How Does Language Change What You Smell?

16:29Michael Stevens:Oh, for sure. Yeah, 100%. I mean, I've talked to you about this before. This is maybe a very not concrete example, But I've thought a lot about the way we name time periods, especially recently. We like to talk about the past in terms of decades. And for a long time, decades had really clear names. The 20s with flappers and then, oh, the 30s were kind of like dust bowl, depression. And in the 40s, we have these ideas of what the 50s mean, what the 60s mean, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s. And then language fails us. We don't have a catchy word for the first decade of the 2000s. We have words for them.

17:15Michael Stevens:I'm not saying we don't have any.

17:17Hannah Fry:I mean, people say the noughties. Do they?

17:19Michael Stevens:I'd say in Britain, we do call it the noughties quite often, yeah. The noughties. The noughties. Noughties. Okay, so if Nadi's really caught on, then I think it would take on a much more concrete existence in our minds and it would be very clear what was and wasn't Nadi's fashion. Until we feel comfortable calling them the 10s, I don't think it'll have as strong of an identity as, say, the 60s already has. And I know that the 10s are much closer to us, and so it's hard to have that kind of reflexive perspective where things get sort of simplified and turn more into like their prototypical examples.

17:58Michael Stevens:But I think that the 1900s show this too. Like we have the 20s as a thing in our minds, but the 10s, the 00s, the 19 naughties, like what are they? They don't have as much of an identity. And there's a lot of factors that make that be the case, the cultural mass production, all these things. But I think that language alone allows us to grab things and they can take on their own personalities because they're cut away by the word.

18:28Hannah Fry:Yeah. I mean, I love all this stuff. I think it's so fascinating. It's also just an ongoing area of debate because there are other people. Chomsky is a really great example of this who is like, no, no, no, no, no. No, it's not like that at all. This is something that is innate in your brains. The language is just the way that it's finding. It's sort of finding out. There's sort of like, there's large scale disagreement among some linguists about this. But I think that as we progress forward in time, it's sort of the way that these things tend to go. I think it's like, it's sort of a bit of both.

18:59Hannah Fry:Language is describing our experience and that our experience is shaped by the language that we have. We should make a new word, Michael, and thus change our experience. Not sure what it should be yet.

19:09Michael Stevens:Well, funny enough, I literally have a copy of the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows right down here next to me. And John Koenig creates words for things that didn't have a word for them before. They can be described, but, you know, he famously is the one who coined the term saunder. That feeling you get when you look at other people and realize that they have lives just as complex and consuming as you do for your own life. But, I mean, gosh, I just – this is a book that, like, it takes me forever to read because I need to spend a whole day thinking about each one.

19:44Hannah Fry:When I was younger, that was my number one ambition, actually, was to have a word that I made up in the English dictionary. I mean, it was sort of a joke, but I also would say it regularly. I think I'm going for koolth, incidentally. That's what I want. I didn't really make it up, but I feel like koolth should be a thing. You've got warmth, you know.

20:02Michael Stevens:We've got warmth. What about koolth?

20:04Hannah Fry:I think koolth should be in.

20:06Michael Stevens:You know, actually, you can see my bookmark, my fun little bookmark in there, tasseled bookmark. I've been dog-earing pages that have words I like. This one, lakotic. Lakotic is an adjective. And what it means is anxiously excited to introduce a friend to something you think is amazing. A classic album, a favorite restaurant, a TV show they're lucky enough to watch for the very first time. And that's a thing we've all felt before. But we don't have a single word to describe it. And I think that if lakotic became this feeling that we named all the time, we would start like doing it more often and preparing for it and there'd be more ritual around it.

20:47Michael Stevens:But without the word, it's just kind of a thing that happens and then flows away.

20:50Hannah Fry:You know, that's what this episode should do. I mean, all of our field notes are basically adventures in lecoticism.

20:56Michael Stevens:Isn't that true? What a coincidence. Ooh, it's a little bit spooky. So let's explore some new things by looking into some questions that came in from you guys after the break. Good idea.

21:39Michael Stevens:We'll see you next time. Plus.

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22:49Hannah Fry:Okay, back to some questions. We've been back on the subreddit, Michael. You in particular, you're choosing a subreddit question every week and I am here for it. So if you ask a good question on the subreddit right now, you're basically guaranteed to get Michael Stevens of Wiesel's fame and Ress's science fame to research a direct answer for you personally.

23:12Michael Stevens:Yeah, that's true.

23:13Hannah Fry:It says, at which speed would you need to throw a rock for it to be able to overcome the friction of the atmosphere, leave the planet and the gravitational pull of the Earth?

