Black Box

21:47Molly Webster:Okay, I'll do that. Okay, let me do it one more time. Three, two, one. This is Tim Howard, and today on Radiolab, we've been talking about black boxes. And the next story started with a radio piece that I heard at the Third Coast International Audio Festival. There were a lot of incredible stories, but there was this one called Keep Them Guessing that I just loved, and I couldn't get it out of my head. So I sat Jad and Robert down in our little black box of a studio. I asked the end D. Look at Tim Howard. I'm not sure I like your tone, okay? And I connected them with the guy who made the piece.

22:22Molly Webster:Hello. I hear the sound of what sounds like another room. Does he sound like me now? Oh! His name is Jesse Cox. Wow, you sound so close because you're far away. He's actually in Australia. Where everybody is, because they're upside down from the rest of us, they are very, very likely to fall into the sky. You have us Australians worked out down to a T, Robert. I'm gripping on with my hands at the table as we speak. Oh, good. Okay, just to start, I mean, maybe just introduce us to your grandparents. Who are they? Well, my grandparents were mind readers on the radio. Really? Yeah. You're going to have to explain that.

23:01Molly Webster:What are their names first? Leslie Pittington and Sidney Pittington. Pittington. Pittington. And they had a radio show? Yeah, the show was called The Piddingtons or The Amazing Piddingtons and it was on the BBC radio in the 1950s. Now, Jesse told us that for most of his life, he didn't know this. I guess the reason was that my grandfather and my grandma divorced well before I was born. And then his grandpa. He died when I was four or five. Then his grandma remarried. So nobody talked about it, crazily enough. I knew that my grandparents had been famous and my grandma was an actress. But it really wasn't until I was a teenager and a radio producer actually discovered by accident that my grandma was alive.

23:44Molly Webster:And went, what? There's still a Pittington alive? The reporter calls up his grandma and is like, hey, can I interview you? And my grandma was hesitant. She was like, oh, I'm not sure. I'll be very good. I can try and remember. And they came and interviewed her. And when it went to air, when it got broadcast, we all drove up to his grandma's house. And listened to it around the radio like they would have back in the 1950s and heard the story. And that's when Jesse discovered that his grandparents, Leslie and Sidney Pittington, one time had an audience of 20 million people. Yeah, yeah. Basically, the population of Australia was listening to my grandparents back in the 1950s.

24:20Molly Webster:No way. I was like, yeah, why don't I know this? This is in my family and why don't I know it? But he says it was really when he sat down and listened to the original broadcasts, what's left of them. two hours of old BBC recordings that survive today because my grandparents pirated them from the BBC back in 1950. He says it wasn't until he heard those tapes that I went, wow. You could now tell us this story. Tell us what you heard that made you go, wow. Well,

24:56Molly Webster:you hear this very dramatic theme song and this old BBC voice comes onto the tape and says, Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We present the Piddington. And the music goes up. All very, very dramatic. And then the narrator sets the scene for you. Good evening to you all, both at home and here in the number one Pickettly studio right in the middle of the West End of London. It was done in front of a live audience. And then you hear my grandfather's voice. Well, as Stephen Grenfell has just told you, He was a stutterer.

25:35Molly Webster:There were all these things that meant it should never have worked on radio. Anyhow, my grandfather is in the studio, on the stage. And my grandma. She was often somewhere dramatic. As in not in the studio. Somewhere exotic. One time she was in a diving bell. She was underwater. One time she was in the Tower of London. there Leslie in the tower yes I'm here and remember Pittington is here in the Piccadilly studio and Leslie is in the Tower of London so your grandpa is on stage and your grandma you're saying is in a tower by phone or no she's in front of she's in front of a microphone now this is back in the time when microphones were the size of small melons there'd be a microphone set up in the Tower of London connected live yeah my grandfather then comes on the air and sets up a series of telepathy tests that they're going to enact.

26:27Molly Webster:And now down to work. I will attempt to transmit to Leslie a line of print selected from a number of books on the table here in the studio. So there was a famous one called the book test. And this is where a member of the audience would come up to the stage and there'd be a pile of books. And they'd randomly pick up a book, randomly open to a page and point to a line. Would you read out the line to the listening audience? the line selected is be abandoned as the electrician said that they would have no current now completely random bit of text selected out of a stack of books after the text had been chosen and only then I shall now call in the Tower of London they would connect to his grandma Leslie in just a moment at the sound of the gong I want your complete silence your sympathy and your cooperation now concentrate on the line while I attempt to transmit it to Leslie.

