No Such Thing As Pudsey's Passport

0:03Hi everyone, welcome to this episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, which we recorded live at the Royal Institution in London. the venerable venerable place where so many great scientists have been over the years and now us although there was a great scientist there with us we had a guest and that was professor alice roberts now if you follow science in britain if you follow science communication if you follow science on tv you'll know all about alice roberts as she's absolutely brilliant we had such a good time doing the show with her and she does have a new book out actually it's called domination and And it is all about the fall of the Roman Empire and the growth of Christianity.

0:43Absolutely brilliant book, as all of Alice's books are. And if you want to learn more about her, then you can go to alice-roberts.co.uk and everything about her will be there. I should just quickly add that we do have a special secret members club called Club Fish, where there's lots of extra stuff. If you feel like you haven't got your fix of Fish at the moment, loads of extra stuff on tiers there. There's an Excel version of this show and every show. If you think that I do a terrible job editing the show and I need to be making it much, much longer, then there is the place to go for that. But yeah, there's loads of stuff there.

1:19So go to patreon.com slash no such thing as a fish if you would like to join. But really hope you enjoy this. We had such a great time at the Royal Institution. I can't tell you how exciting it was to be there. I think it does come through in the show itself. Anyway, Happy New Year and on with the podcast.

1:53Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from the Royal Institution.

2:05my name is Dan Schreiber I am sitting here with James Tarkin Andrew Hunter Murray and Professor Alice Roberts and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go starting with fact number one and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that the first person to travel into the stratosphere did so with a pillow on his head. Yeah. So for people at home who can't see the image, this is two gentlemen and they have like a basket, a wicker basket and underneath is the pillow. And this was a trip by Auguste Picard and he wanted to work out some things about cosmic rays which we might go into later.

2:59But the Germans, where he was setting off from, didn't want him to go up there. They tried to ban his ascent. But he was Swiss, so he managed to get someone in Switzerland to say, no, you're allowed to do it. But the Germans wouldn't have it. And they said, well, OK, you can go up, but you must wear helmets. They didn't have any helmets to hand, so they cobbled some together.

3:22It's important to wear a helmet. Oh, yeah. Completely. but also he was going eight or nine miles up and if it didn't work out a helmet is not going to be the thing that does or doesn't make the difference. No, I would think not. Again, if there are any astronauts listening do keep your helmet on. Take my word for it, you know. It's not like he wasn't wearing a helmet with like an oxygen mask in there or anything like that, right? It was literally just to cover his bonds. Yeah. Did he have a parachute? I do not think they did. That might have been more useful. Yeah, no, absolutely. When did we invent the parachute?

3:55Was it invented in 1931? The guy who invented the modern parachute, because Leonardo da Vinci had pictures of parachutes in his drawings, right? Yeah. But the modern parachute was invented in 1913 by a guy called Everard Calthrop. And he offered it to the Royal Flying Corps, because this was during the war, or was it during the war? Just before the war. So in 1915, he offered it to the Flying Corps, and they said they didn't want to give them to their pilots, because it might impair the fighting spirit of the pilots. I think that's fair. And they thought if they've got parachutes, then they'll just jump out and they won't fight till the death.

4:34Yes. I always say if I'm going to be a racer, just get rid of the brakes. That will only encourage me to slow down my motor car. Do you know this has to be the most accident Mr. Bean prone experiment I think I've ever read about. It's remarkable, isn't it? It is. Have you ever heard about this trip, this first trip to the stratosphere, Alice, with Auguste Picard? No, what happened? Well, basically, we'll get into what they were kind of trying to do, which is they were trying to help Albert Einstein prove the theory of relativity. And they thought we can do that by heading up to the highest spot on Earth.

5:06So Picard, who everyone, if you want to picture what he looks like at home, picture Professor Calculus from the Tintin books, because that's who it was based on. Calculus was based on Auguste Picard. He was this eccentric but brilliant scientist. and he's actually taller than calculus is in the Tintin books. He's six foot six and Hergé had to make him smaller so he'd fit in the frames. Come on. Yeah. He could have just drawn him further away. Yeah. He's wonderful. Yeah. Picard. I just, everything about him sounds wonderful. He never went anywhere without a slide rule and two wristwatches. He decorated his home with prisms.

