Feb 5, 2013
Transcript
[RADIOLAB INTRO]
JOSH FOER: Oh, you know what, will you forgive me if I actually leave my phone on vibrate? Because my wife is pregnant and due literally ...
JAD ABUMRAD: Really?
JOSH FOER: Any day.
JAD: No kidding.
JOSH FOER: If this vibrates it might ruin your radio program.
JAD: No, it's fine, it's all—we're ...
JAD: So recently I had a conversation with this guy, Josh Foer.
JOSH FOER: Yeah.
JAD: He's a journalist.
JOSH FOER: A science journalist.
JAD: And he told me about something that's been obsessing him recently, this very odd experiment.
JOSH FOER: Well, okay, so this is one of the longest-running science experiments of all time. The pitch drop experiment. You can actually see it online.
JAD: How do I get to it?
JOSH FOER: Just search for "pitch drop."
JAD: Pitch drop.
JAD: So you can also go to Radiolab.org. We have got the live feed right there on the website. And what you will see is this funnel with some black stuff in it. And then descending from the stem of the funnel is this little tendril of this black stuff. And at the end of that tendril is a little teardrop of this black stuff. That's it. Doesn't move, do anything. But according to Josh ...
JOSH FOER: There are pitch drop junkies all over the world, people who are just—have got this open in the background on their web browser.
JAD: And he says they all just sit there watching and ...
JOSH FOER: Waiting.
JAD: And that's the thing. Once you understand what's going on here, you kind of can't look away.
JOSH FOER: Okay, so here's what happened. In 1927, there is this guy, Thomas Parnell, who is teaching physics at the University of Queensland in Australia. And he's trying to show his students that, well, I guess that things aren't always what they seem.
JAD: Okay.
JOSH FOER: And so he takes a chunk of this material called pitch.
JAD: What's pitch?
JOSH FOER: Okay, so pitch is a natural substance. In fact, this is actually really the question. What is pitch?
JAD: Well, what does it look like?
JOSH FOER: It's like ...
JAD: Is it gooey?
JOSH FOER: No, that's the thing. It's like a rock. You can break it with a hammer and it shatters into a million little pieces. But it's not a rock. It's a viscoelastic polymer.
JAD: A viscoelastic polymer.
JOSH FOER: Which means that over many, many, many, many years, it moves.
JAD: Really?
JOSH FOER: So what he did was he melted a handful of pitch and poured it into a glass funnel, and once it had properly settled, he snipped the bottom of the funnel and waited.
JAD: For what?
JOSH FOER: Well, for it to drip.
JAD: You mean drip like a faucet would drip?
JOSH FOER: Yeah, but much, much more slowly. So 1930, Pluto is discovered. Bonnie and Clyde meet, fall in love, go on a crime spree, get killed by the police. '31, the Empire State Building is finished.
JAD: No drip.
JOSH FOER: 1933, the Nazis build their first concentration camp. Prohibition ends.
JAD: It still hasn't dripped?
JOSH FOER: 1935, Amelia Earhart flies solo across the Pacific Ocean.
JAD: You're kidding me!
JOSH FOER: Still no drip. 1936, five million barrels of cement turn into the Hoover Dam.
JAD: No drip.
JOSH FOER: For eight years, this rock is slowly, slowly, slowly stretching into this dangling drop. And then suddenly one day, eight years after he poured the damn thing into the funnel, in the tenth of a second, the blink of an eye ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: A drip.]
JOSH FOER: ... the pitch breaks. Now nobody's ever actually seen this happen.
JAD: You mean, it's never—the drop has never dripped?
JOSH FOER: No, no. The drop has dripped eight times, and we're all due for the ninth drop to happen any day now.
JAD: [laughs] So wait, why haven't they seen it?
JOSH FOER: So imagine a science experiment, right? Where the critical data that you want to gather happens in one-tenth of a second every 10 to 12 years.
JAD: [laughs]
JOSH FOER: It is really hard to be there at that critical moment.
JOHN MAINSTONE: Yes. I mean, yeah.
JOSH FOER: This fellow, Professor John Mainstone, he's been watching it religiously ...
JOHN MAINSTONE: Since January of 1961.
JOSH FOER: ... for 50 years.
JOHN MAINSTONE: I am still waiting to see this pitch drop.
JAD: Just out of suspense, or is there some question here?
JOHN MAINSTONE: Well, first of all, during ...
JOSH FOER: Well, okay, the question is, at that moment when you—this ever-elongating droplet gives way, what happens?
JOHN MAINSTONE: If you've got the drop itself held by four little fibers, we call them fibers ...
JOSH FOER: What breaks first? How does it break?
JOHN MAINSTONE: And there are lots of people who, like me, are waiting to see whether we can capture that moment and see the way in which, from a mechanical point of view, it becomes imperative that the drop then forms.
JOSH FOER: So ...
JOHN MAINSTONE: 1962.
JOSH FOER: ... Mainstone missed a drop in 1962.
JOHN MAINSTONE: Yeah.
JOSH FOER: August 1970, missed that one. April 1979, that one he looked at on a Friday, knew it was close ...
JOHN MAINSTONE: And thought, "Well, something might happen over the weekend."
JOSH FOER: Came in on a Saturday.
JOHN MAINSTONE: Saturday evening, checked the pitch drop ...
JOSH FOER: ... nothing happening. "I'm going home."
JOHN MAINSTONE: And by the time I came in very early on the Monday morning, not having gone in on Sunday ...
JOSH FOER: It had fallen.
JAD: Oh!
JOHN MAINSTONE: Then ...
JOSH FOER: 1988, he's standing right there ...
JOHN MAINSTONE: And I decided I need a cup of tea or something like that. Walked away, I came back ...
JAD: Oh no!
JOHN MAINSTONE: And lo and behold ...
JOSH FOER: He thinks he may have missed it by as little as 15 minutes.
JOHN MAINSTONE: ... it had dropped. Now ...
JAD: Did you take your tea and throw it against the wall in rage?
JOHN MAINSTONE: Yes. Well yes, one becomes a bit philosophical about this, and I just said, "Oh well, let—let's be patient."
JOSH FOER: The next time, he installed a camera. And ...
JOSH FOER: And then—and then, 28 November, 2000.
JOHN MAINSTONE: Yes.
JOSH FOER: What happened then?
JOHN MAINSTONE: At the time, I was over on the other side of the world in London.
JOSH FOER: …Gets an email saying, "Professor ..."
JOHN MAINSTONE: "This eighth drop, looking as though it might fall at any time."
JOSH FOER: "We've been waiting 10 years for this. It's about to happen."
JAD: Because it was like [creaking]?
JOHN MAINSTONE: I said, "Don't worry, we've got it covered."
JOSH FOER: "We've got a camera on it."
JOHN MAINSTONE: "I'll be able to see exactly what happened."
JOSH FOER: "When I get back to Australia."
JOHN MAINSTONE: The next email said, "Well, it's dropped."
JOSH FOER: Later that day, "Dear Professor Mainstone, I've got bad news ..."
JOHN MAINSTONE: "Unfortunately, you will not be able to see this because the system failed."
JOSH FOER: The camera went down.
JAD: The camera went out?
JOSH FOER: "We don't have this on record."
JAD: [laughs] Come on!
JOHN MAINSTONE: That was one of my saddest moments, I might say.
JOSH FOER: But right now, the pitch is getting ready to give birth to another drop. And this time, there are three cameras.
