JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I am Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab, and today—[bleep] it! Elements, we're doing it. We're doing it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, "The Elements" – Tom Lehrer: [singing] There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium, and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium, and nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium, and iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium, europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium, and lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium, and gold, protactinium and indium and gallium, and iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.]

ROBERT: Satirist Tom Lehrer.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, "The Elements" – Tom Lehrer: [singing] There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium, and boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium. There's strontium and silicon and silver and samarium, and bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium and barium.]

JAD: Okay, so we have this periodic table of elements, which is a list of the simplest bits of matter that we know of. And so theoretically everything that we see, everything that we are is made of the stuff that is in that table. That's sort of the beauty of the periodic table is that it describes everything, right?

ROBERT: Well, about 45 years ago a scientist named Vera Rubin was studying the motion of the galaxies. You know how the galaxies just spin in that beautiful way around, like in spirals. Her calculations did not explain why the galaxies were holding together, and she figured, "You know, there's gotta be some stuff that I can't see around the galaxies that explain why they move the way they do." What is that stuff? Whatever it is, it's not interacting with the matter of our world hardly at all. Otherwise we'd see it.

RICK GAITSKELL: That’s indeed why we call it dark. Dark matter is the dominant matter component in the universe.

ROBERT: That's experimental physicist Rick Gaitskell.

RICK GAITSKELL: The stuff you and I are made of, these conventional protons, is the flotsam and jetsam of the matter world. It's cast on a sea of dark matter. We're talking about, in terms of the total composition of the universe—you and I, the stuff we're made of—is four-and-a-half percent.

ROBERT: The other 95.5 percent is this stuff: the dark matter, the dark energy, which theoretically is all around us.

RICK GAITSKELL: If you clap your hands you will have a dark matter particle in your hand. The problem, or the challenge, is that it is so weakly interacting that it will pass straight through you, and in fact will pass straight through the Earth, and will have very little probability of interacting.

JAD: But what if you could get one of these little bastards to interact? Then, I mean forget the periodic table, then you would meet the most fundamental element of them all.

ANDY MILLS: City of Lead, historic home town.

JAD: We're gonna tell you about an experiment now, this bizarre experiment, and we sent our producers Andy Mills, and Damiano Marchetti to check it out.

DAMIANO MARCHETTI: Right here, essentially.

ANDY MILLS: You think it's this close?

JAD: It is happening in South Dakota, in the Black Hills, in this little town called Lead.

ANDY: I have not seen this many trees in so long.

JAD: Incredibly beautiful, picturesque little town, but right near the town as you crest over this hill ...

ANDY: That's it?

DAMIANO: Oh, that's a deep cut!

JAD: ... you'll see this mountain that looks like it's just been torn open.

DAMIANO: No.

ANDY: We pulled over and we walked over to the edge of this thing, and it was like 

peering down into an ancient volcano.

ANDY: That's not what I thought it would look like.

DAMIANO: They just carved out that hill.

DAMIANO: In this town, there is one of the deepest man-made holes on the planet.

ANDY: That's where the experiment is, and it's there because way down deep in that hole ...

KENT MEYERS: It's demonstrably the quietest place in the universe.

ANDY: That is Kent Meyers, he's a writer.

DAMIANO: The quietest thing will make sense in a second.

ANDY: He wrote an article in Harper's Magazine recently that is all about this experiment and this hole.

KENT MEYERS: I was interested in the idea of these frontiers, that the ...

ROBERT: "Fraunteer?" Where are you from? "Fraunteer."

KENT MEYERS: I'm from Minnesota.

ROBERT: Oh, there you go.

KENT MEYERS: People tell me I sound like I'm from the movie Fargo.

ROBERT: Well, let me join them.

KENT MEYERS: [laughs]

ANDY: Anyway, Kent says that this story, it starts off way back in the old west.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: A hearty frontier, wild, rugged.]

DAMIANO: 1874, General Custer and crew.

KENT MYERS: Custer comes out looking for this gold, and finds it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Gold on the mountains, in the rivers, and in the dark depths, far below the surface of the Earth.]

KENT MEYERS: Then just like that, 10,000 people within two years are just invading, illegally invading the Black Hills which were the great Sioux reservation.

ANDY: By 1901, the miners blast 1,500 feet down. By 1927, 3,500 feet down. By 1975 ...

KENT MEYERS: It's 8,000 feet deep.

ANDY: To put that into perspective ...

RICK GAITSKELL: That's a sort of mile and a half.

ROBERT: Did you say a mile and a half? Is that ...

RICK GAITSKELL: Yeah, they literally moved mountains.

KENT MYERS: Oh, it's immense.

