JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab and this hour we're talking about ...

ROBERT: Loops.

JAD: Loops.

ROBERT: Loops.

JAD: Loops.

ALEX BELLOS: Okay.

JAD: Loops.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Laguardia Arts High School singers: Something in nothing, nothing in something. Something in nothing, nothing in something.]

ROBERT: Here's one for you.

ALEX BELLOS: I mean, zero is the obvious loop and its loop shape is part of why zero is zero.

JAD: Who's this?

ROBERT: This is Alex Bellos.

ALEX BELLOS: And I'm the author of Here's Looking at Euclid. When I was a kid, I used to think, oh zero, it's just like a hole with nothing in it. But actually zero was chosen by the Indians as kind of reflecting the eternal cycles of the faces of heaven.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Laguardia Arts High School singers: Something in nothing ...]

ALEX BELLOS: The Romans and the Greeks and the—and the Jews, we didn't have a zero. We just had, you know, start, everything started at one. And one reason why we didn't is that we were kind of afraid of the void.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Laguardia Arts High School singers: The void ...]

JAD: Afraid of the void? What, like the ...

ROBERT: Well, I mean, how would you describe something ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Laguardia Arts High School singers: Something.]

ROBERT: ... that isn't there?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Laguardia Arts High School singers: Nothing.]

ROBERT: There's nothing to say.

JAD: And that's scary somehow?

ROBERT: Yeah, it's an emptiness and a nothingness and it means you're so alone, you don't even know where you are.

ALEX BELLOS: And so this sort of was a psychological barrier to us grasping this zero. But in India, everything and nothing was the same thing. They had this very sort of fluidity and they grasped this idea that nothingness was something.

ROBERT: And oddly enough, the way they decided to represent the nothing was they—they took a little piece of nothing and they drew a circle around it, which turns the nothing into a something.

ALEX BELLOS: And it's a loop.

ROBERT: And it's a loop.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Laguardia Arts High School singers: Something in nothing, nothing in something, something in nothing.]

ALEX BELLOS: So this idea of eternity and continuity and infinity is actually contained with the—our numeral for zero.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Laguardia Arts High School singers: God.]

ALEX BELLOS: I mean, I kind of love the idea that actually here is kind of the most mystical,

kind of magical, spiritual digit of them all. You know, and it's—we use it every day.

WILLIAM BASINSKI: See. You rolling?

MARK PHILLIPS: Yeah.

WILLIAM BASINSKI: So here's two of the workhorses. These are like my old ...

JAD: Next up, a story from reporter Mark Phillips.

MARK PHILLIPS: All right.

WILLIAM BASINSKI: As you can see here, there's all these containers of tape loops.

JAD: Okay, so set this up. Who is this guy?

MARK PHILLIPS: His name's William Basinski. He's a musician who makes this

really hard to describe music. He's been doing it for about 30 years. And basically what he does is he takes a little bit of classical music or muzak, records it onto tape, analog tape ...

WILLIAM BASINSKI: This might be terrible.

MARK PHILLIPS: ... and he loops it.

WILLIAM BASINSKI: See if I can find something from the ...

MARK PHILLIPS: He cuts the beginning, the end, tapes it together into a circle, threads it through a tape machine, messes with the speeds. And you get something that sounds like this. This little phrase that just repeats ...

WILLIAM BASINSKI: ... over and over and over again.

MARK PHILLIPS: And never changes.

WILLIAM BASINSKI: You know, loops are everywhere. They're cycles. They're in nature. They're just universal. And if you can find a loop that can repeat without becoming redundant, then you can sort of fall into a different space and time even. Sort of like a bubble of eternity or something. I don't know.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, William Basinski: So that's what that sounds like.]

WILLIAM BASINSKI: Well, in the summer of 2001, I was archiving all these old tape loops, transferring them to digital. And something kind of weird happened.

MARK PHILLIPS: He grabbed this one piece of tape ...

WILLIAM BASINSKI: ... put it on. And it was this wonderful, grave, very stately loop I'd totally forgotten about. And I set it up and turned on the CD burner and left the control room, went to the kitchen, got some coffee, and came back and I started realizing something was changing. I looked and I could see that the tape was shredding.

MARK PHILLIPS: The thing to understand about tape is that when you record music onto analog tape, onto a bit of it, that music ...

WILLIAM BASINSKI: What it is is it's iron oxide powder glued to just a piece of plastic.

JAD: So the iron powder is actually the music.

MARK PHILLIPS: Yeah.

