Big Little Questions

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Hey, it's Latif. Before we get to today's episode, I wanted to play for you just a tiny bit of a chat that I had with our executive editor, Soren Wheeler.
Cause I had, I had this kind of burning question that I wanted to ask him and it actually ended up inspiring why we decided to play this episode for you today. All right.
Okay. Why are we really here? Okay.
I wanted to bring you here today because you are one of the few people at this show who has been around for longer than I have. You started as an intern in what year, Soren? 2007.
2007. Yeah.
Do you know how many episodes of Radiolab you have worked on? It's got to be north of 400. No.
Not that I totally made, but that I had something to do with. Wait, how many shows have we even made? Oh, probably like- As a show.
How many episodes? I think probably around 500 or something. Wow.
Okay. I mean, sometimes it was like a rerun with an update or we had to put a show of little things.
And of those you've've worked on the preponderance, this is some preamble to you suggesting that it's time for me to leave. It's time for you to move on.
This is a coup. You've all gotten together and decided that, you know, no, but like, so my question for you put simply is why do you stick around? What after so long, do you still get joy from doing this and what where does that joy come from where does the joy i i mean i i guess it does feel like um we kind of get to do anything like so many shows are you know kind of have to be in a box like crime or sports or this or that but you know for us it could be we we get to do like, I don't know, hockey and then some weird thorny legal issue and then black holes and then academic publishing.
But actually the thing that keeps you going, the real joy like week to week is that for each and every one of those things, there's always something you didn't know or didn't understand or you thought you knew and then you realized you didn't or you'd never even thought you wanted to know something and then all of a sudden you do like sometimes thinking back over the last 17 years it just feels like a fever dream of of questions like she swam up right next to me and then came up and looked directly at me. Like, can a whale say thank you? Right, right.
Or, how can your mom also be your aunt? Do you enjoy your bowel movements? No. Have you ever thought about killing yourself? No.
Do we lie to ourselves? Why were you laughing? I don't know. Can animals laugh?

Where's morality come from?

Why is there this group of butterflies

that are thriving in an artillery range?

What makes someone successful?

Why can't you sell your blood?

Could we ever cheat death?

Why do vegetables spark in a microwave?

Can you think without words?

Why do we sleep?

How can you be a scientist

and not know the answer to that?

Does time slow down with your phone?

Can we make a living thing? Can babies do math? Was eels how does christmas are made and how fast can you play beethoven's full symphony wow those are a lot of questions that are why was ted doesn't see so angry oh you're still going all right okay keep going i don't know you could yeah you could keep going you could and that does feel really good to think about all the different things that there's already a radio lab for you know um also to me it's like it's actually a fun challenge to find like little nooks and crannies where it's like oh we've never even gone we've never even gone close to this before yeah and sometimes you know the answer, you just keep wondering things. The answer comes from somebody on staff or you get a pitch that

has a new question that you've never thought of before. Although, you know, there was, I have to

say like, one of my favorite things was there was a moment where we were all sitting around and

realized, you know, we're asking all these questions or we're always looking for questions,

but like people are always actually asking us questions too.

And so we're just like,

Thank you. sitting around and realized you know we're asking all these questions or we're always looking for questions but like people are always actually asking us questions too yeah and so we're just like looked in the email inbox and we're kind of like oh my god there's a treasure there are some weird ones yeah yeah and and so like i think it was like 10 years ago we did a thing where we're like let's just take those questions and make a show.
Just take all these listener questions and just hit go. And we've actually done several of these now.
We call them like our stupid question shows. But I think that first one was like 10 years ago or something like that.
And it's just, there's something about those shows that's really fun. I mean, they're listener questions, which is cool.
But it's also just like, it just hits the spirit of what we do in some kind of other way and i don't know those are those are some of my favorite shows yeah i agree okay so right after having that conversation with soren it was like okay we need to play our original stupid questions episode we call them internally stupid questions but it's like a tongue-in-cheek thing we don't't actually call it that. The episode was called Big Little Questions.
Before we get to that, I just wanted to say something that maybe you're tired of hearing, but it's true is the reason we keep saying it. We are an independent nonprofit show for us to keep doing what we do, to keep asking these questions that seem small but are actually big, we need help.
We need your help. We need your support.
And the best way to do that is to become a member of the lab. The way to do that is go to radiolab.org slash join.
If you do that as a member, you will get a bunch of great stuff. You will listen to the show with no ads.
We actually put up a bunch of bonus content for our members, including extra little conversations, nuggets that sort of fell out. If you sign up before the end of the month, we have a very special gift for you.
Everyone on staff is pretty excited about it. I'm not going to tell you what it is yet, but for now, enjoy this romp of listener questions.
Big little questions. Have fun.
Wait, you're listening. Okay.
All right. Okay.
All right. You're listening to Radiolab.
Radiolab. From WNYC.
Hey. Rewind.
Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwitz.
This is Radiolab. And today, we're going to hit the phones.
Hello? Hi, can I speak to Mark?

