Screaming Into the Void

0:28Wait, you're listening? from another dimension rolling through the mists of San Francisco Bay. This is an actual recording of the sound, which was plaguing residents of San Francisco in the late 1980s. People had all kinds of theories about what it might be. Secret government activities, submarines, offshore drilling, UFOs. Whatever it was, it was so powerful, it was rattling the houseboats of the bay.

1:13I'm Latif Nasser. I'm Lulu Miller. This is Radiolab, and it is with that mystery that we kicked off our latest live show about voids. Which we performed beneath the void of the night sky at this gorgeous venue called Little Island in New York City. It sits right alongside the Hudson River, which itself empties out into the void of the ocean. Right. And so in that place, in that very void adjacent place, we wanted to make an episode about not just about voids, about people reckoning with voids. standing on the edge of them, trying to decipher the sounds coming out of them, trying to measure them, trying to decide whether or not to scream into them.

2:01Three stories, one by Latif, one by senior producer Matt Kilty, one by me, plus a little extra special bonus by a guest at the very end. Yeah. So as we head into the fall, we hope you enjoy this end of summer experiment we did. And let's pick back up with that mystery hum. Yes. Let me introduce you to a guy who knew exactly what it was. As musicians have told me, it sounds like a dimiridoo. Oh, I'm just pronouncing that. Oh, yeah, a didgeridoo. Didgeridoo, yes. That is Dr. Andrew Bass, a scientist at Cornell, who for decades has been studying the entity that makes this sound. An entity which is a bottom-dwelling fish.

2:50They've sometimes been referred to as the ugliest fish in the sea. They are certainly a contender. Yeah, you know, it's not like looking at a reef fish, right? Picture a frog. Now melt it. Add a set of deranged teeth. Luckily for this little guy, who is often called the California singing fish, it's not his looks, but his song that attracts a mate. The way that he sings his song is by using an organ that's a little like a drum inside his chest. It's an inflated swim bladder against which he strikes not a mallet, but a set of very powerful muscles that he vibrates faster and faster and faster and faster and faster until it releases this ohm.

3:50And sometimes hundreds of them will gather and sing all at once in unison for over two hours. All of their melodies and harmonics swirling together until the sound jumps dimensions. It becomes audible above water. It's mesmerizing. It's almost like, I don't, if I can, forgive me if I say this, it's almost like a lullaby, I think. And if their siren song works as well on the female fish as it does on Dr. Bass, she will follow him to the source of the sound, which is a little hideout beneath a rock that he has dug out just for her in the shallow end of the sea. And there he will keep singing, trying to impress her.

4:38singing out his different yearnings and melodies and rhythms, impressing her with his stamina. Now, of course, singing out into a void like this can come with a risk. You make yourself known. You'll see gulls fly in and grab them. Wow. They'll take them. And there are reports even of eagles sweeping down and taking them out of the water. But it can also sometimes come with a reward. If the female likes what she hears, she will swim deeper into the cave, turn upside down, and one by one begin depositing her eggs on the underside of the rock. We have videos showing the male will move her sometimes along the roof.

5:28Oh, like helping her to distribute them? Well, yeah, this is like amazing. This is actually, so I have to tell you, my wife, her name is Margaret Moshetare, who's worked with me closely on this over the years. She's the one who's made some really amazing videos showing these things. Oh, neat. Right? You see something like that and you go, wow, that is such a sophisticated behavior and a delicate behavior. This delicate scene lasts about 24 hours. And then the female fish swims away. In this species, it is the male that tends to the children, to the babies until they are hatched for weeks. Over the decades, Dr.

6:12Bass has made dozens of incredible discoveries about these fish. How they sing and why they sing and how the circuits in their brain that let them sing look eerily similar to the ones in our brain that let us talk. But none of that is why I called Dr. Bass. because in the 1980s, he made a discovery that to me is far wilder, something he never expected to see, which is that inside this chorus of blustery singing males, there is a second type of male, a male that lacks the musculature to sing, a silent male. Now, when I first heard about this little guy, I fell in love. This little slice of quiet in the din, I felt so much affection for him.

7:10Because it seemed to me he had found a way to articulate the value of silence. He's not a fluke in the gene pool. In some populations, up to one in every 10 males is anatomically silent. And so I wondered, there must be something about him that allows him to persist. Something that the female is choosing over these vocalizing counterpoints. I pictured a fin, something that was gorgeous but invisible to most, but through negative space looked like prize or attribute to some. These are all fancy words for saying, I am so sick of words. Does anyone else feel that? The more I use them for a living, the more I have come to mistrust them, that they are just these noisy puffs of hot air laden not only with anger and violence and insecurity, but so many untruths, that despite the etymology of communication, meaning to share, that words are distancing.

