DARK vs LIGHT

Welcome to The Rest of Science. I'm Hannah Frye. And I'm Michael Stevens. Now, today's episode, actually, we're cheating a little bit. We're taking one of the listener questions, which we liked so much that we are not putting it in an episode of Field Notes. We are expanding it out into a whole entire super duper long version of our podcast. Point is, we love this question. Adore it. I think we should get right into reading it. Okay, here we go. It's from Kelsey, who asks, hello, Hannah and Michael. My seven-year-old is a huge fan and just asked me a question, which I can't answer, which would win in a fight between black and white. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Here's something strange. Your DNA contains more ancient viral fragments than genes. The genes that build our cells make up only 2% of our DNA. And for years, that is what scientists focused on. They treated the rest, the ancient viruses and stuff, as junk. But now we know that that hidden majority, sometimes called the dark genome, influences how our biology works and how diseases like cancer behave. It's a reminder that... Hi, this is Marina and Richard from the Resters Entertainment. Need anything from Tesco, Richard? Oh, yes. Cheaper cinema tickets, please. No problem at all, because between the 12th and the 31st of May, for just £2.50 in club card vouchers, you can get a cinema ticket for £5 at Cineworld, something to think about the next time you're doing your shop. Exactly. You're basically scanning your way towards watching some of the latest blockbusters, like The Devil Wears Prada 2, The Mandalorian and Grogu, or even family films like The Sheep Detectives, just in time for half-term. Exchange your vouchers in the Tesco app and book online at cineworld.co.uk. Prices for a standard 2D ticket exchange your club card vouchers book online and visit between the 12th and 31st of May, excluding Cineworld, Leicester Square, Dublin and Jersey, and special screenings. T's and C's applies to tesco.com.cineworld. If only they could make parallel parking simpler. To the right a bit, mate. Yep, back. Back a bit. Bit more. Bit more. Oh, nope, too far. We buy any car. Selling made simple. To sell your car today, enter your register number now at webuyanycar.com. Progress rarely comes as a single breakthrough. It builds gradually. Cancer Research UK plays a central role in that progress. Supporting decades of research into over 200 types of cancer, work that's helped double survival in the UK over the past 50 years. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash the rest is science. Yeah, I mean, there's lots of different ways we can take this, isn't there? There are a lot of questions we get where we're like, next, next. This one we were like, no, wait a second. That's not true, too, Michael. We adore every single question. Thank you very much. That's true. I was just joking. We treasure them all and we'll answer them all. Yes, eventually. Eventually. Before, as long as we live long enough. If you've asked us a question, we will answer it. Just do hold your breath about it. Now, I should say Michael and I have not shared our answers with each other yet. No. Of what we think. Yeah, we both decided, look, how do you interpret this? What do you mean white and black? Do you mean color, radiation, good and evil? And we said, stop, let's just both come up with our own interpretations, figure out who wins each of them, and then we'll just come together and compare and that's what's going to happen today. Do you want to get fast? Yeah, I'm going to go first because I think we can start with a, I don't want to say simple interpretation, but what if this is just about color? What if this is just a popularity contest? Well, thankfully, YouGov has the answer. They've polled people across multiple dozens of countries. What's your favorite color? And white and black never make it into the top spot. But, but here's the deal. Black wins the popularity contest against white pretty much everywhere. UK, Germany, US, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, but white actually is more popular than black in China, Malaysia and Indonesia. Okay. A small selection. A small selection. And I don't know why and they didn't propose any hypothesis as to why. I will say this was interesting. The number one top favorite color in every country they surveyed was blue. Even in places like China where red is this very auspicious color, blue was always the favorite. Every single country. By quite a bit actually. Every single country has blue as the favorite. Yeah. Now they did say that in China, the distinction between blue and green might be a bit different. It might not be the same as what it means to an American or a Brit. But basically, for the purposes of this episode, black ranks above white everywhere, except China, Malaysia and Indonesia. I do also sort of wonder whether, I mean, look, if you, it depends on how detailed a color you're allowing, because I might say aubergine, you know, was my favorite. I know. And they didn't allow that. They just said of the traditional. Were you allowed purple? Seven rainbow colors. You were allowed purple. Yes. So it's like the seven rainbow colors, black and white, were allowed. So there was no gray, and there was no brown. So, I mean, look, we still need to do more research. You know what though? This marries actually with the thing that I found, which is that in fashion, in the clothes that people choose to wear, I mean, black wins by an absolute country mile. And not just at funerals, instantly. Yeah, sure. Across the board. There's one industry study that found that black was two and a half times more popular than white. At least. I'm not surprised. I mean, white has a disadvantage. It's going to stain more easily. Sure. Just off the bat, that's going to knock it down below black. It's less slimming as well. It's less slimming. See all your, your lumps and bumps a lot more on it. If it's snowy, no one will see you. Yeah. But at night, no one will see you if you're wearing black, and that's good. Maybe that's an advantage. I think when it comes to what's your favorite color as well, I think for reasons I haven't really investigated, white maybe isn't even really considered a color to a lot of people. It's the blankness on which you then get to see your