alarm struck back and Zeus in his fury hurled down lightning bolts and struck everyone in two, into perfect halves.

So all of a sudden, couples who'd been warm and tight and wedged together were now detached and alone and lost and desperate and losing the will to live.

And the gods, seeing what they'd done, worried that humans might not survive or even multiply again.

And of course, they needed humans to give sacrifices and to pay attention to them.

So the gods decided on a few repairs.

Instead of heads facing backwards or out, they would rotate our heads back forward.

They pulled our skin taut and knotted it right here at the belly button.

Genitalia too were moved to the front, so if we wanted to, you know, we could.

And most important,

they left us with a memory.

It was a longing for that original other half of ourselves, the the boy or the girl who used to make us whole.

And that longing is still so deep in all of us, men for men, women for women, men for women for each other, that it has been the lot of humans ever since to travel the world looking for our other half.

And when, says Aristophanes, when one of us meets another, we recognize each other right away.

We just know this.

We're lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy.

We won't get out of each other's sight even for a moment.

These are people, he says, who pass their whole lives together, and yet if you ask them, they could not explain what they desire of each other.

They just

do.

Very nice.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

So here's the thing.

That story...

Got us started on a little journey.

It truly began just thinking about wholeness and oneness and halves looking for each other.

In all varieties of ways.

Mirrors and shapes, relationships, beauty.

The birth of the universe, the nature of life.

All of these things either have a simple, deep beauty

or

not.

I'm Jad Abu Mr.

I'm Robert Colwich.

This is Radiolab.

And today, for this hour, we are

desperately seeking symmetry.

By the way, that was Zoe Keating on Cello.

We'll hear more from her throughout the hour because she's awesome.

All right, Bobby Kay.

Mm-hmm.

Still thinking about Aristophanes.

Okay.

And

do you ever wonder

what actually happens when two people click, when the halves kind of meet?

Meaning what?

You know, you're going through your day.

Maybe you're at a party.

You meet people and you're like, hey, how are you?

How are you?

And they say something, they try and be interesting.

You try and be interesting back.

But in the end, you're like, I don't need to remember that name.

Right, of course.

It's gone.

and then comes along somebody yeah every hundred times

the stars align the world falls away things narrow and you just

click i i know that

but do you ever wonder what actually happens in that moment like when you meet someone that you really get i just i don't think that there's anything that really feels better than that that's lauren sobert she's a neuroscientist at princeton she wonders she's been wondering for a while when i was i don't know maybe eight, and I used to study with my dad.

We would go over things and I remember, like, I didn't understand this one

math problem, and he was explaining it to me.

And all of a sudden, I got it.

And I started to cry, and he got really nervous because I was crying.

Why were you crying?

Because I was so excited that I

finally got it.

That's my first memory of really like being excited about the intensity of understanding.

So fast forward 20 years, Lauren is at Princeton and in the basement of her building.

Here, can you just tell me where we are?

We are in the FNRI facilities in Green Hall at Princeton University.

They've got this giant brain scanner.

Looks like an airplane engine.

More like a donut.

You can go a doughnut.

And as you know, with the scanner, you can put people in it and have them do tasks.

Think a thought or

sing a song or watch a movie.

And then the researchers can see into their brain, you know, without having to cut in there.

And Lauren got it into her head: could I use use this big donut to investigate the clicking question?

So is the question when things click what clicks?

What clicks.

And if we can know what clicks, can we learn how to

make it click

more?

So one day last year, Lauren got into the brain scanner.

I sort of like it in there.

And she told this story.

Can you just tell me that story?

Well, it's a 15-minute.

So I told the story.

I've ever actually told you the whole thing.

Without any sort of rehearsal.

Fully.

I think maybe 40.

Well, 27 times.

Something under 30.

Under 30 times.

I'm going to tell it one more time for everybody else.

Yeah.

To play along.

So the story is about her prom.

So Lauren is in high school, and this guy that she doesn't really like asked her to go to the prom.

Pretty awkward.

But she's like,

okay.

You know, didn't know what to say.

Now, subsequent to being asked by the first guy, she actually falls for real for a second guy, guy number two.

We just liked each other.

Clear.

So now she has a situation because she likes the second guy, said yes to the first guy.

And he still wants to be the date.

He wants to be with her.

Yeah, oddly enough, he still wants to go with her.

So she ends up going with guy number one.

So we get to the prom, and guy number two, her boyfriend, shows up drunk.

Very drunk.

Punches fly, it gets messy.

So she drags guy number two, her boyfriend, out to the parking lot.

But on the way to the car, he trips and falls directly on his face.

Right onto his face.

Right onto his face.

On the concrete.

And he starts bleeding.

Bloody nose.

Profusely.

So she's like, oh, give me your keys.

I'm going to drive.

I'll drive your car.

And she doesn't have a license, but he can't drive.

Right.

So she drives them both out of the parking lot.

A couple minutes later, they come upon an accident.

In the street?

Yeah, it's right there.

Some cars have gotten into a thing.

So they're rolling up to it.

I get distracted.

And she crashes into the accident that had already happened.

And I'm going very, very slowly.

And it's just that the police were already there and they like watched this.

So the officer walks up, sees her, no license, sees this dude who's all bloody and messy and was like, all right, give me your registration.

She thinks she's going to jail.

But here is where fate steps in.

As the officer is walking back to his car with her registration, a wind,

one of those, kicks up.

blows the registration out of the officer's hands.

He can't find it.

And he has no choice but to let her go.

So then I just left.

So that was the story that forms the basis of the frustration.

Okay, that is the story that forms the basis of the fresh.

Okay, so now let's rewind.