Starting with this guy, Mark Morrison.

This is me.

Hey, Mark, this is Jad calling from Radiolab.

Hey, Jad, good to hear you.

Got a hold of him at his home in Olympia, Washington.

I'm hanging out on the front porch because kids are running around.

So you might hear some traffic.

Okay, gotcha.

All right, maybe we should just jump in.

Maybe you should just tell me the story.

Okay, so I was DJing a wedding out in Lacey, which is the next town over. It was a hot, like, late spring, kind of feeling like summer kind of day.
And we were in a little rented facility that had, like, windows on all sides. And all of a sudden, the power starts flickering, and it starts raining really hard.
Then trees are falling over, the wind is gusting, and the sky turns to night. Whoa.
And this is, like, 3.30 in the afternoon. So Mark takes off, goes back home.
My in-laws are visiting in town to hang out with the new baby. And we open up the curtains, turned off all the lights, and we're just kind of marveling at the insane power of this storm that's happening.
My wife is sitting on the couch. My two-year-old is watching Charlie Brown or something on the iPad.
And then all of a sudden, there's just a loud snap, like the sound of a whip cracking or like a two-by-four being snapped in half. And about a foot and a half to two feet in front of my face, right next to my mother-in-law and the baby,

there's a little sphere of light, white light, just a little orb,

the size of like maybe an orange or a grapefruit, kind of blurry edges around it,

floating in midair as bright as like the sun. It lit up the entire room.

We all screamed. Everybody in the room in unison.
And Mark says this sun orb just sort of hovered in front of his face. Kind of going, wom, wom, wom, wom.
For maybe a second. When all of a sudden, poof, he was gone.
Yeah. That's some X-Files shit right there.
Yeah, none of us had any idea what the heck happened. Well, did you go around the room being like, did you guys see that? Did you see that? Yeah, everybody saw it.
Everybody saw it. My mother-in-law thought that I had, like, taken some kind of, like, fireworks and thrown it up in the air.
It's like, what did you do? I didn't do anything. So what I did was I started trying to Google it, and there's, you know, I mean, imagine trying to Google that.
You're not going to find anything. What did you type into Google? Sphere of light floating indoors.
I didn't get very far. Yeah.
But I just wanted to get to the bottom of it. And so what Mark did is he sat down on a computer and he typed up this email basically saying like, what the hell is this thing? And then he sent that email into the void.
Which would be us. We are the void.
To our email inbox. And, you know, it sat around for a while because we tend to get these kinds of questions.
A lot. Are there more stars in the universe or grains of sand on Earth? A lot.
A lot. Is it clean beneath the sticker of the apple? Why do some birds walk and others hop? How do fish hear? Why are horses special? We get things like...
What's up with traffic jams? Random questions like... If helium is a finite resource, why are we wasting it on balloons? A lot of poop questions.
Why is different animals poop shaped differently? Yeah, a lot of poop. What happens when you flush a toilet on the equator? And they just sort of pile up.
We sort of put them in this bucket and then feel guilty about not answering them. And over the years...
Well, they keep coming, so the bucket gets fuller and fuller. And fuller.
So finally today we decided, okay, let's just dump the bucket out. And so we're going to try and answer some of these questions today.
A bunch of us. Hello? Beginning with a question about the orb.
Can I speak to Martin, please? You're talking to him. Try and answer Mark's question.
I call up a guy named Martin Uman. Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Florida.
Thank you. Is this still a good time to chat? It is about the only time because I'm going to go to dinner in about 10 minutes.
All right. Excellent.
So we'll just jump right in. All right.
How long are we going to talk? Well, so I told Martin the story, thunderstorm, boom, glowing orb, poof, glowing orb, gone. Yeah.
So maybe I'll just put the most basic question to you. Like, what is that? Well, that observation is not uncommon and it's generally called ball lightning.
Ball lightning.

Yeah, that's what it's called.

And according to Martin, ball lightning is timeless.

Ancient Greeks described exactly the same thing.

In the 19th century and 18th century, they used to commonly come down the chimney, come out the fireplace.

Oh, wow.

