[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And today ...

[phone ringing]

ROBERT: ... we're gonna hit the phones.

MARK MORRISON: Hello?

JAD: Hi, can I speak to Mark?

JAD: Starting with this guy, Mark Morrison.

MARK MORRISON: This is me.

JAD: Hey Mark, this is Jad calling from Radiolab.

MARK MORRISON: Hey Jad, good to hear ya.

JAD: [laughs]

JAD: Got a hold of him at his home in Olympia, Washington.

MARK MORRISON: I'm hanging out on the front porch. The kids are running around, so you might hear some traffic.

JAD: Okay, gotcha. All right, maybe we should just jump in, and you should just tell me the story.

MARK MORRISON: Okay, so I was DJing a wedding out in Lacey, which is the next town over. It was a hot, like, late spring, kind of, feeling like summer kinda day. And we were in a little rented facility that had, like, windows on all sides. And then all of the sudden the power starts flickering, and it starts raining really hard.

JAD: Okay.

MARK MORRISON: Then trees are falling over. The wind is gusting, and it—the sky turns to night.

JAD: Whoa!

MARK MORRISON: And this is like 3:30 in the afternoon.

JAD: So Mark takes off, goes back home.

MARK MORRISON: My in-laws are visiting, in town to hang out with the new baby, and we open up the curtains, turned off all the lights, and we're just kind of marveling at the insane power of this storm that's happening. My wife is sitting on the couch. My two-year-old is watching Charlie Brown or something on the iPad. And then all of the sudden, there's just a loud snap, like the sound of a whip cracking or like a two-by-four being snapped in half. And about a foot and a half to two feet in front of my face, right next to my mother-in-law and the baby, there's a little sphere of light, white light. Just a little orb, the size of like maybe an orange or a grapefruit, kind of blurry edges around it, floating in midair, as bright as, like, the sun. Like the bright—it lit up the entire room.

JAD: Whoa!

MARK MORRISON: We all screamed. [laughs]

JAD: [laughs]

MARK MORRISON: Everybody in the room in unison.

JAD: And Mark says this sun orb just sort of hovered in front of his face.

MARK MORRISON: Kind of going whom, , whom, whom, whom, for maybe a second.

JAD: When all of the sudden—poof! It was gone.

MARK MORRISON: Yeah.

JAD: That's some X-Files [bleep] right there.

MARK MORRISON: Yeah. None of us had any idea what the heck happened.

JAD: Well, did you go around the room, being like, "Did you guys see that? Did you see that?"

MARK MORRISON: Yeah. Everybody saw it. Everybody saw it. My mother-in-law thought that I had, like, taken some kind of, like, fireworks and thrown it up in the air. [laughs]

JAD: [laughs]

MARK MORRISON: She's like, "What did you do?" I'm like, "I didn't do anything." So what I did was I started trying to Google it, and there's—you know, I mean, imagine trying to Google that. You're not gonna find anything. [laughs]

JAD: What—what did you type into Google?

MARK MORRISON: Sphere of light floating indoors. [laughs]

JAD: [laughs]

MARK MORRISON: I didn't—I didn't get very far. Yeah. But I just—I just wanted to get to the bottom of it.

JAD: And so what Mark did is he sat down on a computer, and he typed up this email, basically saying ...

MARK MORRISON: Like, what the hell is this thing?

JAD: And then he sent that email into the void.

ROBERT: Which would be us. [laughs]

JAD: Which would be us.

ROBERT: We are the void. Yes. [laughs]

JAD: To our email inbox. And, you know, it sat around for a while, because we tend to get these kinds of questions ...

ROBERT: A lot.

TRACIE HUNTE: Are there more stars in the universe or grains of sand on Earth?

JAD: A lot a lot.

TRACIE: Is it cleaner beneath the sticker of the apple?

JAD: Why do some birds walk and others hop?

TRACIE: How do fish hear?

JAD: Why are horses special?

ROBERT: We get things like ...

TRACIE: What's up with traffic jams?

JAD: Random questions like...

SOREN: If helium is a finite resource, why are we wasting it on balloons?

ROBERT: A lot of poop questions.

TRACIE: Why is different animal's poop shaped differently?

JAD: Yep, a lot of poop.

TRACIE: What happens when you flush a toilet on the equator?

JAD: And they just sort of pile up. We sort of put them in this bucket.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: And then feel guilty about not answering them. And over the years ...

ROBERT: Well, they keep coming, so the bucket gets fuller and fuller.

JAD: And fuller!

ROBERT: So finally, today we decided okay, lets just dump the bucket out.

[phone rings]

JAD: And so we're gonna try and answer some of these questions today. A bunch of us.

[phone rings]

MARTIN UMAN: Hello?

JAD: Beginning with the question about the orb.

JAD: Can I speak to Martin, please?

MARTIN UMAN: You're talking to him.

JAD: Trying to answer Mark's question, I called up a guy named Martin Uman.

MARTIN UMAN: Professor of electrical and computer engineering, University of Florida.

JAD: Thank you. Is this still a good time to chat?

MARTIN UMAN: It's about the only time, because I've gotta go to dinner in about 10 minutes.

JAD: All right. Excellent. So we'll just jump right in.

MARTIN UMAN: All right. How long we gonna talk?

JAD: So I told Martin the story of thunderstorm—boom!—glowing orb—poof!—glowing orb gone.

MARTIN UMAN: Yeah.

JAD: So maybe I'll just put the most basic question to you: like, what is that?

MARTIN UMAN: Well, that observation is not uncommon, and it's called—generally called ball lightning.

JAD: Ball lightning?

MARTIN UMAN: Yeah. That's what it's called.

JAD: And according to Martin, ball lightning is timeless.

MARTIN UMAN: Ancient Greeks described exactly this same thing, and in the 19th century and 18th century, they used to commonly come down the chimney, come out the fireplace.

