Why Michael Abandoned Ink

Welcome to the Rest of Science. I'm Hannah Fry. And I'm Michael Stevens. Today, on this episode of Field Notes, I've brought some very cool things that are important to me, and I'm going to just ask that you indulge me as I nerd out about mechanical pencils. Oh, this is a kind of nerding out I can get behind, Michael Stevens. I tried and nerd out to everyone I meet about this, and by everyone I meet, I mean my wife and daughter. My daughter's into it. My wife is just done with all the little things that I need to say about mechanical pencils, but today, I'm going to get it out of my system. Okay, do we need to make this into a two-part, a three-part, a seven-part, or a three-part? I think it's going to be a new podcast. Okay. Yeah. Or we just have a third episode every week, you know, for the rest of time. Hopefully not. My goal is to get to a point where I'm exactly happy with all the features. It's exactly what I want. And I think I'm going to have to make it myself. Okay. All right. Well, this is something for us to look forward to. Yeah. Let's get on with it. 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 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. So I used to be a pen guy. Okay, I've got one of those stories, one of those like conversion stories. I thought pencils were ridiculous. And honestly, it began with my father who did crossword puzzles every day. The New York Times crossword. And you know how they get harder through the week. And he was very adamant that you do it in pen. Confidence. Commitments. Confidence. Commitment. Being bold. Pencils for people who were like, I'm not really sure. Is this the answer? One more word to say later. And he's like, grow up. When you commit to a letter, it's the way it is. Yeah, he's a hardliner. And I said, that's me. And I made this my mantra and I got really into pens and I had my favorite types of pens. And the pens said they were archival quality pens that the ink was waterproof and fade proof. And that was all a lie. Oh, go on. So I have a shelf of notebooks of all of my ideas and thoughts and everything. I'm not, it's not really a journal and maybe it journals my thoughts. But I've, I fill these notebooks up and I've got them on a shelf and they're all in pen. Well, one day I had like four of them that kind of altogether had all my thoughts about some topic. Had them in a bag with an energy drink. I was an energy drinker back then. And they were just in like a little plastic bag and the energy drink exploded in the bag. Spilled liquid all over the journals and it just washed the ink away. I'd say about two thirds of each journal lost. Like I can't even tell what it used to say because the ink bled through the pages. And these were moleskin notebooks. I'm going to name brands. Okay. It was a, it was a sugar-free rockstar energy drink that spilled on moleskin notebooks. That's why you're not allowed to have energy drinks in libraries, you know? I know now. I know now. Human knowledge. It's too fragile. All three of the notebooks. Many of the pages are just, I can't even recreate what they were. I had, I quickly dried them. I put them on a heater and I, they're dry. They're all crispy and wrinkled up now. They don't shut all the way. And so much of what was in them is lost. So I looked into it and I found that like pencils are just better. You can't wash them away, essentially. They don't wash away. Oh, but they erase. Here's the thing. They can be erased, but they scratch the paper so much they leave a groove. You can see it. It is a frustrating part of pencils is that when you try to erase, you can always tell. There's always a ghost left, even like a mechanical, actual physical groove in the paper where it was scratched, but that means it's still there. Rockstar energy drinks can't get rid of that. Okay, here's a question though, because what about the indelible mark that those notes made on your mind, right? Because the thing is, is that if they were really, really good ideas, you wouldn't have forgotten them. Yeah, I haven't forgotten the details. I can kind of get a sense of like, oh, this is more stuff about philosophy of the past, but the exact words are important to me. In fact, some of the words I would scratch them out and I would like choose a different word, I want to see that process and that's all gone. With pencil, you're talking about carbon on the paper. It's not going to fade. Again, it can be erased, but there's still something left, whereas my ink journals gone. I mean, because there are some people, I remember talking to, I think it's Steven Moffat, the guy who wrote Sherlock, the one with Ben Dicombe, I remember having a chat with him once and he was saying that actually, a lot of the time, he doesn't write down his ideas for the purpose that the act of him managing to remember them or not demonstrates whether it was actually ever a good idea. And he said, he was like, having a really amazing idea is like being complimented by God. Right? And like what, you're just going to forget being complimented by God? No. I think that's a little lie he tells himself. I think that there are a lot of good ideas that you still don't remember, even if they're good. I don't think that's enough to trust that the idea won't go away. And I also think that some bad ideas are