Episode Transcript
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1:16
Hey Bird. Hey Noah. You wanted
1:19
to show me something? Yeah, something
1:21
really strange just happened.
1:23
Okay. It's our 100th episode this week,
1:26
as you know, and I was looking
1:28
through our vault of old episodes.
1:31
Vault. You were
1:33
looking through our Google spreadsheet. I
1:35
was looking through our vault of
1:38
old episodes, just like scrolling
1:40
through. And I noticed
1:43
this tab
1:44
at the bottom of the Google spreadsheet that I'd
1:46
never seen before. Do you see that tab?
1:49
The library of unexandria.
1:51
What is this? Yeah. So
1:55
if you open it up. Are these episodes?
1:59
I think so. I'm not totally
2:01
sure, I just came to find you as soon as I saw this.
2:04
There are thousands of
2:06
them. Yeah, and look at the dates.
2:09
October 1879? Yeah.
2:15
1215? Who made these episodes? Also,
2:19
how did they record them hundreds
2:21
of years ago? I honestly
2:24
have no idea, and I don't have any
2:26
way of figuring this out. This
2:30
may be just one of those magic Narnia
2:32
situations. Do we
2:34
know what's in these episodes? I
2:37
don't know. I wonder if you can
2:40
preview it like we can in our normal Google
2:42
Doc, like if you scroll over. Sure, try the 1879 one. Okay,
2:46
here we go.
2:48
This week on Unexplainable, can
2:50
we use this new telephone thing
2:53
to talk to ghosts? And if we made
2:55
contact, would we even understand
2:57
them?
2:59
That sounds a lot like you. I
3:02
don't know, a little more nasal than me. Do
3:06
you think this one sounds like me?
3:08
I don't know, try another one.
3:10
Okay, this one is from 1380. This
3:15
is so goofy.
3:17
This week on the show, in the
3:19
afterlife,
3:20
are we going to have all the
3:22
fingernails we've ever grown?
3:24
And what counts as part of the body
3:27
anyway?
3:29
Now that sounds like you. Yeah,
3:31
except I would never ask
3:33
those questions, like ghost telephones,
3:35
afterlife fingernails. Do
3:38
you think like,
3:40
I mean, I guess these are just the things that
3:42
people found
3:44
unexplainable in the past, right? Yeah,
3:46
I guess that's kind of
3:47
interesting.
3:49
I figured obviously, like the answers we get
3:51
from science would change over time, but it never really
3:53
occurred to me that the
3:54
questions would have been so different back then.
3:57
I wonder
3:59
if those questions... could help us
4:01
understand how people thought
4:04
about science in the past, or how
4:06
science is
4:08
shaped by the world around us. Should
4:11
we listen to an episode? Oh, I mean,
4:14
obviously we need to listen to an episode.
4:19
Which one do you think we should do?
4:20
I don't know. I mean, it's our 100th episode. Let's
4:23
just do an episode from the year 100. Does
4:25
it go back that far?
4:27
Let's see. We got 1200, 700.
4:30
Yeah, here
4:34
we go.
4:35
100 CE.
4:37
Ready? Ready.
4:41
Okay, I'm Nemo. I'm Bard.
4:44
It's unexplainable. And Bard, this
4:46
week I want to tell you about a mystery
4:49
that changed the course of world
4:51
history. Ooh. Yeah, it
4:53
happened back at the Battle of Actium.
4:55
Heard of it. Of course. Who
4:57
hasn't? Yeah, it's the battle
5:00
that happened 130 years ago back in 31 BCE. Mark
5:04
Antony and Cleopatra lost to
5:07
Octavian, who... Right, right, right. ...ended
5:09
up becoming Augustus Caesar and essentially
5:12
started the Roman Empire as we know it today.
5:15
Hail Caesar. Hail Caesar. So
5:18
basically, the battle's going down in this
5:20
strait on the west side of Greece. Mark
5:23
Antony's ships are at the north side of the strait. Mark Antony's
5:25
are at the south side. And you
5:27
know, there's all this fighting going on. Typical
5:31
stuff. Typical stuff. But then, at one point,
5:33
this really weird thing happens.
5:36
Mark Antony's ships just stop.
5:40
They stop moving? They stop moving. They
5:42
sit there for like three hours. And
5:45
then when they finally start moving, they're just going
5:48
really, really slowly. So
5:50
Octavian could just destroy
5:52
them all. They're basically like sitting ducks. Was
5:56
this like,
5:57
godly interference? Like, what happened
5:59
here?
