Hello, unnecessary detail listeners, it's me, Matt Parker. Before the episode starts, I want to let you know that our next big spectacular live show, that's where... where actual humans on a stage will be in London's glamorous West End on Monday the 2nd of December, tickets to Oriental Sale, and they're selling fast. So get over to festivalofspokener.com slash tickets and you can join up to 1,199 other detail fans. In this fantastic theatre, I hope to see you there, and now on with the episode.
Everyone knows therapy is great for solving problems, but getting therapy has its own problems too. Like finding the right therapist, fitting into their schedule, and of course, the cost. Well, better help can solve those problems. It's totally online and built around your schedule. It's surprisingly affordable too.
Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat, all from the comfort of your home. Visit betterhelp.com to learn more, and save 10% on your first month. That's BetterHelpHELP. Since 2013, Bombas has donated over 100 million socks, underwear, and t-shirts to those facing homelessness. If we counted those on air, this ad would last over 1,157 days, but if we counted the time it takes to make a donation possible, it would take just a few clicks.
Because every time you make a purchase, Bombas donate an item to someone who needs it. Go to Bombas.com slash Acast and use code Acast for 20% off your first purchase. That's Bombas.com slash Acast, code Acast. Hello, I'm Steve Mold. I'm Matt Parker. I'm Helen Arnie, and this is a podcast of unnecessary detail. Yes, and we've got more detail than you can shake a stick at, and while we're shaking the stick, we'll also tell you all about the tree that stick came from.
We've reached the episode known as Two Infinity and Beyond. Which raises an issue right out of the gate, if I'm being honest. Okay, it's just a cute quote from Toy Story. We know it's not physically possible to go beyond infinity. It's just, we just thought it was nice. Yeah, I know. Anyway, to avoid upsetting myself, the only quote I'm going to be using from this episode is an alternate Toy Story quote from the franchise.
Because I'm talking about a race between space probes that was powered by a desktop calculator. So I'm going to go with, you've got a friend in me. And I reach for the sky. I'm going for a reach for the sky. Okay, fine. Yes, very good. You could actually, that one's physically plausible. I'll be talking about how it's impossible to get stars in your eyes. Oh, okay. In that case, let's call it. This isn't flying. This is falling with style.
The podcast episode. What? Well, I'm singing about relativity and talking about the spinning orb that most of us spend our entire life stuck to. In that case, we should name the episode. There's a snake in my boot. That doesn't. Well, it's very relative. What kind of snake it is and where it is in your boot. Matt, you're going to carry on with this throughout the entire episode. You're my favorite deputy. You're very welcome. Steve, what do you have for us today?
I'm actually quite pleased with this. I'm not going to lie because it fits very well with the theme. But also it's going to annoy Matt. I can just say what? You are, you are an expert in the field. I'm talking about seeing stars. Here's the thing. When you look at stars, you're looking almost infinitely far away. Oh, what? Which is remarkable. Really? When you think about it? Oh, my. You're not looking infinitely. Carry on. Carry on.
No, no, you're not not saying you're looking infinitely far away, but I'm saying you're looking almost infinitely far away. Doesn't make it better. That makes it almost as bad. Here's the thing. When you look at something, imagine you put your finger right in front of your face and you look at your finger. And think about where your eyes are pointing. Imagine lines coming from your eyeballs that show the direction that your eyes are pointing.
When you're looking at your finger, those lines coming out of your eyes are really crossed over. They're both pointing at your finger. So they're not parallel. They're facing inwards. They're making a little triangle. Whereas if you're looking at something infinitely far away, those lines coming out of your eyes, they would be exactly parallel. I would accept. As you look at something and the distance approach infinitely far away, the direction of your eyeballs approach is parallel.
Okay. Great. Now here's the thing. When you look at stars, your eyeballs are effectively parallel because the difference between the angle of your eyes when you're looking at stars versus the angle of your eyes, if you were looking at something infinitely far away, it's indistinguishable. That difference in angle, you could never measure that. And it falls well within the just the error of your eyeballs as a biological system.
Steve, you're saying as a physicist, you could never measure them. Matt's like, let me try. I'm just saying. What I'm saying is it's incredibly close to infinity compared to infinitely far away, the star is as close to your face as your finger. That's all I'm saying. But I'm totally on board with the angle argument. I'm with you 90 degrees there. That's what I like to hear. The same thing happens with the lens in your eye, of course. You focus on a certain distance.
So if you're looking at your finger, the shape of the lens in your eye changes so that it's in focus. If you're looking at a star, you're essentially focusing at infinity. And in fact, people who deal with optical equipment, they'll use that kind of language all the time. I'll focus these binoculars at infinity. I'm going to focus this camera at infinity. What they're saying is focus infinitely far away. If you put a virtual headset on the chances are those lenses are focused at infinity.
