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Hello and welcome aboard the new scientist escape pod. Episode one. Yes, it's episode one. This is our response to the... basically to the woes and hardships and doom-scrolling that is the modern world. The Escape Pod is about getting away from all of that. In this little podcast, we're just going to try and get you to a different place, even if you can't actually travel or get out of the house. I'm Rowan Hooper. I'm our podcast editor. And I'm Anna Deming, new scientist features editor.

And I'm going to talk about some of the physics behind ballet and gymnastics. And I'm Timothy Revel, and I'm New Scientist's culture and comment editor, and I'm going to be talking about one of my favourite board games.

Well, I'm going to kick us off with a story about a whale. Because, you know, who doesn't love dolphins and whales? Let's have a soundtrack, please, Magical Ollie producer. Our starting point is the Farallon Islands. They're off the coast of Northern California. A few years ago, there was an incident there. where a whale got tangled up in some crab lines used by some of the suppliers to the seafood industry of San Francisco. And a big 15-metre female humpback whale got tangled up.

in these crab lines and she couldn't surface properly because the weight of the crab pots was making it hard for her to get her blowhole. over the water. So, you know, she'd been struggling and the ropes were cutting into them. Gosh, Ruben, I thought this was supposed to be a skate podcast. Sounds dramatic. Yeah, come on.

OK, it's getting there. I'm just building up. Some scuba divers, some rescue divers went in to get home. They spent five hours cutting the ropes. And one of the divers was called James Mosquito. And he reported afterwards what happened. He says, when I was cutting the line going through the mouth, the whale's eye was there winking at me, watching me. And he said, it was an epic moment of my life. And the team said that there's...

there was this weird vibration coming from the whale as she watched them cutting her free. And then when she was freed, this is the thing, she didn't just swim away. She swam around in circles and then she approached each member of the rescue team and gently nuzzled them. With her head. Yeah. Mosquito said it felt to me like it was thanking us, knowing it was free and that we'd helped it. So I've just never forgotten that account. No, it sounds beautiful.

I've just got this vivid image of a diver working by the giant eye of a whale and the eye watching him as he's doing it. It turns out humpbacks are sometimes more friendly than other species of whales. Either of you had any sort of weird encounters like that with a, I don't know, not necessarily a marine animal, but an ape or anything like that?

the thing i remember is do you remember we had this story of i think it was maybe a year or two ago about how horses can remember whether you were smiling or frowning the last time that you saw them and i just love this so much and it like whenever i see a horse now i always remember to smile because you know they're going to remember next time you see them um what you were doing when you see them yeah always smile at a horse yeah um and there's another story that um stuck in my head is because

it's difficult to work with. As a scientist, it's difficult to work with whales and dolphins on anything really tricky like consciousness because they're stuck in the water. But there was this... There was this experiment where scientists gave dolphins a puzzle to solve and recorded the audio.

of what was happening. It turns out that when the dolphins worked together to solve the puzzle, they made more whistles and clicks and more vocalisations than they did when they were just on their own. So they were chatting about it? Yeah, they were effectively... chatting and perhaps exploring ways to solve the puzzle. There's so much amazing stuff about dolphins and whales, but there's another thing. There's a population of dolphins in Brazil that work with people to catch fish.

So the fisher people stand waist deep in the water, but the water is really muddy and the people, they can't see into it. But because dolphins have sonar, they can see into the water. So when the fish come along. The dolphins herd the fish together and then signal to the people. The dolphins slap the water with their tail or else suddenly dive down. And that's the signal to cast the net. And these dolphins have a different kind of dialect, different whistles.

to those that don't do it. So there's some kind of dialect among the dolphins that work with these people. Yeah, the dolphins give each other some sorts of names, don't they? Yeah, they have signature whistles that are distinct to particular dolphins. So they might go. I didn't know you spoke dolphin. Yeah, that was dolphin. So what some researchers can do is you can play the signature whistle.

through a hydrophone, and then the dolphins whistle back. So you might do that. And then the dolphin might be saying, hey, is Tim over there? And then... the same whistle comes back from Tim and which basically means, yeah, I'm over here. And then they might add whistles after that, which might add historical context to that name. So it might be, yeah, it's Tim who I'm the one who caught that. Fantastic.

octopus the other day remember oh wow reputation names uh yeah exactly might be reputation status social status you know all of this is just to say you know There's a scale of consciousness and a spectrum of abilities of theory of mind and self-awareness. And there's not this sharp divide between humans and other animals.

