How Big Is A Piece Of Chocolate?

17:09Michael Stevens:This one came from Christian David Bohr. How many times can you fold a piece of chewing gum?

17:17Hannah:OK, so I actually I had a good think about this. Right. Because I mean, everyone's heard the whole idea about piece of paper. You can only only fold it seven times. And by the way, that is that is broadly true. Broadly true. and that limit exists because of tensile strength so every time you fold it that outside edge it has to stretch and the inside edge has to compress and eventually either the outer fibers will snap starts to tear or the inner fibers become too dense they can't bend the thing about gum right which is a bit cheating is that it's effectively a type of fluid right it's like a viscoelastic fluid so when you're folding it you're not really folding it's more like you're kneading it it's more like you're you're you're dealing with dough which isn't that um which I appreciate isn't that satisfying an answer because the answer then is effectively an infinite an unlimited number of times until it until it starts to degrade or dry out effectively but if you could instead let's assume for a moment that take that dough analogy and if instead you found some way to sort of fold it and keep the layers from merging into each other like using flour for example um could you make yourself a chewing gum croissant right that's uh that's that's basically what I want to know right I want to do pastry chef with chewing gum so that's what I want to do um and I think that you could then you could but here is where a limit occurs because what you could do you know the way that pastry chefs work is they they take the pastry they roll it out they fold it they turn it round they roll it out they fold it they turn it round and so on and so on and so on and what you're doing every time that you fold it is you're doubling the number of layers right you're kind of re-stretching it out so that you can continue to fold after you've done one fold you've got two layers, fine.

19:12After you've done 10 folds, you've got 1024 layers.

19:18Hannah:Once you've done 24 folds, you've got 16 million layers. And once you've done 30 layers, at that point, each of the layers in your chewing gum croissant would be thinner than the width of a single molecule. So we know it's less than 30. That's the hard upper limit. Interested in eating a chewing gum croissant, Michael? Well, yeah, of course. Apparently when they make actual croissants, they only go for like, you know, 64 layers, maybe 128 layers. Nothing really in comparison.

19:52Michael Stevens:Yeah, sure. But I mean, they're using, you know, bigger dough and they're also using dough and butter. But we're talking about chewing gum and saliva. Sure. Which sounds a little better. Less French, should we say. Less French, I think is the correct way to describe a chewing gum

20:09Hannah:croissant okay here's a question for you we're staying on the food thing um ben asks i need to know how small a piece of chocolate can i have chocolate is comprised of coca sugar coca butter sometimes milk emulsifiers but what really makes it chocolate and not a coca bean is that it is a mixture of many things mixtures cannot be divisible down to the same scale as a chunk of pure iron or a file of chlorine each atom has the same properties chocolate is different from this Goodness me, Ben, you really have gone to town on this. It's a mixture of larger molecules. At what point can you slice chocolate and it is no longer chocolate, but its components?

20:49Hannah:Does that mean there is a lower bound to the size of chocolate? I think maybe I've spent too many days in a row subbing down voiceover scripts, but I feel like I could have summarized that in a single sentence.

21:01Michael Stevens:Yes, but you didn't because we respect your words, listeners. OK, send me a question that's like a literally an audio book and Hannah will read it and it will be our longest podcast episode ever. But I think Ben is asking a really interesting question. What's the smallest a piece of chocolate can be? And so obviously we think, OK, let me buy a chocolate bar and I can cut it into smaller and smaller pieces. and it's always chocolate, except chocolate isn't an element. It's not like I can eventually get down to an atom of chocolate, where if I divide it any further, it's no longer chocolate. That's true of something like gold.

21:46Michael Stevens:If I have one gold atom and I split it in half, I no longer have a gold atom because a gold atom is defined as an atom with a very specific number of protons and that's it. But with chocolate, what is the smallest piece of chocolate? What form does chocolate come in at its atomic, meaning smallest indivisible scale? There isn't one because chocolate is a mixture and chocolate contains, you know, it's not just like, oh, well, there's a chocolate molecule and a sugar molecule and a milk molecule. There is no such thing as a chocolate molecule. Chocolate, as we know it, contains hundreds of different types of molecules, different chemicals that are all, you know, originally organically put in there by the plant in the cacao bean.

22:37Michael Stevens:And these include all kinds of compounds that affect our nervous system and have their own flavors and textures and all these things. So anyway, estimates, I've looked into this, the estimates of how many different kinds of chemicals are in chocolate is between about 300 and 800. What? There's a lot.

