Why Erdős Was The Original Kevin Bacon

0:00This 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.

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1:20Welcome to the Rest is Science. This is Field Notes. It's a sort of a podcast expedition, if you will, where Michael and I are going to trade curious objects or things that have been occupying our minds. Yeah, that's right. Every week we're going to bring something from our little, you know, the mystery bags of our lives to share with the other and with you. I mean, put it this way, Michael and I are massive nerds and always have been. So over the years, we've we've collected all manner of bonkers and bananas, objects and ideas. And that's, I mean, we've got at least seven to eight years worth of stuff to go through, Michael, I reckon, in terms of episodes.

1:55Yeah, right. And there's even more than that, because we want things from you guys. So send in your questions and ideas to where? Well, I know. It's the rest is science at goalhanger.com. What a great email address. Yeah, you would think that by now we would have remembered it. But no, it still remains a difficulty for us. Later on in this episode, I'm going to be showing you the ultimate nerd trophy. It's the most remarkable and weird thing that I own. Oh. That's coming up in our episode. But first, some questions from you. That's right. From you guys who are out there listening, not from me.

2:32I will read this one to you, though, Hannah. This is a question from Hayley, who asks, who is or was, in your opinion, the scientist with the most peculiar personality? Most peculiar personality. I mean, there's a lot of there's a lot of people who could be in that category. It's like all of them. Like you have to be peculiar to. Well, we're all peculiar in some way. Some of us more peculiar than others. It definitely helps, doesn't it? I think if you're willing to completely dedicate your entire life to advancing human knowledge by just the smallest, smallest amount, no guarantee of success. Then then I think there is usually does have to be something a little bit peculiar about it.

3:12I mean mathematicians I think are often right up there with the most peculiar of all I mean there's Cantor who uh discovered that infinities can be different sizes I mean that in itself is a wild idea but he um he at one point thought that he was causing the rain by stirring his own urine so I mean there's a lot of wait really yeah oh that's incredible see I don't know anything about him outside of the mathematics that he worked on. I'm going to write that down because I love examples of things like Isaac Newton believing that the world was going to end on a specific date and all the esoteric work that he did.

3:50D.H. Lawrence, the author, believed that the moon produced its own light. And it's just kind of surprising when you're like, oh, yeah, it was easier to believe that confidently back then. Yeah, absolutely was. I think number one, though, number one for me is going to go to Erdos. Is that the six degrees of Kevin Bacon mathematician? It absolutely is the six degrees of Kevin Bacon mathematician. Okay, explain what that is to our listeners. Okay, so he did a lot of work on graph theory, which it's not about graphs as an x and y axis, it's graphs as in networks, that's what mathematicians call them.

4:23But he also was a sort of lived example of this. He published an incredible number of papers, but in particular he published with a lot of co-authors. And what he would do, actually, He didn't have a house, right? He didn't have a kind of traditional life. What he would do is he would rock up at different mathematicians' houses and then turn up and say, my brain is open, and sleep on their couch, where they would take on the responsibility for cleaning him, feeding him, laundering his... Actually, he didn't do laundry. He chucked his clothes away once he'd worn them. Not because he was ostentatious and rich, just because he didn't care for such things.

5:02But while he was there, he would write papers with them. But what it then meant is that over time he had collaborated with such an unbelievable number of people that people came up with the idea of an Erdos number, which is how many steps away in a network you are from having collaborated directly with Erdos the man himself. So not only a lot of collaborators, but it sounds like also a very diverse variety of types of papers in mathematics. Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is the one that is the most famous idea. So the Bacon number is analogous, but the idea is that Kevin Bacon has been in so many different films with so many different people that you can have a Bacon number too.

5:46So if you have a Bacon number of zero, you are Kevin Bacon himself. If you have a Bacon number of one, you have appeared on screen with Kevin Bacon. And a Bacon number of two, and you have appeared on screen with somebody who has appeared on screen with Kevin Bacon and so on and so on and so on. If you have an Erdos number of zero, you are Erdos. Yeah. Which, by the way, until you said it, I thought it was Erdos. Oh. So that's why it's helpful to do audio programs about mathematicians. Erdos. I think I've got an Erdos number of four, by the way. I think mine is four. Yours is four. I think so, yeah.