But now, says Martin, we are living in an electronic world, and so these balls of lightning? Sometimes come out of a wall socket. Sometimes out of a telephone.
They happen in airplanes. They happen in submarines.
Whoa. That actually, that's been reported? Yeah.
Lightning strikes outside an airplane and a ball comes through the windshield and floats down the whole plane. What? If I'm in that plane, I'm thinking...
You're going to hope you have your diaper on, right? Wear your depends. Anytime you've got electrical stuff going on, you can make a ball of fire like that.
So do we know anything about what causes what it is exactly? Is it just another form of lightning that somehow manages to ball itself up and hang around? Well, probably. Martin is actually one of the few people who has studied ball lightning in the lab.
He actually got funded by DARPA to try and figure out how it works. Wasn't quite able to.
He says what's likely happening is that when a bolt of lightning strikes, it might hit something. Oil, water, treat.
Whatever it is, some substance. Gets lit up and somehow forms itself into a, like a balloon or a bubble or something.
Like if you imagine lightning hits some dust, shocks the dust, changes its chemistry so that it forms some kind of spherical scaffolding, and then the lightning sticks to the scaffolding or something? Maybe that's what's happening, but you can't prove it. I mean, there's some theory which indicates that that might happen, but if you go in the laboratory and you try to make it, you can't make it, so you can't prove it.
And if you get a book on ball lightning, or you get my book and look at the chapter on ball lightning, you'll see probably a list of 50 different theories that people have come up with, from all the way to black holes and discontinuities in time-space and things

that are just, you know, completely almost out of this world.

So they remain a mystery, but a well-observed mystery.

Did you know that people don't have any good maths

for how lightning gets started in a cloud?

Really? I didn't know that.

We don't know how lightning can get started.

It shouldn't be able to.

It shouldn't? Really? Based on what?

The math says there's not enough...

Based on all the measurements that have been made

of the conditions in clouds.

The world is full of things that aren't understood. Almost nothing is understood.
We're floundering around. Do you find yourself thinking about ball lightning and then suddenly just tiptoeing into an existential crisis, how little we know of the world.

Well, that's how I make my living,

is trying to uncover little more bits by little more bits.

But, yeah, there's lots of it, isn't it, about everything.

Next up, producer Tracy Hunt goes on a field trip to some very hallowed ground. Right, I think I finally reached the library.
The New York Public Library. The New York Public Library.
Within its white marble walls is stored the sum of man's wisdom. Which in its glory days.
Okay, so I'm right here in the Grand Hall. There's like beautiful chandeliers all over the place.
These gorgeous columns. It was filled with seven floors of stacks.
Millions of books. In every field of human endeavor.
Row upon row upon row of shelves. Miles of shelves.
Close to 50 centuries of human thinking and experience. And every year, millions of visitors like Tracy would walk through these hallowed halls.
Each has a question. With questions fueled by curiosity, the desire for truth, for knowledge, for wisdom.
People trying to unravel the mysteries of the universe. I came here to ask him a question about catnip.
Catnip? Yes, catnip. Why? Why catnip? Oh, I'd actually back up.
So we actually got like 500 questions from our listeners. So I thought it might be a good idea to take some of them to the library.
Hi, Rosa. So I met up with this woman.
Nice to meet you. I'm Tracy.
Nice to meet you, Rosa. And she walked me into this office.
There's about, like, I don't know, 12 people sitting at their desk. Why don't you just introduce yourself to me? Okay, sure.
So my name is Rosa Lee. I manage Ask NYPL, and I've been in this department for about five years.
Ask NY what? Ask NYPL. It's 917-ASK-NYPL.
I'm putting the phone number out there. And if you call them and you ask them a question, it's their job to answer it.
Yes, so we are like a call center, so our typical day starts with questions. And like in a typical day, how many phone calls do you get? Typical day, about 150 to 200.
And Rosa was telling me that most of the questions they get are all the weather be like this weekend. Very boring.
Hey, my library card expired or I want to renew this book. But, you know, also they get some weird ones.
We take them all. Yeah.
So I got a list right here. And in the past, they've gotten things like, what kind of apple did Eve eat?

Is it proper to go alone to Reno to get a divorce?

Any statistics on the lifespan of the abandoned woman?

Do camels have to be licensed in India?

What is the natural enemy of the duck?

Can I get a book telling me how to be a mistress of ceremonies at a musical orgy?

What does it mean when you dream you're being chased by an elephant?

And do they answer all those?