23:23Michael Stevens:Yeah, I love this question. It comes from Din Reddit. Thank you for this because I learned something very cool and new about escape velocity. I thought of it very naively until now. I thought, oh, yeah, you leave Earth's gravity. And that's how even in this question it's described, leave the planet and the gravitational pull of the Earth. I never once questioned, wait a second, that's impossible though. No matter where you are in the universe, Earth's gravity is affecting you. You know, you could be on the other side of the galaxy and still Earth's gravity is affecting you. Just like barely at all.

24:03Michael Stevens:Okay. But like I've done, I've done videos about the effect that your birth had on the rings of Saturn gravitationally. It can be calculated, right? And yet I never once thought, well, wait a second, what is escape velocity then? And here's the answer. When we calculate escape velocity, what we're really saying is, okay, if you're going really fast, you've got some speed, the gravitational force of some other object, say the Earth, is slowing you down. Well, you have reached the escape velocity for that gravity well. if the object cannot slow you down to zero until you are infinitely far away.

24:45Michael Stevens:Oh, no. That's how you mathematically calculate it. Yep. I did not know that. That's what it means. Because when you're seven light years away, Earth is still decelerating you, just not as much as before. You're constantly being slowed down. For example, Voyager 1 is right now traveling at about 17 kilometers per second. But when it is, and this is, of course, all mathematical, when it is infinitely far away from our solar system, from Earth, it will have slowed down to just 10.27 kilometers per second. So it is traveling above Earth's escape velocity.

25:24Hannah Fry:That is so interesting because I'm thinking, I tell you what, inevitably, I'm thinking here about arithmetic and geometric series, right? And essentially, it's about whether this sort of converges or diverges. It was a version of what you're describing. That was one for the murder people, I'm sorry. But that's incredible. I had no idea.

25:43Michael Stevens:Yes, and it's very cool because it finally made sense in my mind about what it means to escape when you can't actually escape gravity anywhere. All it means is that you're fleeing at such a fast, you have such a fast initial speed that as you decelerate, you will not reach zero until you're infinitely far away. So we need to give something that speed. I'm saying speed, but we're assuming that really it's a velocity because you need to be pointed away from the Earth. If you're moving at a speed at which you can escape Earth, but you're going down, you won't escape Earth. So it is a velocity. But anyway, the point is it's going to hurt a lot.

26:20Michael Stevens:We can use rockets to escape Earth, you know, the way Voyager has. But we don't need to go really fast right away. we can just constantly keep burning fuel or in Voyager's case, zip around Jupiter, give yourself a little slingshot speed. But if you want to throw a rock, the rock doesn't have any fuel or propellant. It can't keep accelerating. So you need to give it all the speed it needs right away. And at the surface of the earth, that escape velocity is 11.186 kilometers per second. That's about 25 ,000 miles per hour. If you have that speed and you're pointing away from Earth so you have the right velocity, then Earth will keep slowing you down, but it will not slow you down to a standstill until you're infinitely far away.

27:08Michael Stevens:Perfect. So that's what you need to do. No, because if you threw a rock that fast, it's got air in the way and it will explode. Moving that quickly, it's going to compress the air in front of it into a plasma and the entire rock will blow up. So unfortunately, that's a problem. Also, I mean, even if even if we somehow invent a material that can survive those temperatures, the drag of the atmosphere will slow it down. So you can't throw the rock at 11.186 kilometers per second. You've got to throw it depending on how aerodynamic it is, at least like 13, 14 kilometers per second, probably more like 30, 20 or 30 kilometers per second.

27:48Michael Stevens:so that by the time it's out of the atmosphere, it hasn't been slowed down so much that it falls back down to Earth. But you definitely cannot throw a rock at, say, 20 kilometers per second right out of your hand. I mean, you can't do that anyway because we're not strong enough. But you can't do that without the immense amount of energy and heat created through friction with the atmosphere destroying the rock. Or can you? Okay? Don't tell me it's not possible. Go ask the dinosaurs. They're going to say rocks can go that fast.

28:20Hannah Fry:It was a very big rock. That was a very big rock.

28:22Michael Stevens:It was a very big rock. That's the secret. The Chicxulub meteor was traveling 20 kilometers per second when it struck Earth. Sorry, 20 kilometers per second? 20 kilometers per second at impact. It spent an eye blink. Well, not really. It spent like five seconds in the atmosphere total. But here's the thing. That obviously was a huge, energetic, explosive event. But the darned meteor was so large, it only lost 1 % of its mass traveling through our atmosphere. If you threw a house-sized rock up into our atmosphere, it wouldn't make it. The whole thing would get destroyed. It would create what's known as an airburst.