worth keeping because of what they can inspire later. I mean, definitely a pencil and paper. It has this, I mean, you're right. You can't wash it away. I mean, you could burn it away. Yes, you can. But at that point, you can also burn something written in pen away. Sure. But it's also, you know, like a hard drive, you can't magnet it away. No. It is, you know, it's one step below tablet and chisel. Oh, right. So I haven't even mentioned tablets in the electronic modern sense. Tablet and chisel would be great. I think there's also something for me at least. This is a personal episode. For me, I need to get as many different modules in my brain involved to really remember, own and move forward with an idea. It can't just be, oh, I thought it, or I typed it, or I voice recorded it. I need the muscles to get into it. And then I really, I really have that idea. So I write and I fill up notebooks of stuff for, for the fiction that I read. I don't underline stuff because I didn't get indelibly deep enough into my brain. I copy down verbatim. Is it all long-land? Hang on. Your writing is so tiny. It has to be tiny in order to not take it. He's got two lines per line, people. Two lines per line. This is like, do you remember when, well, do you remember Darwin when he went off on his voyage? I remember, yeah. Yeah. A mystery. And he, paper was really short. So he would write, you know, like this and then he would also write like that. Oh, really? And then sometimes like that. And if you're really careful, you could actually do that for all of it. It's incredibly neat. I think pencil's just a bit smudgy though, you know. Gandalf continues, other evils there are that may come for Sauronis himself, but a servant or emissary. You really are writing down the quotes. I really am writing down the quotes. So obviously that's from when I was reading Lord of the Rings. And look at what kind of notebook I'm using, by the way. It's not that earlier brand I mentioned. It is right in the rain, all weather universal. So this is waterproof paper. Yeah. And so pens actually don't really work on it. I think you can use maybe a permanent marker, but pencils work best. And the same company that makes these waterproof journals also makes pencils that I mean a pencil, it can get wet, whatever you get a new one, but they make waterproof mechanical pencils as well. So that's what I'm using now. And I have, I could like bike to and from work and it'll rain on them while they're in my pocket and they're just like, I don't care. And I'm like, finally, I feel so much stronger. And then the question became, what type of pencil do I use? And my favorite is wooden pencils. Sure. I mean, I mean, classic lines. It's classic. The feel of it is great. What kind of softness we're talking here to be? Oh, I'm talking 4H. Whoa. Yeah. Let me give some background to those of you who might be wondering. So pencil lead comes in different hardnesses and softness. To distinguish them, they're given names. B is soft. B means black because soft graphite will just, it'll smear off onto the page so thickly that the line is very black, B for black. In the other direction, you get into the H leads where H means hard. These are hard. There's less clay in the graphite. So the line that it leaves is much fainter. It's almost more of a silvery color, but it doesn't, of course, wear down as fast. It'll keep a sharp point for longer. There are some 4Hs. Mark Art makes a 4H that is actually still quite dark, but it's like you're scratching a needle on the paper. I love the physicality of like, I'm doing this to you. But a soft like, you're using like a 6B, you're just smudging around paint on the page, basically. Yeah, you're massaging the paper into something brilliant. It's too kind. It's too massaging. I need to be scratching and tattooing the page. So problem, wooden pencils, you have to sharpen. Eventually they get too short. They don't really fit in your hand very well. Also I became too obsessed with constantly sharpening my pencils. And so I was just, I would write a sentence and then halfway through it, I'd be like, I could give this a few more cranks. So I moved on to mechanical pencils. And mechanical pencils, you can get lead of any kind of softness or hardness that you want. But you can also get mechanical pencils with different lead widths. So you can get thinner and thinner leads, which simulate a sharper and sharper pencil. Now, where should I begin? Here's what I'll say. For the last few months, my go-to pencil has been the Grafgear 500, 0.3 millimeter with H lead. And it's this one right here. And here's what I'm proposing. I think that we should write with these on a sheet of paper. And I don't know if we can do this. The producers can tell me, but we should like sign this and write on it and then give it away to some listener. Auction it for charity. We should auction it for charity. You guys can't say no to charitable causes. Maybe leave your bid in the comments. And frankly, if your bid's 1p, like you're going to win it. So you may as well start. You may as well start. I don't know if we'll bid that way. But yeah, leave us comments anyway, because it's good for engagement. This also, this feels a bit like, you know that scene in American Psycho where they're comparing their business cards? Yes. I think it was when