But actually what I really want to talk about besides annoying Matt is the fact that when you look at stars, this really interesting thing happens. I see a star in your peripheral vision and you'll think, oh, there's an interesting star. I'm going to look directly at that. But you would move your eyes to look directly at the star. And when you do that, the star disappears. You think that's strange. So you look away again. And the star reappears in your peripheral vision.
And astronomers know about this. Sometimes if they want to observe a star, they look away from the star. Because when they look directly at it, it disappears. It's called averted vision. It's a way of seeing faint stars. It's because of the arrangement of cells on your retina. So in the center of your vision, it's mostly cone cells. But in your peripheral vision, it's mostly rod cells.
Steve, before you get into the explanation there, like Matt has got a different type of annoyed on his face now. Yeah. Which is the annoyed of, you know my wife's an astronomer. I can't believe you're Steve's blaming averted vision to me. Yeah, of course you know about this, don't you Matt? Well, he's actually, here's a question. This is for you, Steve. Gone from a biological point of view. Are the cones good for focusing up close because cones are a focused in shape.
Whereas a rod, let's say a cylinder. What is a cylinder? If not a cone, focus that infinity. It's a very good point. It's the solid and argument as I've heard so far. Oh my god. It's a truncated infinite cone. Exactly. Can we just let Steve do the explanation that he is carefully prepared before you try to twist his logic? I'm just trying to embrace Steve's logic as we go along. I mean, it's definitely not that. Oh, but thank you for trying.
Cone cells are for color vision, so they're good at sensing color. And detecting fast changes in scenes that you're looking at. Whereas rod cells, they're not color. They just tell you the brightness. And they're really good in low light situations. They're not great at things that change quickly. So if you're looking at a particular star and your eyes aren't moving, your rod cells will tell you about a star and your peripheral vision.
But when you look over there, your cone cells won't be able to detect it. They're no good in low light situations. What's really interesting, though, is the chemistry of it. Like, literally, sight is chemistry. You don't think about it in that way. The perception of the things around you. It's actually all down to one molecule called retinol. Retinol is a handful of carbon atoms, a few hydrogen atoms, and an oxygen atom. And they're in this little chain.
And you know, you've seen carbon chains before. There might be a little kink in there because of a double bond and so on. In other words, the specific shape of the molecule can vary. In the case of retinol, there are actually two different shapes it can have. They're both stable. So it's by stable. It's like a switch. It can be in one confirmation or another confirmation. And you get from one to the other by twisting it. But it takes energy to bounce between these two different stable shapes.
Can I just clarify what it's called retinol? And where's it found? In the retina. And I'm assuming the biologist named the retina first. Yeah. And the chemists were like, we found their substance in there. What are we going to call it? Ah, the person does the naming is out today. Retinol it is. I mean, there was so close to calling it ijuice that at least they went for something at least sciencey sounding. No, I bet they'd already called a different fluid in the i-ijuice.
Yeah. So the way you can switch retinol from one shape to the other is with photons. So a photon is just an oscillation in the electromagnetic field traveling through space. And you might know that charged particles, when they're in an electromagnetic field, they feel a force. And so the charged particles in the molecule, the electrons and the protons, as a photon passes over, those charged particles will feel a force from that oscillating electromagnetic field.
And if you get the energy right, and if you get the frequency of those oscillations right, in other words, if the wavelength of the light is just right, then you can switch the molecule from one shape to another. In reality, it has what's called an absorption spectrum. So there'll be a peak. There'll be the perfect wavelength of light that it's good at absorbing. And it kind of drops off either side of that wavelength.
So retinol has this inherent absorption spectrum, which peaks at a specific wavelength. Are you basically saying that the light that is entering your eyes, which is the information you're trying to process, is the same photons that provide the energy for this chemical switch to happen. Yes. The information that's coming into your eyes is what is powering the reaction that allows you to perceive that information. Yeah. That's good. That's great. That's my takeaway on it. That's a good takeaway.
Basically, eyes are powering themselves. It's like Iron Man. Both of your eyes are Iron Man. So to be clear though, retinol is the important molecule, but it doesn't work on its own. It's found embedded within a larger protein called an Opsin. And there's different Opsins. So it's called Opsin for the optical protein or whatever it is. Is this part of your argument that scientists are bad at naming molecules? It's pretty much. I'm okay. They got lazy after a while.
Well, this might surprise you, Matt. The Opsin molecule found in Rodcoans is called Rodopsin. Oh my goodness. And is it ConeOpsin? Or is it just... It's actually Photopsins. I don't know why. That's almost upsetting. That's the thing. Not only do they go for the simple naming convention, sometimes they just don't. Sometimes they'll just not follow the naming convention. So you've got these Opsin proteins that sit on the cells in the back of your eyes.
And the retinol is embedded within that Opsin molecule. Rodopsin in the case of the rods, three different Photopsins in the case of the red, green and blue cone cells. And what happens is when the retinol is embedded within one of these proteins, the protein is obviously pulling on parts of it, twisting it a little bit, changing the shape of it, which changes the absorption spectrum. Right?