JOHN MAINSTONE: Three webcams on there.
JAD: And this is what Josh was showing me on the internet. This dangling little—almost!—that all these people are watching.
JOHN MAINSTONE: People from China, South America, Inuit people way up in the north of Canada.
JOSH FOER: So everybody's waiting. Everybody wants to be the person who sees the pitch fall.
JAD: And I've gotta admit, I've been checking this thing online.
ROBERT KRULWICH: Really? Like what, you like watching grass grow?
JAD: I don't know. I think it's more than suspense.
JOSH FOER: I think that this is—it's about time scale is what it's about. We don't really have that many opportunities to interact with things that happen on these two very, very different time scales simultaneously.
JAD: Do you see what he means?
ROBERT: Yeah. Because, you know, you're in this funny situation. You wait slower than you know how for something to take place that's faster than you can, you know ...
JAD: Catch.
ROBERT: Exactly. So you're playing at the very edges of what you know how to do.
JAD: But not if you catch it. Then you get this glimpse into this world that's usually ...
ROBERT: Unknowable.
JAD: Exactly. So for the next hour, we're gonna mess around with this idea. Because, you know, we're humans.
ROBERT: And we live in a human scale.
JAD: But we've got a bunch of stories that are gonna ask us to stretch that scale ...
ROBERT: To the breaking point.
JAD: Yeah. I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: Today on Radiolab, Speed.
ROBERT: Where things keep getting faster. And then faster again. And then faster. And faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and faster ...
JAD: Until we get to the fastest thing in the universe.
ROBERT: Yes.
JAD: And stop it ...
ROBERT: Cold.
JAD: But before we do that, quick update. Some happy news and a bit of sad news about that pitch drop experiment. First up, the drop finally dripped, and it was caught on camera this time. And you can watch that moment in time-lapse at Radiolab.org. Now the sad news. Professor Mainstone missed it again. After 52 years of watching over that tar-filled beaker and waiting, he died without ever actually seeing a drop fall. But on the bright side I guess, the experiment is still going. The 10th drop is expected to fall sometime in the next 14 years or so. So in honor of him, keep an eye on that live feed, and if you're super patient, you might just catch it.
ROBERT: Okay, so let's set the baselines here. How fast are—are we?
JAD: You mean like how fast we run?
ROBERT: I mean how fast could—do we interact with the world around us? How fast do we taste things? How fast do we feel something, see something, respond?
CARL ZIMMER: Hello?
JAD: Oh, hello.
CARL ZIMMER: Hey there.
JAD: Hey.
CARL ZIMMER: How do we sound?
JAD: That sounds better.
ROBERT: Much better.
CARL ZIMMER: Excellent.
JAD: That's Carl Zimmer, of course. Science writer.
ROBERT: Regular around here.
JAD: And he told us that that question you just asked: how fast do people, humans, process the world? That question ...
ROBERT: Popped up in a really big way around ...
CARL ZIMMER: 1850.
ROBERT: With the invention of ...
CARL ZIMMER: The telegraph.
ROBERT: Because suddenly, you could send a message across the country almost instantly.
CARL ZIMMER: If you're in New York and you want to send a message to Chicago ...
ROBERT: "Albert. Send money. Stop."
CARL ZIMMER: It's gonna take about a quarter of a second for that message to get there.
ROBERT: Incoming telegraph for Robert Krulwich.
JAD: That's 790 miles in a quarter second.
CARL ZIMMER: Now that's really fast.
JAD: In fact, if you do the math, 790 times 4 times 60 times 60, it's 11,000,000 miles an hour.
CARL ZIMMER: That's amazingly fast. So fast in fact, that some people, when they first used the telegraph, they just refused to believe that it was real.
ROBERT: Because in 1850, you're doing 35, 40 miles an hour on a horse, 60 maybe on a steam engine, up to 80.
JAD: You're not living too fast.
ROBERT: No.
JAD: But more importantly for our story, the telegraph got people thinking about us, about our bodies.
CARL ZIMMER: Right.
JAD: Because, you know ...
CARL ZIMMER: Nerves and telegraph wires are remarkably similar. Nerves are long and skinny.
JAD: They carry electricity from one place to another.
CARL ZIMMER: Just like telegraph wires.
ROBERT: So naturally, people wanted to know well, if telegraph wires can do millions of miles an hour, well, what about our nerves?
JAD: How fast are they?
CARL ZIMMER: Exactly. And so ...
ROBERT: One day, a German guy ...
CARL ZIMMER: A biologist named Hermann von Helmholtz ...
ROBERT: Took a frog ...
JAD: Because their neurons are kind of like ours.
CARL ZIMMER: And basically what he did was he ...
ROBERT: He hooked some wires up to one of the frog's muscles. Now this was, I should tell you, a dead frog. But he sent an electrical jolt through the muscle. And then using a very fancy timer, he was able to determine ...
CARL ZIMMER: ... that the signal was going down the length of the frog muscle at a speed of 27 meters per second.
ROBERT: What—what is that in miles per hour?
JAD: Meters per second ...
CARL ZIMMER: Let's see, I can Google, actually. I love Google! 27 meters per second is 60.3973 miles per hour.
ROBERT: 60.3 miles per hour.
JAD: Wait, this is a frog? Is this the same speed in—in us?
CARL ZIMMER: Yes.
JAD: 60 miles an hour?
ROBERT: That seems so slow.
CARL ZIMMER: Yeah, so ...
JAD: Yeah.
ROBERT: What's the name of the Jamaican runner, the fastest guy in the world?
CARL ZIMMER: Usain Bolt.
ROBERT: Usain Bolt. So Usain Bolt is running at half the speed of his nervous system.
CARL ZIMMER: Okay, but bear in mind, actually, I mean, there's a big range of speeds of your neurons. And actually, Usain Bolt is much faster than some of your neurons. I mean, there are some neurons that only go about a mile an hour.
JAD: Which ones are those?
ROBERT: Which are those?
CARL ZIMMER: Ironically, some of them are from the reward centers of your brain.
ROBERT: Chocolate travels slowly?
CARL ZIMMER: Yeah, relatively slowly.
JAD: What about pain? I mean, that—that would be fast, I imagine.
CARL ZIMMER: Yeah, you'd think so, but pain actually runs kind of slowly, I am surprised to learn.
JAD: He says it can be as slow as 1.3 miles an hour.
ROBERT: Wait a second. So if I put my hand near a candle and then I go "Ouch!" shouldn't that happen very fast?
CARL ZIMMER: Look, I mean, if you were like 70 miles tall, this might be a problem, okay?
JAD: [laughs] But still, I mean, what if we just take a really ordinary example like Robert looking at the desk in front of him and grabbing that pen? What's involved?
CARL ZIMMER: Yeah. Well I mean, you just essentially need to kind of walk through this brain. You start at the eye.
JAD: Okay, so the eye takes the light that's reflected off the pen, turns it into a little electrical signal, and then sends that deep into the middle of the brain.
CARL ZIMMER: Takes a couple hundredths of a second.
JAD: Bounces around for a bit, and then within ...
CARL ZIMMER: A few more hundredths of a second ...
JAD: The signal has made it ...
CARL ZIMMER: All the way back to the rear end of the brain, where you start processing vision.
JAD: But this is just the beginning.
CARL ZIMMER: Right. Now you've gotta, like, figure out what you're seeing.
JAD: So our jolt is off again, this time toward the middle of the brain and then down toward the bottom.