22:57Hannah:Hang on. When you say chemicals, are you talking, you're talking about different atoms and different molecules, stable molecules?

23:04Michael Stevens:That's right. Different stable molecules and atoms. 300. It's if you want to dive into this, it's actually overwhelming because I feel like every few months, scientists announced the discovery of a new compound in chocolate that had been there all along, but there's like trace amounts of it. And we know that it's an analog for a neurotransmitter. And that's why everyone loves chocolate or, and that's why dogs are killed by chocolate. You know, there's, there's so much, it's so complicated. It is not elemental. It's got, um, all kinds of fats and, and acids and all these different types of chemicals in it.

23:38Michael Stevens:It is an organic complex material. And when chocolate is made, we roast the cacao beans and then there's this whole chocolate making process that separates the meltable cocoa butter from the bean. And you're left with the cocoa butter. And then what doesn't melt is called the cocoa solids. And the cocoa solids are then mixed back in with cocoa butter in very specific ratios, as well as some milk, some sugar. And that's how you make chocolate as we know it. You can also just sell people cocoa butter, right? It's a great skin moisturizer, all kinds of uses. You can use it in cooking. And you can also sell people cocoa solids by themselves.

24:21Michael Stevens:And that's what we call cocoa powder. I don't know if that's what you call it in the UK. We do. Yeah.

24:26Hannah:But it's very it's very bitter.

24:28Michael Stevens:It's very, very bitter. Now, if you add sugar to cocoa powder, you haven't made chocolate. You've made sweetened cocoa powder. You need to put some of the cocoa butter back in to make chocolate. However, that's kind of like an opinion, right? You could say cocoa powder is chocolate. You could say that the cacao bean on its own is already kind of chocolate. No, not for me. Not for me, Michael.

24:57Hannah:It doesn't count as chocolate unless it is a square of Cadbury's dairy milk. And yes, I would like them as a sponsor for this podcast.

25:02Michael Stevens:Continue. Perfect. Perfect. because I think that you're getting at a fundamental issue we have to get across to answer this question. And Ben, see how hard we're working for you? I think that we need to define chocolate as something that pretty much everyone will agree is chocolate. In that case, I think we need to set this upper bound and say you're going to need at least these all 800 of these molecules that are in chocolate as we buy it in the store. And the most famous of those is probably theobromine. That is the like it's what makes chocolate really characteristically chocolate. I think it might be what's toxic to dogs.

25:42Michael Stevens:But anyway, as a rough calculation, I looked at some of the most famous molecules in chocolate and how large they are and then multiplied that by 800. OK, to just kind of be like, look, if it's got 800 different molecules and some are larger and some are smaller than these ones that I'm looking at, then maybe we can get ourselves to an actual volume. So the problem is it's really hard to know what volume certain molecules have. You can take the molar volume of a chemical like theobromine, very famous chemical in chocolate, and you can divide it by Avogadro's number. But that doesn't give you the volume, the size of an individual theobromine molecule.

26:27Michael Stevens:That gives you the amount of space that molecule occupies in the crystal structure of pure theobromine. But then I found that chemists also have calculated the cross-sectional diameter of molecules for collision calculations. And for a typical molecule in chocolate, it's about 130 angstroms across. So let's say 130 30 angstroms cubically is the volume of a typical molecule in chocolate. What's an angstrom? Great question. It's a tenth of a nanometer. So we're talking about really small things here. Yeah. But we've got 800 of them in order to represent every molecule that we believe is in chocolate.

27:12Michael Stevens:Problem. That's only one of each. Chocolate is chocolate and tastes like chocolate because of the ratios they have to each other. So factoring that in and then assuming that maybe it's going to take another order of magnitude to make everyone happy that like this is analogous to real chocolate. We find ourselves with this answer. The smallest piece of chocolate that I believe everyone would agree, yes, that's chocolate, would be a Zepto liter. I don't even know what that is. 10 to the minus what? 10 to the minus 21 liters. Whoa. That is very small. Could you see it? You could not see it. Could you taste it?

27:58Michael Stevens:No. A zeptoliter is submicroscopic. It's down around the size of just like a very, very large molecule. It's smaller than any kind of nano thing we can imagine, little nanobots.

28:12Hannah:Wait, is it too small to have color?