29:07Michael Stevens:This happens with meteors that are the size of houses all the time. But a mountain-sized rock, I'm talking 10 kilometers wide, that's the size of Chicxulub, that thing, if you could throw a mountain straight up at 20 or 30 kilometers per second, you've done it. You've just sent a rock into an escape velocity and it's never coming back.

29:29Hannah Fry:Okay, okay, I've got an easier way. What about if you create a tube that goes up 100 kilometers and you create a perfect vacuum inside the tube? I'm not sure what the structure of the tube is. And then you basically fire the rock, a smaller rock, out of the tube as though it were from a gun, like a cannon.

29:49Michael Stevens:Then you would only need it to go 11.186 kilometers per second. Okay, it's actually still incredibly fast. It's still pretty high, yeah. The thing about the air drag is that you only, if you're aerodynamic enough, you don't need to go that much faster because when you're going that fast, you're just not in the atmosphere very long. You're not being slowed down by it for very long. But I mean, this like vacuum, like evacuated chamber throwing things is already a real project called Spin Launch. This company called Spin Launch is creating these big centrifuges that spin things around in a vacuum until they reach this really, really immense speed.

30:29Michael Stevens:And then they basically open a hatch and let go of it. And it flies out tangential to its original spiral path and it goes up. Now, they're only able to accelerate things up to a little over two kilometers per second. So the things they're accelerating are rockets. And once it gets up really high, boom, it turns on its chemical propulsion and goes the rest of the way. But we're not allowing that. We're just doing this with a rock, just a piece of rock that has no fuel. It's got to have that full speed right off the bat.

31:02Hannah Fry:The thing is, OK, so I went to this lab in Singapore where they were essentially sending up very, very, very modern satellites. These things were like, they were like this big. They were like rock sized, essentially. and like they were saying this is sort of the future of space because actually you don't need to be this gigantic thing it's really expensive blah blah blah blah blah this this way you can like block them together like they're lego you can sort of send them out really easily off you go i had no idea that people were using the like spin it around and fling it trick yeah well spin launch

31:34Michael Stevens:raised an enormous amount of money like i'll have to look it up but it was like north of a hundred million dollars and there's there's been a lot of discussion about how like oh gee i think spin launch sort of came about at a time when everyone wanted to invest in space, but there wasn't anyone to invest in. So all the money went to them. And, you know, whether or not this becomes the future of sending things into orbit, I don't know. But it is it is funny that it's a real thing that's happening. They've they've like built some tests and they're spinning stuff up. Obviously, you have to build your satellite, not only a small right to work, but it also needs to be able to withstand 10 ,000 Gs of force.

32:16Michael Stevens:It has to be able to spin really fast because it's not slowly being accelerated to space. It is reaching that speed and then it goes.

32:27Hannah Fry:Neil, who's our producer, has just sent a message saying that they've raised $230 million in funding so far, which sounds like a lot of money. But actually, when it comes to capital that is raised for space projects. I mean, it's kind of pathetically sore.

32:43Michael Stevens:Yeah. All right. So anyway, there you go. That's how you can get a rock to leave the Earth. Next question comes from Jeff, who asks, Soap. Who thought it would be a great idea to plunge their dirty hands into a mix of boiled down hooves and something alkaline? If the idea is ancient, i.e. before germs were invented, invented I love that what was the purpose of it does soap kill germs or just wash them away to be someone else's problem do bacteria and or viruses develop resistance to soap amazing question

33:18Hannah Fry:Jeff and again this is one of those questions where there is so much information in the question that I strongly suspect strongly suspect that you're actually a secret soap expert yourself Jeffrey um okay so I mean Jeff is absolutely right that soap has been around for thousands of years way before we knew germs even existed, way before there was germ theory, way before we understood that like viruses could be, so it could be a positive thing when it came to controlling the spread of viruses and before we even knew viruses existed at all. And actually, I think this is one of those inventions, a bit like glass, where it's like you can sort of imagine the circumstances which led to its discovery.

34:00Hannah Fry:Because actually all you need to make soap it was this person called saponification. All you need is something that's alkaline, which if you just have some water on some hard wood ash, that'll do it. That'll do it. So you have a fire and then it rains, you know, that's it. You've got your alkaline right there. And then the other thing that you need is something fatty, something with fat in it. So it could be, you know, some like discarded animal detritus. You know, if you've, if you, essentially, if you imagine that you are cooking over a fire, right, you're kind of like burning meat over a fire, and then you finish, you leave some bones by the fire, the fire burns out, it rains the next morning, somewhere in there, somewhere in there, it's sort of, they've got all of the ingredients that you need to make some soap.

