[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hi, could you guys hear us?

JOHN LINNELL: We are—I think our mics are on, but the gear is not on for some reason. Except for the guitar amp.

JAD: Hey, everybody. Jad here. This is Radiolab, the podcast.

JOHN LINNELL: Good morning, everyone.

JAD: Okay, so we have just released our latest season of shows. To the radio, I mean. It's already out on the podcast. But right now across the country on NPR stations, our latest season of shows is airing, and we wanted to celebrate. So last week we had an event which we want to play for you in this podcast. And at this little patch of sand across the East River called the Water Taxi Beach. It's really cool. You can sit on sand and eat hot dogs and drink beer and pretend you're on the beach, but the skyscrapers are right there. Quite surreal! In any case, it was sort of a crappy day weather wise, so we didn't get too lucky on that account, but we were lucky to have a couple hundred people in the audience. And They Might Be Giants, the music group, on stage with us.

JAD: Now for whatever reason, They Might Be Giants has decided, you know, after a bazillion records, a bunch of hits, that they want to make a record for kids about science. We thought, well, science? I mean, come on, that's what we do—sort of.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Well, then we want to welcome everybody who braved the clouds and the potential of downpour, which there hasn't been yet and probably won't be.

JAD: No chance.

ROBERT: So we decided to—here's the deal. This is the beginning of our fifth?

JAD: Sixth.

ROBERT: Sixth season of Radiolab. So we're beginning right now. Last week was the first one, this Friday's the second one. But when we were trying to figure out how to do this, we realized that while we have been like the science people ...

JAD: You know, at this point, we're kind of pros.

ROBERT: We're kind of pros.

JAD: We're like old hats.

ROBERT: So then we heard that there were these musicians that decided to do—like they have an album called ...

JAD: Science!

ROBERT: Yeah, "Here Comes Science."

JAD: Never mind that here already is science.

[laughter]

ROBERT: So yeah, so we thought we would invite them just to check them out and maybe put them through the—because we know so much and they apparently know so little. So that was the thought we had. They're called They Might Be Giants.

JAD: A tentative title.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: And with that, do you guys want to introduce yourselves?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: My name is John Flansburgh. This is Mr. Marty Beller on the drums, ladies and gentlemen.

JOHN LINNELL: Marty. I'm John Linnell over here. Did you guys introduce yourselves, by the way?

JAD: Maybe we didn't.

ROBERT: No, we didn't.

JAD: Jad.

ROBERT: Robert. So like, how did you—how did you kind of wander over into this territory?

JOHN LINNELL: I was gonna ask you that.

JAD: I'm not sure that we ever decided. It was more of a calling, really. We were called.

JOHN LINNELL: [laughs] Can I give you the same answer?

ROBERT: No.

JOHN LINNELL: Because eventually that will be true for us.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Well, we have a long history, a long history in doing fact-based songs. So that was probably the thing that made us think it was a natural leap to actually doing—you know, tackling some more serious scientific stuff.

ROBERT: This is serious scientific stuff, I think.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Super heavy.

ROBERT: Super heavy. Could you just play one? I don't—just start. Yeah.

JAD: Do you want to set it up, though?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Say what?

JAD: Do you want to set up the sound? What are you going to play?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: This song is about evolution, and it's called "My Brother the Ape."

JAD: Okay.

ROBERT: All right.

[music]

JOHN FLANSBURGH: [singing] Well, I got the invitation that you sent to everyone. And I told you family picnics weren't exactly my idea of fun. You replied that everyone but me said they were going to come, which is how you talked me into going to the reunion. When you said everyone, you really meant it, my brother the ape. My brother the ape.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: [singing] I received the photos you sent, and I don't regret that I went. Oh, the sight of everybody stiffly closing under one tent. But I don't feel I belong, and I keep wanting to escape. And I fail to see the likeness between me and my brother the ape. They all kept saying how much we look alike. I don't think that we look alike at all. But I'll admit that I look more like a chimp then I look like my cousin the shrimp, or my distant kin the lichens or the snowy egrets or the moss. And I find it hard to recognize some relatives of ours like the roach, the birch, the sycamore the iguanas and sea stars.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: [singing] My brother the ape, My brother the ape. They say you don't get to choose your family, but there's no other one to choose. So that's why I'm writing this now. And you can tell my sister the cow that I meant to thank her for the gorgonzola. And I'll allow that I've been acting like a stranger, but you guys are all so strange. Though I think of what I'm like and I can see we're all the same. So this time next year we'll meet at my place, my brother the ape. My brother the ape.