JAD: Oh, wow!

JAD: But now, says Martin, we are living in an electronic world, and so these balls of lightning ...

MARTIN UMAN: Sometimes come out of a wall socket, sometimes out of a telephone.

JAD: Huh.

MARTIN UMAN: And they happen in airplanes. They happen in submarines.

JAD: Whoa! That actually—that's been reported?

MARTIN UMAN: Yeah. Lightning strikes outside an airplane, and a ball comes through the windshield and floats down the whole plane.

JAD: What? If I'm in that plane, I'm thinking ...

MARTIN UMAN: You're gonna hope you have your diaper on, right?

JAD: [laughs]

MARTIN UMAN: Wear your Depends.

JAD: [laughs]

MARTIN UMAN: Any time you've got electrical stuff going on, you can make a ball of fire like that.

JAD: So do we know anything about what causes—what it is exactly? Is it just another form of lightning that somehow manages to ball itself up and hang around?

MARTIN UMAN: Well, probably.

JAD: Martin is actually one of the few people who has studied ball lightning in the lab. He actually got funded by DARPA to try and figure out how it works. Wasn't quite able to. He says what's likely happening is that when a bolt of lighting strikes, it might hit something.

MARTIN UMAN: Soil, water, tree.

JAD: Whatever it is, some substance ...

MARTIN UMAN: Gets lit up and somehow forms itself into a sphere, like a balloon or a bubble, or something.

JAD: Like, if you imagine lightning hits some dust, shocks the dust, changes its chemistry so that it forms some kind of spherical scaffolding, and then the lightning sticks to the scaffolding or something?

MARTIN UMAN: Maybe that's what's happening, but you can't prove it. I mean, there's some theory which indicates that that might happen, but if you go into the laboratory and you try to make it, you can't make it. So you can't prove it. And if you get a book on ball lightning, or you get my book and look at the chapter on ball lightning, you'll see probably a list of 50 different theories that people have come up with.

JAD: Huh!

MARTIN UMAN: From all the way to black holes, and discontinuities in time-space, and things that are just, you know, completely almost out of this world. So they remain a mystery, but a well-observed mystery.

JAD: Hmm.

MARTIN UMAN: Did you know that people don't have any good math for how lightning gets started in a cloud?

JAD: Really? I didn't know that.

MARTIN UMAN: We don't know how—what—how lightning can get started. It shouldn't be able to.

JAD: It shouldn't? Really? Based on what? The math says there's not enough ...

MARTIN UMAN: Based on all the measurements that have been made of the conditions in clouds.

JAD: Huh! So you're saying ...

MARTIN UMAN: The world is full of things that aren't understood. Almost nothing is understood.

JAD: [laughs]

MARTIN UMAN: We're floundering around.

JAD: [laughs] Does—do you find yourself thinking about ball lightning, and then suddenly you're just tiptoeing into an existential crisis ...

MARTIN UMAN: [laughs]

JAD: ... about how little we know of the world?

MARTIN UMAN: Well, how I make my living is trying to uncover little—little more bits by little more bits, but yeah, there's lots that isn't known about everything.

ROBERT: Next up, producer Tracie Hunte goes on a field trip to some very hallowed ground.

TRACIE HUNTE: Man, I think I've finally reached the library.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The New York Public Library ...]

ROBERT: The New York Public Library.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Within its white marble walls is stored the sum of man's wisdom.]

ROBERT: Which, in its glory days ...

TRACIE: Okay, so right here in the grand hall, there's, like, beautiful chandeliers all over the place, these gorgeous columns.

ROBERT: ... was filled with ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Seven floors of stacks.]

ROBERT: ... millions of books.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: In every field of human endeavor.]

ROBERT: Row, upon row, upon row of shelves.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Eighty miles of shelves, close to 50 centuries of human thinking and experience.]

ROBERT: And every year, millions of visitors like Tracie would walk through these hallowed halls ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Each has a question.]

ROBERT: ... with questions fueled by curiosity, the desire for truth, for knowledge, for wisdom, people trying to unravel the mysteries of the universe.

TRACIE: I came here to ask them a question about catnip.

JAD: Catnip? [laughs]

TRACIE: Yes, catnip.

JAD: Why? Why catnip?

TRACIE: Oh, and I should back up. So we actually got, like, 500 questions from our listeners, so I thought it might be a good idea to take some of them to the library.

TRACIE: Hi, Rosa?

TRACIE: So I met up with this woman.

ROSA LI: It's nice to meet you.

TRACIE: I'm Tracie. Nice to meet you, Rosa.

TRACIE: And she walked me into this office. There's about, like, I don't know, 12 people sitting at their desks.

TRACIE: Why don't you just introduce yourself?

ROSA LI: Okay, sure. So my name is Rosa LI. I manage Ask NYPL, and I've been in this department for about five years.

ROBERT: Ask NY-what?

TRACIE: Ask NYPL. It's (917) ASK-NYPL. I'm putting the phone number out there. And if you call them and you ask them a question, it's their job to answer it.

ROSA LI: Yes. So we are like a call center, so our typical day starts with questions.

TRACIE: Like, in your typical day, how many phone calls do you get?

ROSA LI: Typical day about 150-200.

TRACIE: And Rosa was telling me that most of the questions they get are ...

ROSA LI: What will the weather be like this weekend?

TRACIE: ... very boring.

ROSA LI: Hey, my library card expired or I want to renew this book.

TRACIE: But, you know, also they get some weird ones.

ROSA LI: We take them all.

TRACIE: Yeah. So I got a list right here, and in the past they've gotten things like, "What kind of apple did Eve eat?", "Is it proper to go alone to Reno to get a divorce?", "Any statistics on the life span of the abandoned woman?", "Do camels have to be licensed in India?", "What is the natural enemy of the duck?", "Can I get a book telling me how to be a mistress of ceremonies at a musical orgy?", "What does it mean when you dreamed you're being chased by an elephant?"