34:46Hannah Fry:It's not going to come out as a bar of imperial leather very easily, but all of the stuff is there, the kind of the stuff is there that exists naturally. So we don't know exactly where people discovered this, but you can kind of imagine the setup. Ancient Roman legend by the way they've got this there was a this the story and this is where the word soap came from uh from mount sapo which was the story was that this is where animals would be sacrificed and then rain water will wash through these these melted animal fats and then the wood ashes into the river below and then the the story is that this soapy mixture you would go to this river and it would wash your clothes really brilliantly you know your skin would come out really clean oh really we don't actually think mount sapo ever existed yeah yeah yeah it's a cute story it is but when i say this is thousands of years old that there's recipes for soap that go back 2200 bce so we're talking what 4000 years ago essentially there's mesopotamian tablets that have got recipes on it it's it's we've really used this for a very long time and i think that the the idea is that actually the stuff that we cared about grind that you can see you know if there's something floating around and you're playing around with it and it just happens to make your hands clean of course you're going to investigate what it was that gave rise to that process in the first place the reason it works by the way the reason why soap is so good is that it's this it's this molecule with two ends it has a head that really really loves water and hates oil and it has a tail that really really loves oil and hates water it's kind of like this double-ended molecule so essentially what happens when you're like washing dishes for instance um the tails that are like looking for the oil they sort of dive their tails into any oil that appears and then they form this sort of like this cluster around a blob of oil and then that can just then be washed away uh down into the sink but but it also the reason why it actually works with bacteria and viruses is that so many of the nastiest things that infect us so you know hiv hepatitis b uh ebola zika virus loads of bacteria all of this stuff they have this like this this lipid outer layer it's called this essentially like a fatty coat and so if you know any of these bugs any of these pathogens are in the presence of the soap what soap will do will be to dive its tails into this coat and as it does so it rips it apart sort of like tears apart the virus or the bacteria from from inside out it's like phenomenally effective and this is the reason why you know i i remember in covid when everyone was like oh wash your hands and it was like oh come on what's it really going to do but no for real for real for real actually that is all you need to do yeah it's all you need to do like soap is this miracle miracle discovery how lucky are we that soap turns out i mean goodness knows whether like How many lives soap has actually saved across the entire history of humanity by being this incredible defense against the things that are most harmful to her?

37:55Michael Stevens:It's one of the most consequential inventions our species has ever, ever made.

38:01Hannah Fry:Yeah. You know what? Yes. Yes, it is. That and the bucket.

38:04Michael Stevens:Look, Donnie Darko agrees. Wait, remind me, what does Donnie Darko do? That's a little reference for the true fans. Basically, there's a scene in the movie where he's asked, like, what's the most important invention? And he's like, soap.

38:15Hannah Fry:Yeah.

38:15Michael Stevens:And they're all like, that's such a weird answer. There's quite a big bit about soap in Fight Club, isn't there? Oh, yeah, right. I haven't seen that in so long. I've got the book. I want to read the book and then watch the movie again.

38:27Hannah Fry:I did a short, a YouTube short, like Instagram Reel thing a little while ago about how you're too sensible to have ever done this, but I'm not. Have you ever accidentally got bleach on your hands? No, I haven't. Okay, so if you do, don't. You'll see why in a second. But if you do, it feels really slippery. essentially what is happening is um we need to make soap alkaline and something fatty you know what's really alkaline bleach you know what's really fatty your fingers so you are literally turning your fingers into soap now when i posted this video there was loads of comments from people one of them was from um from people who wash the lines in pubs right the beer lines and I knew this I used to I worked in pubs like while I was doing you know all the way through uni's for like seven years or something and I did know this but I just I completely had escaped my mind but what you used to do was you would put bleach through the lines to sort of you know kill everything and then to make sure that the bleach had washed out you would put your hand in the the sort of as you're washing it through you would put your hand in it and if it felt slippery you would know that there was still bleach in there but what you were actually doing was turning your own skin into soap and then when the process of turning your own skin into soap stopped you knew that you were ready to put the beer back in wow let's do one last

39:54Michael Stevens:question uh this is a really fun one i'll let you read it okay oh i don't know who it's from

39:59Hannah Fry:actually let's say anonymous but if it isn't then you can write and tell us off okay given that heat makes things expand, I deduce that this is why days are longer in the summer. Are there any papers or theories that ended up completely misunderstanding what they set out to prove? Ancient experiments like the frog and battery spring to mind.