JAD: That was They Might Be Giants playing "My Brother the Ape" off their latest CD, Here Comes Science. I have to confess, we actually played you that song from their album, not from the live performance, because we had some technical difficulties with that song in the recording. So just on that song, we're gonna go with the album version. Henceforth, everything will be live. And I don't know if you caught the lyrics, but it's a song about a family reunion where everybody is invited, including you, your brother the ape, your sister the cow. And this brotherly sisterliness caused Robert and I, as true masters of science, to wonder.

ROBERT: If you're doing, like, "the science," then we could call attention to—why should I—I mean, there's a guy in this audience, I think, who's a science teacher at a high school here in New York. And he wrote us a little note, and I just—you know, it's not like I want to, you know, but ...

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Technically embarrass us?

ROBERT: He says, you know, in science textbooks, the closest that any author gets to a human family relationship is to call the apes "cousins." Now I don't want to bore you with the subtleties of cladistics.

JAD: Cladistics, by the way, is a sort of biological system of representing ancestry.

ROBERT: Yeah. So our ancestors have been separated from other apes for four million years. Most likely, the only brother we could claim would be a bipedal standing ape called the Neanderthal. But an ape ...

JAD: Well, Let me ask you ...

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Hold on, my helicopter's coming.

JAD: [laughs] Let me ask you, did you—when you say "my brother the ape," did you mean brother in a cladistic sense? Or was it more in the kind of brother with an "A" kind of sense?

JOHN LINNELL: My very familiar, close associate the ape? Well, I guess it's—I mean, in some ways, Robert, you actually—I think at one point in the letter, it's specified that we humans are, in fact, also apes. So it wouldn't be correct to say my brother. In fact, you could say "myself the ape" and not be incorrect scientifically.

JAD: Huh!

ROBERT: But did you ever—did you ever ...?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: And in some cases, more accurate.

JAD: Interesting retort, Giants.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: But also, I've got a question about—I've got a small technical note about the letter where he says "four million" like it's a long time. But as everyone who knows who's ever seen a film strip in science, four million years is a very short time.

ROBERT: Right.

JOHN LINNELL: Unless you're watching a film strip for those four million years.

[laughter]

JAD: Wait a second. I'm starting to feel like we're losing this little situation here, Robert.

ROBERT: Well, then let me just get tougher still, or let ...

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Keep digging. Your point is in there somewhere.

ROBERT: This high school science teacher writes, "It might be cozy to believe that we're similar to every other living thing, but we're incredibly distant from moss. So distant it's difficult to find connections unless you look really, really closely. In fact, I could argue a dehydrated rotifer in suspended animation has more in common with a rock," says Aaron San, "than with a human." So what he's questioning here is just how careful—like, do you have a science guy? I mean a "science guy."

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Yeah, we—we actually brought in a consultant to basically fact-check the stuff that we were doing. And he was—it was very helpful, and he was very supportive.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: What was his—what was his name?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: His name was Eric Siegel. He's actually the director of the New York Hall of Science in Queens.

ROBERT: Oh, so you're calling in pedigree.

JAD: How did that work? Did you—did you play the music and then talk to him?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: The internet. We ...

ROBERT: Oh, you never met Eric Siegel?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: I've never met him.

ROBERT: So he could be the guy who wrote the book about love from—in 1960. Wasn't there an Eric Siegel who wrote ...

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Oh, Love Story?

ROBERT: Love Story, Yeah.

JOHN LINNELL: I think that was spelled differently.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Spelled differently.

ROBERT: Okay.

JOHN LINNELL: E-R-I-C-H.

JAD: So you really had to fact check your songs?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Yeah, yeah.

JAD: Was there any moment ...