ROBERT: And do they answer all those?

TRACIE: They'll try to.

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: So, you know, I was maybe a little dismissive for a few of them. I mean, all the questions, of course, are very important. We welcome all questions, please.

TRACIE: This, by the way, is Bernard.

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: Bernard Van Maarseveen.

TRACIE: He has been working for Ask NYPL since about 2001. And so the question—like, he did answer my catnip question, which is ...

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: Do large feline species like tigers and lions have the same reaction to catnip as domestic cats? Yes.

TRACIE: Yes. All cats like catnip!

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: Apparently tigers, at least.

TRACIE: But, you know, I had all these questions, so I actually had them pick one that they thought was super interesting.

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: Yeah.

TRACIE: Which one did you pick to answer?

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: Let me get the exact wording on it.

TRACIE: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: So yeah, so here we go. "Could you play a meaningful game of Frisbee on the surface of Mars?"

TRACIE: Yeah.

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: And ...

TRACIE: Yeah, I really liked that one.

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: Yeah, that was a good one.

TRACIE: [laughs]

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: And I think the word that makes it, like, just really shine is ...

TRACIE: "Meaningful."

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: ... "meaningful."

TRACIE: So the first thing he does ...

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: You want to get me kinda doing some—some searching, you know, back of the envelope kind of stuff here?

TRACIE: And he—I guess I was a little disappointed that we didn't bust out any, like, books.

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: I'm just looking up Frisbee aerodynamics.

TRACIE: He literally just turned to his computer and started Googling.

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: How does a Frisbee behave here on Earth? The spin of the Frisbee, of course the lift, drag ...

TRACIE: So he looks all that stuff up.

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: Let's see.

TRACIE: Then he looked up, like, aerodynamics ...

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: On Mars.

TRACIE: ... on Mars.

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: It's very thin, the air there, so ...

TRACIE: Because the air is so thin on Mars, you wouldn't get that spinning, lifting thing that you always get with Frisbees.

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: It might not have the same sort of hovering effect that a Frisbee does here on Earth. It probably would be more like just throwing a ball.

TRACIE: It would just go—frumph.

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: Ten feet away, 15 feet away.

JAD: I don't think that that counts as a meaningful game of Frisbee.

TRACIE: But, you know, you could still throw it back and forth. [laughs]

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: But meaningful? [laughs]

TRACIE: Well ...

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: To me, the question is, like, you're playing Frisbee on Mars. I mean, that's just inherently ...

TRACIE: So it's already—it's already meaningful.

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: ... meaningful.

TRACIE: Okay.

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: You know, growing up, I remember seeing, you know, rebroadcasts of, you know, like the astronauts on the moon ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Shepard: Houston, while you’re looking that up, you might recognize what I have in my hand is the ...]

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: Playing golf.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Shepard: ... handle for the contingency sample return; it just so happens to have a genuine six iron on the bottom of it. In my left hand, I have a little white pellet that's familiar to millions of Americans. I'll drop it down.]

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: And I'm sure that they were not playing, like, you know, PGA golf.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Shepard: I'm going to try a little sand-trap shot here.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Edgar Mitchell: You got more dirt than ball that time.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Shepard: Got more dirt than ball. Here we go again.]

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: They were just, you know, amateur duffers, but ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Shepard: Here we go.]

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: ... they were golfing on the moon.

TRACIE: [laughs]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Shepard: Straight as a die. One more. Miles and miles and miles.]

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: I mean, to me that's pretty great.

TRACIE: That's pretty—that's pretty impressive.

BERNARD VAN MAARSEVEEN: So the venue kind of makes the whole endeavor meaningful, I think, in its way.

ROBERT: Thanks to producer Tracie.

TRACIE: Wait. I actually did ask them my dragons question.

ROBERT: Oh. Oh, well then next up, Tracie Hunte and dragons.

CHRISTINA HARDQUIST: Hi, this is Christina.

TRACIE: Hi, this is Tracie. Hi. This is Tracie.

CHRISTINA HARDQUIST: Oh, hey. Hey. Oh, you called me back.

TRACIE: This question is from Christina Hardquist.

CHRISTINA HARDQUIST: I'm native of Novato.

TRACIE: Out in Northern California.

CHRISTINA HARDQUIST: And I was born and raised here, so yeah, love this place.

TRACIE: And you—and what was your question to us, if you remember what it was, roughly?

CHRISTINA HARDQUIST: Yeah, so I came across this article about these creatures called olms, that I guess were being, you know, washed out of these caves in Eastern Europe.

TRACIE: What are they called?

CHRISTINA HARDQUIST: Olms, O-L-M. These sort of like blind, cave-dwelling amphibians. They're totally white. Their skin is translucent, very, like, other-worldly. And the article touched on the idea that, you know, folklore thought that these little creatures were actually like dragon babies being pushed out of—of these caves where these huge dragons lived. So I started digging into it a little bit, and of course you can only find so much on the internet, but there was this idea of dragons being a sort of like a universal myth across, you know, different disparate cultures. And ...

TRACIE: Christina started to wonder why it seemed that so many cultures all over the world all had myths about dragons.

CHRISTINA HARDQUIST: What is about, like, humans that cause them to believe in these, like, huge, scary, fire-breathing animals?

JAD: Is that true that cultures all over the world have dragons?

TRACIE: Well, sorta. You have the Northern European dragon that we're all familiar with.

ROBERT: Uh-huh.

TRACIE: Then there's the Chinese dragon, which is a little different. It doesn't have wings. It doesn't breathe fire. Then there's other dragon-looking sorta things. The Nanabolele.

ROBERT: The Nanabolele.