27:26Molly Webster:And a gong would sound, and he'd kind of very dramatically furrow his brow. And the next thing you heard was... Min? My grandmother. Min?

27:42Molly Webster:Light? This sort of frail, gentle voice, and she'd start to unpick... Er... what was being transmitted to her. Something to do... An electrician. Something about light and electricians. Remember that line again was... Be abandoned as the electricians said that they would have no current. Will you concentrate on the word... That's like being left. People being left. It's amazing to listen to over 60 years later, listening to those tapes. I'm still on the edge of my seat. Abandoned. That. Not light.

28:34Concentrate on the word light, light. And right at the end.

28:40Molly Webster:I think the whole line is. Abandoned. as the electricians said there would not be current. Be abandoned as the electricians said that they would have no current.

29:00Molly Webster:Almost every time it would be 100 % correct. Truly remarkable broadcast.

29:09Molly Webster:It just was this feeling inside you that you get going, hang on, what? When Jesse heard those broadcasts, his obvious question was, how did they do that? Well, this is the question that I have wanted to know for so long. And there have been many, many theories. I mean, they used to get letters in from listeners all the time. There's this box of press clippings we found at the bottom of my grandma's closet. And we started going through these press clippings. And there were wild theories, like little Morse code transmitters in their teeth. I mean, one of the theories I quite liked was someone who wrote in saying there was a green man that ran between their shoulders.

29:49Molly Webster:And he knew this on authority because he also had a green man. And so that was precisely how they did it. But you are totally convinced that this was a carefully worked out trick of some kind. Yes. That is the one part of almost certainty I can say. There has to be some secret code, some tapping of the some something. Well, you're not the first person to say that. that people were constantly trying to guess what the code was. That's Jim Steinmeier. I'm an author and a consultant to magicians. He says that at the time, some magicians in London thought that his stammer was part of the code.

30:25Molly Webster:Two nuts. I can just think, yes. Jesse, for his part, ended up going through a ton of these theories as he interviewed magicians and historians, read through magic books. Initially, one of the theories that made sense to him is that the code was in the silence. that basically my grandparents and my grandma were so in sync that between each time a sound or a word was uttered, they'd inside their head start going through the alphabet. And they'd be so in tune, so in sync, that whatever letter that matched up, that that would be a code. Wait a minute. So Chad? A, B, C. Hi. No, stop at C. I'm wondering.

31:05Molly Webster:A, B, C, D, E. F. G. The next letter is going to be J. I'm going to be standing here for all that. Yeah, of course. As soon as you start playing any of these theories out in real time, you realize how ridiculous they are. And if you listen to the second broadcast of the two that survived, you hear something that makes the whole idea of a code seem kind of impossible. Yeah. That was a test they did on the aeroplane broadcast. In that broadcast, his grandma? She was in an aeroplane. Flying at a great height, at a great speed towards somewhere, but we're not sure where. Flying around Bristol. And she was in this plane at the same moment that he was on stage.

31:44Molly Webster:Exactly. And on that time, there were numbered envelopes on everyone's seat. And my grandfather said, OK, everyone, write something and put it in the envelope. Seal it up. Just write a poem off the top of your head. 150 people do this. And then Sid turns to one of the judges and says, OK, pick two numbers from 1 to 150. And then someone goes into the audience and goes and picks those two envelopes, brings them back to the stage, gives them to the judges. and then the judge picks one of the envelopes, pulls out the poem, and then holds it in front of my grandfather. And so here you have a poem chosen seemingly at random and Leslie, the grandma, is several thousand feet in the air.

32:20Molly Webster:When they finally connect her... First, we'll come in, will you? Hello? ...via shortwave relay. Leslie is still completely isolated. She can't even hear a word that they're saying. She never had a pair of headphones, so she could never actually hear what was going on in the studio. She literally just spoke into a microphone once the technician said, Leslie, we're ready for you.

32:38Tim Howard:We're ready for you.