28:14Michael Stevens:I think it's going to be much too small to have color, yes. but we're not quite at the answer that I want to give as my final answer because this is just the smallest collection of molecules that will have the appropriate ratio and makeup as chocolate. Could you taste it? No, it is too small. The threshold for human taste requires like hundreds of billions of molecules. So I think we're talking more about something to the order of 10 to the negative 13 cubic meters. basically an extremely coarse grain of silt okay all almost sand but not quite okay you could dissolve that in some water and people could drink it and say yeah there's something in here and i think it might be chocolate but any smaller than that and you just will not be able to detect

29:07Hannah:any things in your mouth i have a question about the the molecules that you included a controversial question. Did you include butyric acid? Yes, I'm including all of these things. Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. This is not chocolate.

29:24Michael Stevens:Is butyric acid the thing that makes American chocolate bad?

29:28Hannah:Yes, it is. Okay. Thank you for preempting. So this is this acid that you find, you find it in American chocolate, Hershey's in particular. Maybe we'll bleep that in case Hershey wants to sponsor us. But you also find it in rancid butter, in parmesan cheese and human vomit. So, and there, but there is a reason why it's in American chocolate. There is a reason. So this is early 1900s and Hershey wants to mass produce chocolate. But the problem is they were adding milk. The Swiss had this really fancy pants, expensive way of drying the milk so that it didn't spoil before it went into the chocolate.

30:10Hannah:So the chocolate didn't go off really quickly. So Hershey's like, OK, I'm going to develop this process and a byproduct of the process to stop the milk from spoiling was butyric acid that went in it. I buy into your answer. You've clearly spent a lot of time doing these calculations and I buy into your answer on the condition that butyric acid is excluded, please.

30:31Michael Stevens:OK, fine. Let's not allow butyric acid. That doesn't dramatically affect the volume of this very tiny thing. I want to put this into like a few other terms, like a very fine grain of sand, a very coarse grain of silt is on like the microgram, a single or maybe two micrograms of matter. You could taste it. And if we threw in the butyric acid so that it tasted like American chocolate and made us feel like we had just puked in our mouths, it would still be a microgram. Okay. That's, you wouldn't need to add much to give it the same ratio as Hershey's chocolate or something.

31:10Hannah:That's why I want an experimental version of this episode where you stir in one grain of salt into some water, taste it, and they go, I know exactly what it needs. Throw in a couple of months.

31:23Michael Stevens:You throw in a billion atoms of butyric acid, which by the way, is a tiny microscopic amount. And then go, tastes like childhood. Tastes like my childhood. But I think, I think that, gosh, butyric acid might not even really come through in a small amount. Cause I'm looking this up. It's flavor threshold is between one and 15 milligrams per liter. Okay. So it takes a lot of it for us to taste. A lot of human vomit. That would mean that if you cut up a Hershey's bar small enough, you would be left with some flavor compounds that were above the threshold, but the butyric acid would no longer be there.

32:02Michael Stevens:So eating that one tiny piece, just that one piece, it would once again taste like regular nice chocolate.

32:10Hannah:Maybe that's the secret. If you're ever stuck with only American chocolate to eat, just cut it up really, really, really small. Yes, sub-microscopic scale, you're good to go. I think we may have ruined our chances for sponsorship with Hershey's, but now all the same, shall we go to a break? Yeah.

32:32Hannah:This segment is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

32:35Michael Stevens:Now, when we think about scientific breakthroughs, we usually don't think about naked mole rats, unless you listen to this podcast a lot, in which case, we've got some more stuff for you. We also think about things like cutting edge technology and huge amounts of data. But, you know, often progress starts somewhere quieter with just curiosity.

32:57Hannah:Absolutely. And that brings us to a story of discovery in cancer that begins with two very unlikely places, a brewery and the sea. Yeast, sea urchins, and research that would later be recognised with the Nobel Prize.

33:12Michael Stevens:So today we're asking, how does curiosity-led science end up changing how we understand and treat cancer.

33:19Hannah:Okay, well, some of the most important advances that happen in cancer research don't actually begin with cancer at all. They begin with scientists who are following an unexpected question.

33:30Michael Stevens:Yeast and sea urchins do not seem like obvious places to start if you want to understand cancer. But scientists use organisms like them because they're simple and they're fast and they're easy to observe, which makes fundamental biological processes much clearer. Now, the crucial insight is that the core machinery controlling how cells behave is shared across much of life. Some of the most important proteins were established very early on. They are fundamental to life, and around half of yeast genes can be directly swapped with human ones. Now, Cancer Research UK backs this kind of foundational, curiosity-led research, including work that can take many years to reveal its value, because understanding the basics is often essential to understanding disease.