TRACIE: Among the Basotho people of Southern Africa. There's the Amaru associated with the Incan empire.

ADRIENNE MAYOR: Yeah, I think there's no doubt that we have fabulous, awesome creatures like dragons in almost every culture in the world.

TRACIE: So this is Adrienne Mayor.

ADRIENNE MAYOR: I'm a research scholar in the classics department at Stanford, and I'm most interested in is what sorts of things found in nature might have led pre-scientific people to believe that dragons or monsters or other fantastic creatures really existed, at least in the past or even maybe in the present.

TRACIE: Adrienne actually wrote a book called The First Fossil Hunters that lays out this theory that a lot of these stories were actually based on people finding old, you know, fossils and bones.

ADRIENNE MAYOR: Fossil bones, or teeth or claws or footprints embedded in stone.

ROBERT: So they'd see a set of old bones that they couldn't explain with any modern creatures, so the creature they go to is this dragon-shaped thing?

TRACIE: Yes, but ...

ADRIENNE MAYOR: I do want to point out, though, that we can never know for certain which comes first: the observations of mysterious traces of unknown animals or the stories of dragons. We don't know which comes first.

TRACIE: She says it could be that the story about the dragon was already there, and then when they found some bones, they just sort of applied those bones to the dragon myth.

JAD: Well, if—if the dragon came before the bones, where did it come from?

TRACIE: Well, there's another theory.

ADRIENNE MAYOR: Some scholars have said they're like monsters of the id. They arise from ancient memories of very real predators that were faced by our ancestors

TRACIE: Basically, dragons are composites of these creatures that used to eat us and hunt us and kill us, like crocodiles.

ADRIENNE MAYOR: Saber-tooth tigers and ...

TRACIE: Lions.

ADRIENNE MAYOR: ... cave bears, gigantic serpents.

TRACIE: Snakes.

ADRIENNE MAYOR: Pythons

TRACIE: Condors.

ADRIENNE MAYOR: Giant raptors.

TRACIE: So you can take, like, the scaly skin of the crocodile, the claws of the saber-tooth tiger, and its saber teeth, the wings of these raptors, put them all together ...

ROBERT: Oh, so this is all the old terrors rolled into one. Like—boom! Together.

TRACIE: Yeah. They tap into all those fears that already—are already inside of us. In theory.

ROBERT: I'm gonna go for that one.

JAD: Yeah, I like that. That works. That feels like an answer.

PAULA FAIRFIELD: Well, you know, like, they're very powerful. I mean, they could be very scary, they could be very destructive. But what's kind of magical in Game Of Thrones is that the intimate scenes also melt your heart and bring you closer to these creatures that should be, you know, burning your face off.

TRACIE: Okay, so I should admit that I actually just used this whole dragon thing to talk to this lady from Game Of Thrones.

ROBERT: This whole thing was ...

JAD: [laughs]

TRACIE: Her name is Paula Fairfield, and she makes all the dragon noises for Game Of Thrones.

JAD: Oh, she makes the dragons?

TRACIE: Right.

ROBERT: Well, what did you ask her, I guess is the real question. What did you want to know?

TRACIE: Well, I wanted to know—like, I wanted to know, like, how does she make these sounds? And it was really interesting because, you know, we're talking a little bit about, you know, how dragons are composite creatures.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

TRACIE: And she basically uses composites to make these noises.

PAULA FAIRFIELD: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I absolutely ...

TRACIE: She takes the noises from birds.

PAULA FAIRFIELD: Screechy, shrieky bird sounds.

TRACIE: Insects.

PAULA FAIRFIELD: Different kinds of reptilian recordings and stuff.

JAD: Is it always the scary animals?

TRACIE: Well, it depends on what dragon that she—you know, which of the dragons that she's trying to actually create a performance for.

PAULA FAIRFIELD: I have sounds I might choose simply by certain personality traits that I might want to push forward. So in the case of Drogon ...

TRACIE: So on the show, there's Daenerys, who's this dragon queen. And she has three dragons, and one of them is named Drogon.

PAULA FAIRFIELD: And she named that dragon after Khal Drogo, her hot late husband. [laughs]

TRACIE: [laughs]

PAULA FAIRFIELD: So Drogon is like her lover.

TRACIE: He kind of has, like, a very affectionate and sensual relationship with her.

PAULA FAIRFIELD: He's whistling at her all the time. He's looking at her butt and goin', "Ooh baby!" [laughs]

TRACIE: And so in order to kind of push forward this sort of like, dragon sexual tension, I guess, she uses the sounds of ...

PAULA FAIRFIELD: Two giant tortoises, you know, mating.

JAD: Oh, that's...

ROBERT: Giant tortoises.

JAD: Wow!

ROBERT: What does that sound like?

TRACIE: Well, you know. I'll just play it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Tortoises mating]

JAD: Whoa!

ROBERT: Oh.

PAULA FAIRFIELD: But the groan of the male actually became—with some work and, you know, adjustments and stuff, became the source, the basis for Drogon's purr with her.

TRACIE: With Daenerys.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Game of Thrones: Drogon, we need to return! My people need me.]

PAULA FAIRFIELD: The funny thing about the purr with Drogon was watching people watch it and giggling when they heard it, but not really knowing why. To me, it's because it had that essence, that kind of sensual, sexual essence, that purr. So yeah, yeah, I use from all kinds of things, and, you know, I also used for dragonfly wings to make that kind of funny flutter of the thorns as it's moving, like especially on the end of his tail this year. As he moved through there was like a chitter, and that was like dragonfly wings.

JAD: Dragonfly wings?

TRACIE: Yeah.

ROBERT: Really?

TRACIE: I was wondering if you ever had a question about dragons that you would like to have answered?

PAULA FAIRFIELD: You know, no, it's curious because I think the thing that differentiates the dragons from creatures and makes them slightly otherworldly is the fire thing. Where did the idea for that come along?

