SciShow Tangents - Trick or Treat Month: Theories with Dan Schreiber!

Episode Date: October 17, 2023

Trick or Treat Month returns... and this time it's personal! Join us for another month of spooky themes and special surprise guest apparitions! Try not to get too scared!Our yearly cavalcade of terror rolls on with a new Grand Marshall of Terror: podcaster, author, and mad genius Dan Schreiber! And he's here to tell us about the weirdest, creepiest, most otherworldly theories ever devised of! There are lots of science-y ideas out there, and not all of them can be right, after all!  SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! Head to www.patreon.com/SciShowTangents to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter! A big thank you to Patreon subscribers Garth Riley and Glenn Trewitt for helping to make the show possible!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy some great Tangents merch!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @im_sam_schultz Hank: @hankgreen[Trivia Question]The Classification of Quasithin Groups page numberhttps://www.livescience.com/33628-funny-physics-theorems-names.htmlhttps://www.scientificamerican.com/article/researchers-race-to-rescue-the-enormous-theorem-before-its-giant-proof-vanishes/https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Classification_of_Quasithin_Groups.html?id=KC0ZAQAAIAAJhttps://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20893-prize-awarded-for-largest-mathematical-proof/[Fact Off]Infinite monkey theorem test in a zoohttps://law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/PATENTS-IN-AN-ERA-OF-INFINITE-MONKEYS-AND-ARTIFICIAL-INTELLIGENCE.pdfhttps://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/12/10/249726951/the-infinite-monkey-theorem-comes-to-lifehttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/3013959.stmhttps://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/may/09/science.artsNostradamus: predictions & jam & benzoic acid[Ask the Science Couch]Theory of mind & false belief testshttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3629913/https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/does-the-chimpanzee-have-a-theory-of-mind/1E96B02CD9850016B7C93BC6D2FEF1D0https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2010-18540-002https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-1-4419-1698-3_91[Butt One More Thing]Freudian developmental theory & the anal stagehttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK557526/

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the frightly competitive science-nodded scream case. I'm your ghost, Hank Gangrene, And joining me this week, as always, is mad scientist, Scary Riley. And our resident every wolfman, Sam Skulls.

Brains. Great. Well done. The old calendar says it's Halloween time once more, and as you know here at SciShow Tangents, we love getting to the Halloween spirit. And by we at SciShow Tangents, we getting to the Halloween spirit and by we at SciShow Tangents we mean mostly Sam this year is no different it's true isn't it

October will be trick or treat month as Sam and Sari have invited some ghoulish guests over to Tangents Manor to join us this month in fact I hear one of them approaching the door now trick or treat! Hey! It's mystery guest, radio producer, writer, podcaster, and comedian Dan Schreiber! So good to see you.

Well, thanks for having me on as this trick or treat mystery guest. Love it. So, in honor of you being here, I am on the spur of the moment coming up with a topic. And that topic is, what's your favorite fish? Even though there's no such thing as a fish. What's the best fish, objectively? Dan, you go first. Oh, God.

Well, I have to stick with my whole premise here. There is no fish. I can't. I pass. No. What the heck? They don't exist. I've always had. Human, then. Human. Human. There it is. I can't. I pass. No. What the heck? They don't exist. I've always had.

Human then. Human. Human. There it is. There it is. That's what I wanted to hear from a true pedant. Human is the best fish. I think it's a shark.

You think just a shark? One of the sharks? Any particular shark? Just sharks in general. Not whale shark. Any other kind of shark they're so boring i like when they can go get really get you for me i think it's like a seahorse it's one of those sneaky like it is as if you're gonna be taxonomic about it kind of a fish it's a

fish kind of closer to fish it's a fish um but it looks like just a little guy it looks like nothing else in the planet earth what is that even what are they like closely related to octopuses or something fish they're just fish why do they look like that it's like if you put a fish in a character creator and then just like squashed and stretched its fins yeah seahorse does feel like it got made in the video game Spore. Or it looked out of the ocean and saw a horse and said, that's my goal. Yeah.

Everyone's scrolling the internet, scrolling through Instagram being like, oh, that's my beach bod for the summer. I want to work out, eat protein. Seahorse just poked its head out. It was like, damn. That is a weird looking animal. Well done, Sari. Seahorse just poked its head out. It was like, damn. That is a weird-looking animal. Well done, Sari.

