Radiolab - The Times They Are a-Changin'

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

This episode first aired back in December of 2013, and at the start of that new year, the team was cracking open fossils, peering back into ancient seas, and looking up at lunar skies only to find that a year is not quite as fixed as we thought it was.With the help of paleontologist Neil Shubin, reporter Emily Graslie and the Field Museum's Paul Mayer we discover that our world is full of ancient coral calendars. Each one of these sea skeletons reveals that once upon a very-long-time-ago, years were shorter by over forty days. And astrophysicist Chis Impey helps us comprehend how the change is all to be blamed on a celestial slow dance with the moon. Plus, Robert indulges his curiosity about stopping time and counteracting the spinning of the spheres by taking astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on a (theoretical) trip to Venus with a rooster and sprinter Usain Bolt.We have some exciting news! In the “Zoozve” episode, Radiolab named its first-ever quasi-moon, and now it's your turn! Radiolab has teamed up with The International Astronomical Union to launch a global naming contest for one of Earth’s quasi-moons. This is your chance to make your mark on the heavens. Submit your name ideas now through September, or vote on your favorites starting in November: https://radiolab.org/moonSignup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.Follow our show on Instagram,X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail] support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Listener supported. WNYC studios. Imagine your arms break off. And your flesh turns to poison. And your body begins turning strange colors. Bright yellow and tangerine orange. And you suddenly get really good at math. Bugs can do math? Uh huh.

There is a whole new season of terrestrials coming. Radiolab's family-friendly, ever-so-occasionally musical series about nature. On each episode, we tell you a story about a creature that may seem fantastical. It was like, unbelievable. But is entirely true. Oh my goodness. And this season, we scoured high and low, all over the globe.

Underwater. In the desert, in the wind. Underground. Up to the Arctic. Oh, it is cold. Braving dangerous terrain. All right, mud's getting deeper down here, guys. Wild beasts. It bit me several times.

There was blood everywhere. And our own confusion. So honey doesn't come out of bees? No, it doesn't come out of bees. Mm-hmm. To uncover... Wow. The overlooked... Look at them. These. To uncover. Wow.

The overlooked. Look at them. Overlooked creatures. It's like a fur ball the size of a grapefruit. They are dancing on the comb, which is. Extremely beautiful. And overlooked storytellers. I didn't really speak much, really at all.

I didn't speak at all. Waiting quietly beneath our noses. There's moments where you are made to feel different. Who have life-changing secrets to share. It totally upended everything we know about what we think of as an organism. What a witchy little ritual. Join us for a nature walk that just might get you to fall in love with this place again. Woo! This hippo's barely up to my waist.

I mean, how realistic is it, do you think that we could get humans hibernating in like 20 years? I think that it would be possible. Ooh. Maybe, I don't know. Come, hang out with us. See you for it for you.

Terrestrials, Radiolab's ever so occasionally musical series all about nature. Hosted by me, Lulu Miller, kids and adults. Welcome. All right. Good luck. Thank you. Get busy. I don't know. nature hosted by me Lulu Miller kids and adults welcome all right good luck thank you get busy I don't know oh my goodness all new episodes coming in September terrestrials on the radio lab for kids feed wherever you cast your pods yeah it sounds like a whole little party And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and,

and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, hearing it right now. Anyway, I have an episode for you, one we made a few years ago.

It is both timeless and time full, time centric is maybe a better word. It's an episode about time. Because the vast majority of us, no matter our philosophy of time, whether you think of it as linear or cyclical, time feels static, right? Like no matter what you use to measure it, a second, a year, time feels static, right? Like no matter what you use to measure it,

a second, a year, a millennium, those are constant units, right? Like ticking away the same amount. Not so fast. The times, as they say, are a-changing. Set your watches and let's go. Yeah, wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. are a-changing. Set your watches and let's go! You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab.