CARL ZIMMER: To these other regions ...
JAD: That start to decode the signal.
CARL ZIMMER: The first visual region is called V1.
JAD: Next up ...
CARL ZIMMER: V2, V4, and so on. And they're gonna sharpen the image, make out contrasts, edges.
JAD: And then electricity goes back towards the front of the brain.
CARL ZIMMER: After, let's see, another tenth of a second or so ...
JAD: We finally get to a place where we think ...
CARL ZIMMER: "Oh, that's a pen."
ROBERT: We haven't gotten yet to "I want it".
CARL ZIMMER: Exactly.
JAD: For that to happen, the electricity has to jump from one part of the front of the brain to another and another before you can finally say ...
CARL ZIMMER: "That's a nice pen. I could use a pen."
JAD: [laughs]
ROBERT: [laughs]
CARL ZIMMER: And we are still not done, you know. Then—then—then ...
JAD: Little jolt heads north.
CARL ZIMMER: To sort of the top of your brain. So we—we've gone from your eyes to the back of your brain, around up to the front of your brain again. And now we're up to the top of your head where you set up motor commands, and then you can grab the pen.
ROBERT: Christ!
JAD: So I mean, you add all this up and what are we talking about here?
CARL ZIMMER: About a quarter of a second.
JAD: Quarter of a second?
ROBERT: It feels like: "One month later, Robert's hand begins slowly to move toward the object of his desire."
JAD: Quarter of a second. So that's the same amount of time it takes a telegraph to send a message from New York to Chicago.
CARL ZIMMER: Yeah, so from your eye to your hand, New York-Chicago.
JAD: Oh man!
ROBERT: The sad truth, says Carl, is that our neurons, when it comes to communicating and sending signals, our neurons are ...
CARL ZIMMER: They're—they're terrible, actually. I mean, compared to our, you know, broadband networks.
ROBERT: Particularly because when one neuron bumps into the next one, there's actually a little space between them. So the signal to get across has got to jump and then jump to the next one and jump and then jump. It's kind of like doing hurdles. It's not smooth.
JAD: And the spooky part about this slowness, says Carl, the deeper thought here is that if you think about it, because we have this built-in delay in processing the outside world ...
CARL ZIMMER: Everything that I'm experiencing already happened. You know how, like, you look out at the stars and you think, "Oh, that light's been traveling for thousands, millions of years to get to me. And what's happening on that star or the planet around that star right now, does it even still exist?" You can say that about everything around you, you know? Because, I mean, by the time that you become aware of something in front of you, it's been sitting there for a while, relatively speaking. I'm stuck in the past.
JAD: But it—it sounds like if you want to be in the moment, then what you do is you stare up at the sun, and you let the light just be light entering your eyes, and you don't think anything about the light. You don't try and comprehend the light. You just let the light be light.
ROBERT: And that's as close as you're gonna get to now.
JAD: Yeah.
CARL ZIMMER: Well, you're looking at old light, but ...
ROBERT: It's eight—it's eight minutes old, and it's from a star.
CARL ZIMMER: No, it's old light. Even if you switch—you know, even if you switch on the light and you're looking at the light bulb across the room, it's old light because it had to go from your eyes through your brain to you to be aware that there was light there. So what I would suggest is that you close your eyes and you stop thinking about, you know, the chair you're sitting in and just focus on your own thoughts, because that's the fastest stuff you've got. It's right there. You don't have to wait for it to be delivered into your brain. It's already in your brain. So I think your thoughts are the fastest things that you can experience.
ROBERT: So my fastest thought that I could ever have is, "Where are my keys?"
JAD: You've gotta have faster thoughts than that.
ROBERT: What's a faster one?
CARL ZIMMER: [laughs]
JAD: This is an interesting question, though. I think it would be non-narrative. I don't think it can be your keys or something. I think it would just be like, "Oh." Someone has thought about this.
CARL ZIMMER: Well, It wasn't me, because I have no idea. [laughs]
JAD: Don't you think somebody has an answer for us on this?
JAD: Hello? Hello?
SETH HOROWITZ: Hello?
JAD: In fact, we found a guy. His name is Seth Horowitz.
SETH HOROWITZ: I'm the ...
JAD: He's a neuroscientist.
SETH HOROWITZ: ... author of The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind.
JAD: So we were talking ...
JAD: And we ran Seth through the question. You know, if we're all trapped in the past by the slowness of our nervous system, what would be the most present, the most "in the now" that we could be?
SETH HOROWITZ: Well, if you ...
JAD: And he actually disagreed with Carl's guess. He said even if you think the simplest thought that it is possible to think ...
SETH HOROWITZ: It's probably still gonna be on the order of a quarter of a second, half second.
ROBERT: Oh man.
SETH HOROWITZ: You have to get away from the conscious brain.
JAD: No thinking, no seeing.
SETH HOROWITZ: Hearing is the fastest sense because it's mechanical. It normally operates on the millisecond range, the thousandth of a second.
ROBERT: Huh.
SETH HOROWITZ: A sudden loud noise activates a very specialized circuit from your ear to your spinal neurons.
JAD: You mean it bypasses the brain?
SETH HOROWITZ: Yeah, it's the startle circuit. If you suddenly hear a loud noise, within 50 milliseconds, that's 50 thousandths of a second, so you're talking 20 times faster than cognition, your body jumps, will begin the release of adrenaline. No consciousness involved. It's five neurons, and it takes 50 milliseconds.
JAD: 50 milliseconds. So ...
SETH HOROWITZ: So you're already getting into a faster—much faster paradigm by using sound.
JAD: So if we're gonna jolt ourselves as close to the present as possible, then we'd have to play a really loud noise.
SETH HOROWITZ: Right.
JAD: Like, wait for it—this!
[loud bang]
SETH HOROWITZ: [laughs]
JAD: I know that was annoying. I know, I know. But look, think of what we just did together, we were all in the moment. In the present tense together.
ROBERT: Well not quite, not as we now understand it. We were just shy, just an itsy-bitsy shy of the moment. But enough ...
JAD: Close! Close!
ROBERT: But enough time if I spoke fast enough for me to say thank you to Carl Zimmer and thank you to Seth Horowitz and now go to break.
JAD: There's no way you could even form the "th" of "thank you" in 50 milliseconds. But I tell you what, in this next segment we're gonna make 50 milliseconds feel like 50 years.
ROBERT: Oh, that's a really, really nice promo there. That'll make everybody lean in. [laughs]
JAD: [laughs] That's actually a terrible, terrible promo.
[ANSWERING MACHINE: Start of message.]
[JOSH FOER: Hi, this is Joshua Foer calling from the middle of the Congolese rainforest.]
[CARL ZIMMER: This is Carl Zimmer. I'm gonna read you the credits. I'm going to—I'm gonna read you the credits slow and then fast. So ...]
[JOHN MAINSTONE: Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation ...]
[CARL ZIMMER: Enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.]
[JOSH FOER: More information at www.sloan.org.]
[CARL ZIMMER: Sloan.org]
[JOSH FOER: Radiolab is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR.]
[CARL ZIMMER: Okay, well, I hope that helps. See you guys.]
JAD: Ready?
ROBERT: Mm-hmm.
JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab and ...
ROBERT: Speed is our subject.
JAD: [laughs] You beat me to it.
ROBERT: I ...
JAD: …actually, that's what this whole next segment is about.