you gave me the exact name of this. What was it called again? The Grafgear 500. Now that's 0.3 millimeter lead, which is quite thin. It's very thin. Usually a mechanical pencil that you might find like in an office supply closet is going to be a 0.7 millimeter. It's still very thin, but I love the amount of control I have with such a thin lead. It's almost like it slows me down and it makes me write more legibly. I think it's quite scratchy. You think it's too scratchy? Well, that's H lead as well. So it's hard. For me, I mean, look, it was a continuous experience, right? Like if you get a really hard pencil, I find it scratchy in, but it's sort of the lead doesn't flow smoothly across the table. It sort of catches almost. But yeah, it is like writing with a needle. Yes, it is. Okay. So let me give you the opposite. Now, this is a pencil that is known as the Rotring 600 and it is a completely metal body. This is much heavier. This one has a lead indicator on the end. So I can actually dial in which kind of lead I've put in it so you don't forget. And it's 0.5 millimeter lead. So this is thicker. Also this is incredibly soft. This pencil, let me just make sure it's working before I hand it to you because some of the leads have broken inside. I don't actually know what lead is made from because it's obviously not lead. It's not made from lead, the metal. Good question. It's made from graphite, which is a form of carbon, an allotrope of carbon, just like a diamond, but the atoms are arranged differently. But there are other things added to it to make it either stronger or softer. I think pure graphite would be extremely soft. That would be like a thing that you would, it's like a piece of chalk and you would be really putting down a lot. Pure graphite I think would be a little too hard, but you can add like clay or something to it to make it soft enough that it's smooth. Because if you get pure graphite and you rub it, I mean you can basically get down to like incredibly thin layers of graphite. That's right. That's right. When it comes to again, just to give you context, pencil leads range from B to H and the number before the letter is a degree of blackness or hardness. So like a 6B is much softer than a 2B. The number 2 pencil that we use in school is right in the middle. It's an HB. So it's a hard black. It's right in the middle. If you want to get any softer, you're going to move into the 2B, 3B, 4B, any harder, you're going to be moving towards actually F comes first. F is very close to a number 2. Is F 4 first? No. F is for fine because it's a little harder than a number 2 pencil so that it keeps a fine point longer. After that in hardness is the pure H and then 2H, 3H, 4H and so on. What does it go up to? The biggest H I've ever seen is only 4H but the biggest B I've seen is like 12B. And that stuff is goop. Like I'm riding with a cloud. It's like riding with an oil slick. So here try the Rotring 600 and this has 4B lead in it. That's what I use for underlining in nonfiction books. See this is more my thing. I like that a lot. I didn't know we were doing this today otherwise I would have brought in my fountain pen connection. We should do fountain pens in the other episodes. Obviously I am as nerdy about fountain pens as you are about mechanical pencils and the thing that I like in a fountain pen is what's known as a wet noodle. See I don't even know what that means. This is why we need to do this episode because I don't know fountain pens at all. Oh fountain, oh the delight. I want to be like a drawing with the sloshiest pen nib that exists. Interesting. I want to be like a pouring ink onto that paper. I want the paper to be like a sponge like soaking it up. That's so great. I love this personal side of writing implements because my opinions that are being expressed today are mine. That might not work for you. What's interesting though is that my reasoning is exactly the same as yours which is that I like the sloshiest pens because it makes me slow down. Oh interesting they make me speed up. Do they? There's too much of an amusement park ride. Hello. I need a surgical instrument where I'm like I'm just delicately slicing into the brain as I copy things down or as I write down my thoughts. Otherwise I can't read them later because it's too sloppy. I think it is, you're right it is a bit like an amusement park ride but it's sort of like it makes me really take care of the beautiful shape of the letters. So let's keep going. This is going to become a three hour long episode which is fine. It's the way it's going to be everybody. Now you'll notice that those two pencils you've used are drafting pencils. They have really sharp points on them and the lead comes out of what's called a lead pipe that's very long and that's so that you can use thin leads but also so that when you're using a ruler or a stencil they fit in and the sides of the pencil don't get in the way. The problem with having a long lead pipe is that it's fragile. I mean this thing is so thin. If you drop the pencil that lead pipe gets bent, lead's not going to come out of it again. You've broken your pencil. You've broken it and it can be very difficult to fix. I dropped the Rotring 600 on the third day that I had it and that lead pipe got bent and I had to bend it back and I think I got it. It works