Now, Anna, bring us back to dry land. What's your means of escape this week? I thought we could talk about... Ballet and gymnastics. I confess, actually, I have more than a passing interest in ballet. It's probably one of the few obsessions that compete with my interest in physics and science. they don't compete at all. People, when they see ballet dancers doing all these impossible looking things with their bodies, people like to say they're defying physics, but they're absolutely not.

And when you really think about it and you look at it, it's more like a really exquisite demonstration of some of the really fundamental basic principles of physics and mechanics and momentum conservation and so on. Yeah. Yeah, OK. So, yeah, nothing defies the laws of physics. But I guess in headline writing, it's a kind of law to say gravity defying basketball player or ballerina. Because they do seem to hang in the air, don't they?

Yes, you do. There's little tricks like the way you open your legs a little bit more as you're coming down so it looks like you're not actually coming down and things like that. So tell us about the balancing and the training and how it works when a ballerina will start to twirl, or that's not the technical word for it, is it?

Yeah, sure. I mean, all that teetering around on the tiptoes, I guess is what looks most obviously balletic to a lot of people. And obviously, if you just launch yourself onto a pair of pointe shoes without any training. it would hurt like hell because you'd be, no offense intended, but it'd be like a dead weight just flopping around all over the place and have all these torques and awkward pressure points and stuff. So all the training gets all the muscles tuned so that they can...

align and control your center of mass along the line of stronger support to your big toe and so then you've got all your twitch muscles to hold you in balance so it looks like you're just floating and then it gets easier when you start turning obviously

Right. So how is that? Well, they call it the gyroscopic effect. It's the same thing that kicks in when you're on a bicycle. It's a lot easier to balance on a bicycle when it's moving than when it's standing still. And that, yeah, so it comes from... the angular momentum of the wheels turning or your ballet dancer turning and the

angular momentum is greater the faster you're turning and so if you want to then topple the axis of that turn you then have to create a torque that's strong enough to overcome that angular momentum whereas when they're not turning there's no angular momentum to overcome. So it's quite easy to just flick a ballet dancer off a point. Yeah. And then of course, when you're in the air.

You've got more to deal with because when you're on the ground doing your turns, you can push off the ground and you can give yourself that extra angular momentum. You see them doing their sweaty turns in the Sugar Plum Fairy or Black Swan solos and whipping the leg round and pushing off with that.

elevate each time and then you get you can keep getting more one momentum and try and keep all that in control when you're in the air you've got nothing to push against you it's really all in the launch so the Fuete turns, that's when they kick the leg out and that just keeps them going round, does it? Yeah, Fuete is whipping. So all that whipping into a frenzy has to be impeccably controlled. And of course, if you're in the air, you haven't got the ground there.

to push against, to correct yourself if something's a little bit awry. So if you're doing turns in the air, then you really need to get yourself in order and you take off. Ten years from today, Lisa Schneider will trade in her office job to become the leader of a pack of dogs. As the owner of her own dog rescue, that is.

A second act made possible by the re-skilling courses Lisa's taking now with AARP to help make sure her income lives as long as she does. And she can finally run with the big dogs. And the small dogs, who just think they're big dogs. That's why the younger you are, the more you need AARP. Learn more at aarp.org slash skills. Welcome to those who can't teach anymore.

a narrative podcast series that explores why teachers are leaving education and what can be done to stop the exodus. After the first season, several teachers reached out to say how validating the podcast was. Listening to the stories of other teachers who feel the same way that I do has been therapeutic. I felt so validated just hearing other well-educated professionals speak to the problems they were seeing and the reasons they needed to leave. I more so just felt a part of something bigger.

This season, we're getting a look at the year and the life of teachers from across the country through their audio journals. These teachers are at different parts in their careers, teaching different subjects and grade levels and in different parts of the country. But they still have a lot in common. Look for those who can't teach anymore. Season two, a different kind of the same thing.