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Fourteenth album, first time fact-checked.

JAD: [laughs] That is kind of a new experience for rock and roll.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Yeah. Technically against the rules.

JAD: Do you feel a little less rockin' that you need to be fact-checked?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Well, you know, in rock music, you know, sometimes songs have premises like there's going to be a jailbreak somewhere in this town. And you're think—when you hear a song like that, you think maybe that should have been fact-checked.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JOHN FLANSBURGH: I mean, the jailbreak is going to be near the jail or in the jail, you know? Ah, great song! Crazy words.

ROBERT: So was Eric really easy, do you think?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Well, you know, he's got a—he's got a strong liberal arts background, I think. And ...

ROBERT: Did he ever—like, apparently he let—he let this, "My brother the ape" thing through. So ...

JAD: Who fact-checks the fact-checker?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Well, I mean, there was one experience where we were doing the song Why Does the Sun Shine? Which is a song that we recorded many years ago. It's actually one of the very first science-based songs that we did. And it was a cover from the '50s. And that song is no longer factually correct.

JAD: Before we de-factify it, can we hear it?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Yes. Can you please—you got the setup? Okay. I think it—I think it would go something like this.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: I think it would go something like this.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: [singing] The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace, where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees. Yo ho, it's hot. The sun is not a place where we could live, but here on Earth, there'd be no life without the light it gives. We need its light. We need its heat, we need its energy. Without the sun, without a doubt, there'd be no you and me. The sun is the mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace, where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees. The sun is hot.

JOHN LINNELL: The sun is so hot that everything on it is a gas: Aluminum, copper, iron and many others.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: [singing] The sun is large.

JOHN LINNELL: If the sun were hollow, a million Earths would fit inside. And yet the sun is only a middle-sized star.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: [singing] The sun is far away.

JOHN LINNELL: It's about 93 million miles away, and that's why it looks so small.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: [singing] But ...

JOHN LINNELL: Do that again.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: [singing] But even when it's out of sight, the sun shines night and day. We need its heat. We need its light. The sunlight that we see. The sunlight comes from our own sun's atomic energy.

JOHN LINNELL: Scientists have found that the sun is a huge atom-smashing machine. The heat and light of the sun are caused by the nuclear reactions between sand, fake palm trees with neon lights in them, helicopters that are flying too low, and helium.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: [singing] The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace, where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees.

[applause]

JOHN LINNELL: Thank you.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: A beautiful song, no doubt based on an Irish folk song, but the publishing still comes through for the original authors.

JAD: Where'd you get the ...

JOHN FLANSBURGH: And the text is, I believe it's either from the Collier's Encyclopedia or the Golden Book Encyclopedia. I'm sure that information is available online.

JAD: Literally word for word from the ...?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Well, the opening lines of the song, which sort of don't—is the word "scansion." They don't have any metric. "The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees is the opening paragraph" describing the sun in the encyclopedia. And most of the song is actually pretty much factually correct, it turns out.

JAD: Which part is wrong?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: In the part where John was talking about sand, that was wrong.

JAD: [laughs] Yeah.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: And in the spoken word part right there, it lists what the sun is composed of. And basically, it's—evidently the sun is composed of like two things and not much else. And it's a long list of things that are very marginal. And that was one thing that Eric pointed out. We actually had completely rerecorded the song, confident that after 15 years of performing in front of drunks, that this song was actually factually fine.

JAD: I mean, that seems the last ...

JOHN FLANSBURGH: That is an assumption. Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak, my friend. Somewhere near this town.

JAD: But just so I understand what was wrong with that song that you just sang. It's the part that he didn't say.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: No.

JOHN LINNELL: Well, there was one other major problem with the song, which has actually only came to light after the song was written, which is that the sun is, in fact, not a mass of incandescent gas.

ROBERT: Uh-oh.

JOHN LINNELL: That was the real problem.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Well, it was assumed. You know, this is like many things, the science, which is that it's an ever-changing, ever-evolving world.

JAD: Wait, the theory is that the sun is not gas?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: The sun is—is plasma in the science.

ROBERT: The sun is a mass of incandescent plasma. Is that the ...?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Yeah, it could—it could have been that.

