Desperately Seeking Symmetry

Hey, it's Molly Webster. I have a surprise for you. Next month, myself and producer Mona Medgalker are going to do an AMA about our Snail Sex Tape episode. You can ask us anything about snails and the behind the scenes of making an episode work. How long did it take us to make? How did we come up with the sound effects? Why are snails and slugs related? The AMA will be on April 16th and in order to come, you have to be a member of the lab. So go to radiolab.org slash join right now, sign up, use the code word snail to get a discount on your membership. And also if you sign up now, you get a snail enamel pin. If you're already a member of the lab, come to the AMA. Thank you for listening. Can't wait to see you there, April 16th. Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. This is Radio Lab. And today we're bringing back a classic episode from way back in the Chad 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. Wait, wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC. Okay. Yeah. Rewind. So you're going to identify the Washington place because I can't remember where you're at. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Three, two, one. Ready? I am ready, but we should tell the audience that we're not going to start this not in our usual studio spot. Not here here, where we're sitting now. Here. Thanks to explain. This is the Shakespeare theater in DC. 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. It's a 2400 year old story. Breaking news in other words. Yeah, 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 the heaven and take over heaven. And the gods' alarms 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 and 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. The genitalia too were moved 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 a 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. So here's the thing, that story got us started on a little journey. Truly began just thinking about wholeness and oneness and has looking for each other. In all varieties of ways. Mirrors and shapes. Relationships. Beauty. The birth of the universe. The nature of life. Things either have a simple deep beauty or not. I'm Chad Abumrah. I'm Robert Kovic. This is Radio Lab 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. Very Bobby K. Still thinking about Aristophanes. And do you ever wonder what actually happens when two people click when the halves 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 that 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 Sobert, 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 like 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. It looks like an airplane engine. We're like a donut. You can go 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. 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. Okay. So I told the story. Have I actually told you the whole thing? Without any sort of rehearsal. I think maybe for, well, 27 times. Something under 30. Under 30 times. I'm going to tell it one more 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 the date. Yeah, at least 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. 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, oh, give me your keys. I'm going to drive. I'm going to drive your car. Now 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 gone into a thing. So they're rolling up to it. I get distracted. And she crashes into the accident that had already happened. I'm going very very slowly. It's just that the police were already there and they watched. So the officer walks up, sees her, no license, sees this dude who's all bloody and messy and was like, all right, give me your registration. She thinks she's going to jail. But here is where fate steps in. Because 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. OK, that is the story that forms the basis of this project. OK, 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, 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. With me so far? Yeah. Next, she compared brains. OK, 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 had 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. 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 would 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 she's saying. I get that. No, no. And let me put it to you a different way. You're right. Now you and I, our voxels are mirroring each other. Yeah, it's vaguely. Like we're both speaking English. So we can assume say 20%. At least. I would go 23, 24. Let's say 24. 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 never understood you at a 50% level. But let's say we get to 50%, even 60. It'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? Yeah. Like you know that the difference between explanation and experience is like the Grand Canyon, right? Yes. 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. Yeah. 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... Wait, these... This is just background. The little X's. Oh, these are individual subjects. I see. So if you take out this one outlier, actually... She pointed to this one subject who was way on one side of the graph. So that person is... 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 person... Well, so this is a little interesting to admit. I know this person. You know this person. I know this person. Yeah. To that person, my most positive is her fiancé. Yeah, there were some fights. Ingest 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 was a super brain-coupling master. Was a girl in undergrad who I had never met before. And her brain, coupled with my brain, was twice as much as everybody else. Oh. 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. Really? 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 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 on email as a BD. BD, meaning what? Meaning brain double. BD, BD. BD, BD, BD, BD. I see. Brain double, brain double, brain double. BD, BD, BD. I see. Brain double, brain double, brain double. 