So anyhow, she told that story in the scanner.

All the while the scanner snapped pictures of her brain.

Moment to moment.

Then she got a bunch of other people put them in the scanner and have the scanner snap pictures of their brain.

As they're listening to the story.

You with me so far?

Yep.

Next, she compared brains.

Okay, so here I can show you.

Lauren showed us brain scans where she divided each brain into thousands.

Of tiny little squares.

That we call voxels.

Thousands?

Thousands.

Yeah.

So then what we can do is we can take one voxel in one brain and directly compare it to the same exact voxel in the other brain.

Shut up, wow.

And we do this across the entire brain.

And this...

is where things get interesting when people really got her story.

Because she had run them through all these tests to see if they could remember the different chapters, the words she used.

So she was checking to see how well they listened.

Yeah, she would have them kind of recall the story.

Okay, some were really good at recalling, others not so much.

Now, the people that did well, like really well, she found that as they were listening to her story, their brain would literally begin to mirror hers.

All the little voxels in their head would start to sync up with all the little voxels in her head.

So they're so they're just listening like anyone listens, they're just hearing what she's saying.

I get that.

No.

No.

Let me put it to you a different way.

You're right.

I mean, right now, you and I, our voxels, are mirroring each other.

Yeah.

You know,

like we're both speaking English.

Yeah.

So we can assume, say, 20%.

At least.

I would go 23, 24.

Let's say 24.

Okay.

But let's say you bump it up to 30.

Maybe bump it up to 35.

Well, let's get a little higher.

40, 42, 48, 49.

I understood you at a 50% level.

But let's say we get to 50%, even 60.

There's a certain point at which something happens, where it's no longer me just describing an experience to you.

It's you actually having the experience, you know?

Ah, yeah.

Like, you know that the difference between explanation and experience is like the Grand Canyon, right?

Well, she's found a way to quantify the gap.

So when I'm sitting there listening to Meryl Streep, I'm all Meryl, inside, outside, and all around.

That's 100% Meryl.

Well, I'm listening.

That's 100% Meryl Streep.

She is not listening to this.

You were saying.

I'll give you an example of what I was just saying.

Here, let me show you.

So while I was in Lauren's office, she showed me this particular slide of her results.

So on this side, we have this comprehension rank.

And what that means...

Basically, it was a graph.

And on one axis, she had how much they actually understood the story and could recall it.

And on the other axis, she had how much their brain synced up with hers, which is sort of like how much they experienced the story.

What are these marks, by the way?

Are these music?

Yeah, no, sorry about the mark.

Wait, these are just background.

Oh, these are individual subjects.

I see.

So if you take out this one outlier, actually.

She pointed to this one subject who was way on one side of the graph.

So that person just didn't get your story at all.

No, this person.

Actually, that person did understand her story, scored really nice on comprehension, but just didn't sync up with her brain at all.

This person.

this

person,

I taste, well,

so this is a a little interesting to admit.

I know this person.

You know this person?

I know this person.

Yeah.

So that person, I'm almost positive, is her fiancé.

Yeah, it was, there were some fights.

In jest or for real?

I mean, for real.

I don't think he was actually paying attention.

But this one up here.

She pointed to another subject all the way on the other side of the graph who is a super brain coupling master.

Was a girl in undergrad who I had never met before.

And

her brain coupled with my brain was twice as much as everybody else.

I mean, really just like...

I contacted her after because I wanted to like have lunch with her and just see if we're the same person or not.

And?

And you never got back to me.

What?

I know.

It's not really.

It was sort of the end of their semester and I think she might have been away.

In the weeks after I spoke with Lauren, we emailed a few times and I kept asking her.

I was like, so what about that girl?

The one who knew everything.

Yeah, who knew?

Like, how do you explain the connection?

Is it a connection?

Let's go meet her.

Come on, come on, come on.

She didn't want to?

No, she did, actually.

And we started referring to the girl girl in email as a BD.

BD, meaning what?

Meaning brain double.

BD BD.

BD BD BDB.

BDB.

Anyhow, eventually, after two weeks of constant emailing and searching, BD turns up and agrees to meet.

The meeting took place on a sunny Tuesday afternoon at Princeton, and I...

missed it because I was on the wrong train.

When I finally get there, BD has come and gone.

So you never laid eyes on BD.

I did not.

But I talked to Lauren right after she had.

It was weird.

Really?

We sat down on a bench and she gave me the scoop.

Okay, you seem a little shaken.

Yeah, it was a strange experience.

First thing she tells me is that the mystery girl's name

is her name.

Lauren, my name as well.

She was Lauren and you were Lauren?

Yes, we're both named Lauren.

Wow.

I know, it's weird, but

Lauren's out there.

I know, but still, that's so weird.

At this point, I'm like,

I mean, this is like an Aristophanes whopper here, folks.

That's what I was thinking.

And that's what Lauren told me that she had been expecting, too.

Yeah.

Beforehand.

I was expecting her to come in and just like

be me.

And

when she showed up, was she you?

No.

Not at all.

Yeah.

Earlier, they admitted a coffee shop.

And since I'd missed the whole thing, I was very lucky that Laura number one had recorded the meeting on her laptop.

Okay, so I want to know Did you where did you grow up?

I grew up in Vancouver, BC.

In Vancouver.

Yeah.

Lauren Wen's theory was that they would have a common background.

Or a common something that would explain the symmetry between them.

But what you hear

is Lauren Wand looking for points of connection and

okay.

Do you have prom in Canada?

Is that a stupid question?

Uh, well, we do.

I actually couldn't go to mine.

You didn't go to to your prom?

Yeah.