Oh. So you've got three different Photopsins that change the shape of retinol in three different ways so that the retinol is now sensitive to short wavelengths, medium wavelengths, and long wavelengths in those three different Photopsin molecules. So you can sense three different parts of the color spectrum, and that's how we see color. And so what happens is this Opsin protein has been holding on to a little molecule on the inside of the cell, because the Opsin molecule straddles the cell wall.
Right? On the outside it's accepting photons. On the inside it's holding on to a molecule. And when the retinol changes shape, it causes the Opsin protein to let go of that molecule. That molecule then reacts with another molecule, which reacts with another molecule. Is this whole chain reaction that ultimately leads to a signal being sent to your brain, and you perceive that as light. You perceive that as vision. What's really cool, and I think you'll appreciate this, Matt.
For whatever evolutionary reason, those rod and cone cells are default in the on position from a neurological point of view. What? So the cells are always on, and then when they're stimulated by a photon, those cells turn off. And so the next cell in the sequence that goes to your brain is like a knock gate. It changes on to an off and off to an arm, so that you can actually get the right information. You got me back on board. So when you see a star, you're actually...
You're no longer not seeing a star. Yeah. Yeah. What? So seeing a star is actually letting your eye know that you're not seeing anything anymore. That's exactly right. And it's a chemical reaction powered by light that has travelled for potentially millions of years. That's actually blown my mind. One final thing to say about retinolum redoxin and all that sort of stuff. There's another type of cell that isn't cone cells, isn't rod cells that you find in your eye.
And again, it's a different kind of opsy. Spearsel's. That's sensitive to blue. Spearsel's. I'm just picking the other shapes it could be. No, no, it's not Spearsel's. Tetrahedripsin. Tetrahedripsin. Yeah, prisms. It's got a name, maybe I should find it, but it's not important. I think we're pretty good at the naming thing now. I think you could leave it with us. Tell us what it does. I'll tell you what the name is. Don't worry. I'll tell you what it does.
It's sensitive to the blue end of the spectrum. And if you follow the neurons into the brain, it goes to a part of the brain that is colloquially known as the body clock. It mediates the production of melatonin, which is the sleep hormone. It's called a wakenol. A wakenol, thank you. Now what's the opsy called? It needs to be wakopsin or something like that. Oh, blue opsy. That's the opsy. If it's got a knock gate in it, it's going to be sleepopsy. Sleepopsy.
You actually write it right, because it's, because it's reversed. So yeah, I thought that was pretty cool. That's why people turn down the blue on their devices before they go to bed. Oh. Because it's the thing that helps people to wake up. What I love about this whole thing is that Matt has been wandering for a while. Why astronomers never look directly at him.
And now I think we understand is that they were attempting to see your star, like qualities using their peripheral rather than the central vision. Are you saying my brilliance is so faint? Yeah. It can only be appreciated through averted vision. And now it explains why none of your wife's friends will look you in the face. Wow. Yeah. That's so great, because it's so weird. I was like, why is Helen complimenting Matt like that? The closet turns out. Oh no, it's clearly a set up.
So Helen, where are you taking us? I am taking us across the universe. This is a song that I wrote for our domestic science series on Radio 4, that we then put into our You Can't Polish a Nerd Show, available from all good digital download platforms. I'll website it all from our website. You know what I find out. So this is a song that I wrote because I wanted to write something that let you know simultaneously how insignificant we all are, but also make you feel at one with the universe.
And I feel like after a couple of years that we've had, I kind of think this song may provide some comfort and perspective to our lives. And let's play it in. Snug and warm tucked up in bed, Dozing off your sleepy head is still upon your Ikea flat pack bowler. But as the earth rotates, you're moving at 600 miles an hour. That's if you will hear it's faster closer to the equator. It's slower if you're near the North Pole or to some lesser extent. Scotland.
And as you lay down to sleep, do not don't let those existential bed bugs bite. So while you sleep, I'll let you know that's not the only place you'll go because the earth's revolving round and round the sun at 67,000 miles an hour. Give or take a ton. I find this helps me to know my place, which is insignificant in the vastness of space. Because our galaxy is turning spiral arms all in a spin, 515,000 miles an hour for the bit of solar systems in this crazy feeling may disappear.
In the calming weeks months or possibly years, probably not though. I wrote this song 18 months ago and I haven't slept since. Because our Milky Way is still moving from the moment of the big bang. We are currently cruising at 1.3 million miles an hour. You might be feeling still and tiny, but you're moving faster than lightning. With relativity, you're a space traveler in your sleep. I mean that's okay, honey. I didn't want to sleep tonight. You know, that's fine. I'm not sleeping anyway.
