Desperately Seeking Symmetry

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Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. This is Radiolab. And today we're bringing back a classic episode from way back in the Jad and Robert days. It starts with an ancient parable. winds its way through a brain scanner, a trick mirror, and a disastrous high school prom night, and somehow ends with the Big Bang. Here it is. Alright. Okay. Alright. You're listening to Radiolab. From WNYC. Rewind!

So you're going to identify the Washington place because I can't remember. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Three, two, one. Ready? I am ready. But we should tell the audience that we're going to start this not in our usual studio spot. Not here, here, where we're sitting now. Here.

Just to explain, this is the Shakespeare Theater in D.C. Recently, Robert and I were there in front of about 800 folks just trying out some material for the show. Beginning with this story, which comes from Plato, actually by way of Aristophanes. 2,400-year-old story. Breaking news, in other words. Yeah, and it goes like this. Once upon a time, he says, people were not born separate from each other. They were born...

entwined, kind of coupled with each other. So there were boys attached to boys and there were girls attached to girls. and of course boys and girls together in a wonderfully intimate ball and back then we had eight limbs there were four on top four on the bottom, and you didn't have to walk if you didn't want to. You could roll, and roll we did. We rolled backwards and we rolled forwards, achieving fantastic speeds that gave us a kind of courage. And then the courage swelled to pride.

and the pride became arrogance. And then we decided that we were greater than the gods, and we tried to roll up to heaven and take over heaven, and the gods' alarm struck back, and Zeus, in his fury, hurled down lightning bolts and struck everyone in two into perfect halves so all of a sudden couples who'd been warm and tight and wedged together were now detached and alone lost and desperate and losing the will to live and the gods seeing what they'd done

worried that humans might not survive or even multiply again, and of course they needed humans to give sacrifices and to pay attention to them, so the gods decided on a few repairs. Instead of heads facing backwards or out, they would rotate our heads back forward. They pulled our skin taut and knotted it right here at the belly button. Genitalia, too, removed to the front, so if we wanted to, you know, we could. And most important, they left us with a memory. It was a longing.

for that original other half of ourselves, the boy or the girl who used to make us whole. And that longing is still so deep in all of us, men for men, women for women, men for women for each other. that it has been the lot of humans ever since to travel the world looking for our other half. And when, says Aristophanes, when one of us meets another, we recognize each other right away. We just know this.

We're lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy. We won't get out of each other's sight, even for a moment. These are people, he says, who pass their whole lives together, and yet if you ask them, they could not explain. What they desire of each other, they just do. Very nice. Thank you very much. Thank you.

So here's the thing, that story got us started on a little journey. It truly began just thinking about wholeness and oneness. And halves looking for each other. In all varieties of ways. Mirrors and shapes. Relationships. Beauty. The birth of the universe. The nature of life. All of these things either have a simple, deep beauty. Or... Not. I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Pilwich. This is Radiolab, and today, for this hour, we are desperately seeking symmetry.

By the way, that was Zoe Keating on Cello. We'll hear more from her throughout the hour because she's awesome. All right, Bobby K. Mm-hmm. I'm still thinking about Aristophanes. Okay. And do you ever wonder...

What actually happens when two people click, when the haves kind of meet? Meaning what? You know, you go in through your day. Maybe you're at a party. You meet people and you're like, hey, how are you? How are you? They say something. They try and be interesting. You try and be interesting back. But in the end, you're like...

I don't need to remember that name. Right, of course. Gone. And then comes along somebody. Yeah, every hundred times. The stars align, the world falls away, things narrow, and you just... Click. I know that. But do you ever wonder what actually happens in that moment? Like when you meet someone that you really get, I just, I don't think that there's anything that really feels better than that.

That's Lauren Silbert. She's a neuroscientist at Princeton. She wonders. She's been wondering for a while. When I was, I don't know, maybe eight, and I used to study with my dad. We would go over things, and I remember, like, I didn't understand this one. like math problem and he was explaining it to me and all of a sudden I got it and I started to cry and he got really nervous because I was crying. Why were you crying? Because I was so excited that I like finally got it.

That's my first memory of really being excited about the intensity of understanding. So fast forward 20 years, Lauren is at Princeton and in the basement of a building. Here, can you just tell me where we are? We are in the fMRI facilities in Green Hall at Princeton University. They've got this giant brain scanner. Looks like an airplane engine. More like a donut.

You can go a donut. And as you know, with the scanner, you can put people in it and have them do tasks. Think a thought or sing a song or watch a movie. And then the researchers can see into their brain. without having to cut in there. And Lauren got it into her head, could I use this big donut to investigate the clicking question? So is the question when things click, what clicks? What clicks? And if we can know what clicks...

Can we learn how to make it click more? So one day last year, Lauren got into the brain scanner. I sort of like it in there. And she told this story. Can you just tell me that story? Well, it's a 15 minute... Come on. So I told the story. Have I ever actually told you the whole thing? Without any sort of rehearsal. I think maybe, well, 27 times. Something under 30. Under 30 times. I'm going to tell it one more time.

Time for everybody else to play along. So the story is about her prom. So Lauren is in high school, and this guy that she doesn't really like asks her to go to the prom. Pretty awkward. But she's like, okay. You know, didn't know what to say. Now, subsequent to being asked by the first guy, she actually falls for real for a second guy, guy number two. We just liked each other.