Okay.

Um.

I wish I could have.

Did you...

Did you have like significant relationships in high school?

No.

No, not at all.

I went to an all-girls' school.

You went to an all-girls school?

Yeah.

Did you have to wear uniforms?

Yeah.

Was it like Kathleen?

In the end?

There was not one thing they had in common, except their names and...

Princeton.

You thought that this was going to be, you know, a...

Something, I don't know.

Maybe your premise is wrong.

What do you mean?

Well,

actually, I snuck up to Columbia University and I asked a neuroscientist about this, actually.

When did you do that?

While you were in Princeton, I was on the subway going up to see Joy Hurt.

Hi.

Hi.

What?

Nice to meet you.

You went behind my back.

What happened is I said to her, look, we have this pretty great paper, and she agreed.

It was a wonderful paper.

I said, it shows these two women who seem to be in such lockstep.

Wouldn't you suppose that the two of them, if they ever met, would become friendly?

Or have some connection.

Yeah.

Would you come to the same conclusion if yours and my heartbeats were exactly the same?

Depends on the circumstances.

If it was a beautiful night and a sinking moon in Venice, maybe.

If...

You have elaborated the story beyond my question.

Say your heartbeat is about 62 beats per minute.

Say mine was exactly 62 62 beats per minute.

Would you say that we were more in sync than if mine was 72 beats per minute?

That you and I were more soulmates?

No, probably not.

I'd want to, but I don't know if I.

You see, I would want to.

Don't you want to?

When you see synchrony between individuals.

Well, yes, but I'm saying that I think that the conclusion doesn't follow from the data.

Joyce says it's equally possible that...

Lauren, too, is just an extraordinarily good listener.

Hello?

Hey.

Hey, can you hear me okay?

Yeah, yeah, I can hear you.

In fact, when I finally got Lauren 2 on the phone,

she did tell me that she is one of those people that when she hears a story, she just falls in.

To the point where somebody can be like, Lauren!

Lauren!

And I don't hear it because I'm so focused on the book.

Yeah.

How do I explain it?

So, have you ever done any sports?

Soccer a little bit, yeah.

Do you ever find that sometimes when you're playing soccer, you are so into the game and just reacting or whatever that you kind of lose track of yourself for a little bit?

Yeah, it's like a dream state, almost.

Yeah, like a dream state.

I definitely have that happen when I'm doing sports, but I also sometimes have it happen when I read.

Even so, do you think that you and Lauren One will become friends?

Um,

I

honestly,

probably

not no

um I mean we're just

I just I just don't I wouldn't I just want it

but she's you

but not you don't you want to hang out with her?

Don't you need to know her?

Okay, Jen.

Thank you very much.

Why don't you just sit down just for a second?

We're gonna play a little

bit.

Come on.

I think we can just repair all the damage that has just occurred to your sensitive psyche.

Just listen, and we'll be right back.

Chirality, tick 30.

Thousand.

Yay, I'm Chad Abumrod.

I'm Robert Krolwich.

This is Radio Lab, and today we are desperately seeking symmetry.

And thus far we are failing desperately.

Because maybe, maybe, you know, if we took, if we rejiggered our whole approach because symmetry you know is really about love.

No, it's

it's what you know we're changing the subject now.

It's about the way things look when they're flipped around or turned or rotated and this is where it gets really interesting reflected

reflected yes reflected because there was a math reflected yes there was a mathematician at Oxford University named Charles Lutwidge Dotson there's a mathy name for you.

Well he had a different name as it happens.

What?

Lewis Carroll.

Oh, like the Alice in Wonderland dude?

The Alice in Wonderland dude.

He was a mathematician.

He was.

I really didn't know that.

Did you know that he wrote another book called Through the Looking Glass?

Truthfully, I didn't know they were different books.

You know very little in this particular section of our book.

I really don't.

But there's a part of the book where Alice is standing in her room

talking to her cat.

Now, if you'll only attend, Kitty, and not talk so much, I'll tell you all about my ideas about Looking Glass House.

This is Natasha Gostwick reading, and in this section of the book, Alice is telling her cat, let's take a look at the difference between our world and that world right there, in the mirror.

That's just the same as our drawing room, only the things go the other way.

The books are something like our books, only the words go the wrong way.

I know that because I've held up one of our books to the glass, and then they hold up one in the other room.

How would you like to live in a looking glass house, Kitty?

I wonder if they give you milk in there.

Perhaps looking glass milk isn't good to drink.

Perhaps mirror milk isn't good to drink, she says.

Why are you talking like that?

What does that even mean?

Well, you just stick with me on this.

I think I will make it perfectly clear.

Okay.

This is a very, as it turns out, difficult scientific question.

Yes, they call it a chirality.

This is Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Neil, N-E-I-L.

DeGrasse, small D-E, capital G-R-A-S-S-E, Tyson.

He's an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History.

Also, he's the director of the Hayden Planetarium.

Cool.

And what is chirality?

Well, it's when you make a molecule.

There's no rule or law that says it has to be symmetric.

Neil says if you zoom into that bowl of milk, what you're going to find is just chains of atoms that are stuck together in a very particular shape.

And that shape, it could curl in a particular way.

So for example, if you have a spring and you turn your finger in the direction the spring,

like a coil.

A coil, but like the spring out of your click pen.

Pull out that spring.

All right, I mean, I have a pen right here.

Under your pen, pull it out.

And I got the spring out.

Here we go.

And look at the way the spring turns.

Looking at the spring.

And move your finger in the direction it turns.

I am moving my finger.

It's turning clockwise.

Clockwise.

All the way up to the top.

Okay.