WILLIAM BASINSKI: But after 20, 30 years ...

MARK PHILLIPS: The glue loses its strength ...

WILLIAM BASINSKI: ... and the dust falls off ...

MARK PHILLIPS: ... onto the floor.

JAD: His music was actually falling on the floor?

MARK PHILLIPS: Yeah.

WILLIAM BASINSKI: And I thought, oh my God, what's gonna happen? And what happened was, in the course of about an hour ...

MARK PHILLIPS: ... the music disintegrated. And you put more loops on and it kept happening. But the really interesting thing was, while some disintegrated quickly, some slowly, they all sort of had the same pattern.

JAD: What do you mean?

MARK PHILLIPS: Just listen to this one. So this is one of his loops at the beginning.

JAD: Okay.

MARK PHILLIPS: And after it went around and around for 20 minutes or so, the dust started to fall off, and then it sounded like this. All the—all the notes are still there, but the tails ...

JAD: ... they're getting shorter.

WILLIAM BASINSKI: 

MARK PHILLIPS: And that's what would always happen.

WILLIAM BASINSKI: The sustains and decays of the notes seem to fall away, like from the back, moving backwards. Backwards.

MARK PHILLIPS: It gets shorter and shorter. Instead of being held for four seconds, it's held for three seconds. Two seconds. And finally, you just really hear ...

WILLIAM BASINSKI: ... like the attacks and the accents.

MARK PHILLIPS: Just the beginnings of the notes. Only the beginning.

WILLIAM BASINSKI: Those seemed to hold on ...

MARK PHILLIPS: ... at least for a little while.

WILLIAM BASINSKI: I was thinking, wow, this is like, I'm recording the life and death of a melody. It just made me think of human beings, you know, and how we die.

MARK PHILLIPS: You can really hear the disintegration on this particular loop. I think this was number five. It starts sounding like the rest, like this. But after just 15 minutes, it's basically completely gone. And the tape on this one, you know, tape is normally brown. Right now it's clear, like scotch tape.

JAD: The dust is gone.

MARK PHILLIPS: And there's a little bit of brown here. But now it's just clear.

JAD: Oh, it's almost all gone.

ROBERT: This next loop is—is a sly one, and you're gonna have to wait a bit for its loopiness to kick in.

JAD: Ready?

LYNN LEVY: Born ready.

MARK PHILLIPS: Producer Lynn Levy.

CRAIG SMITH: The smell of a dead whale is, you have to experience to know—to know what it's like. It's like nothing I've ever smelled.

LYNN: This is Craig Smith, professor of oceanography.

CRAIG SMITH: It really is. It's really putrid.

LYNN: Back when Craig was a graduate student ...

CRAIG SMITH: This is in 1982.

LYNN: ... he heard there was a dead whale floating off the coast of San Diego.

CRAIG SMITH: About a third out of the water with seabirds on it pecking at it.

JAD: How big?

CRAIG SMITH: Around 25 to 30 feet long.

LYNN: So what is that, like a train car?

CRAIG SMITH: More like the size of a small yacht, I guess.

JAD: Whoa!

LYNN: Big freaking whale.

JAD: Yeah.

LYNN: Craig wanted to sink that whale.

CRAIG SMITH: No one had ever studied what happens when a whale sinks to the seafloor. People just speculated about it.

JAD: So no one had ever followed it down to the bottom?

LYNN: No one had followed the whale down to the bottom.

JAD: Huh.

LYNN: Right?

CRAIG SMITH: So we—we towed the carcass out to sea.

LYNN: And they had all these little scraps of steel that they tied to the whale's tail one at a time.

CRAIG SMITH: About 2,000 pounds. And ...

LYNN: Nothing.

CRAIG SMITH: It wasn't enough to sink the whale.

LYNN: Whale kept floating there like a big smelly balloon. Its belly was all full of ...

CRAIG SMITH: Decompositional gasses.

LYNN: And the captain of the ship goes, "Well ..."

CRAIG SMITH: "I have a big rifle. Let's bring that out." So he got out his rifle. And all the other guys on the boat take out their guns.

JAD: Shooting the whale.

CRAIG SMITH: Yeah. Yeah.

LYNN: This also doesn't work.

JAD: It doesn't work?

CRAIG SMITH: It didn't really do anything.

LYNN: But Craig tried again and again. And eventually, not with that whale, but with others, he got to see something so cool.

CRAIG SMITH: So a whale dies and sinks down into the dark, and ...

LYNN:  And then this incredible cycle begins.

