The Device That Maps The Heavens

0:05This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Dinosaurs walked the earth 180 million years ago. But, you know, cancer was part of their story too. Scientists have found tumors in ancient fossils. Well, that is part of the reason why cancer is a big, big part of our story, right? It's the other side of evolution. It's the most complex disease that we face. There are more than 200 types of cancer in total, each with distinct characteristics, challenges and mysteries. And that complexity demands scale. Cancer Research UK is the world's largest charitable funder of cancer research, with more than 4 ,000 scientists, doctors and nurses working across more than 20 countries in the search for answers, and then sharing their discoveries beyond borders.

0:51And the impact of this collaboration is clear, because over the last 50 years, the charity's pioneering work has helped to double cancer survival in the UK. That is, more people who are living longer, better lives. Fossils can show us the past, but research is shaping the future. And for more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit CancerResearchUK.org forward slash Rest is Science.

1:24Hello and welcome to The Rest is Science. Today is an episode of Field Notes, where Hannah and I share amazing stories, objects, our deepest fears. Oh, we're going there today, are we? We might be, or we might not. If you have questions or things you want to share with us, you can always reach out. We would love to take on those. But today, Hannah told me that she brought something related to ellipses. I did. Okay, if you want to draw a circle, easy peasy, get a compass. Hold on. I want to guess what you brought. you've already given me a piece of information that's almost confirming what I was going to guess.

2:02Oh, really? Okay, let's imagine I didn't go. Okay, is it an ellipsograph? It might be. Is it just an ellipsograph? Does it allow me to draw an ellipse or does it simply trace an ellipse in a surprising way? It allows you to draw one, but I think in a surprising way. I think in a very beautiful way. Is it a circle that rolls on the inside of another circle? No. Okay. Let's see it. Okay. You want to draw a circle. You get the compass from your primary school pencil case that you have not opened since and never needed to use in actual real life. And that's fine because you just, a circle is a fixed distance from a single point and trace out the arc, right?

2:45Easy peasy. Ellipse is way harder, way harder because instead of having one focus, you have two. and you can do it by putting two pins into a piece of paper and like tying a single piece of string between the two and then using a pencil to kind of trace out that arc. That is one way of doing it. So some friends of mine at Maker's Cabinet have over-engineered a way to draw ellipses and I thought you might enjoy it. Yeah. You know, there's sort of like a draftsman in you somewhere. Yeah, there is. The key point here is that an ellipse is a fixed distance between two foci, okay? Between two points.

3:25So what does that mean? That means that no matter where you are on the ellipse, the combined distance from that point to both foci is fixed. Is the same. Exactly right. Got it. Okay, so do you want to have a little play with this so you can get it out to work? Okay, okay, so there's a magnet. Oh, that's a nice strong magnet. There's a magnet underneath this page. This sits on it. Ah, yeah. I wanted people to appreciate this ellipse graph. Look at this. those shuttles are following straight line tracks and yet we trace out an ellipse from circular motion well from linear motion we get circular motion i love that it's so well made it's beautiful isn't it i've seen them made of wood and plastic but this is like brass look at there isn't that beautiful come on what a treat i mean isn't that a treat yeah they're the coolest objects they're how the planets move they are how the planets move but the thing is that there was such big arguments about the idea that that is how the planets move because the greeks in particular were obsessed with circles they thought there was like the platonic ideal the symmetry of it the beauty of it it's just absolute perfection and this stood for a really long time this idea of circles i mean like thousands and thousands of years people thought it's circles that's going on in the sky and then tico bra or sometimes people say tyco don't know i say tyco i say tyco bra from now on that is how are we known and he was a bit of a bra actually because he um he got into an argument with someone about a formula had a jewel ended up losing his nose no kidding you know this right i didn't know this so he lost his nose so he had a prosthetic nose he had different ones he had a bronze one he had a silver one for special occasions and then a gold one that uh flickered in the candlelight to look realistic but he collected all of these observations of of uh celestial objects in the sky he also had a pet elk that he um he used to like bring around to places in the end uh the elk passed away because it got drunk got the elk drunk and tried to take it downstairs anyway whatever he was a bit of a dude yeah this was in like the late 1500s exactly exactly early 1600s exactly and he collected all of these observations and he handed off all of that data to his assistant Kepler and Kepler was like looking for the circles looking for the circles trying this circle that circle and then eventually came to the conclusion that no it's not circles it's ellipses And he said that it was like a cartload of dung that you had to swallow because he just hated, hated the idea that there might be anything other than circles in the sky.

