Matt Kielty

So a few months after the initial experiment in 1989, something unthinkable happened.

The big jump in history...

The Berlin Wall fell.

Rostock was in East Germany.

And all of a sudden, it just felt like overnight, everything changed.

The currency changed.

The head of state changed.

The university changed its name, its curriculum.

Like, all these very specific things about Reinhardt's day-to-day life all of a sudden just changed.

Cut to six months later.

June 1990, in all the chaos, Reinhardt had totally forgotten about the barrels until one day a colleague of his in his department wanted to do a different experiment and so came to him and was like, hey, could you, it was just bugging him, like, could you just get those barrels out of there?

I was asked to remove these barrels for their own experiments.

So he does it one by one.

So he like takes the one, he like shimmies it over, he dumps it out.

Empty the water and wash out the sediment.

Takes the other one.

So he's sort of doing that.

And then he gets to the control barrel, which is the one in the experiment that they, you know, they had done nothing to.

It was just sitting there under a light source, right?

As a comparison for the other barrels where they were tweaking things.