SPEAKER_04: Radiolab is supported by Apple Card. Apple Card has a cash-back rewards program unlike other credit cards. You earn unlimited daily cash on every purchase, receive it daily, and can grow it at 4.15% annual percentage yield when you open a savings account. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on iPhone. Apple Card subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility requirements. Savings accounts provided by Goldman Sachs Bank USA. Member FDIC terms apply.
SPEAKER_01: Crack cocaine plagued the United States for more than a decade. This week on Notes from America author Donovan Ramsey explains how the myths of crack prolonged a disastrous era and shaped millions of lives. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to Radiolab.
SPEAKER_05: Okay, so Latif. Yes, hello. Happy New Year. Happy New Year to you. We are now just a few days into a brand new year. And think about what that means. We have all completed a 500 million mile plus lap around the sun.
SPEAKER_04: And so in honor of completing that journey, I wanted to try something a little different today and take us all on a journey. Okay. We're gonna travel all the way back to the
SPEAKER_04: very beginning of all of it. And then we're gonna zip forward and make pit stops at certain moments in the development of the universe and planet. And to do that, to really understand what's going on scientifically, we are going to turn to poets.
SPEAKER_09: Do you even like poetry? What are your feelings about poetry?
SPEAKER_10: I generally dislike poetry. And why? Why?
SPEAKER_10: I think that like, okay, like I just for circumstances that are too complicated to even go into, I recently just had to read a book of poems and like write about it a little bit. Yeah. And I was like, for all I can tell, this is just like an AI random word generator. It does not make me feel anything except stupid. And it's just like, I'm like, what is the point of what we're doing here?
SPEAKER_02: Well, can I offer some assurance and consolation for that? Please.
SPEAKER_04: This by the way, is going to be our lovely guide on this poetry journey. Her name is Maria Popova. She's a writer. You've probably heard of her website used to be called Brain Pickings now the marginalian. And she curated this journey of poems that we're about to hear, but it turns out she herself has incredibly mixed feelings about poetry. So first I'll say I personally like maybe 1% of the poetry I read. Poetry was not a
SPEAKER_02: part of my life for most of my adult life and I really discounted it. But then she read this T.S. Eliot poem and she said it disturbed her universe.
SPEAKER_02: I saw this way it has of slipping in through the back door of consciousness past our intellectual judgments and open up this other portal of receptivity.
SPEAKER_04: So she started doing this event where she would have poets read poems about science. The universe in verse. I've never been to the event myself, but I've listened to the poems over the years and some of them have really moved me. So today for this special treat for the new year, I asked Maria to curate a little journey for us from the very beginning of the universe to a kind of future, a glimpse of the beyond. So let's turn the key in our time travel machine and we're going to go back to our first stop. And this is a moment before the Big Bang, the explosion that supposedly many argue made our universe. Theoretical physicists continue to debate what was happening and if the Big Bang happened and what was really there before and blah, blah, blah. But at the time of the poem, there was a belief that what existed before the Big Bang was something called the singularity. Okay, so that's what this poem is going to be about before we hear it. Maria, can you just explain as best you can what like what the singularity is?
SPEAKER_02: Everything that ever existed could have once been compressed into the single point, single point, you know, this kind of totality shrunken into nothingness that contains everything.
SPEAKER_04: A compact little everything. Okay, so the poem that we're going to hear is called the Singularity and it is written and performed by Marie Howe. Should we just play it? Let's do it. Let's do it. She walks up to the stage and here's what we hear.