6:16But it was. But it was. And swallowing that heap of dung really moved us forward. It really did. Imagine that. Being like, oh, here's my assistant, Kepler. Like, can you imagine better help? Speaking of the motion of planets as perfect because I actually brought something related to them. Now, this shows them in circular orbits. Sorry, Kepler. But it's a simplified thing for a reason. Watch. This is an orrery calendar. It's a page a day calendar. It doesn't tell you an inspirational quote for each day or give you a Sudoku for each day. It shows you the relative positions of the planets each day.

6:57This is January 1st of 2026. It's a 2026 calendar. And then the next one is, we actually got two of January 1st. And then the next one is Friday, January 2nd. And as you can see. Almost imperceptible. Almost don't change. However, you use it like a flip book and you can see just how quickly the planets are moving in their orbits. So Neptune basically doesn't move at all in a year. But Earth goes all the way around once. Now, full disclosure, you can only flip it backwards easily. You kind of have to, like, break the back. Oh, that is amazing. So you can plan ahead and be like, oh, I want to do that thing, but only when Uranus is as far away from Earth as it's going to be all year.

7:45And they've got the moon phases on them. It sort of feels like more than 360 pages, but it isn't. Well, we made it out of a special recyclable paper, like a compostable paper, because I was like, if we're going to print this many sheets, I want to keep Earth happy. That is absolutely delightful. Mercury whizzing around there. I know. Isn't it nuts? And Jupiter just barely, I mean, it's taking its time. Jupiter takes its time to go around the sun, but around its own axis, Jupiter is like really fast. Takes the Earth 24 hours to go once around its axis, but it takes Jupiter just 10 hours. So it's two and a bit days for every day.

8:21That's wild because Jupiter is huge. Yeah. So if you are some gas out on the edge of Jupiter around the equator, you are booking it. Like, no wonder that great red spot won't go away. The storms on Jupiter have an enormous amount of energy just from that planet whipping it around. I'm just liking the idea of being on a spaceship and just your face being pulled back with the speed of it. Well, I mean, it's not quite that fast. I mean, none of us are on Earth being like, whoa, even though we are rotating at, you know, hundreds of miles per hour around its axis, Earth is just too big. even for us to appreciate that.

8:56Don't ruin my memory. It does make us a little bit lighter in the same way that when you're on a spinning carnival ride, you feel like you're being pulled away. Really, you're being pulled tangential to the circle. But on Earth, we are feeling that motion too. And so we weigh a few fractions of a gram less because of its rotation. If it stopped moving, we'd be like, oh, all of the gravity, I'm feeling all of it. So wait, what's that on Jupiter then? So you're spinning faster, but it is heavier. You're spinning faster. So you've got an even greater uplift. We often call it a centrifugal force when it's not really a force, but it's that like, whoa, I'm moving away from the center of rotation of my curve.

9:38When in reality, you're leaving tangential to the path. But on a big circle, that feels like going straight up. There's a ride at Thought Park. and what's interesting about it is that it has the longest negative g basically so you are effectively airborne as you if you like in your seat but the way that they have to do it you know normally you are as you go on a roller coaster you are forced into your seat right so you've got to go down it's like right like really feel the weight of it in this one it's the opposite and the way they do it is they have to slow down the carriage as it goes on the outside of a turn in order for you to really have that feeling sort of being flung out into the air.

10:21Whoa. I won't be writing on that anytime soon. I don't, no. I just, I never had. As a kid, I actually collected newspaper clippings of deaths on roller coasters. Because it made me feel like my fear was justified. I wish I knew you when you were eight years old. I still have the box. It's actually the box that my Bill Nye fan club subscription goodies came in, and then I just put little comics and recipes and deaths at the Worlds of Fun theme park in Kansas City all in there. Please, one day, can we do a field notes where you go through that box? Yeah, we sure can. It's going to be a lot of corny family circus cartoons that I thought were quite clever when I was eight.

11:03But I brought one more thing. This is actually for your two daughters. Okay, amazing. You better believe I'm stealing this, by the way, just to be absolutely clear. You cannot steal that because I have to make a video about it. It's the only one I have. Fine. I will get you one that can be just yours. Here's two CMY cubes. These are the additions that we put in a curiosity box as if I'm going to buy anything for you. But the couple who invented those are fantastic people. And we partnered with them to make this addition of their CMY cube. It is a translucent cube about two inches on each edge.