now. It works again but there's no cap. There's no way to protect it. That's how it is. You put this in a pocket, you're going to reach in and stab yourself on that point. Like a hypodermic needle. It's going to rip into fabric and it's going to bend itself again so I have to use these little protective caps which fit on these pencils and that's how I carry it in my bag. Wait, where do you get the protective caps from? I got these at a craft store in London actually. I just, I just- But it's not a branded one. It's like it's just a generic thing. It's a generic little thing. It's like a piece of aluminum that's formed into a cap with a little slit on it so it can expand and then tightly hold on to whatever you shove in there. It looks a little like a bullet. It looks a little bit like a bullet shape. That's right and it's curved here and so it's protecting, you can use these on wooden pencils to protect the lead but on this it's protecting the pipe of the mechanical pencil. Now here's what I want to say. I want to show you, well I want to show you 12 more things. Just kidding but it's close to 12. So I do think you might love this. Now this is right in the Reigns mechanical pencil and it uses lead that is 1.2 millimeters thick. Whoa fat boy. It's a fat boy and this came with 2B lead and I'm sorry to say knowing that you now like the soft ones, I've replaced it with 2H lead. Okay this one- Because I wanted it to hold a sharp point so if you look it's pretty sharp and that's because I've sharpened it using a special sharpener that can sharpen mechanical pencil lead. Okay. Now try that out. What did you say this one was called? That's called the right in the rain 1.2 millimeter. What do you think? I prefer it to the old scratchy boy. Got it. And look how much darker your writing is. It also feels nice to touch. It's got a really really nice weight to it and the best eraser ever invented in human history. Try that eraser out. Oh that is actually quite good. That's really good. You know I once actually I was reading the Japanese stationery awards which is the kind of thing I do. And there was a new eraser which won or clean sweep which is quite nice to imagine an eraser getting a clean sweep. But I think it rivals this. Okay so I haven't tried every eraser. I shouldn't say that it's the best ever. This is a very good eraser. It's the best eraser I've ever experienced. That's why the perfect mechanical pencil for me is going to be Frankenstein out of all these. It's going to be the eraser from right in the rain's mechanical pencil. It's going to be like the form factor of the graph gear 500 with a protected lead pipe. So watch this. How do you protect the lead pipe? Well one way to do it is to have a cap that actually comes with the pencil. On the market right now there are only two mechanical pencils that are capped. One is the Kuru Toga Dive which is like $120 if you want it in the color that I like. I feel like I'm having an out of body experience everybody. I could work at a mechanical pencil store and never make a sale because I won't stop talking. Right tell me what it was called again. The Kuru Toga Dive. Are you familiar with the Kuru Toga mechanism? I have a feeling I'm about to be. You're about to find out. So here's, honestly I don't like it but it's changed a lot of people's lives. So imagine that this is the lead in the pencil. As you're writing what happens is that it hits the page and you draw and you pick it up and you draw another letter and blah blah blah and it gets cut obliquely. So it actually becomes thicker. And so your lines wind up being thicker and thicker as you draw because you're- Because the lead is not wearing down evenly across the entire surface. If you wrote straight up and down the lead would hit the page and it would just get shorter. Because you write it at an angle it's getting cut this way and you wind up with a much larger surface area at the tip. Kuru Toga fixes that by having a little mechanism inside such that each time the lead touches the paper the lead is actually rotated a little bit. So you draw, lift and it comes up and then you go back down and it keeps going around and around. So the lead, that tiny 0.5 millimeter lead is actually being sharpened by being used. Amazing. That is pretty good. That's pretty amazing. That's pretty good. For me it's too much movement. I don't want to feel the lead moving a little bit every time. You can feel it. And I'm a guy who wants that scratch. I want to be doing old school cuneiform like on clay, on stone type work. I don't want this like delicate little, hello I'm doing a little dance for you. But Kuru Toga Dive has that mechanism in a cap. The Pintel Keri has a cap and it's just a more standard one. This looks like a fountain pen from afar. Check it out. What's cool is that when you put the cap on the back and you push it all the way in the lead can still be advanced even though you've put a cap on the back of it. The button goes through. I think the feeling of this is like, this is sort of like what I would describe as a lady pen. You know? You feel lady like with it, especially the sparkliness, the shininess. I think Mont Blanc actually literally make lady sized pens for smaller hands. I'm not actually joking. My hands are pretty small. Your hands though. They are absolutely ginormous. Famously