ROBERT: See, I had it in my bones.
JAD: Just to set it up. I got this idea from my friend Andrew Zolli, who is a fantastic writer, wrote the book Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back. We were at a diner. I was telling him about this show, and he says, "You should do something about the stock market." And I was like, "I'm the last person who should do something about the stock market." He's like, "No, no, no, no. Forget everything you think you know about the stock market."
ANDREW ZOLLI: Most of us, when we think about stock markets, if you just close your eyes and you think about the financial world, what you imagine is a bunch of people in a room, and they're all wearing funny-colored jackets, and they're shouting at each other.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, stockbrokers: And these two bid, two bids. Two.]
ANDREW ZOLLI: Waving bids up.
JAD: Waving, yeah.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, stockbrokers: 70 bid.]
ANDREW ZOLLI: This kind of raucous ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, stockbrokers: 23!]
ANDREW ZOLLI: ... people screaming, trying to figure out what a price is. And we have this sort of iconography, this cultural iconography of how the financial system works that is, in large part, completely divorced from reality.
JAD: Because he told me—here's my first surprise—that somewhere between 50 and ...
ANDREW ZOLLI: 70-plus percent ...
JAD: Of all the trades that happen on what we think of as Wall Street ...
ANDREW ZOLLI: Are not executed by a human being as the result of a human decision. They're actually executed by an algorithm at a speed, rate and scale that is beyond our comprehension.
JAD: So I decided I would try and comprehend this new world that he was describing. And since this is a subject matter that generally makes me frightened, frankly, I decided to call up David Kestenbaum from Planet Money.
DAVID KESTENBAUM: Hey, Jad?
JAD: Hello.
ROBERT: The David Kestenbaum.
JAD: Indeed.
DAVID KESTENBAUM: There could be more than one.
JAD: There probably are on Twitter.
JAD: In any case, it did not click for either of us just how fast, how inhumanly fast trading had gotten until we visited this firm called Tradeworx.
DAVID KESTENBAUM: Hey. David.
MIKE BELLER: Nice to meet you, David.
DAVID KESTENBAUM: So we go into this little building in New Jersey. It looks like it's a startup or something, and this guy says, "Hello."
MIKE BELLER: My name is Mike Beller. I'm the chief technology officer of Tradeworx.
JAD: And Mike sat us down at this computer, opened up this little program that logs ...
DAVID KESTENBAUM: Exactly what is going on at the market at insanely specific times.
MIKE BELLER: You could pick a stock. We could look at Yahoo, for example. We can literally pick some time of day that we're interested in.
DAVID KESTENBAUM: What time is this? Wait, so what time?
MIKE BELLER: So this is at 11:35 and 26.979 seconds.
JAD: Really!
MIKE BELLER: And in fact, that's not enough precision for us because we really deal in microseconds.
JAD: That would be millionths of a second.
MIKE BELLER: So we have another way of measuring time, which is the number of microseconds since midnight of the previous day.
JAD: Can you read that 417 number?
MIKE BELLER: Sure. 41,729,979,559 microseconds since midnight.
JAD: Wow!
DAVID KESTENBAUM: So—so do you always have lunch at like 2,000,305,000?
MIKE BELLER: No, that'd be really early.
JAD: [laughs] How many trades do you do in a day?
MIKE BELLER: I think it depends. A lot. A high-frequency trader might do 1,000 trades in a minute.
[Very fast pulses]
DAVID KESTENBAUM: It's about that tempo.
MIKE BELLER: But it's kind of very burst-y.
JAD: Now what happens during those bursts is a bit of a mystery.
ANDREW ZOLLI: It's very hard to see what's going on.
JAD: Often, says Andrew, it's the computers testing the market.
ANDREW ZOLLI: Testing to see if they can find a nibble on the other side.
JAD: They'll fire out a bunch of buy and sell orders, and then when another computer bites on one, they'll quickly cancel the ones that didn't stick.
ANDREW ZOLLI: "Nope, sorry, didn't want to do that."
JAD: And they're doing this on a microsecond basis. "Buy."
ANDREW ZOLLI: "Nope, sorry."
JAD: "Sell."
ANDREW ZOLLI: "Nope."
JAD: "Buy."
ANDREW ZOLLI: "Nope."
JAD: "Sell again."
ANDREW ZOLLI: "Nope, forget about that."
JAD: "Buy."
JAD: "Nah."
ANDREW ZOLLI: And they create huge volumes of transactions that just disappear into the ether.
JAD: There are some computer algorithms, he says, whose whole job is to ...
ANDREW ZOLLI: Combat other algorithms.
JAD: Fake them out.
ERIC HUNSADER: For example, we just had a very good example. It happened about a month ago, in Kraft.
JAD: That's Eric Hunsader. He tracks high-frequency trading for the firm Nanex.
JAD: Kraft, like Kraft cheese, Kraft?
ERIC HUNSADER: Yes.
JAD: He says what they saw was this algorithm jump into the market, buy up a bunch of Kraft, which ...
ERIC HUNSADER: Jammed the price up.
JAD: Which allowed that algorithm ...
ERIC HUNSADER: To sell at much higher prices to the other algorithms. And we calculated it out, it cost them $200,000 to push the price up, but they were able to sell about $900,000 of stock, netting a gain of over half a million dollars ...
JAD: In a matter of seconds. Now to put that in context, back in the day, you know, 20 years ago when the humans still ran the trading pits ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, stockbroker: 500!]
JAD: ... according to this guy ...
LARRY TABB: I'm Larry Tabb, founder and CEO of the Tabb Group.
JAD: ... the average time that it took to execute a trade was ...
LARRY TABB: Around 11 or 12 seconds back then.
JAD: And when you ask people, "How did we get from 11 or 12 seconds to ..."
MIKE BELLER: 41,729,979,559 microseconds since midnight.
JAD: ... phrases like that, the answer is kind of surprising. But I'll just start with the obvious part, at least the part that's obvious to people who work in finance. It wasn't obvious to me. But a basic law of the market is that the fastest person will usually win.
ANDREW ZOLLI: There's always a benefit ...
JAD: That's Andrew again.
ANDREW ZOLLI: ... to getting information faster than the other guy.
LARRY TABB: Absolutely. This has been going on since Julius Reuters used carrier pigeons ...
JAD: To send a bunch of stock quotes ...
LARRY TABB: ... faster than a guy on a horseback.
JAD: And that was in the 1850s.
LARRY TABB: Here's a more modern example. Say the latest job numbers come out.
[NEWS CLIP: US employers added 227,000 jobs in February.]
LARRY TABB: If those numbers are good, that means the stock market is going to go up. So if you can get the numbers and rush to the market before anyone else gets there and buy the stock before it goes up, you could make a lot of money, right?
ANDREW ZOLLI: On the, you know, buy-low, sell-high principle.
ROBERT: Basic law of—of getting rich.
JAD: But when the markets turned electronic, which began to happen in the early '90s, this basic law created a situation that was totally bananas.
ROBERT: What do you mean?
JAD: So imagine it's the year 2000. You've got this market in New York. It's electronic. It's basically just a building on Broad Street near Wall Street with a giant computer inside of it that's matching buyers and sellers. And you have a bunch of traders in different parts of the country that are connected to this market, to this building, and some of them are using automated trading bots. And one day, this guy Dave Cummings, who is in Kansas, notices that his robot keeps getting beat. Like, when it would send a trade to New York, like say a buy order, often right as that buy order was about to get to New York, some other robot would swoop in, get there first, and snatch up the trade. And it occurs to this guy, Dave, wait a second, is it because I'm in Kansas? If the other guy's closer to New York, then his cable would be shorter. So I need to move to New York.