5:59
Experts aren't really sure,
6:02
but the best working theory
6:04
they have has to do with little
6:07
fish. Little fish?
6:10
Tiny fish. So, you
6:13
know those fish that, like, stick to
6:15
the bottom of sharks? I don't know
6:17
how familiar you are with the undersides of sharks. Yeah, not
6:19
super. I haven't examined any shark underbellies
6:22
of late. That's fine, but basically
6:24
there are these, you know, little fish on the undersides
6:27
of sharks. They're called remora. And
6:29
they don't just stick to sharks,
6:31
they stick to ships. And
6:35
apparently they can slow down ships.
6:38
Like, remora actually means delay in
6:40
Latin. So they're literally delay
6:42
fish. Exactly. Okay. And
6:45
apparently sailors know all about this. They've
6:47
talked about pulling the fish off the boats,
6:50
and then the boats start going again. So
6:53
how, like, what, how are they
6:55
doing this? Yeah, that is basically
6:58
the question that I want to get into this
7:00
week. That's this week's unexplainable? That's
7:02
this week's unexplainable. How can remora slow
7:05
down boats? Is it something particular
7:07
about the remora themselves? Or
7:10
can these little fish actually teach us something
7:12
about the fundamental structure
7:15
of the universe?
7:30
Okay, so Bart, I wanted to figure
7:32
out exactly how remora, these
7:34
delay fish, work. So I got
7:36
in touch with someone who knows all about
7:38
this kind of thing. My name is Darius Aquifolius.
7:41
I'm a natural philosopher with a particular
7:43
interest in questions
7:46
of physics and the origins
7:49
of life. Darius told me that natural
7:51
philosophers are pretty sure remora
7:53
aren't just, like, swimming really fast
7:55
in the opposite direction of the boats. There
7:58
might be something more... fundamental
8:00
happening here, which has to do with these two major
8:03
forces in the universe called sympathy
8:06
and antipathy. So sympathy and antipathy
8:08
are essentially two sides of the same coin.
8:11
Antipathy's are where things oppose each other, sympathies
8:13
are when things work in concert together.
8:17
Dari said it's helpful to think of like a lyre,
8:19
you know, like a musical instrument. If
8:22
I have a lyre and somebody
8:24
else plucks a string on their lyre nearby,
8:27
it causes the same string on my lyre
8:29
to vibrate, even though they're across
8:31
a distance. And this is an example
8:33
of sympathetic vibration. Yeah,
8:35
I've seen this before. You don't touch the
8:38
second string, but for some reason it's also vibrating
8:40
even though the first string is vibrating. Yeah,
8:42
and it's not just music, like think about the moon. When
8:45
at night the moon comes up, that causes
8:48
dew to emerge from plants
8:50
and my laundry that I left out or whatever.
8:53
So dew is also sympathy
8:56
or sympathetic. Yeah, I mean it happens
8:58
because of sympathy. So the moon can
9:01
bring the dew out of the grass even though it's far
9:03
away, just like the lyre strings can make strings
9:05
on another lyre vibrate. Okay. Or
9:08
the clearest example here honestly might just be magnets.
9:11
Magnets attract iron, so there's an obvious
9:13
sympathy there. And
9:16
then on the flip side you have antipathy.
9:18
So this is... Chariots
9:22
going by, one sec. So
9:25
antipathy is when things stop
9:27
other things from happening. Water, for
9:30
example, always puts out a fire. Even
9:32
in relatively small amounts it can put out a fire.
9:34
Or just like garlic in general is
9:37
just super antipathetic. It just stops
9:40
all kinds of things. If I boil it in honey,
9:42
for example, it's really good for a cough. If
9:44
I boil it in milk, it can help you with a cold. There
9:47
must be some sort of power in the garlic, is the
9:49
thinking, that causes it to act
9:52
against a power that's in the body
9:54
that you want to try and get rid of. It
9:56
can keep scorpions and snakes away. You know,
9:58
it
9:59
literally...
9:59
Oh yeah, I mean the
10:02
garlic magnet effect. Like everyone knows that
10:04
when garlic gets on sympathetic things like
10:06
magnets, it just totally wrecks them. Destroys
10:09
them. But just to get back
10:11
to the Remora that slowed down
10:14
boats question from the
10:16
beginning of the episode,
10:19
are we saying that
10:20
Remora are antipathetic?