They'll try to. So, you know, I was maybe a little dismissive for a few of them.
I mean, all the questions, of course, are very important. We welcome all questions, please.
This, by the way, is Bernard. Bernard Van Marceveen.
He has been working for Ask NYPL since about 2001. And so the question, he did answer my catnip question, which is...
Do large feline species like tigers and lions have the same reaction to catnip as domestic cats? Yes. All cats like catnip.
Apparently tigers, at least. But, you know, I had all these questions, so I actually had them pick one that they thought was super interesting.
Yeah. Which one did you pick to answer? Let me get the exact wording out of it.
So, yeah. So here we go.
Could you play a meaningful game of Frisbee on the surface of Mars? Yeah. And.
Yeah, I really like that. Yeah, that was a good one.
And I think the word that makes it, like, just really shine is meaningful. So the first thing he does.
If you want to get me kind of doing some searching, you know, again, back of the envelope kind of stuff here. And he, I guess I was a little disappointed that we didn't bust out any, like, books.
I'm just looking up Frisbee aerodynamics. He literally just turned to his computer and started Googling.
How does a Frisbee behave here on Earth? The spin of the Frisbee, of course, lift, drag. So he looks all that stuff up.
Let's see. Then he looked up, like, aerodynamics.
On Mars. On Mars.
It's very thin, the air there, so. Because the air is so thin on Mars, you wouldn't get that spinning, lifting thing that you always get in Frisbees.
It might not have the same sort of hovering effect that Frisbee does here on Earth. It probably would be more like just throwing a ball.
It would just go. 10 feet away, 15 feet away.
I don't think that that counts as a meaningful game of Frisbee. But, you know, you could still throw it back and forth.
But meaningful? No. To me, the question is, like, you're playing Frisbee on Mars.
I mean, that's just inherently meaningful. It's already meaningful.
I mean, you know, growing up, I remember seeing, you know, rebroadcasts of, you know, like the astronauts on the moon.

Playing golf.

Playing golf. They were just, you know, amateur duffers, but...
They were golfing on the moon. I mean, to me, that's pretty great.
That's pretty impressive. So the venue kind of makes the whole endeavor meaningful,

I think, in its way.

Thanks to producer Tracy.

Oh, wait.

I actually did ask them my dragons question. Oh, well, then next up.
Tracy Hunt. And dragons.
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Hi, this is Christina.

Hi, this is Tracy.

Hi.

Oh, hey, hey. Oh, you called me back? This question is from Christina Hartquist.
I'm a native of Novato. Out in Northern California.
And I was born and raised here. So, yeah, love this place.
And what was your question to us, if you remember what it was roughly? Yeah, so I came across this article about these creatures called olms that I guess were being, you know, washed out of these caves in Eastern Europe. What are they called? Olms, O-L-M, these sort of like blind cave-dwelling amphibians.
They're totally white. Their skin is translucent, very otherworldly.
And the article touched on the idea that folklore thought that these little creatures were actually like dragon babies being pushed out of these caves where these huge dragons live. So I started digging into it a little bit.
And of course, you can only find so much on the Internet. But there was this idea of dragons being a sort of like a universal myth across, you know, different disparate cultures.
And Christina started to wonder why it seemed that so many cultures all over the world all have myths about dragons. What is it about humans that caused them to believe in these huge, scary, fire-breathing animals? Is that true, that cultures all over the world have dragons? Well, sort of.
You have the northern European dragon that we're all familiar with. Then there's the Chinese dragon, which is a little different.
It doesn't have wings, doesn't breathe fire. Then there's other dragon-looking sort of things, the Nana Bolele.
The Nana Bolele. Among the Besoto people in Southern Africa.
There's the Amaru associated with the Incan Empire. Yeah, I think there's no doubt that we have fabulous, awesome creatures like dragons in almost every culture in the world.
So this is Adrienne Mayer. I'm a research scholar in the classics department at Stanford.
And what I'm most interested in is what sorts of things found in nature might have led pre-scientific people to believe that dragons or monsters or other fantastic creatures really existed, at least in the past or even maybe in the present. Adrienne actually wrote a book called The First Fossil Hunters that lays out this theory that a lot of these stories were actually based on people finding old fossils and bones.
Fossil bones or teeth or claws or footprints embedded in stone. So they'd see a set of old bones that they couldn't explain with any modern creatures.
So the creature they go to is this dragon-shaped thing. Yes, but...
I do want to point out, though, that we can never know for certain which comes first. The observations of mysterious traces of unknown animals or the stories of dragons.
We don't know which comes first. She says it could be that the story about the dragon was already there.
And then when they found some bones, they just sort of applied those bones to the dragon myth. Well, if the dragon came before the bones, where did it come from? Well, there's another theory.
Some scholars have said they're like monsters of the id. They arise from ancient memories of very real predators that were faced by our ancestors.
Basically, dragons are composites of these creatures that used to eat us and hunt us and kill us, like crocodiles. Saber-toothed tigers and...
Lions. Cave bears.
Gigantic serpents. Snakes.
Pythons. Condors.
Giant raptors. So you can take like the scaly skin of the crocodile, the claws of the saber-toothed tiger and its saber teeth, the wings of these raptors, put them all together.
So this is all the old terrors rolled into one. Boom.
Together. Yeah.
They tap into all those spheres that are ready inside of us, in theory. I'm going to go for that one.
Yeah, I like that. That works.
That feels like an answer. Well, you know, like they're very powerful.
I mean, they could be very scary. They could be very destructive.
But what's kind of magical in Game of Thrones is that the intimate scenes also melt your heart and bring you closer to these creatures

that should be, you know, burning your face off.