32:40Molly Webster:So thousands of people below, Sidney is there furrowing his brow, and the poem he's trying to send her is from Keats. It's one line that goes, Hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert.

32:54Tim Howard:A bird?

32:59Molly Webster:One bird. Oh, it's two lines.

33:07Molly Webster:A burnt spirit. Oh, I've got it. I can guess it. Hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert. Miss Young, would you read out what is written down on the piece of paper that you hold? Hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert. Thank you. The crazy part is that in that trick, your grandpa doesn't even talk to her. There's complete silence between Sid and Leslie. And if there's silence, there can be no coding. So it was kind of this wonderful process. I'd talk to people and even as they came up with theories, you'd listen to the tape and then realize that even the theories themselves just seem so implausible.

33:48Molly Webster:Well, maybe it's the narrator. Do you think it's the narrator? Whatever it is the narrator says each night, which is before the game is even on, somehow encoded into that man's introduction is the answer. No, because the audience hasn't yet gone and done its random act when he starts the show. There was one thing that I discovered from reading the magic books. And this is this whole idea about passing on a piece of information through a third party. Now, my grandfather never speaks to my grandma, but he says to the technician in the studio, can you please call Gilbert Sullivan in the Strata Cruiser and ask my wife to stand by?

34:23Molly Webster:Then the technician calls Gilbert and says, Gilbert, can you please ask Leslie to stand by? and then Gilbert Sullivan says to my grandma, Leslie, please stand by. Now, that is the only thing I can see where there's some kind of communication. Wait, but how would stand by communicate something like a random sentence from a book or whatever? Exactly. And that's then essentially where the theory falls down because then what happens next is that my grandma basically successfully recites a half-written crossword which someone has put into an envelope and passed up to my grandpa. So like you go, how stand by means, you know, six down, I have no idea.

34:59Molly Webster:So really, I'm back to square one again. I can't work it out. I've got, you know, the closest - You mean to this day you don't know? To this day, I do not know. To this day. Wait a second. Wait a second. No, we can't. No, there's got to be somebody who knows. Can't believe we can come to this interview. We have no - So it's the technician. It's got to be the technician. You got to get to the technician because the technician is looking at her and he's doing something - Or the pilot. Or the pilot. And all they have to do is move their lips. Something is happening with that man's eyebrows. That's the code.

35:27Molly Webster:It's the eyebrows. I feel like I'm just listening to this, like what's been going on in my head for about 10, 12 years. So then I asked Jesse, like, what happened when he talked to his grandma? Total dead end. What do you mean total dead end? You mean like - Growing up, once we discovered this story, around the dinner table when we visited her, it would always be, but why don't you tell us? Why can't you tell us? We're family. Surely you can tell us. And she would fob us off and just say, you are the judge. That is the line that they finished. Come on. Well, that is the line they finish with every single broadcast.

35:58Molly Webster:Anything to say. Well, only thanks very much, everyone. And you're the judge. Well, I think maybe. Well, all right. I'm baffled. Now back to City Pittington in Piccadilly. She won't even give me the satisfaction of saying, yes, it was a trick. She won't even say that. Clearly, you aren't the favorite grandchild. There was probably another, another, you have a cousin or a sibling whom she really adored. And one day, without your knowing it, she whispered the secret to her. What about to her son, your father? Did she tell your dad? She told my dad something. What? What did she tell him? I have no idea.

36:35Molly Webster:He will not even admit being told something. If she slipped up, This is Jesse's dad. and I'm not even sure that she did slip up. But I had to finish that scene, Steve. And I have grilled my dad. I don't understand why you can't say yes. Leslie did tell me something. I'm not going to tell you, but yes, she did actually tell me something. If my mum entrusted me with something all those years ago, then I will keep that trust. Why? Because I believe in keeping trust. My dad won't tell my mum. They've been together for over 30 years. You'll just have to continue not knowing. There's no book that's published.

37:17Molly Webster:There's no one that came out and said, I was the fellow who worked behind the scenes with the Pittingtons. Let me tell you how it was done. That's Jim Steinmeier again. They left people guessing and walked away. The thing that got me is when I was talking to magicians and they said, we can repeat everything that they did. Really? So they can actually do – I mean like one of them is in a plane and another is on the – Apparently. But they still themselves don't know 100 % for sure how my grandparents did it. If we could figure this out, would you want – it sounds like you would want to know the answer.