That's a good fish. Thank you. Hank, what do you think? I'm going to go with what's broadly considered to be the worst fish, which is the mola mola. A fish that seems incapable of many things that fish are supposed to be good at. But, cool thing about the Mola Mola, undergoes the largest transition from a birth size, hatching from the egg size to full size of any animal on earth.

It's a very, very tiny little guy when it's, when it first hatches and then they can get very, very big and they eat jellyfish and they're, they get terrible parasitic infections. They cannot. They can kind of move kind of fast if they really need to. Though oftentimes you will find them sort of like pancaking on the surface of the ocean and no one knows why they do it.

For a while we thought they were just stuck there. They're just like not capable of going down. But maybe they're doing it to heat up before they go down, down deep into the cold ocean to get their jellyfish. I feel like they know what they're doing. They not stuck can't they relax too yeah i just want to sunburn it's not a little mola mola sunburn i've always liked herring herring needs a say i think at this point um because herring just to eat no because they communicate by farting which is a interesting trait i'm sure you've all heard about this um and at times when there's like big conversation going on they've been confused for being sort of enemy submarine in local areas particularly during the war it was almost a proper

attack and then they were suddenly like sorry no it's the herring farting they're just having a great old chat i just love the idea of sending a torpedo into a school of herring farting. They're just having a great old chat. I just love the idea of sending a torpedo into a school of herring, though. We were just farting! No! No. You die anyway. Not while there's a war on, fellas.

Yeah. Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to unnerve, disgust, and horrify each other with science facts while trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for gory and candy,

which we'll be awarding as we play. And at the end of the episode, one of us will be crowned the king of Halloween. Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from Dan. If there's one thing I really suck at, it's writing poetry. Though I've tried it once or twice,

most regrettably once while delivering a eulogy i genuinely did that it was horrible but here we are i'll try it now to express my strong belief that the most important thing that humans do is something utterly unique you see our understanding of everything has relied on one very special human breed, that person who dedicates their life trying to prove their own theory. Ah, theories, yes. We are all of us detectives, a planetary Sherlock Holmes, the universe a giant cold case, 14 billion years unsolved. And though we may dismiss the people who we consider to be a loon just remember the man who invented pcr saving millions of lives during the pandemic also believed he was once abducted into

a spaceship by an english-speaking glowing raccoon that the academic who uncovered we can get to that afterwards that the academic who uncovered how homo sapien became a species you couldn't beat also believed our rise to world domination only happened because we were just too smelly to eat. Through the marvel of science, we can know impossible things, like when dinosaurs went extinct, almost down to the hour, yet we still don't know some basic things, like why a curtain billows in towards you in the shower. So I say thank you to the people who spend their life trying to prove their own theories, no matter how odd, how tiny, or how batshit they may be.

Yes. That was so good. Aside from the part at the beginning where you said, I suck at writing poems for a really long time. That was a really good one. You didn't need that part, I don't think. It was terrible. The topic for the day is theories, but it's going to be hard for us to move on without figuring out

that the guy who invented PCR thought he got abducted by raccoons. Well, this is Cary Mullis. I'm sure you all must know about Cary Mullis. Cary Mullis invented PCR, and in the exact same year that he proved it, he was at his house. It was late at night and he had an outhouse for a toilet. He went out to go and use it. And on the walk under a tree, he spotted a glowing raccoon who said, hello, doctor.

And he replied, hello. And then he doesn't remember anything for the next four or five hours. He's walking on an entirely different road and he spent basically a large part of the rest of his life trying to work out what happened there and uh that was his thing was he abducted into a spaceship by a glowing raccoon that was uh that was a big belief of his i've got i got some simpler explanations what are they oh you know just the brain made a mistake yeah well mini stroke maybe took a nap maybe maybe accidentally made some lsd while he was doing pcr

and he did used to do a lot of lsd that is true that was a big thing he says he wasn't on it at the time though well he claims he claims he wants uh because he used to do um uh balloons you know sucking in what is it uh wow laughing gas yeah exactly and he did it with a pipe and he got a bit too keen one day and passed out while the pipe was in his mouth so he fell down he was at his home alone and he woke up later and the pipe was somewhere else in the room and he thought how the hell does this happen no one's here. He was at his home alone. And he woke up later and the pipe was somewhere else in the room. And he thought, how the hell does this happen? No one's here. And he was at a party and a woman came up to him and said, hey, by the way, you're welcome

for saving your life. He's never met her before. Again, this is Nobel Prize winner Carrie Mullis. And he says, you weren't in my house. And she said, no, no, no. But I flew through the astral plane to get to you. And I removed the pipe via that. And he went, oh, of course. I flew through the astral plane to get to you, and I removed the plane via that. And he went, oh, of course, and they became lovers.