Click. So now she has a situation because she likes the second guy. Said yes to the first guy. And he still wants to be the date. He wants to be here. Yeah, oddly enough, he still wants to go with her. So she ends up going with guy number one. So we get to the prom and... Guy number two, her boyfriend, shows up. drunk. Very drunk. Punches fly. It gets messy.

So she drags guy number two, her boyfriend, out to the parking lot. But on the way to the car, he trips and falls directly on his face. Right onto his face? Right onto his face. On the concrete? And he starts bleeding. Bloody nose. Profusely. So she's like...

Give me your keys. I'm going to drive. She doesn't have a license, but he can't drive. So she drives them both out of the parking lot. A couple minutes later, they come upon an accident. In the street? Yeah, it's right there. Some cars had gotten into it. So they're rolling up to it. I get distracted. And she crashes into the accident that had already happened. And it's just that the police were already there and they like watched. So the officer walks.

up, sees her, no license. Sees this dude who's all bloody and messy and was like, alright, give me your registration. She thinks she's going to jail. But... Here is where fate steps in. As the officer is walking back to his car with her registration, a wind. A lucky wind. One of those kicks up, blows the registration out of the officer's hands. He can't find it.

And he has no choice but to let her go. So then I just left. So that was the story that forms the basis of this project. Okay, that is the story that forms the basis of this project. Okay, so now let's rewind. So anyhow, she told that story in the scanner. All the while, the scanner snapped pictures of her brain. Moment to moment. Then she got a bunch of other people, put them in the scanner, and had the scanner snap pictures of their brain. As they're listening to the story.

You with me so far? Yep. Next, she compared brains. Okay, so here I can show you. Lauren showed us brain scans where she divided each brain into thousands of tiny little squares that we call voxels. Thousands? Thousands, yeah. So then what we can do is we can take one voxel in one brain and directly compare it to the same exact voxel in the other brain. Shut up. Wow. And we do this across the entire brain. And this

is where things get interesting. When people really got her story, because she'd run them through all these tests to see if they could remember the different chapters, the words she used. She was checking to see how well they listened? Yeah, she would have them kind of recall the story. Okay.

Some were really good at recalling, others not so much. Now the people that did well, like really well, she found that as they were listening to her story, their brain would literally begin to mirror hers. All the little voxels in their head. we'd start to sync up with all the little voxels in her head. So they're just listening like anyone listens. They're just hearing what you're saying. I get that. No, no. Let me put it to you a different way.

You're right. I mean, right now, you and I, our voxels are mirroring each other. We're both speaking English. So we could assume, say, 20%. At least. I would go 23, 24. Let's say 24. Okay. But let's say you bump it up to 30. Maybe bump it up to 35. Let's get a little higher. 40, 42, 48, 49. I've never understood you at a 50% level. But let's say we get to 50%, even 60. There's a certain point at which something happens.

Where it's no longer me just describing an experience to you. It's you actually having the experience, you know? Like, you know that the difference between explanation and experience is like... The Grand Canyon, right? Well, she's found a way to quantify the gap. So when I'm sitting there listening to Meryl Streep, I'm all Meryl, inside, outside, and all around. That's 100% Meryl.

If you're listening, that's 100% Meryl Streep. She is not listening to this. You were saying. I'll give you an example of what I was just saying. Here, let me show you. So while I was in Lauren's office, she showed me this particular slide of her results. So on this side, we have this comprehension rank. And what that means... Basically, it was a graph. And on one axis, she had how much they actually understood the story.

and could recall it. And on the other axis, she had how much their brain synced up with hers, which is sort of like how much they experienced the story. What are these marks, by the way? Are these people? Yeah, no, sorry about the marks. Wait, these... This is just background. Oh, these are individual subjects. I see. So if you take out this one outlier, actually. She pointed to this one subject who is way on one side of the graph. So that person just didn't get your story at all.

No, this person... Actually, that person did understand her story, scored really nice on comprehension, but just didn't sync up with her brain at all. This person... This... Well, so this is a little interesting tidbit. I know this person. You know this person. I know this person. Yeah. To that person, I'm almost positive, is her fiancé. Yeah, there were some fights. In jest or for real? I mean, for real. I don't think he was actually paying attention.

But this one up here She pointed to another subject all the way on the other side of the graph who is a super brain coupling master was a girl in undergrad who I had never met before and and Her brain coupled with my brain was twice as much as everybody else. I mean really just like... I contacted her after because I wanted to have lunch with her and just see if we're the same person or not. And? And you never got back to me. What? I know.

Isn't that crazy? It was sort of the end of their semester, and I think she might have been away. In the weeks after I spoke with Lauren, we emailed a few times, and I kept asking her, I was like, so what about that girl? The one who knew everything. Yeah, who is she? Like, how do you explain the connection? Is it a connection? Let's go meet her. Come on, come on, come on. She didn't want to? No, she did, actually. And we started referring to the girl in email as a BD. BD meaning what?

meaning brain double, BD, BD, BD, BD, BD, BD, BD, BD, BD, BD, BD, BD, BD, BD, BD, BD, BD, BD, BD, BD. Anyhow, eventually, after two weeks of constant emailing and searching, BD turns up and agrees to meet. The meeting took place on a sunny Tuesday afternoon at Princeton, and I missed it because I was on the wrong train. When I finally get there, BD has come and gone. So you never laid eyes on BD. I did not, but...