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 interesting 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 Lauren's out there. I know, but still, that's so weird. I've always felt like BD. At this point, I'm like, I mean, this is like an Aristophanes whopper here folks. So that's 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 admitted to coffee shop. And since I 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, B.C. In Vancouver. Yeah. The symmetry 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 while I'm looking for points of connection and... Okay. Do you have prom in Canada? Is that a stupid question? Well, we do. I actually couldn't go to mine. You didn't go to your prom? Yeah. Okay. I wish I could. Did you have like significant relationships in high school? Yeah. I wish I could. I wish I could. I wish I could. Did you have like significant relationships in high school? No. No, not at all. I went to an all-girls school. You went to an all-girls school. Yeah. Did you have to wear uniforms? Yeah. Was it like Catholic? In the end, there was not one thing they had in common except their names in Princeton. You thought that this was going to be, you know... Something, I don't know. Is it maybe your premise is wrong? What do you mean? 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 Hurk. I'll sign in. Hi. 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. I said, it shows these two women who have seemed 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? Yeah. So, you have come to the same conclusion. If yours and my heartbeats were exactly the same? It depends on the circumstances. If it was a beautiful night at a sinking moon in Venice, maybe. If you have elaborated the story beyond my question. Say your heartbeats 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, too, on the phone, she did tell me that she is one of those people that when she hears a story, she just falls in. To the point where somebody can be like, Lauren, Lauren, and I don't hear it because I'm so focused on the book. How do I explain it? So, have you ever done any sports? Soccer a little bit, yeah. Do you ever find that sometimes when you're playing soccer, you are so into the game and just reacting or whatever that you kind of lose track of yourself for 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 one will become friends? I honestly, probably not. No. No. I mean, we're just, I just, I just, 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 her path. Okay, thank you very much. Why don't you just sit down just for a second? Why? We're going to play a little soft and go, 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. At AJ Bell, we believe every customer deserves brilliant service, which is just one reason we're rated excellent on Trust Pilot. And we all trust pilots with their smooth, captainly voices that make you feel like you'd let them land anywhere they like. Sorry, where was I? Right, AJ Bell, rated excellent by sexy pilots. I mean Trust Pilot. I'm a flight risk. AJ Bell, feel good investing. The value of your investments can go up or down. On this week's On The Media, The New York Times sued the Pentagon to get its reporters back in the building and won. The Pentagon said, not so fast. A spokesman said yesterday an area of the building known as Correspondence Corridor, which reporters have used for decades to cover the DoD, will close immediately. Don't miss this week's On The Media from WNYC. Find On The Media wherever you get your podcasts. Chirality, tick 30. Hey, I'm Chad Abumrah. I'm Robert Krollich. This is Radio Lab, and today we are desperately seeking symmetry. And thus far we are failing desperately because maybe if we rejiggered our whole approach, because symmetry is really about 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 mathematician at Oxford University named Charles Lutwidge Dotson. There's a mathie name for you. Well, he had a different name as it happens. What? Louis 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. But 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, why are you talking like that? What does that even mean? Well, if you just stick with me on this, I think I will make it perfectly clear. This is a very, as it turns out, difficult scientific question. Yes, they call it a chirality. What? 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. 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. It goes 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. Under 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. But if you had a mirror, Chad, 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. 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. 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 curiously 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 righties. They call them lefties. Sometimes we call it handedness. Sometimes we get a little more fancy and we call it chirality because chirochiros 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're always left-handed and no right-handed at all. Really? Life has chosen one over the other. Life as we know it. You know when scientists look inside of living things, they always see 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. Life has chosen. That's the, 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, tiniest thing to the tree, 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. I mean like. 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. This brings us back to the mirror mystery in 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 milks 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? Mirror milk? I don't know about milk in particular, but I do know that when I talked to an Oxford professor Marcus de Satoy, 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, this is what's put on Wrigley's 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 calm morning sickness and most of us, well we know what happened next. The 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 Jeth? What? That in a show about symmetry what we've just discovered is that life itself is actually deeply asymmetric. Yeah. It's like 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. You run me the other way. Stay away. Anyhow. That's well enough about mirrors. No, no, no. I think we can take this another step further. There is no further step to take. No there is. I mean because something about this chemistry reflections thing resonates for me with the actual experience of standing in front of a mirror. How? You look at that guy and you're like, ehh. I mean we talked about this on stage actually in DC 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 at the mirror? Is that a question you want to ask me in front of a... 