Yeah. Oh! So he found out for sure that she wasn't a raccoon, is what I'm hearing. Well, we don't know. That might have been the real reason he was hanging on to her, yeah. All right. Well, boy, the facts have already begun to roll. You already won the episode.

So, Sari, can we say what a theory is? I mean, yes. Yes. There are a lot of different. The thing about theory and when we start talking about human ideas is that the vocabulary can get a little bit mushy. But colloquially, theory is used in all kinds of circumstances. People are like, oh, I have a theory about that. I have a guess about that.

It's used in contexts that are more similar to a hypothesis. But when you get down into scientific terminology, the things that we know about the universe get broken down into categories. So a fact is often an observation of the universe. So like plants have chlorophyll and are green. A law is a relationship between facts. So like Newton's laws of motion for sequence mass times acceleration is a relationship between facts. Mass exists, acceleration exists, the law relates those concepts. And then a theory is a synthesis of facts and laws along with evidence that has been thoroughly researched or tested and explanations of the natural world that kind of explain the why of things,

explain the how of things, allow scientists to interpret the world and provide a structure for us to make predictions about future observations about the world. And so theories are testable and new evidence should be compatible and build upon that theory. And a lot of the theories that we talk about nowadays are mostly well substantiated because we've been doing science for a really long time. So some examples of theories are heliocentric theory, which is the idea that the earth orbits around the sun. Cell theory, that living things are made from cells. Atomic theory, that stuff or matter is made from atoms. Plate tectonic theory, that living things are made from cells. Atomic theory, that stuff or matter is made from atoms. Plate tectonic theory, which is the surface of the Earth, is plates that move over geologic time, and so on and so forth. And there's this idea that theories can be refined or rejected over time.

And this has happened. Humans get it wrong sometimes. I think this is where as a science communicator, it can get a little tricky talking about theories getting refined or rejected because then people use that to say, well, then cell theory can be rejected, right? Or like the germ theory of disease can be rejected. But most often refined or rejected theories are because one piece of them isn't quite right. So like, if we talk about Newton's theory of gravity, it was overall really innovative and thought, changed the way that we thought about planetary objects, planets moving through space, their relationship to each other, the gravitational pulls on one another,

but they didn't quite explain how Mercury's orbit precessed in space. So basically all planets changed their orbits slightly. Mercury's changed slightly more than Newton's theory of gravity predicted. So that wasn't a flaw in Newton's theory of gravity, but we didn't throw it all in the trash. It just kind of made room for more revision, more evidence, and led to the general theory of relativity that Einstein and other scientists then proposed that now explains bends in spacetime or explains those phenomena where Newton's theory of gravity fell short. So when we disprove a theory, we don't just like crumple it in a ball smash it uh in many cases because if it has like a ton of explanatory power like if it was really good at being like oh i can see why like with math that like all of these bodies in space are obeying the same rules

i can predict like what's going to happen on earth i could predict what's going to happen in space i could predict what's going to happen the next galaxy I could predict what's going to happen in space. I can predict what's going to happen the next galaxy over. That's all like super good explanatory power. And then if there's like something a little bit weird about it, then, uh, like what, oftentimes what you're finding is that there's something like a little bit below,

not like an entirely new thing that was over here, but like something that's deeper and that provides more insight and has more explanatory power. Well, you know, it's a weird thing about Newton? Did he ever have sex with a raccoon? He didn't. But Newton, I discovered while I was writing my book,

is responsible for hollow earth theory. Oh, that's a wrong one. Okay. Yeah. So this was, and this kind of shows the uh the importance of getting your equations right and so on when you're in a role like uh as influential as newton but when he first published uh the principia mathematica he got a he got an equation wrong in it he was talking about the density of the moon in relation to the earth and i I believe I'm right in saying that, um, either way,

there was a, there was a miscalculation and Edmund Halley slash Holly, depending on your pronunciation, took that as something that he then applied to the mass of the earth and worked out that based on that equation, there must be hollow cavities all the way through the earth. And so it was Holly who pushed the theory of, of the hollow earth theory.