34:16Hannah:Okay, well, let's give you an example. An example about Cancer Research UK scientist Sir Paul Nurse and Cell Division. Now, before becoming a Cancer Research UK scientist, Sir Paul Nurse, he worked in a Guinness brewery where he was working with yeast and he started getting curious about the way that these yeast cells would grow and divide. And then years later, he was working as this young researcher and he noticed something really unusual. There were these yeast cells that kept on getting longer and longer and longer, but weren't dividing. And as a result of that, his curiosity led him to identify this gene that was acting as a control switch for cell division, later called CDC2.

35:02Hannah:And then scientists together, they methodically tested human genes one by one by one, eventually showing that this human version of the same gene could stand in for the yeast version. And that demonstrated that the same division control system operates in yeast all the way through to humans. And that makes it this vital insight for cancer biology, where, of course, it's all about cells dividing when they shouldn't.

35:29Michael Stevens:Yeah. The circle of life. We are all bound together. Speaking of circles, let's talk about cycles, because at the same time, Cancer Research UK scientist Sir Tim Hunt was studying sea urchin embryos, and he was intrigued by this really bizarre fact that unfertilized sea urchin eggs can be triggered to start dividing on their own. And that offers a powerful way to study the earliest steps of cell division. So, OK, first of all, to understand sea urchin eggs required a lot of sea urchin eggs, which was not easy for him to get in landlocked Cambridge, but he observed proteins that build up and then trigger cell division and then actively break down straight away.

36:12Michael Stevens:And these rise and fall proteins became known as cyclins because their levels cycle in time with cell division. Also, Tim Hunt loves cycling by cycling bicycling. Anyway, all of this revealed that cell division isn't just switched on or off. It's a tightly timed and carefully regulated thing like a metronome or a traffic light. And so together with the yeast work, it showed that cell division follows an ordered sequence, not a random process.

36:43Hannah:Right. So you're building up this picture of how cells actually divide. And I mean, these discoveries, they helped scientists to understand, particularly when cell division control systems fail, which is one of the defining features of cancer. and then that understanding laid the groundwork for targeted treatments and so today I mean this has had a gigantic impact it's already improving outcomes in really difficult to treat breast cancers with there are trials underway across lung cancer skin cancer bowel cancers there's some drugs that work by by jamming the machinery that drives cell division that slows down tumor growth in certain cancers and all of these advances they only exist because the researchers They followed these unexpected clues and then they tested them rigorously again and again over many years.

37:35Hannah:Now, Cancer Research UK continues to support research across this full pathway by funding early discovery science long before outcomes are guaranteed and helping to translate that knowledge into new treatments.

37:48Michael Stevens:A humble yeast used for brewing beer and sea urchins in the ocean aren't where you would expect cancer research to begin, but it's exactly the kind of curiosity-led science that helps reveal how cancer really works.

38:03Hannah:For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash rest is science.

38:20Michael Stevens:This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

38:24Hannah:Radiotherapy is over a century old, but it is still changing. Cancer Research UK helped lay the foundations of radiotherapy in the early 20th century and has driven progress ever since.

38:36Michael Stevens:Radiotherapy remains one of the cornerstones of cancer treatment today. Every year, millions of people worldwide benefit from Cancer Research UK's work to make it more precise.

38:46Hannah:Scientists are still refining how radiotherapy is delivered. And one example is an experimental treatment called flash radiotherapy, which delivers radiation in fractions of a second, up to a thousand times faster than standard radiotherapy.

39:02Michael Stevens:And early studies suggest that speed could make a real difference. Flash radiotherapy may cause up to 50 % less damage to healthy cells.

39:11Hannah:But scientists don't yet know why healthy cells seem to be spared. So Cancer Research UK are working to answer that. Understanding it could be key to reducing side effects in the future.

39:23Michael Stevens:For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash the rest is science. When you want your spring break to feel like and your kids pool day to feel like and your hotel bed to feel like ooh, and room service to feel like because at Hilton, hospitality feels like your cabana's ready. Would you like fresh towels? It matters where you stay. Book now at Hilton.com. Hilton, for this day.