favorite color. But black is, it's got an association with being, you know, the black belt, heavy metal and goth. And it's like, it's a whole style. Whereas white is like, what are you, you know, gand off the white, like grow up, you know, it's just a little more nothingness, nothingness. Even though in reality, when it comes to the colors, it's actually the other way around, right? Black is nothingness and white is all of the colors all together. That's interesting. Yeah. I mean, who wears white? Like Colt members? But who wears black? Cooler Colt members. There's the coolness factor there. And this is coming from a very specific Western perspective, but yet across countries, Yuga found that black was still usually more popular. Only usually though. You know what though, actually, while we're on the topic of black clothing, you know, there was a study into the color uniform that athletes wear and whether it changed how they played. And they came up with the conclusion that players are much more nausea and more aggressive when they're wearing black. Oh yeah. Yeah. When it comes to American football, look at the Raiders, right? So they are the scariest looking team because they're in black and silver. And their fans, like, are violent, famously and proudly violent. But I think if they were the Las Vegas tulips, that would not be their reputation. Yeah. So, okay, so so far when it comes to popularity as a color in fashion as a way to win as a sports team. Well, let me tell you the stats on this. Oh, you've got stats. Oh, I've got stats. Of course I have. Okay. So this is 1988. This is Mark Frank and Thomas Gilvoit, Jack Cornell. They analyze NFL and so football and hockey, basically, American football and hockey. And they were looking at penalty records specifically. Oh, so as a measure of how aggressive the team was. Right. In the idea being that if you got more penalties, then you were playing a bit in the water. Right. Of course. Yeah. A bit rougher, a bit rougher around the edges. And the thing is, this is like a natural experiment in a lot of ways because there were a couple of occasions where teams changed the color of their shirts from one season to the next, from black to a different color. And they found they're going to cross the board. The penalty average, right, was much higher the number of minutes that you would get, you know, of penalties. I don't know how these sports work. You've got to have to fill in the gaps. You're doing fine. Okay, fine. The number of minutes that your team were in penalty for increased if you were wearing black. So there was one team in particular, Pittsburgh Penguins. They went the other way around. They went from light blue to black. And they committed more penalties. And they committed more penalties. Oh, whoa, whoa. We need to point out, did they commit more penalties or were they penalized more often? Great question. I've got the answer for you. Because in 2012, there was a follow-up study. And in this, they not only looked at, you know, tens of thousands of hockey games across different seasons, but they also then ran these controlled experiments in high school and college students so that they would like essentially run some teams would be in black and some teams would be wearing white. And then they would see how it would work out over and over and over again to see if there were any difference. And they found both things were true. Referees call more fouls on players who were wearing black. Okay. But players in black were also behaving more aggressively. So they like objectively rewatched these games or something? Right. Because I think that's it. When you're wearing darker colors, you're like, maybe I can get away with this. Maybe I just sort of feel a little bit like, I don't know. Okay. So these researchers are pretty confident that it wasn't just that the referees themselves thought, ah, something happened. The player wearing the darker colors probably instigated it because I'm biased against that. They really studied this and found that it truly was the fault of the players wearing the darker colors. It was both things. So they were both being accused more often and also... Oh, it was both. Yes, it was both. Wow. Okay. So if you think that's a good thing, then black wins again. I've noticed that as I've gone through my interpretations, it depends on what you think is better. Yeah. Like black and white have differences, but which difference you prefer determines which one wins. Look, I'll be honest with you. I think black wins every single time. I mean, there's the occasional one. This is in my analysis, right? There's the occasional time here and there where white sort of puts up a good fight, but almost always I'm team black. In rugby, the all blacks, New Zealand all blacks, terrifying. Have you seen them do the hacker? Oh, my God. Yeah. I was going to say, and they're called the all blacks. They wear black and like silver or white. Yeah. Yeah. I guess we're not the two people who are going to know the answer to that. Maybe it's just all black. Maybe it is all black. They're also really good. Yeah, they're amazing. Their women's team is actually really good right now. My stepfather-in-law, someone in your family. I feel like my mother-in-law's husband is really into rugby and he loves the women's team because they're like blowing it out of the water right now. That's cool. And he's in New Zealand, by the way. Back when Michael Jordan was playing basketball, he was so good. The Detroit Pistons had this idea of like, why don't we just really focus on stopping him from being able to do anything? Like, in fact, let's tire him out. Let's penalize him. Let's be mean to him and like break his will and force his other teammates to do it on their own. And it was really negative. They called it Jordan rules. And in my memory, the Detroit Pistons, who had this whole like strategy, wore black jerseys. But apparently they were more like blue, red, and white. However, in my mind, they are the like angry- Batty. Looney Tunes baddies. And then you've got like Michael Jordan, this little guy who's like, I'm just a Bugs Bunny over here. I'm a good guy. But- Here I'm flying. But this association between aggression and black colors and blamelessness and white runs very deep. It really does. So black wins in terms of roughness, popularity, fashion, but