And still today, I mean, it's the most amazing thing because it's the most pseudoscience thing that you could possibly imagine. But if you travel to the Royal Society in the UK, in London, there is a portrait of one of the founders of what is like the bastion of science in the UK. And in the painting sitting there in this incredible hall of scientists is edmund hawley holding a drawing of his belief of the hollow earth he never let it go off the back of this miscalculation he did a bunch he did like so much stuff though so like you could kind of you gotta it is amazing how sticky things can be in people's heads and i love i love to watch scientists fight and often like it comes down

to these like very little things but oftentimes they end up both being right my favorite times is when all the scientists fight for 20 years and then they're like oh we're both right but shit's super complicated like that's what it always reminds me of is like you can be really good like he like holly did all kinds of amazing and you know deep bed just like newton did yeah incredible guy uh sari do we know where the word theory comes from yes this is very straightforward as far as etymologies go um because when humans started thinking we wanted to put a word to that um so it comes from the latin theoria which means speculation or contemplation so like the thinky approach to understanding the world,

or like an act of beholding rather than the other side of things. And the other side of things is practica or like practice. So the dichotomy there is the theoric is the speculative knowledge of a subject versus the practic, which is the performance or execution of an action or procedure. So you're thinking science, thinking about the nature of things versus an applied science where you're testing out those principles and rules. Good job, ancient people. You so rarely do words well. Dan, I keep hearing word of this book. Do you want to tell us about the book real quick?

Oh, yeah. It's called The Theory of Everything Else. And the basic idea is that while the great scientists of the world are trying to find the ultimate theory of everything, millions of the rest of us around the world are trying to solve very basic, simple things. And that is the theory of everything else that we're trying to look into. It's not anything woo-woo. I just find it interesting that most people you look into, like Cary Mullis I was talking about, despite having all this incredible scientific outlook, also seem to harbor just a little bit of weirdness. And I sometimes think we are trying to shove the weirdness under the carpet. And actually, weirdness is what's helped us progress. We stand on the shoulders of weirdness. So I looked into every possible territory just to see where weirdness has led us

to somewhere great. And it's everywhere. So the book is just, yeah, a collection of all the oddities. Even down to a basic thing like the reason the Beatles have the drumming style that they have. Ringo Starr has a drumming style which is said to be unique. If you hear drummers talking about him, you'll hear Dave Grohl say, give me more Ringo. It's a sloppy, slow thing. And the reason is because when he was a kid, his grandmother, who was known as the voodoo queen of Liverpool, performed so many exorcisms on him to rid him of being a left-handed person that he became a right-handed drummer.

And that gave him this unique beat. So he started as a drummer on a right-handed kit. But after he left his voodoo queen of Liverpool grandmother, he slowly went left-handed but continued playing on a right-handed drum kit. And it gives him a sloppy sound as a result. And that was the queen of Liverpool grandmother. He slowly went left-handed, but continued playing on a right-handed drum kit, and it gives him a sloppy sound as a result. And that was the beat of the Beatles. That's the Ringo sound. And that's all down to his loopy grandmother

giving him exorcisms as a child. So it's all that stuff. We need to be more cruel to children. Yes. Better drummers. Exactly. Oh, good. I'm glad that we...

That is... I can't..., good. I'm glad that we... That is... I can't... I mean, I'm very excited. You can get it at all the places where books are in all of the formats that books are available in. All right, Dan, you're ready? We're going to be playing a game. It's called The Scientific Definition.

So humans have been coming up with theories to explain all sorts of phenomena in our universe for an awful long time, but creativity doesn't end with the theory itself. Plenty of ingenuity has gone into naming those theories as well. So today, in honor of those wonderful names, we're going to play the scientific definition. I'm going to present you with a name of some kind of theorem or idea, and you will have to come up with what you think it's all about. We're going to start out with the first one. It's called the Harry Ball Theorem.