10:24
Like is that what's going on here? So natural
10:26
philosophers aren't fully
10:29
sure here. One idea is
10:31
that these Remora are
10:33
just naturally antipathetic. They're like
10:35
garlic. They just slow things down. And
10:37
it kind of makes sense if you think about it, right? Like they're on
10:39
the bottoms of sharks. They suck energy from the
10:41
sharks. So if they're on the bottom of ships, they would
10:44
kind of slow down ships. But
10:47
they aren't really sure if Remora
10:49
are just a naturally antipathetic
10:51
thing in a way like garlic is, or if there's
10:54
something particular in this connection
10:56
with boats. I only know of it stopping
10:58
ships, so it might only have that power. I'm
11:01
not sure what else it does. Remora
11:03
might just work on oceany things
11:06
like sharks and boats, but
11:08
it's also possible they're so antipathetic
11:10
that they might break magnets just
11:12
like garlic does. And figuring that
11:15
out isn't really easy because
11:17
magnetic rocks like lodestones, they're
11:19
super rare. They're hard to
11:21
get. Natural philosophers might not be
11:24
all that into the idea of putting antipathetic
11:26
things on them and potentially breaking
11:29
their magnets. And we might just not
11:32
need to test that, right? Like Daria
11:34
says there's all kinds of things we just
11:36
accept as obvious without necessarily
11:38
testing them. I don't need to smash
11:40
a battering ram into a tassel
11:43
to know what effect it's going to have. Right,
11:45
right, right, right. But honestly trying this out
11:47
and putting Remora on magnets, it
11:50
could be worth the risk. Like
11:52
if Remora really are so generally
11:55
antipathetic that they slow down more
11:57
than just boats, you know that
11:59
could be a super powerful tool and
12:02
it might be worth testing because Daria says that even
12:04
if things seem obvious there's
12:06
always a chance we can learn something new. Any
12:11
given theory could be proved wrong
12:13
I mean if we go back 400 years we can
12:16
see that people didn't understand sympathy
12:19
and antipathy Aristotle doesn't talk about it really Plato
12:21
certainly doesn't have it and how
12:24
that could be the case I don't understand but it's not
12:26
there. The fact that these great
12:28
natural philosophers had no idea about
12:31
these basic fundamental forces of the world
12:34
it just makes you wonder a little bit like
12:37
what are the kinds of things that we don't
12:39
know about how the world works.
12:42
And so we have to be attuned to new facts coming
12:44
in we live in a world where our knowledge
12:47
even of other cultures other societies
12:49
is growing who knows what they've got
12:51
out there that might challenge us
12:54
or enrich our scientific
12:56
theories.
13:00
Okay that was different.
13:05
Also kind of the
13:07
same weirdly. Yeah I mean
13:09
it sounded like an unexplainable episode just
13:12
you know all the science was kind of wacky
13:14
and fish-centric. A
13:20
couple of fish can't slow down like a whole
13:22
fleet of boats
13:24
right?
13:25
Yeah I feel pretty confident
13:27
they don't I also feel pretty sure that
13:29
garlic doesn't stop magnets
13:31
from working but
13:33
you know like I also feel like Darius
13:36
and these ancient natural philosophers they weren't just saying
13:38
these things randomly
13:41
like they
13:41
did seem to have real justifications
13:44
and
13:46
they did seem to be thinking through these questions
13:48
systematically like scientists do now.
13:50
I see that I see sort of how
13:52
they're
13:53
systematically thinking through things
13:56
but I think what I still want to understand
13:58
is like
14:00
What does their sort of
14:03
rational working through the arguments
14:06
teach us about ancient
14:09
science or just about like science
14:11
overall?
14:12
You know, I do actually know a guy who
14:15
studies ancient science. Do
14:17
you want to talk to him? Like just
14:19
ask him these questions? Yeah,
14:21
how about this? I'll call him up and
14:24
I'll tell you what I find out in a minute.
14:26
Okay. See you after the break.
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And when I see a solar eclipse like the one
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I went to last year in Hawaii, I think, oh
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no, is the moon eating
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the sun? I don't know,
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because I'm a caveman. That's the way
17:02
I think.
17:04
Okay, bird, we're back. Here we
17:07
are. And
17:08
it's been a journey. So want to just
17:10
maybe recap the couple
17:13
thousands of years we've covered so far. Um,
17:15
so we heard
17:17
an episode from the year 100 CE
17:21
about
17:23
a lot of things, but I guess like garlic
17:26
making magnets not work, and fish
17:28
slowing down boats.
17:30
And it's all because of like sympathy
17:32
and antipathy. Sure.
