Decoding the secret messages of data, biology and music

0:00This message comes from AT &T. Staying connected matters. That's why AT &T has connectivity you can depend on. or they'll proactively make it right. That's the AT &T Guarantee. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com slash guarantee for details. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy?

0:44And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi.

1:04This is music from German composer George Philipp Telemann. Telemann is the most prolific Baroque composer. He wrote more than 3 ,000 compositions. And in the 1700s, he was incredibly popular. But eventually, Baroque music went out of style. And many of Telemann's scores sat collecting dust in Germany. Forgotten. Including this concerto. And this was a piece that had just simply existed really only one manuscript and no one had really seen before. This is Gregory Hayworth. He's a professor at the University of Rochester and calls himself a textual scientist. We'll explain what he means in a minute.

1:51But for the last two decades, Gregory has been hunting down and translating lost manuscripts all over the world, including at a library in Dresden where many of Telemann's works were archived alongside a treasure trove of other manuscripts, all of them badly damaged in World War II. Yes. At the end of the war, both the British and the Americans had bombed Dresden, as we all know. The manuscripts, which had been in the King's Library at the time, had been stored in an underground room near the river, the Elbe. And with one of the bombings, the side of the river broke and it flooded this underground room.

2:40And many of the manuscripts lay in water for about two weeks. And of course there was chaos. And then conservators from Berlin came and they dried the manuscripts out. So these manuscripts went through a lot. And when the war ended, things didn't get that much better. Dresden became part of the Eastern Bloc, and the kind of restoration that was available to them was limited. And so they remained, wasting away and illegible, until 2009. That's when Gregory went to Dresden to try out a new scanning technology. He spent the next few years rescuing all kinds of documents there, including that Telemann concerto.

3:26It was one of those badly damaged items that the music curator knew about and said, hey, have a look at this. The score was stained by mold, the notes nearly impossible to read, and for two years, Gregory and his team worked on it. And we managed to recover most of what was gone. This is a 2017 recording of the concerto, the first time it was performed in hundreds of years. Yes. Do you remember listening to the concerto? I mean, it's like you resuscitated something that was truly dead and buried, and then you could hear it come alive. Well, what's fascinating about this particular piece is that many of the objects that we image are esoteric.

4:14esoteric. They're in languages that people don't speak anymore, and the public has a hard time relating to them. But by far the most compelling is music, because it communicates to the general public on an emotional level. And so that's really exciting, to be able to take an object from total invisibility to sharing with the public. And so the moment of actually hearing and recovering an object is really intimate.

4:45A musical masterpiece revealed. Those notes on the page would have remained illegible smudges, but the right person and the right technology came along to interpret them. Which brings us to our show today, Found in Translation. Ideas about making sense of data, biology, and language that can change the way we understand entire economies, diseases, and human interaction. So back to Gregory Hayworth. His evolution from medieval scholar to so-called textual scientist began 20 years ago when he was just a reader of texts. What an unsatisfying word reader is. Here's Gregory Hayworth on the TED stage.

5:33For me, it conjures up images of passivity, of someone sitting idly in an armchair waiting for knowledge to come to him in a neat little parcel. How much better to be a participant in the past? An adventurer in an undiscovered country searching for the hidden text. I read and taught the same classics that people had been reading and teaching for hundreds of years. And with every scholarly article that I published, I added to human knowledge an ever-diminishing slivers of insight. What I wanted to be was an archaeologist of the past, a discoverer of literature, An Indiana Jones without the whip, or actually with the whip.

6:15And so I changed the direction of my career. Gregory changed the direction of his career all because of one manuscript. In the early 2000s, he was working in that same Dresden library, studying a medieval manuscript that was in bad shape to begin with, made even worse by the Cold War. And it was called Les issues d 'amour, the chess of love. And it is perhaps the last major long poem of the European Middle Ages that has never been, well, it's never been transcribed and it's never been edited. When you first saw the manuscript, the poem, what did it look like? Well, because it had been in water, it looked like a series of huge ink blots.

7:01And what the Soviets had done was they had decided to clean up the extra ink. and they did it using a technique that was popular among the Soviets at that time. They used urea, which is basically made from urine. Pee? Yes. And it's acidic and it actually is quite effective. But in so doing, it had two effects. First of all, it removed ink, but it also removed ink from the text. So much of it was so faded that you couldn't see it, although all the ink blots were now largely gone. The second thing it did is it caused in many places the parchment, which of course is animal skin, to turn translucent, a kind of gray translucent quality, which is typical of urea.