ANDY: Imagine six Empire State Buildings going straight down.

ROBERT: And gold is that valuable that you could put that kind of effort and energy, and ...

KENT MEYERS: Isn't that astonishing?

ROBERT: Yeah.

KENT MEYERS: But what happened is that eventually the price of gold dropped to the point 

where the size of mine ...

ANDY: Was just unsustainable.

KENT MEYERS: When you're mining 8.000 feet down, you know, for every foot you go down your price increases, your costs increase. You've got to haul it further, you've got to air-condition the mine.

ANDY: You've got to pump out the ground water.

KENT MEYERS: You have to run electrical lines down there.

ANDY: And so in 2001, after 126 years of being in operation, the mine shut down.

ANDY: Did it create a ghost town? I mean, did ...

KENT MEYERS: Well, this was the fear. This was the fear that we were just gonna have—the whole economy of this part of the country was gonna fall apart, but as this was happening ...

RICK GAITSKELL: We saw an opportunity there.

KENT MEYERS: ... these physicists realized that this was a golden opportunity.

ROBERT: Wait, wait, wait. Before we—I don't—how—do experimental physicists—do they love holes? I mean, is that just an old tradition?

KENT MEYERS: Yeah, they're just in love with holes. They're just like dwarves. [laughs]

ANDY: No, no, no. This is where we get to that idea of quiet. This experiment, it needs a kind of quiet that you cannot find on the surface of the Earth.

RICK GAITSKELL: When you and I are sitting on the surface of the Earth we're not acutely aware of it, but we are being hit by cosmic rays at a rate that, I think, really rather amazes people. If you simply hold your hand out, three or four times a second a cosmic ray is going through your hand. And it's going right through it, and that's every second. So your body is literally bathed in thousands of these every second.

KENT MEYERS: We are just being bombarded with a din.

ANDY: Rick Gaitskell talks about it like being in the middle of a stadium during the Super Bowl.

RICK GAITSKELL: This is as though everybody in this arena is clapping.

ANDY: Now just imagine that in the middle of all this chaos there is one person leaning over to their friend and whispering a secret into their ear.

KENT MEYERS: Dark matter is like the whisper.

RICK GAITSKELL: It'll be lost in the noise.

KENT MEYERS: We have to cut out all this noise in order to even come close to hearing it.

RICK GAITSKELL: And it turns out putting a mile of rock between you and the clappers is taking you a lot of the way there.

ANDY: Yeah, that's a great sound.

ANDY: So Rick took us into this mine through these massive iron doors, down these long, underground tunnels, into a room where we met this guy.

ANDY: What's your name and who are you?

MIKE SUNEESE: Mike Suneese. Grew up in Lead, South Dakota. I'm the fourth generation that's been hanging around the homestake mine.

ANDY: Mike worked at the mine, so did his dad.

MIKE SUNEESE: Both my grandfathers are homestake veterans.

ANDY: Most kids that Mike went to school with, and his dad went to school with, they worked at the mines.

MIKE SUNEESE: And my grandmother's father, on my dad's side, was also a miner.

ANDY: But now ...

DAMIANO: Now he works in a room where he basically equips scientists with all their safety gear and stuff.

MIKE SUNEESE: Got to have your belt on.

ANDY: He gave us these boots and a respirator.

MIKE SUNEESE: You catch on fire, you want to be able to breathe, right?

DAMIANO: That's what you want to hear in the morning.

ANDY: Yeah.

ANDY: And eventually ...

DAMIANO: We climb into this old steel service elevator.

MIKE SUNEESE: A little further. South cage, this is 41.

VOICE ON RADIO: South cage, 41.

MIKE SUNEESE: Lower south cage.

ANDY: And then we just start rocketing downward.

DAMIANO: We're going so fast.

RICK GAITSKELL: The speed of which we're moving is sort of equivalent to the speed of which an airplane—often when it's descending.

DAMIANO: At 1,000 feet our ears pop. At 2,000 feet this sort of wet, muddy smell sort of wafts up.

ANDY: And as we're dropping, all that noise is getting slowly filtered out.

RICK GAITSKELL: We're able to literally use the rock to absorb these cosmic ray particles.

ANDY: After about 10 minutes the elevator stops.

DAMIANO: Whoa!

MIKE SUNEESE: Okay guys, watch your step here.

ANDY: Thank you guys.

DAMIANO: Thank you.

DAMIANO: And we step out, 4,850 feet down.

ANDY: This is a [bleep] cave, man!

ANDY: It looks like a cave. It's got a dome-like ceiling and walls that are just carved rock.

JAD: So what is that sound?

DAMIANO: It's water.