17:34
And then I was wondering, one,
17:37
like, what, like,
17:40
why would people believe something like that? And also
17:42
sort of what does it tell us about
17:44
the past? And then you said
17:46
you knew a guy who might be able to
17:48
explain all that for us. And then you said you would
17:51
tell me all about it after the break. And
17:53
now it's after the break. Yeah,
17:55
amazing summary. So
17:58
I went and talked to this professor named Darren
18:00
Lahoo. I'm a professor of classics
18:03
and a professor of philosophy at Queens University
18:05
and my research specialization is
18:08
ancient science and medicine.
18:10
Wow, he sounds both perfect and
18:12
a lot like Darius Aquifolius.
18:15
Yeah, weird coincidence, but
18:18
Darren essentially studies what
18:20
kinds of questions people
18:22
used to ask themselves in the past. So
18:25
like why do Remora stop boats? Things
18:27
that might seem weird or even kind of out there today.
18:30
So we had a long conversation
18:32
that I'm going to play for you and I found it really
18:35
fascinating because he told me that despite
18:37
how weird they might sound on the surface, there's a
18:39
ton we can learn when we analyze these kind
18:42
of ancient questions. You know, one
18:44
of the things that is interesting to me is
18:46
to ask why I believe in
18:48
the science I believe in. And what's interesting
18:50
is when you go back in time to
18:52
a world where a lot of what
18:55
they believed about nature is
18:57
from a modern point of view false and
19:00
yet they had really good reasons for believing
19:02
it. What does that say about
19:04
my own good reasons for believing in modern
19:07
science? And yeah, at the same time,
19:09
how
19:10
much of the science I believe in now is
19:12
still going to be true in 300, 400, 500 years. If I treat history as
19:14
a great big experiment, I
19:19
have to say maybe not much. I
19:21
don't know what it'll look like. But the fact that everything
19:24
I believe about the universe could be wrong
19:26
at some fundamental level is kind
19:28
of humbling. And so I find looking
19:30
at old science and science
19:32
that we would now say is really very wrong.
19:35
Looking at how that becomes plausible
19:38
when you think your way into it is really
19:40
revealing of my own understanding of
19:42
science and my own fallibilities.
19:45
Yeah. So the thing that really stands
19:47
out to me more than anything is this discussion
19:50
of garlic. As
19:52
part of this weirder discussion of Remora
19:54
stopping boats, we learn that, oh, it's
19:56
just obvious it's taken for granted
19:58
that. are like stops magnets
20:01
from working. Does that
20:03
idea sound ridiculous to you on
20:05
the surface? Is that a ridiculous idea? It
20:08
made me laugh out loud the first time
20:10
I read it. Okay. And
20:12
I've always had this kind of general operating principle
20:15
that the things that make me laugh should
20:17
be looked into more seriously. It's
20:20
a good principle. There's always some truth hiding
20:22
in there. Yeah. And then I thought,
20:25
wait, how do I know that's wrong? And
20:28
I immediately went, well, I know how magnets work and
20:31
I have a sense of what garlic is and
20:33
what its applications are and so on. It's got nothing to do with
20:35
magnets. So it's a dumb idea. And
20:37
then you say, okay,
20:38
why does Ptolemy or
20:41
Plutarch think that getting
20:43
garlic on your magnets is gonna negate them? And why
20:45
do they think it's so obvious? That's
20:47
the part that grabs me. Exactly. And I
20:49
think the reason they think it's so obvious is that they've
20:52
classified these objects as having
20:54
a certain kind of property that turns out to be
20:56
quite closely related. So magnets
20:59
are sympathetic to iron. They draw iron
21:01
in towards them. Garlic is used in ancient
21:04
medicine quite widely as a kind of antipathetic
21:07
agent. It cuts through certain
21:09
kinds of humors. It repels certain
21:11
kinds of things. And so it's got this push
21:13
away quality to it. A magnet's got a drawing
21:16
in quality to it. And so you can immediately
21:18
see that since they're the same kind
21:20
of thing that work in exactly opposite ways,
21:22
you maybe shouldn't put them together because you'll have some
21:25
kind of negation or reaction or something.
21:28
Yeah, and I guess it's so obvious there's
21:30
kind of a limited desire to even test
21:33
it, right? Yeah, I don't know how many lodestones
21:35
are kicking around in people's houses and
21:37
things in antiquity, but I don't imagine there's a lot of them. They're
21:40
probably reasonably rare and therefore
21:42
reasonably valuable. And if
21:44
I've got something nice that does cool
21:47
things and I show it off to my friends, I don't wanna
21:49
break it. How
21:52
do ideas like this that seem so unquestionably
21:55
obvious
21:58
end up
21:59
totally changing? changing, like whether we're talking about garlic
22:01
and magnets or just
22:04
big ideas in general.