7:47And that really damaged and destroyed some last of it. But I managed to transcribe, oh, maybe a few thousand lines using the standard tools of the trade at the time, which was like a black light and a lot of effort. And then I ended up not being able to go any further. And so I went online to try to figure out what technological means I could use to improve the reading. And there I learned about how multispectral imaging had been used to recover two lost treatises of the famed Greek mathematician Archimedes. I decided to write to the lead imaging scientist, Professor Roger Easton. And to my surprise, he actually wrote back.

8:35With his help, I was able to build a transportable multispectral imaging lab. And with this lab, I transformed what was a charred and faded mess into a new medieval classic. The idea behind multispectral imaging is something that anyone who's familiar with infrared night vision goggles will immediately appreciate. that what we can see in the visible spectrum of light is only a tiny fraction of what's actually there. The same is true with invisible writing. Our system uses 12 wavelengths of light between the ultraviolet and the infrared. And these are shown down onto the manuscript from above from banks of LEDs.

9:19And another multispectral light source which comes up through the individual leaves of the manuscript. So multispectral imaging means shining different wavelengths of light onto a manuscript and taking numerous photographs with a very special lens. And by taking separate photographs of the same object in multiple wavelengths, we can reveal or are able to see things that the naked eye can't see. Computers then help refine the photos. You know, statistical algorithms which help enhance the images. And starting with that, we work with scholars to try to decipher and transcribe the manuscript so that we can understand them better.

10:03Gregory and his team have used this technology to restore everything from biblical gospels to maps from the 1400s. And what they discover often helps historians understand what the writers were thinking at the time. So, spectral imaging can recover lost texts. More subtly, though, it can recover a second story behind every object, the story of how, when, and by whom a text was created, and sometimes what the author was thinking at the time he wrote. Take, for example, a draft of the Declaration of Independence, written in Thomas Jefferson's own hand, which some colleagues of mine imaged a few years ago at the Library of Congress.

10:49Curators had noticed that one word throughout had been scratched out and overwritten. The word overwritten was citizens. Perhaps you can guess what the word underneath was. Subjects. There, ladies and gentlemen, is American democracy evolving under the hand of Thomas Jefferson. Through this lens, we witness the mistakes, the changes of mind, the naivetes, the uncensored thoughts, the imperfections of human imagination that allow these hallowed objects and their authors to become more real, that make history closer to us. I'm a little embarrassed to admit, Gregory, that the images that are coming to mind for me are Sherlock Holmes and Invisible Ink and Nick Cage in that movie National Treasure trying to hunt down precious manuscripts.

11:46I mean, it is kind of as exciting as that, though, right? Yeah, this is a kind of recovery of the past which has, I don't know, maybe exaggerated or lurid elements of recovery. But it's something that I hope will become much more common as students begin to learn textual science. It's something that we need to be able to do because otherwise we're going to lose forever parts of our past in the next 50 years. Several years ago, I conducted a survey of European research libraries and discovered that at the barest minimum, there are 60 ,000 manuscripts pre-1500 that are illegible because of water damage, fading, mold, and chemical reagents.

12:34Imagine worldwide how a trove of hundreds of thousands of previously unknown texts could radically transform our knowledge of the past. Imagine what unknown classics we would discover which would rewrite the canons of literature, history, philosophy, music. Or, more provocatively, that could rewrite our cultural identities, building new bridges between people and culture. In a minute, how this technology can be used to scan documents written now, too. Today on the show, found in translation. I'm Manoush Zamarodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

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14:54That's why when it comes to managing your wealth, Schwab gives you more choices. you can invest and trade on your own. Plus, get advice and more comprehensive wealth solutions to help meet your unique needs. With award-winning service, low costs, and transparent advice, you can manage your wealth your way at Schwab. Visit schwab.com to learn more. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, found in translation. We were just talking to textual scientist Gregory Hayworth. He helped develop technology that uses multispectral imaging to recover manuscripts that would otherwise be illegible.

15:40And he's working on more recent documents too, including some written by prisoners of war in Syria. They're scraps of cloth with inscribed names in Arabic. and they came from an escapee of the prisons of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. These prisoners had found themselves in these horrific conditions and they wanted to record at the very least a story of who had been there and they agreed that if anyone got out, they would make multiple lists of this and they would be able to contact people and tell them their mother, their father, had been there. In order to make these manuscripts, they ripped pieces of linen cloth from their shirts, and they used chicken bones as a stylus, and ink made from a mixture of the blood from their gums with the rust from the bars.