it loses in chess. It does lose in chess. Fair or not, though, is I think maybe up for debate because when you look at who wins chess games, the person playing white or the person playing black, white has an advantage. This is like a known thing. You can even, if you look at chess games and the history of chess games, white wins, you know, four to 10 percent more often. By the way, that chance of winning, this is very complicated because there's two answers. It's like white wins 37 percent of the time. Oh, because of the draws, of course. Because yes, that 55 number is if you give them half a win for a draw. Right, I see. So, yes, it took me a long time to understand this because they'd be like white scores 55 percent. And I'm like scores. I had to go look at a chess glossary to figure out the difference. But across chess games, white tends to win four to 10 percent more. It's usually like 37 percent of the time white is the decisive victor. 27 percent of the time black is the rest of the time it's a draw. And as the standard of play increases, you get more and more draws. But also, white's win percentage approaches 100 percent. Why? Because white gets to go first. White has this advantage. I want to talk about rainbow chess, which is not a thing. My daughter says she invented it. And I don't. It's kind of like Bobby Fisher's chess 360, his like Fisher random chess. But instead of randomizing the back row of pieces for each team, you put all the pieces, black and white, into a bag. This is how she explained it to me. And then you reach in and you pull out a piece and you put it where it should go on your side, regardless of whether it's black or white. Okay. So both players wind up with this randomized mix of black and white pieces. And yet you both still are either black or white. So some of you, if you're black, some of your black pieces are already on the other side of the board. That sounds really fun. It sounds really fun. And it means that there's a lot of like, okay, so first of all, you have to have the same arrangement of pieces. So if you've already drawn a queen, then the next time you draw a queen, you have to put it back in. Also a pawn does not become a queen when it reaches the other side of the board. Cause some of them are just one step away from already being there. So there's like some tweaks that she had to make to make this sort of work. I don't know if it's actually a good game. We have a lot of fun playing it though. I think that sounds amazing fun. Now, white still gets to go first though. So it probably still mathematically will have an advantage. I'm not sure though, because I think that it would be, I think that the dominant thing would be that the luck of where your pieces ended up. If you end up with the queen on their back rank, then I mean, game over. Or not. Okay. Yeah. That's another rule that the neither king can begin in check. There's a lot of rules that you have to make up because this doesn't work. But if you follow all the rules, then you get something that kind of works and is kind of fun, especially to play with a six year old. Yeah, that does sound very fun. But I don't know if there's something else like it. So let us know in the comments if you've heard of a variation of chess like this. When I was teaching my daughter's play chess, when she was about six years old, we were like, okay, and this one is the little horsey and then it jumps, it hops over here. Anyway, she then started calling it that piece. She started calling it the gala hop. And I was like, oh, that is this child's a genius. Yeah, absolutely adorable. What a great name. There's a huge fly. I'm really fat fly. Just with my ear in it was like like a helicopter. Anyway, I went around thinking that she was a genius for a few weeks. And then a couple of weeks later, we just happened to be watching it. Hi, this is Garry linica from goal hangers. The rest is football. This episode is brought to you by clarner. When you open your bank app, it's not always clear what you've actually spent and what's still waiting to come out of your account. Some money's gone out, other payments haven't come through yet. 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The first stage of the trial starts this year focusing on people at higher risk. It shows what long-term research makes possible. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org The rest is science. An episode of Bluey in which they teach Bluey Chess and she decides to call the horse the night, a gallop hop. Wait, so did she get it from that? Yeah, she got it from there. Gallop hop is a pretty, it's a cute word, but it also helps you remember that the night can go over pieces like a hop. Gallop and hop. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so in Chess True, the white does have an advantage. I'll concede that, but in Go, which is played by a lot of people, Black moves first and is the other way around. In fact, actually in Go, there's so much of an advantage for Black that there's some rule where you have to give away a certain number of points to white. I didn't know that. I don't know Go very well, but Black goes first in Go. Black goes first in Go. And has the advantage. Wow. All right, well, we've done games. Let's turn to people, but after the break. Okay, welcome back. So now let's talk about Black and White, not as colors, but as names of people. Go on. We've got Jack Black. She's also Jack White of the White Stripes. Let's make them fight. Let's make them fight. And so last night I did. And no, I didn't. But which surname do you think is more popular? Black, I reckon. Incorrect. By a long shot, White is more popular. It's the 24th most popular surname in the United States. Black, not even in the top 100. I had to go searching much deeper. It's the 149th most popular surname. In the UK, White is the 15th most common surname. It's the ninth most common in Australia, 21st in Canada. There's only 156,000 people with the last name Black in the US, but there's almost 700,000 with the surname White. Wow. Yeah. I'd much rather be called Hannah Black than Hannah White. Well, you're not called either. I know, but I could be. I could change it by default. You could change it. You know, I have a... Hannah Black, yeah. I mean, look, Hannah Black, again, why would you rather be called Hannah Black? Because