Okay, so I should admit that

I actually just used this whole dragon thing

to talk to this lady from Game of Thrones.

Your whole thing was just...

Her name is Paula Fairfield,

and she makes all the dragon noises for Game of Thrones.

Oh, she makes the dragons?

Right.

What did you ask her, I guess?

What did you want to know? Well, I wanted to know how does she make these sounds? And it was really interesting because we're talking a little bit about how dragons are composite creatures, and she basically uses composites to make these noises. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.

She takes the noises from birds.

Reachy, shrieky bird sounds.

Insects.

Different kinds of reptilian recordings and stuff.

Is it always the scary animals?

Well, it depends on what dragon that she, you know, which of the dragons that she's trying to actually create a performance for.

I have sounds I might choose simply by certain personality traits that I might want to push forward. So in the case of Drogon.
So on the show, there's Daenerys. Who's this dragon queen, and she has three dragons, and one of them is named Drogon.

And she named that dragon after Khal Drogo, her hot, late husband.

So Drogon is like her lover.

We have to go home.

He kind of has like a very affectionate, sensual relationship with her. He's whistling at her all the time.
He's looking at her butt and going, ooh, baby. Oh, that poor sweet thing.
Does it hurt? And so in order to kind of push forward this sort of like dragon sexual tension, I guess, she uses the sounds of two giant tortoises, you know, mating. Giant tortoises? What does that sound like? Well, you know, I'll just play it.
Whoa. Whoa.

The groan of the male actually became, with some work and adjustments and stuff,

became the source, the basis for Drogon's purr with her.

Mm-hmm.

With Daenerys.

How far did you carry me?

Drogon, we need your return. My people need me.
The funny thing about the Purr with Drogon was watching people watch it and giggling when they heard it, but not really knowing why. And to me, it's because it had that essence, that kind of sensual, sexual essence, that Pur yeah.
Now, I used for all kinds of things. And, you know, I also used for dragonfly wings to make that kind of funny flutter of the thorns as it's moving.
Like, especially on the end of his tail this year, as he moved through, there was like a chitter. And that was like dragonfly wings.
Dragonfly wings? Yeah. Really? I was wondering if you ever had a question about dragons that you would like to have answered.
You know, no, it's curious because I think the thing that differentiates the dragons from creatures and makes them slightly otherworldly is the fire thing. Where did the idea for that come along? That's a good question.
Yeah. Where did that come from? Well, there are many theories about that.
Actually, I took that question back to Adrienne Mayer. The one that I like is connected to the devastating weapon called Greek fire.
Which was this unquenchable fire. It can't be put out by water.
In fact, it burns in water. And so it was a naval weapon.
And I believe that scholars have found that some of the nozzles for blasting Greek fire were shaped like dragons so that the boat looked like it had a dragon on board breathing fire at the enemy ship. That's so cool.
Just stories of they had breathed fire, would make it back to Northern Europe.

That's the best theory I've heard.

Oh, that's interesting.

So it's like if the dragon is a composite of all the things, creatures that have scared us, now we're part of that composite. Well, it's our technology.

It becomes part of the creature that frightens us. Thanks, Tracy.
You're welcome. Who is...
What is... What is...
Ah, uh Anything coming to mind? What is... Say something.
Hurry. It's a fedora.
I should have known that. You should have known that.
All right, we're going to take a break. Hey, this is Latif again.
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Jad, Robert, Radiolab, and we are back with more questions. Next one comes from producer Rachel Cusick.
So this question comes from Liam Hamburger from Denver on. I was browsing memes on my Instagram feed, and there was this meme where the picture was of a husband and a wife trying to go to sleep.
The wife was looking away, and she was, like, looking irritated. And then the husband was looking, like, just kind of confused on the outside of the bed.
And the caption was, He's probably thinking of other girls. And then him, I wonder if I've ever bought milk from the same cow twice.
What'd he say? I wonder what? Yeah, so he said, I wonder if I've ever bought milk from the same cow twice.

What did he say? I wonder what? Yeah, so he said, I wonder if I've ever bought milk from the same cow twice. So if I go to the store, I buy a gallon of milk, and then I go back maybe a week later, I get another gallon of milk.
What are the odds that the same cow is in both of those gallons of milk? I see. I would say the answer is almost certainly yes, 100%.
That's Art Benjamin. He's a math professor.
At Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. And I'm also a mathemagician.
And how is he so sure that it's 100%? Well, according to Art Benjamin, it all comes down to... Probability, statistics, and dare I say, calculus.
So take a farm like Dale's here. Hey, here we go.
My name is Dale Mattoon, Pine Hollow Dairy. Dale has about 1,000 cows.
And 20 at a time, these cows walk into a milking parlor. They line up.
It looks like a wishbone. All day and all night long.
And they get hooked up with these black rubber hoses.