I feel like everyone is now able to share where I am at this point in time. The detail I want to talk about with that song comes from one single line that could have turned into a whole song of its own and may yet do. There's a single line that says we're travelling at 600 miles an hour. That's how fast we're rotating around the earth somewhere near the UK, which is where we are.
But as you travel towards the North Pole, that rotation gets slower and slower because you're closer and closer to the North Pole. I wanted to write that line to say when you're at the North Pole, you're not moving at all. You're just spinning around on the spot. You're going infinitely slow. You don't have any movement left or right. The exact North Pole, you're just spinning around on the top of a spinning top or a spinning basket ball or whatever. But that's not true.
As I was researching for this song, it turns out that almost everything I thought I knew about the North Pole is not true. Things that are not true don't make a very good song. They make a great clickbait title for a list. They're a great listicle. They're not a good song. I'm still working on it. I thought I'd share my North Pole facts and see if this conversation inspires anything. Number one, the North Pole is actually the South Pole. What do you mean?
Technically speaking, if you were talking about magnetism. Because the Earth is a giant magnet with a magnetic pole at one pole and the opposite magnetic pole at the other pole. The word pole has now lost all its meaning for me. It's very strange to hear it being said a thousand times. Yeah. Pole, pole, pole, pole. But the thing is, you think that the North end of that magnet should be at the North Pole and the South end of that magnet should be at the South Pole. That is incorrect.
It is the other way round. Because the original compasses were a little magnet or a little bit of magnetic material. The North end of that magnetic material pointed towards North. They were North pointing. North speaking is the phrase. And named it because it pointed North. Yeah, not because it was pointing at the North magnetic pole. So the North seeking, North bit of those compass magnets were pointing towards the South Pole.
So the magnetic South Pole of the Earth is next to the North Pole and vice versa. That is great. So if we all said North seeking and South seeking when we talked about magnets, it would be clearer, but we just shortened it. Is that where it seems like it just fell off at one point and because the North Pole had been named the North Pole and it's using the same word as the magnetic North Pole, it's just become one big blur. But yeah, the North Pole is basically the South Pole.
Because opposite attract, removing the word seeking flips the meaning of the name. Yeah. People. People, eh. Okay, next thing I found out was the North Pole, even if it was the North Pole, is not actually at the North Pole. Right? But it's worth. It gets worse. There's a difference between where the magnetic North Pole is. Because that's dictated by the physics of Earth and all the magnetic material inside it and on the crust and rolling around in the centre.
But the geographical North Pole is dictated by the spin of the Earth. So there's two different North Poles, the magnetic Pole and the geographical Pole, and they are in different places. That might be something you learned at school. Like that's something I vaguely remembered. Vagely, yeah. What you might not know is that that magnetic North Pole just wanders around in various directions over periods of time and is never in the same place where you last looked for it.
For a bit of background, the Earth's magnetic field is generated by the iron in the core that is kind of smoothing and sloshing around. But it's still a magnet, so it still has a North Pole and a South Pole. And the exact position of those poles depends on how the surface of the Earth kind of changes and bends that magnetic field that's coming from the centre. And because the Earth is not like a still block of solid material, it's all swirling around in there.
So the magnetic pole is defined as the place where the magnetic field is basically pointing downwards. If you had a compass with a completely free swinging needle and the only place where it points downwards, that is where you would call the North Pole. And this North magnetic pole kind of wanders around. It's somewhere between 400 and 1,000 kilometres away from the geographical North Pole. So it's quite a significant way.
They used to update the position every five years, but recently it's just gone completely rogue and it's moving about 55 kilometres a year towards Siberia away from Canada. I don't know if you knew that. I knew the anti-fact of that because I went to Antarctica. Yes! And I thought it was hilarious to repeatedly say the South Pole is just to the South of here. Yeah! Ahaha!
In fact, the South Pole isn't even in the Antarctic Circle. It's on the outside of the Antarctic Circle moving away from it. It's ridiculous. There's a whole half of Antarctica where if you stood there, you'd have the South Pole to the North of you. But the rotational South Pole... Well, would be to the South of you, but your compass would say it's to the North of you because the South Pole is to the North.
It's super confusing if you're holding a magnet near either the North Pole or the South Pole. Either Pole doesn't matter which pole you're talking about. That's why I've never done it. And the reason these different continents are getting more and less magnetic is because about 50 years ago, there was this big flow of molten lava, molten iron inside the Earth's core.
And that all started moving around and it's the after effects of that as it seeps into the Earth's crust and solidifies, and those 50-year-old movements of the internal parts of the Earth are slowly changing the magnetic field of the rest of the Earth. Because if a bit of that molten iron kind of seeps into rock and then that molten rock solidifies, it keeps the magnetic field that it had when it was still liquid and kind of jiggling around.
This wild rogue magnetic North is speeding away from the North Pole itself towards the plains of Siberia as far as anyone can tell. And at some point it might turn around and come back again, but they kind of don't really know. They can kind of predict it for the next few years, but after that they're just like, well, I don't know, might fancy Canada again. Maybe a bit of Greenland, I'm not sure. God, it's weird. Might they be doing an exchange? They're going to flip.