ginormous. I'm kidding. There was once where you were like hiding your hands because you were showing something up close to the camera and thought it made them look too big. Now that also has like three or four B lead in it. What's this one called again? That's called the Pintel Carry. It's one of the oldest continuously manufactured mechanical pencils. You can buy that today for about six bucks. Yeah, I don't like it as much. You don't. It's too small. Fair enough. I do appreciate that it's got a cap so I can throw it in my pocket, walk around, never worry about the pen getting damaged. This one, I feel like it could sort of double up as a screwdriver. Yes. So that's the right in the rain 1.3 millimeter pencil. And it is for like work outdoors. It's for you're doing construction, you need to draw lines on boards and whatnot. That's why it has thick, soft lead. Not to gender your pencils, but this one feels very manly. It's a manly pencil. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So the last thing I'll say is that I reached the end of my journey by discovering that you can get lead that's even thinner than the 0.3 millimeter you tried with the graph gear. Now, you might actually enjoy these because when lead gets that thin, we're talking a fifth of a millimeter. These look like hairs. They break way too easily. You can't put them in a normal mechanical pencil. They need to have some special protective mechanism. And so here, I'll give you this one first. This is called the Pintel Orins and they're the only people at the moment who sell a 0.2 millimeter lead pencil. Now when you look at it, you won't see any lead sticking out. And that's because the pipe protects the lead and it's got a little bevel on it so that when it touches paper, it moves up a little and exposes the lead. See how thin that is? This is incredibly thin. What's this one called again? It's called the Pintel Orins and it has the ability to hold the thinnest mechanical pencil leads being made right now. And because it protects it so well, you can put in very soft lead. So you are right now writing with a fifth of a millimeter thick lead that's 2B softness. So it's a quite dark compared to the stuff at the top, the graph gear 500. The graph gears H lead looks like gray. It does. It does. It's incredibly thin. You're just putting way more... Way more graphite atoms per stroke, right? This is the same pencil but with a metal grip. And so that's been my go-to and I think I'm kind of done. It's got a little bit of a different weight distribution. It's a little bit heavier. Now Pintel also makes an advanced version of the Orins called the Orins Nero and it automatically shoots more lead out so you don't have to push the button. I don't like it. I think a lot of people will agree that the mechanism that moves lead out is too sensitive. So when you use the eraser on the pencil, it shoots more lead out and you have to keep fixing it every time you erase. This one's your absolute favorite. That's my favorite. How much actually are these? My favorite pencil that metal grip Pintel Orins, that was $9. Oh! Well $9.90 so 10 bucks. How about the one that looks like a screwdriver? That one was more. That was like $17 I think. Okay! I mean look, I'll be honest with you. Before we started I was quite jealous of the number of options that you had here to show me because I was like, well he's really invested here. Knowing that my fountain pen collection is not as extensive as yours. These are substantially cheaper than fountain pens. You can spend more money if you want. There are Pintel Orins with newfangled metal grips that will cost you like $23. I mean that's a lot more than a wooden pencil. I agree. However, it's worth it in the long run. So I think today when I walk around I carry the Pintel carry and I also carry the Pintel Orins. If you hold down the button you can push the pipe all the way in. Oh, so it doesn't stab you. So it doesn't stab you and it also doesn't get bent. So this is like, you know, nice and protected and so I keep this in my pocket and this one. And so if I need to write something I'll use this but because it's a bit weird you have to like just push once and then don't look for lead coming out. I don't want another person to have to use it. They'll think it's annoying and they'll think that I'm being difficult and fancy. I'll just give them this non-fancy one. I give them this one because this works like you would expect a mechanical pencil to work. And that works even if they've got lady hands. Even with the lady hands? This won't overwhelm them. Yeah, so I love it. And this is the one I've been like, I just love fidgeting with it too. It's got like the perfect size for my hands to just kind of have some fun with. Yeah, thank you for that tour. That was, I think that that will have, what I'm interested in looking at is the retention statistics on this episode to see how much we split our audience. It's going to be one of those rare episodes where viewership goes up the longer it lasts. Like people are inexplicably like showing up. Their friends are saying, where did you come from? Where did you come from? Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you are still watching, you're a hardcore pencil fan like Michael. You need to sign this as well. I know, I realized I wasn't writing because I mean the microphone's in the way of the table. What did you write down? I just wrote down what the name of the pens were. What I'm going to do is I'm going to put my own handwriting on here with all the pencils and when we come back, we're going to get to your questions. I live 7,636 kilometers away from Hannah. So we rarely get to see each other in person. That's what makes this such genuinely thrilling news for us. And maybe for you too. Because for the first time ever, you can see both of us live on stage at Goldhangers inaugural festival. It's going to be amazing to be able to reach through the screen and meet those of you who watch and listen to the show in the flesh. The rest is fest. Runs from the 4th to the 6th of September at London's Southbank Center. General sale goes live on the 2nd of June at 10 a.m. So get some tickets and get ready for some fun. Some serious fun. Go to Southbankcenter.co.uk to find out more. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. In the UK, nearly one in two people will face cancer in their lifetime. The question is, could science stop cancer before it begins? In over the past 50 years, Cancer Research UK has helped double cancer survival in the UK. That's proof of what research can achieve. Like take cervical cancer. Almost every case is caused by HPV, the human papillomavirus. And when scientists uncovered that link, prevention became possible. Indeed, it did by a vaccine. And it's protection that works way before the cancer itself can actually grow. After the vaccine was introduced, cervical cancer rates in England were nearly 90% lower than expected in women in their 20s. I mean, we're now genuinely at a point where this is a disease that is disappearing in young women in the UK. This is something that I really hope my daughters will never have to deal with. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash rest is science. The internet is coaching our kids. When boys hear that on repeat, it shapes how they see themselves. We can't leave it to those voices. We have to be louder. Together. With E. We need to coach them. Guide them. Back them. Building our boys up every chance we get. Be yourself. Back your mates. Confidence comes from the beginning. As proud partner of the England teams, EE has support and guidance to help build all our boys up on and off the pitch. Search EE Yes Boys. Okay, welcome back. We have, we've got some questions from you guys. First up, we've got a question from Justin, who asks, what happens to the bubbles inside a soft drink when you open up a bottle on the International Space Station? On Earth they float upwards, seemingly against gravity. True. What happens in space when there is no up? It's funny. I was just watching a British astronomer, astronomer, a British astronaut. Was it Tim Peake? I don't know. Was he ginger? I don't remember. I don't see. There is only one British astronaut. You guys in this country are so obsessed with hair color. Like. Hair color and class. Where I grew up, you were a redhead and that was like what it was. And here it's all like, gingers and the whole like, they don't have souls. And I'm like, what the heck? Excuse me, that was on South Park. That is very much on the outside of the bunch. I know it's in America, but I first heard about it from them and it was like out of nowhere. My whole childhood, I'd never heard that gingers were like, worthy of derision and outcasts. Yeah, but you know, we know why it's because, I mean, I have not fact checked this to be absolutely clear. Okay, good. But it's, we had like invaders from, you know, like the French and the Nordics. And then all the Celts were like pushed to the outer borders. So like up in Scotland and over in Ireland. And so they're really considered the sort of savages. Like they're the, they're more indigenous to these aisles. Maybe not more indigenous because I think there were, you know, Europeans floating around the whole time and when did this aisle become an aisle, etc. Right. But yeah, the sort of the Celtic blood was considered sort of beneath savages. The, like who then, the Normans, the, yeah. I'm not just saying that that bit is absolutely completely true, by the way, that, that for example, there was lots of stuff during the Irish famine where in Britain they were sort of like, well, it's because they're just, just a bit lazy, you know. So that's why gingers were considered genuinely subhuman. You know, in Iceland, when they, we've got onto gingers now again. Just seeks out the edges. But yeah, the ginger people who came from Ireland, that the, that the Viking stopped off in Ireland on the way to Iceland, picked up loads of women, which you can see in the DNA of modern Icelandic people, that it was females from Ireland. Anyway, when they were like had churches and stuff, all of the ginger people had to sit at the back. Really? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's fun that we can all have a little bit of fun, insulting gingers. And it's like safer. Safer than insulting other people. Because we don't really mean it. Like, I guess to me, it just never felt like it was real. It was like a South Park joke. Like, I thought they, I thought they'd made that up until I met people from England, from Britain, and they were just like, oh no, like. Oh, it's real. It's real. Yeah. I think it's less real than it used to be. Okay. I think like in the 80s, it was much more real than it used to be. All right. Anyway, but that's why Tim Peek, Tim Peek's the ginger guy. I just, I don't remember because, yeah, again, I see everyone as a human. Okay. Point is though, that he had a big blob of water there in the weightless international space station, and he stuck an Alka Seltzer tablet, a busy tablet in it. And the bubbles form, but they don't go up. Instead, they just go around. They just expand. They just expand. So on the international space station, a can of carbonated liquid will expand, and it'll be like a kind of a foamy mess, but it's going to all come out as that pressure change causes the gas to come out of solution. And now it's going to be probably quite quick. I don't know if it's, they've actually done this. I haven't seen if they've done it on the ISS. It would make a mess. I think it would be like if you'd shaken it up and opened it. And then just the explosion. But this is what's happening inside the human body. Because gases are released when you're digesting, and on earth, it's fine. It kind of comes up to the top and you end up burping out. But on the ISS, it's like incredibly uncomfortable, apparently, the bloating that you end up getting. They talk about having like sort of wet burps where it's kind of all coming out of the edges, which is a bit disgusting. Yeah, it makes you thankful for gravity keeping things down. Right, exactly. So yeah, there you go. There's your answer with a little bit of ginger stuff thrown in. Okay, here's a question for you, Michael. Okay, Adam asks, I've been reading Bill Bryson off the back of Michael's recommendation. And it had been wondering, if you could be alive in any era of science, when would it be? Wow. Can it be in the future? Sure. Yeah, I mean, I just stipulated. So I think you can do whatever you like. I think there's so many cool historical eras of science. But I feel like I'd be there and I'd be a little bit like, we've moved past this, but also I can't really explain to you how we did. So I'm of no use. But I think that it'd be cool to go, I don't know how far though, I'd like to go to where we've paradigm shifted away from our current thinking where someone's come along and said, guys, all this discussion of quantum electrodynamics and cosmology at really big scales, like all of that is actually part of something else. Kind of like what Einstein did and Copernicus did. I want another level to be around when there's that new way of looking at reality, where we go, oh, of course, of course, Newtonian physics and Einsteinian physics are all just approximations still and there's still something else there. And that's what's going to push us over the edge to faster than like travel, creating wormholes, stuff like that. Yeah, I hear you. I hear you. I sort of think that there's, I don't know, I think if you look back through the history of science, you get these eras where, I don't know, I think that a lot of the really simple stuff to discover has sort of maybe already happened. I don't think that there's an equation of biology in the same way there's an equation of equals mc squared. I think that the systems that we are, that are now at the frontier are so phenomenally complex that it's probably beyond the human brain to be able to understand the full inter-scracies of the entire systems all simultaneously. Yeah. I mean, even really, I think even if you go back a hundred years or so, it was possible for you as one individual person to pick up on a piece of science and make one breakthrough that actually ended up having this gigantic repercussions. Yeah, by yourself. By yourself. But I think now we're really in an era where there's like, it just doesn't really happen anymore. You need gigantic teams of people. You need gigantic teams. You need gigantic equipment. You need like neutrino detectors and particle accelerators the size of a country or telescopes that take a decade to build, right? And having big teams of people is exciting in itself, but it also means that you as an individual only ever get to like fully grasp one tiny bit of it. You know? I like the idea of being able to fully understand literally all of it. I just prefer pulling apart things that are mechanical because I can really understand how they're made and how they're designed. Whereas pulling apart something that's, I don't know, like a laptop or a smartphone or whatever, it's like they're just too complicated for one person to understand it. Yeah, you could be a real Renaissance woman if you went back to a time when you could know a bit of everything. I think historically I would like to go back and hang out with Lewin Hook and his microscope. When was that? Like the 1600s? Late 1600s? Yeah, little bit later maybe 1700s? Let's check it out. Lewin Hook. But he was the one who first saw sperm, right? Yeah, he is. That's, imagine that. You just get, just get like a little instrument. It's just like, whoa, what shall I put on next? Famously, Lewin Hook did not invent the microscope, but made some adjustments to make it like 300 times stronger, magnification wise, and like scooped out some gunk from his infected tooth and looked at it and saw microorganisms and he called them animalcules. Like, molecules. Yeah, like