40:11Hannah:okay we are back we are refueled we are we are ready for the next discovery and uh michael

40:16Michael Stevens:over to you what have you got for us over to me i've got i've got a few things i'm traveling at the moment and so i don't have um i've kind of had to scrape together some ideas but look at this Now, I won't explain why I'm traveling with this, but it is a stool sample. Wait, no. What I'm showing is a little plastic vial that contains a tiny wooden stool, a sample of a stool, if you will. A three-sided stool made of wood. It's about the size of, you know, half of my thumb. So it's just a stool sample. and there's a sticker on the vial. It says Prairie Dog Town stool sample. Prairie Dog Town is a little roadside attraction in Kansas and they sell some of these goofy things like, you know, a box of bees and you open it up and it's just like the letter B painted all over the inside of the box.

41:14Michael Stevens:All right, so I had to buy this stool sample and I just carry it around. Sometimes if someone ever is like, Michael, you got to blow my mind right now. I'm like, guess what I've got? It's a good thing to have around.

41:27Hannah:Is that why you continue to have that giant rucksack full of stuff for all the times people ask you to instantly surprise and amaze them?

41:34Michael Stevens:Well, yeah, you know, because because they kind of expect it. But also I like it. I like it. I like having something kind of strange with me at all times. That reminds me of a show that never actually happened because of COVID. So like just before COVID, I did a show at UC Irvine, the University of California, Irvine, called Michael's Toys, where I just showed up with a bag full of toys. And I just talked about them and passed them around. and it was so fun. And then with COVID, I tried to figure out a way to do the show virtually, but it was just not nearly as fun as being able to pass around a cube of tungsten and the most illegal thing I own, which by the way, I cannot find.

42:21Michael Stevens:Now I've talked about this in a video, but I have an update on the item, not just the fact that I may have lost it, but there's something else quite strange. Do you know what I'm talking about?

42:30Hannah:OK, well, I mean, you've mentioned. Wait, how did you describe it? Just then the most illegal thing you own.

42:35Michael Stevens:It's the most illegal thing I own.

42:37Hannah:OK, I mean, you've mentioned quite a few things on the podcast over time. You've mentioned radioactive lead. You've mentioned enriched uranium. There's I'm pretty sure there's there's there's various stories about BB guns, etc. So honestly, the mind the mind boggles.

42:53Michael Stevens:OK, well, so I don't own any enriched uranium as far as anyone knows. But the thing the thing I'm talking about is is a totally legal material. It's the way the material is arranged that makes it illegal. OK, go on. But maybe it's not illegal anymore. It is a counterfeit U.S. penny.

43:16Hannah:That is pretty illegal, Michael. I believe that they come down pretty hard.

43:21Michael Stevens:It is illegally manufactured currency and it's a penny. So someone took some copper and they put together the appropriate alloy to make a penny and then they made a mold or maybe they stamped it. I'm not sure how they made it, but it is identical to a regular U.S. penny. You could spend it and get a cent worth of value, a cent worth of goods without actually having earned that money. And as long as it costs you less than a cent to make it, you're winning. It costs a lot more than a cent to make. It costs, or should I say, used to cost, the US meant like four or five cents to make a penny. So making counterfeit pennies is probably not going to get anyone in trouble because you're losing money doing it.

44:13Michael Stevens:I won't say who gave it to me, but it was given to me by a magician who was a very interesting guy. And the thing that makes this counterfeit penny so special is that you can tell it's counterfeit for one tiny reason. And that reason is that the year stamped on it, every penny in the U.S. has a year on it, the year that it was made. The year on this penny is 2027, which hasn't happened yet. So no 2027 pennies had ever been made. The whole time I've owned this penny, It's been like a penny from the future. Right. And then I thought philosophically, this is really interesting because by in the year 2027, it will cease to be a joke and it will just look like every other penny that's ever been made.

45:03Michael Stevens:It's the perfect crime. Exactly. Its novelty kind of expires. And it almost becomes more criminal in 2027 because before that happens, people can tell that it's not real. But after 2027, it could be real. But here's obviously, and I think a lot of listeners are probably thinking this, the new twist is that the United States Mint, just a few months ago, announced that it will not make any more pennies ever again. The joke lives on. That's right. So the last penny was made in 2025, which means my 2027 counterfeit penny will always have an impossible date on it. Its entire character has changed.

45:50Hannah:Wait, I want to know, how did this magician get hold of it? What was the magician doing with it?