I feel like Dan and Terry are just going to know the Harry Ball Theorem, but maybe not. No, no. I'm desperately thinking. Yeah. I think I know the field it's in. So I'll go a little bit later. I bet it's like physics or something. It's probably about a particle that's

like touching other particles and there's wigglers of some sort are involved in this fields there's fields and balls i bet that's it as as we all say it's all balls and wiggles here on planet earth so this is the fundamental theory of balls and wiggles. I think it must absolutely have to do with testicles. And the hair growth of a hairy ball is correlated to the, I'm going to say, sort of an attitude of a human, an outlook. Because there was a theory back in... Phrenology, like phrenology but for balls. Exactly. there was a theory back in phrenology like a like phrenology but for balls exactly there was there was a theory back in victorian england that women were more likely to be a criminal if they had a

hairy anus that was a real theory that was put forward around the time of jack the ripper okay and um so the idea was if you were looking for a criminal you would um you would make the arrest you would search uh the buttock area, and if there was hair, that was more likely. So I think it's in the same field. I am so sad. That one made me sad, that fact. It's a real one.

It's a real one. I researched and helped with a whole SciShow episode on butt hair at one point and didn't know that. So really, Google failed me. You guys must have different Google searches to the UK because that's a top-ranking immediate return. Top hit. You're just Googling anything.

How to make a strawberry shortcake, and then that just pops up. Sarah, what do you think? So I think it has to do with math, which is why it's so weird and unexpected. I think it's something to do with topology. So like shapes and 3D objects and something to do with, I guess I'm going to guess a physics-y angle to how those objects. You got it. You got it. You didn angle to how those objects... You got it. You got it. You didn't quite get it, but you got it.

Sari is certainly the winner of this one. It has nothing to do with testicles or with whatever Sam said. My short-term memory is gone. But it is indeed just a math thing. And it's mostly just a theoretical math thing. It's not really aiming for any particular applications. But basically, if you have a hairy ball and you try to comb all the hairs in a continuous way you can't get them all to lie flat on the ball at some point there will be a hair that sticks straight up because all the other balls push all the other hairs are lying flat and then one hair

is like i can't i can't you think about it when you think about like winds on the surface of the earth so those are like sort of like all going flat but there always has to be like an escape valve for where particles are going to travel around the ball but i think it's largely it's just a theoretical fun not very practical math yeah it's still fun to think about a hairy ball combing that ball i'm picturing it right now in my mind It's still fun to think about a hairy ball. Combing that ball. I'm picturing it right now in my mind. That's a fun ball. It's like a koosh ball. Dan, do you have koosh balls? That is

too personal a question. Do you have koosh balls over there? Theory number two, the name of this theory is the tachyonic antitelephone. The tachyonic antitelephone. Oh, the tachyonic antitelephone. I don't even know what tachyonic really means. I thought I did for a second, and then as I opened my mouth to articulate it.

I say it on Star Trek a lot. Yeah, what do you think it means? Well, I bet it's something that makes it so that you can't hear stuff from far away somehow. There's some, it's a, I don't know how it's a theory, but can't hear it from far away. Just like a phone is, you can hear it from far away. My guess is that it, instead of it being like a physics-y thing, like you can't, like a cone of silence thing, it's like a social science theory. It's like, what if you just have people who hate gossip and you like there is there's the grapevine in some societies and some cultures where you say something and then your mom's neighbor all of a sudden immediately knows it and then the tachyonic anti-telephone is like

you can say whatever you want and it's never going past your immediate connection. I wonder if it's sort of, I mean, it sounds very futuristic. It almost sounds like a telephone that you would have to undo a conversation that you just had on a telephone. So almost like when you send a voice note on WhatsApp and you're able to just delete it before you've seen the red signal. It's sort of, we've just had a chat. I'm now going to use the old tachyonic because that went so badly. I just want to erase that memory from both of us. And we'll have that chat from scratch again.

I think that I'm going to give it to Dan because it does involve time traveling messages. it does involve time traveling messages. So yeah, the tachyonic antitelephone was an idea about how to maybe send messages back in time. And it was developed by Einstein in 1907, but he did not name it that. That was Gregory Belford in the seventies named it the tachyonic antitelephone.

And it relies on this hypothetical particle called a tachyon, which can travel faster than the speed of light. So here's the idea in summation. If you were to trying to send a message to someone who's on a spaceship and that spaceship is traveling at some velocity less than the speed of light and the spaceship is then able

to immediately send the message back to us, the tachyons traveling at a speed greater than the speed of light, based on standard relativity and depending on the spaceship speed, the message could actually arrive prior to when it was originally sent. How far back in time would depend

on how far away the spaceship is and how fast it's traveling. But that would be nice that we could send messages to our former selves. And then you like, once you build the tachyonic anti-telephone, then you can start receiving messages from the future. That is incredible.