ROBERT: No, no, no, because we're talking about the speed of light.
JAD: Well, close to the speed of light.
ROBERT: But still ...
ANDREW ZOLLI: Obviously, it's because he's in Kansas.
ROBERT: What do you mean, obviously?
ANDREW ZOLLI: Because the speed of light is like a foot a nanosecond. You're gonna get your ass kicked if you're in Kansas.
ROBERT: I don't even—do you know this for a fact?
ANDREW ZOLLI: Yeah, it's a foot a nanosecond.
ROBERT: It's a foot a nanosecond.
ANDREW ZOLLI: It takes a billionth of a second to go a foot. It's 3x10¹º.
ROBERT: [laughs] Why do you act like this is something everybody knows?
ANDREW ZOLLI: I—I know this because when I was in physics, like if I needed to delay a signal by a nanosecond, by a billionth of a second, I just added an extra foot of cable.
ROBERT: Really?
JAD: Did you really do that?
ANDREW ZOLLI: Yeah, 'cause the proton-antiproton would collide, and then it would create a muon that would go out. And you only wanted to measure—you want to filter all the junk so you knew when it was gonna arrive roughly. So you had a little, like, window. It had to arrive in the window. But you had to get the timing of the window right, so it meant, like, adding a delay. And we just would add cable. That was the easiest way to add.
ROBERT: So you would literally go get some—some cable and just splice it in?
ANDREW ZOLLI: Not splice it. LEMO—they're LEMO connectors.
ROBERT: Oh, they're LEMO connectors. Of course.
JAD: Here's another way to think about it. Like, say the time it takes for information to get from Kansas to New York is something like this. [beep beep] Did you hear that?
ROBERT: I did.
JAD: First beep is when it leaves Kansas. Second beep is when it arrives in New York.
ROBERT: Yes.
JAD: Actually slowed that down just a bit so we can hear it better. But the point is that is fast, but there's still a little space in there between the beeps, which is the travel time.
ROBERT: Very, very little space.
JAD: But even if these signals are traveling at millions of miles an hour, close to the speed of light, if somebody is a few hundred miles closer to New York than you and they leave at the same time as you, well, then it's gonna be like [beep beep beep] you hear that? [beep beep beep]
ROBERT: Yeah.
JAD: That beep in the middle is some other dude beating you by a few milliseconds.
ROBERT: These little differences matter?
JAD: That—they're trying to get in and out super fast, and maybe each trade, they're only making ...
ANDREW ZOLLI: A fraction of a penny.
JAD: That's it, says Andrew.
ANDREW ZOLLI: But if you're making a fraction of a penny, millisecond after millisecond after millisecond ...
JAD: It can add up.
ANDREW ZOLLI: Right.
JAD: But you have to be able to react really fast. So when this guy in Kansas decided to move his robot to New York to get closer to the big market computer ...
ANDREW ZOLLI: When this happened ...
JAD: ... it started kind of a land grab.
ANDREW ZOLLI: There was a real estate bubble around some of these buildings.
ROBERT: Really?
ANDREW ZOLLI: Because people were trying to buy physical real estate next to the exchanges so that the cables that they would run into the exchanges would be just a few feet shorter than the other guy.
ROBERT: Wait a second. So does this mean, like, if I'm, like, one stop up on the elevator and you're two stops up, that I have the—the second floor advantage? I mean, how far do you do this?
JAD: Theoretically, yeah. I mean, that's what it means. But I don't know how far this real estate jockeying got because pretty early on, the—the people who run the market stepped in and they were like, "Okay, this could get crazy." So they told the machine traders, "Okay, you want to be close to us? Fine. Pay us some money, we'll let you come inside."
ROBERT: Inside our box?
JAD: Inside the mothership!
ROBERT: Is there, like, some room where all these computers are keeping each other company now?
ANDREW ZOLLI: Oh, yes, there is.
JAD: If you visit the New York Stock Exchange now, which we did ...
JAD: So this is—where are we headed now?
JAD: ... after going through months of security checks, what you see is ...
IAN JACK: This is where the trades actually happen.
JAD: ... amazing!
ROBERT: Ooh!
JAD: Wow!
IAN JACK: So this is what, a 20,000-square-foot hall.
JAD: This is Ian Jack. He's head of infrastructure at the New York Stock Exchange. He showed us around.
IAN JACK: With a number of rows of racks for customer equipments.
JAD: In 2006, the New York Stock Exchange opened up this room. It's the size of three football fields, filled with nothing but ...
IAN JACK: ... rows and rows of servers, different specifications.
ANDREW ZOLLI: So these are owned by banks, hedge funds, brokers?
IAN JACK: Yeah, a whole number of financial institutions.
ANDREW ZOLLI: Are these things trading right now?
IAN JACK: Absolutely.
JAD: Each of these computers—and there were close to 10,000 in the room, give or take—were at that moment analyzing the market, making a decision as to whether to buy or sell, sending that decision over a cable into an adjacent room where it gets bought or sold. No people involved.
ANDREW ZOLLI: If you stood still for a few seconds, the lights went out. They automatically went off if nothing moved because the assumption was there were not gonna be people there.
JAD: And the whole idea of this place, says Ian ...
IAN JACK: The whole premise is a level playing field. So any firm can come in here and they'll have the same access as anyone else.
JAD: And to make sure of that—this is my favorite part ...
IAN JACK: Every single rack within this facility has the same length of cabling to get to the network points at the end.
ANDREW ZOLLI: Exactly the same length?
IAN JACK: Exactly the same.
JAD: Everybody gets the same length cabling. Whether you're one foot away from the network hub or a thousand feet away, you get the same length.
ANDREW ZOLLI: I'm sure they send synchronized test pulses from both your trading computer and Jad's trading computer and they make sure they arrive exactly at the same moment.
JAD: I like to imagine they have a guy with a tape measure.
ROBERT: That's the guy you bribe. That's the guy!
JAD: Anyhow, you would think that since all machines can now be inside the exchange, literally inside the market building, that the speed race would be over, right?
ROBERT: Yeah.
JAD: No. Actually, it only gets worse because the place we visited, the New York Stock Exchange, that's just one market of many. I didn't know this but apparently when all trading went electronic, the markets fragmented.
LARRY TABB: It used to be that to trade stocks, there was the New York Stock Exchange, and then there was NASDAQ.
JAD: Really just those two markets, says Larry.
LARRY TABB: Now, there are 13 regulated exchanges. There are roughly 50 what they call dark pools in the marketplace.
JAD: Those are non-public, basically.
LARRY TABB: Yeah.
JAD: So you got these 60-some-odd different markets, and that's created all these different speed races between them.
LARRY TABB: Yeah.
JAD: Here's a super basic example I talked about with Andrew. In Chicago, you've got this thing called the commodities market.
ANDREW ZOLLI: Commodities are basic goods like corn, oil, soybeans, zinc, pork.
JAD: That's what they do in Chicago. Here in New York, we do equities.
ANDREW ZOLLI: An equity is a share of a company.
JAD: So you have basic goods in Chicago, stocks of companies in New York.
ANDREW ZOLLI: Those are different kinds of things, but they're connected to each other.