22:05
I tend to take a case by case
22:08
approach to this to look at sort of specific contexts
22:10
where it might have happened. But a more
22:13
general approach is something like what you see in Thomas
22:15
Kuhn, who talks about scientific
22:17
paradigms, which are sort of overarching
22:19
ways of understanding or
22:21
explaining the things that go on in the universe.
22:24
We could be explaining why rocks fall, and
22:26
we could be explaining why the moon orbits the earth. But
22:29
the explanation for it in Aristotle is
22:32
a different paradigm than the explanation for it
22:34
that I would give now. But
22:36
slowly over time, there are little questions
22:39
that are annoying that we can't
22:41
quite fit into the theory. And
22:44
at first, we patch that up. This happens with
22:46
Ptolemaic astronomy. And
22:49
Ptolemy? Ptolemy is the greatest astronomer
22:51
before Copernicus. Yeah. And if
22:54
you look at the way that the Ptolemaic system worked,
22:56
where the earth is at the center of the universe and all the planets are
22:58
orbiting around it, that works fine.
23:01
But over time, you start noticing
23:03
little problems, little problems, little bits that aren't easily
23:06
explained necessarily. You have to kind of fudge
23:08
things in order to make it work. And
23:10
eventually, those become so intolerable that
23:12
people throw the whole system away and start again. So
23:14
Copernicus says, no, let's try putting the sun at the center
23:17
and moving the earth around it. That's
23:19
a really there are going to be people pulling their
23:21
hair out over this when I say this, because it's really
23:23
too simplified what I've just said. But it gives you an
23:25
idea of how Kuhn's theory is supposed to work. Yeah.
23:28
The idea is that little problems are
23:30
in the background. We ignore them
23:32
for a while. And eventually, these little problems
23:34
get too loud to ignore and we have to question
23:36
our basic assumptions. That's it. So
23:39
is there anything like that today, like
23:42
places where we have little problems
23:44
that we might eventually need to pull the whole
23:46
rug out and sort of change paradigms?
23:49
I mean, one of the things that we have, you
23:52
know, one of the big examples I always go
23:54
back to is just the fact that we've got in modern
23:56
physics, one kind of physics for
23:58
little tiny things and then in
23:59
entirely different kind of physics for great big
24:02
things. And we can't join
24:04
the dots between those two sets of theory.
24:07
That would be quantum mechanics and general
24:09
relativity? Exactly. Okay. You
24:12
know, if we're looking at the ways in which electrons behave or photons behave,
24:14
we go to quantum mechanics. But if we're looking at the way planets
24:16
behave, we run to general relativity. And
24:19
we don't have anything to bridge those two sets
24:22
of explanations, which
24:24
as a historian, you look at that situation, you say,
24:27
either we're going to come up with something really interesting
24:29
that brings the two things together. Or
24:32
we're going to come up with something really interesting that just gets rid
24:34
of those two things and has a completely different
24:36
explanatory framework. But
24:38
in the meantime, we're just waltzing along
24:41
with these two different things that don't talk to each other
24:43
and acting as though there's not
24:45
really a deep seated problem there.
24:48
Yeah.
24:49
I don't know. Is there anything about the
24:51
current way we do science that might make it
24:53
less likely to have to rethink some of these
24:56
major aspects of our worldview? Like, we're
24:58
not exactly running around talking
25:01
about garlic and magnets anymore. We
25:03
have a, I mean, modern science is amazing. But
25:05
at the same time, I don't think we're doing anything qualitatively
25:09
different from what ancient scientists
25:11
were doing in the ways in which we investigate
25:14
questions. And we can disagree on this. I mean,
25:16
I have, I have arguments with this among my colleagues,
25:19
but I don't think we've got anything new going
25:21
on here. I think we still are using the basic
25:24
tools of logic, basic tools of empiricism.
25:27
We're testing different variables, we're isolating variables.