I talked to Lauren right after she had. It was weird. Really? We sat down on a bench and she gave me the scoop. Okay, you seem a little shaken. Yeah, it was a strange experience. The first thing she tells me is that the mystery girl's name is her name. Lauren, my name as well. She was Lauren and you were Lauren? Yes, we're both named Lauren.

Wow. I know, it's weird, but there's lots of Laurens out there. I know, but still, that's so weird. At this point, I'm like, I mean, this is like an Aristophanes whopper here, folks. That's what I was thinking. And that's what Lauren told me that she had been expecting, too. Yeah. beforehand. I was expecting her to come in and just like be me. And? When she showed up was she you? No.

Not at all. Yeah. Earlier, they had met at a coffee shop. And since I'd missed the whole thing, I was very lucky that Lauren number one had recorded the meeting on her laptop. Okay, so I want to know, where did you grow up? I grew up in Vancouver, BC. In Vancouver, yeah. Lauren Wynn's theory was that they would have a common background, or a common something that would explain the symmetry between them. But what you hear...

Is Lauren Wong looking for points of connection? And, uh, well, listen. Okay. Do you have prom in Canada? Is that a stupid question? Uh, well, we do. I actually couldn't go to mine. You didn't go to your prom? Yeah. Okay. I wish I could have. Did you have significant relationships in high school? In the end, there was not one thing they had in common except their names.

Princeton. You thought that this was going to be, you know... Something, I don't know. Maybe your premise is wrong. What do you mean? Well, uh... Actually, I snuck up to Columbia University and I asked a neuroscientist about this, actually. When did you do that? While you were in Princeton, I was on the subway going up to see Joy Hurst. Hi. What? Nice to meet you. You went behind my back? What happened is I said to her, look.

We have this pretty great paper, and she agreed. It was a wonderful paper. It shows these two women who seem to be in such lockstep. Wouldn't you suppose that the two of them, if they ever met, would become friendly? Or have some connection. Would you come to the same conclusion if yours and my heartbeats were exactly the same? Depends on the circumstances. If it was a beautiful night and a sinking moon in Venice, maybe.

If you have elaborated the story beyond my question, say your heartbeat is about 62 beats per minute. Say mine was exactly 62 beats per minute. Would you say that... we were more in sync than if mine was 72 beats per minute. That you and I were more soulmates? No, probably not. I'd want to, but I don't know if I... You see, I would want to. Don't you want to? When you see synchrony between individuals...

Well, yes, but I'm saying that I think that the conclusion doesn't follow from the data. Joy says it's equally possible that... Lauren, too, is just an extraordinarily good listener. Hello? Hey. Hey, can you hear me okay? Yeah, I can hear you. In fact, when I finally got Lauren 2 on the phone, she did tell me that she is one of those people that when she hears a story, she just... Falls in. Yeah. Yeah. Soccer a little bit, yeah.

A little bit. Yeah, it's like a dream state almost. Yeah, like a dream state. I definitely have that happen when I'm doing sports, but I also sometimes have that happen when I read. Even so, do you think that you and Lauren 1 will become friends? I... Honestly, probably not. No. No. I mean, we're just... I just... I just don't. I wouldn't. I just wouldn't. But she's you. But not you. Don't you want to hang out with her? Don't you need to know her? I want to follow.

Okay, Jed, thank you very much. Why don't we just sit down just for a second? We're going to play a little soft and low. Come on. I think we can just repair all the damage that has just occurred to your sensitive psyche. Just listen, and we'll be right back.

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treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Chirality, take 30. Hey, I'm Chad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab, and today we are desperately seeking symmetry. And thus far, we are failing. Desperately. Because maybe, you know, if we rejiggered our whole approach, because symmetry, you know, is really...

Love. No, it's... What? No, we're changing the subject now. It's about the way things look when they're flipped around or turned or rotated. And this is where it gets really interesting. Reflected. Reflected. Yes, reflected, because there was a math... Reflected. Yes. There was a mathematician at Oxford University named Charles Lutwidge Dotson. There's a mathy name for you. Well, he had a different name, as it happens. What? Lewis Carroll.

Oh, like the Alice in Wonderland dude? The Alice in Wonderland dude, yes. He was a mathematician. He was. I really didn't know that. Did you know that he wrote another book called Through the Looking Glass? Truthfully, I didn't know they were different books. You know very little in this particular section of our program. I really don't. But there's a part of the book where Alice is standing in her room talking to her cat. Now, if you'll only attend Kitty and not talk so much...

I'll tell you all about my ideas about Looking Glass House. This is Natasha Gostwick reading, and in this section of the book, Alice is telling her cat, well, let's take a look at the difference between our world and that world right there in the mirror. That's just the same as our drawing room. Only the things go the other way. The books are something like our books. Only the words go the wrong way. I know that because I've held up one of our books to the glass.

And then they hold up one in the other room. How would you like to live in a looking glass house, Kitty? I wonder if they give you milk in there. Perhaps looking glass milk isn't good to drink. Perhaps mirror milk isn't good to drink, she says. Why are you talking like that? What does that even mean? Well, if you just stick with me on this, I think I'll make it perfectly clear. Okay. This is a very, as it turns out, difficult scientific question. Yes, they call it a chirality.