6:24Let me just double check. We haven't published a paper together, which is like the rule, right? But if we did, I would have a number of five. Absolutely. But we have appeared on screen together. What's your bacon number? I don't know. Is there a way to find out? I don't, I haven't really been in enough like IMDB type shows. Oh, it's five. My Erdos number is five. Oh, okay. Oh, hold on. I've got a bacon number of three. How? I've only done one thing ever, which was drama. But I appeared on screen with Lenny Rush, who is this absolutely amazing actor. He has a bacon number of two. So there we go.

7:05I've got an Erdos bacon number of five, two. But that means you're six, three at the very least. You think? I have a bacon of six? Erdos of six. We have to publish something together. But after that. Well, should we come up with a name for the bacon Erdos ratio? Yeah, go on. Oh, oh my gosh. There's an Erdash Bacon number. It measures the collaborative distance in authoring papers between that person and Erdash and their Bacon number. Oh no. Go on. It doesn't have a funny name. It's just called the Erdash Bacon number. And the lowest is three. Mathematician Daniel Kleitman has an Erdash Bacon number of three because he co-authored papers with Erdash and has a Bacon number of two because he appeared as an extra in Goodwill Hunting with Minnie Driver who appeared with Bacon in Sleepers.

7:53Yeah, that is impressive. So what was his three? Mine's seven. Pathetic. Pathetic. I need to hunt down Kevin Bacon immediately. Right. I mean, yeah. So you could probably collaborate with someone who worked with Erdash directly. Yeah. I mean, I haven't got long to go because he was particularly big in the 1960s. Yeah. You got to do it now. But you could achieve what at most today, a Erdash number of two. Yeah. And then Bacon is still alive. That can become a one. So you could beat Daniel Kleitman. You could equal him, no? Two and one. Yeah, you add them together. So the best you could do would be to tie him.

8:35Records that can't be broken, Michael. One of your favorite subjects. Wow. OK, yet another tab I'm not going to be closing. How many are there out of interest? Let's see if I can figure that out. There's too many for me to easily navigate. But on this one window I have, it's over a hundred. Can I tell you why I pick Erdos, right, as the most peculiar person? Well, yeah. I mean, the Erdos breaking stuff is all very nice, but what makes Erdos peculiar, apart from the fact that he didn't have a house and just turned up at his friend's doors, insisting that they take care of him? He also took a lot of amphetamines, and some people were concerned that he was addicted to them.

9:19He was working like 19 hours a day. And so a friend of his, Ron Graham, and bet him$500 that he wasn't able to stop taking the drugs, right? He couldn't go cold turkey for 30 days. And so Erdős was like, fine, I'll do it. So he stopped. He immediately stopped. He took the$500 from Graham and, you know, didn't touch the drugs at all in that time. And then at the end, he said, look, see, what you've proved is you've proved that I'm not an addict, so well done you, but what you've done here is you've set mathematics back by a month. Because he needed the drugs to do math. and he knew the drugs didn't do the math which I quite like the other thing about him is that he um my my favorite story about him is that he was totally incapable of feeding himself right just couldn't didn't understand the most basic ideas of how to construct a sandwich for instance so there was one day where he was staying at a friend's house and he was hungry he went into the kitchen probably because of all of them amphetamines went into the kitchen um opened the fridge and found a carton of tomato juice.

10:19Couldn't work out how to open it, so got a knife from the counter, stabbed it open, tomato juice went everywhere, drank from the carton, left it on the side and then went off back to work. And his friend came down just to witness what looked like a murder scene in his kitchen. Just like, that's just Erdos. That's just Erdos. There he is. I mean, that sounds like something I might do in college. not saying I'm Erdashi, but I get it. I get it. Yeah. Yeah. What nice. Well, I mean, what a great guy. He also, he thought that God was the supreme fascist. And he would, he would regularly attribute every time he lost his glasses or, you know, couldn't find a book that he wanted to read or whatever.