ANDY: That's the sound of rain coming through a whole lot of rock. To be clear, it's not raining outside. It's not raining up in the world. It's just ground water.

DAMIANO: According to Kent, it's costing over a million dollars a year.

KENT MEYERS: Just to run the pumps to drain that water. So that gives you some ...

JAD: A million dollars a year?

KENT MEYERS: Yeah.

DAMIANO: But Rick says down here ...

ANDY: This is the least amount of radiation that we will ever experience in our lives.

RICK GAITSKELL: It is quite dramatic. It's about three million less cosmic rays. So when you 

hold your hand out, less than one every few months.

DAMIANO: January.

RICK GAITSKELL: Coming through your hand now.

DAMIANO: March.

RICK GAITSKELL: But that isn't the end of the story.

MIKE SUNEESE: So we're gonna step inside here. The very first step, we actually have a nice ...

ANDY: It turns out that even if you cut out all of the rays coming from the outside, there are still rays coming off of us.

RICK GAITSKELL: You and I, we carry a certain amount of uranium and thorium, these radioactive elements, in us.

ROBIN BARLIN: Okay, so what we're gonna do is you're going to take your coveralls off.

DAMIANO: A woman named Robin Barlin made us change clothes.

ROBIN BARLIN: So can you take that machine out?

ANDY: Yeah.

ROBIN BARLIN: Okay.

DAMIANO: Scrubbed our stuff.

ROBIN BARLIN: Oh, the microphone. I'm gonna wipe this. Is that okay?

DAMIANO: Yeah.

DAMIANO: And then Rick takes us into the lab where the experiment happens. It's this all-white room with this huge tank in the middle.

RICK GAITSKELL: The tank contains 70,000 gallons of high purity water, and we're directly inside it, and we can, without fear of disrupting the experiment one can ...

ANDY: The experiment actually happens inside this tank.

RICK GAITSKELL: One can bang the outside of the steel container.

ANDY: The whole idea is that this water will actually filter out even more radiation.

RICK GAITSKELL: That makes it very quiet.

DAMIANO: But still, it's not quiet enough.

ANDY: And so inside that tank of water, they put an even smaller tank of the element xenon.

RICK GAITSKELL: About a third of a ton of liquid xenon.

ROBERT: Where do we find xenon on the periodic table? What is this?

RICK GAITSKELL: Xenon is number 54.

ROBERT: 54. 

RICK GAITSKELL: It's over on the right hand side so that we have this imperially-named set of elements we call the noble elements.

ROBERT: You mean they're just too good for everybody else? They interact hardly at all.

RICK GAITSKELL: That's right. You really struggle to make xenon interact with any other atoms.

ANDY: Which is just another way of saying that inside of this tank of xenon, which is inside of this tank of water, which is down in one of the biggest holes ever dug by man, it is really, really, really, really, really quiet.

KENT MEYERS: It's demonstrably the quietest place in the universe. I mean you can't—you don't know that it is because there could be somewhere some quieter place, but as far as we know the center of this lux detector is the quietest place that we human beings know of.

JAD: And what's supposed to happen inside this super-quiet xenon space?

KENT MEYERS: So the idea that you have here is that this cloud of xenon, it's just waiting. And the thought is that when a dark matter particle that's, like, zooming around all the time, when that zooms through this xenon because it is so quiet in there, because there is nothing else happening in there, that dark matter particle, even though it's not supposed to interact with anything from our world, that particle, if it disturbs, if it nudges, in any way, any of the atoms of the xenon, we'll notice it.

DAMIANO: And that tiny little disturbance, whenever it happens, Kent says you can think of that moment as the universe whispering to us.

KENT MEYERS: The whisper—in human nature, the whisper is the point when we really—when we really want to speak intently to a single person, we whisper. You know, we whisper at funerals. We whisper in the presence of awesome things in nature. You know, it's that reduced use of the voice that drops down, and drops down to—only goes into the ear it's intended for. It's Isaiah's call, you know? He's lying on his mat and he hears the whisper because he knows that's for me alone, that call is for me alone. And that's that sense that this experiment gives to me, is that here the universe has been shouting and shouting and shouting at us and we've gathered all this scientific knowledge out of the shock, out of the clapping, out of the cheers. And now where we're at in the 21st century is we're going down to what's it saying in the whisper? And those whispers go clear back to conception. They go clear back to birth. If we understand these whispers, we're very close to understanding gestation. And I got carried away there, but ...

ANDY: Oh, we love it.

KENT MEYERS: But you really—yeah.

JAD: Okay, and did you get to hear the whispers, see the disturbance, whatever it is? Did you meet the dark matter?

DAMIANO: Well, how can I give this to you lightly?