37:52Molly Webster:I'm not so sure anymore. Really? We all say we want to know. We all go completely crazy and mad. But I feel like this story wouldn't have lasted for 60 years. It wouldn't still captivate people today if they'd told people. If they hadn't kept to their line, you are the judge. I kind of feel like that's almost the greater magic than whatever magic they were doing. I just feel like this is a black box that we can shine a light into it and go, okay, check that one off the list. Now we can go to the other ones. Well, this is the cool thing. Now, if we can't figure it out, then you will be very happy with our program.

38:24Molly Webster:If we can figure it out, we will call you and say, do not listen to this show because it will deeply disappoint you. Well, I mean, the thing I think for me that made me come to peace with not finding out and not knowing the answer was that a lot of the interviews I did with my grandma were from a few years ago. And she actually isn't very well. She has dementia and she's been sick the past couple of years. And so she physically can't tell it anymore. And, yeah, for me, there is something about, you know, I visit my grandma now and you go, she was amazing. She, not only did she make this incredible program with my grandfather that had 20 million people listen to them, which is just incredible when you think of the 1950s.

39:14Molly Webster:They've managed to. What happened? Hey, no, no, no, Jesse. Come back. No. We just went straight on the hour. It was exactly, it's exactly nine seconds ago was the hour. Ah, mother. Yeah. Hello. Hello.

39:34Tim Howard:Yeah, hi. Your booking ran out just a minute ago. Yes, we noticed.

39:40Molly Webster:Yeah, I think we'll probably need to use the phone because that booth now needs to be used. Sorry. So we called Jesse back and while we didn't drag him back into the studio, actually we couldn't, he did send us this tape. Now, you've held on to this secret for so many, so, so many years. Why haven't you wanted to reveal it to anybody? I think the reason I haven't ever wanted to reveal the secret is because it's a wonderful mystery. and I like to think that after I've died, people will still say, how did they do it? Was it or wasn't it? It just tickles me to think of that. A lot of secrets, magic secrets, they get passed down from generations and they get re-performed over and over again.

40:31Molly Webster:I guess that very much becomes a part of that family. Now, as a performer myself, if I wanted to bring back the Pidditans, would you feel like you could hand down this magic trick to your grandson to carry it on? Of course if I had a grandson who wanted to carry it on I'd have enormous difficulty telling him how to. I don't think it would be possible because there's an awful lot that I wouldn't be able to tell him. What do you mean you wouldn't be able to tell that grandson? It's hard to explain why I wouldn't be able to. it's just that I wouldn't be able to that's all I can say about that

41:15Molly Webster:our sincere thanks to Jesse Cox for so graciously allowing us to air that story and also thank you to ABC National Radio's 360 Documentaries who produced the story with him it's called Keep Them Guessing and we've linked to the original story on our website radiolab.org and we'd also like to take a moment here not only to thank Jesse for his amazing story but to honor his memory. Jesse passed away very unexpectedly in 2017, caught all of us off guard and he is incredibly, incredibly missed. So... Well, you know, I don't think it's actually time for us to end this because I didn't tell you this.

41:55Molly Webster:We were so interested in trying to figure out how they did that trick that Soren and I... Because we just wanted to find out, like, did somebody know how they did it? So we called this guy.

42:13Molly Webster:Who ruined everything. This is Penn Jillette, who you probably know from Penn & Teller, famous for doing magic tricks and then telling you how they're done. Now, I don't really know what I was expecting when we called him. I guess I was thinking he would know what they did, but he wouldn't choose to tell us. I didn't know. But when we called him and we played him the story, as soon as he heard it, he said, Oh, it's a book test, right? It's a book test. It's an envelope switch. A what? And there are, you know, three or four ways to do that. What did he say? He said, basically, I can tell you how they did it.