The air you're hearing every once in a while is the guy putting a machine on a cow.

When he hits the button, it turns on the vacuum.

And he pumps the milk out of their udders into this big hose along the bottom of the floor.

Running through the hose, down into this line.

And it's meeting up with all the milk from all the other cows.

And then it goes from that room into another room where it gets cooled down. This is the milk out.
Put your hand on this pipe. Oh my gosh, it's cold.
There's condensation on it. Very cold.
Once it's cooled down, it goes into this rocket ship looking thing outside called a milk silo where all the milk from Dale's farm is just hanging out together. The silo gets filled up and up and up and up until it's full.
We're sending out over 8,000 gallons of milk a day on a tractor trailer. This truck comes along, picks up that milk, and it stops at another farm and another farm and another farm until that truck is full.
Right full. Goes to the processing plant.
And once you're at the processing plant, all that milk is just mixed around even more with milk from all the cows in the region. and I still have my

my back of the envelope that had the calculation here. Here's where the math comes in.
There are about 90,000 drops of milk in a gallon and, oh, I don't know, 100,000 cows who are contributing to a particular processing plant. When you run the odds of a drop of milk from any one cow getting into any particular gallon.
That's probably the case. Every gallon of milk contains most of those cows contributing.
And here's the thing. In one drop of milk, you could probably have a bunch of different milk molecules from a bunch of different cows.
And so one glass of milk might have, you know, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of different cow molecules in my glass of milk. Wow.
That's crazy. Oh my gosh.
So going back to Liam's original question, our argument is that when you're drinking a glass of milk, there's like so many different bits of milk from so many different cows. Then it's probably the case that after just two glasses of milk, you're almost certain to have a cow that was represented in both of them.
So you're bound to run into at least a little bit of one of those 100,000 cows again. The point being that every glass of milk has, you know, has thousands and thousands of different cows contributing to it.
A little bit of 10,000 cows in every glass. In every glass of milk.
I love that. I don't know that I do.
No, it's great. It's like you're enjoying the collective efforts of this entire species.
No, no. I think it should be the product of one or two cows whom you can picture in your head and maybe pat on the nose.
Thank you, you could say. Yeah, I don't know.
I'm with both of you. I feel like it weirds me out, but I also think it's kind of cool at the same time.
Well, you know, but come to think of it, what happens if you drink a glass of milk in New York, get on a plane, fly to Atlanta, then have another glass of milk? Are you getting the same 10,000 in each glass or are they different 10,000? Yeah. So I tried calling around a little bit to answer that question and it seems like no one really wants to pay to ship milk that far.
And so basically a different processing plant might mean a whole different group of cows. Oh.
Yeah. If you really want to figure out exactly which plant your milk is coming from, you can go to whereismymilkfrom.com.
Really? Yeah. And you input the little code on the top of your carton and see how often that number comes up again.
Each processing plant has its own code. Thank you, Rachel.
Thank you. And just a big thanks to dairy farmer Dale Mattoon over at Pine Hollow Dairy.
Are you a big milk drinker? Oh, yeah. How often do you drink milk? Oh, I have it on my cereal in the morning.
I have a glass or two for lunch and a glass or two for dinner.

Probably two glasses each meal.

If I don't drink milk, I don't feel good.

Like if I go away on vacation and a lot of times you go to a restaurant.

The cow gives milk cartons and cartons of milk. How now, brown cow? How now, brown cow? How now, brown cow? How now, brown cow? All right, this next one came from a couple.
Hello? A married couple. Hello, is this Marie? Yep.
This is Matt Kilty, calling from Radiolab. How are you? I'm good, thanks.
I have you on speakerphone, and Zach is right here. Oh, hey, Zach.
Hi, Matt. How's it going? Good.
Good. So, Zach Marie, it was years ago, actually, they sent us an email about what I think is like one of the most confounding, perplexing, mysterious devices that you can find inside anybody's home.
Okay, so the microwave. I guess what I'm wondering is, one, why were you microwaving peppers? And two, do you remember the moment this happened? Oh, I know what it is.
I know exactly what happened. Okay, so quick scene set, Portland, Maine, a kitchen around dinnertime.
I think we were like cooking a tomato sauce. Zach was on bell pepper duty.
Try and take a shortcut, stick them in the microwave to make them a little warm or soft or something. Then I said, Oh, Zach, don't put those in the microwave.
They'll spark. And Zach was just like, you're crazy.
I was like, no, no, no. I remember seeing it as a kid.
She said there was a couple times her mom put some peppers in a microwave and they sparked. Yes.
My first thought was that my memory was wrong. That's what I thought.
It was that your memory was wrong. Like there must have been a piece of metal in the microwave and you just don't remember that.
And that's what was sparking up because vegetables wouldn't do that. And this is going back and forth and yes and no and sparks and nothing until.