That spring is that way in its life.

Whether it's right side up or upside down.

Doesn't matter.

It's always clockwise.

But if you had a mirror, Jad, do you happen to have something?

Do I have a mirror?

No.

Or take your phone, which has a reflected

shiny thing.

Okay.

Put your spring in front of the shiny surface of the phone.

Trace the spring with your finger and tell me which direction is your finger going.

Clockwise.

No.

We already did this.

In the reflection.

Oh.

In the phone.

It's kind of hard to tell, but in the phone.

It's going the opposite way.

Yes.

Counterclockwise.

Exactly.

And so now you have two oppositely turned springs.

You cannot turn one into the other.

They're built differently, yet they are curiously identical.

So, since molecules are just sequences of atoms, imagine a molecule that has that shape.

If you put that molecule in front of a mirror, just the same as the spring, you've got now two molecules built differently, but curiously identical.

Kind of like your right hand and your left hand.

Your left hand and your right hand are related by a mirror image.

It's the same thing with these molecules.

This is Marcelo Gleiser.

He's a physicist at Dartmouth College.

And according to Marcelo, this is how scientists talk about molecules.

They call them right.

Sometimes we call it handedness, sometimes we get a little more fancy and we call it chirality because chiral chiros in Greek means hand.

And Marcelo says, if you look at pebbles or granite or cement, inanimate stuff, when you look at the shape of things inside, it's a mixture of the two.

50% left-handed, 50% right-handed.

However, if you look at all the proteins of living things, they are always left-handed and no right-handed at all.

Really?

Life has chosen one over the other.

Life as we know it has chosen.

You mean when scientists look inside of living things,

they always see it.

the molecules are pointing one way?

Yeah.

Right.

So somehow, and this is what's really amazing, somehow life is choosing a very specific shape for the molecules to make up stuff.

That's correct.

When you say life has chosen,

let's take that sentence apart.

Life meaning everything that is that we know of on Earth.

Every living thing.

Hence, my phrase, life as we know it.

Everything.

That's what that means.

The littlest things to the blue whale.

That would be as we know it.

The littlest...

Tiniest thing to the tree, the biggest tree, the giant sequoia.

That would be as we know it.

Every protein in you, dogs trees you name it is filled with left-handed building blocks yes it's called the chirality of life the chirality of life life my friend is left-handed hmm that's pretty that's uh well it feels cool but uh let me just uh

like so what

i mean i don't want to put it bluntly but i mean like well other than the sheer surprise of having everything in life being shaped you know and it's surprising but i mean what does it have to do with my life?

Well, this

life is

a matter of fact.

This brings us back to the mirror mystery in Alice and the mirror milk.

No, no.

Because you just told me that the milk is left-handed, because milk is an organic.

It's a living cow, yeah.

Remember you said that?

Life is lefty.

Mm-hmm.

So there can't be any right-handed milks, so the mirror milk doesn't exist.

Well, that's because I forgot to tell you that scientists all the time manufacture mirror molecules.

They do?

Yeah, yeah.

They go into their laboratories and they synthetically make mirror molecules of all kinds of things.

Can they do milk?

Mirror milk?

I don't know about milk in particular, but I do know that when I talked to an Oxford professor, Marcus de Satoy,

he told me...

If you take the atoms which built caraway seeds, which is the spice they use in rye bread, take a mirror image of them, suddenly you get something which tastes of spearmint.

Huh.

It's what's put on Wriggly Spearmint gum.

And in fact, there are some very dramatic examples of this, not just where the taste changes, but

listeners might remember a story about the thalidomide drug.

In 1958, a West German pharmaceutical firm began marketing a new drug.

This is a new spot from the early 1960s.

A sedative so effective and apparently harmless, it quickly became one of the most widely used and prescribed drugs in West Europe.

Thalidomide.

Before long, pregnant women started taking it as a way to calm morning sickness.

And most of us, well, we know what happened next.

Every woman, President Kennedy in a press conference in this country, I think, must be aware that it's most important that they do not take this drug, that they turn it in.

Every citizen, of course, should be aware of the hazards.

All in all, more than 12,000 children were born with arms and legs that were shortened or deformed or completely missing.

The strange thing, according to Marcus, is that we now know

that when they first made thalidomide, it was all one-handed.

Let's say it was left-handed.

Yeah.

And it did actually cure morning sickness.

And was completely harmless.

But somewhere along the way, thalidomide flip.

We don't know whether this was in the drug making process or after, but we do know.

Its mirror image was incredibly poisonous.

So you know what this means, Jan?

What?

That in a show about symmetry, what we've just discovered is that life itself is actually deeply asymmetric.

Yeah.

Unlike love, where we started the program back with Aristophanes.

When it comes to life, you don't want to meet the other half.

Stay away, mirror.

Stay away.

Anyhow.

That's, well, enough about mirrors.

No, no, no, no.

No, no.

I think we can take this another step further.

There is no further step.

No, there is.

I mean, because something about this chemistry reflections thing

resonates for me with the actual experience of standing in front of a mirror.

How?

Well, you know, you look at that guy and you're like, eh.

Oof.

I mean, we talked about this on stage, actually, in D.C.

at the Shakespeare Theater.

Remember when I asked you that personal question?

Oh, yeah.

Do we want to do that?

Oh, yes, we do.

Psychologically, let me ask.

Psychologically, do you enjoy looking in the mirror?

Is that a question you want to ask me in front of...

That's a private question, I feel.

Surely you know, though, that

the difference between your true self and your mirror self is not trivial.

My true...

What does he mean by my true self?

I don't know.

Well, I'm going to tell you the story now about a guy named John Walter.