it's cooler. It is cooler. You know that my mother didn't allow me to wear Black shoes as a kid? Why? She thought that it was what the violent kids wore. This was during the moral panic of the 90s around like, oh, kids are sacrificing cats at night and doing all these things because of Satan. What about school shoes though? What color were your school shoes? They were white and blue. Okay. They were always very bright colors, very pleasing saintly colors. I'd go to the store and I'd be like, oh, I want these Black sneakers. She'd be like, oh, do not even... Do not even... Think about them. Bless me, Father, because you're going to go to hell if you wear shoes that are Black like the devil's thumb. And so I own Black shoes now. When did you get your first pair of Black shoes? I think it was about 33. I got my first pair of Black shoes. Did you feel super naughty with them? I felt really naughty. I hid them in my closet, even though my mom lived a thousand miles away. Have you worn Black shoes in front of her? I have now, but also as we've established, my mom has softened over time. She now allows me to say some bad words. Whoa. Yes. Okay. Yeah. And I can also say the C word. Crap. And so of course I say it all the time around. Adorable. I had, in terms of the surname thing, I have a very good friend actually who is a doctor. She's called Dr. Black. She was working in it, a doctor surgery, and there's another doctor. They're called Dr. White. And I think, and I still think that the two of them should set up a surgery together and call it the gray doctors. The gray doctors. Yeah. It's a good joke. It's a good joke. It's a good little, it was hilarious. It's a hilarious joke. Good and evil though. Good and evil. There is, there is those themes along those. Should we kind of go through the tally up who's winning so far? Black's winning. I think Black is winning. Yeah. I think all that White has won is chess and surname, but Black has won popularity as a color. It's winning in fashion, what people wear. We should look up car colors. Car colors are white wins in car colors. And white wins actually in more than one way in car colors because not only are there more white cars, you're also significantly more likely to die in a black car. Oh no. Yeah. Let me just say. I don't know. Okay. I don't know how you tally these up. Is it because I don't think they're each worth one point? No, we need to wait. I'd rather have an unpopular color car than a car that I die in. So I don't know. You would look cool when you die though. Oh, you would. Well, he died in a white car. Okay. So here's some stats. In 2025, white cars, there were 33% of cars are white globally. Black is at 23%. This is the second most popular. However, if it's luxury cars, it's the other way around. So in North America, 29% of luxury cars are black and white is second. From Monash University Accident Research Center, who were looking at crashes between 1987 and 2004, and they found whites are safest color, easier to see, perhaps. Black cars are 12% more likely to be involved in a deadly crash. Yeah. I know. I believe it. I did actually talk to my insurance company about like, hey, we've got light colored cars. Do you guys charge less for those? And they were like, no. But it is true that the lighter color of your car is the easier it is for others to see and you're in fewer accidents. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. It makes sense. I'm still going black here. I'm still going black nonetheless. I think this is the reason why I just think black wins. Full stop, okay? Piano keys. Yes. There are more white piano keys than black ones, but the only interesting music comes from the black ones. Well, now that seems a bit subjective. Come on. Twinkle, twinkle, little stars. That's all you got. I don't know enough about music to, I don't know enough about piano to debate you on this. Bluntly, me neither, but that's not going to stop me being overly confident. Okay. I think you are giving me fuel for my final conclusion. Okay. All right. But also, I'll just grant you that the black keys are more interesting. They are more interesting. They are much more interesting. But there are more white keys. There are more white keys, but who cares if they're boring? Well, I think that we got to give white a point for being the dominant color on a keyboard. Sure. And then we'll give black a point because it's cooler sounding. It's more fun. Going back to your idea about light. So I was also thinking about if you shine a torch into a dark space, right, which wins there? Is it the brightness of the torch or is it the blackness of the space? And I mean, in an enclosed space, on earth, sure, the whiteness might win. But actually, in the universe as a whole, the universe is very, very definitely black. This is Olber's paradox, by the way. Yeah. You know about this? Yeah. This is the paradox that the sky is dark at night. And why should it be? Well, at first you would say, well, why shouldn't it be? But then, when you point out that there are stars everywhere, even between stars that we can see, if you look with a telescope, you find more and more stars. So there should be light coming from every direction. There should be a very well lit room, essentially. But it isn't. But it isn't. It's black. Black wins out. The reason, incidentally, the reason it sort of essentially demonstrates that the universe had a beginning. The light hasn't been going forever and the universe is expanding, which is why blackness wins out. But blackness does nonetheless win out. It wins out. Also, there's light extinction. There's the inverse square law of light can shine and be very bright. But the further away you get, the dimmer and dimmer it appears. Absolutely. So ultimately, the blackness wins out. Blackness wins. I mean, look, if you are also pitting the black versus white against one another on a sort of cosmological basis, white dwarfs, which are essentially what happens when a star dies, everything kind of blows off and you're just left with like the really solid, bright core. Put one of them against a black hole. I mean, there's no contest. The black hole wins. The black hole wins. Well, if we're going to be talking about electromagnetic radiation, here's something fascinating. This morning, I thought, oh yeah, obviously, here's a good thing to