11:44and opposite faces of the cube have the same color, the same translucent color. And the colors that you'll find are, there's three of them, cyan, magenta, and yellow, CMY. Those are primary colors in the CMY system and you can combine them to make all kinds of other colors. You've got magenta, then twist it, you've got yellow, and then twist it again and you have got cyan. Cyan. I mean, these are the colors you get in your printer. That's right. But if you combine them together. Hang on. Does it work? Does it work? It does work. Yeah. I'm just trying to work out what the colors would be. It can be very confusing because there's not just the subtractive color mixing that's happening.

12:32There's also reflection. But greens and purples and oranges are produced as the light is subtractively changed, passing through the cyan filter only cyan comes through hey um do you know where you send naughty rainbows where to prism i do i do like that prisms can create rainbows but they can also destroy them if you send a prism through a rainbow it comes out as white light does it yeah and if you look at a rainbow, like a rainbow in a children's book through a prism, at the right distance, it'll get smashed into just a white line. Yeah. These are absolutely amazing. They're really beautiful.

13:16Really beautiful. And they're really well made. Also, what I notice is, like the source of truth, this is the second object that you've given me for my children with extremely sharp edges. Oh, that's right. Yeah. You're welcome. Amazing. Should we go to a break? Let's take a break.

13:44Welcome back. This is Field Notes. An extra half an hour that you get to spend in the company of me and Michael every single week where we try and impress each other with things that we know, things that we found. I'm not trying to impress you with any of this. Oh, I'm absolutely trying to impress you. I'm trying to impress my mom. Yeah, aren't we all? Anyway, sorry, this got really... Deep. Deep very quickly. Let's lighten it up. Who's got a question? Should we go to the mailbag? Yeah. Okay. All right. We've got some interesting questions this week. By the way, please do feel free to send in your questions to the rest of science at goalhanger.com.

14:19All right. Alana asks, you can invite three other people from the world of science who are dead or alive to a dinner party who you choose in? Oh, my gosh. Do you have an answer? I mean, I've definitely got some favorites. Yeah, sure, sure, sure. I feel like, you know, Albert Einstein is one of the more obvious cliche types of answers. But I want to know what his last words were. You know, he spoke them in German to a nurse who did not know German. And so they've been lost. No. I want to know if it was like, oh, crap. Or if it was like, oh, it's actually MCQ, you know, or something. I don't know.

15:02But I would love to find out. I'd also like to know how he feels about, do you know the story about Einstein's brain? Oh, his brain. Yes, and then it was sort of extracted, put in a jar, and then just forgotten about. That's right. It was in the back of a cupboard, and someone found it years later and was like, what is this? And it turned out to be Einstein's brain. Einstein's brain. And this was at like a medical facility, by the way. It wasn't just like, oh, his neighbors came over and pulled it out. Not in a shade in the garden. It was like donated to be studied and then... Just forgotten about.

15:32Forgotten about. Yeah. in a little medical closet. But when they did study it, they basically found there was nothing remarkable about it, right? So maybe slightly more white matter than the rest of us. Okay. I'd like to ask him about that. I would like to ask him about that. How do you feel about your brain being forgotten about in a cupboard for a very long time? Okay, so besides Einstein, who's on your list? Okay, I would quite like to meet Galois. Who is that? Okay, so Galois, he's such a dude. He's this French mathematician. He's like 19, 20 years old and he is super, super, super bright.

16:07But he's also very French and loves to have affairs with beautiful women. One of the people he has an affair with turns out to be engaged to some very important soldier in the town who challenges him to a duel. And of course, because he is very French and this is, you know, around 1700s, you can't turn down a duel. so he agrees to go off and have the duel have the fight with this you know with his lover's partner before he does that he decides he needs to finish his maths theory okay so he stays up all night and he scribbles this stuff down it's all about you know you have uh quadratics which is where you have um where you have something squared yeah you have cubics which is which is cubed to the power of three um but he was looking at quartics and quintics so equations to the power five right i'll be honest with you it gets very hard very quickly yeah um but so he's he's there he's like i've got to i've got to work out these equations i've got to work out these equations and we still have the kind of ink splatted pages that he wrote on that night every now and then he's like he's scribbling down the theory he's crossing stuff out and he's like then he writes like la femme la femme and then he's like oh i'm gonna die in the morning it's like no i've got to get back to these equations anyway he goes off he does the jewel he loses in the jewel he loses his life but those pages and the work that he did in advance of that then goes on to be absolutely foundational and now every person who goes to study mathematics as a degree level will learn Galois theory this 20 year old kid what a romantic story that is wow it's like if he'd been given just a couple more days what else could he have discovered or was it the impending possibility of death that made him work so well it just spilled off all that brilliance at once I'd just like to to meet him at dinner and be like you idiot you idiot that would be very cool can we go to the same dinner party together okay so we've got einstein and galois we could go we could go way back in time like i'm thinking about a pythagoras would be neat this is sort of the world of math at this point but like i want to hear about the the meaning of numbers to him what do they mean to you it was much more religious he didn't really like numbers i mean they didn't really like numbers at all the Greeks.