molecules, but animals. And he was the first human to see a sperm and he was like convinced because there seemed to be a lot of detail in them. He was convinced that there was an entire little baby person in it. Yeah. And that this proved the notion of pre-formation. Absolutely. That when life began, every individual that ever would be already existed and that like my children are in my sperm as little tiny things. Yeah. And inside them, the boys have some sperm. They're Russian dolls, my friends. It's Russian dolls all the way down. In the shape of a human, this is rather than when it goes into the woman, it's like tiny little human and then it just gets slightly bigger, slightly bigger. Yeah. And it gets bigger and the woman's egg provides some kind of maybe it's a life force, maybe it's just whatever. It turns out that's not true. No. But on the way over here. I think the woman's got a bit more to do with it than that. They may have a little bit more to do with it. But on the way over here before the show, I finished Ted Chang's stories of your life and others and he's got a short story in here. This is all sci-fi where he imagines a world where pre-formation is true. And the story is set in Victorian times where some scientists have found a way to, I won't give too much away, they found a way to look closer and closer at all these like nested homunculi little people that are inside the sperm. And they realize that after the next five generations, it doesn't keep going. That the whole human species. It's about to come to an end. Is about to come to an end. That's a great idea for a story. Because when it formed, however it formed, its creator or nature only gave it whatever, 200 generations. Nested generations. And they're like, how are we going to fix this? And I won't tell you how they fix it, but it's a pretty neat story. That's a great story. Yeah, good answer. Good answer. I think being there at the beginning of the microscope does a really good one. Okay, last question. This is from Otis who asks, in your opinion, what is the most beautiful phenomenon of the cosmos? Now, okay, on this, I think that, I mean, sure, there's like supernovae and stars and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but I think we're really biased towards vision in all of this. I think that the most beautiful phenomenon, I'm going to go gravitational waves. Because I think, I just think that's really pretty spectacular. Actually, this idea that you can have something like two black holes colliding together. And it has these measurable ripples. In space time. In space time. That you can get lasers that are 90 degrees to one another and then measure the difference. I mean, that is, it's also the fact that, you know, we turned on Seti to listen. The bias towards vision has always been there, but we turned on Seti to listen, to hear if there was sounds being made by alien civilizations. And there was nothing really. We haven't heard anything. There's no cacophony of sounds. But with, when LIGO was turned on to look for gravitational waves, it took about, how long was it before they detected the first wave? It was like 48 hours or something, wasn't it? I don't know. I just, it would be really funny if I pretended like, oh, yeah, most. Hang on one second. It was really quick. Oh, okay. This is interesting. So they hadn't, they were supposed to turn it on to do the first official observation on September the 18th. They actually found the first gravitational wave on September the 14th, four days before the original start day, when it was in engineering mode. Wow. How cool is that? Very cool. Like, what a feeling for you to be like, guys, this is working so well. Like, we're detecting the target and we haven't even started. Yeah. I mean, they literally turned it on and we're like, oh no, there's one. Wow. Yeah. That's, I think that's really cool. Gravitational waves, right? It's not like a wave in water or in, it's a wave in whatever it is we are on, the stage that all the matter is set on. Yeah. Not a wave in matter, a wave in the thing that we're in and are moving through space and time. I think someday we'll get a better idea of what space time really is. It's such a shame that we can't conceive of things in the fourth dimension, isn't it? Because the two dimensional analogy is where it's like, oh, it's like, you live on a curtain and then the curtain is being rippled. Like, sure. Okay, fine. But it just doesn't, it's not satisfying. No, because it makes you think of a curtain and how a curtain will bend and fold into a third dimension. And that doesn't exist for, in our minds, for a three dimensional space time. So it just winds up becoming, like it feels made up and it has to be too mathematical for everyone to really appreciate. Yeah, agree. Agree. Okay, well, that's a bit of a depressing point to leave on. Sorry, guys, the most beautiful phenomenon in space you can't imagine. Which I think is kind of beautiful in its own way. Hey, there you go. There's the philosophical answer. It's always a good answer. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Field Notes. As ever, you can write to us, therestescienceatgoelhanger.com. You can leave comments for us under the videos in whatever app you happen to be accessing this. We read all of them. Thanks for watching, guys. Thank you.