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 does that mean by my true self? Well I'm going to tell you a story now about a guy named John Walter. Oh the little 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. A year. 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. 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. I remember at the time there was a lot of kids hanging out. You know 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 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. Very normal. Like people would say, what's that guy doing here? Maybe he was wearing the wrong plaid pants or had mismatched socks. Whatever. Don't you emphasize with this guy? Nobody wants to be 19 and be the yechee person. Of course I would emphasize. 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 are ID photos that you got? Yeah. It was an ID camera that had four lenses. So when they took the negative that 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. Nirty. 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. You know, when I looked at myself. 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. 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 John... Wait, wait, wait, wait, which side of my hair parted on? Your left. Your left. Now 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 to 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 he 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 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. And 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. He says this time... Things were different. Somebody offered him a beer. It was like, wow. But the thing that I knew made it better was when I left, I got goodbyes. Come on, come on, I look... God, for the first time. 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... This is very 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... Are you ready for this? I don't think you're ready. Are you ready? If you're 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. At... Who is that? Our 16th president, Abraham. Yes, our 16th president. 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. All right. 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 the other picture? No, no, no, no, no, no. Is this the same picture? This is the same picture. Go back to the other picture. Go. All right. There is Abe. Now do the other one. Oh, that's so weird. You see? 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. Huh. So there's something going on here. Would you not at least acknowledge me? I find this bigly plausible, yes. Okay? With your permission, Mr. Sinek, I will now rejoin John. Who's about to what? Is it okay? He has three babies because his hair is... 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 it, 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, 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. But 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, what is... Why? I think I just said, I think you should change your hair part on the left. I did myself and then found it to be much more powerful, much more successful. And about six... Do you have that letter? I so wish I did. I don't have it. And then about six weeks later, boom, he switched. He switched. No, he did not. John wrote him a letter and President Carter switched. No. It might not have been John's letter that did. You have no evidence for it. 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 this. Did anyone actually record this? Yes. They did? I will now read you a journalistic account from no... A periodical... Well, 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 Prescor 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 luxuriously haired man, Reagan, and it didn't matter. Okay, fine, fine, fine. So he just got crushed. All right, you know what? Forget the executive branch. Stay with me now. I was with John and he was showing me pictures of congressmen and of celebrities. I noticed something peeking out at the bottom of the pile. I see peeking out underneath the stack of photos of Superman. Yeah. 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 a little bit of a right. And as we know from the movies, Clark Kent is bumbling, 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 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, but what is 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. Can I get it? His name is Mike Nichols. Oh, from the graduate. Is the Mike Nichols. Very good. A psychology professor in Australia. It'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 part of the right, but then every time he tries to the Superman, he has to have it. So I 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, that's, I have to... But, but, 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, amount of muscle movement and that it 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. It's 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 their face. 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 your left side is actually flipped over to your right, it's a where are we? It's exactly, but John has developed a solution to this problem. Take this one apart. Now makes and sells his own very special mirrors right out of his home. Is this where you make the mirrors? Everything goes into the mirrors 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. Let's just push this up a little bit. That's still not enough. I think it's 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 seen the mirror, re-flips him so that what you're 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 here? This is a true mirror. This is the 12 inch model. And so when you like 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 they, it's just 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... There's something there. Monster. 