11:06He would be like, it was the supreme fascist that did that. But when he found a really beautiful mathematical proof that was, that couldn't be approved upon, that was essentially perfection, he said, look, that came from the book. And the book was the supreme fascist's little handbook of perfect mathematical proofs that could only even have been created by God. Oh, so it's like a bittersweet supreme fascist. A bittersweet supreme fascist. That's a sentence I think that has not ever been spoken before and probably never will again. Good. This is a great question. It's from Francisco from Lisbon.

11:42Would it be possible to explain to a humanoid alien, bilaterally symmetrical, via written or spoken message, no direct or visual contact, which side is left and which is right? The alien would have no access to anything on Earth or a human body as a reference, nor would they be really aware of North and South. Is there a fundamental physical or cosmological real world difference between left and right? And can that information be passed on? Great question, Francisco. guy? Oh my gosh. Yes. I love this because I, I got really obsessed with it years ago. I read Martin Gardner's Amidextrous Universe, which I recommend to everyone.

12:22It is a book all about mirror images, symmetries. He poses that same question and goes through all the ways we can't answer it. And so I, I read the whole book thinking we still don't know the answer. And I'm like, I'm going to make a video about this. It's such a deep mystery. And at the end he's like, oh, and then in 1956, we figured it out. So to kind of like lay the scene, I think it's good to imagine communicating with aliens through, say, radio waves only, so we can't send images. And we're trying to tell them how to build something that is anadymorphic, like a coffee cup, a Father's Day number one dad coffee cup.

13:05All right. So you tell them, all right, this is easy. you make a cylinder fine they know what a cylinder is right there are symmetries in our universe that make that something we can easily explain we can talk about points and whatever now we tell them like take off the top and empty the volume inside but leave one one side at the bottom and now they've made a cup and then you tell them print number one dad so that when you look at it you see it and they're like yeah we're following and they're doing this and now you tell them you got to put a handle on it. And you say, now the handle should go since, you know, here on earth, most people are right-handed.

13:39We tend to put the handles on the right side. So when you hold it, you see the printing and they go, which one's the right side? Think about it. This is much harder than you might imagine. Because remember, we cannot reference anything in the environment. You can't say, look at number one dad on the mug, look at earth and the Virgo supercluster is to the right. You can't do that. If you're not allowed to do that, what do you tell them to differentiate left and right? Because you could say, you could say, okay, place the handle along the axis of the cylinder so that it's perpendicular to the base.

14:13That would be fine. And then you could say, and now rotate it so that the handle, so it's no longer symmetrical about the central line. That would be fine. But distinguishing left from right, really hard. Yes, because we could tell them to, you know, looking at the handle, rotate the mug. But rotate which way? Which way is right and which is left? And how do we tell them with words alone and no references to any other models? Ever since at least Kant, people wrote about how, golly, it doesn't make any sense. Like a right hand floating in a universe all on its own doesn't have a rightness or a leftness.

14:56So for decades, we thought maybe there wasn't an answer because of the four fundamental forces, three of them we knew made no difference when mirror reversed. Left and right didn't matter. So gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force make no distinction. If you watch them do things in a mirror, it all looks fine, right? You look at a pendulum in a mirror, it's obeying all the normal physics, and it fits all the normal formula and equations. So this was true for these three fundamental forces, but the weak force was hypothesized to not have that same symmetry. And an experiment was devised that essentially looked at the spin of electrons emitted by a decaying cobalt-60.

15:43This is called the Wu experiment. So in the Wu experiment, they use cobalt-60 atoms that are decaying, and they put them into both, let's call it regular spin orientations and mirror image spin orientations, and found that the electrons that decayed out came out in the same direction. It's not like, okay, you spin this way, the electrons come up, and you spin the other way, and they come down. In which case, then it's, you can't really know. You just reverse it, and it's the same. Instead, they found it didn't matter. The electrons always came out in one direction. so that can be called you know your left or right whichever it is i don't know enough about cobalt but that is a way to agree because you'll both see the same thing so okay let me make sure i understand this then right so you get the mug you you're like you've got number one dad on it and then the only way to distinguish left and right as innate properties of the universe rather than just some sort of convention that we have decided on is to get subatomic particles, perform these experiments where you are, looking at the spin, looking at the direction of the electrons, and then that's the way that they can print the handle on the right.