Okay, what? Shh, this is Neil deGrasse Tyson. Neil, N-E-I-L, deGrasse, small D-E, capital G-R-A-S-S-E, Tyson. He's an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History. Also the director of the Hayden Planetarium. Cool. What is chirality? Well, it's when you make a molecule, there's no rule or law that says it has to be symmetric. Neil says if you zoom into that bowl of milk, what you're going to find is just chains of atoms that are...

stuck together in a very particular shape. And that shape, it could... curl in a particular way. So for example, if you have a spring and you turn your finger in the direction the spring goes. A spring like a coil. A coil. Like the spring out of your click pen. Pull out that spring.

All right, we have a pen right here. Undo your pen. Pull it out. I've got the spring out. Here we go. And look at the way the spring turns. Looking at the spring. And move your finger in the direction it turns. I'm moving my finger. It's turning clockwise. Clockwise. All the way up to the top. Okay. That spring is that way in its life. Whether it's right side up or upside down. Doesn't matter. Always clockwise. Bye.

If you had a mirror, Jad, do you happen to have something? Do I have a mirror? No. Or take your phone, which has a reflected shiny thing. Okay. Put your spring in front of the shiny surface of the phone. Okay. Trace the spring with your finger and tell me which direction is your finger going? Clockwise. No. We already did this. In the reflection. Oh. In the phone. It's kind of hard to tell that in the phone.

It's going the opposite way. Yes. Counterclockwise. Exactly. And so now you have two oppositely turned springs. You cannot turn one into the other. They're built differently. yet they are curiously identical. So... Since molecules are just sequences of atoms, imagine a molecule that has that shape. If you put that molecule in front of a mirror, just the same as the spring, you've got now two molecules built differently, but cheeriously identical.

Kind of like your right hand and your left hand. Your left hand and your right hand are related by a mirror image. It's the same thing with these molecules. This is Marcelo Gleiser. He's a physicist at Dartmouth College. And according to Marcelo, this is how scientists talk about molecules. They call them...

Sometimes we call it handiness. Sometimes we get a little more fancy and we call it chirality because chiro, kiros in Greek means hand. And Marcelo says if you look at pebbles or granite or cement. inanimate stuff, when you look at the shape of things inside, it's a mixture of the two. 50% left-handed, 50% right-handed. However... If you look at all the proteins of living things, they are always left-handed and no right-handed at all. Really? Life has chosen one over the other.

Life as we know it. You mean when scientists look inside of living things, they always see it? the molecules are pointing one way. Yeah. Right. So somehow, and this is what's really amazing, somehow life is choosing a very specific shape for the molecules to make up stuff. That's correct. When you say life has chosen...

Let's take that sentence apart. Life meaning everything that is that we know of on earth. Every living thing. Hence my phrase life as we know it. Everything. That's what that means. The littlest things to the blue whale. That would be as we know it. The littlest, teeniest thing to the biggest tree, the giant sequoia. That would be as we know it. Every protein in you.

Dogs, trees, you name it. It's filled with left-handed building blocks? Yes. It's called the chirality of life. The chirality of life. Life, my friend, is left-handed. Hmm. That's pretty... That's, well, it feels cool, but let me just, like, so what?

I mean, I don't want to put it bluntly. Well, other than the sheer surprise of having everything in life being shaped in one direction. No, it is surprising, but I mean, what does it have to do with my life, anyone's life, or the mirror thing? This brings us back to the mirror mystery. and Alice and the Mirror Milk. No. No. Because you just told me that the milk is left-handed because milk is an organic thing. I'm a living cow, yeah. Remember you said that?

Life is lefty. So there can't be any right-handed milk, so the mirror milk doesn't exist. Well, that's because I forgot to tell you that scientists all the time manufacture mirror molecules. They do? Yeah, yeah, they go into their laboratories and they synthetically make mirror molecules of all kinds of things. Can they do milk? I don't know about milk in particular, but I do know that when I talked to an Oxford professor, Marcus de Satoi, he told me...

If you take the atoms which built caraway seeds, which is the spice they use in rye bread, take a mirror image of them, suddenly you get something which tastes of spearmint. Huh. is what's put on Wrigley Spearmint gum. And in fact, there are some very dramatic examples of this, not just where the taste changes, but listeners might remember a story about the thalidomide drug.

In 1958, a West German pharmaceutical firm began marketing a new drug. This is a new spot from the early 1960s. A sedative so effective and apparently harmless, it quickly became one of the most widely used and prescribed drugs in West Europe, thalidomide. Before long, pregnant women started taking it as a way to come. Morning sickness, and most of us, well, we know what happened next. Every woman...

President Kennedy in a press conference. In this country, I think, must be aware that it's most important that they do not take this drug, that they turn it in. Every citizen, of course, should be aware of the hazards. All in all more than 12,000 children were born with arms and legs that were shortened or deformed or completely missing.

The strange thing, according to Marcus, is that we now know that when they first made thalidomide, it was all one-handed. Let's say it was left-handed. Yeah, and it did actually cure morning sickness. And was completely harmless. But somewhere along the way, thalidomide flipped. We don't know whether this was in the drug-making process or after, but we do know... Its mirror image was incredibly poisonous.

So you know what this means, Jan? What? That in a show about symmetry, what we've just discovered is that life itself is actually deeply asymmetric. Yeah. Unlike Love, where we started the program back with Aristophanes. When it comes to life, you don't want to meet the other half. Stay away, Mirror Milk. Stay away. Anyhow. That's, well, enough about mirrors. No, no, no. No, no.