SPEAKER_11: Let me think. When I was talking with Maria about doing something this evening, I just jotted something in my journal really. And I told her I wanted to read Walt Whitman and but, but I just sort of sent this really this thing too. And she said, Oh, read that read that. I said, I don't know. Usually I wait about 10 years before I read anything out loud. And this has been about a week. Anyway, I don't know anything about science. I've tried to read these books. My daughter, however, loves physics. I don't understand that. But I was trying to get her to explain to me what the singularity is. And I was reading Hawkins, of course. And then I was trying to read Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson. I said to her a few weeks ago, I don't believe in the big bang. And she said, you don't. I said, no, it's impossible. Who here really believes that we were all everything that ever is, was once a singularity so dense, it was one thing before it blew up? Raise your hands. See, just like not that many over there. So here it is the singularity. Do you
SPEAKER_11: sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were? So compact, nobody needed a bed, or food, or money. Nobody hiding in the school bathroom, or home alone, pulling open the drawer where the pills are kept. For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you, remember? There was no nature, no them, no tasks to determine if the elephant grieves her calf, or if the coral reef feels pain. Trashed oceans don't speak English, or Farsi, or French. Would that we could wake up to what we were when we were ocean, and before that, when earth was sky, and animal was energy, and rock was liquid, and stars were space, and space was not at all, nothing. Before we came to believe humans were so important. Before this awful loneliness. Can molecules remember it? What once was before anything happened? Can our molecules remember? No I, no we, no one, no was, no verb, no noun yet, but only a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny dot brimming with is, is, is, is, is, all, everything, all at home. Thank you.
SPEAKER_04: That line, can our molecules remember it, is the line that gets me in that one where I'm just like, well crap, if the singularities right, they were in there right? Or the hint
SPEAKER_02: of them right? I also love how that line echoes that quote from Whitman which is in the beginning of the poem that iconic every atom belonging to me is good belongs to you and she says remember this this idea of the singularity that everything everywhere in both of those
SPEAKER_10: E's being capitalized all was in one dot like it's so absurd when you think about it it's like the most absurd possible thing just like one of those things it's like oh yeah like anything could have ever happened yeah well I think that's that's the gift of the poem
SPEAKER_02: though that that that it names so plainly what we experience as common sense is no litmus test for reality that reality is so much larger than our creaturely perceptions and intuition yeah yeah um okay so stop two here we go bye bye singularity bye bye big bang we're zooming
SPEAKER_04: forward 9.2 billion years yada yada 9.2 billion years a planet has formed we and eventually
SPEAKER_04: we'll call it earth whoo whoo whoo earth keeps laughing the sun happy new year happy new year happy new year interestingly billions of years ago years were longer but the days were shorter weird how many days don't ask me any follow-up questions okay then we go
SPEAKER_04: boo more and more life is getting supported we get plankton and mollusks and snails and sharks and dinosaurs and then from what we can see in the fossil record there is an explosion of sorts all over the planet what is it what happened um flowers appeared and carpeted
SPEAKER_02: the world so rapidly that darwin called it an abominable mystery abominable flowers abominable
SPEAKER_04: mystery the worst but it's true it was extremely puzzling why it happened so fast on the scale
SPEAKER_02: of how other life forms had evolved and it happened so fast because in some poetic sense flowers invented love what or or or economics depending on how we look at it but what happened
SPEAKER_02: was that once there were flowers they were fruit and once there were fruit then plants could enlist the help of animals in a kind of trade you know sweetness for a lift to my mate and it was a kind of love relationship to biological entities finding each other and something of beauty transpiring between them and the young german marine biologist
SPEAKER_02: ernst hackel gave that interdependence a name he called it ecology after the greek oicus or house house that's the root of ecology house our home home planet now this was in 1866 and now we're getting to the poem because it was written in 1865 so that's a year before ernst hackel coined the term ecology but it's really a poem capturing the notion the concept of ecology through the lens of a single flower and it was written by a poet who was a keen and passionate observer of the house of life emily dickinson right and for the universe
SPEAKER_04: inverse performance obviously emily dickinson wasn't available so you had a musician perform this poem as a song but before we hear that can you just actually read the poem in your own voice real quick maria yes because in in the song it's harder to tell the words