Oh, the little mustache from Baltimore, from the movies.

No, that's John Waters.

Walter.

He's a computer programmer in New Rochelle, paid him a visit recently.

Because back when he was in college, he sort of kind of switched places with the guy in the mirror.

It was many years ago.

How old were you?

I was 19.

19.

So it was a long time ago.

We're talking late 70s here.

But I

had already had some issues with the mirror.

So let me set this up up for you.

The thing to know about John is that as a kid, he had a tough time, like so many of us.

He would get bullied, beaten up on the playground.

It was no better when he got into his teens.

And as a 19-year-old, his social life consisted of a series of stinging humiliations like the following.

I remember at the time there was a lot of kids hanging out.

You know, there was a crew of people, like, you know, 20, 30, 40 kids would gather together at the aqueduct, beautiful woods of the aqueduct, and go drink beers and smoke cigarettes, you know.

I walked into the group, like, yo, what's up?

And it's like, yeah, whatever.

Roundly rejected.

And that, according to John, was normal.

That's fine.

That was normal.

That's normal.

Very normal.

Like, people would say, what's that guy doing here?

Yeah.

Maybe he was like wearing the wrong plaid pants or had like, you know, mismatched socks.

They might be some.

Whatever.

Don't you emphasize?

Of course.

Nobody wants to be 19 and be the yucky person.

Of course, I would emphasize.

However, the story that will follow centers on a revelation that John had that began just as he was about to start his summer job.

For Con Ed, I was working for them.

As a painter.

And I had some pictures taken for Con Ed.

These were ID photos that you had.

Yeah, it was an ID camera that had four lenses.

So when they took the negative, it was four of me.

Boom, boom, boom, boom.

Like little squares?

Little squares.

And I remember looking over and

going,

why do I look so weird?

Why do I look so weird?

Why do I look at

so weird why do I look so weird because here's the thing I mean the John in the pictures was not the John that he knew himself to be that John was kind of timid nerdy not cool why do I look so weird in pictures

I look fine what do you mean you look fine how do you know you look fine well I thought I looked fine in the mirror you know when I looked at myself in the mirror things on the left go to the right things on the right go to the left wait a second that's when it hit him

what what hit him

it's the hair part

it it

it's the what it's the hair part

it's the what it's the hair part i could do this all night it's the hair part what does that mean it's the hair i hear it i hear it i'm like what does that mean it's the hair part well in the picture i saw a guy with a right hair part in the mirror i seen a guy with a left hair part essentially John,

which side of my hair parted on?

Your left.

You're left.

My left.

Okay.

And John thought he was a lefty, too.

He would stand in front of the mirror and the mirror would tell him he was parting it to the left.

But in fact, he was parting it to the right in real life.

Now the lefty guy in the mirror, he liked that guy.

I was fine with that guy.

He was cool.

There was nothing wrong with him.

But he realized he was the only person seeing that guy.

So he thought, oh, let me put my hair on the other side.

Let me essentially swap real me for mirror me.

It was one of these things where, yeah, that looks really weird in the mirror, but I betch it looks good in real life.

Let me go find out.

So, what did you do?

Well, that night.

He goes back to the aqueduct.

Same posse there as before.

I mean, that same group, interestingly enough, had beat the crap out of me like three years earlier when I was in like ninth grade.

But there he was now with his hair parted on the left.

He says, This time.

Things were different.

Somebody offered him a beer.

I was like, wow.

But the thing that I knew made it better was when I left,

I got goodbyes.

Come on, come on.

I look for the first time.

This is ridiculous that you would tell me a story about a man who is having social failures universally, shifts his hair over

and is remade.

This is like...

Look, it's his experience.

This is very

easy to dismiss.

But I'm going to win you over.

Are you ready?

I'm going to win you over.

You're not.

You're ready for this?

I don't think you're ready.

Are you ready?

You are asking me to be broadcasting.

I'm going to show you a picture right now.

All right.

Okay.

Have a look at.

Okay.

Who is that?

It's Abraham Lincoln.

Our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln.

Just stare at him, Robert.

Take him in.

Take him deep into your consciousness.

By the way, this next part, you can see the pictures at radiolab.org.

It's worth checking out.

His eyes, his nose, his mouth.

Pay attention particularly to the hair part.

Okay?

Now, look what happens when you flip Abraham.

Oh, that.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

Is this the same picture?

It's the same picture.

Go back to the other picture.

Go.

All right.

There's Abe.

Now do the other one.

You see?

That's so weird.

Now, here's the thing.

This is what Abraham Lincoln would have seen when he looked in the mirror.

He would have seen this guy, not the other guy, the one we all see.

Huh.

So there's something going on here.

Would you not at least acknowledge me that you're not going to be able to do that?

I find this vaguely plausible.

Yes.

Okay.

With your permission, Mr.

Sinek, I will now rejoin John.

Who's about to

get married and have three babies because his hair is bad?

He says,

after he switched his part.

It just kept getting better and better and better all summer long.

He was suddenly invited to all of these parties by the very same people that used to beat him up.

And for the first time, he says, I was clearly one of them.

Now, whether or not you buy that this is in fact because of his hair, that's on you, okay?

But let's fast forward just a little bit.

The next summer.

This would have been 1979.

Yeah, 1979.

John's sitting in front of the TV and on comes.

Good evening.

This is a special night for me.

The President.

Jimmy Carter.

Making a speech about how our nation is in a deep funk.

Why have we not been able to get together as a nation to resolve our serious energy problem?

The Malays speech, you know, that infamous countries in Malays.

It's clear that the true problems of our nation are much deeper.

Deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages.