From WNYC. C. Rewind. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Kralwich. I want to tell you a story about a discovery I made. Not me, I just learned about it from other people, but it has made me completely reconsider what a year means and specifically how big a year really is. How big a year?

What? How big a year really is. I don't know how is a year, how long a year is? Well, long you're confused now I think I can confuse even more I'm going to begin this investigation by introducing you to a little creature in the sea called a coral corals a shelly animal a little creature it's a there's that's Neil Schupin I'm a paleontologist an evolutionary biologist at the University

of Chicago just like a clam has an animal, clam shell has an animal inside it, so do corals. A little fleshy, wormy thing? Exactly, and it wears its skeleton on the outside. And because they sit in the same place for their whole life, they're really sensitive to local environmental changes. Meaning what? Think about it this way. Let's just sort of think about what happens

to a creature as it lives its life in the water, which is what these things do. You know, we live in a world of cycles, of cycles on cycles. Temperature rises and falls. Light rises and falls. The tides rise and fall several times in the course of a day. So you think about what that means for creatures living in water. What it means for corals, says Neil, is that they're growing.

They're slapping on new skeleton, if you will, new shell. In time with these cycles of rise and fall, of light and dark, hot and cold, and... Hello, hello. Hi. You can actually see these changes written onto their shells, maybe into their shells. Emily. Andy. And that's why Andy Mills and I called up our pal Emily Grassley, whose job is...

What are they? I am the chief curiosity correspondent of the Field Museum in Chicago. That's your actual title. The chief curiosity correspondent, yes, it is. You brought some corals, did you? We have many corals. We have corals all over the studio desk right now.

All right. All right, let's cut it. Because when you cut into these shells... Oh, it's warm. We have a little bit of water we can spritz on there and cool it off. Right off, you can see a pattern. You see these gray stripes. I mean, they're all different variations of gray, but some are really dark gray and some are tan.

They're like bands running either through or across the shell. They kind of radiate out like the bands of a tree. And between the bands there are spaces. You got a stripe, then a space, stripe, then a space, stripe, then a space, but- When you hold it up close to your eye- If you look closer in between the stripes, you can see sort of... Wow!

You can see the lines! Wow! You can see that the spaces are filled with faint little lines. And that's where the piece of this story is just so fascinating. Because in 1962, a paleontologist... Professor John Wells... Was looking at some corals just like these.

He was just sitting there saying, okay, well, what can we figure out from coral shells? So what he did is he did something really simple. He says, well, golly gee, why don't I count the number of little lines between these bands, just to see. So he starts counting, it's 100, 200 lines, 300 lines, 310, 320. And every time he counted. He got a number. Around. Around 360, 365.

Wait a second. Familiar number, no? Doesn't take a lot of inference that hey, maybe those individual rings represent a daily pattern. Meaning each of these little lines actually equaled a day. And why, they're not just making a gray mark after 365. No. What are the gray lines?

Well, the thicker lines are the times of the year when the coral grows a lot. But if you've got a summer coral, then it grows a lot in one summer, then it goes quiet, then it grows a lot the next summer. So that's again, that marks a year. Those big bands are kind of like, ah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, happy new year. Rosalop in next summer. So that's again that marks a year that those big bands are kind of like

Happy New Year Happy New Year Happy New Year, they're actually calendars and clocks inside each of these things. You just have to know how to read them So this guy professor Wells what he did was then this is the really bold bit I thought which is is he then said, well okay that's a living coral, let's look at some fossils. He was after all a paleontologist. So he was at Cornell University and Cornell University is surrounded by rocks around 370

or so million years old. And he collected some nice corals and there are a lot of nice coral fossils known from there. And he opened up these ancient skeletons and he did the count. Found a hundred days, two hundred days. He was expecting three hundred days. Three hundred and sixty to three hundred and sixty-five. Three hundred and sixty-eight. Then low and behold he found four hundred. Between four hundred and 410. Really?