JAD: You know, because, like, take oil, which is traded in Chicago. A lot of companies depend on oil, and they're traded in New York. So say oil goes up in Chicago, you can pretty much bet that right after that, a company like Exxon is going to go up in New York. But it won't be instantaneous.
ANDREW ZOLLI: Right. Because information has a speed.
JAD: Back in the days of the telegraph, as we've learned, it took a quarter second. About that long to get from New York to Chicago. Now with fiber optic cables, about 15 milliseconds.
ANDREW ZOLLI: I love that. I had no idea you could actually hear the time difference.
JAD: That one, I think, is pretty accurate. 15 milliseconds. But say you're in Chicago, oil goes up, you know it, and you can get to New York in 14 milliseconds. Well, you've got one millisecond where you know the future. You know exactly what's gonna happen. You're not even betting at this point. This is easy money.
MIKE BELLER: So what happened over time was a race of people to provide the straightest fiber line between Chicago and New York.
ANDREW ZOLLI: That's Mike Beller again from Tradeworx. He's part of this race.
MIKE BELLER: A couple of years ago, a company came along ...
JAD: Not his, unfortunately.
MIKE BELLER: ... and spent some eight-figure sum to cut a straighter fiber line between those two points. And ...
JAD: According to some reports, they blew through a mountain to do it.
MIKE BELLER: ... they did a lot. And where the state-of-the-art for communication lines at the time between the two locations was about 15.5 milliseconds, they came along and they made that state-of-the-art 13.3 milliseconds.
ANDREW ZOLLI: A savings of about one millisecond each way.
MIKE BELLER: Which is just an—it's just an eon.
ANDREW ZOLLI: It's just a thousandth of a second you're talking about. That's not an eon.
MIKE BELLER: Well, it's an eon when your computer system is able to make a decision in 10 microseconds, which ours are.
JAD: That's 10 times faster.
ANDREW ZOLLI: So your computer is like, "I could do this so fast, but I'm just waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting for the news from Chicago."
JAD: [laughs]
MIKE BELLER: So a lot of us were sitting around thinking, "What can we do about this?"
ANDREW ZOLLI: Turns out, there was a way to get from Chicago to New York a little faster because the speed of light through air it's a little faster than when you're going through a fiber optic cable. And so what they're doing now is they're building a series of towers so they can beam the signal through the air from one tower to the next tower to the next tower, all the way from Chicago to New York.
MIKE BELLER: So ...
JAD: And that would bring the travel time down to about ...
MIKE BELLER: In the neighborhood of around 8.5 milliseconds.
JAD: So you're going from 13 to 8.5?
MIKE BELLER: Yeah.
JAD: That would be going from this ...
[quick beep]
JAD: ... to this.
[quicker beep]
JAD: I mean, come on!
MIKE BELLER: That's a lot of potential savings.
JAD: I can totally hear the difference.
ANDREW ZOLLI: Is it helping? Is it—are we fast enough now? Can we stop?
MANOJ NARANG: Here's the thing.
ANDREW ZOLLI: That's Manoj Narang, the CEO of Tradeworx. He joined us for part of the interview, and he told us, actually, we would love to stop this arms race.
MANOJ NARANG: Yeah, absolutely. The arms race is a huge drain on resources.
ANDREW ZOLLI: But he says we just can't.
MANOJ NARANG: As it stands, when a new technology comes out that makes it possible to be faster, if I don't adopt it and my competitors do, I will lose out to them. I have to do it.
JAD: And looking at Manoj in particular, you could kind of tell that this part of the job ...
MANOJ NARANG: It's just like the plumbing.
JAD: Yeah, it just kind of makes him weary.
MANOJ NARANG: Yeah, I couldn't care less.
ANDREW ZOLLI: Why not just call it a truce and everyone say we're not gonna try and go faster? We're already way faster than any human can think. It's fast enough. We're gonna ...
MANOJ NARANG: Why not call it truce? Because there's such a thing in game theory called Prisoner's Dilemma, and…
ANDREW ZOLLI: Someone will cheat, you're saying, basically.
MANOJ NARANG: Yeah. You can't put a gun to everyone's head and force them to abide by this truce.
ANDREW ZOLLI: Even though we'd all be better off if you could.
MANOJ NARANG: Well, who would be better off?
JAD: And here, Manoj told us, "Look, even though this speed race sucks for us, it's actually helping you." Because on a basic level, anytime you replace a human with a computer, things are gonna get faster, they're gonna get cheaper. And now that the machines are competing, getting cheaper still. In 1992, it would have cost you about $100 to trade 1,000 shares. Now? 10 bucks.
MANOJ NARANG: So yes, humans have been completely supplanted when it comes to short-term trading. And humans who complain about that are being disingenuous, okay? They have not been displaced by anything other than the fact that they can't compete.
ANDREW ZOLLI: You seem like you've had the—you seem defensive.
MANOJ NARANG: Well, just because I can explain the economics of the business doesn't make me defensive.
JAD: [laughs]
ANDREW ZOLLI: That also sounded defensive.
MANOJ NARANG: [laughs]
JAD: If Manoj did sound defensive it's only because he and Mike and everyone in their industry have had to answer a lot of questions over the past few years about where all this speed is taking us. And those questions always come back to one particular day, May 6, 2010, when things got a little fruity.
ROBERT: [laughs]
ERIC HUNSADER: We hadn't had a down day in a long while. The market had been solely creeping up for quite a while.
JAD: That's Eric Hunsader again, the analyst who's been tracking high-frequency trading. He says that day, even though things had been going really well ...
ERIC HUNSADER: That day had started off down pretty hard.
JAD: Which made some sense because there was bad news coming out of Athens. People were nervous. But then at a very specific moment, 2:42 in the afternoon ...
ERIC HUNSADER: 14:42 and 44 seconds ...
JAD: ... all hell breaks loose.
[NEWS CLIP: Okay, Neil, let me just—let me just interrupt for a second because this market is dropping precipitously. It just went -500. It is now -560.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, floor trader: I need an offer, seven need an offer, six halves are trading here now!]
[NEWS CLIP: The Dow was losing about 653 points. Now, Dow is down 707 points.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, floor trader: …The 79's are trading.]
[NEWS CLIP: Boom, there it goes.]
[NEWS CLIP: Look at this market. It continues to slide.]
[NEWS CLIP: Look at it! 835.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, floor trader: This is the widest we have seen this in years.]
[NEWS CLIP: Now it's down 900.]
[NEWS CLIP: Wow, almost 1,000 points.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, floor trader: This will blow people out in a big way like you won't believe.]
[NEWS CLIP: Cancel all orders down 1,000 points. Cancel all orders!]
JAD: At 2:45 and 27 seconds an emergency circuit breaker shuts off ...
ERIC HUNSADER: For five seconds, and that was the end of the slide. When it went out and stopped for five seconds, that was the bottom of the market.
JAD: 1,000 points down. Several hundred billion dollars vanished.
ERIC HUNSADER: Two and a half minutes.
JAD: Equally weird, when trading started again, the markets bounced right back up.
ERIC HUNSADER: About two and a half minutes later, it was 600 points higher than the bottom.
JAD: It was like—foom! Boing! Now these kind of swings had happened before, but never that fast. And the speed is one thing. Arguably, what's more troubling is that we still, two and a half years later, don't really know what happened. I mean, the SEC investigated for months, released this giant 84-page report where they essentially blamed the whole thing on one bad algorithm. That this guy in New York was trying to sell a bunch of stocks, told his computer to do it. His computer just did it a little too aggressively.
