Why We Follow Orders We Know Are Wrong

0:00Hannah Fry:This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. So when most people think of naked mole rats, their unusual relationship to cancer probably isn't the first thing that comes to mind. But maybe it should be because it is incredibly rare for them to develop cancer, which could be partly down to their unique immune system, or it might be the way that their cells respond to damage. So scientists are studying their biology for its cancer-fighting secrets. It's a reminder that discoveries can sometimes come from places you don't expect. Cancer Research UK is the world's largest charitable funder of cancer research.

0:35Hannah Fry:Thousands of scientists of doctors and nurses work across more than 20 countries to help turn discoveries in the lab into new tests, new treatments and new innovations. And the impact is clear. Over the past 50 years, the charity's pioneering work has helped double cancer survival in the UK, meaning more people living longer, better lives free from the fear of cancer. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, their breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash rest is science. Score more with the college branded Venmo debit card and earn up to 5 % cash back with Venmo Stash.

1:15Hannah Fry:Got paid back? With the Venmo debit card you can instantly access your balance and spend on what you want like game day snacks, gear, tickets and more. The more you do, the more cash back you can earn. Plus, there's no monthly fee or minimum balance. Sign up now at Venmo.com slash college card. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank N.A. Select schools available. Venmo stash terms and exclusions apply at Venmo.me slash stash terms. Max$100 cash back per month. This episode is brought to you by Focus Features. On March 27th, Focus Features invites you to be a part of the most explosive movie of this year's Sundance and South by Southwest film festivals.

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2:15Welcome to The Rest is Science. This is Field Notes, a kind of podcast expedition diary where Hannah and I share some of the thoughts we've been carrying around. Thrilling discoveries and big questions, whatever's been occupying our minds.

2:30Hannah Fry:I mean, some people call it thoughts, other people call it burdens. But every week we're going to do... I call it all I've got. Yeah, I mean, that's fair. We're going to bring something from up from up of our science mystery bag. We're going to we're going to bring something to show each other. It's like a rest of science is its very own version of show and tell. And yeah, this week, it's your turn, Michael. That's right. And so later in the episode, I am going to share a story, actually, a story about the scariest moment for me ever in the minefield psychological experimentation show I did. And it's not what you're expecting.

3:11Hannah Fry:Well, I mean, you were the man who locked himself away for three days and started hallucinating. So if it's scarier than that, then I think the rest of us need to buckle up. As ever, we would also like to hear your questions, your theories, your thought experiments, maybe not your burdens. You can send them in to us and we'll dust off a shelf for you. You can join our vast collection of curiosities. Yeah, we'd love to put you there. So let's begin with Francois, who sent in a question. It seems such a waste to spend energy adding heat to our houses in winter and spending more energy on AC to remove it in summer.

3:46Could we feasibly design a machine that pumps heat into a form of reverse fridge during summer, stores it, and then pumps the heat back into our homes in the winter?

3:55Hannah Fry:I mean, Francois, you have a mind that is a marvel, but unfortunately you've invented something that already exists. because the machine you're describing is called a seasonal thermal energy storage system. And it's essentially, it's like a big battery, but for heat. The problem is if you try and store heat, it leaks quite a lot, right? If you put a cup of tea in a thermos to come back the next morning, it's going to be cold, right? Heat has this habit of like sneaking away. But there are some places where they do this. So there's a particular neighborhood in Canada known as Drake landing where it gets really warm in the summer, but also extremely cold in the winter.

4:39Hannah Fry:I mean, that sort of part of the world has massive variance in summer and winter temperature. And what they did there is they built 52 houses that were all connected to this massive underground storage field. So in the summer, what they do is they have all of these solar panels on their roof and they use that to pump this solution basically down into this massive underground chamber where they have all of these boreholes and they literally heat up the rock that sits down there to about 80 degrees centigrade and then in the winter when it's like freezing cold up top they reverse the process they pump water through these like very warm rocks and use it all to heat up their houses up top.