SPEAKER_02: it's a little harder yeah this one is known as bloom bloom is result to meet a flower
SPEAKER_02: and casually glance would cause one scarcely to suspect the minor circumstance assisting in the bright affair so intricately done then offered as a butterfly to the meridian to pack the bud oppose the worm obtain its right of dew adjust the heat elude the wind escape the prowling be great nature not to disappoint awaiting her that day to be a flower is profound responsibility yeah i'm just i don't know like i like the first one this one i'm not
SPEAKER_10: sure i really get it if i'm being honest like okay i i i like the idea that it's like from the point of view of the flower and you're like it's actually like kind of dramatic it's it's like a big this is as i'm understanding it tell me if i'm getting it wrong no great uh and maybe there's no getting poems wrong or whatever but whatever uh well also if you're
SPEAKER_02: not confused by emily dickinson you're like not doing it right okay great great excellent
SPEAKER_10: excellent okay so so okay so i get that part like a little action movie about a flower like having to debut like and it's like not easy um and then the part at the end why is being a flower a profound responsibility so i mean think about the time she lived in this
SPEAKER_02: these were victorian times and in victorian times flowers of course appeared very much in poetry and art but there were always these pretty objects there were objects for admiration and they were not really living things much less interconnected living things and here comes emily dickinson and composes this poem that looks at a single flower and everything that goes into making its bloom possible all the pollinators in the air and the worms in the soil the animals competing for resources aiding each other the the natural world around it and the flower suddenly emerges not as an object but as a system huh but but yeah
SPEAKER_04: i mean i i also think yeah i agree if i had encountered this on my own in a book i would have been like but like your preamble in the context of emily dickinson's close looking
SPEAKER_04: and kind of fathoming an ecology before the word ecology was even around the the interdependence the interconnection like it it makes me now walk around and see flowers as like not soft and feathery but these like keystone these rock hard strong things i love that like i feel kind of grateful and bad for that all right well with that new understanding of flowers with us thanks to poetry uh we are going to take a short break and when we come back we are going to get a new understanding of invisible matter all around us and wilder still we might even get latif to actually like a poem good luck this by the way is the
SPEAKER_04: performance of emily dickinson's bloom by musician jone as policewoman
SPEAKER_09: so
SPEAKER_09: lulu here if you ever heard the classic radio lab episode sometimes behaves so strangely
SPEAKER_04: you know that speech can suddenly leap into music and really how strange and magic sound itself can be we at radio lab take sound seriously and use it to make our journalism as impactful as it can be and we need your help to keep doing it the best way to support us is to join our membership program the lab this month all new members will get a t-shirt that says sometimes behave so strangely to check out the t-shirt and support the show go to radio lab.org slash join wnyc studios is supported by carvana selling your car to carvana is as
SPEAKER_06: easy as easy as pie sure all you have to do is enter your license plate or bin as easy
SPEAKER_01: as a stroll in the park okay then just answer a few questions and you'll get a real offer
SPEAKER_06: in seconds as easy as singing why not schedule a pickup or drop off and carvana will pay
SPEAKER_06: you that amount right on the spot as easy as playing guitar actually i find that kind
SPEAKER_06: of difficult but selling your car to carvana is as easy as can be visit carvana.com or
SPEAKER_13: download the app to get an instant offer today radio lab is supported by capital one with
SPEAKER_04: no fees or minimums banking with capital one is the easiest decision in the history of decisions even easier than deciding to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast and with no overdraft fees is it even a decision that's banking reimagined what's in your wallet terms apply see capital one dot com slash bank capital one n a member fdic after but
SPEAKER_08: her emails became shorthand in 2016 for the media's deep focus on hillary clinton's server hygiene at the expense of policy issues is history repeating itself you can almost see
SPEAKER_05: an equation again i would say led by the times in biden being old with donald trump being under dozens of felony indictments listen to on the media from wnyc find on the media
SPEAKER_08: wherever you get your podcasts lulu lot this radio lab okay should we zoom all right all