8:23As I sink, should have a better word for sink, as I luxuriate into middle age, into mothering, into marriage, I find myself more and more turning to silence. As anger rises in me or yearning, I turn to silence, to coexist, to connect, to mend, to encounter some bit of good left in another person, left in this burning and blustery world. and so I wondered was there any way that what was going on in the fish could explain this that the female fish was choosing in the silent male just a more pure and honest offering of self so I asked Dr. Bass so the silent male does he use silence in a way that's analogous to like a rack of tail feathers or gorgeous antlers, like, is the silence a feature that he's actually, like, a way that he can, like, actively attract a female?

9:38Yeah. You know, that's a really good question. We have no evidence to support what you just said. Okay, so then how does the silent male get the girl? Well. To get the girl, Dr. Bass explained, first of all, you need to know that they don't call him the silent male, but rather. Sneaker males. And when you say sneaker male, you're not, it's not because he's sporting cool Reeboks. What do you mean? In other words, they were fishes that would sneak into the nest of another male to try to steal fertilizations from them. Okay, so sneaky, skulking, stealth mode. Yeah, yeah, essentially, yeah, sneaky.

10:18What we observed was that these smaller males would literally sneak into, so the male already has a female in his nest. So, okay. So we're at the point where our singer has, he has sung his little heart out. He's attracted her and it's that 24 hour window while she's in there. And he's like caressing her to help her lay the eggs. Yeah. Yeah. And then what happens with this silent male? He tries to sink into the nest and now. So wait, there'd be three of them in there? Yeah. Okay. But here's the dilemma for that male who produced the hum and attracted the female. Yeah. Well, what do I do? Do I focus on trying to fertilize the eggs or chasing that other male out of the nest?

11:01Because, yeah, I was going to ask, like the singing male, when he's helping position her, is he fertilizing that whole time or does he wait till she's gone or he's like right away? He's fertilizing the whole time. If she deposits an egg, he fertilizes it. Okay. Just for like 24 hours straight? Yeah. But here's the thing. The sneaker male will release more. You can almost see like a solid thread of sperm being released. Oh, with the naked eye? Yeah. Whereas with the singing male, you can't? No, because their vent is right up. I mean, they're right up against the egg, right? Oh, I don't know. So they have the advantage of proximity.

11:41So here's the thing. Why would the little guy try to release lots of sperm? Well, he's trying to flood the other sperm. So his fertilized the egg before the other one. Okay. So the singing male is he's up close and he's like going egg by egg. Like, here's some sperm. Here's some sperm. I'm up close. And then from like further away Rambo style, the sneaker male is like shooting a ton. Oh, yeah. Basically, that's yeah. Yeah. To put it simply. And then he is gone. the silent male back to the depths, leaving the singing male to care for his babies. For weeks, the singing male uses his voice to bark away predators, foregoing food so that he emerges as a near skeleton to let the silent male's babies hatch and grow.

12:38As I think about this silent male, I picture him alone and happy and carefree and healthy in the deep. I see his silence anew. Like it sounds aggressive, violent, cowardly, deceptive. Those are strong words. But he doesn't sound admirable. No, he doesn't. Those words, of course, are not meant for fish, for creatures who have no way other than to behave how they might behave to survive. Those words are meant for people, people like me, who have the choice to become unsilent, to heave up from that cozy refuge of silence and risk disinterest, ridicule, and attack, to sing out what is true in you, what is angry and yearning and real, and just might make enough vibrations to change, or at least rattle, the rusting fixtures of this world.

14:09Thank you, guys.

14:17When we come back, we are headed out of the sea and up to the stars.

14:29Lulu. Latif. Radiolab. On with our show about voids. Okay, so imagine all the lights are off. And you're staring at the stage behind which is the river, behind which is the New Jersey shoreline, and then all of a sudden, a spotlight comes on and illuminates a man standing way up high on a scaffold. Um, hey everybody. Don't mind me, I've just been hanging out up here for a little while. I'm a producer at Radiolab. My name is Matt Kilty. Please join me in casting your eyes out to the sublime, the awe-inspiring New Jersey.