That leads us nicely onto Simone Biles. So I watched her... legendary triple double before we had this chat. And it's just, it's still incredible. So go on. Well, like if people can't remember it, just can you just explain first?

what what what is the triple double yeah I mean to be honest even if you've seen it especially if you haven't seen it in slow motion you might still wonder what on earth was going on there this is an awful lot going on it's this extraordinary gymnastic leap where she turns You need to turn twice through an axis going through the hips like a somersault.

for the less athletic of us, a roly-poly. And then three times around the axis going from head to toes, the axis you turn in a pirouette. So it's just a double back fit with triple pirouette at the same time. Yeah, so Simone Biles pulled this off, the first woman to pull it off in a competition in US Championships in August 2019. And what was special about her that she managed to be the first woman to be able to do that?

I think it was a lot of determination and a lot of practice. I think it is quite character telling to pull off something like that. But there's a, it's always physically. And when you come down to the training, obviously you get the muscles. It's really.

Again, conservation of momentum. So you see her when she starts, she's gearing up for it. There's a massive, powerful run up. So that's giving her a load of momentum that she can then send airborne and give her the airtime to fit in all these twists and turns. And if you watch it in slow motion, that launch, she looks like a, I think especially with all the blurring of the slow-mo frames, it looks like a jet of water. Every molecule of her body is perfectly aligned.

perfect projectile trajectory there's not you know she's not wasting a jewel it's very very efficient yeah that's what the coach said well done you didn't waste a jewel there but how does she start the spinning once she's in the air though

Well, the spinning actually starts in the launch. So when she's taking off, she's taking off into a sort of dive. So there is already angular momentum going around her hips. But she's in this long stretch, you know, full of... force and the angular momentum is not just proportional to the speed of the spins but also the radius the distance from her extremity to the axis she's spinning around so she then tucks

And that makes that radius shorter. So you have to have the angular momentum conserved. So the spins speed up to compensate.

So she can fit in more turns around that axis around her hips. And then you see her arm whipping, a bit like you see the leg whipping around with those ballerinas doing their footy turns. And that sets up in motion the... turns around the head to toe axis and and this is she's basically just got to then hold it all out because there's not a lot you can do in the air to correct yourself when it's going wrong you just want to hold your knees tight and your feet tight and

I think a lot of muscle memory just makes it all that magic come together. Yeah. It just also all happens so quickly, right? It feels like when you see it in real time, it's like she kicks off and then before you've really realized what happened. she lands again. And all of that has happened. It's just amazing.

It is. It's extraordinary. Yeah. Just the overcoming the impulse to just protect your head when you're spinning around upside down. Because you've got to hold yourself all neatly in aerodynamic and with your central mass control. And then, of course.

landing otherwise if she doesn't get that right it might be the last jump she ever does so at that point you don't want to squeeze your knees together and everything you need your knees and feet under your hips your knees going straight over your toes so it's all aligned and you want a really really deep plie to absorb all of that impact and she actually does a little bit of a hot back again on that well forgive that hot but it gives you a little bit more of a absorption of that

massive, massive momentum, yeah. But even then with the hop back, it's just so, it feels like such a small reaction to what has just been a explosion of energy. And then she smiles to the audience. I know, like she's done nothing. You know, if I could even imagine jumping that high, let alone doing all of the rest of it, I feel like I would absolutely be puffing. I would be sweating all over. And she just a little wave and then carries on and does, you know, 15 more amazing moves.

Yeah, it's extraordinary. But yeah, that's how it's done. I wouldn't try at home necessarily. Tim, what's your escapism this week? Go, which is a board game. Can you play Go, actually, Tim? Have you ever played it? I have tried. It's one of those games that it seems really simple, but then a little bit like chess, you can sort of very quickly get a bit confused about what you're meant to be doing. So I've played against a computer, but I...

Though I've played probably dozens of games, I've never actually won one. And so why is it in your escape pod this week? Okay, what I really like about Go is that it's a beautiful example of how something incredibly simple... can become absurdly complicated very quickly. Go is played on a 19 by 19 board, just like a grid, and you place down stones according to a few very simple rules, and the aim of the game is to capture territory.

But when you work out the number of possible ways that a game of Go can occur, there are more moves than there are atoms in the universe. Yeah, which just really blows my mind. And in fact, it's not even close. Like you think it's one of those, oh, maybe it's just a few more moves. The number of possible ways that a game can occur is 10 to the power of 170, which is a one followed by 170.

zeros yeah it's a daft number isn't it yeah you can't comprehend that number but the number of atoms in the universe is just 10 to the 80 so it's just not even close and that just really really blows my mind So one of the reasons that I'm particularly interested in Go and that many people are is because of its link to artificial intelligence research. And the thing about Go, because it has so many moves, is there's no way that a computer can just solve it.