5:22Hannah Fry:You know, the London Underground is basically a perfect demonstration of the way that the earth itself can hold on to energy in the form of heat. I was going to say, that's impressive that the rock can hold the heat so well. This happens in the underground in London as well? Yeah, because right in the early days when the underground was built, it was like 10-15 degrees and they're the clay the sort of London clay it was actually quite cold down there but after you know 150 years or so of all of these trains moving in and out of tunnels of people of that energy being continually pushed in it sort of saturated the heat capacity of the clay itself the clay cannot take on any more heat effectively so all of the heat just continues to be down there it can be 40 degrees down there in winter you you actually get more people fainting in the underground during winter than in summer when it is also insufferably hot but in winter people are also wearing all of these like coats and things so the earth itself is actually very capable of of like holding on to working as this this heat battery um it works really well in this place in in uh in canada there's a there's another example a finnish company who've done this as well they're using sand instead this massive silo filled with sand and they sort of heat the sand up to this crazy numbers like sort of 500 degrees c um using renewable energy in the summer and then blow air through it in the winter to to give them heat back the only problem with this is that um if you wanted to like install one of these batteries yourself if you want to say okay you know what i can dig down however many i could dig a kilometer her down under my own house and have my own little battery that's what i think i know i know that's what you're thinking the slight problem with this is that i mean there's it's the the the square cube law is going on here right which is this um actually the surface area to volume ratio needs to be you basically need to do it for a lot of houses simultaneously for for the heat to not to escape you need like 50 houses at once but if you know if francois you happen to be a housing developer who wants to heavily invest in minimizing energy bills for the future of your potential homeowners, then I mean, this is a great way to do it.

7:44Hannah Fry:Just as long as you don't mind a bit of sand in your water, in your shower. Or your air. Or your air. Exactly. Ah, turn on the dust storm. I'm getting chilly.

7:58Hannah Fry:okay next question we had one question come in from a guy from slovenia in fact he said do you think there will ever be a tool an invention that humanity creates which would let us gaze into a different dimension oh wow i love this question because it's um i i hope so much that before I leave this earth, I get to look in a direction that isn't one of the three I was born into. So boring looking in the same three directions the entire time. I know. I think that there's so much more out there. I feel like Belle from Beauty and the Beast. I'm just this provincial 3D blob. And I desperately want to not look up, down, left, right, forward, backward, but I want to look on a kata.

8:42And I think that, you know, things like, oh, we'll look in a history book, then you're, you know, looking through time, a fourth dimension. I'm like, no, I want it to be spatial. And I think that the closest we are is unsatisfying. We can see the results, for example, of dimensional change. Look in a mirror. And every time you look in a mirror, you are looking at yourself as you would appear if you had been rotated in a fourth dimension through a fourth dimension. You can think about this as like an L shape. If this is stuck in a plane and it's moving around, it can never become this unless it gets rotated in a third dimension outside of the plane.

9:26And if we do that to our bodies, we wind up just like this getting mirror reversed. So when I see my mirror image, I'm seeing what I would look like if someone from a fourth dimension grabbed me and rotated me out beyond these three dimensions that I live in. We have a lot of computer simulations that can simulate four dimensional objects, right? There are a lot of amazing games that allow you to do this, but they only show you three dimensions. And then the object like leaves for a little while or part of it leaves and comes back in and you go, Oh, it was transformed in more dimensions than I can perceive.

10:03Interesting. But it's not just the effects that I want. It's the, um, the actual direction. And I feel like it's too late for me. I think that children might be able, if we catch them early enough, they might be able to see, I think they're the tool because they haven't been ingrained into the three dimensions yet. Like, you know how, if you look at kids, they'll, they'll sometimes when they're learning to, form letters. They'll write words backwards and mirror reversed. It looks like an amazing feat that would be hard for me to do as an adult. And they're just like, oh, yep. And they write their name.

10:42Everything's perfectly reversed because to them, this and this are the same shape. Like they, they understand what is the same between anatiomorphs, between mirror image pairs. And we unlearn that as we become more familiar with the universe that we live in. I do have somewhere a four-dimensional Rubik's Cube. Let me see if I can find it. I don't think I've put on my wall yet. Let me look in the chill room, which maybe I'll show you guys one of these days. Chill isn't cold or chill isn't cool?