40:16Michael Stevens:Yeah, I love that. I love that the reasoning is off. However, the conclusion is still correct. I mean, the first thing I thought of was this now very discredited theory of climatology, which is called Rain Follows the Plow. So in the 1860s and 70s, settlers were moving out west in the United States. And if you look at a satellite picture of the United States, you'll see that there's this line around the 100th meridian where it just goes from being really green to really not green, like suddenly very dry. Not a good place to grow a bunch of crops, right? Well, what happened was the settlers went out there and then they started to report that things were getting greener, that it was wetter.

41:03Michael Stevens:And one of the theories was that if people go, the water comes. Rain follows the plow. If you need water for your crops, just plant them anyway. The act of plowing and planting and human activity causes rain. So go ahead, settlers, like move out there, build the farms. And so this wasn't just like an old wives tale or something. This was like scientists, people at the University of Nebraska were like, yeah, this is a permanent change. Something's happening. It could be that when we plow the ground, the surface area of dirt exposed means that more moisture gets up. It could be that the smoke and the steam from the locomotives is affecting this.

41:45Michael Stevens:It could just be that the sounds of human activity and human voices causes cloud formation. Like, it's fine. And this was a very believed thing. Turns out, no, it was just a temporary wet few years. And as we all know, there were some bad results from that. Many, many years later in the 30s, the very beginning of the 1930s, drought came, as it often would, and farmers had removed topsoil. They'd removed the root structures of grass, and suddenly the soil just got pulverized by dryness into a dust that would blow away. And that's the dust bowl displaced huge amounts of people. Millions of acres of land just became completely unfarmable.

42:31Michael Stevens:My grandmother on my mom's side was born in California because her family in Missouri just could not live there until things got better. And then, you know, she moved back, met my grandpa. And so I grew up in that same area. But that was it's very funny to read these like scientific papers about how like, you know what? There's not enough rain there unless we start wanting rain and we plant things anyway. And then it brings the rain.

42:58Hannah Fry:You know what? This episode, you know what you've done with that? This episode's done like a nice little, you tied it up in a little bow at the end because we started with the Dust Bowl, like different decades having different themes, different sort of like, you know, the like the great Dust Bowl of the, what was it, 1930s?

43:14Michael Stevens:Yeah, it was like the end of 1930, like it kind of started. Wow. Which was a terrible time for a climate disaster because the stock market had just crashed. So, you know, you couldn't grow anything, but even if you could, you couldn't sell it for much. Not a great time.

43:30Hannah Fry:I think I'm going to read The Grapes of Wrath tomorrow on my train.

43:33Michael Stevens:There's also a great Ken Burns Dust Bowl documentary.

43:36Hannah Fry:Ooh, yes, please. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, I will. Wow, what an extraordinary example. Yeah, I mean, this is the thing, actually. There are countless examples like this. History is sort of littered with them, false correlations, incorrect theories. And this is one of the main reasons why science is not about finding something that proves your theory. I think this is one of the great misconceptions about what science is and does. Science is never about finding evidence to support your theory. Because if you do that, that's the situation that you end up in. Instead, science is like the opposite.

44:17Hannah Fry:Science is saying, if you have a theory, you do everything you possibly can to disprove it. and then if you fail if you throw everything you have at it if you are like go at it with kind of real honesty and integrity and try and disprove your theory and fail then maybe there's evidence to suggest that your original theory was correct but i mean actually to be honest the time that you're talking about the 1930s these kind of modern ideas of science were only really in their infancy around that time. Well, look, we love the scientific method, but we also love you, our listeners. And we love the questions that you send us.

44:56Hannah Fry:So please do send us more. We're getting slick with these links.

45:00Michael Stevens:I was going to say, I was going to say, that wasn't maybe the slickest ever. How dare you? But it was done with such confidence. I loved it. It was like, oh, yeah. So anyway, speaking of climate disaster, don't be a disaster yourself. Leave a comment below.

45:14Hannah Fry:I think if you commit, people don't know Right.

45:17Michael Stevens:Commitment is 100 percent that, you know, it's not even like a 91. I second what Hannah said. Follow us on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Leave us some comments. Join us on the subreddit. Send us any emails. The rest is science at goal hanger dot com.

45:33Hannah Fry:And we will see you next week.

46:14Michael Stevens:We'll be right back.

46:16Hannah Fry:Every style, every home