I think we can take this another step further. There is no further step to take. No, there is. Because something about this chemistry reflections thing resonates for me with the actual experience of standing in front of a mirror. How? Well, you know, you look at that guy and you're like, eh, oof. I mean, we talked about this on stage, actually, in D.C. at the Shakespeare Theater.

Remember when I asked you that personal question? Oh, yeah. Do we want to do that? Oh, yes, we do. Psychologically, let me ask. Psychologically, do you enjoy looking in the mirror? Is that a question you want to ask me in front of... That's a private question, I feel. Surely you know, though, that the difference between your true self and your mirror self is not trivial.

What do you mean by my true self? Well, I'm going to tell you the story now about a guy named John Walter. Oh, with the mustache from Baltimore from the movies. No, that's John Waters. Walter. He's a computer programmer in New Rochelle, paid him a visit recently. Because back when he was in college, he sort of kind of switched places with the guy in the mirror. It was many years ago. How old were you? I was 19.

19. So it was a long time ago. We're talking late 70s here. But I had already had some issues with the mirror. So let me set this up for you. The thing to know about John is that as a kid, he had a tough time. Like so many of us. He would get bullied, beaten up on the playground. It was no better when he got into his teens. And as a 19-year-old, his social life consisted of a series of stinging humiliations like the following.

At the time, there was a lot of kids hanging out. There was a crew of people, like 20, 30, 40 kids would gather together at the aqueduct, beautiful woods of the aqueduct, and go drink beers and smoke cigarettes. I've walked into the group like, hey, what's up? And it's like, yeah, whatever. Roundly rejected. And that, according to John, was normal. That was normal for you. Very normal. Like people would say, what's that guy doing here? Maybe he was like wearing the wrong...

plaid pants or had like, you know, mismatched socks. They might be some... Whatever. Don't you emphasize with this guy? Nobody wants to be 19 and be the yucky person. Of course I would empathize. However, the story that will follow centers on a revelation that John had. that began...

just as he was about to start his summer job. For Con Ed, I was working for them. As a painter. And I had some pictures taken for Con Ed. These were ID photos that you got? Yeah, it was an ID camera that had four lenses. So when they took the negative, it was four of me. Boom, boom, boom, boom.

Like little squares? Little squares. And I remember looking over and going, why do I look so weird? Why do I look so weird? Why do I look so weird? Why do I look so weird? Because here's the thing. I mean, the John in the pictures... was not the John that he knew himself to be. That John was kind of timid. Nerdy. Not cool. Why do I look so weird in pictures?

I look fine. What do you mean you look fine? How do you know you look fine? Well, I thought I looked fine in the mirror. Of course, in the mirror, things on the left go to the right, things on the right go to the left. Wait a second, that's when it hit him. What hit him? It's the hair part. It's the what? It's the hair part.

It's the what? It's the hair part. I could do this all night! It's the hair part. What does that mean, it's the hair? I hear it, I hear it. What does that mean, it's the hair part? Well, in the picture, I saw a guy with a right hair part. In the mirror, I saw a guy with a left hair part. Essentially... Wait, which side of my hair parted on? You're a left. John thought he was a lefty too. He would stand in front of the mirror and the mirror would tell him he was parting it too.

The left. But in fact, he was parting it to the right in real life. Now, the lefty guy in the mirror, he liked that guy. I was fine with that guy. He was cool. There was nothing wrong with him. But he realized he was the only person seeing that guy. So we thought, oh, let me put my hair on the other side. Let me essentially swap real me

For mirror me. It was one of these things where, yeah, that looks really weird in the mirror, but I bet you it looks good in real life. Let me go find out. So what did you do? Well, that night... He goes... Back to the aqueduct, same posse as there as before. I mean, that same group, interesting enough, had beat the crap out of me like three years earlier when I was in like ninth grade. But there he was now with his hair parted on the left. Oh no. He says this time. Things were different.

offered him a beer I was like wow but the thing that I knew made it better was when I left I got goodbyes This is ridiculous that you would tell me a story about a man who is having social failures universally shifts his hair over and is remade. This is like... Look, it's his experience. It's very easy. Vidal Sassoon wouldn't...

It's not easy to dismiss, but I'm going to win you over. Yes, very easy. Are you ready? I'm going to win you over. You're not good. Are you ready for this? I don't think you're ready. Are you ready? Are you asking me to be broad-minded? Because I'm going to show you a picture right now. All right. Okay. Have a look at... Okay.

Who is that? It's Abraham Lincoln. Our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln. Just stare at him, Robert. Take him in. Take him deep into your consciousness. By the way, this next part, you can see the pictures at radiolab.org. It's worth checking out. His eyes, his nose, his mouth. Pay attention particularly to the hair part. Okay? Now, look what happens when you flip Abraham. Oh, that...

You see what happened there? No, no, no, no, no. Is this the same picture? It's the same picture. Go back to the other picture. Go. All right. There's Abe. Now do the other one. Ooh. You see? That's so weird. Now. Here's the thing. This is what Abraham Lincoln would have seen when he looked in the mirror. He would have seen this guy, not the other guy, the one we all see. So there's something going on here. Would you not at least acknowledge me? I find this vaguely plausible, yes.

Okay? With your permission, Mr. Cynic, I will now rejoin John. Who's about to, what? Get married and have three babies because his hair... He says, after...