I think it was like, we have the ability to find this out and prove this wrong.

So that was like five years ago in the past.

So we decided that we would actually do our own experiment in the present to get to the bottom of this.

Do green peppers spark in the microwave?

Oh, Maserati. First things first, I actually went and bought a microwave.
Hey, how's it going? Off a guy on Craigslist. All right, yeah, so 50 bucks? 50 bucks.
50 bucks. All right.
Our baby. Then carried it like eight blocks back to work.
Holy s***. Also, bought a bunch of groceries because we're going to do more than just a peppers test.
And for reasons I'd rather not get into, decided not to start with the peppers. Baby carrots.
Baby carrots is little carrots. Yeah.
Producer Annie McKeown. So we're going to kitchen.
Really? Yeah. Couldn't tell.
Carrots? Okay. And as the great Ronco says of infomercial fame.
I don't know who the great Ronco is. Great Ronco! Set it and forget it.
All right, two minutes. Let's see what happens.
Hey. And all of a sudden...
Oh my god! This little yellow spark just shot out from one of our slices of carrots. That was crazy.
It was a little spark. Oh, yeah, there.
You see another one? Yeah, I just saw a little flash. Wow.
A little tiny spark. Ready? Mmm, carrots.
Mmm, carrots. Okay, next.
Kale. Set it for kale.
This is where it gets a little crazy, because the kale. Ooh, there.
Same thing. What? Boom, boom, boom.
Sparks. Smoke.
It's just smoke. Let's have it.
Let's have it. It's not a smoke.
It's not a smoke. Jesus.
Delicioso. That is smoke.
We're going to try the blueberries. Ready? Set it.
Set it for kale... Whoa! Oh, it's on! We started to draw a bit of a crowd in the studio.
What? Why was electricity coming out of the blueberry? Alright, up next... Crepes.
Crepitos. Crepes.
Crepetitis. Creepininis.
Ready? Ready. Time cook.
You set it. Whoa! Oh my god! Look at it go! Alright, what's up next? Okay, Jumbo Franks.
I got turkey Franks. You said it.
Spread it! Oh, oh, I saw one! Oh my god. Okay, Pepper.
You said it. Whoa! Whoa! Oh my god! Okay, both red and green bell peppers.
Green was crazy. Hey, pepper! We also threw in diced up tomatoes, pears, decorative gourd.
Are we gonna get fire for this? And also, a flaming lip city. There we go! Who needs fireworks when you've got a CD in the mirror? This is crazy! Stop, stop.
All right, we'll stop. Yeah, because I don't want to...
Yeah, is it gonna... It looks like it was on fire.
Is it smoking in here? Yeah, it's definitely smoking. Oh, that smells really bad.
All right, let's take a break. Okay, everyone.
Oh, God. Yeah, we want to keep the door open.
What did you say to Marie after the peppers sparked in the microwave? I think I was, I don't know, I was probably speechless. I can't believe that you're right about this.
And Marie, did you say anything in return? Probably something to the effect if I told you so. So peppers sparking the microwave, that was settled but then there was the debate about...
Marie doesn't believe my understanding of how microwaves work. Why? Maybe it's just that pepper has a lot of moisture in it.
Zach, maybe it's you put the pepper in the microwave, all that water gets really hot. The skin acts as like tinder, and that lights on fire quickly.
But Marie... We always have peppers in our house, and I think that the green ones taste a little bit metallic.
It's like maybe these peppers just have like some little bit of metal in there that's sparking. Yeah.
So is your next step to find the appropriate scientist? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm definitely going to try and put this case to bed.
Yeah, just give us one moment. So ended up tracking down this woman.
Is it Caroline or Carolyn? Is it? It's Caroline. Caroline.
Okay. Her name is Caroline Ross.
I'm a professor in the Department of Material Science and Engineering in MIT.

An experienced microwaver?

I've done it with roast potatoes.

Oh, you've seen sparks.

Yeah, I've seen sparks from roast potatoes.

Huh.