Yeah, and he looked at lots of specimens. That number, the 400 number kept showing up. What does that mean? Well that means that it's now reasonable to think that back in the day, you know, 380 million years ago, there were more days in a year. And he published a paper saying more or less that. And right away, clam scientists said, well, if that's true for corals, then it's gotta be true for my animal, the clam.

And the oyster people said, well, it's gotta be true for oysters, and mussel folks, it's gotta be true for mussels. This paper set off a bit of a cottage industry of folks applying this technique to other species. In looking at these other species, they found that the general trend is absolutely correct. That when you compare modern animals to ancient animals, you will find they record the old ones more days in a year.

So you go back to a time period called the Ordovician, which is about 450 million years ago. A typical year had about 415, 410 days in it. If you go to the time period I work on in the Devonian, about 360 million years, probably about 400. So what you see is the number of days in a year has declined from over 400 to what we have now, which is 365. That's really, so we have lost 40 days since the... Yeah, since creatures first started to walk on land. So now comes the obvious question.

Why? Why would there be more days then than there are now? Okay, wait a second, wait a second, wait a second. So a year is a trip around the sun. That's a trip, that's right. And days are when we spin around and since we're going around the sun. Okay, so maybe if you want to squeeze more days into a year, maybe it just means the trip around the sun. Okay, so maybe if you want to squeeze more days into a year, maybe it just means the trip around the sun took longer back then?

Well, if you ask astronomers about that, I asked Chris Impey at the University of Arizona, and he says... There's no sense that the length of time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun is changing. Because the Earth's orbit around the sun is basic physics and it hasn't really changed significantly, he's pretty sure of that. So then what is it? Well Chris says the answer takes us back about four and a half billion years to a time when the earth was very young. So there was this crazy period of time lasting about 50 million years. Which

they called the Great Bombardment Period. There was still a lot of debris left over from the formation of the solar system, so the meteor impact rate was thousands of times higher. The Earth was still like a tacky magma. So there was a hail, brimstone, endless rain. I mean, kind of crazy time, really. And a bit of that mayhem, of course, we think, gave birth to the Moon. There was a huge collision and a rock about the size of Mars banged into us,

from the hunk of Earth's shrapnel into orbit. And those pieces coalesced and became our moon, which is now sort of parked right next to us. And so it sort of tugs us around in a kind of hefty way. And I thought we tugged the moon. Oh, it's it works both ways. You know, we tug the moon and the moon tugs us and the force is actually equal So it's kind of like a dance. It's a dance. I tug the moon and the moon tugs exactly. It's a celestial waltz And it's that dance that waltz that explains why the Earth used to have 450 days in a year,

then 400 days in a year, and now only 365. Well, I don't see how this explains anything. Well, first of all, let's just remember what a day is. A day is a full spin of the planet from the sun coming up in the morning, then going down, coming up the next morning. So, one spin, a total spin, equals a day. We all know that. Now, today we make 365 of these spins as we orbit the sun.

That would be a year. But back when the Earth was born, when it was all by itself dancing alone, in those days, it spun faster. It was making more of these spins as it went around the sun, so a year had more days in it. But then along comes the moon to join the dance, and now here's the key according to Chris. Earth is spinning faster than the moon is orbiting it.

A dance partner takes a month to come around us. We take, fweew, 24 hours. Fweew! And you know how it is when you're dancing with a partner who's slower than you are? Then you have to you have to tug them along along which is what has happened here gravitationally. We are constantly tugging the moon along It is constantly dragging us down There's a transfer of energy here that over billions of years has caused the earth spin to slow down just a little bit a teeny Teeny bit and as the spin has slowed Well our days have gotten longer and if you do the math you calculate that the day is getting longer by 1.7

milliseconds each century 1.7 milliseconds each century what this means on a daily basis is that today was 54 billionths of a second longer than yesterday and the day before that was 54 billionths of a second longer than the day before And the day before that was 54 billionths of a second longer than the day before. And the day before that was 54 billionths of a second longer than the day before that, which was 54. And if you extrapolate that out over the millions of years people like me think about. That's Neil Shubin again, the paleontologist. That becomes quite significant.