After he switched his part... It just kept getting better and better and better all summer long. He was suddenly invited to all of these parties by the very same people that used to beat him up. And for the first time, he says... I was clearly one of them. Now whether or not you buy that this is in fact because of his hair, that's on you, okay?

But let's fast forward just a little bit. The next summer. This would have been 1979. Yeah, 1979. John's sitting in front of the TV and on comes. Good evening. This is a special night for me. The president. Jimmy Carter. Making a speech about how our nation is in a deep funk. Why have we not been able to get together as a nation?

to resolve our serious energy problems. The malaise speech, you know, that infamous countries in malaise. It's clear that the true problems of our nation are much deeper, deeper. than gasoline lines or energy shortages deeper even than inflation or recession

Now, as you know, I'm sure you remember, a lot of people would criticize Jimmy Carter for making the speech because he's up there admitting flaws, and they were like, come on, Mr. President, don't be weak, man up! John, meanwhile, is sitting in front of the TV, and he's thinking... Dude, you got to change your hair part. And so I wrote him. You wrote to him? I wrote to him. Wait, wait, so you said...

Wait, why? I think I just said, I think you should change your hair on the left. I did myself and found it to be much more powerful, much more successful. Do you have that letter? I so wish I did. I don't have it. And then about six weeks later, boom, he twitched. He switched. No, he didn't. John wrote him a letter.

and President Carter switched. No. It might not have been John Slaughter that did. You have no evidence. Think about how much, what's involved in a president switching his hair. There are focus groups, there are prayer meetings, there's so much thought that goes into that. Did anyone actually record this? Yes. They did? I will now read you a journalistic account from no... A periodical... There you go. Washington book. Right there. You see? Bam. Right there. Oh, man.

Newsweek, May 7th, 1979. At first, photographers thought they had their negatives reversed. But no, Jimmy Carter has changed the part in his hair from the right side to the left. The Washington Press Corps demanded an explanation. But remember that as opposed to John who changes his hair and then all the girls give him beers, this guy, he was running against a luxuriantly haired man.

Reagan, and it didn't matter. So he just, you know, he got crushed. Part smart. Forget the executive branch. Stay with me now. I was with John, and he was showing me pictures of congressmen and of celebrities, and I noticed... peeking out at the bottom of the pile. I see peeking out underneath the stack of photos as a Superman.

He showed me a picture of Superman looking mighty in his Superman suit. Notice how he parts his hair. Yeah, it's a little bit on there, on that side, yeah. Now, this is Clark Kent. With it on the right. And as we know from the movies, Clark Kent is bumbling. He's sort of a dork. I mean, I was at first really nervous about tonight. So somebody who made that movie...

maybe explicitly, intuitively understood something about the difference. That maybe, you know, the right part said one thing about Clark Kent, the left part said something about Superman. In fact... There is a scene in the movie where Clark Kent's running down an alley. He's about to turn into Superman. He pulls his shirt open to reveal the S, and literally mid-stride, his hair goes...

And turns from the left to the left. So... You're saying that sophisticated popular cultural motion picture manufacturers and at least two presidents have been persuaded to this position. At this very moment... On a Saturday night, that is what I'm saying. All right. Well, for argument's sake, then.

What would you say, I hate to get into this any deeper, explains the difference between putting the power of your hair on the left hand or the right hand? Well, if you ask John, what he'll say is that the left... hair part emphasizes strength and logic because it draws your attention to the logical more masculine side of your

face, your brain, because it's a left brain kind of thing, but I don't really know. So I decided I would actually take this seriously and figure out how to feel about it. So I called up this guy. His name is Mike Nichols. Oh, from The Graduate. Very good. A psychology professor in Australia. He's an expert in symmetry. That Mike Nichols. Yes, that guy. I ran him through John's theory. Have you ever seen the Superman movies?

Some of the earlier ones, I think. You know how Clark Kent's hair is parted to the right, but then every time he turns into Superman, his hair... So ran him through the whole thing. You know, Clark's on the right, maybe he's weak, Superman's on the left, maybe he's stronger, more assertive. Right. Is there anything to that? Anything at all? Yeah, I mean, possibly, you know. But he did say this.

Which is interesting. In focusing on the left, John may be picking up on a particular bias that we human beings have to our left side. For instance, here's an experiment that he and his colleagues did. Take a snapshot of someone's face at baseline when they're showing no emotion. Blank face. And then get them to try to look as happy or sad as they could. Take happy guy.

and overlay him onto no expression guy. And almost like a contour map, you could actually look at the amount of change, the amount of muscle movement that had occurred. Which you will see if you measure the muscle movement. in millimeters on each side of the face, you'll see that the smile curves a few extra millimeters on the left side of the face. He says this is nearly always the case.

always on the left side. What it's really telling you is that when somebody smiles or when they frown or whatever, they're doing it slightly more strongly on the left side of there. Now, if this is the case, that our left side is sort of saying more emotionally than our right side, then if you think about the mirror, it's kind of a discombobulating thing.

You know, because it's taking your left, which is sort of broadcasting emotion, flipping it to your right. You're seeing yourself. You're all mixed up. You don't know which part of you is where. So you're saying, like, because I tend to address you with my attention on your left side, unbeknownst to me, and you're.

left side has actually flipped over to your right and said, it's a where are we sort of question. Exactly. But John has developed a solution to this problem. Let me take this one apart. He now makes and sells his own very special mirrors right out of his home. Is this where you make mirrors? Everything that goes into the mirror is made here. You see here, this is the machine that cuts the mirror.