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. Yes, right. And subscribe to our podcast there as well. You're having strongest man, Donathan. Donathan? Donathan, that can't be right. Donathan? Well, whatever your name is, if you're a real person, investing is for you too. AJ Bell, feel good investing. The value of your investments can go up or down. This week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll talk with the actor John Lithgow, who's on Broadway playing the author, Roald Dahl, whose anti-Semitic statements caused an international scandal. His anti-Semitism is obvious, like a leaky car battery. It's just in between the lines. In some cases, just explicit. John Lithgow joins me next time on The New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, hey, I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Krowich. 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 Tyson. 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 surprised to you in some deep way that we are all here made of stuff? Yes, it's not so much... It, surprise, understates it. It's shocking, really. It's shocking. Huh. What is, what is shocking? That there's any matter in the universe at all. Meaning that this conversation shouldn't be happening. No, it's way deeper than that. Your mouth. 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 Glazer, again, the physicist, and he says if you roll back the history of the universe, no more stars, no molecules, no atoms, you can 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 was made of light, universe of light, very high energy. And out of this energy, this heat, this interactions, you suddenly get... What the hell is that? These are belches, Chad. 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 a light all around us, we're in a studio, it's visible light. So this light has no mass, has energy. E-Banom. 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. So Chad, 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 Chad, just picture the soup. Really intensely hot. And it's belching out matter. You know, electrons, zoom around, photons, farks, neutrons, neutrinos, continuously churning, churning, churning. Over time, all that matter clumps together in more and more complex forms until you finally know it. Us. Sounds very simple. Look at that. Yes. But there's a butt coming, I can smell it. Butt, and here's the big butt. Do it. 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, if 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 or a negative, like make an electron, okay? Just make one. Right now? Yeah. Gone. That electron has a, you remember this from eighth grade, a negative one, baby. So you make two electrons. There we go. Now make three electrons. 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. You have nothing on the other 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. Yeah. Well, here's the solution. Right. Here's wrong. Well, no. Paul Dirac thought, well, how about this? What if every time you created an electron, you 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 they were different. Is it a mirror image? Or 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 anti-matter 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. 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. Bada bing. They found the positron. The anti-matter 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 its 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, anti-matter 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. Wow. Very clever. How cool. 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, which 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 would say, great, I have a very democratic universe, you know, as many particles and anti-particles and everybody's happy. Only problem is the following. And an electron and a positron meet. They will find each other. And uh-oh. Bottom-ish. And they will annihilate. You mean they'll find each other 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? I'm an anti-crowich. I'm an anti-crowich. And so the program which is sitting here and I see you across the haze. Now I'm positive charged. We're negative charged. Opposite charges are tracked. 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. Eventually 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. Then. We 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. Radiation. Radiation. Radiation. Radiation. Radiation. Radiation. Radiation. Radiation. Radiation. Radiation. Radiation. Radiation. Radiation. Radiation. Radiation. Radiation. Radiation. Radiation. Radiation. Radiation. Radiation. Radiation. Radiation. Radiation. Radiation. Radiation. because we're talking to each other. And we are. Exactly. 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. And that tiny excess of one and a billion is enough to create everything that exists now. You're a lonely little guy. We would call that an 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. You don't know. We do not know. That's right. Which is okay. Not knowing is a wonderful thing in science. Otherwise, it could just retire. Can I tell you my favorite lawyer joke told to me by a lawyer? I have to 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. 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, whatever you like. I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Krollich. Thanks for listening. Hi, I'm Isha and I'm from Plano, Texas. And here are the staff credits. Rebecca Laf was created by Chad Abumrod and is edited by Dorn Wheeler. Luzel Miller and Lottes Nasser are our co-hosts. Dilling Keith is our director of Sants Sines. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Breusler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Rebecca Laf, Maria Paz Pateras, Sindhu Nyanasambandam, Matt Kilty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Tari, Sarah Sandbach, Anissa Vita, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, Molly Webster, Jessica Young, with help from Rebecca Rand. Our fact-trickers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujol-Mazzini, and Natalie Middleton. Hi, this is Michelle, colleagues 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. At A.J. Bell, we believe investing is for everyone. And when we say everyone, we mean your dad, Dan, Danielle, Dean, Dave, Dell, Dell's delivery driver Denise, Denise's dentist, Dinesh, and Devon's strongest man, Donathan. Donathan? Donathan, that can't be right. Donathan? Well, whatever your name is, if you're a real person, investing is for you too. A.J. Bell, feel good investing. The value of your investments can go up or down.