JAD: So what did you just change—do you just change the word?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Well, we actually—we'd already finished the video, so it was too late.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JOHN FLANSBURGH: And the video was really good. And it was made by this—this crazy, wonderful animator in Canada. And she actually makes everything, like, on her—like, it's totally handmade. So basically she would just start—she would be crying for three months.

JAD: Why? Did she have animated gas?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: No, no, it was just—it's like beautiful puppets and stuff. It was personal. So we wanted to save—we wanted to save that project. So we actually—we just fixed up the little bit of the lyrics that we could to make it slightly more accurate. And then we did what in the—in the proud tradition of country-western acts, we actually did an answer song to our own song.

ROBERT: But before we get to the answer song, what little changes could you make to a real bopper? Like, the sun is not a mass of incandescent gas.

JAD: I mean, you could either put "not," or you could find something to rhyme with "plasma."

ROBERT: What else is there but—there's asthma.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Miasma. I say miasma.

JAD: Kasbah?

ROBERT: Kasbah? A song is a kasbah of incandescent ...?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: The song that we came up with, which was prompted by a recording engineer who was actually just listening to us having a free range, you know, grumble session about this whole dilemma, is he said, "Why don't you just write a song called, "The Sun is a Miasma of Incandescent Plasma?"

JAD: He just said that?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: He just said that. He's really smart.

JAD: Wow!

JOHN FLANSBURGH: He says stuff like that.

JAD: Is he a scientist?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: He's a Berklee College music grad. He's got perfect pitch.

ROBERT: That explains everything, right?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Yeah.

ROBERT: So you write an answer song.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: So we've written an answer song to ourselves. That's just kind of a way to redeem ourselves within the scientific community, to show that we're not just, like, sloughing off the facts but also not losing, you know, one-eighth of our video.

ROBERT: So for those of us who are not entirely familiar with the concept of an answer song, an answer song is where you say, "You stupid, stupid, stupid person who is also singing the song right now, you were wrong then and now let me set it right. I'm in." Kind of thing?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: You must be listening to more rap answer songs than ...

JAD: I was gonna say that's more like in the Roxanne-Roxanne kind of ...

JOHN FLANSBURGH: This isn't about, like, a beef that we have with ourselves.

JAD: Well, it sounds like it is, in a way, because you have a beef with your former selves.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: It's like an east-west plasma gas feud.

ROBERT: Well, maybe we should hear your answer song. Yeah. Okay. All right.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: So, ready, John?

JOHN LINNELL: So, yeah.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: [singing] The sun is miasma of incandescent plasma. The sun's not simply made out of gas. No, no, no. The sun is a quagmire, it's not made of fire. Forget what you've been told in the past. Plasma electrons are free. Plasma—a full state of matter. Not gas, not liquid, not solid.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: [singing] The sun is the red dwarf. I hope it never morphs into some supernova collapse or, or, or, or ... The sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma. I forget what I was told by myself. Self, self, self ... Plasma electrons are free. Plasma—a full state of matter, not gas, not liquid, not solid. Plasma! Forget that song. Plasma. They got it wrong. That thesis has been rendered invalid.

JOHN LINNELL: Forget that song.

[laughter]

JAD: Wow! Such—such venom!

JOHN FLANSBURGH: We're experimenting with becoming haters here at this performance.

ROBERT: But what kind of a song would finish with "Forget that song. Plasma! Exclamation point! They got it wrong. That thesis has been rendered invalid."

JOHN LINNELL: Well, we get the publishing on the second song

JOHN FLANSBURGH: So we're really pushing it hard. We got a problem with that other sun.

JAD: You know, my thing is, though, okay—and this is perhaps an appropriate question to ask on a sunless, sunless day such as this. But I'm not sure I really understand the sun any better now.

JOHN LINNELL: Oh, you understand it.

ROBERT: Yes.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Well, I didn't even know what plasma was when we started writing this song.

JAD: Like, what is miasma? What does that mean?

ROBERT: A miasma is like a fog with a slightly noxious quality.

JAD: You only know that 'cause you looked it up earlier.