bring up. The more and more darkness you have, no problem. Right? But the more and more light you have, the more and more electromagnetic radiation you have, the closer you get to darkness. Go on. So I've talked about this before, but I have an update. Go on. So there's this concept. It's a theoretical concept, which states that, I mean, as we know, if you get too much matter in one place, black hole forms. But what if you get a lot of energy, a lot of light in one place? What happens? Should be the same thing as it turns out. And so a black hole can form if there's too much energy within one small area. And a black hole that forms not from matter, but from light is known as a kugelblitz. Good name. A kugelblitz. I know I love this. And in an episode many years ago, I turned it into this really cool way to flirt with someone. Like, you're not just hot. You're a kugelblitz. There's so much. You're just so hot that it cannot remain stable and it collapses in on itself, your hotness. Has, is there any evidence of that ever working on any human? I've never tried it on another human. But if you and your partner met because of that line, let me know in the comments below. You're welcome. Also, if that's how you guys met, I've got some bad news for you. Go on. A couple of years ago, kugelblitzes were studied. And again, it's a theoretical thing. We, we cannot make one. Okay. The amount of energy required to create one is 50 orders of magnitude higher than what we can currently achieve. But there was a paper that came out in 2024 that had this, this great name, no black holes from light. That was the name. And the paper talks about how when you have that much light, that much electromagnetic radiation in one place, you need to start worrying about things like vacuum polarization, which is a dissipative quantum effect. I'm not going to pretend to know what all of that means, but I do trust that these people know what they're talking about. It's called the Schwinger effect. Schwinger. Yeah. And this is where. So we've got kugelblitzes and now we've got Schwingers. Schwinger effect. And this is the effect where I can only give you a very service explanation, but where photons can decompose into electrons and positrons. And this process limits the potential for a black hole to form. Theoretically, we don't know one way or the other, but there's definitely a school of thought now that says that a kugelblitz isn't possible, that before you could reach that critical amount of energy in one location, that energy density necessary for the collapse of a black hole, energy would be dissipated away. So, but then, but then, but then, but then, if you, does that mean that if you have too much energy, too much light, it will stay light. It won't become. That's one conclusion you could draw from this. And so maybe white doesn't lose to black here. The idea being like too much black, not a problem. Too much white goes back to black, black wins in both cases. That may or may not be true. Jury is still out. It could be that more and more light, you're just going to continue to have a lot of light. More and more black, more black. It's a draw. Yeah, but I mean, in the universe as a whole, once you kind of go to the heat death of everything, once you kind of looking at entropy and the fact that we are tending towards disorder over time, I mean, everything's eventually going to die. Black, I mean, there's no doubt that black blackness wins. I didn't come in here to fight for any particular side. I did. You did. I did. And I'm not even really going to disagree with you. I think you're bringing up a lot of good points that ultimately darkness is all there will be. It will be the one on the field of battle at the end, still standing. Absolutely. Because you've got the heat death where eventually it's the same temperature everywhere and there isn't a useful energy differential to take advantage of to do any work. There is no light. There is no light. That's the ultimate fate of the universe. Absolutely. That's the direction we're all heading towards. Enjoy the light and the light while it lasts, everybody. I mean, I'm going to definitely say that light does some interesting things. Energy and work mean that stuff can happen, but they're battling it out all the time every day. That wasn't the question that was being asked, was it? It wasn't which one do you like more. Please tell me which of these does interesting things. It was which wins. Which wins. Which wins. And yeah, you're right. I tell you what, if we're not going in quite so depressing a direction, if we're not going to the heat death of the universe, let's look at the battles, not the wars. Okay. I still think darkness wins. I still think black wins. I found this absolutely amazing story about Chernobyl. Okay. Since 2016 and researchers who were near where the damaged reactor was were looking at the wildlife that had that still manages to survive close to where everything happened. And they found this really strange thing, which is that right close to the reactor, all the frogs are black. Oh, right? Isn't that strange? And then you go a bit further out, some of them, you know, they sort of tend to become a little bit lighter. And then if you go far enough out away, then they are, they are essentially back to normal frog. Normal frog color. But the frogs all around are very, very dark, sometimes actually pitch black. And they white. It's amazing. So they worked out that what's going on here is that melanin, which is a pigment that you get in your skin, but also in the skin of frogs, is the thing that gives you a tan color, but it doesn't just absorb UV. It also dissipates ionizing radiation. Of course. Right. So there's all this radiation that's floating around. And so essentially what was happening is that it forced this survival pressure on darker frogs. So the frogs who had much lighter skin, who had less of the dark pigment in their skin already, you know, would die out much more easily. Only the darker frogs would remain. And then they reckon within about 15 frog generations, the pigment had sort of sorted itself into the population. And there was this natural selection for darkness kind of happening in real time. But I mean, also as a person who has no melanin in my skin, you know, this is one of the downsides of the MC1R mutation, having red