Deeper even than inflation or recession.

Now, as you know, I'm sure you remember, a lot of people would criticize Jimmy Carter for making the speech because he's up there admitting flaws and they were like, come on, Mr.

President, don't be weak.

Man up.

John, meanwhile, is sitting in front of the TV and he's thinking, dude, you got to change your hair part.

And so I wrote him.

You wrote to him?

I wrote to him.

Wait, wait, so you said.

Wait, well, what is...

Why?

Why?

I think I just said, I think you should change your hair parted on the left.

I did myself and found it to be much more powerful,

much more successful.

And about six.

Did you have that letter?

I so wish I did.

I don't have it.

And then about six weeks later, boom, he switched.

He switched.

No, he didn't.

John wrote him a letter and President Carter switched.

Now, it might not have been John's letter that did it.

You have no evidence.

Think about how much

what's involved in a president switching his hair.

There are focus groups, there are prayer meetings.

There's so much thought that goes into this.

Did anyone actually record this?

Yes.

They did?

I will now read you a journalistic account from No.

Periodical.

Well, there you go.

Washington.

Right there.

You see?

Bam.

Right there.

Oh, man.

Newsweek, May 7th, 1979.

At first, photographers thought they had their negatives reversed, but no.

Jimmy Carter has changed the part of his hair from the right side to the left.

The Washington Press Corps demanded an explanation.

But remember that, you you know, as opposed to John, who changes his hair and then all the girls give him beers, this guy, he was running against a luxuriantly haired man,

Reagan, and it didn't matter.

So he just, you know, he got crushed.

All right, you know what?

Forget

the executive branch.

Stay with me now.

I was with John, and he was showing me pictures of congressmen and of celebrities, and I noticed something peeking out at the bottom of the pile.

I see peeking out underneath the stack of photos as a Superman.

Yeah.

He showed me a picture of Superman looking mighty in his Superman suit.

Notice how he parts his hair.

Yeah, it's a little bit on there on that side, yeah.

Now.

This is Clark Kent

with it on the right.

And as we know from the movies, Clark Kent is fumbling, he's sort of a dork.

I mean, I was at first really nervous about tonight.

So somebody who made that movie maybe explicitly, intuitively understood something about the difference.

That maybe the right part said one thing about Clark Kent, the left part said something about Superman.

In fact, there is a scene in the movie where Clark Kent's running down an alley.

He's about to turn into Superman.

He pulls his shirt open to reveal the S, and literally mid-stride, his hair goes

and turns from the right to the left.

So.

You're saying that sophisticated popular cultural motion picture manufacturers and and at least two presidents have been persuaded to this position.

At this very moment, on a Saturday night, that is what I'm saying.

All right.

Well, for argument's sake, then, what would you say, I hate to get into this any deeper,

explains the difference between putting the power of your hair on the left hand or the right hand?

Well, if you ask John, what he'll say is that the left hand hair part emphasizes strength and logic because it draws your attention to the logical, more masculine side of your face, your brain, because it's a left-brain kind of thing, but I don't really know.

So I decided I would actually take this seriously and figure out how to feel about it.

So I called up this guy.

Good idea.

It's Mike.

His name is Mike Nichols.

Oh, from the graduate.

Very good.

A psychology professor in Australia.

He's an expert in symmetry.

That Mike Nichols.

Yes, that guy.

I ran him through John's theory.

Have you ever seen the Superman movies?

Some of the earlier ones, I think.

You know how Clark Kent's hair is parted to the right?

But then every time he ties in Superman, he's having a little bit of a skin.

So I ran him through the whole thing.

You know, Clark's on on the right, maybe he's weak, Superman on the left, maybe he's stronger, more assertive.

Right.

Is there anything to that?

Anything at all?

Yeah, I mean, possibly, you know.

I'll have to.

But.

He did say this, which is interesting.

In focusing on the left, John may be picking up on a particular bias that we human beings have to our left side.

For instance, here's an experiment that he and his colleagues did.

Take a snapshot of someone's face at baseline when they're showing no emotion.

Blank face.

And then get them to try to look as happy or as sad as they could.

Take happy guy and overlay him onto no expression guy.

And almost like a contour map, you could actually look at the amount of change.

amount of muscle movement that had occurred.

What you will see, if you measure the muscle movement in millimeters on each side of the face, you'll see that the smile curves a few extra millimeters on the left side of the face.

He says this is nearly always the case, always on the left side.

What it's really telling you is that when somebody smiles or when they frown or whatever, they're doing it slightly more strongly on the left side of the face.

Now if this is the case that our left side is sort of saying more emotionally than our right side, then if you think about the mirror, it's kind of a discombobulating thing, you know, because it's taking your left, which is sort of broadcasting emotion, flipping it to your right, you're seeing yourself, you're all mixed up.

You don't know which part of you is where.

So you're saying, like, because I tend to address you with my attention on your left side, unbeknownst to me, and your left side is actually flipped over to your right side.

I don't, it's a where are we sort of.

Exactly.

But John has developed a solution to this problem.

Take this one apart.

He now makes and sells his own very special mirrors right out of his home.

And is this where you make the mirrors?

Everything that goes into the mirror is made here.

You see here, this is the machine that cuts the mirror.

He buys these giant sheets of reflective glass and he slices them into little pieces.

Clunk.

And then I snap it.

Now for each mirror, this is the key.

He uses two pieces of mirror glass instead of one.

What he'll do is he'll take these two pieces and he'll place them together at right angles.

Two mirrors at right angles.

Like exactly at right angles.

It has to be 90.00 degrees.

And let's just push this up a little bit.

That's still not enough.