There's no way for a computer to just work out all of the best thing to do in any given situation because you couldn't store that information because you'd need all the atoms in the universe many, many, many times over. Has that comforted you at all, the idea that it's not something that you can crunch solve mathematically?

Yeah, I think so. I think like when you're a bit confused about the universe and all of these, you know, what makes life complicated, and then you look at something as simple as go is... extraordinarily complicated. I find some comfort in that, that even the simple things are so complicated. There's no way I can possibly worry about all of the big complicated stuff because that's even more complicated. Just have a game and go. Always smile at all.

course and even the simple things are complicated these are the things i'm taking so far okay yeah carry on tim okay so one of the things that um has got people particularly focused on Go recently is the fact that now the world's best Go player is an artificial intelligence called AlphaGo.

which was developed by DeepMind, which is a very famous London-based technology firm. And what makes it interesting is because you can't just solve Go, because you can't just work out the best thing to do in any given situation, AlphaGo had to learn to play instead by learning from hundreds of thousands of games through trial and error.

And at the end of all of this trial and error, even though it couldn't possibly know the best move in a situation, because that information just can't be hard coded into it, it could make a good guess. Some people think of this as it developing a sort of intuition. And I think that's really cool. Yeah, so there was a famous move, 37, it made that this is the one that people think was an intuitive... creative work of genius by AlphaGo, right?

Yeah, so like this sort of intuition it developed was, even though it learned from a lot of human games, actually was not like human play at all. So in its famous matchup against Lee Sedol, who was a Go Grandmaster. AlphaGo played a five match series against LisaDoll and it won the first match and it sort of won the first match by just not really making any mistakes, you know, in a very sort of machine like way. But in the second game, this move 37 was a moment where it placed a stone.

whereby if a grandmaster did it, everyone would think the grandmaster had lost his mind or her mind. Because it went against, you know, thousands of years worth of study and go that you should not put a stone on this particular square at this particular time. Then when they went back and looked at what point AlphaGo had won, it was the turning point. And so all of the pundits now consider it to be one of the most beautiful and creative bits of gameplay in Go.

done by anyone, and yet it came from a machine. Unsaddled by humans' training and stuff. Yeah. What's interesting is that in the first iteration of AlphaGo, it learned from human games. And then it also did lots of games against itself through trial and error. But then in later versions of AlphaGo, it decided to completely dispense with...

any human intuition, because it seemed that actually that wasn't maybe the best thing. And it started right from the beginning, just playing against itself. And that is the version of AlphaGo we have at the moment. And that is way better than any of the preceding ones.

On the one hand, it's really exciting, but it's also a bit embarrassing that thousands of years worth of grandmaster play by humans that went into AlphaGo actually turned out to make it a worse Go player than if it just learned by itself machine on machine. You seem to be granting AIs this creative ability. I think most people will. So do you think eventually they're going to have, we'll get this artificial general intelligence, a human level intelligence in AIs?

My feeling is that it's a long way off yet. But I think what we will see soon, and we're already starting to see, is this sort of AI that can solve or...

provide some sort of solution for very, very complicated problems. And like Go as an example of that, it's just not a... problem that people that you know that gives you any practical examples but there are so many situations where you have fairly simple rules that lead to something that's really complicated just when you look at you know at the building blocks of life fundamental physics the way atoms

interact, or even the way weather occurs, all of that starts from very simple rules that suddenly become incredibly complicated with... billions and billions and billions of possible outcomes. And so if your AI can develop some sort of intuition involving some sort of creativity to provide solutions that humans couldn't have thought of themselves.

I think that would be really exciting. I think that's a long way off a machine that is artificial general intelligence that can surpass humans on every task. on these sorts of tasks, it could completely change our understanding of a lot of parts of the universe at the moment. I think that would be amazing.

Thanks, Tim. Thanks, Anna. That's all for this week. Thanks for joining us on the first mission of the Escape Pod. We'll be back next week. Do let us know what sort of things you'd like us to feature and we'll do our best to oblige. We're on Twitter at New Scientist Pod. And just before you go, there's a special offer. You can get a subscription to New Scientist for 12 weeks for half price at the moment. Go to newscientist.com slash escape 12.

to get your special discount bargain thanks for listening bye for now bye This podcast is produced