If we had built one in the future, would we know about it now? No, I don't think so. A lot of sort of physics, time travel experiments rely on building something uh that you can only then travel back to that thing which solves a lot of problems because if they can't travel back to now then it's like oh that's why they that's why there are no time travelers but that's just not it's not like

really solving a physics problem it's just solving a why aren't there any time travelers if the time travel is possible problem wasn't it do you guys know this i i actually don't know the the you know details of this but the higgs boson uh when it was being searched for at cern there were a few times where the machine just packed in on itself and it was really confusing and they weren't sure why it was happening and there was a scientist who came up with an idea that particles from the future were coming back in time to destroy the higgs boson to stop it from being invented to work to find the thing it was looking for do you remember that i mean it was a bit of a i don't remember that but that's okay it's a slightly satirical idea but it was written up with proper science by a very serious scientist and yeah time traveling information was coming

back to stop a thing from being invented that was sending the time traveling thing back to stop it yeah but we did it anyway yeah here's my memory of that well this next uh theory is not that theory it is the friendship paradox god it doesn't it doesn't give much does it that one no there's no cool words like tachyonic that we can really just make things up yeah we all have a shared understanding of friendship and paradoxes i feel like the obvious choice is a social science so i'm going to go in a different direction i'm going to say the related to plant biology and it is the idea that plants uh specifically like mycorrhizal like the the micro mycorrh being part of the same original organism. And that's the paradox because even though they're friends, even though they're related,

they start acting like two separate organisms instead of one cohesive thing. That's amazing. Beautiful. You thought of a whole ass thing. Really wonderful. I love making up things. It's scary how good I am at lying. That was great. As you were saying that,

I slightly misremembered the paradox title as the friends paradox as opposed to the friendship paradox which gave me an idea which i'm now going to stick with anyway so uh this is my theory it's that um it's the tv show friends is a paradox because the and this is pointed out by quite a few people, how can these people who are earning so little working in a cafe, out of work actors and so on, afford a giant apartment in New York City based on what they have and lead the lives that they lead on a day to day basis based on the earnings and the economy of the world they live in. Therefore, it's a paradox that they can exist at all and not have the show implode on itself because of the counterintuitive stuff that's going on there. So yeah, that's my friendship paradox. They explain it in the show, but we won't get into that.

Oh, do they, Sam? No, no, no. That's science. We need people like you. Yeah. I will say it's something to do with magnets. Okay. That's great, Sam.

Saving us some time there. You're not going to come with a whole big-ass lie. I'm producing right now. Well, I think I'm going to give that one to Dan because it is actually about friends, at least. Ah, I think I'm going to give that one to Dan because it is actually about friends, at least. I see. Yes. So the friendship paradox, you probably might have heard about this, but it first appeared in a 1991 journal titled in an article titled Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do.

in an article titled why your friends have more friends than you do uh and i have i've heard about this a few times but according to the friendship paradox a person's friends will on average have more friends than that person does so if you have 10 friends the average number of friends that your friends have will be more than 10 there's math behind all of this uh that we don't need to get into but it could also make sense if you think about how people become friends. If there are two people and one of them has five friends and the other has 500 friends, the likelihood is higher that you're going to be friends with the person who has 500 friends because they have more friends and they just make more friends. The friend paradox tends to hold more strongly in social networks comprised of a wider range of popularities, which is interesting. And it originated in sociology, but it's helped in other fields as well,

including helping scientists devise flu surveillance methods, which I guess makes sense for epidemiology. Hanging out with all your friends. So you always have less friends than everyone else in the world. That's so sad. You usually have fewer friends than your friends, but not than everyone else in the world. You might very well have more friends than everyone else in the world. That's so sad. You usually have fewer friends than your friends, but not than everyone else in the world. You might very well

have more friends than everyone else in the world. But when it comes to your friends, they probably have more friends than you. That tracks for me. Probably. And that means

that Dan came out of the first game with two pieces of candy. Sari has one. Sam doesn't have any. Next up, we're going to take a short break and then it'll be time for the Fact Off. Now, get ready for the fact-off.