That is a genuine possibility and one that I do not wish to think about. That came up and I immediately stopped reading that information because it really scared me. I mean all the signs are there, Helen, you know, they're wandering round further and further. Surely that's a sign that they're about to flip. I'm going to have to take that with a meteorological unit who know, you know, there's one of them. They're not making predictions. I'm definitely not making predictions.
Can I just give you a side factor? The first pilot to fly over the geographical North Pole, his name was Richard E. Bird. Although he's claimed to have flown over the geographical North Pole was later disputed and it was thought that he didn't actually manage to do it. His name is Dickie Bird. It's Richard E. Bird and he's a pilot who flew over the North Pole. That is one of the most beautiful things I've heard recently.
Until I discovered that the first explorer to walk to the geographical North Pole on foot, which is quite hard because it's not on a landmass, it's just on an ice sheet. This explorer had the most English name in the world, which is Wally Herbert. And separately, both of those names mean idiot. They couldn't be a better like anti-nominative determinism about that. I just like, is it a bird? Is it a plane? Yes.
Correct. I've got another thing that I think you guys are probably pretty confident about knowing that you may wish to rethink after we've talked some more. I just want to go back to that idea that if the earth is rotating and you're standing at any point on it, you are spinning at the same speed as that rotation. Which is about 600 miles an hour here in London and less towards the North Pole, more towards the equator. But as you go towards the North Pole, you expect it to go down to zero.
It doesn't. There appears to be no place on earth where you can stand and be just spinning in a circle relative to the space around you. Because the earth doesn't spin like a perfect globe, you know, like you're going to classroom and there's a globe and it's there on an angle and it's got a stick running through it and you spin it and it's this perfect smooth spin. And someone's like, what are you doing in this school?
What's the thing that we've cleared that up? I go, I then break the globe and it kind of wobbles as it spins around and then I go, fix it for you. Because the earth is not a perfect around sphere. It's more like a kind of squished ball. Is it an oblate spheroid? I'm looking at you like it is an oblate spheroid. An oblate spheroid. Like you're sitting on a beach ball and it's got a squished. Because it's a bit fatter around the middle because of all this spinning.
And it's worse than that. It's kind of lumpy and it's got different densities. The densities all over the shop. What a mess. And that means that it can wobble or something then. So in addition to spinning around an axis that axis itself moves or wobbles or something or processes. The geographical North Pole and South Pole is where this like fictional center of the axis of spinning is right.
So if you will go to put a stick through the earth and spin it around like a toy globe or something, you also then have to wiggle the stick around in a circle. So if you wiggle the stick that the globe is on and the globe is also squished as well. So someone sat on the globe, they put a stick through it, they're wiggling the stick and they're spinning the globe.
That's more like what is actually happening. So there is no place on earth that you can actually stand and be spinning in a direct circle. Like if you went under the surface somewhere, if you were under the surface, then you would probably find the one of two points that were stable not moving. In the center of the earth probably. Yeah, there's an intermediate value theorem proof that there is at least one point such that you should know that space.
Yeah, because on one side you go in one way, the other side you go in the other. It's going to be a continuous transformation from one to the other. Of hand waving this, there'll be a point relative to the earth as such that you're not moving. It's going to be inside the earth. It's not going to be on the surface. Just to recap your terminology, just so we're all clear on this, magma jiggles, the axis of rotation, wiggles. Yeah, yeah, got it. Really important.
Thank God we're using the proper scientific terms because you don't want to mess those up. There's something else about this wiggle, right? If you were there wiggling a globe on a stick in a little circle and you'd already squished the globe and done all of these things and made it lumpy and weirdly magnetic in a different way from your stick.
You would also have to be wiggling more each year because the drift of the axis is getting greater as time goes on. So the earth is wiggling more as it wiggles. Technical terms. It's not very much. It's only about 10 meters over the last century. That axis has moved away from the central point even further. There's loads of reasons why it's stuff going on inside the earth. Glaciers melting, glaciers squishing bits of earth out of other parts of the globe.
So there's loads of reasons why it's happening, but it's yet another thing that is not stable that I thought was. Would you like a fun terrifying fact? Yes, I have only told you terrifying fact so far. Well, that will help. So humans have built dams big enough that the accumulation of water has changed the gravitational distribution of the earth sufficiently enough to alter the length of the day because it changes how fast the earth rotates by redistributing the mass.
As if anyone was going to sleep tonight, that's just blown it for the last few holdouts. I think it slowed the day down because it's moved. I'm now I'm just guessing because I think as you're moving mass further out from the center, you're probably reducing the length of the day. The earth is definitely slowing down, which is a beautiful fact.