11:18Both. I'm so sorry. I don't know where the heck it is. It doesn't matter because I forget which kind of moves are allowed on it. So I would just make a fool of myself. But if you, if you, if you look up four dimensional Rubik's cube, Melinda green, a long time ago made an interactive website where you can solve a four dimensional Rubik's cube. It can be rotated in the three dimensions we're used to, but also this fourth one that kind of turns it inside out. And it's phenomenal. And she's actually invented a physical version. And I've been talking to her about like, how do we make more of these?

11:55And what would you do if you had, you know, more resources? And she's like, ah, I would put lines on them to represent the like geodesics. And I'm very excited for it.

12:06Hannah Fry:That sounds really cool. I mean, impossible, but really cool. I do like the idea there of just getting a child as young as possible and then just being to them like demanding to point where the fourth dimension is because they're the only ones who can possibly know. exactly they're the only ones and from there maybe um guy we could invent a tool to actually see it for ourselves what if though what if we are like bell and uh actually once we do get to the fourth or other dimensions all that's to be found is beasts um but they won't really be beasts but there will be gastons who are afraid of that knowledge that new vista that's been opened and they will say, kill the beast, kill the fourth dimension, build walls to block it.

12:53And they may be right, but should they be right?

12:58Hannah Fry:The thing is, Michael, I think Beauty and the Beast was originally written as a little story that you would tell young, very young girls who are about to be married off to scary old rich men. To make them okay with it. It's like you think he's a beast because he is, but... Maybe if you put in a lot of work, you can fix him. Well, look, the fourth dimension is my old rich man. And I am jumping into this relationship with both feet. Okay. Yeah. Give me the candlestick. I'm a teapot and off we go. Okay. Amazing. Let's move on to a question from Henry. Why does gravity bend light if light has no mass?

13:47Hannah Fry:It's a great question, isn't it? It's a great question. And the thing is, is that that doesn't make any sense if you stick to Newton's idea of what light is, of what gravity is, sorry, that it's like it's something that acts on mass. But Einstein's version of gravity is that it's not the light that's bending, it's the space around the light that is bending. And that is why it appears to bend. It's not that it's like having a gravitational pull or gravitational effect. And I know that actually we did this whole episode on gravity and we talked about there's sort of slight problems with imagining it as though it's a bowling ball on a rubber sheet, which is the one that sort of people talk about quite a lot.

14:28Hannah Fry:But there's a slightly simpler way to think about this, I think. Imagine if you're standing in like in an elevator in a lift and you've got a laser and you're sort of pointing the laser over at the other side, hitting the wall directly opposite the elevator. And then all of a sudden there's like a rocket engine under the elevator that blasts off, accelerating the elevator up extremely fast. Now, the thing is, is that while the floor is rushing up, while the light is travelling across the room, the floor underneath it is rushing upwards so quickly that it means that by the time the light hits the wall, the wall will have moved up so to you standing on the inside of the elevator it looks like the laser beam is curving downwards because you're moving up incredibly fast and what Einstein realized essentially that's like the bending of the light as it were and what Einstein realized is that the acceleration feels exactly the same as gravity there's those two things that the feeling of them as it were is sort of indistinguishable if you if you wake up in a windowless box and you feel heavy you don't know whether you're on earth or whether you're you're in a rocket that's accelerating at 1g and so if acceleration can bend light then gravity must also bend light and the proof of this came in um like the really remarkable proof was of einstein's ideas came in 1919 it was a big eclipse for years it was just this cool theory right but then this total solar eclipse happened and astronomers, in 1919, went to the site of the eclipse and they looked at stars that were directly behind the sun.

16:08Hannah Fry:Now, if light didn't bend, then during the total eclipse, you shouldn't be able to see them, right? You'd have to wait for different moments in the year, different times to be able to see those stars. But because the sun's gravity bends the light from those stars around during the total solar eclipse those stars appeared next to the sun and that the position of them the position of those stars was shifted by exactly the amount that einstein had predicted so i and and that experiment that was what really made einstein this this celebrity overnight superstar superstar yeah he proved that light It doesn't need mass to be pushed around.

16:48Hannah Fry:It just needs this road that it follows. Yeah, the space-time that it travels through is being curved. And the light is just traveling in the geodesic, the straight-line path. And whoops, it happens to be curved. Guess I went around the sun into your eyeball. Peek-a-boo. This is really why Einstein has the reputation that he does. This is why everyone is still, you know, 100 and whatever years later, still so completely flawed by the unimaginable foresight of this man. Like to be able to sit in a room and have a thought experiment like that elevator and conclude from it that during a total eclipse, you should still be able to see the stars that are hiding behind the sun and then ending up being correct.