So you're telling me that today is the shortest day of the rest of my life? Yes. Andy worries about these things. Well you're not gonna live longer because of this I'm sorry to say. But no so this moon dance does not affect the ticking of time it just affects what we choose to call a day. And by the way one of the consequences of this dance is as we lose a little energy to our moon every year and the moon picks up a little energy from us, because these things are always equal. Think about like when you throw a ball, the more energy you use,

the further the ball is away from you. Well, as we add a little more energy to the moon, the moon very slyly moves a little further away from us. Every year it's about- A couple of inches. According to Chris. The length of a worm. Really, So the moon is getting a worm's distance further away from us every year. Yeah. And he says if you go back about four billion years, the moon

was originally about ten times closer than it is now. Ten times closer? Imagine the moon looking ten times bigger than it does now, that would have been crazy. Also, the days would have been six hours long. Six hours long? To me, what this says is that everything that we take for granted as normal in our world, ice at the poles, seas in certain places, continents configured the way they are, the number of days in a year. All that is subject to change. And all that has changed. All that

has dramatically changed over the course of the history of our planet. And that includes how we measure time itself. So, you know, when I'm sitting in a hole in the middle of the Arctic digging out a fish fossil, every now and then, you know, I pinch myself and say, here I am in the Arctic, digging out a fish fossil that lived in an ancient subtropical environment. You know, the juxtaposition between present and past sometimes is utterly mind blowing, but it's very informative about our own age and that we, you know, we think things are eternal, but they're not. Everything is subject to change. Change is the way of the world.

We are going to change now to a break, but we've got more coming up after that. Hello again. You're listening to Radiolab. I'm Letif Nasser. We are discussing the flexibility, the surprising flexibility of time today. And in the first segment, we learned all about how coral has marked the ever-changing march of time, how days were once shorter, years once longer. Now we're going to pivot to a more, I mean, I don't know, it's like taking that idea of time flexibility and just taking it to an absurd, absurd place with our host emeritus, Robert Krawich. So I just want to play you a little bit of a, can we do this? Can we just add an end to the end?

Because that's what I'd like to do. Yeah, sure. I was talking to Neil deGrasse Tyson, who's an astrophysicist and who thinks about spin, which we've just thought about, thinks about the inner solar system, which we've just thought about. So here's him and I talking about holding on to time. It's a little goofy, but here it is, just for the fun of it.

So if you're on Earth and you're walking around Quito on the equator, if you're walking at four miles an hour, your day will go sort of the normal way. The sun will rise behind you, go overhead, and then go down the other side. Well, if you're stationary, it will be the 24-hour day, yes. If you started walking on the equator, depending on which direction you walked,

your day will either last longer or shorter. Okay, so if you walk west, the faster you walk, the longer your day will become you could walk at a pace where you have a 25 hour day or 27 hour day. There's a speed with which you can walk on the equator and the earth going west, where your day lasts forever. And that is the rotation rate of the earth. You would have compensated for the rotation. Roughly what type, that would be a gerbil. A gerbil running on a beach ball, a rotating beach ball.

So that would, on the top of a beach ball. So that speed for the equator is about a thousand miles an hour. So the equator moves a thousand miles an hour, and that gives us the 24 hour day. If you wanna go a thousand miles an hour in the gives us the 24 hour day. If you want to go a thousand miles an hour the opposite direction, you will stop the day, the sun will never move in the sky and you'll have a, and your day will last.