16:43Oh my gosh. And they inscribed names, and then they rolled them up, and they sewed them into their hems. And one man escaped, and he delivered these precious lists to the Holocaust Museum. So did they actually take the list then? Yes. So we imaged the list and made it more legible so that we could read some of these names and have a real record of them. And the images now exist at the Holocaust Museum as a testament to who had been disappeared. So you are looking at things that have been written incredibly recently and can help us make sense of what is going on in the world right now. Yes. In fact, many cultural heritage objects from the last century and a half, for example, are in much worse shape than objects from a thousand years ago.

17:37One of the things that we're particularly interested in are modern objects that have been censored by governments, beginning with Nazi-censored documents, many of them like postcards and letters from the camps. And that should, I hope, fill in gaps which otherwise we would never be able to know. So we're calling this episode Found in Translation. And it occurs to me that we could use the word translation to describe your work on numerous levels. I mean, there's the literal translation from an ancient language to languages we speak now. There's the translating from what looks like absolutely nothing on a page to making sense of it with the help of this technology.

18:24There's the translating it from the page to our ears with the Telemann Concerto. I wonder how you think about it. Well, this particular Telemann piece, it was written in the hand of Giovanni Vivaldi, who was Antonio Vivaldi's father. And Antonio Vivaldi had wanted to hear this particular concerto. And so he sent his father to copy it. So what we're hearing is Giovanni Vivaldi's interpretation of some of the lines as well. So manuscripts are objects that evolve. We're used to books in which the same text is printed in all the copies of that same book. But a manuscript evolves and changes because it's copied by hand.

19:13One of the things that multispecial imaging has taught us is that our present is changing our past in ways that will really reshape our understanding of culture and the transmission of that culture. And at its best, I hope, bring people together and eliminate or reduce misunderstandings from the past. That's textual scientist Gregory Hayworth, professor at the University of Rochester and founder of The Lazarus Project. You can find his full talk at TED.com. And that 2017 performance of Telemann's Concerto was played by students from the Eastman School of Music. Today on the show, found in translation.

20:05I'm sitting at the edge and suddenly this magnificent creature surfaces. And I'm thinking, that's a blue whale. Ralph Shami was on a boat in Mexico's Gulf of California when he saw his first whale up close. And she's massive, massive. And she comes up to breathe, and that breath is like a train. She dives, and she comes up, and she blows all that air out. I mean, I had tears in my eyes. I'm seeing this incredible mystery unfolding in front of me, thinking, where have I been all this time? And life has never been the same.

20:52Ralph is an economist who recently left the International Monetary Fund after 25 years there. And within the IMF, I worked on all kinds of issues. I'm an expert on fragile states and conflict-affected countries. It was a very stressful job. What happened was, after you work on fragile states and you lead missions, these are dangerous missions, really. And you become fragile yourself. So in 2017, he was on a rare break. An old friend who knew how much he loved the ocean got him a spot on an expedition studying whales. The researchers told Ralph he had one job. If you really want to help Ralph, clock when the whale breaches, when it dies.

21:42At night, the whole team would go ashore to unwind. We'd all cook together, and some of us would cook, some of us would clean. One night, Ralph joined a dinner table discussion that stuck with him. And so we're sitting around the table and having conversations about the whales. And I'm on my third glass of wine, trying to get into a conversation. And I overhear a conversation about whale carbon. Whale carbon, the amount of carbon dioxide that a whale houses in its body, away from the atmosphere. They said, well, they have tremendous amount of carbon. Because whales eat massive amounts of krill, which themselves feed on phytoplankton, single-cell plants.

22:29Now, why is phyto important? Because phytoplankton is really where the biological life of the ocean starts. They capture about 33 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year. That's equivalent to the work of four Amazon forests. So the whales eat krill, the krill eats phyto. And then what does the phyto need to survive? Well, they need phosphorus, nitrogen, and iron. And all three factors are in the poop of the whale. So it's a virtuous cycle. Whale feeds on krill, krill feeds on phyto, phyto needs the poop of the whale. So this whale is not only grabbing carbon on its body, it's fertilizing the phyto.

23:11So the whale is a great ally in the fight against climate change. You see? It was the greatest story never told. That's what I kept saying to myself. So you have this wonderful cycle. Here's Ralph Shammy on the TED stage. The whale feeds on the krill. The krill feeds on the phyto. And the phyto needs the poop of the whale to get more active. And when the phyto gets more active, it grabs more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Now, that's good news, right? Yeah. except that whales are dying. They're dying from ship strikes. They're dying from pollution. They're dying from entanglements. In fact, they're dying because our current economic system puts zero value on a living whale.