42:43Molly Webster:Yeah. Or how they might have done it. But you are not going to like it. There you go. The only secret in magic, there's only one, and that is that the secret must be ugly. You cannot have a beautiful secret. A beautiful secret is the kind of thing that's short and sweet, like, you know, he folded the hat twice. There's mirrors under that table. When you hear it, it's like, oh, of course, that's what they would do. And you love finding it out. Then you will whisper it to the person next to you. So in magic, what you want is an idea that is not beautiful. So what he told us is a magic trick that stays secret is one that's so boring to tell, you don't want to tell it, and you don't even want to hear it.

43:25Molly Webster:If I have to say, he's lying about this and there's gaffer's tape over behind there and they're not actually telling you the exact truth here. And it gets so, you don't get an aha. One of the strongest feelings you can get in life, one of the most rewarding feelings is the feeling of an aha. I finally understand. If you don't have a wonderful aha, people won't figure it out. So I can tell you easily how they did that trick, but you will not get an aha. Basically, he said the true answer to this one is going to kill your joy. Yeah, it's ugly. So did he tell you what they did? Yeah. What did he say?

44:13Molly Webster:Well, I'll tell you in just a second. He went into excruciating detail about how he thinks they did it. Now, a book test, we actually do one in our show, The Penitentiary. But the more important thing, he was so right. Once we heard the explanation and the details and all, we were both like, all right, well.

44:37Molly Webster:This is like a kiss with a poison dart in it. I love how much I bummed your shit. As you can hear, he knew exactly what he was doing with us. And in a way, he's asking us a deeper and more philosophical question. I've done this to you. Will you turn around and do it to your audience? Well, all I've done to you, you know, because you get to edit. All I have done is put you in precisely the position I live my life in. You now have to make the exact same decisions that I make. And I will tell you, and this is just true, that I would have played this particular thing differently with almost any other show.

45:17Molly Webster:You know, my move on the chessboard with another show would be to say, you know, I do have several ideas as to how this could be done. But I think I'm going to be like the grandmother and go to my grave with this. You know, and I would have just given you that soundbite, which I just have. Except that we have pivoted the entire piece called, so? it's like all eyes, all eyes have been directed to the next sentence. So that's a little difficult. But I want to see how you solve a problem that I solve every day. But we have like a higher call. You're entertaining, but we're entertaining with the caveat that we're supposed to be like telling the truth as best we understand it.

46:09Molly Webster:So we have a slightly different set of gods in our Mount Olympus than you do, which makes it very confusing. You don't really. You don't really because I am not suggesting that you lie. You're just going to have to tell your audience what you think they need to hear. And that's where he left it. So in the days after the interview, we just got into this debate about what we should do. We obviously have an obligation to you, you listening, to tell you what we know. Yes, the whole deal. We can't pretend that we don't know something that we now do know, even if it would make a much more beautiful story.

46:42Molly Webster:So this leaves us in a conundrum. Are we – Yeah. Are we entertainers or are we actually – Journalists. Journalists. Yes. So here's where we ultimately came down. We have decided not to tell you how the Pittingtons did it. I mean we're going to tell you, but we're not going to tell you here in this podcast because we have now been soiled by this truth we learned off the record. And you, if you want to be soiled, sure, come and soil yourself. You can go to this URL, radiolab.org slash theuglytruth, don't click this. Radiolab.org slash theuglytruth, don't, no apostrophe, click this. And we just leave it to you.

47:24You can go there or you cannot.

47:26Molly Webster:All I have said to you is that it's a trick. Yeah. And you knew that. The fact that it wasn't the trick you wanted it to be.

47:37Molly Webster:you know he did turn sweet at one moment we were talking about the grandma right the grandma tells the grandson in the conversation at the end she is not sure she could explain to him yes how it well that's beautiful that is the most beautiful thing that that happens in the whole thing because I think she's telling the truth. She may not know how the trick was done. And yet she was a party to it. She's the one. He says, you know, oftentimes when you're doing tricks, somebody knows everything and the other person is, you know, in the dark. Yeah. You mean like one of the partners intentionally not knows what's happening?

48:18Molly Webster:Yeah. There are tricks in the Penn and Teller show that I don't really know how they're done. It might have happened here. He may have decided that he would be the knowing one, she would be the innocent, and maybe therefore, and this is just a hunch, but just possibly everything she's saying to her grandchild, instead of being a kind of dodge or a little bit of a lie, maybe it was the whole truth. Music

49:17Molly Webster:The Black Box Hour The butterfly rainforest. Oh.