15:17Now, pretend it doesn't exist, which, like, really shouldn't be that hard to do. Instead, just imagine it's just ocean. The sea, as far as you can see. Now, thousands of years ago, that sea that you're imagining your mind's eye was thought of as a river. A river that circled all of Earth. And the thing that was big, enormous, the thing that we thought was at the center of the Earth, the center of the universe, really, was the land underneath our feet. The ocean was just this kind of like tidy boundary that seemed to surround this big island we were floating on. And this idea, you can trace it back the world over, ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Babylon.

16:02The Greeks handed it down to the Romans. It persisted into the Middle Ages. This idea that the sea, at least on paper, was contained. But then The Europeans, they started building bigger ships They started venturing further out And as they did, the sea began to expand There was Columbus This day we completely lost sight of land 1492, trying to find India And many men sighed and cried For fear they would not see land again for a long time They wouldn't see it for 33 days Either too No land appeared before us. 1501 in Medigo Vespucci. In the vast sea. Sailing south across the Atlantic. We all would have died of hunger.

16:511520 Magellan crosses the Pacific. In that exceedingly vast sea. And in 1580, Sir Francis Drake goes two whole months without seeing land. 10 ,000 total miles around the globe. Proving, for the first time ever, that the sea, in a sense, is never ending. And with that, in a matter of a century, the ocean went from something that was contained to something that was terrifyingly, staggeringly huge. As these explorers mapped out the oceans, we began to realize that we were just simply a speck floating on this vast, churning sea. And to stand on any shore and look out across that vastness. To gaze into the depths of the sea is in the imagination, like beholding the vast, unknown.

17:41That's writer Victor Hugo in 1866. And for him and others like him, painters, philosophers, poets, the sea became this place to go to contemplate our very own existence. I'm going to wait for the helicopter at this pivotal juncture. I'm giving it a second, giving it five seconds giving it ten seconds

18:14so we contemplated the smallness of it in the face of such enormity hit it Victor analogous to the realm of night and dreams

18:26alright it was incredible but that was then and this is now and if you are one of those people who still looks out across an ocean you feel a sense of awe and wonder and a little bit of terror. Well, I'm sorry, but you're a child. I don't know what to tell you. It's really not that big of a deal. It's like a six-hour flight to Europe, which is probably what you're looking at. That's it. And I mean, I don't know. To be fair, for like 300 years or whatever, this ocean was kind of like the biggest thing any of us could conceive of. There was nothing bigger. until some very obsessive women came along.

19:07So, around 1890, Boston, Harvard, every night a team of astronomers, all men, would sit in the Harvard Observatory and they would point an 11-foot-long telescope into the night sky, and then they would open the shutter and the telescope on a clock-driven mount would move in time with the rotation of the Earth. so that the faint light of the stars would stay fixed in relation to it. They would move at the same rate. Telescope, stars, and lockstep together. And for 30 minutes, maybe an hour, that faint light would come rushing down the telescope onto this glass plate about the size of a notebook that was covered in this emulsion.

19:52The light would hit the plate, and slowly little dots would start to emerge. stars, hundreds of them, thousands of them, tiny little individual ones, big clusters of stars, all of them trapped within this glass plate.

20:11Think of it like a photograph of the night sky captured on the glass. The plate would then be marked with date and time and sent over across the street to this brick building that was full of computers. These are maybe people you've heard of the Harvard computers. These are the women who were not allowed to work in the observatory because of the patriarchy, but they could go to this brick building where they were essentially computing the data, the data of the dots on the plate, the stars. So their job was to figure out like, you know, the positions of the stars or if a star was actually a star or just like a speck of something or whatever.

20:49All of this was a part of our most significant attempt at cataloging the heavens. Now, one of these computers was a woman named Henrietta Leavitt. Got some fans in the house. So, Leavitt started at the observatory at the age of 25. She was a former lit major who her senior year took an astronomy class and was just like, I think, I have no idea. She didn't write anything about what she experienced in that moment, but whatever it was, it had to be profound because after that, for 30 cents an hour, she would go to this brick building, sit with about a dozen other women, and using a magnifying glass, she would study plate after plate after plate.

21:30And her job was to mark any star that she saw on these plates that were variable stars. What's a variable star? Great question. Astute listener. So variable star is a star that over time varies in brightness. So some nights it appears a little bit dimmer, some nights it appears a little bit brighter. This is just a thing that some stars do over the course of their life. So her job was basically to look for these dots on thousands of these glass plates that were getting lighter and darker and lighter and darker, and then circle them. Over the course of 28 years, she finds 2 ,400 of them, and that's it.

22:11That is her job. But it was in the midst of this, in the midst of these 28 years, where something incredible happens. The thing that would shift our gaze, our deepest sense of awe and wonder as a species, from the sea to the stars.