He buys these giant sheets of reflective glass and he slices them into little pieces. Clunk. And then I snap it. Now for each mirror, this is the key, he uses two pieces of mirror glass instead of one. What he'll do is he'll take these two pieces and he'll place them together. At right angles. Two mirrors at right angles. Like exactly at right angles. It has to be 90.00 degrees. And let's just push this up a little bit. That's still not enough.

I think is when he finally gets it right, which can take hours. What he'll have is this V-shaped mirror. He'll stand it up, put it in a box, and then voila. What you have is a mirror that shows you a mirror image of a mirror image of you. Takes the normally flipped guy that you'd see in the mirror re flips him so that what you are seeing is essentially Well for the first time in a mirror you see yourself as other people see you. Okay, so there you go

So what is this that you have in your hand? This is a true mirror. This is the 12-inch model. So this is actually what I look like? Yeah, touch your right eye. See, it's actually on the right side. Oh, my God. Isn't that crazy? That's crazy. It is surprisingly weird to see yourself this way. I feel like my nose is going the wrong way. Yeah. I never knew my nose went that way. And this little flare in my eyebrows is on the wrong side. Or the right side, as it were.

John claims that many a fair number, I probably would put you in this bunch, my co-host, when they stand in front of this mirror, they freak out, many of them, because their perception is shaken up a little bit. In fact, he sometimes takes his mirrors to these festivals and will sort of set them up and have people look at themselves and then fill out comment cards afterwards. You know, I mean, if you look at some of the comments, you know, it's like... I am a...

monster in your mirror. What did he say? I am a monster in your mirror. To break we go. If you want any more information on anything you heard, go to our website, radiolab.org. Or if you want to see those incredible pictures of Abe Lincoln, that's where they are. That's right. And subscribe to our podcast there as well. Radio Lab is supported by Mint Mobile. You know what doesn't belong in your epic summer plans? Getting burned by your old wireless bill.

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Okay, hey, I'm Jed Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolwich. This is Radiolab, and today... We're still desperately looking, seeking symmetry, as you say. Not well. We have looked at love. Failed. Looked at brains. Failed. Looked at mirrors. Failed. The chemistry of life.

So we thought, well, for the last stop on this trip, if we were to go anywhere to find or look for deep unity, a deep oneness and symmetry, maybe... The beginning. Yeah, of everything. Moment zero. So we found ourselves a physicist. Again, it's Neil deGrasse. I began with a very, very basic question. If...

You look at me and I look at you and you seem to be made of stuff and I seem to be made of stuff and here we are and here are tables and chairs. Is it a surprise to you in some deep way that we are all here made of stuff? Yes, it's not so much – surprise understates it. It's shocking, really. It's shocking. What is shocking? That there's any matter in the universe at all. Meaning that this conversation shouldn't be happening.

It's way deeper than that. Right, thank you. It's deeper than just whether or not we'd be having this conversation now. It's whether or not any of this would exist. Earth, the galaxy, and the like. Okay, so if you go back 13.7 billion years ago... That's Marcelo Gleiser again, the physicist, and he says if you roll back the history of the universe, no more stars, no molecules, no atoms, if you play the movie backwards now, all the way to the beginning, just after, you know.

The Big Bang. You have what we call a primeval soup. This soup was actually made of light. Universe of light. Very high energy. And out of this energy, this heat, these interactions, you suddenly get... What the hell is that? These are belches, Jad. Belches? Belches of matter. The light is doing this? Yes. This is what a equals mc squared is all about. Because energy is just a form of matter. And vice versa.

I feel like I should know what you're talking about, but I don't. Okay, let's start a little simpler. There's light all around us. We're in a studio. It's visible light. So this light has no mass, has energy. Even OM. Crank up the energy of the light. Go to ultraviolet. X-rays. There's a point in X-rays where you have a high enough X-ray photon. It will spontaneously...

turn into a particle. Electrons, in fact. Oh, so you're saying if you crank up the E, the energy of the light, high enough it'll suddenly just turn into mass? That's correct. So, Jed, just picture the soup. Really intensely hot. And it's belching out. Electrons zooming around. Photons. Forks. Neutrons. Neutrinos. Continuously churning. Over time, all that matter clumps together in more and more complex forms until you finally get us. Sounds very simple. Doesn't it, Chad? Yes.

But there's a but coming. I can smell it. But, and here's the big but. Back in 1928, 1929, there was this physicist, really young guy, Paul Dirac. He's doing some math and he's thinking about this whole business of turning light into matter. Okay. Now he's puzzled by something.

What? There is a law in physics called the law of conservation of charge, which simply means this. My, how it rolls off your tongue quite nicely. Doesn't it? It does. So here's what it means. Whenever you create something, in the beginning you have zero electric charge. At the end, you have to have zero electric charge, too. That is, you cannot create electric charge. You have to keep the balance. If you make something in the universe that has a positive charge, make an electron. Just make one.

Right now? Yeah. Gone. That electron has a, you remember this from eighth grade, a negative. Negative one, baby. So you make two electrons. There we go. Now make three electrons. Woo! Negative three. Now, if the universe is to stay in balance, you need to have something that has a positive charge. You've got three minuses on one side.