24:05But chop a whale, sell it for its meat, it acquires a value. the value of a living whale is zero zero dollars zero in any currency i'm a financial economist and i'm listening to these scientists bemoaning what's happening to the whales and i wanted to help i didn't know how to help and i thought wait a minute maybe i can bring your message to the audiences around the world maybe i can translate all of that value those services they to do for us in a language that we can all understand. It's the language of dollars and cents. What was going through your mind? I mean, it sounds like your brain was kind of set on fire in some ways.

24:53Yes. Right away, my mind went to value. Value of the carbon captured by a whale. Because, you know, I'm an economist. I work on wages and people's earnings. And I said, So whale carbon, how much would I be paying the whale for fighting climate change? What if I could value the services of the whale? I was Googling and I found nothing on this at all. I'm a financial economist, so I'm looking at it from a market valuation. And I knew that a dead whale was worth a lot of money in countries where they still eat whale meat. So that whale had a value, 40 ,000 to 80 ,000, depending on the size of the whale.

25:38But a living whale had no value. So I'm thinking, well, how would I go about doing it? After all, the whale is a living system. The whale captures carbon on her body. And she gives birth to baby whales who also grow up to capture carbon on their body. And they give birth to whales and so forth. and indirectly through the fertilization of phytos. So how would you do something like this? Well, I looked at it and I said, wait a minute. This looks like a share of stock that pays dividends. Except those dividends are live dividends. They give birth to more dividends. So if I were to track the whale over her lifetime and keep track of all these dividends into the future and then multiply that by the price of carbon and discount that all the way to the present, I can figure out what is the present value of the lifetime earnings of a single whale.

26:38Would you like to know how much? Would you like to know how much? At least$3 million. At least. $3 million per whale. Now that's just an estimate because for now there's no standardized way for countries and companies to price carbon. But Ralph says that needs to happen ASAP because companies and governments have made a lot of promises to go carbon neutral. And pretty soon they'll need to deliver on those promises. So voluntary carbon markets, that's what we have right now. But in Europe, the regulation is coming. Even the Biden administration is coming around the idea of interest, around the protection of nature and its biodiversity and dealing with climate change.

27:31And it's no longer the privy of just the governments. The consumers are asking companies, what is your footprint? Investors, I mean, billionaires, I know some of them, that are saying now, I don't want my money to be invested in extractive services. I don't want to be linked to companies that have a huge carbon footprint. For the last six years, Ralph has been working to envision a new kind of marketplace, one that doesn't extract from nature, but puts a value on it. He calls his solution science-based finance, and he's not just applying it to whales, but to elephants, wildebeest, seagrass. Right now, he's working with the Bahamas on one pilot project.

28:14So they mapped the seafloor of the Bahamas and discovered that the Bahamas is sitting on 30 % of the total mass of seagrass in the world. In the world? Yeah. According to my calculations and my colleagues, that is worth about$150 billion. So I am sitting on seagrass and you, Microsoft, you need to offset your carbon footprint. You made a commitment to go carbon negative. So here's what we do. How much carbon do you need? And Microsoft says, well, for this year, I need 100 tons. For next year, 150. I say, okay, I'll sell you these from my seagrass. You pay me that money. Because remember, in order for the seagrass to do its work, it has to stay alive and well.

29:02Which means you also have to look after the sea turtles and the apex predator, the tiger sharks. When the tiger sharks die, the sea turtles would completely destroy the seagrass. So when you're investing in seagrass, you're impacting food security. When you're investing in seagrass, you're looking after fauna. When you're investing in seagrass, you're looking after the people, the communities. You're alleviating poverty. You're creating employment. You're bringing new businesses. So suddenly for Microsoft, they can put on their website, look, we are purchasing the carbon of the seagrass. We're ensuring that seagrass lives forever.

29:39Mm-hmm. We're investing in nature in perpetuity. By creating resilience in nature, we create resilience in the people. Not to be cynical, though, Ralph, but who is going to keep track of all this? Who's going to make sure that the people who say they're going to grow more seagrass actually grow it? Who's going to make sure that the companies actually spend the money to buy the carbon offsets from the seagrass growers? How do we keep track of all this? Exactly. Who verifies the verifier? Who certifies the certifier? Who's watching the watch person? That's what you're asking. Well, I've worked on financial development for 30 years.

30:21Every nascent market is subject to gold rush behavior, double counting, triple counting, cheating. For Pete's sake, even mature markets, how many times do we hear about all kinds of insider trading on Wall Street? So especially nascent markets are subject to these things. But if the market is to take off, we need to solve these issues. Some of them the market themselves would solve. Some of it would need a policy. Because I'm now telling people conservation is not a cost proposition. Conservation, now we've turned it upside down, is a profit-making proposition. Just think about it. What this paradigm does, it turns it upside down, says, no, you are conserving what is now an asset.