Superman did that once I think when he had this thing with Lois. Superman would have so messed up everybody on earth for having stopped the rotation of the earth, reversed it and then set it forward. Yes he did that. He would have scrambled all, anything not bolted to the earth would have been. Really, would have flown off? Yeah, yeah, so depending on your latitude, any equatorial residents, if you stop the earth,

they were going at 1,000 miles an hour with the earth. You stop the earth and you're not seatbelted to the earth, you will fall over and roll due east 1,000 miles an hour. In our mid-latitudes, we're in New York, you can do the math, we're moving about 800 miles an hour, due east, and stop the Earth, we will roll 800 miles an hour due east and crash into buildings and other things

that are attached to the Earth. That are attached to the Earth. All right? But let's, going back to Venus now. Oh, you wanna go to Venus, isn't this enough for you? No, I wanted to, the whole point was to go to Venus, because it's so different there. Yeah, on every way.

No, it's about the same size, and about the same surface gravity, but that's it. It's 900 degrees Fahrenheit, it's a runaway greenhouse effect, it is heavy volcanic activity that repaves the surface periodically, so there are very few craters on Venus. Just unpleasant in general. Unpleasant. It rotates very slowly. Well, that's why I want to stop. So how slowly does it rotate? You know, I don't remember the exact number. It's like four miles an hour or something like that.

Yeah, it's some very slow rate at its equator, slow enough so that you don't need airplanes to stop the sun. You don't need special speed devices. You could probably trot and stop the sun on the horizon or wherever the sun is. So if you're that guy from Jamaica, what's his name? Hussein Bolt.

Hussein Bolt. And you happen to be on Venus for a little while, and you decide to go for a run. What happens to Hussein during the run? So normally, the sun would rise in one direction and set in the other. Depending on which direction you chose to run in, you could reverse your day and have the sun rise

in the opposite side of the sky than it normally would. And, but I think Venus is rotating slowly enough that you wouldn't have to be Usain Bolt. I'd have to check my numbers on this. Oh, I don't think you would. Maybe you'd, in order to have the sun actually sort of seem to go backwards, that's what you're saying, is the sun would go backwards.

Yeah, yeah. So you'd be having lunch, you're Usain Bolt, and you go backwards? That's what you're saying, is the sun would go backwards. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you'd be having lunch, you're Usain Bolt, and you go inside, now I'm gonna run, and the sun's going backwards towards the morning horizon. You can reverse the sun, that's correct. In fact. Wow, that is a really good reason to sprint, I think. Well, but who cares about the sun anymore?

Me, if I was Usain Bolt, I'd go up to him and say. Is the sun telling you when to eat lunch? I don't think so. Your stomach is telling you when to eat lunch. You're saying, okay, it was saying you eat breakfast, but you wanna have lunch real soon? Run so that the sun is now at the top of the sky so now you can legally have lunch.

No! You are not buying my poetic cremacies at all today. This is the 21st century, Jack. And the sun is, we wake by alarm clocks, not by roosters and sunlight, I'm sorry. Just doesn't work that way. I wish I could help you out by thinking, let's suppose.

I am not gonna depend on running on Venus to get the sun in the middle of the sky at my command so that I can have lunch. Okay, all right, but let's suppose you're a rooster and you like to crow at dawn. That's just a deep feeling in you. You could totally mess with a rooster this way. Yes, that's what I wanna do.

Usain Bolt carrying a rooster with him. Usain Bolt carries a rooster on Venus. He does it in a remarkably fast sprint. The rooster, having started the run in the middle of the day, well past the crowing period, feels a strange compulsion to crow two hours into the run. Because he ran backwards to the sunrise rather than to the sun. He ran forwards but the sun went backwards relative to him.

Yes, he ran in the other way to reverse the sun back to sunrise. Yeah, the ro, will need therapy. Every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day,

every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, Yeah, we should definitely go. I'm Jad. I'm Robert. Thanks for listening. Hi, this is Danielle, and I'm in beautiful Glover, Vermont. And here are the staff credits. Radio Lab was created by Jad Ebbemrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts.

Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bresler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Niyanusam Bumdum, Matt Guilty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Valentina Powers, Sara Khare, Sarah Sandbach, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. Hi, this is Ellie from Cleveland, Ohio. Leadership support for Radiolab Science Programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, Assignment Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred

P. Sloan Foundation.