45:55Michael Stevens:Well, he was just a guy who also liked to collect curious things and had a lot of very interesting friends. And one of them was a metallurgist who made probably made counterfeit coins, not for the purposes of counterfeiting, meaning to pass it off as real currency, but to to design special magic coins like a quarter that's hollow or a quarter that can be folded up, you know, stuff like that. And he made this penny. And I think he said, you know what, if I'm going to make a penny, I can decide what year to stamp on it. Why don't I stamp a year far in the future? So it looks like it's from the future.

46:29Michael Stevens:That also makes it funny because it'll be even more believable in the future. But no one could have anticipated that in November of 2025, the last pennies would be made. And so suddenly I have an item with a whole new meaning.

46:45Hannah:A perfect ending to the story. I do remember hearing about Banksy, the artist. I don't know, have you come across him? I don't know how well known he is in America.

46:56Michael Stevens:I am Banksy.

46:58Hannah:Oh, okay. So very well known. Did you not know that? Well, this is, okay, a story about you, of course.

47:04Michael Stevens:I've been trying to tell people, but they all just act like, oh, who is he? I think they enjoy that more.

47:09Hannah:Yeah, the Bristolian accent is just a put on that you do when you're covering your identity.

47:15Michael Stevens:That's right. There was a stunt that he was going to do where he printed a million pounds worth of fake£10 notes.

47:24Hannah:And where he replaced, instead of having the Queen's face on it, this is a few years ago, he put on Princess Diana's face instead. And then instead of it being Bank of England, it was Banksy of England. Anyway, the idea was that he was going to go to some sort of town square. I think I'm remembering this right. And throw out all of this money and let people collect it. and just in advance of this big stunt which he had planned he went to Reading Festival and with a bunch of his friends and handed out a bunch of these like fake£10 notes which looked really good and were like go on go and see it'll be quite funny go and go and see if you can spend them and these people went up spent the£10 note nobody checked them nobody checked them they went through absolutely fine.

48:11Hannah:And at that point, Banksy realized that what he was about to do was so phenomenally illegal. But somewhere out there in the world is this very small number of Banksy£10 notes, which were exchanged and are now worth an absolute unimaginable amount of money.

48:32Michael Stevens:Jeez, I can only imagine. Yeah. But see, if it confuses people, if it tricks them into thinking it's real, then yeah, it's counterfeit money and it's illegal. There was an artist. I don't remember the artist's name, but when I was a kid, my dad and I watched a documentary about this artist who drew on a sheet of paper a$100 bill by hand, like meticulously every little detail drawn by hand, and then took it to a store and didn't try to pass it off as a real hundred, simply said to the person at the store, hey, this isn't a real$100 bill, but it looks real, doesn't it? Like, would you give me$100 worth of goods in exchange for this piece of art?

49:15Michael Stevens:And they agreed. So he bought like$100 worth of stuff with his fake$100 bill, but it was more of a barter exchange than it was fooled you. So I don't think that was nearly as illegal, but as soon as you pretend it's currency and people start believing it is, then you've committed a crime.

49:33Hannah:I made a documentary a few years ago about the passport, the British passport, and the number of different layers of security that they have embedded within them in order to prevent people from just copying what they look like. And it is phenomenal. I can't remember the exact number, but we're with the man who has designed a number of different British passports. But it's something like 20 different systems. some of them are very obvious some of them are much less obvious you know every single page is unique there's like a pattern along the side there's also this extraordinary pattern if you look at it under uv light that is different for every country i mean it's absolutely incredible the amount of science and uh well just considered engineering that goes into making one of these things there was a big controversy in the uk a few years ago when our passports changed from from red to blue.

50:26Hannah:And the passport designer said that his favourite vintage, the best passport he's ever designed, was the last red one with a paper page. Because they've now got this sort of plastic page where your photograph is. So the one with the paper page was absolute counter-counterfeit genius. That's what he says.

50:48Michael Stevens:But surely the plastic page makes it even harder to counterfeit.

50:52Hannah:I think that there was some quite clever things about the way that you could, the transparency of that paper page changed across the course, across the grain of it. Yeah.

51:02Michael Stevens:So my my American passport still has all paper pages. My wife has a British passport with like a plastic page and it doesn't feel like a book anymore. It feels like like one of those novelty books that has like all kinds of little things inside of it, like a klutz book. So I don't enjoy it as much. But I'm sure it's a lot more steady and less likely to get all folded or ripped by mistake.

51:25Hannah:Yeah, I mean, you know.