SPEAKER_04: right all right all right so we started before time itself existed and then we zoomed forward through the formation of the earth animals flowers next up stop three we're zooming ahead a bunch more million years humans show up they start stomping around and like making fires and inventing things and trying to perceive things and um and we're going to hear a poem about a discovery that was made in the somewhat recent times of 1978 um but to get ourselves all warmed up to understand it we're going to head back to the 1800s because you unearthed this hidden chain of scientists influencing each other over time that resulted in this discovery of hidden matter and then in the in the writing of the poem itself so the first person in this chain is mariah mitchell right she was this amazing quaker woman young girl
SPEAKER_02: in um on the island of nantucket and she fell in love with astronomy and watching an annular eclipse then every night she would climb up the narrow wooden steps to the roof of their house in her long quaker gown hauling the brass telescope and rain or shine or snow or freeze she would as they say sweep the heavens so you know sweep going sweep go side by side with the telescope that's what the term is go side by side across the night sky to cover basically the whole region of the visible sky just to see what's up and one evening october 1847 she slipped out of the family dinner went up on the roof and there was the comet the king of denmark had given this gold medal for whoever finds it and she was only 29 years old how did they know it was there if they hadn't seen it i mean it
SPEAKER_02: was for whoever finds a telescopic comet and that established her first of all is america's great scientific celebrity she would go on to sort of tour the world and ended up teaching what essentially became the first class of astrophysicists in the world because she introduced a mathematically rigorous curriculum that even the men at harvard didn't have and now we call this astrophysics and those were the first astrophysicists in the world it happened they were all women wow i didn't know that part okay so then basically about 110 years
SPEAKER_04: after she is born another woman is born a little girl a little girl in dc is reading
SPEAKER_02: a children's book about mariah mitchell and this little girl is looking out her window into the night sky and suddenly thinks oh my god there are people who do this for a living and i could do this for a living as a girl and that little girl grew up to be the great vera rubin the astronomer who confirmed the existence of dark matter that's what our
SPEAKER_04: poem is going to be about dark matter that is dark matter trying to perceive it or it being there um but there's one more person in this string the person who actually wrote the poem who in her day job was a scientist uh she was born in 1960 who is that her name
SPEAKER_02: was rebecca elson and she was one of the first astronomers tasked with studying hubble images particularly an image of the milky way in order to study the dark matter halo surrounding it and she was this incredible person who was only 29 when she received a terminal diagnosis with a very rare kind of blood cancer and when she died she left behind 56 scientific papers which is an extraordinary number for a lifetime right and this slender splendid book of poems that has a title that to me is the meaning of life i mean that's what we're here for it's titled a responsibility to awe the responsibility to all or to ah
SPEAKER_04: ah ah huh ah yes all right so we are going to hear one of the poems from this collection
SPEAKER_04: it's called let there always be light searching for dark matter uh and i guess before we do can you explain dark matter real quick um it is matter comprising the vast majority
SPEAKER_02: of the universe that interacts with gravity but doesn't interact with light so it's stuff
SPEAKER_04: it's stuff but we can't see it now we have this poem by rebecca elson and who is going to read it for us we are going to hear the wonderful paddy smith with the paddy smith
SPEAKER_10: or just a paddy smith the paddy smith wow okay here we go let there always be light
SPEAKER_12: searching for dark matter for this we go out dark nights searching for the dimmest stars for signs of unseen things to weigh us down to stop the universe from rushing on and on into its own beyond till it exhausts itself and lies down cold its last star going out whatever they turn out to be let there be swarms of them enough for immortality always a star where we can warm ourselves let there be enough to bring it back from its own edges to bring us all so close that we ignite the bright spark of resurrection
SPEAKER_04: what do you guys hear in it what does it make you think about there was that great book
SPEAKER_10: recently by katie mack i think her name is um about the end of the universe and she writes that two of the possible ways the universe will end is either like everything will keep expanding and expanding till everything like chills itself to death or the idea is it's like is it going to expand at some point and then at some point it's going to contract and then it's going to all go into this like like bang back into a singularity kind of into a singularity well that's what i was going to say this is so great it takes us
SPEAKER_02: back to this mystery of the big bang and it's your image like what's on the other side of everything that's the other nothingness is there another somethingness right that's right
SPEAKER_10: but also think about it this is a dying woman writing this poem i mean even a hard materialist