17:34I mean, that really is just phenomenal.

17:39Hannah Fry:I mean, that's the dream. Your ideas are testable. They are tested in your lifetime. And you were right. You predicted things we had not observed before. Absolutely. Well, okay. From predicting things that have not been observed before to hearing stories that have not been told before. Join us back after the break.

18:12This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Cancer drugs aren't developed overnight. They start as ideas in the lab, then move into testing to check they're safe and work effectively.

18:23Hannah Fry:In the late 1990s, Cancer Research UK scientists began exploring a bold idea. Could the antibodies that normally trigger allergic reactions be used to treat cancer? The lab results were promising, but allergic reactions carry real risks. After years of work, an early stage trial showed these antibodies could be used safely. And for one person on the trial, their tumour shrank. Research is ongoing, but this careful process is how treatments move from the lab into hospitals. Cancer Research UK backs innovative ideas. And thanks to decades of support, over 8 in 10 people in the UK receiving cancer drugs are using one developed by or with Cancer Research UK scientists.

19:06For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash the rest is science.

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20:55All right, welcome back. Hannah, have you ever had your mind experimented on by scientists? Not knowingly. Well, good. One of these days I'd like to do some on your brain, but today I want to talk about the scariest experiments I've been a part of. I did this a lot in college for money. Did you? You could go in and make a few bucks by taking a survey, or you could make dozens of bucks by having them do an MRI scan on you.

21:25Hannah Fry:Are you one of the weird people that they talk about? The idea that psychology experiments are largely done on a particular type of person. Exactly. They're done by college undergrads who want five bucks to get a Big Mac, you know? And so, yeah, I was one of those people that like the foundations of psychology are built on and continue to be built on. And I remember one time I did this MRI study and while they calibrated the machine, they had me watch a movie and I could pick a movie. And it was clear that they had three movies to choose from. One was for women, one was for men, and one was for children.

22:05And the movie for children was Air Bud. And I'd never seen Air Bud. So I'm like, yeah, I'll do Air Bud. So I'm watching Air Bud in this MRI machine while they calibrate the magnets to my brain. and the amount of time it took for them to calibrate the machine was the amount of time it takes for the kid in the movie to realize the dog can play basketball. So I got to watch everything but the dog play basketball. And I was so upset. It wasn't worth the 50 bucks I got paid. And I'm still mad about it. I still haven't seen Air Bud.

22:35Hannah Fry:Did they not give you the option to continue the film? No, they were like, all right, now the experiment must commence. And I had to like recognize patterns and stuff. And I'm like, please put the dog back on the screen. Now I've seen clips of the dog playing basketball and I did a whole episode about whether or not a dog could play basketball according to the rules of the state that the movie appears in. I won't spoil it, but the conclusions were quite surprising. Anyway, psychological experiments is what we're talking about. When I was in high school, I had a psychology teacher that got me into psychology.

23:08It's why I studied psychology in college. But all he really did is play us videos. He played candid camera clips and then would talk about the psychology that was part of the prank we were watching. You know, candid camera is a TV show where people get pranked. Pranks are a big thing on the Internet now, and they can be amusing. They can sometimes be cruel, but often, almost all the time, you're learning a lot about how humans behave and how we think. So I envisioned doing a prank show that was actually psychological experiments because so many experiments on human psychology are basically tricking people into thinking one thing and seeing what they do.

23:54And so in minefield, we did a lot of experiments that were, you know, pretty, pretty intense. We actually recreated the trolley problem. right we developed this intense ruse where people thought they were coming in to review these new high-speed rail car interiors right is the fabric soft or the colors good is the lighting good but then there was a delay and they had to go and wait in this air-conditioned room because it was a hot day there was a switching room and this old man that we hired who used to switch railroad cars like teaches them yeah i have to switch the lines because these guys are coming to work on it and whatever he shows them and he's an affable guy and they they get to do it themselves while they wait and then he has to leave the room and boom the trolley problem happens and the trolley problem