16:56I would say it doesn't matter if they print it on the left-hand side. I think it'd probably be all right. I think if we want them to match, we have to do all of that rigmarole. And that is such a cool feature of our universe because it is otherwise so simple left and right. Come on. You know, it's it's it's it's it's right there. And yet it isn't, except the weak force comes in clutch at the end and says, all right, guys, technically, if you're willing to do a lot of work, I can help. There is something really nice about this idea that there are directions. I mean, time is the other one, right?

17:34Time faces only in one direction. You know, you can't go backwards in time. There's something really nice about this idea of these fundamental rules of physics. Maybe this is, maybe I don't think about this deeply enough, but couldn't you just say, all right, you've got some electrons going through a wire. Those electrons are going in, say, one particular direction. and they will create a magnetic field that wraps around the wire. I mean, that's the right hand rule, right? Could you not say that it wraps around clockwise, anticlockwise? Can you, I don't know. Is there no way to get it that way?

18:08Yes, there is not a way to do it that way. And I unfortunately do not know why. I think it has something to do with you need to both agree on which is the north side of a magnet first. Oh. It's something like that. Now, we've since learned that you can use other things besides cobalt. You can use uranium-239. You know, that might help us if the aliens are like, ooh, we don't have any cobalt. But still, it's a lot of work. So then if you get the mug to bring the mug in, you say, all right, whichever way the electron goes off in, orient the mug so that the axis or the wording of the number one dad is in parallel to that.

18:50And then perpendicular, whatever. I mean, that's the way that you do it. That's the way you would have to do it. Yeah. Wow. Extraordinary. Extraordinary. By the way, this is my dream Father's Day gift. I want my daughter to get me a number 2 ,587 ,312 dad. Why specifically that number? I just feel like that's probably where I am, you know? Like, I'm not the number one dad. There can't be more than one number one, but that's all they sell. Number one dad mugs. I want to have a reasonable, I'm probably like, you know, top, top 30 % maybe. Like put me there. Make it act like I actually earned this.

19:29Anyway, that's the gift that I want. But after the break, Hannah, you've got a gift for me. It's a treat. Buckle up.

19:43This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK, who over the past 50 years have helped double cancer survival in the UK. You might have heard of BRCA genes. These are the ones that made headlines when Angelina Jolie revealed that she carried a faulty version. Yeah, BRCA genes are part of our DNA. They help to repair cells and keep them healthy. The risk comes when BRCA genes are faulty. And about 1 in 400 people inherit a faulty version, increasing the risk of some cancers. Yeah, now this discovery came from cancer research UK scientists who came across the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, a breakthrough that changed how doctors prevent, diagnose and treat cancer.

20:22And now we've got genetic testing that means that people who have faulty BRCA genes can take steps to prevent cancer or to receive tailored treatment. The discovery also revealed a weakness in cancer. By turning that flaw against the disease, researchers developed PARP inhibitors, targeted drugs that are now helping thousands of people. And all of this really points to a future where medicine is no longer just one size fits all. It's something that's informed by your own DNA. So for more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash rested science.

21:05Welcome back from the break. I've been saving this one, Michael. This is by quite a long stretch the best thing I own. It's also the most ridiculous thing I own. So, you know, don't judge my entire character based on this. I will. I'm going to. OK. It's, as I described earlier on, the ultimate nerd trophy. OK, so there is a science fiction director called Alex Garland. He wrote The Beach. He directed X. Mackinac, it's a really amazing film about the sort of future of humanity with artificial intelligence embedded in it. He also did this amazing HBO show called Devs, which was about a sentient quantum computer that was able to calculate the position of every atom in the entire universe.