5:48Why did he wear two watches? Well, one for, well I don't need to you know I mean one for you know one for the time here and one for the time up there you know what the reason I asked you is because I knew the answer and I thought you might do as well no absolutely not but the reason he did is because he knew that if they didn't match then at least one of them was wrong

6:13clever very clever but this trip they made up a couple of people had tried to get into the stratosphere it before i think in planes and how high do you have to go i think it's about it's at least seven and a half miles okay so the air is pretty thin and pretty cold and a couple of people had tried in planes and not done terribly well picard's innovation was a sealed what he called a sealed gondola with walls of aluminium that were i think three and a half millimeters thick so it's quite fragile this thing carrying them up and above him and his his assistant uh kipfer paul kipfer i believe uh a huge balloon filled with hydrogen and that expands uh and it carries him up and it expands in the light of the sun and it carried them up and up and up and up and up and as you said dan one thing after another started going wrong well nightmare but even before the mission started it started going wrong so kipfer said he knew that the whole thing had got off to a rough start when they were doing their final checks and he looked out the window and he saw chimneys passing them from the top of houses.

7:21Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're like, oh, so we've left. Like they just didn't even know. They had no idea that they'd taken off. So immediately that was an issue. Yep. And they had this sort of half an hour crisis of there was a hole in the side of the gondola which had to be pasted shut. And they were very ingenious in the way they did it. Oh, yeah. The other thing, it might get extremely hot up there because you've got less protection against the sun's rays. So they had this little propeller on the side of the gondola, their capsule. So what that meant was one side of the capsule was painted white and one was painted black.

7:54And they thought, well, look, if we can turn it, if we can turn the white side towards the sun, that'll reflect the sun's light, keep us nice and cool. And that's ingenious. Unfortunately, the propeller broke. and so they were then unable to control the temperature. It got up to 40 degrees Celsius in there, 104 Fahrenheit. The water evaporated. They had to lick the walls for moisture. It's just a matter of... How long were they up there? They were for hours and the problem was they couldn't... A full day. Yeah, they couldn't come down because the machine that was going to allow them to come down froze.

8:26So they were like, well, we're just here now and we just have to wait for it to take us back down. Nightfall, when the sun goes down, hydrogen cools and shrinks and allows them to descend. Yeah. They didn't pop the balloon. No, they didn't pop it. I don't think they had a way of getting to the balloon. No, they couldn't because they were closed inside. Meanwhile, the barometer explodes, the mercury within it falls to the ground and because the material is made of this metal, it starts eating the actual thing that they're in on the floor. I mean, can you imagine? You're in this, just two of you, one's six foot six.

8:58Looks like Professor Calculus. Doesn't know what time it is. No.

9:05The press said that they died, didn't they? Yeah. They'd been up for so long. They were expected to come back quicker than that. So in the newspapers that afternoon, they said, yeah, they've gone. That's it. So like, I've never been in a hot air balloon. I think you have. Have you done that before? I have been up a couple of times in a hot air balloon. Is it petrifying? It's really lovely until you land. Right. Why? No, I love it. I mean, I love that kind of taking off and it's so quiet when you're up and you can just hear dogs barking. See, that's what I find scary. Yeah. Is how quiet it is. It's amazing, yeah.

9:36Because every other way you might go in the air, like in a plane or a helicopter, it's noisy as hell, isn't it? But it's just so peaceful. But the thing is, you just can't steer them, can you? No. You go where the wind takes you. Yeah, you're kind of just relying on that and then trying to find somewhere to land that doesn't involve a lot of cows, usually. Right. Why were you doing it, by the way, for the show? Was that like a BBC budget thing, or were you...? No, I don't think I've done it for television. Oh, you've not? I think I've just done it for fun. Right, okay. And it was fun until we landed.

10:06Okay. There isn't a thing in the BBC budget that says, we haven't spent all of this year's money yet. Get Roberts in a hot air balloon now. Do you know, there was an experiment that we tried to do years and years ago when I did Coast back in 2005, when they were trying to work out how many weather balloons they'd have to attach to me to lift me off the ground. And then it became obvious that actually it was too windy to do it and I was likely to be kind of dragged off this quay, which we were doing. honestly the whole thing and there's this picture of me standing there looking utterly terrified and i think i've got about 14 where the balloons attached to me and i'm just my toes are just starting to lift off but we never actually but you let them at that point you went no no i think actually this is a bad idea you got scared at 14 balloons being attached how would they how would they have got you back down well this is a question isn't it i don't think i've thought that far so when they put these 14 on did you start to feel a little bit wait yeah definitely wow yeah Yeah, they landed, Picard and Kipfer, they landed on a glacier.