JAD: That's a good question.

ROBERT: Yeah, where did that come from?

ADRIENNE MAYOR: Well, there are many theories about that.

TRACIE: Actually, I threw that question back to Adrienne Mayor.

ADRIENNE MAYOR: The one that I like is connected to the devastating weapon called Greek Fire.

TRACIE: Which was this unquenchable fire.

ADRIENNE MAYOR: It can't be put out by water. In fact, it burns in water, and so it was a naval weapon. And I believe that scholars have found that some of the nozzles for blasting Greek Fire were shaped like dragons, so that the boat looked like it had a dragon on board breathing fire at the enemy ships.

JAD: Oh, that's so cool! Wow!

ADRIENNE MAYOR: And just stories of they had dragons that breathed fire would make it back to—to Northern Europe. That's the best theory I've heard.

JAD: Oh, that's interesting. So it's like if the dragon is a composite of all the things, creatures that have scared us, now we're a part of that composite.

ROBERT: Our technology becomes part of the creature that frightens us.

JAD: Thanks Tracie.

TRACIE: You're welcome!

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Who is ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: What is ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: What is ah, ah ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Um, what is ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Huh.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Who is ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Hmm.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Anything coming to mind?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: What is a ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Say something. Hurry.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It's a fedora.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Should have known that.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: You should have known that. All right we're gonna take a break.]

[LISTENER: This is Marnie Campbell from the beautiful banks of Lake Washington in Seattle, Washington. 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: Jad.

ROBERT: Robert.

JAD: Radiolab.

ROBERT: And we are back.

JAD: With more questions. Next one comes from producer Rachael Cusick.

RACHAEL CUSICK: So this question comes from Liam Humburger from Denver, Colorado.

LIAM HUMBERGER: I was browsing memes on my Instagram feed, and there was this scene where the picture was of the husband and wife trying to go to sleep. The wife was looking away, and she was, like, looking irritated, and then the husband was looking, like, just kind of confused on the opposite side of the bed. And the caption was her, "He's probably thinking of other girls," and then him, "I wonder if I've ever bought milk from the same cow twice."

ROBERT: What'd he say?

JAD: I wonder what?

RACHAEL: Yeah, so he said, "I wonder if I've ever bought milk from the same cow twice." So if I go to the store, I buy a gallon of milk, and then I go back maybe a week later, I get another gallon of milk, what are the odds that the same cow is in both of those gallons of milk?

ROBERT: I see.

ART BENJAMIN: I would say the answer is almost certainly yes. A hundred percent.

RACHAEL: That's Art Benjamin. He's a math professor.

ART BENJAMIN: At Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, and I'm also a mathemagician.

JAD: And how is he so sure it's 100 percent?

RACHAEL: Well, according to Art Benjamin, it all comes down to ...

ART BENJAMIN: Probability, statistics, and dare I say, calculus.

RACHAEL: [laughs]

RACHAEL: So take a farm like Dale's here ...

DALE MATTOON: Okay, here we go. My name is Dale Mattoon, Pine Hollow Dairy.

RACHAEL: Dale has about a thousand cows, and 20 at a time, these cows walk into a milking parlor. They line up. It looks like a wishbone.

DALE MATTOON: All day and all night long.

RACHAEL: And they get hooked up with these black rubber hoses.

DALE MATTOON: The air you're hearing every once in a while is the guy putting the machine on a cow, and he hits the button that turns on the vacuum, and then he ...

RACHAEL: Pumps the milk out of their udders into this big hose along the bottom of the floor.

DALE MATTOON: Running through the hose down into this line.

RACHAEL: And it's meeting up with the milk from the other cows. And then it goes from that room into another room where it gets cooled down.

DALE MATTOON: This is the milk out. Put your hand on this pipe.

RACHAEL: Oh my gosh, it's cold! There's condensation on it.

DALE MATTOON: It's very cold.

RACHAEL: Once it's cooled down, it goes into this rocket ship-looking thing outside called a 'milk silo,' where all the milk from Dale's farm is just hanging out together. The silo gets filled up and up and up until it's full.

DALE MATTOON: We're sending out over 8,000 gallons of milk a day on a tractor trailer.

RACHAEL: This truck comes along, picks up that milk. And it stops at another farm, and another farm, and another farm until the truck is full.

DALE MATTOON: Right full.

RACHAEL: It goes to the processing plant. And once you're at the processing plant, all that milk is just mixed around even more with milk from all the cows in the region. And ...

ART BENJAMIN: On a second look, I still have my back of the envelope that had the calculation here.

RACHAEL: ... here's where the math comes in.

ART BENJAMIN: There are about 90,000 drops of milk in a gallon, and—oh, I don't know, 100,000 cows who are contributing to a particular processing plant.

RACHAEL: When you run the odds a drop of milk from any one cow getting into any particular gallon ...

ART BENJAMIN: It's probably the case every gallon of milk contains most of those cows contributing.

RACHAEL: And here's the thing: in one drop of milk you could probably have a bunch of different milk molecules from a bunch of different cows.

ART BENJAMIN: And so one glass of milk might have thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of different cow molecules in my glass of milk.

RACHAEL: Wow, that's crazy! Oh my gosh!

ART BENJAMIN: [laughs]

RACHAEL: So going back to Liam's original question, Art's argument is that when you're drinking a glass of milk, there's, like, so many different bits of milk from so many different cows ...

ART BENJAMIN: That it's probably the case that after just two glasses of milk, you're almost certain to have a cow that was represented in both of them.

RACHAEL: So you're bound to run into at least a little bit of one of those 100,000 cows again.

ART BENJAMIN: The point being that every glass of milk has thousands and thousands of different cows contributing to it.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: A little bit of 10,000 cows in every glass. Wow!