51:27Michael Stevens:Okay, speaking of books, there's something that we teased in the beginning that I haven't gotten to yet. And in way of context, I wrote this book, I think, I don't actually know how old I was, but it's one of those books that a kid makes by taking sheets of paper, folding them in half, and then stapling them together. Now, remember that I grew up in a small town in Kansas that was quite conservative in many ways, and there was a very big debate around whether or not evolution should be taught in schools and how it should be taught. Should it be taught as what scientific consensus believes explains the diversity of animal life and life on Earth?

52:06Michael Stevens:Or is it just a theory full of many problems? Because the truth is that all life on Earth was created by a creator God. So I was given many, many books as a kid about how evolution was a lie and that creation science was this thing. creation science is of course a pseudoscientific idea that maybe the world is only a few thousand years old could be older but that clearly nothing evolved in the way that darwin said that the world was obviously created by god and so i summarized what i had learned in this book

52:47Hannah:evolution the lie wait how old do we reckon you were when you wrote this like i wish there was a

52:53Michael Stevens:year on it but i'm going to say i was probably 10 or 11 okay immediate things that stick out for me

53:00Hannah:right one look at that eon evolution that is there's there's design that's gone into that there's like and the different type of font that you've created for the word lie the sort of bubble font of the word this is um look it's typographic everybody there's no there's no pictures there's no images. It's just clean. It gets in and gets out.

53:21Michael Stevens:It's very sophisticated. I clearly, I must have had some kind of stencil tool. And that's how I created these different typefaces. I may have had a book of typefaces and then I traced each letter off of that page. But I don't think that I came up with this on my own, especially LIE, lie. That does not look like something I came up with.

53:46Hannah:Well, it certainly looks like something adults had a heavy hand in influencing somewhere or another.

53:52Michael Stevens:Basically, it just reads like a whole list of the typical concerns people had with evolution. They would say things like, there's a difference between evolution with a capital E and evolution with a lowercase e, where lowercase e evolution is just the way things change. You know, it's the way the moths in England died off if they were white because of all the black soot that covered the trees. Predators could find them more easily, and so the black ones became more prevalent. It might be kind of boring, but I'll read from chapter two, Stanley Miller's experiment. Are you familiar with this experiment?

54:26Michael Stevens:Of course. Okay, well, we all know about Stanley Miller's. I'm reading from the book now. We all know about Stanley Miller's, quote, life from a test tube, unquote, experiment. He mixed gases and liquids thought to be on Earth billions of years ago, i.e., before life, then shot sparks at the mixture and poof, special amino acids found in living things. Newspapers raved about, quote, life in a test tube. That is just the same as a man stacking two bricks on each other and saying he made a 50-story skyscraper. First, those same acids can be found in dead bodies, too. Just having the right acids doesn't make something alive.

55:08Michael Stevens:Second, the three needed acids weren't there. And third, many deadly acids have been formed in experiments like this. So as you can see, life can't just happen. It must come from other life. In a creationist's view, God. Okay, here's what I'm noticing from that.

55:26Hannah:We've got the hook, right? You've got the excellent title right in the beginning. You've got the counterintuitive way to see the world. Here's what everybody else thinks and here's how it should really be. We've got detail on scientific minutiae. And we have got what is essentially an extremely fascinating monologue. Vsauce was there. It was the early beginnings.

55:50Michael Stevens:It was. Yeah, it was there. It was there. You know, this is a Vsauce script. You know, I no longer believe that evolution is clearly false. But I do think that, you know, belief in a supernatural creator does not exclude belief in evolution exactly as Darwin said. I think that that is to make religion way too small. But you can definitely see how I was synthesizing information. And then rather than just saying, OK, cool, I decided to create not videos, but there was no YouTube back then, but books where I taught what I had learned and put it into words and phrases that I thought would make it exciting.

56:32Hannah:So I also actually grew up in a very religious household where we would often have Catholic priests who would come around and say mass in my living room. It was not a big fancy house, to be absolutely clear. It was a very small living room. But nonetheless, priests would come around and say mass. Anyway, there was one time in particular where there was a priest who was giving his sermon, his little homily. and he was talking about how science and religion were at war with one another and how science was seeking to destroy religion and he was so deeply moved by the words that he was saying that he cried and that was the first time I'd ever seen a grown man cry and the thing is is that while I completely understand the emotional weight behind feeling like you're, I mean, the sort of central story to your life is under attack, right?