It's the fact I did when I got invited onto the No Such Thing as a fish podcast every day you live is your longest ever day because the days are getting slightly longer. So maybe that's going to counteract everything else that I've said because every day that you live, you get to live that little bit longer every day. There is a little bit of hope in here. I've got one more fact for you. There is no time zone at the North Pole.
So if you are at the geographic North Pole, you can just decide what time it is, whatever you love. So in conclusion, if that song hasn't stopped you sleeping, then the fact that the North Pole is actually the South Pole, it's not even at the North Pole. Midday is midnight at whatever North Pole you're at. And if you could stand on it, which by any reasonable means you can't, you're still rotating in a big old circle.
So black is why up is down, night is day, and you are never, ever able to just stand still, which to me says welcome to 2022. I just say that your lullaby game has not improved at all. Is this why my son isn't sleeping? Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At MidMobile, we like to do the opposite of what Big Wireless does. They charge you a lot, we charge you a little. So naturally, when they announce they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you.
That's right, we're cutting the price of mint unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at minemobile.com slash switch. $45 upfront for three months plus taxes and fees, promoting for new customers for limited time, unlimited more than 40 gigabytes per month, slows, full turns at minemobile.com.
Everyone knows therapy is great for solving problems, but getting therapy has its own problems too, like finding the right therapist, fitting into their schedule, and of course the cost. While better help can solve those problems, it's totally online and built around your schedule. It's surprisingly affordable too, connect with the credential therapist by phone, video, or online chat all from the comfort of your home.
Visit betterhelp.com to learn more and save 10% on your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P. Wow! Nice! Yeah! What you're hearing are the sounds of people everywhere putting on bombas, socks, underwear, and t-shirts made from absurdly soft materials that feel like plush clouds. Yeah, that plush. And the best part for every item you purchase, bombas donate another to someone facing homelessness.
Bombas, big comfort for everyone. Go to bombas.com slash a cast and use code a cast for 20% off your first purchase. That's bombas.com slash a cast, code a cast. Hey there, it's me, Shell Norris. I'm host of a podcast called Your Mama's Kitchen. For travel, I'm usually looking for a way to find a taste of home when I'm not at home. And one of the things I love to do when I am at home is entertain.
An Airbnb allows me to do that. When I was in California recently, I rented a house that had a great kitchen. And when we were sitting around the table, we're all thinking, we're in someone else's house. Someone could be in all of our homes as well. If you have a home, but you're not always at home, you have an Airbnb. Home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.com slash host.
Well, I thought we were two thirds of the way through this episode, but it seems like we have an infinite amount left. Thanks, Steve. Now, I know. I knew this was going to happen. I know you would both do something spacey or, you know, fun, earth spinning. And everyone's like, oh, Matt's going to come and talk about different sized infinities or infinity paradoxes is important. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's tough. I'm not doing it. I want to be, you know, a popularist sell out as well.
So I'm going to do I'm going to do space that everyone loves. Okay. No, dry, boring, maths this time. It's all about space and it's all relatable. That's what I'm going for. I'd really love to thank you for that huge compliment of calling me a popular science sell out. I feel like that's truly elevated me in the industry. You've joined some of the best popular science sellouts, which is everyone apart from people who talk solely about abstract mathematics.
Hey, you know that thing, everyone, where you're working on a spacecraft for over a decade and then some other jerk spacecraft beat you to one of your significant milestones. That's the whole relatable setup. Do you know what that is relatable? Because we did do an episode in series one about the filaylander. Exactly. And how that people spend 15 years working on that and sent 15 year old technology into space and it still did the job.
Like it's a it's a beautiful testament to how hard work can be totally duffed up at the last minute. So my wife, the smarter half of this relationship, Professor Luzegreen spent 15 years working on the solar orbiter project and solar orbiter was a spacecraft that was launched in early 2020. We're able to get over there for the launch in Florida. However, after ESA had announced their spacecraft, which was going to go closer to the sun than any other human-made object before it.
NASA were like, guess what? We're doing a solar probe. The Parker solar probe. It's going to go closer. And so after all that is going to get that quick. And it's got their first. Yeah, it did. What? Yeah. How? It's such a jerk move. Lucy would like to point out they didn't put any cameras on it. They've got some viewing but no like images come back from it. It's like sampling the wind and doing all these things. Whereas solar orbiter, the ESA project, it's taking images of the sun.
So she's still claiming that's fastly superior. But let's just say the NASA one is doing sunfarts and the ESA one is taking beautiful things. That's exactly right. That's perfectly worded like a popular science sellout. And you know what? If I was trying to capture sunfarts, I would want to get in quicker, get out faster. I think NASA's got the right idea. It is. I think it's on a more elliptical orbit. So I think you're onto something.
And so this happens. This happens. And it's been happening for a very long time. In fact, specifically I want to talk about Voyager one, which thought it was going to be the first spacecraft to get to Saturn. It looked like it was going to be very safe. Definitely the first. I mean, how is another spacecraft going to get there before it?