21:51And thus all of the future and the past was available to him. Oh, like Laplace's demon. Exactly. Laplace's demon, this theoretical construct that was based on the idea that if the universe is deterministic, then every single thing should be predictable. The only problem is, is we don't know where all the atoms are. And that's the thing that's stopping us knowing every single thing. So this is the central idea of this show. Now, as part of the show, they made a quantum computer, or at least a prop that looked like a quantum computer. And what they made was this very beautiful thing. Ooh, yeah. Very beautiful prop that was made for the show.

22:34Yes. This is designed to be an accurate representation of what you really see from quantum computers. So what we're looking at here is like the Tower of Babel, but upside down, like an upside down tiered cake. But without the cake, just the tiers, a series of platforms like circular disks connected one below the other by thin rods with a big collection of very thin, very ultra fine wires coming out. but arranged very neatly. Like they've just been so precisely combed and gelled into this arrangement. It's almost like lit from inside as well. Very golden everywhere. Gold and silver are the big notes of colour.

23:16It's very blingy, isn't it? It's very blingy, but very like delicate, like a fish skeleton. These very thin bones arranged so purposefully. So they are indeed made with this incredible amount of gold. all of this wiring this is all very accurate i mean it's sort of like slightly fancified for the purposes of production if you've seen photographs of quantum computers that is exactly what they look like these these great golden structures with wires all over the place they're very beautiful um would make i think a very nice chandelier um that's uh that's that's what i think about that's what it looks like that is exactly what it looks like very beautiful Anyway, so they made this show and a little while after it was made, they still had this beautiful prop.

24:02The problem was that after they finished filming, they had this object in a storage unit and it was... How big was it? It's hard for you to get a sense of its scale. I mean, big. We're talking sort of from top to bottom, maybe 10 feet. Oh, wow. OK. Right. Giant. OK. So they have these giant crates, this big storage unit, and these storage units were costing an absolute fortune. So a couple of years after production ended, Alex Garland and his team were, they were like, we don't want to throw it away. We spent an absolute fortune making this incredibly beautiful model of a quantum computer. So they were ringing around the different museums and places which might take it.

24:42And it just so happened at the time I was doing up my house. And I have in my house this big sort of hole that's cut in the floor, kind of a big void. And I was looking, I just so happened to be looking at that moment in time for something that I could hang in that void. And so I basically rescued it out for Skip. So it's hanging from the ceiling. It's hanging from the ceiling. Like a big chandelier. Like a giant chandelier. Oh, Hannah, that is incredible. No, isn't it? I mean, you can, Michael can see the picture of my house and he can confirm that my house is not massive. It basically takes up quite a lot of my house.

25:20Every time someone, I mean, the postman comes in, you can see it from inside the front door. They wonder what it is because it sort of looks like a spaceship if I accidentally leave the curtains. Yeah, I mean, it can pass as a chandelier, as a piece of artwork. How is it lit up? Is that the way it was lit up in the movie or did you have to add the lighting, the bulbs? The light panels were in there from the movie. Real quantum computers, by the way, do not have light panels. You can see sort of like a scan of it in position. We replaced the LEDs so that they could be, they would last much longer.

25:53Also, what I did is I've made it so they're each individually controlled. So I have put a little computer in there, Bluetooth, it's connected via Bluetooth. And one of my projects for a summer, when I have some time off, what I want to do is program it so that when I play music in the house, the quantum computer sort of twinkles in time. Visualizes the music. Exactly right. But what I really wanted to do, I wanted to show you this image because I sort of actually wanted to talk a little bit about the way that these things work. Okay, but first of all, I'm sorry, how did you get it? Did you reach out to them?

26:27No. So I have a, my very good friend, Adam Rutherford, was the scientific advisor on the series and is a very good friend of Alex Garland's. But I just so happened to be in the right room when they were like we're gonna have to throw it away we're gonna have to basically sell it for scrap because nobody wants it the museums didn't want it because it wasn't a real quantum computer yeah I mean where else would you put it you know who would be crazy enough to have one of these it's a very interesting thing because it's it's beautiful it's a piece of like science fiction history it's a it's a part of the history of human ambition exactly and storytelling.