ROBERT: In every glass of milk.

RACHAEL: [laughs]

JAD: I love that!

ROBERT: I don't know that I do.

JAD: No, it's great. It's like you're enjoying the collective efforts of this entire species almost.

RACHAEL: [laughs]

ROBERT: No. No, I think it should be the product of one or two cows that you can picture in your head and maybe pat on the nose.

RACHAEL: [laughs]

ROBERT: "Thank you," you could say.

RACHAEL: Yeah, I don't know. I'm with both of you. I feel like it weirds me out, but I also think it's kind of cool at the same time.

JAD: Well, you know, but come to think of it, what happens if you drink a glass of milk in New York, get on a plane, fly to Atlanta, then have another glass of milk. Are you getting the same 10,000 in each glass, or are they a different 10,000?

RACHAEL: Yeah, so I tried calling around a little bit to answer that question, and it seems like no one really wants to pay to ship milk that far, and so basically, a different processing plant might mean a whole different group of cows.

JAD: Oh!

ROBERT: Oh!

RACHAEL: Yeah. If you really want to figure exactly which plant your milk is coming from, you can go to WhereIsMyMilkFrom.com

ROBERT: Really?

RACHAEL: Yeah. And you input the little code on the top of your carton, and see how often that number comes up again. Each processing plant has its own code.

JAD: Thank you, Rachel.

RACHAEL: Thank you! And just a big thanks to dairy farmer Dale Mattoon over at Pine Hollow Dairy.

RACHAEL: Are you a big milk drinker?

DALE MATTOON: Oh, yeah.

RACHAEL: How often do you drink milk?

DALE MATTOON: Oh well, I have it on my cereal in the morning, and I have a glass or two for lunch and a glass or two for dinner. Probably two glasses each meal. If I don't drink milk, I don't feel good. Like, if I go away on vacation, and a lot of times you go ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The cow gives milk, cartons and cartons of milk.]

[phone ringing]

MATT KIELTY: It's ringing.

MATT: All right, this next one came from a couple.

MARIE: Hello?

MATT: A married couple.

MATT: Hello, is this Marie?

MARIE: Yep.

MATT: This is Matt Kielty calling from Radiolab. How are you?

MARIE: I'm good, thanks. I have you on speakerphone, and Zack is right here.

MATT: Oh, hey Zack.

ZACK: Hi Matt.

MATT: How's it going?

MARIE: Good.

ZACK: Good.

MATT: So Zack and Marie, it was years ago actually, they sent us an email about what I think is like one of the most confounding, perplexing, mysterious devices that you can find inside of anybody's home.

MATT: Okay, so the microwave. I guess what I was wondering is how—one, why were you microwaving peppers? And two, do you remember the moment this happened?

MARIE: Oh, I know what it is. I know exactly what happened. So ...

MATT: Okay, so quick scene set. Portland, Maine. A kitchen around dinner time.

ZACK: I think we were, like, cooking a tomato sauce.

MATT: Zack was on bell pepper duty.

MARIE: Trying to take a shortcut: stick them in the microwave to make them a little warm or soft or something. And I said, "Oh Zack, don't put those in the microwave. They'll spark."

MATT: And Zack was just like ...

ZACK: Hmm.

MARIE: "You're crazy." [laughs]

ZACK: Hogwash. I don't believe you at all. And ...

MATT: Marie's like, "No, no, no."

MARIE: I remember seeing it as a kid.

MATT: She said there was a couple times her mom put some peppers in a microwave and they sparked.

MARIE: Yes.

ZACK: My first thought was that ...

MARIE: My memory was wrong.

ZACK: That's what I thought was that your memory was wrong.

MATT: Like, there must have been a piece of metal in the microwave. You just don't remember that.

ZACK: And that's what was sparking out, because vegetables wouldn't do that.

MATT: And this is going back and forth, and yes and no, and sparks and nothing until ...

ZACK: I think it was like we have the ability to find this out, and prove that it's wrong.

MATT: So that was like five years ago in the past, so we decided that we would actually do our own experiment in the present to get to the bottom of this. Do green peppers spark in the microwave?

[car drives past]

MATT: Maserati.

MATT: First things first, I actually went and bought a microwave.

MAN: [laughs] Hey, how's it going?

MATT: Off a guy on Craigslist.

MATT: Yeah, so fifty bucks?

MAN: Fifty bucks.

MATT: Fifty bucks. All right.

MAN: All gravy.

MATT: Then carried it, like ...

MATT: Ugh! All right.

MATT: ... eight blocks back to work.

MATT: Holy [bleep].

MATT: Also, bought a bunch of groceries because we were gonna do more than just the peppers test, and for reasons I'd rather not get into, I decided not to start with the peppers.

MATT: Baby carrots.

ANNIE MCEWEN: Baby carrots or just little carrots?

MATT: Yeah.

MATT: Producer Annie McEwen

ANNIE: I used to work in a kitchen.

MATT: Really?

ANNIE: Yeah.

MATT: Couldn't tell.

ANNIE: [laughs]

MATT: Carrots. Okay.

MATT: And as the great Ronco says of infomercial fame ...

ANNIE: I don't know who the great Ronco is. Great Ronco?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Set it and forget it!]

MATT: All right, two minutes. Let's see what happens.

ANNIE: Okay.

MATT: And then all of a sudden ...

ANNIE: My God!

MATT: ... this little yellow spark just shot out from one of our slices of carrots.

ANNIE: [laughs] That was crazy. This little spark. Oh yeah, there!

MATT: You see another one?

ANNIE: Yeah. I just saw a little flash. Wow, a little tiny spark!

MATT: Mmm, carrots!

ANNIE: Mmm, carrots! Okay, next.

MATT: Kale.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Set it and forget it!]

MATT: This is where it gets a little crazy, because the kale ...