Wait a second. If this is true, how would you even make an electron? The sheer fact of creating an electron puts it out of balance. This fundamental story here is wrong. Well, no. Paul Dirac thought, well, how about this? What if every time you created an electron, you created an electron? created an anti-electron.

What? Every particle could have an equal but opposite anti-particle. That is, a particle that looks very much the same, but essentially its electric charge is reversed. It would look the same? Like, really look the same? Yes, you'd have to measure their properties to know that. that they were different. Is it a mirror image? You might think of it as a mirror image. There's a thing called quantum spin, and it would be spinning the opposite way.

But charge is the most obvious difference. For example, the antimatter cousin of the electron. Because the electron is a negative charge, this little guy should have a positive charge. Exactly. But in every other way, it would be the same. Right. But no one ever seen one. He just thought that there probably would be one. Yes. And why did he think this? Math.

Math. It was a solution to his equations. And that's the beauty of theoretical physics. By solving equations, you can sometimes find out about the world. And then, yes, a few years later, they found the positron. The antimatter version of the electron. Oh. Yeah, no, it's deep. It's deep. How did they do that? Did they actually see it? Well, particles, you know, they're very tiny, right? You can't really see them. So what you do is you create little...

systems in the laboratory, you get like a vapor. And you put the vapor in a tank, he says, and when the electron or the anti-electron shoots through the vapor, the particle destabilizes the vapor and makes little bubbles. okay, you can see these little bubbles appearing out of nothing. Wow. Seriously. It's really an amazing thing. So you can't see the particle itself, but you can see it's...

Shadow. It's road trip. It's road trip, yeah. So then he says, okay, imagine you get this little piece of light and you heat it up really hot so that it... spawns, well, as we learned, not one particle, but two. Matter-antimatter pair. Put them in the vapor tank. And you put a magnet in there. You can tell if it's going to the left or to the right if it's a positive or a negative charge.

Very clever. It is cool. You see two particle tracks that each curl opposite directions, and if they have the same rate of curl, that means they have the same mass. So if we go back to our picture of the early universe of the soup, and you named all of those particles, does that mean that for every particle that you named, there is its opposite floating around there as well? Exactly. You have electrons, anti-electrons, neutron, anti-neutron, proton, anti-

proton this is all very beautiful and you'd say great I have a very democratic universe you know as many particles and antiparticles and everybody's happy only problem is the following When an electron and a positron meet, they will find each other, and uh-oh, and they will annihilate.

You mean they'll find it because they'll find their original other half? No, no, they wouldn't need to. No, just find another kind like that. That's correct. I see. That's correct. So, Jed, now imagine that we're in the very early universe. I am a teeny bit of matter, and you my opposite.

I'm an anti-crawl witch. An anti-crawl witch. And so the pro-crawl witch is sitting here, and I see you across the haze. Now, I'm positive charge. You're negative charge. And we are zooming together. Here we come. You see it doesn't work out too well for us. But, you know, wait, wait, wait. This is actually a rather profound puzzle because if Paul Dirac was right and half the universe is matter, the other half the universe is anti-matter, and we all bump into each other as we just did, well...

I guess we would just not, we would just become, I don't know, what? Well, I don't know. We would not be here. You just blink out and there'd be nothing. Exactly. Really nothing. So it's a field of... Mostly not. Mostly just radiation. Radiation. Radiation. Radiation. Radiation. It's shocking. It's shocking. it's shocking Well, there's something wrong with this theory because we're talking to each other. So something's wrong with this notion.

Yes, and what's wrong is an imperfection in the laws of physics that we know of now and that is responsible for this bias. Which means what? That there was a little more of matter, what we call matter, than... antimatter? Yes. There was, to be precise, to every billion particles of antimatter, we had a billion and one.

particles of matter. Oh my god, really? Yes. Wow. That tiny excess of one in a billion is enough to create everything that exists now. One lonely little guy. We would call that... and asymmetry. So everything we see in the universe, all the stars, all the suns and the moons and the grass and the mountains and us, we're the extra stuff? Yes.

We are the result of this asymmetry. Has anybody dealt with the real question that's provoked here? It's like, why was there more one stuff kind of stuff than the other kind of stuff? So there you go. That is one beautiful question.

But we don't have any final answer yet. You don't know? Because, you see, we don't know. We do not know, which is OK. Not knowing is a wonderful thing in science. Otherwise, you could just retire. Can I tell you my favorite lawyer joke told to me by a lawyer? Yeah. I have to like spread this because it's the best one. 98% of lawyers give the other 2% a bad name. I'm sorry.

Well, that's the go music. The go music, meaning go away. Meaning us. Or here's a different place to go, to our website, radiolab.org. where you can read more about anything you heard in this hour. You can see those amazing Lincoln pics and other things we've got there on Symmetry. And of course... you can subscribe to our podcast. Which means you get to hear the show, you know, whenever you like. I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolwich. Thanks for listening. Hi, I'm Isha.

And I'm from Plano, Texas. And here are the staff credits. Radio Lab was created by Chad Abinrod and is edited by Dawn Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keith is our director of sound design. Our staff includes... Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Rebecca Lacks, Maria Paz-Piteras, Sindhu Jnana Sambandam, Matt Kilty, Annie McEwan, Alex Neeson, Dara Kari,

Sarah Sandak, Anissa Vita, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, Molly Webster, Jessica Young, with help from Rebecca Rand. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujol-Mazzini, and Natalie Middleton. Hi, this is Michelle calling from Richardson, Texas. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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