I think it's when he finally gets it right, which can take hours, what he'll have is this V-shaped mirror.

He'll stand it up, put it in a box, and then voila, what you have is a mirror that shows you a mirror image of a mirror image of you.

takes the normally flipped guy that you'd see in the mirror, re-flips him, so that what you are seeing is essentially, well, for the first time in a mirror, you see yourself as other people see you.

Okay, so there you go.

So, what is this that you have in your hand?

This is a true mirror.

This is the 12-inch model.

And so, when you like

touch your right eye,

see, it's actually on the right side.

Oh, my God.

Isn't that crazy?

That's crazy.

It is surprisingly weird to see yourself this way.

I feel like my nose is going the wrong way.

Yeah.

I never knew my nose went that way.

And this little flare in my eyebrows is on the wrong side.

Or the right right side, as it were.

John claims that many a fair number, I probably would put you in this bunch, my co-host, when they stand in front of this mirror, they

freak out, many of them, because it's just their perception is shaken up a little bit.

In fact, he sometimes takes his mirrors to these festivals and will sort of set them up and have people look at themselves and then fill out comment cards afterwards.

You know, I mean, if you look at some of the comments, you know, it's like

a person like they're a monster.

I am a monster in your mirror.

What did he say?

I am a

monster in your mirror.

To Break We Go.

If you want any more information on anything you heard, go to our website, Radiolab.org.

Or if you want to see those incredible pictures of Abe Lincoln, that's where they are.

That's right.

And subscribe to our podcast there as well.

Okay, hey, I'm Jadab Umran.

I'm Robert Krulwich.

This is Radiolab, and today...

We're still desperately looking, seeking symmetry, as you say.

Not well.

We have looked at love.

Failed.

Looked at brains.

Failed.

Looked at mirrors.

Failed.

The chemistry of life.

So we thought, well, for the last stop on this trip, if we were to go anywhere to find or look for deep unity, a deep oneness and symmetry, maybe...

The beginning.

Yeah.

Of everything.

Moment zero.

So I found ourselves a physicist.

Again, it's Neil deGrasse Tyson.

I began with a very,

very basic question.

If you look at me and I look at you and you seem to be made of stuff and I seem to be made of stuff and here we are and here are tables and chairs.

Is it a surprise to you in some deep way that we are all here made of stuff?

Yes, it's not so much.

Surprise understates it.

It's shocking, really.

It's shocking.

Huh.

What is what is shocking?

That there's any matter in the universe at all.

Meaning that this conversation shouldn't be happening.

No, it's way deeper than the mouth.

Thank you.

It's deeper than just whether or not we'd be having this conversation now.

It's whether or not any of this would exist.

Earth, the galaxy, and the like.

Okay, so if you go back 13.7 billion years ago, ago...

That's Marcelo Gleiser again, the physicist.

And he says, if you roll back the history of the universe...

No more stars, no molecules, no atoms.

If you play the movie backwards now...

All the way to the beginning.

Just after...

You know.

The Big Bang, you have what we call a primeval soup.

This soup was kind of...

Actually, it was made of light.

Universe of light.

Very high energy.

And out of this energy, this heat these interactions you suddenly get

what the hell is that these are belches jad belches belches of matter

the light is doing this yes this is the what a equals mc squared is all about because energy is just a form of matter and vice versa i feel like i should know what you're talking about but i i don't okay let's let's start let's start a little simpler there's light all around us we're in a studio it's visible light so this light

has no mass, has energy.

E but no M.

Crank up the energy of the light, go to ultraviolet.

X-rays, there's a point in X-rays where you have a high enough X-ray photon, it will spontaneously

turn into a particle.

Electrons, in fact.

Oh, so you're saying if you crank up the E, the energy of the light, high enough, it'll suddenly just turn into mass?

That's correct.

So, Jad, just pictured the soup really intensely hot

and it's belching out matter.

You know, electrons zooming around.

Protons, quarks, neutrons, neutrinos.

Continuously churning,

churning,

churning.

Over time, all that matter clumps together in more and more complex forms until you finally get us.

Sounds very simple.

Doesn't it, Chad?

Yes.

But there's a butt coming.

I can smell it.

But, and here's the big butt.

Back in 1928, 1929, there was this physicist, really young guy, Paul Dirac.

He's doing some math and he's thinking about this whole business of turning light into matter.

Okay.

Now he's puzzled by something.

What?

There is a law in physics called the law of conservation of charge, which simply means this.

I mean, it rolls off your tongue quite nicely.

Doesn't it?

It does.

So here's what it means.

Whenever you create something, if it beginning you have zero electric charge, at the end you have to have zero electric charge too.

That is, you cannot create electric charge.

You have to keep the balance.

If you make something in the universe that has a positive charge or a negative charge, make an electron, right?

Just make one.

Right now?

Yeah.

Gone.

That electron has a, you remember this from eighth grade, a negative one.

Negative one, baby.

You make, make two electrons.

There we go.

Now make three electrons.

Woo!

Negative three.

Now, if the universe is to stay in balance, you need to have something that has a positive charge.

You've got three minuses on one side, and you have nothing on the other side.

Wait a second.

If this is true, how would you even make an electron?

The sheer fact of creating an electron puts it out of balance.

The fundamental story here is wrong.

Well, no.

Paul Dirac thought, well, how about this?

What if every time you created an electron, you created an anti-electron?

What?

Every particle could have an equal but opposite anti-particle.

That is, a particle that looks very much the same, but essentially its electric charge is reversed.

It would look the same, like really looking at the same.

Yes, you'd have to measure their properties to know that they were different.

Is it a mirror image?