MATT: Oh!

ANNIE: There!

MATT: Same thing.

ANNIE: What?

MATT: Boom boom boom.

MATT: Sparks.

ANNIE: It's smoke. It's—there's smoke. Let's stop it. There's smoke, I smell smoke! Smell that. Jesus.

MATT: Delicioso!

ANNIE: That is smoke.

MATT: We're gonna try blueberries.

ANNIE: Ready? Set it ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: And forget it!]

MATT: Whoa!

ANNIE: Whoa, it's hot!

MATT: We started to draw a bit of a crowd in the studio.

MAN: Why was electricity coming out of the blueberry?

MATT: Up next ...

ANNIE: Grapes, grapitos.

MATT: Grapes.

ANNIE: Grapatitis, grapaninis.

MATT: Ready?

ANNIE: Ready.

MATT: Time cook.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Set it and forget it!]

ANNIE: Whoa, my God! Look at it go!

MATT: All right, what's up next?

ANNIE: Okay, jumbo franks.

MATT: I got turkey franks. Set it.

ANNIE: Spread it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: And forget it!]

ANNIE: Oh! Oh, I saw one! Oh my gosh!

MATT: Okay, pepper.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Set it and forget it!]

ANNIE: Oh, whoa!

MATT: Okay, both red and green bell peppers. Green was crazy.

MATT: Yay, peppers!

[applause]

MATT: We also threw in some diced-up tomatoes, pears, decorative gourd.

ANNIE: [singing] Are we gonna get fired for this?

MATT: And also ...

MATT: Whoa!

MATT: ... a Flaming Lips CD.

MATT: There we go! Who needs fireworks when you got a CD in the—this is crazy!

MATT: Stop, stop. Everyone stop.

ANNIE: Yeah, because I don't wanna—yeah, is it gonna—it looks like it was on fire.

WOMAN: Is it smoky in here?

ANNIE: Yes, it's definitely smoking.

MATT: Whoa, that smells really bad. All right, let's take a break.

ANNIE: Yeah, we want to keep this door open.

MATT: What did you say to Marie after the peppers sparked in the microwave?

ZACK: I think I was—I don't know, I was probably speechless.

MARIE: [laughs]

ZACK: I was, "Can't believe that you're right about this."

MATT: And Marie, did you say anything in return?

MARIE: Probably something to the effect of, "I told you so."

MATT: So peppers spark in the microwave. That was settled, but then there was the debate about ...

ZACK: Marie doesn't believe my understanding of how microwaves work.

MATT: Why?

ZACK: Maybe it's just that pepper has a lot of moisture in it?

MATT: Zack means you put the pepper in the microwave, all that water gets really hot.

ZACK: The skin acts as, like, tinder, and that lights on fire quickly.

MATT: But Marie ...

MARIE: We always have peppers in house, and I think that the green ones taste a little bit metallic.

MATT: To her it's like, maybe these peppers just have, like, some little bit of metal in there that's sparking.

MARIE: Yeah. So is your next step to find the appropriate scientist?

MATT: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm definitely gonna try and put this case to bed.

MAN: Yeah, just give us one moment.

MATT: So I ended up tracking down this woman.

MATT: Is it Caroline or Carolyn? Is it ...

CAROLINE ROSS: It's Caroline.

MATT: Caroline, okay.

MATT: Her name is Caroline Ross.

CAROLINE ROSS: I'm a professor in the department of material science and engineering at MIT.

MATT: An experienced microwaver?

CAROLINE ROSS: I've done it with roast potatoes.

MATT: Oh, you've seen sparks.

CAROLINE ROSS: Yeah, I've seen sparks from roast potatoes.

MATT: Huh. All right. So yeah, maybe we should just like ...

MATT: So I asked her, in the case of the peppers or, you know, the roast potatoes, or the grapes, like all the different food that we tried, like, what happens in a microwave that makes the food just go, like—blrrrp?

CAROLINE ROSS: Right.

MATT: So let's say I got some pieces of pepper, put them in the microwave. I press start. Like, what—what happens next?

CAROLINE ROSS: Okay, so there is a gadget in the microwave oven that produces the microwaves. It's called a magnetron, and it's an interesting thing in itself.

MATT: Okay, quick side note: it's basically like this hunk of metal that makes the microwaves, but Caroline told me this really cool thing, which is it actually used to be used in World War II for radar.

CAROLINE ROSS: That was in the' 40's. And in 1945, there was an engineer at Raytheon who was working on these devices, and he found that some candy bar he had in his pocket got hot.

MATT: He's like, "Oh, this cooks food." And so eventually, a magnatron got thrown inside of a metal box, and thus was born the microwave.

CAROLINE ROSS: So it's an interesting thing in itself, but it produces a beam of microwaves, and they bounce around inside the microwave oven, moving at the speed of light.

MATT: And what are they—are they pounding into the pepper? Or maybe they not pound but, like, shooting into the pepper?

CAROLINE ROSS: They're being absorbed.

MATT: Absorbed.

CAROLINE ROSS: Yeah, they're being absorbed. And these microwaves, they are the right kind of frequency to cause the molecules in food to oscillate back and forth.

MATT: Oh!

CAROLINE ROSS: You put a pepper in there, so the pepper's got a lot of water in it. It's got other things as well. And those molecules start absorbing the microwaves and dancing back and forth, and hitting each other, and heating up. And then that bit gets even hotter and even hotter, and eventually, it could burst into flames.

MATT: But that is not what we're seeing with our pepper or any of the food in the microwave.

JAD: It's not.

MATT: No, because as Caroline explained to me, a flame is very different than a spark.

CAROLINE ROSS: So one thing to keep in mind is that the pepper is fairly conductive. It's got all this water in it. We know that water can conduct electricity.

MATT: Mm-hmm.