SPEAKER_02: like me like you know a lot of scientists who think you know we die and that's it the atoms go back into the swirl of atoms and that's that but somehow we live with this open question but what's what's there you know like what happens what actually happens yeah and it's like this wish like it i i find it sad but maybe this is my misread but i
SPEAKER_04: find it like almost like a foolish wish like how would there be warmth out of the darkness and the lack of energy it based on her training isn't that exactly not how it works i hear that but i think she's doing something else which is i think this is her playful way of
SPEAKER_02: saying this light we live in live with it's great it's enough appreciated while you're not dying because we are dying all the time we are little universes running out of fuel each of us and actually the bright star of resurrection is this right here right now the only one we have we're in it we're in it we are it all right i know we're almost out of time but we're gonna sneak in one last stop so
SPEAKER_04: zooming ahead another 10 years and a little bit after the discovery of dark matter there is a shiny brand new instrument poised to let us look deeper into space than we have ever seen for our last poem you chose one by the brilliant poet laureate tracy k smith that is about the hubble telescope on which her dad worked yeah that's so cool so he worked
SPEAKER_04: like building it helping to make it yeah he was an engineer on it he was one of nasa's
SPEAKER_02: first black engineers that's so cool she made a beautiful book called life on mars that actually won her the pulitzer prize and this poem we're going to hear is called my god it's full of stars my god it's full of stars okay here we go when my father worked on the
SPEAKER_13: hubble telescope he said they operated like surgeons scrubbed and sheathed in papery green the room a clean cold and bright white he'd read larry niven at home and drink scotch on the rocks his eyes exhausted and pink these were the reagan years when we lived with our finger on the button and struggled to view our enemies as children my father spent whole seasons bowing before the oracle eye hungry for what it would find his face lit up whenever anyone asked and his arms would rise as if he were weightless perfectly at ease in the never-ending night of space on the ground we tied postcards to balloons for peace prince charles married lady di rock hudson died we learned new words for things the decade changed the first few pictures came back blurred and i felt ashamed for all the cheerful engineers my father and his tribe the second time the optics jived we saw to the edge of all there is so brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back
SPEAKER_04: i know we should wrap up but latif do you have last um yeah my last this is a very beautiful
SPEAKER_10: poem and in a way i think out of all of them it's weirdly like the most honest one because i feel like so much of this and so much of science in a way uh is like an exercise to know things that are not our scale like it's like before we were born or after we're dead or too small or too big or too far away or too like two two two two two like it's just like not in our scale like a lot of these other poems were like it's like okay let's like think about the world through a flowers perspective but this is like very honestly from one human about another human who happens to be the human who helped make her um and i don't know there's just something very beautiful about this and human
SPEAKER_04: friends that'll do it happy new year happy completion of the giant millions of miles lap to all yeah happy new year biggest thanks to maria popova if you want to go deeper on
SPEAKER_04: some of these poems she recently got a bunch of them animated in such a thoughtful and stirring way just google universe inverse this episode is produced by sindu yana sambandham
SPEAKER_04: special thanks to all of the poets musicians and performers tracy k smith marie how rebecca elson joan as policewoman patty smith gotham shrikashan zoe keating and emily dickinson i hope you have a good one or if you don't that you go and uh write a poem about it radio lab was created by jad abbermont and is edited by sorin wheeler lulu miller and
SPEAKER_00: latif nasser are our co-host dylan keefe is our director of sound design our staff includes simon adler jeremy bloom becca brussela raychu cusick mckeddy foster keys w harry fortuna david gable maria pascu tuyeres cindy yana sambandhan matt cutie anna mckuen alex nason sara kari anna rascuet pass sarah sandback arianne wack pat walters and molly webster with help from andrew vignales our fact checkers are diane kelly emily krieger and natalie meadowton hi my name is treza i'm calling from colchester in asics uk leadership support
SPEAKER_07: for radio lab science programming is provided by the gordon and betty moore foundation science sandbox seymans foundation initiative and the john tamboutin foundation foundational support for radio lab was provided by the alfred peaceville foundation radio lab is
SPEAKER_04: supported by capital one with no fees or minimums banking with capital one is the easiest decision in the history of decisions even easier than deciding to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast and with no overdraft fees is it even a decision that's banking reimagined what's in your wallet terms apply see capital one dot com slash bank capital one na member fdic