11:04And they weren't out of the woods even when they landed, you know. Yes, they were. They were on a glacier. Sorry. I love the tree line. I love the tree line, yeah. But they had to, I think, hike down the glacier. This was 1931, we should say. Did they get their data, though? Sorry? They were up there to get some data. They got the data. I think they did get the data. They were studying cosmic rays because they were trying to support Einstein's theories of relativity. Yeah, they did. I think by accident, because they largely were just trying to survive, because from the get-go, they should have died.

11:36And they didn't. Like, the mercury, there was a statement that Picard just said out loud. He was like, if only I had a vacuum cleaner. And they realized that the hole of the actual ship, if we can call it, the gondola, he called it, was, there was a hole in it where they opened it and it acted like a vacuum and sucked all the mercury out. And then they stuffed some clothes into it. and then it's Apollo 13. It's the original Apollo 13, basically. Yeah, it is. Yeah, yeah. It sounds like there were a lot of risks that they hadn't thought. I would have liked to have seen a risk assessment. It sounds like there's a lot of things they hadn't thought about, but they had thought about the possibility of things falling on their head.

12:10I know. While all this has happened, they're like, and we've got these baskets on our head. We're going to be found dead looking like idiots. This is... So in the vein of risk assessments and thinking about what you might need to go up into the stratosphere, you would have thought that there needed to be a better set of instructions for getting in that thing and going up there and not smashing your mercury and that kind of thing. Not making holes in the vessel that you're in. So I had a look at some safety instructions for various more everyday items. And these are some real bits of safety advice.

12:48So one is on a buggy where it says remove child before folding.

12:56These are real. There's one on a hairdryer that said, do not use while sleeping. On items of clothing, do not iron clothes whilst wearing them. Now, hang on a second, Alice, because... Is everybody pointing it down? Yeah. Have you done it? All the time. Oh, no. No. I'll notice a crease, and I'll lay down on the bit of the iron board, and I'll just separate it from where I need to be. Dan, you're not the same shape as an ironing board, but you are the same shape as your own body. So it's much better to do it on yourself. You can't encourage people to do that. Chainsaws don't hold the wrong end.

13:36And a microwave, and this was apparently following a very sad experiment where this had happened, and then after that they had to put the label on because there was some litigation which said you should have had the label on there to begin with, and then this woman would have known not to do it. Do not dry your pets in the microwave. Wow. Is it true that there are some animals that are small enough that they can dodge the microwaves though? If you have a pet ant. If you have a pet ant. Listen to this guy. Really? Your poor kid. I know you want a pet. I know you've asked for a pet for Christmas for years now.

14:10Well, great news. I've finally decided. It's got more legs than a cat. Yeah, I think in a microwave, the microwaves go in a certain pattern. and the wavelength is long enough that if you put an ant in there, it'll find a bit that isn't going to cook it. I think you have to take this. Yeah, otherwise it's like Tekashi's Castle. They're just going around. It's just one extra level of unfair on the ant. I will say as well, don't try that at home either. Don't try it at home, yeah. Okay, hey guys, we need to move on very soon. Oh, when Apollo 11 took off, NASA worked out that if the rocket exploded, it would fire shrapnel three miles away.

14:52So they sat all the VIPs 3.5 miles away to watch the... Very nice. That's amazing. But you're relying on their maths, aren't you? Yeah. Although I suppose... Was it just the VIPs? They allowed other people to go games. Yeah, everyone else is... Great news. We've got you front row seats.

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17:01Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Alice. Thank you very much. So my fact is basically an X fact. so it is that people used to think that arteries carried air not blood and that the airways themselves were full of fluid so for a very very long time people thought that actually blood vessels were full of just air and in fact that's what artery means so artery means air carrier it comes from air terrain in in greek and i find this just astonishing as an anatomist because you don't have to do much digging around in the body to work out that there's blood in the blood vessels and air in the airways um but this just went on and on and on do we know why do we know why people thought it i think because sometimes if you are if you're dissecting a body and you've waited a while to dissect it then maybe the arteries could be empty but i mean it just seems really really odd that they didn't realize and and obviously it took a long time to work out that um the heart was pumping blood around the body and that it was circulating so it's kind of um there's just misunderstanding upon misunderstanding.