25:29
All of those approaches are there in the ancient
25:31
sources. And when
25:34
you're teaching the history of science, as I do,
25:36
one of the main things that you have to counter,
25:39
something you have to fight against, is a general
25:41
sort of feeling that students have or people
25:43
in the general public have, that in
25:45
antiquity, the solutions were simpler, that
25:48
people were thinking in simpler terms or
25:50
something like that. But if you dig into Ptolemaic
25:52
astronomy, or Aristotelian biology,
25:55
any ancient science, these
25:57
things are elaborated by really smart
25:59
people. as fully as they can
26:01
elaborate them. You know, these theories were really, really
26:04
deeply complex, even
26:06
though they're very different from what we now have. It's not
26:08
that they're simple. There's nothing simple about
26:10
any of this. And then I guess the
26:12
lesson is, if we don't just say,
26:15
ha ha, these questions were dumb,
26:18
we can see how seriously ancient scientists
26:20
took them. They were just these
26:23
really different bedrock assumptions about
26:25
the world, which eventually changed.
26:27
And it's not like
26:29
we're definitely gonna have one of those pull the rug
26:31
out moments today. But if we look at ancient
26:33
science, we can see that it's at least plausible
26:36
that we might have to question some of our assumptions,
26:38
even if we're really confident.
26:40
I would agree with that wholeheartedly. I think about
26:43
one of the Hippocratic texts called On Ancient
26:45
Medicine, where the author of that
26:47
text, it's pretty clear, because
26:49
we're able to do so much and so
26:51
successfully, our theories of medicine
26:54
must be right. And this is the
26:56
fourth century BC. I don't think that
26:58
guy was good at healing people. If I
27:00
had a choice between my doctor and that
27:02
person, I'm not choosing that person
27:05
for pretty much any of my ailments, I don't
27:07
think. And yet we have this example
27:10
of somebody who was really wrong and
27:12
thought they were right. And so we can't be
27:15
nearly done yet. There must be some really
27:17
interesting and major changes to come still,
27:20
even though we seem to have it pretty well,
27:23
but that anybody would have said that at any time
27:25
in the history of science. And at any time in
27:27
the history of science, there's gonna
27:30
be
27:31
more knowledge after you than there is before.
27:33
Right, that's absolutely true. It's a nice way to put
27:35
it too. I mean, anybody who was ever doing
27:37
any kind of science at all was always
27:40
at the cutting edge of modernity. They were the newest
27:42
thing. As soon as they put their pen down to paper, it was
27:44
the newest thing being written on the subject. It
27:46
was the latest, most modern,
27:49
cutting-edgist stuff. That's
27:52
true of us, that was true of Ptolemy. And
27:54
that part of it gives me what I
27:57
think would be really healthy for all of us,
27:59
a deep. epistemic humility, the
28:01
feeling that I get when I look at ancient science and
28:03
see how they are so
28:06
proud of what they have and then I'm
28:08
so impressed by what we have as a society,
28:10
is to remember that as you said, there's so much
28:12
more future ahead of us than
28:15
you can imagine and who knows, I mean it would be
28:17
amazing if we could just see what's going to happen 500 years
28:19
from now, I think. It'd
28:21
be incredible. Daron
28:32
LeHoux is the author of What Did the Romans Know?
28:34
which gets much deeper into questions like, why
28:38
did Romans think that garlic breaks magnets? He's
28:41
also very good at pretending to be a Roman philosopher
28:44
and we are very grateful to him for bringing Darius
28:46
Aquifolius to life. Do
28:50
you know how much magnets cost? You would just wreck
28:52
them. I haven't tried
28:54
running a bulldozer into a supercollider either, but
28:56
oh, I'm out of characters. This episode was produced by Noam Hassenfeld
28:59
and me, Bird Pinkerton. It was edited
29:01
by Brian Resnick with help from A. Hall and
29:03
Meredith Hodnot, who manages our team. We
29:07
had sound design and mixing from Christian Ayala and
29:09
music from Noam. Serena
29:12
Solon checked our files and we had a
29:14
lot
29:14
of fun. Thank you so much
29:16
to Claire Bubb and Candida Moss for being
29:18
so generous with their time and advice
29:20
on this episode.
29:21
And thanks to all of you for listening to our
29:23
show. We literally would not
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have made 100 episodes without you. If
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you have a question, please feel
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free to ask. We're always
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29:40
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maybe we take a week off and the week after
31:01
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after that, the week after that, the week
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after that, the
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week after that, the week after that,
31:07
the week
31:15
after that. I'm NH 3000. I'm
31:18
Juliana electronica. And
31:20
this week on unexplainable.
31:22
One of the most important breakthroughs
31:24
of the 26th century has finally
31:27
allowed us to ask what might be the most important
31:29
question of all. Who
31:32
is our universe
31:34
and could its favorite color help
31:36
explain the behavior of even the tiniest
31:39
particles?
31:41
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