hair, there is no melanin. If I go out in the sun, it goes red and then back to white. I have to say, darkness wins again, right? You put me outside on a sunny day. And unless I've got a bottle of Factor 50 with me, I'm over. It's game over for me. Yeah. I can put you in a radioactive fallout zone and you are going to be hurt more. I'm done. I'm done. Of course, there are, I mean, there are some creatures that are, that have both black and white orcas, for example. I mean, they're pretty cool. Zebras. Zebras. Zebras. Zebras. Pandas. Pandas. They're less cool. Tuxedo cats. Pandas, by the way, side note, pathetic creatures. Pathetic. You know how much space they need to have in order for them to agree to mate? Too much. But also, if you have this like gigantic land space where you're like, okay, panda, chill out, all right? Have fun. And then somebody does like a little tiny track road through it that's not even taking up any space. They're like, no, no, no, no, no, no. You've encroached. You've encroached. I'm not having babies anymore. They are absolute drama queens. That's how I like my diary to be, by the way, when I'm writing. Say, I'm going into panda mode. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I need nothing encroaching. Okay. It's one panda, seven square kilometers. So the pair needs seven square kilometers. So I think that detailed field studies say that female giant pandas have about five square kilometers and males about seven square kilometers. And if you go anywhere near that, then they're like, babies, thank you. Really? Yeah. So they need just the two of them within their little zones, and then they can come together. And as long as no one encroaches. Yeah, but not even, not even anyone encroaches. It's like any evidence of any building or any track nothing, it's got to be like completely untouched. It's a bit like, you know, they just really, really, really want privacy. They really want privacy. They really need the mood to be right or it's ruined. Exactly. They don't want anyone to find out they're playing Barry White in the jungle. Yeah. Fair enough. But like, it's a lot of work for us to accommodate that. It is a lot of work. Barry White, though, didn't think about him, did we? Barry Black. Barry, who is Barry Black? Exactly. That's a win for White, I think. That is the win for White. I hear something interesting that is kind of related that I've just been wanting to share. So it's kind of related. Like, if darkness, if Blackness is nothingness, like empty, then we should talk about the words, ought and not. Go on. They both mean nothing, right? Like, nots and crosses, the not refers to an O, nothing. People will call the 2000s the naughties, because the year ends with the zeros, but ought, AUGHT also means nothing. Give it a sentence. In a sentence, it might be something like, well, if ought is learned, meaning if nothing is learned. And I would see these in books. I'd see ought meaning nothing and not meaning nothing. And I'm like, how it's kind of strange that ought and not both mean zero. Why are they different words? They didn't used to be different. Aut came first, meaning nothing, not for ought, not for nothing. But there's this thing in linguistics called a faulty separation, where people who are speaking to each other misinterpret what your word is and what the article is because they've been smashed together. So when someone said, I don't give an ought, it sounds a little bit like I don't give a not. Nice. And so people started to think that ought means nothing, but there's also a thing called a not. I don't give a not. I don't give an ought. They were just so similar that we wound up having not as well mean zero. The other one I've heard is a napple. Yes. There are a lot of these faulty separations. Napkin is one. I think an apkin is what it was called before. People would be like, oh, can I have an apkin? And someone was like, oh, a napkin? Sure. This must be called a napkin. I think other words like that, I've got a whole list of them and I don't have them actually here on my page, but apron umpire. What? So it was a prom? I think so. Oh, I like that. Now, don't I mean, look this up because I only I only have the list of these words. I don't know what they originally were, but they got smashed together because of the a in the an article before them. Go on. What were the other ones? Okay, you ready? Mm. Nickname. An ik name. apron, orange, umpire, humble pie. It was umpile pie, auger. But I with auger, I'm like, was it a ger before? Or was auger? Auger, like a thing that you screw that you dig a hole with? I've never done before in my life. Well, you don't dig enough holes. Evidently. Or no enough words. Drill enough holes. On the word thing, um, tell me what I found out when I was researching this. The word candidate. Yep. Do you want to know where that came from? Let me guess. Go on. Candidate. I've given you a bit of a clue given that it's related to this episode. Shoot. Now I'm even more kid. I was not thinking that way, but I should have been. Where does it come from? Roman. Uh-huh. It means the one wearing white because if you were wearing a white toga, then you were a political candidate. Right. Yeah. Where does white in there? Candid? Candid? Because I think it means shining. Oh, does it? Yeah. Like chandelier is another. Oh, interesting. Candle, Candid. Candle provides light, Candidate. Incandescent. Oh yeah. Candela, a unit of light. But anyway, that's all white stuff. Yeah, it sure is. I'll tell you what we haven't touched on though. Good and evil. Because it feels like in stories, black and white do end up taking those two different sides. It's kind of, we've sort of touched on it a bit, but I haven't really gotten there. Yeah. And in stories, good often wins. Not all the time, but certainly more often than not. Stories are instructing us that good will prevail and that evil doesn't pay. Right? These are cliches. That topic, in my mind, it's like way too big to jump into when it's just supposed to be one little interpretation of a question in a podcast. But as you all know, I just finished reading The Lord of the Rings, and I also read the Earthsea trilogy from Ursula Le Guin, who by the way, I love this, she describes herself as a irreligious Puritan and a rational mystic, which talk about opposites colliding. Yeah. I loved