ROBERT: [laughs] Yeah, that's not really nice, you know?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: With a slightly noxious quality?

ROBERT: Yeah, I didn't know about that either. Apparently it's something like a toxin.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Oh, I thought it was—I thought it was just like a sort of mess.

ROBERT: A mess.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Yeah.

ROBERT: No, it's ...

JOHN LINNELL: In other words, the new song is just as—just as completely misguided as the original. It's not a miasma of anything.

ROBERT: So it's a fourth state of—this is like ...

JOHN FLANSBURGH: But it's the fourth state of matter is correct.

ROBERT: That part is fourth state of matter. Not gas. That's the first state. Not liquid, not solid. So it's something else. It's like a fourth one.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Yes.

ROBERT: So that's the answer.

JAD: But what is the fourth state?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Well, plasma.

JOHN LINNELL: I can give you a little quick explanation. Solid: The molecules are packed tight. They don't move.

ROBERT: Yeah?

JOHN LINNELL: Liquid: They—over there, they swim around. A gas: They're moving very freely. And with a plasma, apparently they're so free that the electrons have been cut loose from the nucleus. And that's what makes ...

JAD: So it's like a gas on steroids.

JOHN LINNELL: It's a gas on steroids.

ROBERT: No, that does nothing for me. No.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: I guess the truth is the song, "The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas" was not incorrect by, you know, the scientific standards of 1960 when it was written.

ROBERT: Right.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: It's just as we learn more, our theories and ideas have to evolve.

JAD: But in making fact-based rock and roll, you were then—you're stepping into this sort of scientific revisioning that happens. So you're gonna have to keep doing this. There's gonna be a fourth answer song and a fifth one.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Yep.

JAD: Yeah, don't do a song about Pluto. You did do a song about Pluto.

ROBERT: A song about Pluto. Yeah, actually.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: It also has a question mark in the title.

JOHN LINNELL: Yeah. Well, we wrote—we wrote—there's a song on the science record that enumerates the planets, but it doesn't actually commit to whether Pluto is or isn't a planet.

ROBERT: Right. See that's what you can do. You can say, "And other stuff." You can, like, finish the sentence. We can't say, "And other stuff." But even when we think we've got it right, you want to tell the ...

JAD: Yeah, we have—just so that we can, you know, play both sides for a second. We had a situation in our current season. I don't know if anyone here has heard the "Stochasticity" show.

[applause]

JAD: Okay, well, there's a moment in the "Stochasticity" show. Just to give context, we were—we were exploring—'stochasticity' is a wonderfully Latinate word that essentially means chaos, randomness. And so we were exploring the chaos and randomness in biology and in cells and in genes. Because apparently, if you look at genes, they're incredibly noisy and chaotic little things, and you expect them to be very ordered.

ROBERT: Because we are ordered. We wake up in the morning, our hearts beat regularly, our brains function. You know, if we're healthy, more or less in the—in a predictable way.

JAD: We wake up at the same time most days, and we go to sleep at the same time. So up here we're very ordered, but down there it's quite noisy. So the question is: How do you go from noisy bottom to order top? And we put that question to a very smart science reporter, Carl Zimmer, and he said, "Actually, what may happen is the body engineers its own noise filters." And I thought, "Filters, oh my God! I could do something with that. I could call a friend. We could do a whole filter demonstration." So this is what resulted in—and I played this very thing you're about to hear—it's just four minutes—to Carl Zimmer in the studio just to make sure it was scientifically accurate. And this is what happened.

JAD: I'll just give you an example from my world, and this is the honest to God's truth: I have a friend named Little Wing Lee.

JAD: Hey, Little Wing.

LITTLE WING LEE: Hello, Jad.

JAD: Tell me what you're holding in your hands there.

LITTLE WING LEE: In my hands, I have two audio tapes.

JAD: And Little Wing just recently called me up. She said, "I've got these two cassette tapes. They're really old."

LITTLE WING LEE: I think they were made in the '70s.

JAD: Her mom found them in her attic, and they're of her grandmother ...

LITTLE WING LEE: One's labeled "MeeMaw sings."