18:09And what's interesting is that it's still in the words. So the fact that artery means air carrier. And then they're confused about the airways as well. So they call the trachea, the original word is actually arteria trachea. So they're calling it an artery, but in order to differentiate it from other, what they think are air carrying vessels, they call it the rough artery. So arteria trachea. so we still call it trachea we just miss the artery bit of it but they were totally confused about the whole thing i mean a lot of it goes back to aristotle he did he did a lot of great work and he knew quite a bit about how bodies were put together and then he kind of made it up so he said he reckoned that the heart was making blood um and they could see that blood was moving through some vessels and going to the periphery but then they thought that the body was just consuming it so they thought blood was constantly being made and consumed by the body and then as far as he was concerned the lungs were just to cool the heart down so the heart's working so hard it's getting really hot so it needs the lungs to cool it down also the brain is another radiator to help cool the blood cool the heart as well right and that's all the brain is doing it's just a cooling mechanism yeah um and you're thinking from your heart too so your heart is the seat of your emotions and your and your intellect yes doing a lot it's doing a lot yeah if if today i went to see a doctor who still believed this how how much of a difference would that make on my survival like because they knew there was still blood in there yeah actually like it was william harvey who found out that the heart was pumping blood around the body and a lot of people didn't really like that idea a lot of physicians because their theory kind of worked like it worked for them do you know what i mean so him coming up with this new way that the heart works they kind of resisted it quite a lot of the time and he put it in his book um which is in latin so i'm not going to read it but it was he put it right i've seen it recently i've i went into the royal college of physicians and they got out the first edition of de moto cordis on the on the the motion of the heart and and the way that the blood is moved around the body and it's just incredible and what he's worked out that nobody else has worked out before is that veins carried blood back to the heart so that so that he was going right yes blood is being pushed out but it's also coming back again and he said look there's a closed loop actually but he still didn't know why he still didn't know why blood was being pumped off to the lungs and then coming back to the heart again they could see some connections between arteries and veins in the in the gut so they could see that happening at some levels but they couldn't see capillaries and then it was a cornish doctor called john mayo who's a who's a hero of mine i think he's fantastic and he basically went well i think something's going on in the lungs i think the blood's getting something out of the air i think tiny particles are coming out of the air into the blood in the lungs and that's what's going on.

21:00And that was 100 years before anybody knew. And then in the end, it is air going through, but it's just inside the blood. Yeah. Count one for Aristotle, I think. Well, he knew what he was talking about. He put it in shorthand, but you know. William Harvey was friends with Charles I. And Charles I used to get him deer to use in his experiments. Very nice. Because obviously kings have lots of deer at their disposal. Yeah. And Harvey was there when Charles was people had this thing called scrofula and it was thought that the king could touch you and it would make you better. And William Harvey was one of the people who was there sort of like with a notepad going, yep, they got better, they got better, they got better.

21:42And also, Charles... Wait, what? Did he? Definitely did that. And also, Charles I sent him to Burnley in Lancashire because there was a report of some witches there and he had to go to Burnley and count their nipples. Now was he volunteering for this job Or was he just a send? The king asked him to do it Because actually Charles wasn't massively into Burning witches and killing witches Like his predecessors had been So he wanted to do an actual Check it out whether it was happening Harvey went over and said These people are all completely normal We shouldn't be killing them And they all got pardoned by Charles I Why would they have had more nipples?

22:23like with a supernumerary nipples was the idea if you were a witch you needed extra nipples to feed your like black cat and the devil I'm afraid there's a known fact that witches do have a nipple on their tailbone which is where the devil feeds I'm sorry it's a bit well it's just science guys it's worse than Aristotle you'd be a bit grown up about it no no that was the belief in the 17th century was it was all a bit it's all a bit sort of like fruity stuff you know basically they'll find something if they think you're a witch they'll find something especially if you go to burnley i just hear the ghost of faraday in this room going what's happened to my institution so when when was it at what point did we realize blood was where it is who was that who was that person it's just it's gradual it's a really gradual process um so galen saw that arteries did contain blood so he was a physician in the first century he was physician to marcus aurelius and he was a surgeon for the gladiators as well um so he worked out yeah he worked out that these arteries didn't have air in them but they had they had blood in them but he still didn't understand the circulation so and that comes along much later then there's a there's an arabic uh physician called ibn al-nafis in the 13th century who works out that there's a pulmonary loop but he doesn't link it up with the rest of the circulation so it's it's gradually in the Yeah, absolutely.

