Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello and welcome to The Rest is Science. I'm Michael Stevens.
And I'm Hannah Frey.
And today on Field Notes, we're going to be tackling your questions. And then also, Hannah has brought something. I think it might be a story. I literally don't know.
It is a story. You know, I noticed in the introduction that I used my BBC voice. Did you hear it?
No, I wasn't even listening. To be honest, I was just looking at my own video going, look at that handsome devil. So do your BBC voice again.
It's a bit more formal and I think that might be because my story is about a BBC show that I did where I accidentally almost perfectly predicted the pandemic two years before it happened. Whoops. Whoops. I've got into a lot of trouble for it, I'll be honest. I'm Hannah Fry. Nice, yeah. Do you know what I mean?
It's still definitely you, but it feels like you're not talking to me.
On the spectrum between BBC and Essex, which is, you know, my natural state, I would say that you're closer to the Essex than the BBC.
Let me try to do a BBC voice. Go on. Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Science. I'm Michael Stevens. Oh, that was good.
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Chapter 2: How can outbreak simulations help predict pandemics?
It's almost like American newscaster, really.
That was very good. I was going to say, I think that the only problem with it is that it's, is the accent, I'm afraid. I'm afraid you're sacked.
Hello. My name's Michael Stevens. I dig you to death. That's BBC. That's like... There you go.
Right there. Queen's English. Okay.
Notice how it becomes Southern. And that's because that non-rhotic... Non-rhotic? What's that? There's no R, right? Like both the British and the Southern Americans will drop the R's out. They'll be like, yeah, I'm working down on the farm. But then a British person will be like, I was dancing at the farm, right?
It's much smoother. That's nice. I like that. Can we do an episode on accents at some point? Because I've got to arrange my back catalogue that I can... wheel out at will.
As do I. I have never been shy to show off the range of accents I can do.
That's the best possible hook and tease that we've got for an episode on accents coming up.
That doesn't exist yet. But we're going to start with questions.
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Chapter 3: What unique data was collected during the citizen science experiment?
And that, I think, is very interesting. That, I think, really demonstrates. Because this is something that is testable. This is something that you can recreate so that we can understand how it looks for different people who suffer from red-green colour blindness, for example. And it's so fundamentally different to the experience of the rest of us.
And yet you can go through your life having conversations with people the entire time and never know that you were viewing the world in a fundamentally different way.
That's right. And yet you have access to yourself and your history. So people are aware that something's changed for them. I remember there's a YouTube video you can look up where a guy who has colorblindness talks about how peanuts and peanut butter are extremely different colors to him. Whereas to us, it might change its hue of brown a little bit.
But for him, they were able to show him peanuts and he's like, oh yeah, they're green or whatever. I forget exactly, but it was quite different than a regular vision experience. And then they put the peanuts in a blender and they tell him, tell us when it changes color. And they start spinning them up. And to me, it just looks like the same color, but like fast.
And at a certain point he goes, okay, now it's different. Now it's, you know, now it's become a whole different color. And I'm like, What in the world? Wow. I was plugged into his eyeballs or I don't actually know what was causing it. Let's assume it was the retina because this was a lifelong thing for him. For me, I would experience the same thing.
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Chapter 4: What was the significance of the BBC's pandemic simulation?
I would notice the color change as well because different signals were being sent to my brain. But I might like fix it myself as my brain went, nah, nah, nah, it's supposed to be the same.
Hmm.
I don't know if the illusion would persist. It might be like transplanting parts of my skin. It might go, uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is not helpful.
Chapter 5: How did the pandemic prediction align with real-world events?
This is not what we expected. Let's fix that. But I don't know. We'll have to, we'll have to do these experiments, but it's very hard to do things like this.
My brother-in-law is kind of blind and, um, And so for Christmas one year, I made him a t-shirt where I did one of the, you know, the colorblind tests where you have all the dots and it's one color against the other. So I made him one of those. And in it, it says in a pattern that he couldn't read, F the colorblind.
No kidding. Okay, so first of all, when did he find out?
I think he knew straight away that I was messing with him. We have a sort of Christmas tradition in my family of where we get each other gifts that sort of play on the other people's absolute weaknesses. It's quite an Irish thing.
I love this, yeah.
Yeah, he got me a t-shirt once where I'd done a TV program where I had hosted Have I Got News For You in the UK and at one point I'd done air quotes and someone had made a joke about whether I really was a professor while I was hosting this program.