You might think of it as a mirror image.

There's a thing called quantum spin, and it would be spinning the opposite way.

But charge is the most obvious difference.

For example, the antimatter cousin of the electron.

Because the electron is a negative charge.

This little guy should have a positive charge.

Exactly.

But in every other way, it would be the same.

Right.

And no one ever seen one.

He just thought that there probably would be one.

Yes.

And why did he think this?

Math.

Math.

Math.

It was a solution to his equations.

And that's the beauty of theoretical physics.

By solving equations, you can sometimes find out about the world.

And then, yes, a few years later,

they found the positron.

The antimatter version of the electron.

Oh.

Yeah, no, it's deep.

It's deep.

How did they do that?

Did they actually see it?

Well, particles,

you know, they're very tiny, right you can't really see them so what you do is uh you you create little systems in the laboratory you get like a vapor and you put the vapor in a tank he says and when the electron or the anti-electron shoots through the vapor the particle destabilizes the vapor and makes little bubbles okay

you can see these little bubbles appearing out of nothing wow serious really an amazing thing

So you can't see the particle itself, but you can see its shadow.

It's road trip.

It's road trip.

Yeah.

So then he says, okay, imagine you get this little piece of light and you heat it up really hot so that it

spawns, well, as we learned, not one particle, but two.

Matter-antimatter pair.

Put them in the vapor tank.

And you put a magnet in there, you can tell if it's going to the left or to the right, if it's a positive or a negative charge.

Wow.

Very cool.

It is cool.

You see two particle tracks that each curl opposite directions, and if they have the same rate of curl, that means they have the same mass.

So, if we go back to our picture of the early universe of the soup, which and you named all those particles, does that mean that for every particle that you name, there is its opposite floating around there as well?

Exactly.

You have electrons, anti-electrons, neutron, anti-neutron, proton, anti-proton.

This is all very beautiful, and you'd say, Great, I have a very democratic universe, you know, as many particles and antiparticles, and everybody's happy.

Only problem is the following: when an electron and a positron meet, they will find each other.

And uh-oh,

and they will annihilate.

You mean they'll find each other because they'll find their original other half?

No, no, they wouldn't need to just find another kind like that.

That's correct.

I see.

That's correct.

So, Jad, now imagine that we are in the very early universe.

I am a teeny bit of matter, and you

opposite.

I'm an anti-Crow Witch.

An anti-Crow Witch.

And so the ProCrowitch is sitting here, and I see you across the haze.

Now, I'm positive charge.

You're negative charged, opposite charges.

Together,

I truly

see it doesn't work out too well for us.

But you know, wait, wait, wait.

This is actually a rather profound puzzle because if Paul Dirac was right, and half the universe is matter, the other half the universe is antimatter, and we all bump into each other as we just did, well.

Eventually, I guess we would just not, we would just

become, I don't, what?

Well,

I don't know.

Hmm.

We would not be here.

Damn.

You'd just blink out and there'd be nothing.

Exactly.

Really?

Nothing?

So it's a field of

mostly not.

Mostly just

radiation, radiation, radiation, radiation, radiation, radiation, radiation, radiation, radiation, radiation, radiation, radiation, radiation, radiation, radiation, radiation.

It's shocking.

It's shocking.

It's shocking.

It's shocking.

It's shocking.

It's shocking.

Well, there's something wrong with this theory because we're talking to each other and we're making matters.

So something, something's wrong with this notion.

Yes, and what's wrong is an imperfection in the laws of physics that we know of now and that is responsible for this bias.

Which means what?

That there was a little more of matter, what we call matter, than antimatter?

Yes, there was, to be precise, to every billion particles of antimatter, we had a billion and one

particles of matter.

Oh my God, really?

Yes.

That tiny excess of one in a billion is enough to create everything that exists now.

One lonely little guy.

We would call that an asymmetry.

So everything we see in the universe, all the stars, all the suns and the moons and the grass and the mountains and us, all the,

we're the extra stuff.

Yes.

We are the result of this asymmetry.

Has anybody dealt with the real question that's provoked here?

It's like, why was there more one stuff kind of stuff than the other kind of stuff?

So there you go.

That is one beautiful question, but we don't have any

final answer yet.

You don't?

No?

Because you see,

we don't know.

We do not know.

Which is okay.

Not knowing is a wonderful thing in science.

Otherwise, you could just retire.

Can I tell you my favorite lawyer joke told to to me by a lawyer?

Yeah.

I have to like spread this because it's the best one.

98% of lawyers give the other 2% a bad name.

Well, that's the go music.

The go music, meaning go away.

Meaning us.

Or here's a different place to go.

To our website, radiolab.org, where you can read more about anything you heard in this hour.

You can see those amazing Lincoln pics and other things we've got there on Symmetry.

And of course, you can subscribe to our podcast which means you get to hear the show you know whenever you like I'm Jad Abumrod I'm Robert Krolich thanks for listening

hi I'm Isha and I'm from Plano Texas and here are the staff credits Radio Lab was created by Chad Abumrod and is edited by Doran Wheeler Lulu Miller and Lattice Nasser are our co-hosts.

Dylan Keith is our director of Santesign.

Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Brusler, W.

Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Rebecca Lacks, Maria Paz-Putires, Sindhu Nyana Sumbundam, Matt Kilty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Tari, Sarah Sandak, Anissa Vicha, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, Molly Webster, Jessica Young, with help from Rebecca Rand.

Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujol-Mazzini, and Natalie Middleton.

Hi, this is Michelle calling from Richardson, Texas.

Leadership support for Radio Lab science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.

Foundational support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P.

Sloan Foundation.

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