JAD: ... singing. Singing old slave songs and old hymns. Now Little Wing's grandmother died last year.

LITTLE WING LEE: She was 99 years old.

JAD: Wow!

JAD: And they were really close.

LITTLE WING LEE: Yeah, very close. They used to call me Little MeeMaw when I was a kid.

JAD: So she's got these tapes. She wants to hear them. The problem is, if you put it on for more than three minutes you get annoyed.

LITTLE WING LEE: There's that weird, like, hiss.

JAD: It's too noisy. And she wanted to know if I could do something about it.

LITTLE WING LEE: Yeah.

JAD: So real quick, here's what I did: I put it into a computer, launched an EQ program, found the bass noisiness, which was around 600 hertz and dialed that down like so. And then I found the high hiss frequencies, which are around 2,000 hertz, and dialed that down. Ah. Now as a final step, I just kind of located the voice around 1,000 hertz and dialed it up.

[MeeMaw singing]

JAD: Okay, so it's not a flawless process. I mean, now she sounds like she's coming out of a well, but for the first time you can hear her voice.

LITTLE WING LEE: I don't know. This is the first time I'm hearing this song, but it seems like she's describing the night that my grandfather passed away, talking about the doctors telling her that my grandfather has passed. And then she's describing putting a fern in his hand, and she said it should be a rose.

JAD: The thing that's applicable here is that we started with this ...

[tape hiss]

JAD: ... and then just by bringing certain frequencies down and others up, we ended up with this ...

[MeeMaw singing]

JAD: This might be how it is in the body. That you've got this noise all the way in the bottom, these genetic circuits which are spitting out messiness. But somehow, just on top of that are other genetic circuits which are cleaning it all up, giving it a shape.

CARL ZIMMER: Uh ...

JAD: Wait, what? Is that not right?

CARL ZIMMER: Not quite.

JAD: Dammit! Science!

JAD: Literally, what happened is we played that piece to Carl and he didn't quite, "Uh!" We did that later, but he was sort of like, "Well, it's not really that way." And we looked at each other in absolute terror because I'd spent three days working on this, and it turned out to be completely wrong.

ROBERT: So then we said, "Well, all right, what are we gonna do? So we'll run the problem and then do our answer song. And that's pretty much what we did.

JAD: So we said ...

JAD: Okay. So to close the performance, we thought we would spring one on They Might Be Giants, you know, see if we can catch them off guard.

ROBERT: Because we have musicians here. We were kind of curious.

JAD: Do you guys take requests?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: We can play the songs that we know how to play.

ROBERT: Because we have a line. We have a line that we just thought—I mean, one of the problems about doing this for a living is you gotta—you can't just do the science, you gotta kind of give it beats and kind of make it sing. And we thought we would—we would go look for certain phrases that are so dense that they almost defy beats, defy musicality. So we're gonna show you.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: What a perfect invitation for a song.

ROBERT: [laughs] So Jad, so you want to read this phrase?

JAD: Sure. It's—we were wondering if this could be musicified in any way: Quantum decoupling transition in a one-dimensional Feshbach resonant superfluid.

ROBERT: Quantum decoupling transition in a one-dimensional Feshbach resonance superfluid. So we thought—we were thinking like a quantum decoupling. It sounds kind of like a maybe a breakup song here.

[laughter]

JAD: Dramatic possibilities.

ROBERT: You could get sad, you know? [singing] Quantum decoupling.

JAD: Do you want me to hold it for you while you ...

JOHN FLANSBURGH: No, I got it. You guys ready?

JOHN LINNELL: Hey, Marty Beller, you want to help us? Help us out here.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Stare at me. Stare at me. Ready? [singing] Quantum decoupling transition in one-dimensional Feshbach resonant superfluid.

JAD: Wow!

JOHN LINNELL: That was kind of the beatnik—the beatnik approach.

ROBERT: What if it were sad?

JOHN LINNELL: Sad?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: You want sad?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: What if it were like a breakup song?

ROBERT: It's a breakup. It's decoupling. If it's quantum decoupling transition into a one-dimensional Feshbach resonant superfluid.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Hit me with some sad.