And so he got me a t-shirt of just a screenshot of me going air quotes and just saying professor in inverted commas as though to really call my credibility into question. So, you know, it's sort of a, it's a running thing.
It's a very great tradition. I'd love to start one of those. But this colorblind shirt, the F the colorblind shirt, that is very similar to the shirt that's coming in the summer curiosity box. Oh, is it? Go on. Instead of making fun of the colorblind, which I do not support, it makes fun of dogs. And so the shirt is red. Okay. It's a red T-shirt, and in white it says, no bones in here.
Because, of course, dogs really like bones. And if a dog knew that I was full of bones, they might want to play with them. So it says in white letters, no bones in here. So any dog sees me, they know this guy doesn't have any bones in him. I'm not going to mess with him. But then in green letters underneath, it says, JK, I'm actually full of bones. Okay.
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Chapter 6: What role does emotional experience play in decision-making?
I'll be honest. Because people use this phrase, it gets thrown around and in your head I think it conjures up a mental image of a ball that's literally spinning. It is absolutely not like that at all. I sort of think in a way it shouldn't be called spin because the analogy only works really on one level. We're not talking about physical spin here.
It's more like a property of the particle that's like mass or electric charge, right? Just in the same ways you can't take away the mass of an electron, you can't take away its spin either. It's like a characteristic of it. But the reason why they've used the word spin is because it's all around how the particle behaves and it's got these similarities to angular momentum.
It's a quantity that gets conserved, essentially.
Can I just interrupt and say my favorite quote about this? I don't know who it came from, but it shows up all the time. It's this definition of quantum spin. So here's the quote. The spin of an electron is like a spinning ball, except that it's not spinning and there is no ball.
So it is metaphorical.
It's important to remember that when people talk about spin. It is a property of particles. Yeah. But you got to just realize there's no actual spinning ball there.
There's no spinning ball there. No. Unless... There is a way, there is a way to get them to spin, to physically spin. The thing is, is that you have to remember that like electrons in particular, for example, it's like a teeny tiny little bar magnet, right? And it has this magnetic field that exists around it and it can align with other magnetic fields that you impose upon it.
So, for example, let's say that I've got an electric field and I have a really heavy magnet, right? Really like meaty magnet. And I put the electric field...
I get so scared because the exact words that you use in this situation, right, field, for example, you have to be so careful to get the exact one right because otherwise, I mean, I'm literally looking at the Department for Theoretical Physics of Cambridge University out of my window. Bring it over. I can feel the judgment, the war judgment of all of those guys. So I'm going to be really careful.
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Chapter 7: How does trust influence public health decisions?
A spin half particle, like an electron, see if you can spot this, a little bit weirder. If you rotate it 360 degrees, it doesn't go back to the same point. You have to rotate it twice, you have to rotate it 720 degrees for it to return to where it started.
Weird.
Which is, I mean, yes, weird it is. This is one of the reasons why Feynman says anyone who says they understand quantum mechanics doesn't understand quantum mechanics.
Chapter 8: How can we better communicate scientific information to the public?
Yeah, it's very non-intuitive. It's very non-intuitive. So we've got all these metaphors, we use words like spin, and yet it's just kind of a thing that we may never truly understand. That said, do we really know what gravity is? Like, we experience it so often it's easy for us to go, oh yeah, I get it, gravity. But really? Like, what's happening?
This is absolutely one of the reasons why people say that the fundamental language of the universe is mathematics, because it becomes so difficult to translate these concepts into words and analogies.
and you lose something in the telling, it's all of this stuff that we're describing here essentially comes out from the structure of an equation and the way that different things relate to one another. So yeah, there we go.
I think at some point, I know this is now the second of these questions that we've said this about, we've got sort of a nested system here where every question we ask, every question we answer reveals itself into a whole new episode. And... which includes more questions and therefore more episodes. It's sort of exponential growth, the rest of science. That's kind of what we're going for here.
But I think at some point we will do something on the very weird nature of quantum and the strangeness that happens when it comes to rotating objects. Because actually, I mean, there is quite a nice little puzzle, I guess, that we could set people between now and when we do a full episode on this, Michael, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Go on, you do it.
That's right. Here's the puzzle. I want you to put out your hand with your palm facing down. And I want you to then rotate your hand such that your palm is up without rotating your arm or wrist. So no rotations allowed, but you can move your hand and you can bend your elbow.
You start off with your palm facing down and your hand flat. And you need to get your thumb pointing in the air without rotating your wrist.
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