18:21Not all of them. Sure. Those irrational ones. Those irrational ones they weren't so happy with. They were like the the demons. Obviously Archimedes I think it'd be cool just to say that I met him. I love that of all the things Archimedes did the inventions the Eureka I'm in a bathtub and I've learned about volume and how to measure it. The story goes that on his gravestone. Do you know what he had them put there? Go on. A sphere, a cylinder and a cone of equal heights. Because he showed the relationships between their volumes. And he was so proud of that, that he was like, of everything I did, I want that to be what's on my grave.

19:04Is Archimedes the one who died at the hand of a soldier who was trying to capture him? I think there was some sort of invasion of his island. And then he was told to, because he was such a genius they were like going to capture him and bring him back to the whatever king okay something the soldier went in and was like you need to come with me and he was like don't disturb me when i'm with my circles and uh and so the soldier killed him wow yeah for the circles for the circle you just couldn't give them up yeah maybe maybe instead of doing like maybe instead of picking people based on the interesting things they have to offer maybe we should just get the people who've got the most stupid deaths in science yeah right and we can just make fun of them just make fun of them you could bring archimedes and then have a bunch of circle foods okay slices of bologna pie pizzas yeah and be like hey let's cut them up let's make some cords some diameters in your honor in your honor here is this here's a cone-shaped cake so yeah it's not so much to learn from them but it's to honor them and kind of razz them a bit yeah i'd be up for that that sounds like a good dinner party actually pythagoras himself he's got an amazing death do you know about pythagoras's death no okay so i mean this is possibly apocryphal but i'll be honest with you a lot of stories that old are sure yeah right pythagoras of triangle fame absolutely amazing had a school basically like had loads of you know disciples terrified of beans really really hated them thought that they looked like sort of miniature humans just really he absolutely abhorred them yeah who hasn't thought that he hasn't thought that beans were banned in his school.

20:39Okay, got it. And the rumor goes that he had sort of a fight with some other people. They wanted to join his school. He didn't let them. They barricaded his house, set it on fire and he ran away. He managed to get free. Ran away and they were chasing him. And then he carried on running and it was all fine until he came up to a field of beans and he refused to run through the field of beans as they caught up with him and killed him. Wow. This sounds like a great dinner party. Beans and pizza for dinner. Would you bring beans? Yeah. Would Could you not bring beans? Bean pizza, bean cookies, like a can of refried beans is a cylinder.

21:16Archimedes would love that, Pythagoras wouldn't. But, you know, he's got a lot of credit. It's time for him to get a little... Roasting. Roasting. That's right. That's right. Well, we've got one more question. This one is from Fred. Fred asks, why do goldfish have such short memories? Okay. I think that this is a massive misconception. I was wondering if that might be, yeah. I think that actually there have been experiments with goldfish where they can sort of be shown to navigate a maze to get food and then can remember the route that they've learned months afterwards. So where did this misconception start?

21:53I think it's just snobbery. Right. I think it's just straight up snobbery. But also it really does, I think, underline the cruelty of putting a goldfish in a bowl where it's got nothing to do. Because, of course, if it's only got a three second memory, who cares that it doesn't have anything to interact with? But I mean, we did an episode about boredom all this time. Those pretty little goldfish that we've been having to effectively decorate our homes. We've been essentially torturing them. Yeah, I don't know what kind of space they need. But yeah, a three second memory seems pretty made up. Maybe to make us feel better about like, oh, yeah, there's not much to do there.

22:29But yeah, I don't know how much room they need. They might even need like a place where they feel like they can go to be safe and hidden. like a little, you know, rock cave feature. Maybe a goldfish friend. A goldfish friend. Yeah. Do they like having friends? I think they do. I wouldn't be surprised if they did. Yeah. Yeah. I've never owned one of you. I might have had one when I was like four. Because I kind of remember fish. But not since then. My daughter really wants a bird. Oh, yeah. And I'm like, birds deserve to be free. Not going to happen. So I had a cockatiel when I was younger. what was interesting about him is he would sit on your shoulder in the garden oh outdoors yeah and not leave and not leave i think you can bond with the bird i think that's my point i think you can bond with the bird i believe that for sure for sure and you guys can bond with us by joining our newsletter at the rest is science at goal hanger.com