49:30Molly Webster:So that you can see the butterflies that are flying, in fact.

49:34Tim Howard:So a few days ago, I was in Gainesville, Florida, at the Florida Museum of Natural History, where they have a rainforest. It's, what, about three stories tall? It's got a top that's all wrapped in a net, and then it was covered in butterflies. Oh my gosh, there's so many. Thousands. Yes, so these are Heliconia's butterfly. That's Andrei Surikoff. I started looking at butterflies when I was six years old, and I have never grew up. He was my guide. And here under this leaf, you can see an owl butterfly. Wow. One wing is like the size of my palm. So there were red ones. Black and yellow ones. Blue ones.

50:11Tim Howard:Zebra-striped ones. Is that a monarch? Yes. Watch out, don't step on this butterfly. It was like a Dr. Seussian land of butterflies. But I was there to look at the moment right before. Or they become butterflies, which remains one of the most mysterious black boxes in nature. What I'm talking about is something called the chrysalis.

50:33Molly Webster:The chrysalis.

50:34Tim Howard:Just to back up. At a certain point in all caterpillars' lives, after they've eaten a lot of leaves, they hit a certain weight. That is coded in their gene as their final weight. Some hormones start pumping, some genetics turn on, and it starts growing a little shell. That's the chrysalis.

50:51Molly Webster:And inside that chrysalis, as we know, a caterpillar becomes a butterfly or moth.

51:01Molly Webster:And this is a mystery?

51:03Tim Howard:What do you think happens inside the chrysalis?

51:05Molly Webster:I think that... Actually, I've never thought about it, to be honest.

51:10Tim Howard:I don't know. I don't understand how it works. Not many people have. Are you, like, surprised that you actually don't know? Yeah, I'm surprised. I thought, like, I knew and I don't. Those are folks I met at the museum.

51:20Molly Webster:Hey, hold up. Now that I've thought about it for a second. Isn't it simply that the caterpillar is inside the shell, it sort of snuggles up, and then it grows a wing off of its right side and then off of its left side, and it just pops wings out?

51:32Tim Howard:No. That is actually what I thought, but that's not right at all.

51:37Molly Webster:So the Maguire Center is located on three floors.

51:41Tim Howard:Because here's the thing. So now we're going into the bowels of the building. When you take one of those little black boxes and you slice it open... Shall we do it? Yes. which Andre was nice enough to do for me. Sorry. Even though he loves these guys, he took a tiny little chrysalis,

51:55Molly Webster:It's about an inch long.

51:58Tim Howard:which a caterpillar had just gotten into one day ago, and he slowly began to cut. So we're taking our tweezer-like scissors through the outer layer of the chrysalis until... I can see pupil. Oh.

52:15What?

52:16Tim Howard:Oh my gosh. What? No, it was like there was no caterpillar there.

52:21Molly Webster:What do you mean?

52:22Tim Howard:There was no head. There were no legs. There was no antennae, no spiky spine. It's like a pale white yellow. It's very liquidy.

52:32Molly Webster:What was there then?

52:33Tim Howard:Basically just goo. Just like a runny goopy goo. Looks like snot. All you had to do is give it like a little squeeze and then just went. Oh! That is nothing. Oh! It just exploded it. He exploded it. I think he looks shocked, too.

52:52Molly Webster:Wait, I don't understand. Where did the caterpillar go?

52:55Tim Howard:It seems like once the caterpillar gets into its shell, it sort of just melts. Its head, legs. Antenna, abdomen. They all just dissolve. Muscles themselves just sort of, like, dissolve away into individual muscle cells. And some of the cells rupture, and so their insides, the amino acids, the proteins, those all go floating out into space.

53:18Molly Webster:Wait, you're saying that the caterpillar just becomes like a soup of cells?

53:21Tim Howard:Yeah. And yet somehow...

53:24Molly Webster:This soup will magically be transformed into a butterfly or moth. Well, how does that happen?

53:36Tim Howard:That question, that question is the big, fat, metaphysical, quasi-religious, semi-mystical, This is a whole philosophical question that people have been asking forever.

53:49Molly Webster:Yeah. So one of the big arguments that was taking place.