CRAIG SMITH: Within minutes, scavengers will be at the carcass.

LYNN: Lots of them.

JAD: How do these little creatures see the whale if it's so dark?

LYNN: They smell it.

JAD: They smell the whale?

LYNN: Mm-hmm.

CRAIG SMITH: Within hours, it may well have hundreds of hagfish on it.

LYNN: They're terrifying.

CRAIG SMITH: These eel-like animals, they have grinding plates instead of teeth. And they burrow into the—the carcass.

LYNN: Hundreds, like a hagfish convention.

CRAIG SMITH: This writhing mass of eels.

LYNN: What does that look like?

CRAIG SMITH: Well, it looks like a giant Medusa head.

LYNN: Over the next few days, a bunch of other scavengers show up.

CRAIG SMITH: Including stone crabs, shrimp, sea scuds, sharks, crustaceans.

LYNN: Huge feeding frenzy. Flesh flying everywhere. Sometimes the hagfish get ticked off, and they try to defend their territory.

CRAIG SMITH: Hagfish have a very interesting ability to produce mucus. You can put a couple of hagfish into a bucket of water and kick it, and they can produce enough mucus to essentially turn the bucket of water into something like gelatin.

JAD: Wow! So it's like a Medusa head in a cloud of mucus.

LYNN: And all that is just the first stage.

CRAIG SMITH: The mobile scavenger stage.

JAD: Okay. So what happens after that?

CRAIG SMITH: Well, after the mobile scavenger stage is the enrichment opportunist stage.

LYNN: At that point ...

CRAIG SMITH: The whale is beginning to look pretty dilapidated. Little bits of whale soft tissue get implanted in the seafloor.

LYNN: And so the ground around the whale becomes sort of its own little ecosystem.

And a bunch of new animals show up. 

CRAIG SMITH: They're worms. They're wriggly little worms.

LYNN: Just, like, tons of them.

CRAIG SMITH: We can—we can get 30,000 or 40,000 of them per square meter. Sometimes the sediment around a whale fall looks like a lawn of grass, where these worms are just wriggling, sticking up out of the sediment and waving back and forth.

JAD: What—what color are these worms? Do you know?

LYNN: I think they're white.

JAD: So a field of white worms.

LYNN: Yeah.

JAD: White grass.

LYNN: It's kind of ghostly.

JAD: Yeah.

LYNN: And finally, the last stage.

CRAIG SMITH: Something we call the sulfur-loving stage. At this point, the whale looks like a skeleton just covered with this actually beautiful mat of white bacteria. And it's fluffy and just looks like a polar bear's fur.

JAD: Covering the bones of the whale?

LYNN: Yeah.

CRAIG SMITH: Think about a whale skeleton draped in a polar bear fur coat.

JAD: Huh!

LYNN: Sulfur's coming out of the bones, and the bacteria are just clustering around, sucking it up for years. When you step back and look at it, these dead whales, they become like planets. And you find creatures living on them that you don't find anywhere else.

CRAIG SMITH: There are now about 55 species that haven't been found in any other habitat. Species of animals that only live on whale falls.

JAD: Does that mean that these creatures, like, the whale is their entire world? They don't know anything else?

LYNN: For some of them, yeah.

JAD: What do they do the rest of the time? I mean, this can't happen that often.

CRAIG SMITH: Well, that's a good question. It may be that they are living as—as fugitive species.

LYNN: In other words, they just drift around, sort of waiting. Can I say hoping? For—and when that happens?

CRAIG SMITH: They grow quickly, produce hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of larvae that they then broadcast out into the water column.

LYNN: Then their babies drift around in the darkness, waiting. Until ...

CRAIG SMITH: A few of them find another such habitat, tens or maybe even hundreds of kilometers away.

LYNN: And repeat.

LYNN: So altogether, how long can a whale fall last?

CRAIG SMITH: Well, a whale fall can last, a large whale skeleton, that of a large blue whale or a fin whale, can support a community for 50 to 75 years.

LYNN: Wow!

CRAIG SMITH: Which really astounded us.

LYNN: And how does that compare to the lifespan of the whale?

CRAIG SMITH: Well, it's probably pretty comparable, actually. Whales live on the order of 50 to 70 years.

LYNN: There's something kind of poetic about that, the idea that, you know, for the same amount of time that the whale lived, it's gonna support this life.

CRAIG SMITH: Yeah, it is very appealing.

JAD: Thanks, Lynn. Radiolab will continue in a moment.

 

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