RICK GAITSKELL: Okay, so this is confession time. I've—I've been looking for dark matter for 27 years, and so far we have yet to see a convincing set of interactions that are associated with this dark matter and that's ...

JAD: Nothing at all?

DAMIANO: Yeah, nothing. But Rick hasn't given up hope. I mean, he sort of never gives up hope. I mean, he says maybe we just need to build a bigger, more sensitive detector.

RICK GAITSKELL: That's, of course, exactly what we're doing.

DAMIANO: Instead of their current one, which has a third of a ton of xenon ...

RICK GAITSKELL: We are now designing and building a detector that's going to be 10 tons, you see.

ANDY: He says, even there, who knows?

RICK GAITSKELL: The uncertainty we have to deal with is at least a factor of 10 million.

MIKE SUNEESE: 9,000 RPM, 10,020. 25 ...

DAMIANO: And the other pretty disappointing thing is that when you're in this room, like in the room with the lux detector that's supposed to be the quietest place in the universe, it's loud. It's crazy loud!

ANDY: There are sounds that I can only describe as robots dying. Like, listen to this.

JAD: Was there any moment that was quiet? Like quiet-y-quiet, like deep quiet, feely quiet?

DAMIANO: Well, sort of. After we went to the lux, we had some time to kill, and they took us into the raw part of the mine where they used to mine for gold, and they just sort of walked us through these old tunnels.

ANDY: Are you scared?

DAMIANO: A little bit, yeah.

DAMIANO: And you're walking through the black, and all you hear is, like, the sound of our feet crunching. The wind is being sucked down. It's kind of rushing through the tunnel so you hear—and it's the silence. It's not like the silence of, like, "Oh, this street is really quiet outside of my bedroom." It's got like an energy to it. It's got like this—it's kind of like when you're running, and when you stop running and the absence of your exertion sort of fills you.

ROBERT: Yeah.

DAMIANO: It's like that moment where the absence of the noise sort of becomes palpable. That's, for me, the moment. Not standing in the laboratory. For me, that moment was the moment where I'm like, now I am standing at the center of the xenon. I don't think I ever, ever, have felt that before.

JAD: Producers Damiano Marchetti and Andy Mills.

ROBERT: We have had Damiano with us for almost a year, and it's been a total pleasure. He is moving on, but we wish him—what would you like to wish him?

JAD: I wish him quiet, but the good kind of quiet. You know, the kind that has energy.

ROBERT: Oh, that's nice.

JAD: You know, the whomp, whomp, whomp kind. That kind.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Thank you, Damiano. Huge thanks to Thomas Dooley. We had original music this hour from Oneohtrix Point Never, Sylvan Esso, Kevin Drum, Ken Camden, and Vijay Iyer.

ROBERT: Thanks also to Matt Kapust and to Connie Walter, and to the folks at Sanford Underground Research Facility for letting us visit them and stay, and stay, and ask so many questions and finally leave.

JAD: Yeah. Which is what we're about to do. I'm Jad Abumrad. 

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Message two, new.]

[JAMIE LOWE: This is Jamie Lowe.]

[KENT MYERS: This is Kent Meyers.]

DEREK MULLER: Hey, this is Derek Muller calling to read the credits, and I just wanted to do this because I think all of these peoples' names are awesome. I mean, tell me you don't agree.]

[KENT MEYERS: Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad.]

[DEREK MULLER: Our staff includes Brenna Farrell, Ellen Horne ...]

[KENT MEYERS: ... David Gabel ...]

[JAMIE LOWE: ... Dylan Keefe ...]

[DEREK MULLER: ... Matt Kielty ...]

[JAMIE LOWE: ... Andy Mills ...]

[KENT MEYERS: ... Latif Nasser ...]

[JAMIE LOWE: ... Kelsey Padgett ...]

[DEREK MULLER: ... Arianne Wack ...]

[JAMIE LOWE: ... Molly Webster ...]

[KENT MEYERS: ... Soren Wheeler and Jamie York.]

[DEREK MULLER: Who are these people? It sounds like a crime-fighting team. You know, when you've got the Kelsey Padgett and the Soren Wheeler?]

[JAMIE LOWE: With help from Simon Adler, Kathy Tu, Molly McBride-Jacobson, and Alexandra Leigh Young.]

[KENT MYERS: Our fact checkers are Eva Dasher and Michelle Harris.]

[DEREK MULLER: I mean, tell me those aren't cool names. Eva Dasher? I just love these names. Anyway, thank you so much for having me on the show, and I don't know if you guys have time for a plug, but if you haven't checked out Veritasium, you might just want to go check that out—"the element of truth.” All right, bye.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

 

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