57:27Hannah:And I think that lots of religious people do feel like that about science. I agree with you. I don't, I have never thought that science proves that there is no God or that science really has anything to say about God in any way whatsoever.

57:40Michael Stevens:It can't. It can't. Because claims about God are specifically beyond Newton's flaming laser sword, meaning science cannot disprove it one way or the other. And if it thinks that it has, it's not science anymore. And so that means that religious claims are unfalsifiable, but it doesn't mean that they therefore are false.

58:02Hannah:I also think that it's sort of it's dishonest to pretend that science is the hunt for truth all of the way down. I think that inevitably, once you hit the absolute limits of our knowledge, there does come a certain leaf of faith, regardless of what camp you find yourself in, whether it's religious or scientific or both. You know, why is the speed of light an absolute constant? You know, what happened before the Big Bang?

58:32Michael Stevens:Or is the speed of light an absolute constant? We don't know. We are making some assumptions here. And there's evidence that it hasn't changed. But how would we know? What sort of evidence should we be looking for? And that's thinking scientifically. Yeah, absolutely. It's important to me to give a little bit more context, too, which is, first of all, When did this man cry in your home about the war between science and religion? Like, do you mind telling me approximately when?

59:00Hannah:It was probably it was almost certainly the 90s.

59:03Michael Stevens:OK.

59:04Hannah:And my guess would be around 95-ish.

59:10Michael Stevens:That's very interesting because it's probably about the time that I was hearing a lot of this, too. Obviously, science and religion have been famously at odds forever. ever. Okay. But keep in mind that, you know, my father was a chemical engineer. You know, he definitely believed in evolution as an explanatory theory. And I remember being a very young child, single digits old in Sunday school. And my Sunday school teacher, who was a woman who was about 180 years old, says to all of us that science and religion are not at war. Like, of course God used evolution to bring about life in exactly the way scientists say.

59:48Michael Stevens:And it wasn't until the election of George W. Bush, which was in 2000, that suddenly everything changed. And a lot of adults in my life, not my parents, but other adults kept pushing creationist books on me. And I thought, what's I thought I thought that we all agreed, you know, that the same church now had a different position that was much more culturally motivated than it was biblically or scientifically. And it really was a big shift. And I remember that my high school biology teacher, Mr. McDonald, was really controversial because he was fighting for Kansas to allow evolution education in classrooms.

1:00:29Michael Stevens:And I really looked up to him for that because I didn't understand why it was so evil to see that evolution explained things. I didn't think there was a conflict. It was like, whether or not, you know, we have a soul is very different than whether or not, you know, mammals came, you know, after bacteria or and how and how that transition happened.

1:00:54Hannah:Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, I remember I remember very well hearing the stories about America having those discussions about evolution. I think there was a bit of a backlash here, actually. I think in around 2010, there was a real movement from a number of actually quite distinguished scientists who became really vocal, quite militant, frankly, militant atheists. And anyway, I just would like to do things a bit nicer. I just think extremism is best avoided in all directions. So maybe that's what you get with this podcast, right? That's what you get with me and Michael. We're nice, cuddly, all-inclusive.

1:01:37Hannah:The world is a broad church, and so is science.

1:01:39Michael Stevens:That's right. And we are always learning because we're curious and, above all, being thoughtful is what matters. So although I probably won't ever publish Evolution the Lie, it is a part of my journey. It's a part of my coming to understand this world that I was born into. Yeah.

1:01:58Hannah:Well, thank you so much for sharing with us. Well, okay, that I think concludes our podcast expedition for today. If you have any questions that you would like us to answer or any stories you want to tell us or objects you want to share with us, you can send them to us, therestiscience at goldhanger.com.

1:02:13Michael Stevens:And you can join our newsletter at therestis.com slash science.

1:02:19Hannah:We are going to be back next Thursday with another edition of Field Notes and on Tuesday with our normal episodes. That's right.

1:02:26Michael Stevens:Until then, stay curious, stay thoughtful. Goodbye.

1:02:43Michael Stevens:Rinse knows that greatness takes time, but so does laundry. So Rinse will take your laundry and hand deliver it to your door expertly cleaned. And you can take the time pursuing your passions. Time once spent sorting and waiting, folding and queuing, now spent challenging and innovating and pushing your way to greatness. So pick up the Irish flute or those calligraphy pens or that daunting Beef Wellington recipe card and leave the laundry to us. Rinse. It's time to be great.