it. But anyway, Lord of the Rings and Tolkien is often criticized as being just like way too black and white. You've got the amazingly pure Gandalf and the Hobbits and they don't even poop. And then you've got Sauron, who is just evil incarnate. And it's just, it couldn't be more obvious. I don't think that's entirely fair. I think, for example, that if you really dive into like what's going on here, you see that the elves kind of made their own bed. They were the ones who were like, yeah, I want rings. Give us three so that we can stop things from decaying. We don't want anything to change. We want everything to stay the way we want. Well, Saruman even says, look, when you, when you destroyed me, you destroyed yourselves. And where are they all going at the end of the book? They're not going to the white lands. They're not going to the black lands. They have to all leave Middle Earth for gray haven. Somewhere in between the two. A new age begins. The age of man and magic is like gone. I'm not a Tolkien scholar, but I just wanted to say it's a bit more complicated than that. But in, in Le Guin's fantasy, it's very rich. So like in the Wizard of Earthsea, the first book, there isn't a battle of good and evil. There's a battle of a wizard against a shadow. Seems like good and evil, right? But how does he defeat the shadow? I won't, I won't, I won't spoil it. But he has to embrace the shadow. As in he's got to accept that darkness exists. Not only does he have to accept that it exists, he has to name it. And what does he name this shadow that's been terrorizing the world? His own name. I think there's something quite deep in there. That took a very long time to explain to my daughter. Because she gets the like bad guys, good guys. Right. But for the good guy to have to say, I am the bad guy. You're just another part of me. Because at the end of the day, the shadow only exists because of the arrogance of the wizard in the first place. And so if he runs from it and denies those bad parts of themselves, the shadow gets stronger. But as he hunts it and thinks about it and considers it, it gets smaller. And so by embracing it and understanding and being conscious and mindful of his darker side, he wins. Do you know what that is so interesting? Because this is something that if you go through therapy, I think that this is something that happens a lot, right? Is to accept that you have a shadow side, that everybody has a darker side to themselves. And it's not like, oh, you have to try and repress it or imagine it's not there. It's like you have to really embrace it and almost love it, if that makes sense. You have to have to really sort of have empathy for it because that's the only way that you can really exist as a whole complete person. That's exactly what the Wizard of Earth sees is an allegory. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing that I really noticed as you were talking then, when grayness, right, the way that we sort of think about grayness is very flat, very boring. It's almost like black and white are too extreme. It's the way that we, it's a dichotomy that, sort of an analogy for a dichotomy. But they're definitely not boring. Black and white, neither of them are boring. Gray, the combination of the two, the land in the middle is something that feels quite dead and flat. And actually, I think that there is something in this, because I think we fall into this trap quite often of binary thinking when we shouldn't, where actually, the reality is everything is a process. Everything has good and bad in it. Everything has good and evil in it. The acceptance that you have both of them isn't gray at all. It's just actually a much richer version of reality. Well, yeah, exactly. And so again, this is something that Le Guin investigates, like almost in some of her stories, too much. You're like, oh my gosh, like I get it. You mentioned that white light is all the colors, all the wavelengths, whereas darkness is nothing. Now, this is the opposite of what Tolstoy told us in Anna Karenina. Go on. So the famous first line there, which I'm just going to paraphrase, is that every happy family is happy in the same way. But every unhappy family is uniquely unhappy in their own way. This became the Anna Karenina principle that Jared Diamond pushed a lot saying, look, you've got systems in the world and these systems have a lot of parts and every part has to work perfectly for everything to go well. Okay, so goodness is this really fragile thing that can only happen in one way. But if one little thing goes wrong or that little thing or these two or these three, there's so many permutations of things in which everything goes wrong. So there you go. Unhappiness is very complex, but happiness is very simple. However, in physics, that's not true. In physics, there's just darkness and it's kind of just nothing. But white requires everything. Yeah, wow, that's such a nice way to think of it. And at the end of Le Guin's Dispossessed, can you tell what I've been reading a bunch of? There's this brilliant line. It's almost like a throwaway line where this guy goes, man, there's all these different planets and so many different kinds of intelligent beings live on them. And the sunlights on all of these worlds are all different. The stars have different chemistries, different temperatures, different sizes, different orbital distances to the planets. They're all different. And yet darkness is the same everywhere. It absolutely is. There's only one way to be dark. There's only one way to be dark. But there are so many ways to illuminate. Yeah, all right. White can have that one. I'll let it go. White can have that one. But I think that maybe they both should take a W here. I think there's another side of this, the Taoist side, which is that we need both. And I'm not a scholar of Taoism, but that's what the yin yang is about. It's about you've got the white and the black, and they are inside each other and they're both necessary, but they're not combined into a dull gray. In the laze of heaven, Le Guin basically a guy creates, he improves the world by solving all race relations by having everyone just be the same color, battleship gray. No, thanks. There isn't any any judging people based on how they look, because they all look the same. But in changing the world that way, a lot of the really