53:53Tim Howard:This is Matthew Cobb. He's a biologist and a historian. And he says back in the 1600s, when naturalists saw that goo, they just thought, oh, well, clearly what's happening is that.

54:03Molly Webster:The caterpillar.

54:04Tim Howard:Goes into the chrysalis.

54:05Molly Webster:And then it actually dies.

54:08Tim Howard:Totally dies.

54:09Molly Webster:And out of its burial cloth is going to come the new life.

54:13Tim Howard:This beautiful and completely new creature.

54:17Molly Webster:Death, as it were, and then a kind of resurrection.

54:23Tim Howard:That's Philip Clayton. He's a philosopher from the Claremont School of Theology. And he says from the beginning, people thought about and wrote about metamorphosis.

54:32Molly Webster:As a kind of spiritual ascent. Says somewhere in the New Testament, Behold, the old has passed away, the new has surely come.

54:40Tim Howard:Basically, people saw the caterpillar as a symbol of our lowly, earthbound, lazy bodies, right? And then the butterfly was sort of casting away all of that, and it represented our soul up in heaven sort of in its most perfect form. Never mind that butterflies actually like to eat. Feces and urine and other unappetizing substances. According to Andre. Sounds tasty. Never mind that. The metaphor is like inspiring at some level, right? Because you think, oh, I've got all, I'm going to just become more, a more perfect version of myself, right? But then the converse side of that is you cut open a chrysalis and it looks like a whole bunch of goo.

55:23Tim Howard:And you think, that is a hell of a lot of change. So the thing is, is that this transformation, either of the butterfly or of my soul, seems so dramatic, so miraculous, that it made some people think like, geez, if you're going to go to heaven in the process, transform that much. Is it even you up there?

55:41Molly Webster:It still has to be you that makes it to heaven.

55:44Tim Howard:You can't change too much. Otherwise, like someone else will be up there enjoying your afterlife.

55:49Molly Webster:So certain memories and elements of your identity have to continue, just not all the elements. Yeah, I'm so intrigued by that because I also think like what, like what, when you undergo such a transformation, what do they think carries through? That's a really interesting question.

56:12Tim Howard:Cleaning out the poop and throwing away the moldy leaves, you have a lot of time to think. Which brings us to Martha Weiss. I am an associate professor of biology at Georgetown University. She got to thinking about this question in more concrete terms. Okay, so... She did an experiment. What we did was we took a big green caterpillar, and we did something that was not entirely nice. She put them in a box, filled it with a nasty odor. And is the odor like an odor of a plant? It's actually a plant-based odor, but it smells kind of like a nail polish remover. In any case, she gassed them with this nasty smell.

56:47Tim Howard:And then once they could smell the odor, then we gave them a zap. Is that just like a zap? Just a zip? A zap? I think 10 seconds of zap. 10 seconds. And they did this over and over. Odor, zap. Odor, zap. Until eventually, most of these caterpillars learned to hate the smell. Every time they get a whiff, they head in the opposite direction. Okay, so then we let them pupate. Meaning the caterpillar changes into its shell and... Organs dissolve, muscles melt. You get this... Cataclysmic, catastrophic, chaotic...

57:26change.

57:28Tim Howard:And then one month later, the moth emerges. And now we're the drum roll. We're ready for the drum roll. They give the moths a whiff. Okay. And the moths hate the smell. I mean, normally moths don't care about the smell at all. It's like 50-50, but these moths hated it.

57:49Molly Webster:Somehow I'm confused. What does that mean?

57:51Tim Howard:That means the memory made it through the goo. Oh. And it came out the other side. Oh. What's your feeling like coming out of this? My feeling is wow. I think it's amazing that a caterpillar can have an experience, go into its chrysalis, five weeks pass, emerge as a seemingly different organism, and that it still can recall experiences that happened to it when it was a caterpillar.

58:24Molly Webster:And how does that happen?

58:25Tim Howard:The answer to this question is we do not know. But out there floating in that sea of goo is actually a tiny little speck of brain. Some of the brain is dissolved away, but there's this like microscopic fragment that has made it through. And Martha suspects that nestled into that fragment is this memory. Oh, it's like a little boop. It's like a little beacon. And it turns out there are others, too. There's a speck of gut, some nerves, some muscle. It's not as gooey as it seems.