ERIC HUNSADER: No, that's not how it went down at all.
JAD: Eric doesn't agree. He thinks what happened is that all the high-frequency computers just clogged the network.
ERIC HUNSADER: Really, the cause of the flash crash was system overload.
JAD: Because he says a basic feature of these computer algorithms is when they detect that the network is slow, they pull it out.
ERIC HUNSADER: I mean, one of the maxims on the street is "When in doubt, stay out or pull out."
JAD: And so if you've got this one computer selling a ton of stock and no computers left to buy, that creates a vacuum.
ANDREW ZOLLI: Now there were people who argued that high-frequency trading had actually made the situation better.
JAD: Because, you know, Andrew says the markets did bounce back.
ANDREW ZOLLI: Right up to the top.
JAD: The computers self-corrected, perhaps.
ANDREW ZOLLI: But the point is nobody had any idea.
JAD: And that's what gets him. That we're in a situation now where when things go wrong, they go wrong in the blink of an eye, and then it takes us years to figure out what happened?
ANDREW ZOLLI: The question that comes up is: have we crossed some kind of Rubicon where we've passed into a realm where the complexity, speed, the volume of all of this stuff makes it no longer human-readable? We just don't know what the system is doing and can't, in principle, find out when things go wrong.
JAD: If you're having a hard time picturing just how fast and furious high-speed trading is, check out the visualizations we've got at Radiolab.org. They are strangely beautiful in a trippy sort of way. You can also hear how fast they go by listening to a piano riff that turns one stock's buy and sell orders into a string of musical notes. That's at Radiolab.org. Big thanks to David Kestenbaum for joining me. If you don't listen to NPR's Planet Money, you definitely should. Definitely. Check them out at NPR.org/money. And thanks to Chris Berube, who carried a heavy load with the reporting on this segment. And also sound artist Ben Rubin, who lent us the sound of those floor traders.
[LISTENER: Hey, Radiolab. This is Adam in Toronto. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]
JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab. And today—do you wanna say it?
ROBERT: Uh, speed.
JAD: [laughs] See, this is a perfect example of what we've been bumping into all hour. Humans are slow. We're just too slow.
ROBERT: But now ...
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Yeah, hello?
ROBERT: This Lene?
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: It is.
ROBERT: All right!
ROBERT: ... now we have a story that should make us all feel a little better.
JAD: Can I just say I didn't even think this was remotely possible what we're about to talk about.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: [laughs]
ROBERT: And the heroine of our story is Lene ...
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Vestergaard Hau.
ROBERT: That's a—is that a hyphenate?
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: No, that—Vestergaard is my middle name. Hau is the last name, and my first name is Lene.
JAD: So Lene is a physicist at Harvard, and she has done something with speed that is just remarkable. It's the only way to say it.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Well—well if we sort of step back, one ...
JAD: We asked her to walk us through what she does step by step, because it's totally worth it.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: We start out with a clump of room temperature sodium. And at room temperature, sodium is actually a nice shiny metal.
ROBERT: Lene and her team, they take the sodium, they put it in an oven and heat it up.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Exactly.
ROBERT: And as it heats up, atoms in the sodium start to vibrate faster and then faster. And when the temperature gets to around ...
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: 350 degrees centigrade, the atoms form a vapor.
JAD: Super high pressure.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: And then ...
JAD: She forces the atoms into this little ...
ROBERT: ... pinhole.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: You have a little hole in the source.
ROBERT: So this thin stream of atoms now comes zipping out of the hole, and ...
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: We hit them head-on with a laser beam.
ROBERT: So you bang them right in their pathway.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Yes, kick them in a direction opposite to their motion.
ROBERT: And that slows them down.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Exactly. And now we can load them into what we call an optical molasses.
ROBERT: Optical molasses. [laughs]
JAD: This is so baroque, I love it!
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: In the optical molasses, the atoms will be hit by laser beams from all directions.
JAD: Is that your way of, like, saying "Don't go this way, don't go this way, don't go this way, stop!"
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: That's right. Yes.
JAD: You corner them in from all angles.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Yes. Then we can get them to really slow down.
JAD: It feels a little bit like you've enslaved these atoms. I feel bad for them.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: [laughs]
ROBERT: It's gonna get worse.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Yes, because that's not good enough.
ROBERT: Now that she has these atoms trapped, she needs to make them sit as still as possible. So she turns off the lasers.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Total darkness in the lab. And then we turn on an electromagnet. Use the fact
ROBERT: [laughs]
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Use the fact that the atoms are small magnets to hold them in a particular point in space so they don't all fly apart. Then we can flip the magnet of these small atoms and selectively kick out the hottest—just the hottest of them. So they will fly out of the magnet, and we just keep the lowest energy.
ROBERT: By flipping the magnets, you could say to the—there's one atom that's a little bit too jumpy, so you say, "Get out of here!"
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Yup. "Get out of here." Exactly.
JAD: Because you—because you want just the quietest atoms to stay.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: That's right.
ROBERT: So now after all this, Lene has this teeny little cloud ...
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: 0.1 millimeter in size, typically.
ROBERT: ... of just a few million atoms.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Like five, ten million.
JAD: And she says at this point, they're all very, very still. And because temperature is really just a measure of speed, really, you know, when atoms are moving quickly, we call that hot, when they're moving slowly, we call that cold, these atoms, because they're so still ...
ROBERT: These atoms are really cold. Colder than anything on Earth. Colder than the middle of empty space. Basically, these are the coldest things that have ever been cold.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Yeah. And at that point, we have a totally new state of matter.
JAD: And of course, she was curious about this new state of matter.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: That's right. I'm a curious lady.
JAD: And now we get to the part where—well, this is the whole reason we're telling you this.
ROBERT: She now decides to ...
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Poke these atoms. Basically, send a light pulse in ...
ROBERT: Shoot a beam of light into this cold atom cloud ...
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: ... and see how it reacts. You know, you have a totally ...
JAD: Why? What was it that ...
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Well, you know, light fascinates me.
JAD: I mean, she says, here's this thing that goes 671,000,000 miles an hour.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: You know, that nothing goes faster than light.
JAD: And the question just occurred to her, like, "What would happen if I took the fastest thing in the universe and stuck it into the coldest thing ever made?"
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Exactly. Yes.
ROBERT: So she points her laser at the atom cloud ...
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Aim the laser beam.
ROBERT: ... hits a switch ...
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: So here you have this light pulse coming in.
JAD: Zooming through space.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Then the front edge will reach our atom cloud ...
ROBERT: And unbelievably, the light pulse in that moment, goes ...
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: From 186,000 miles per second to 15 miles per hour.
JAD: [laughs] Are you kidding?
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: No!
JAD: So the light is going, like, zoom!
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: That's right.
JAD: Wow!
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Inside our atom cloud!
JAD: Amazing!
ROBERT: And then it just chugs along at a leisurely speed.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Something you could beat on your bicycle.
ROBERT: Yeah, you mean ride your bike faster than the light?
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: I mean, exactly. You—you can sort of think of this race between a bicycle and a light pulse.
JAD: I mean, imagine you could just bike next to this blob of light, and you could reach out and maybe pet it a little bit, and then—pshew!—bike on ahead. But then you'd be in darkness. But you could go maybe to the edge of the cloud and wait for the light, and so that when it comes through, you could just catch it.
