[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. All right.

JAD: So when you go to this website, what you really 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. 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—its 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?

CARL ZIMMER: Somebody somewhere.

SETH HOROWITZ: I'm here.

JAD: In fact, we found a guy.

SETH HOROWITZ: Are we—are we recording right now?

JAD: We are, yeah.

JAD: 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-bit 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.

ROBERT: Terrible. We will amaze you by slowing down time so that you will find a millisecond generous. You will be—you will surprise yourself in all kinds of ways if you just stay listening to this program, believe me.

JAD: Thank you.

ROBERT: Stay there. We know.

JAD: Good save.

ROBERT: [laughs]

[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 National Science Foundation and 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.]

 

-30-

 

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

 

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.