CAROLINE ROSS: And the water isn't pure. It has a lot of salts dissolved in it.

MATT: Ah, okay.

CAROLINE ROSS: Minerals, things like that. In that sense, it's a little bit like a piece of metal. Metal, as we know, absorbs microwave energy rather well.

MATT: As we all know.

CAROLINE ROSS: Yes. [laughs] So ...

MATT: Okay, let's say you get these pieces of pepper in a microwave, and they're, you know, heating up. Now the thing is, the microwave, like the wave itself ...

CAROLINE ROSS: It has an electric field, which oscillates back and forth at rather a high frequency.

MATT: So when these microwaves shoot into these pieces of pepper, what happens is this electricity starts ...

CAROLINE ROSS: Swishing back and forth ...

MATT: ... through the bits of pepper.

CAROLINE ROSS: So there's a current flowing.

MATT: And as more microwaves are absorbed into these bits of pepper ...

CAROLINE ROSS: You can get quite big currents.

MATT: Currents so big that they create electric field around the food.

CAROLINE ROSS: And that electric field builds up and up and up, and eventually, it's big enough to cause the air to glow around the food.

MATT: Because now there's actually electricity coursing through the air.

CAROLINE ROSS: Like a florescent light bulb.

MATT: And Caroline says at this point you can start to see ...

CAROLINE ROSS: These glowing balls of gas floating.

MATT: It's actually the air turning into plasma. Now back in the center of the microwave are little bits of pepper where there is still this electrical current ...

CAROLINE ROSS: Swishing back and forth through those bits of pepper. And if you have sharp corners ...

MATT: Like the actual corner of a pepper, or even on the skin, like these tiny microscopic little points, the electricity in the pepper, the electricity in the air ...

CAROLINE ROSS: Can get concentrated at those sharp corners like a lightning rod.

MATT: And at those corners, the electricity will just build and build and build, until ...

ANNIE: Whoa!

CAROLINE ROSS: You get a mini lightning bolt.

ANNIE: Why? Why? Why?

MATT: And then Caroline said that everything in the microwave just sort of calms down.

CAROLINE ROSS: Until the electric field builds up again, and it does it all over, letting loose these mini lightning bolts. So it's a very dynamic process. You've got things being ionized. You've got things recombining. You've got charge flowing. You've got light being emitted. Things get hot. There's a big current flowing, all for that tiny fraction of a second. A lot of quantum physics in there.

MATT: [laughs]

CAROLINE ROSS: [laughs]

MATT: And then we hear a little ding!

CAROLINE ROSS: Yep.

MATT: And then ...

CAROLINE ROSS: We're done.

MATT: And then we're done. But ...

MATT: I just had one last job to do.

MATT: How you two doing?

MARIE: We're good.

ZACK: Good.

MATT: Okay. All right, so I think ...

MATT: Called up Zack and Marie. Told them everything I learned about their sparking pepper, and that even though both of them didn't have the exact theory, like Zack was right, water's an important part. And Marie was, you know, kind of on with something with this metal thing.

MARIE: Yep.

MATT: It feels like it's almost like a little bit like a marriage of sorts, pardon the pun, between both your ideas that kind of is what is happening inside this black box.

ZACK: Right.

MATT: So yeah.

ZACK: So I think we were—we had some of the elements there.

MATT: Yeah. Yeah.

ZACK: Yeah.

MATT: So that's—that's about it.

MARIE: Okay.

ZACK: Excellent.

MATT: Oh, there was one thing that I actually thought was kind of interesting in all these questions we were getting in, there was this tiny little pattern of married couples sending us in ...

MARIE: [laughs]

MATT: ... arguments that they got in. There was one couple that was, like—they were arguing about the nutritional value of microwaving a potato.

MARIE: [laughs]

MATT: There was another couple that sent in a very long email about how they'd been debating about how we perceive color.

MARIE: We've actually had a similar dispute.

ZACK: Yeah, that's true.

MATT: Oh. Over color?

MARIE: It was the couch?

ZACK: Oh, yeah.

MATT: [laughs]

MARIE: There was a couch that we had. It was some sort of, like, drab tone that I thought was green and you thought was brown.

ZACK: Gray. I was ...

MARIE: Gray. Okay.

ZACK: Yeah. I think I—yeah, we had that couch for, like, between different houses and different combinations for probably, like, five or six years, and maybe seven years, ten years? And ...

MARIE: Put a lot of life in it.

ZACK: And I was—yeah, I always thought it was gray, and still do. But apparently, you and your sister thought it was green. We, like, lived together for years, and just never realized you're seeing something completely differently. [laughs] I'm like, "What do you mean our green couch? I had no idea we even have a green couch."

ROBERT: Producer Matt Kielty. All right. So that's just a few of the questions you asked us, which we tried to answer. But that's just the first part of our effort. We have another whole sequence of questions and answers coming up.

JAD: So if your question hasn't been answered yet, hang tight.

ROBERT: You never know, the next batch ...

JAD: You never know.

ROBERT: ... could include your question.

JAD: And it's coming very, very soon.

MAN: Why do humans have two feet?

WOMAN: When are we gonna be able to fax a pencil?

WOMAN: Do the little leaves go through the little headphone string? I don't know.

[indistinct questions]

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[MARIE: Hi this is Marie Mueller calling from Portland, Maine, with Nora Mueller and Calvin Mueller in the background. Radiolab was created by Jab Abumrad and is produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design, Maria Matasar-Padilla is our managing director. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, David Gebel, Bethel Habte, Tracie Hunte, Matt Kielty, Robert Krulwich, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Malissa O'Donnell, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters1 and Molly Webster, with help from Amanda Aronczyk, Shima Oliaee, David Fuchs, Nigar Fatali, Phoebe Wang and Katie Ferguson. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris. Thanks, Radiolab!]

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