ROBERT: Well no, you can't catch it, because when the light gets to the other side of the atom cloud ...
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: The—the front edge will accelerate back up to this enormous normal light speed, and then it rushes off. So it stretches out again.
JAD: Wow. Cool!
ROBERT: So here's my ...
JAD: Can you ...
ROBERT: Oh, sorry. Go ahead.
JAD: I'm sorry. So if you've got it down to 15, is that kind of like a limit? I mean, can you—can you ...
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: We—we could bring it lower.
ROBERT: Can you stop light? Can you actually stop light?
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: We can, yeah.
JAD: What? So that laser goes in and doesn't come out?
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Yes.
ROBERT: I mean, you hold it, like a ...
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: We hold it.
JAD: How do you do that?
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Okay, so what we do is—it's actually...
JAD: Okay, so things get a little technical here, but basically—probably too simply—Lene has figured out a way to tweak the properties of this atom cloud.
ROBERT: She can make it like a brick that light bounces off of, or she can make it clear so light cruises through.
JAD: In this case, what she does is she shoots the light into the atom cloud ...
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: So we slow it down.
JAD: And then right at that moment, as it's chugging along ...
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Chug chug chug at 15 miles an hour.
ROBERT: ... she tweaks the atom cloud to make it, well, thick.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: And the light pulse will say, "Oops!" It'll come to a halt.
ROBERT: …almost like it's frozen in a block of ice.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: In this ...
JAD: Oh, so it just sits?
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Mm-hmm, yes. It just sits.
JAD: Wow!
ROBERT: When—when you realized what you'd done, did you do a little jig or what did you ...
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Oh, yes. That was amazing. It's like sitting in the lab, of course, in the middle of the night, and just knowing, "Whoa, you're the first one who has been in this part of nature." Yeah, it was joy. You know, of course, to some extent, I'm an engineer, but this whole idea that I can take this light pulse and bring it down to a human scale, that's something you just, at a very personal level, get excited about. This is more like, you know—I mean, you can sort of say, you know, like—like a sculptor will create a beautiful sculpture.
JAD: For me as I was thinking about this, I actually think of it in terms of painting. Like Vermeer, you know, the painter?
ROBERT: Hmm.
JAD: Like, he could create this illusion that light was just suspended there on the canvas, just shimmering. Like he somehow captured the light. But that was just an illusion. Lene actually did it.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Mm-hmm. Yes.
JAD: Do you ever—do you ever wonder—do you ever, like, you know, after this night, you walk out and into the—well, I imagine next day, and the sun is shining, and you just look at the light, and you think, "Ha ha ha! I've got your number!"
ROBERT: You're like Zeus, you know? You could be Zeus for a moment.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And also perhaps being Scandinavian, right? Where we love the light around midsummer.
JAD: Yeah, you have a whole lot of it. Or then a whole lot ...
ROBERT: Then a whole lot not.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Yeah. Yeah.
JAD: Maybe you could do something about that. Maybe you could store the light.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Hold it up for the wintertime.
JAD: You could store it up, and then you could unleash the cloud, and suddenly there would be sunshine when there was darkness.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: So save it—save it for the wintertime, yes?
JAD: Yeah!
ROBERT: Well, we've been doing this for a number of years, but this has to be one of the more remarkable conversations we've ever had.
JAD: Thank you very much. This was wonderful.
ROBERT: Thank you. Yeah, it really is.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: But you—but you didn't get to the real important stuff, though.
ROBERT: Oh, wait!
JAD: What, what, what, what, what?
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: So we—we can play a trick. The trick is we can stop and extinguish the light pulse in one part of space and revive it in a totally different location.
ROBERT: You mean you can transport ...
JAD: You can transport it?
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Yeah.
JAD: At this point, we were like, "What weird-ass science fiction movie did we just slip into?"
ROBERT: Lene says when the light hit those atoms back in her cloud there ...
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: The light pulse cloud will create a little imprint in the atoms.
JAD: It's like if you were to punch soft clay with your hand, and then you could see the imprint of your knuckles there in the clay.
ROBERT: That's what happens when the light hits those atoms.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: The light pulse will change the atoms a little bit. That's how it imprints its information in the atoms.
ROBERT: And according to Lene, that imprint is like a physical impression of the light. All the information about the light, its frequency, energy, whatever ...
JAD: All that stuff is copied.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: In the atoms.
ROBERT: So there's a shadow of light? I mean, what does that mean?
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: It's a shadow of light, yes. And now we can pull that imprint out, so now what we have out in free space is a perfect matter copy.
ROBERT: You mean like physical matter?
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Yes. And then we can move that around. We can put it on the shelf or we can move it around. We can squish it, and then we can take it over ...
JAD: She says if she wants to, she can then make a few tweaks to the cloud.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Then the light pulse will come back to life, propagate slowly through the cloud, and then exit and speed back up.
JAD: So you could store—I mean, if you were—if you were President Obama and you said, "I would like to put the light around me right now in a time capsule for later generations to experience," he could take it using your process, put it in an archive somewhere, and then ...
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Put it in a bottle. Mm-hmm.
JAD: And 1,000 years later, they would—they would know the light that surrounded him.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Yes.
ROBERT: No!
JAD: That's what she said. That's what she just said!
ROBERT: No, I know she did. Yeah. That's—how would you know the difference? Light is the same. How do you know oh, that's the same light?
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: It's contained in my matter copy that preserves the information.
ROBERT: So when the new light turns on, it identically copies the light from before in a way that—that makes it as—as specific as saying that's Mary Kay Jones again, or whatever.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Yes. Yes. That's right.
ROBERT: Oh, man.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: I've also—also—also wondered about, you know—because we could—in our lab in Cambridge, we could send a light pulse and stop it, extinguish it, make our little matter copy, put it in a bottle. I could put it in a suitcase, say, bring it to Copenhagen, turn it into light. But I've thought about also, how do I get that bottle through security in the airport?
JAD: What would it look like? Would it just be a bottle full of—full of emptiness?
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: It would be a vacuum, but there would be a little clump of atoms in there.
JAD: It would have to be less than three ounces of atoms, or they would have ...
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Well, yes.
ROBERT: It would be so much less than three ounces. Yeah, you could just walk through the airport. You've got no problems there.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Okay.
JAD: Or you can open it and be like, "You wanna see something cool?" Pew! Blind him.
ROBERT: That would probably be also against the law.
LENE VESTERGAARD HAU: Yes, yes, yes.
JAD: How am I gonna get my light through security?
JAD: If you want to keep the momentum going, check out our short called "Speedy Beet." It's about Beethoven and his apparent need for speed. Most orchestras don't play his work anywhere near as fast as he may have wanted. Go listen at Radiolab.org. And while you're there, you can watch a string quartet play Beethoven's fifth at warp speed. Seriously, it sounds like speed metal.
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[LISTENER: Hi, Christian Rivest, former Radiolab intern, calling in with the credits. I actually don't have enough credits on this phone to try and do this again very fast. Well, I'll try really, really fast. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes Ellen Horne, Soren Wheeler, Pat Walters, Tim Howard, Brenna Farrel, Molly Webster, Melissa Dunn, Dylan Keefe. All right guys, this is harder than I thought.]
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[LISTENER: And special thanks to Alan Pierson and the Brooklyn Philharmonic. Even though I just read that very, very fast, this call probably cost me about $20. I hope you guys use it on the air. Bye.]
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