Because Pioneer 11 has already launched and is not going to Saturn. It's going to Jupiter. And then it's going out of the solar system. Confusingly Voyager 2 launched before Voyager 1. But Voyager 1 moved faster. So the Voyager 2 launched months before Voyager 1. But then Voyager 1 caught up and overtook it to become the true Voyager 1. And they had the four sites to name them the wrong way round so that they would end up being named the right way round.
I don't know if that was their motorbader. But I was like, they launched them in the wrong order. They're going different speeds. Can I just check? What period of time are we talking about? Is this like the 70s? Yeah, 70s. So Voyager 2 launched in August 1977. And 16 days after that, Voyager 1 was launched in September 1977. Can I just cross-reference when were the Star Wars films made? Because I feel like the numbering system has a lot of power at us.
Oh my goodness. With 77 were Star Wars, wasn't it? Wow. Yeah, hang on a minute. This is no coincidence. People were numbering stuff in the wrong order. This is the time. That's amazing. They launched Voyager 2. Everyone's like, why is it number 2? And NASA's like, pretty cool potential. Once the technology is better, we all do it again. The world is not ready for this story with this low level of graphics.
So you're on the Voyager 1 team, right? And you're thinking, okay, obviously there's Voyager 2, but we're faster. We're still going to get there first. We're going to beat Voyager 2 there. And Pioneer, which launched back in 1973, isn't going to go there. But then some jerk with the desktop calculator works out that you could change the trajectory of Pioneer 11, which is already launched. You could change it on route to get to Saturn before either of the Voyager missions. What?
And so because of the invention of the world's first desktop scientific calculator, a different spacecraft got to Saturn first. And what a calculator it was. We're talking about the HP 9100A. What a classic. I have no idea what you're talking about. Hey, what I love is how you're reading out the name of the calculator with genuine reverence. But also the genuine reverence of the jerk who had that calculator. Oh, yeah, yeah.
You're just a man born after your time. Like, you know, if you'd been alive then, I would have been you. Imagine that calculator. Now the calculator, it was a massive breakthrough at the time. As in, it wasn't massive. And you can put it on a desk without it breaking through. It was the first ever computer that could do scientific functions that wasn't like a massive, like main, creamy, you know, big chunk of metal somewhere.
Yeah. And in fact, it was the first device ever described as a personal computer. Wow. But I'm guessing it was still pretty chunky, right? You could put it on a desk, but you couldn't put it in your pocket. It was designed to fit in the slot that was previously used by typewriters. Oh. So on these executive desks, you'd have like a little drawer or a thing that pops out and then that's where your typewriter would live. And it was designed to fit into one of those.
That is a beautiful way of increasing your adoption rates of this new technology. It's make it fit exactly. It was literally, it'll slot into the old spot. The very early prototype didn't quite fit. And while the HP executive was away, they got a carpenter in to make their desk slightly bigger. So that they could fit the prototype into the slightly enlarged typewriter spot. And they got away with it. It's incredible. And the production one was the right size.
They just didn't want to have to explain why the prototype was slightly bigger than it should be. And when this thing launched, oh my goodness, it made waves. It officially, according to Steve Jobs, inspired them to get into personal computers when they first started HP 9100A calculator. And Arthur C. Clarke wrote how in a space Odyssey based on this calculator. In fact, how is how 9000 named after the HP 9100 desktop calculator? It was such an influential calculator.
They took an early prototype of it to NASA. They demonstrated it to some of the NASA engineers, and they literally gave it a standing round of applause. There were takes a lot to get engineers out of their seats. And they actually all stood up. And they just, when they saw it, it was able to calculate all these trigolomic functions. And then plot them. They just lost their minds. They jumped out of their seats. Percent or applause. Wow, and it was Dr. James Van Allen of the Van Allen belt.
Oh, the fame. Who realized with his HP 9100A, with optional plotter attachment, could calculate the new trajectory for Pioneer 11 to send it to a slightly different part of Jupiter. So then the gravitational slingshot would zip it over and whip it towards Saturn, and it was able to get there slightly before Voyager 2 got there. So Pioneer 11 got there in August 1979, and Voyager 1 arrived a year later in August 1980. Oh, clear. Yeah, I mean, that is sneaky, sneaky slingshot action there.
I'm really surprised that like, my assumption was, once you set these things off, there's an initial burn, and then you've got a little bit of fuel for like, changing direction a little bit, whatever, but not enough to just completely... Now you'd be amazed how much they fix on the fly. When you think you've got to build this thing and launch it, and then you can never touch it again, they're still constantly updating.
And think about how rudimentary the circuitry and computing power of these things was. So Voyager 2, which got to Saturn 3rd now, fairly counts. They're still metal, I suppose. It's still metal. It's on the podium. Yeah, yeah. He's got some metal. Yeah. It's made of metal. It was the first spacecraft to then get to Uranus and Neptune. Right.