All right, so yeah, maybe we should just like do-

So I asked her, in the case of the peppers or, you know, the roast potatoes or the grapes,

like all the different food that we tried, like what happens in a microwave that makes the food just go like-

I'm start. Like what, what happens next? Okay.
So there is a gadget in the microwave oven that produces the microwaves. It's called a magnetron.
And it's an interesting thing in itself. Okay, quick side note.
It's basically like this hunk of metal that makes the microwaves. But Caroline told me this really cool thing, which is they actually used to be used in World War II for radar.
That was in the 40s. And in 1945, there was an engineer at Raytheon who was working on these devices.
And he found that some candy bar he had in his pocket got hot. It was like, oh, this cooks food.
And so eventually a magnetron got thrown inside of a metal box, and thus was born the microwave. So it's an interesting thing in itself, but it produces the beam of microwaves, and they bounce around inside the microwave oven, moving at the speed of light.
Are they pounding into the pepper? Or maybe not pounding, but like shooting into the pepper? They're being absorbed. Absorb.
Yeah, they're being absorbed. And these microwaves, they are the right kind of frequency to cause the molecules in food to oscillate back and forth.
Oh. You've put a pepper in there.
So the pepper's got a lot of water in it. It's got other things as well.
And those molecules start absorbing the microwaves and dancing back and forth and hitting each other and heating up. And then that bit gets even hotter and even hotter.
And eventually it could burst into flames. But that is not what we're seeing with our pepper or any of the food in the microwave.
It's not. No, because as Caroline explained to me, a flame is very different than a spark.
So one thing to keep in mind is that the pepper is fairly conductive. It's got all this water in it.
We know that water can conduct electricity and the water isn't pure. It has a lot of salts dissolved in it, minerals, things like that.
In that sense, it's a little bit like a piece of metal.

Metal, as we know, absorbs microwave energy rather well.

As we all know.

Yes.

So.

Okay, so let's say you get these pieces of pepper in a microwave and they're, you know,

heating up.

Now, the thing is, the microwave, like the wave itself. It has an electric field which oscillates back and forth at rather a high frequency.
So when these microwaves shoot into these pieces of pepper, what happens is this electricity starts... Swishing back and forth.
Through the bits of pepper. So there's a current flowing.
And as more microwaves are absorbed in these bits of pepper... You can get quite big currents.
Currents so big that they start to create this electric field around the food. And that electric field builds up and up and up, and eventually it's big enough to cause the air to glow around the food.
Because now there's actually electricity coursing through the air. Like a fluorescent light bulb.
And Caroline says at this point you can start to see these glowing balls of gas floating. It's actually the air turning into plasma.
Now, back in the center of the microwave are our little bits of pepper, where there's still this electrical current swishing back and forth through those bits of pepper. And if you have sharp corners, like the actual corner of a pepper, even on the skin, like these tiny microscopic little points, the electricity in the pepper, the electricity in the air...
...can get concentrated at those sharp corners like a lightning rod. And at those corners, the electricity will just build and build and build until...
You get a mini lightning bolt. Why? Why? Why? And then Caroline said everything in the microwave just sort of calms down.
Until the electric field builds up again and it does it all over. Letting loose these mini lightning bolts.
So it's a very dynamic process. You've got things being ionized.
You've got things recombining. You've got charge flowing.
You've got light being emitted. Things get hot.
There's a big current flowing. All for that tiny fraction of a second.
A lot of quantum physics in there. And then we hear a little ding.
Yep, we're done. And then we're done.
But I just had one last job to do. How are you two doing? Good.

Okay.

All right.

So I think called up Zach and Marie,

told him everything I learned about their sparking pepper. And that even though both of them didn't have the exact theory,

like Zach was right.

Water is an important part.

Marie was kind of onto something with this metal thing.

Yeah.

It feels like it's almost like a little bit of like a marriage of sorts,

pardon the pun,

between both your ideas that kind of is what is happening inside this black box. So yeah.
We had some of the elements there. Yeah.
That's about it. Oh, there was one thing that I actually thought was kind of interesting.
All all these questions we were getting in, there was like this tiny little pattern of married couples sending us in arguments that they got. There was one couple that was like, they were arguing about the nutritional value of microwaving a potato.
There was another couple that sent in a very long email about how they'd been debating about how we perceive color. We've actually had a similar dispute.
Yeah, that's true. Oh, over color.
It was the couch. Oh, yeah.
There was a couch that we had. It was some sort of, like, drab tone that I thought was green and you thought was brown.
Gray. Gray, Yeah, I think I, yeah, we had that couch for like between different houses and different combinations for probably like five or six years and maybe seven years, 10 years.
And a lot of life in it. And I was, yeah, I always thought it was gray.
I still do. But apparently you and your sister thought it was green.
You like lived together for years and just never realized you're seeing something completely differently. Like, what do you mean

our green couch? I have no idea. We don't have a green couch.

Producer, Matt Gilty. Why do humans have two feet? When are we going to be able to fax a pencil? The little waves go through the little headphone strings.
I don't know. What is the world all about? Why are we here? What are we doing here? What is happening after this live? Where do we go from here? I wish not to do this.
How does that work? I have no idea. Why? Where? I want to know.
I am curious. Who knows? Let me know.
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