Our panelists have brought science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind, and after they have presented their facts, I will give them candy any way I see fit. But to decide who goes first, here's a trivia question. In 2011, a mathematician won $75,000 from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in part for his work on the paper The Classification of Quasi-Thin Groups. Is that what it says? That's what it says.

Maybe it's quasi-thin. Like kind of thin. Kind of thin. And that helps prove what's known as the Enormous Theorem which can also which is also called the Classification Theorem of Finite Groups. This theorem, very broadly, involves classifying numbers in four different groups, and more than 100 mathematicians have been working to prove it since the end of the

19th century. How many pages, though, are in this paper, the Classification of Quasi-Thin Groups? are in this paper, the classification of quasi-thin groups. I'm imagining the size of a giant fish book. 400 pages. Three. 1,221 pages. Holy cow.

That was a lot of work. Maybe it's just a lot of tables, possibly. Probably. They double-spaced it. They bumped up the font size a couple. a lot of work i don't maybe it's just a lot of tables possibly probably they double spaced it they bumped up the they bumped up the font size a couple yeah somebody was like you need it to be over a thousand pages and they're like it needs to be over a thousand two hundred and twenty pages so they just like font size up a little more yeah and that means that Sari gets to go first. The French mathematician, Emile Borrell,

did a lot of his work in the realm of probability theory, which broadly deals with predictions about how likely various things will happen. And one of his papers published in 1913 in the Journal de Physique is pointed to as the origin for a now pretty famous thought experiment

called the infinite monkey theorem. You've probably heard some form of this before. journal de physique is pointed to as the origin for a now pretty famous thought experiment called the infinite monkey theorem. You've probably heard some form of this before. It's been used in a lot of pop culture, but it's the idea that if enough trained monkeys type enough random letter keys over enough time, they'll eventually generate exact copies of great literature. People throw out Shakespeare as an example. And the thing about mathematical theorems is that you can take them to extremes that aren't physically possible. It's a logical argument proven by a chain of reasoning rather than testing them through practical means in many cases. Some computer programmers have tried to model the infinite monkey theorem for the heck of it.

In 2011, for example, someone named Jesse Anderson created a program with a million virtual monkeys with very heavy air quotes, typing 180 billion random character groups a day, and pulled out strings of letters that matched a Shakespearean sonnet. So in a way, computer engineering and the language AIs we're seeing are sort of an extension of this idea. But what's much weirder is that in 2003, a group of academics from the University of Plymouth in England went to a zoo to try a partially science, partially art experiment testing a finite version of the infinite monkey theorem. Specifically, they partnered with a painting zoo for a month and put a computer in an enclosure with six crested black macaques named Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe, and Rowan. It was way less than Infinite Monkeys and Infinite Time, but the monkeys ended up typing five whole pages of text,

mostly of the letter S, though some other letters like A, J, L, and M were thrown into the mix. They also bashed parts of the computer with rocks and junk, got bored and didn't pay attention to it, and hooped on the keyboard because they're monkeys. And while this isn't the point of probability or how you usually test mathematical theorems, and the articles I was reading about it were saying how there wasn't much scientific value, I think it's a good and funny reminder that models are models. We can call something in probability theory, the infinite monkey theorem, because it's a fun experiment, but it is way more complicated to actually approximate monkey behavior and come up with a real theory of monkeys. And that's what we're running up against with all these like computers and AI models. They're really good at following programs, but it's way more complicated to approximate thinking and writing and all kinds of behavioral things uh even if the ideas sound flashy i love it i can't believe they actually gave the monkeys a computer because i was you know you know that monkeys aren't going to type randomly they're not going to like just hit keys in a random order the way that the infinite

monkey theorem needs them to they're going to have to hit mostly one key. Do that for a while. Then they're going to go SSSSSS and then take a poop. I love it. We've got to get more animals computers, I think. It's important work to be done. They published in a

hardbound copy the work of these monkeys with all the S's. You can buy. It's a limited edition. You've got to find it on eBay these days, but it's out there. That's, I can't, I should, I should, I shouldn't, I should, I shouldn't, I should. You should already have this book, Hank, honestly. Okay. Well, I didn't find it when I just tried to search for it. Dan, what do you have for me? Okay. In 1988, the musician Nile Rod rogers co-founder of the band chic received a very