But by the time it got there, the photographs it was taking, the exposure time was getting so long that they had to update how it compensated for roll because when they turned on the magnetic tape drives that was used for its memory, the spinning of the magnetic tape drives changed the angular momentum of the spacecraft and caused it to slightly roll.
And the exposures were so long, it was fine for Jupiter and Saturn, but it was getting so dark at Uranus and Neptune that they had to update the software to compensate from the roll induced by the magnetic tape drives on the spacecraft. And that was done after launch. The inverse square is one hell of a rule, isn't it? It's all over. The inverse square might get you every time. It gets you every time.
The only slight bit of revenge that the Voyager folks got was, well, what the Pioneer 11 people wanted to do was to go to a scientifically interesting part of Saturn, probably like over the pole, so you can see more of it, you can see the rings, you can do more science from the pole. The Voyager folks were like, fine, if you're going to get there first, you're going to be the test. And we want you to just to slam straight into the rings to make sure it's safe when we get there.
And that one, so Pioneer 11 didn't get to do the interesting science trajectory when it got there. They're like, fine, you can get there first, but NASA said, you're going to be the cannon fodder to check its safe when we bring the expensive ones through. And so they sent Pioneer 11 through the rings to double check that would be safe when Voyager 1 eventually showed up. I mean, it stops you ever wanting to be first for anything. Now I'll be against like, why would you?
Because your boss is like, hey, you're going to get there first. Cool, can you just like check it, you're not going to die? And then we can send other people. Yeah, it was very early startup. It's like, you know, move fast and break rings. Yeah. Why does this satellite look like a canary? Toot to do. There you are.
The history of space exploration was changed because in very clever people at HP managed to work out how to do scientific, proper, trig and hyperbolic calculations in something the size of a typewriter. It was actually guy could Tom Osborne, who first designed what became the HP 9100A. He tried pitching it to places where he was working at the time and no one else thought it was possible or thought it was feasible.
So we actually, he quit his job and his wife kept working and him and his wife worked on this thing at home to build the very first prototype of what became the first scientific calculator ever. And there was a moment when he first got at working and he sat there looking at it and he wrote some years afterwards that he felt more like the discoverer of an object than its creator.
I thought of things to come, he said, if I could do this alone in my tiny apartment, then there were some big changes in store for the world. And he realized he was looking at more computing power per unit volume than had ever existed on the planet. And he realized that was going to change the course of the future. He didn't realize also going to change the course of the spacecraft or two. There you are. That's my crowd-pleasing story about the HP 9100A. Ah, the first ever scientific calculator.
Welcome to the popularization of science, Matt. You did well. Oh, it feels good. Ah, I feel really good selling out. That was fun. That's it. That's the end of this episode and it's the end of the entire second series. So anything left to say is, you uncultured swine, what are you looking at, your hockey puck? Yes. It's to quote Mr. Potato Head from Toy Story. OK, snap out of it, Buzz. Thank you so much for listening. We've love making this podcast.
And we really hope we can come back at some point with a third series. If we do, we'll be back as part of the ACES Creator Network. Yes, we will. And if you still need more detail in your life, our show notes have loads of links to other related things from this episode. Not just calculator recommendations, astronomy tips, and songs to help you not sleep at night. Now, we are done for this season. So we should say, first of all, hello to everyone, listening in reverse order. I like your style.
But if you've just reached the end, you can still help out by spreading the nerd because the more people who do listen to this podcast, the greater the chance we'll get to make season three. And don't forget that. We also make a ton of other stuff as festival of the spoken nerd and as individuals. You can find our live science comedy specials, books, audiobooks, ready-to-series, t-shirts, YouTube channel, all online.
You can get links to all that stuff at festivalofthespoken.com and if you want to get in touch, we're on all the social meters and on podcast.festivalofthespoken.com. W a stranger. It has been a pleasure to have you along for this series. And we hope we will be back soon. Thank you so much. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. A podcast of unnecessary detail is made by festivalofthespoken.nerd. That's Helen Arnie, Steve Mold and Matt Parker. Our series producer is Lindsey Senner.
This episode was produced by John Harvey and edited by Clarissa Maycock. Our theme music is by Howard Carter and we're proud to be part of the ACAST Creator Network. Thanks for listening. A.CAST powers the world's best podcast. Here's a show that we recommend. So Robert, tell the people what's a pretendian. It's just what it sounds like, Angel, a pretend Indian. Someone who fakes being one of us. Someone who impersonates a native. We're talking about real scammers and con artists.
There are pretendians teaching at universities. Pretendians running governments. Pretendians in Hollywood. On our new podcast, pretendians will tell you the incredible story of these jaw-dropping frauds. Who are they? Why do they do it? And how the heck do they keep getting away with it? Listen to pretendians on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. ACAST helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. A.CAST.com.