23:52So it's just gradual steps. So we often kind of put Harvey up there, but he's standing on the shoulders of giants. I mean, you always are in science, aren't you? Yes. Like gradual increments. There was a thing, wasn't there, where people thought the blood went out. Let's say the blood goes out to my hand and then back to the heart and the same blood goes out to my hand and then back to the heart. It's kind of like a big hokey-cokey action of, like all the blood is going out and then back in. Well, yeah, I mean, this is one of the things that, so in Harvey's time, there was this idea that the blood was being made constantly and not that it was coming back actually but it was being made in the heart and then pushed out and he was working out the volume of blood that was being pushed out by the heart and one of his arguments is actually there's too much blood being pushed out for the body to actually potentially you know possibly absorb this much so it must be coming back it can't be that it's all being pushed out and then other people thought that the liver made it they thought because if you if you kind of look at what the liver's doing it it's it's uh receiving all these nutrients from the gut you know and that is what it does so it receives all the nutrients come from the um the veins from the gut go to the liver and then it does a lot of processing of that and then the idea was that that then goes to the heart gets turned into blood somehow and then it's all about nutrients so they just had no idea about oxygen and that being you know one of the primary reasons of blood circulating obviously it does take nutrients around as well but the oxygen is pretty important well yeah but also like there was steps but people made mistakes as well and when they realized that there was nutrients as well as oxygen going around the body there was a guy called richard lower from cornwall who thought that he could inject soup into the veins of dogs and that would nourish them interesting yeah what flavor not recorded but i'm afraid it wouldn't matter either way and it doesn't work so again do not try that at home bad for yeah bad for you bad for the dog yeah yeah soup in the microwave pets out of the microwave yeah that's but that would have been before soup was differentiated into flavors that was there was only there was just like some soup and then Gruul.

26:02Just gruel. It was the 18... Oh, I want to say 1860s when we got the first... I feel like you're fixating on the wrong part of this stuff. Can I... Just while we're on heart, sort of innovations around the heart as well, can I tell you... Have you guys heard of Werner Forsman? No. Such an interesting scientist. So he was a young German doctor who... He theorized that you could study the heart by inserting a catheter into either an artery or a vein and pushing it towards the heart and then taking an x-ray of yourself and sort of seeing the heart in more detail basically. That was his premise and he was a very young doctor.

26:42He was about 25 when he came up with this idea. He asked his bosses, can I do this to a patient? No, no you can't. So he says, well can I do it to myself? His bosses say no. So at this point he goes a bit rogue and he just asks a nurse working in this hospital, I need to do this to you. So to put a catheter in and all the way to the heart, right? He tells her he's going to do it to her. She's sort of strapped to a trolley. But this is the thing. He's not going to do it to her. He only needs the nurse because he is so junior as a doctor. He doesn't have access to catheters. So she has opened the catheter cabinet for him.

27:22He sort of straps it to the table. And then while she's strapped to the table, she looks over and he's doing it to himself. he's pushed a catheter all the way into touching his own heart wow stunning he's done it in completely the wrong room to take a picture of so they he then has to unstrap her and she has to help him carry all of his clobber and all the attached stuff like down two flights of stairs everyone's furious everyone's shouting at him what are you doing wow like sorry what year is this 20s I think roughly the 20s 1920s so we're still on those old it was last week and like as a colleague is trying to wrestle this thing out of him saying no you can't do this this is insane he goes ta-da and there it is photo is taken x-ray image of his own heart amazing it doesn't really go anywhere his career doesn't go especially well he's a German doctor he goes through World War 2 as a German army doctor nothing he thinks has really come of his sort of idea all those years ago and then he gets these weird phone calls in 1956 from foreign accented people saying and yeah he's won a Nobel Prize he's won a Nobel Prize for this because it turns out other doctors carried on his innovations and went further with it I'm sorry for caricature I'm just laughing about the fact that we have mentioned the Nobel Prize recently in a couple of episodes.

28:53And any time we talk about the phone call, this is like the body of science excellence. And every time one of the three of us go, So rude.