22:31so Levitt's doing her job day in and day out when she comes across this one plate a plate that contains the Magellanic clouds which is just like a cluster of stars close together that look like a cloud in the night sky now this was crucial nobody knew how far that cloud was from earth in fact we knew very little about how far anything was from earth we had an approximate distance to the sun, to the moon, a few nearby stars, but that was pretty much it. Beyond that, we really had no idea. Mainly because we didn't have a good way to measure anything in space. We didn't have like a yardstick. And so what we had settled on was this idea that everything in the night sky, all of it, was a part of our Milky Way galaxy.

23:19And that we here on Earth, We were floating in the center of the Milky Way, and that was the entire universe, us right there in the center. But this plate was about to change that, because Levitt noticed this pattern, which was the bright stars, the bright variable stars that she was circling on this plate in the cluster, they varied really slowly. So it took him a long time to go from bright to dark, bright to dark. It was almost like uniform, so the brighter the star, the slower it would flicker. And she's like, oh, okay, there's a little pattern here. So she goes looking for it in the other stars in the cluster, and she finds, sure enough, that the dim stars, they varied more quickly.

24:05And this pattern, it was really reliable, so reliable, in fact, that one could use the time it takes for a star to flicker to just whoop on a graph, figure out the brightness of that star, which I don't know, probably doesn't sound that important to anybody here, but this is a thing that would truly crack open the universe because, and this had always been the problem about figuring out distance in space. Like, let's say you're looking at a bright star in the night sky. Well, how do you know that bright star isn't just like really close to you? Or a dim star, Is that a star that's really far away, or is it just a dim star?

24:47Nobody knew how to answer these questions, but suddenly, Leavitt could. The rate at which a star flickers tells you its intrinsic brightness, and once you figure out the brightness, with some fancy math, you can start to figure out distances. And so, if we jump ahead 10 years after Leavitt plots out this pattern, and publishes it in paper. In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble is out in California with what was then the world's largest telescope. And he's pointing it up at another cluster of stars called the Andromeda Cluster. And like I said, at that time, people deeply believed that our entire universe was the Milky Way, but Hubble had suspected different.

25:30He just never had a way to prove it. And so there he is pointing this incredible telescope up at the cluster. and in the cluster he sees a few little flickering stars. So he watches one of them, a star called V1, and he watches it go from bright to dark, bright to dark. Counts the number of days, grabs Levitt's calculations, does a bunch of math, and he gets a number. An astonishing, unfathomable number. 900 ,000 light years away is that star from us, which is way outside of our Milky Way galaxy. and this is an important footnote, Hubble actually totally botched it. He's not even close. That star is not 900 ,000 light years away from us.

26:19It is in fact 2.5 million light years away. And just to put this into perspective, if you think about it like this, so think of Earth as us here in New York City. the edge of the milky way galaxy what we thought was our universe is probably like out around moscow what hubble was observing what he was measuring would be like from us here in new york to the moon and in astronomy circles this was huge news because what it told us for the first time is that that cluster of stars isn't just a cluster of stars in our own galaxy. It is in fact a galaxy in and of itself. And so Hubble keeps at it and he keeps pointing this telescope and he finds another cluster of stars that is 2.73 million light years away.

27:12He finds another that's nearly 10 million light years away. Another that's 15 million light years away. Another that's 23 million light years away. And as he's measuring these galaxies, he realizes that they're all moving out away from each other. Out into what? Nobody knows. It is just trillions of galaxies expanding out into the infinite. And with that, suddenly, we were confronted by another sort of dark mirror. This one with tiny little specks of light, an even bigger void for us to confront. And it would take some time for people to start waxing on about the enormity of this void, conjuring up just how itty bitty we really are, where our eyes would start to turn away from the sea and up to the stars.

28:15A void that goes on forever. I mean further than forever. A forever that is getting bigger with each passing moment that we sit here and contemplate it. And to do this, to gaze up into the depths of the universe, is, as Victor Hugo might say, in the imagination, like beholding the vast unknown.

29:01Senior producer, Matt Kilty. When we come back, it's time for Lawtiff and Aliens. Maybe. Stick with us.

29:26Lulu Latif. Radiolab. And today we are playing a recording of a live show we did a few weeks ago in New York City. And for the last story, I'm taking you to space with a guy who is reaching out into that void. Latif tells this one, and just to picture his stage entrance, It's completely dark, and then he is carried out on an orange armchair holding a book.