JOHN LINNELL: [singing] Quantum decoupling transition into a one-dimensional Feshbach resonant superfluid.

JAD: What if it were like—what if you were to kind of emphasize the ...

ROBERT: [laughs] Wait, wait. That was good.

JAD: That was pretty amazing.

JOHN LINNELL: Bring the beat back!

JAD: What about the quantum? Like, it's neither here it's nor there. It's just probability. What about that? Could you do something that's quantum.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: You want to do this one, John?

JOHN LINNELL: Okay, that—that means you guys have to provide the actual music. [singing] Quantum decoupling transition into a one-dimensional Feshbach resonant superfluid.

JAD: Wow!

JOHN LINNELL: I'm waiting for Jad to go, "Yeah, but what if it was ..."

JAD: What about fluid? No, forget it.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: You know, I thought we worked pretty fast before. I realize we could actually—we've been wasting a lot of time.

JAD: All right, so okay, let's just bring it down to sort of respectable dialogue again. Now that you've wandered into this thorny neighborhood of science, I'm just curious, like, how has that been for you?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Writing songs about things that are completely outside ourselves is actually very fascinating. I think we were a little bit nervous that we were gonna be sort of stirring the pot in the fact check department, and that—from the YouTube comments that we received so far, I think we'll be moving over to Friendster now.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Did you have any red state moments at all? I'm just curious. I mean, evolution as being a ...

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Well, there are songs about evolution. We—we acknowledge that evolution—evolution is. And that's a problem for some people.

ROBERT: We should—should we say goodbye and then put them on the final thing?

JAD: Sure. Do you want to do the—I don't know. What do you guys want to do? Do you want to play another song?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Oh, you got any other ideas for song?

JAD: Do you ...

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Yeah, we have another song prepared. It's actually—it's about the elements.

ROBERT: Oh!

JAD: Like the elements.

JOHN LINNELL: The chemical elements.

JAD: Oh, the chemical. Periodic table. Not elements like rain and wind and fire. Not those kind of elements. Okay.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: [singing] Iron is a metal, you see it every day/Oxygen, eventually, will make it rust away/Carbon in its ordinary form is coal/Crush it together, and diamonds are born.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: [singing] Come on come on and meet the elements/May I introduce you to our friends, the elements?/Like a box of paints that are mixed to make every shade/They either combine to make a chemical compound or stand alone as they are.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Neon's a gas that lights up the sign for a pizza place/The coins that you pay with are copper, nickel and zinc/Silicon and oxygen make concrete, bricks and glass/Now add some gold and silver for some pizza place class.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Come on come on and meet the elements/I think you should check out the ones they call the elements/Like a box of paints that are mixed to make every shade/ They either combine to make a chemical compound or stand alone as they are.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Team up with other elements forming compounds when they combine/Or make up a simple element formed out of atoms of the one kind.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Balloons are full of helium, and so is every star/Stars are mostly hydrogen, which may someday fuel your car.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Hey, who let in all these elephants?/Did you know that elephants are made of elements?Elephants are mostly made of four elements/And every living thing is mostly made of four elements/Plants, bugs, fish, worms, bacteria and men/Are mostly carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Come on come on and meet the elements/You and I are complicated, but we're made of elements/Like a box of paints that are mixed to make every shade/They either combine to make a chemical compound or stand alone as they are.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Team up with other elements forming compounds when they combine/Or make up a simple element formed out of atoms of the one kind.

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Come on come on and meet the elements/Check out the ones they call the elements/Like a box of paints that are mixed to make every shade/They either combine to make a chemical compound or stand alone as they are.*

JAD: Well, there you have it. Hope you enjoyed this podcast. I want to thank They Might Be Giants for appearing on stage with us under stormy skies. Their new album, Here Comes Science, is out. Our new season is out. I want to thank Michael Rayfield for making the whole thing happen, Aaron Sands, the high school science teacher, for writing us that letter, and thank you for listening. And of course, on the subject of thanks, gotta say Radiolab is funded in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation. I'm Jad Abumrad. Mr. K is not here with me at the moment, but he is always here in spirit, and he says bye, too. And we'll catch you in two weeks.

 

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