59:05Molly Webster:God, it's like, it's like, I can't help wondering, what does the butterfly know about its caterpillar life? Like it knows this one tiny thing, but how much else? Does it know it crawled?

59:17Tim Howard:There's no answer to that question. But Martha says that these types of questions come up all the time. In fact, one of her colleagues... And I was talking to Doug the other day, and he said that he had gotten an email from a guy who was... I'm not exactly sure what flavor of Christian, but he had gone into the whole resurrection thing. and he felt like this was, you know, when he ascended that he wondered if he would then be able to remember his life on Earth.

59:51Tim Howard:Well, here's the answer.

59:54Molly Webster:What answer?

59:55Tim Howard:The answer to the question about what carries through. The continuity question. Oh, right, yes. And memory carries through. Which is freaking cool, I gotta say. It is freaking cool, but there's a little more freaking cool.

1:00:08Molly Webster:All right.

1:00:08Tim Howard:And that is that there's actually a continuity, but it goes in the reverse direction.

1:00:14Molly Webster:What does that even mean?

1:00:15Tim Howard:Well, Matthew Cobb told me this story about this guy.

1:00:19Molly Webster:This 17th century man who I had never heard of. Jan, his name's written Swammerdam, but it's probably more pronounced Schwammerdam.

1:00:27Tim Howard:Schwammerdam.

1:00:27Molly Webster:Schwammerdam.

1:00:28Tim Howard:Schwammerdam, okay. That's Jan Swammerdam, a Dutch microscopist from the 1600s.

1:00:33Molly Webster:He was definitely the first to do some very clear dissections of the chrysalis.

1:00:37Tim Howard:And the caterpillar. And one day in Paris, in front of this crowd of assembled worthies, bewigged and bestocking.

1:00:45Molly Webster:He gets a fat white caterpillar, gets a scalpel or a tiny little thin bit of glass, and he dissects it. He just opens it up at the back along its back, a long line. And what he sees inside or what he can show them is that, in fact, there are some of the structures of the future butterfly, its wings its antennae and even its legs that are actually already formed even before

1:01:11Tim Howard:pupation takes place so you peel back the skin of a caterpillar and beneath it you see the a new

1:01:21Molly Webster:the new creature hidden absolutely there's no decay so bizarre it's like it's like if you were

1:01:29Tim Howard:Just skin me and my 70-year-old self is inside of me or something.

1:01:36Molly Webster:Wait, and the wings also survive the goo?

1:01:38Tim Howard:Yeah, so it's like the caterpillar will actually start to grow little tiny adult parts that are super thin and transparent. And it just keeps them tightly rolled up and hidden up against the edges of the chrysalis. But they don't actually ever go through the goo or become the goo.

1:01:56Molly Webster:What he'd then shown was, you know what, this isn't about death. This isn't about decay. This is actually about transformation.

1:02:07Tim Howard:I don't know, it's kind of eerie. Like, it's not just what of me carries forward into the future. It's like, what of my future self is in me right now?

1:02:29Thank you.

1:03:07Molly Webster:Thanks to our producers this hour, Tim Howard, Molly Webster, Jesse Cox. And thanks to you guys for listening. Yeah.

1:03:18Tim Howard:Real quick before I let you go, I wanted to tell you that we shared an amazing story on our feed about the butterfly researcher you just heard, Dr. Martha Weiss, and how she later befriended a little boy on the other side of the world who wanted to do his own caterpillar memory study.

1:03:34Molly Webster:Martha's daughter is actually an audio reporter, and she captured the whole adventure on tape, which was first published in the audio magazine Signal Hill. And it was so beautiful. We featured it on our feed last year. The episode is called Caterpillar Roadshow, and you can find it on Radiolab or on signalhill.fm.

1:03:55Thank you.

1:04:37Molly Webster:Hi, I'm Gabby. I'm from San Francisco, and here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lula Miller and Latif Nasser. Soran Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandback is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our Director of Sound Design Our staff includes

1:05:11Molly Webster:With help from Gabby Santas Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Anjali Mercado, and Sophie Semayi.

1:05:27Molly Webster:Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.