interesting characters have gone, because they were only interesting because they were by racial, by cultural, they, they, they became who they were, their boldness, their courage, their timidity, all these interesting things about them only existed because of that tension. And by getting rid of it, the only people left are the main character because he's so boring. He realizes I am just a lump of clay. And so I'm still here, but like this woman I loved is gone. I mean, it's the same as what we were talking about with entropy, you know, the universe is interesting because it has variation, because it has like differences. That's the thing that is, allows for energy, allows for matter, allows for light, allows for everything. You know, without it, if you strip out the variation, all you end up with is nothingness. So you sort of need both of them. And this isn't just a Taoist thing. This is also, you find this in Christianity, when the lion lays down with the lamb, that's an important scene, not because the lion becomes lamb like, or the lamb becomes lion like, but because it's a lion and a lamb, both bright and burning. Some of you may have noticed I'm quoting GK Chesterton here, all one and a half of you. It's a wonderful essay, Paradoxes of Christianity, and he mentions this very thing, that you've got both of these powerful things together, not mixed into some undifferentiated middle that's very boring and orderly, but the complexity of the opposites together. Heaven and hell. Yeah. And I think Le Guin puts it really well in one of the Earthsea books. She has the wizard mention, look, in order to hear the word, you need silence on either side. You need darkness to see the stars. Yeah. So picking just black or just white, what does it get us? I mean, sure, let's have both, but also let's secretly know the black ones. Okay? I'm not letting that go. I don't want to make this a podcast where Michael defends the Lord of the Rings and talks about every single book Ursula whenever wrote, but it might become that. Basically, it is true that in the Lord of the Rings, you've got the good guys and the bad guys, and it's very stark, but at the same time, just like the Yin Yang, they're never done. One never beats out the other. The story continues forever. Here's my notes where I've written down quotes that I really like, and I'll say that at one point, Sam, Frodo's friend, realizes, hey, he's the one with feet like yours, right? Yeah, well, all the hobbits have feet like mine, but they realize that their journey is not like a unique part of history, that it's just a continuation of a story that's been told forever. Sam asks, do the great tales never end? And Frodo responds, no, they never end as tales, but the people in them come and go when their parts ended. Our part will end later or sooner. But the point there is that they don't even anticipate actual victory, white over black, good over evil or anything. They just anticipate that there will always be both of them together. And in the Hobbit, the most courageous, brave thing Bilbo does isn't anything except to just be courageous enough to explore both. So Tolkien himself says that when Bilbo walks down the tunnel to see the dragon for the first time, which everyone's afraid to do, but he does anyway, in going on, that was the bravest thing Bilbo ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterwards were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in that tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait. What's really celebrated in literature, not just in Tolkien, but everywhere is more the confrontation than it is the end. I mean, the end is the like, there's nothing else to say. Yeah, it's everything is a process. Everything is a process. Yeah, I think this is it, right? I do think that there is something about this that is really relevant to the way that people live their own lives. Because so often, I mean, I've been guilty of this myself, and often still am actually, frankly, of like, oh, I'll be happy when this happens. As soon as I get to this bit, then my life will be, that will be the end, that will be the sort of the conclusion I will have decided, white or black, right? It's like, no, everything is a process. You don't get to cross a finish line. You have to accept that there is everything in everything. There is goodness and darkness in everything. Yeah, there is no end that you're reaching where it'll be good or bad. There's just the means to an end. All we have are those means, those efforts, the trying, the practice, and the universe knows this too. What's the brightest thing in the universe? A quasar. Okay. The brightest things in the universe are quasars. What are quasars? Oh, don't test me. Go on. Okay. Well, I'm asking this, I'm asking this rhetorically to the, to everyone. But what is a quasar? A quasar is a black hole. Matter falls into the black hole. It can't all cram in there together. It pushes against itself. The pressures increase and enormous amounts of energies are released. And that's a quasar. Just like the yin yang symbol in the universe, the brightest light comes from the darkest depth that eats all light. It's they're all together, not separate, not mixed, but both bright and burning and dark and void. And definitely not gray. And definitely not gray. Yeah. So there we go. That's what wins. Not gray. Not gray. I love that. I love that. That should be a t-shirt. Thank you for wearing a gray t-shirt today just to, just to, oh yeah, I'm wearing my, if Uranus, the whole planet of Uranus was compressed into this shape, it would become a black hole. This is its sort of child radius. Very nice. Yeah. Yeah, there we go. We've come to a conclusion. Not gray. Not gray. So thanks for not being gray. And, and thanks for watching. And as always, keep sending in questions because look what it does. We had so much fun with this, Kelsey. And we hope that your seven-year-old is suitably pleased that Michael and I have witted on about this for nearly an hour. That's right, Kelsey. You've got a bright seven-year-old or maybe a dark seven-year-old. Or maybe both. Or maybe both. But definitely not gray. Not gray. So stay not gray. And by the way, you can send questions to... The rest is science at gohanger.com. That's it. Thank you. And we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.