important phone call from hollywood it was a director called john landis and he was offering him a role as composer on a new film called coming to america starring as we all know one of the great american comedian actors eddie murphy this was a hugely exciting project for rogers because he'd never scored a big budget hollywood before. So he arrives on his first day of work, full of enthusiasm and joy until he's delivered some very odd news. The entire film's production schedule is to be accelerated to breakneck speed. And the reason for this is because Eddie Murphy had recently come across a prediction by Nostradamus that said an earthquake was going to destroy California on one of the days that he was

supposed to be filming there. And therefore, to ensure that he wasn't there for when LA plunged into the Pacific, Murphy required all the scenes to be filmed as soon as possible so he could fly out before the great earthquake hit. So, Nile Rodgers suddenly found himself working 17 hour long days in order to produce music through the dailies to match all the footage that was being shot. And equally, the rest of the production was thrown into chaos and it was costing them millions and millions. So I was interested to talk about the predictions of Nostradamus,

but the real-life scientific application of the chaos that he has caused since he made these so-called predictions 400 years ago. So Eddie Murphy learned about these predictions when he was watching a movie that was a documentary called The Man Who Saw Tomorrow. It was a movie that was fronted by Orson Welles, who later disowned himself from the project because a number of embarrassing, incorrect predictions were made in it. This included Ted Kennedy being predicted as the elected president in 1984. He wasn't. World War III beginning in 1999.

It didn't. And an earthquake, as I mentioned before, devastating California in May of 1988, which is when they were filming, did not happen. It also showcased some of Nostradamus' most amazing predictions that are claimed to be made by him. My personal favorite being the beginning of the film where they show that in May 1791, when grave diggers dug up his body, they found around his neck a plaque reading the words May 1791 the exact day that he was dug up and month that he was dug up it's just a perfect prediction but he's caused so much fuss in the

400 years since he has died uh in 1988 the griffith observatory in los angeles fielded months of phone calls almost on a daily basis a dozen of the a dozen a day, from members of the public who were calling just to check if it's true that the city was going to be devastated by a huge earthquake following a planetary alignment. The calls became such a nuisance that the observatory's program manager had to send out a company-wide memo properly debunking Nostradamus's claims, which could be read out by anyone who was manning the phones at the time. The memo basically said that if the planets did align, don't worry, the only effect of the resulting gravitational pull would be that the oceans would be sucked in or they would raise by 1 25th of a millimeter. So all was going to be fine. And this was not the only thing

that was troubling America in the 1980s. There was a book that came out, well, outside of other political landscapes, but even scientists were releasing books that were kind of pulling in on this theory. So, The Jupiter Effect, which was written by a popular science writer, John Gribben, who's written hundreds of books, predicted a devastating earthquake would occur somewhere along the San Andreas Fault in 1982. He subsequently has disowned himself from that book as well. So the real question that I have is, he is often portrayed as someone who wasn't scientific, a spooky character who was a soothsayer who could see into the future. But actually, Nostradamus was an extraordinary person.

He was someone who was very scientifically sound. He was a person who owned a shop that sold very interesting things, like his own jam recipes. He was huge for jam back in his day. He was massive. I like that. And he had a best-selling book. It had information about how to dye your hair blonde. It had recipes for other things like marmalade. It gave directions on how to grind up sea snail shells and cuttlefish bone, how to make toothpaste. And he would run a shop where he would also, and this was one of his lesser predictions, try to bet on the sex of an unborn baby.

bet on the sex of an unborn baby. But his main thing was during a pandemic, he was someone who used to go around to all these different towns and encourage the idea of hygiene. He would say, wash your hands and so on before treating a patient. He really was responsible for the saving of so many, so many lives around the world. But his biggest contribution to science, which he hasn't quite ever got the acknowledgement for, is not obviously the misinformed predictions, but the fact that he was the first ever person to describe benzoic acid, which in these days is used for the production of insect repellent, perfumes, dyes, preserved foods like jam, which is how he probably came across it. And it's a chemical that very excitingly is also used to make the tiny little crystals that you see as snowflakes when you're looking at a snow globe. So what's quite exciting is this person who has been attributed with being

the great predictor of all these things that supposedly have happened, all the tragedies and all that stuff. He didn't actually have any influence on that. But in a weird way, he has had a weird influence on the world of soothsaying because one of the things about benzoic acid, it's also used in benzoil peroxide, which is often used to make acrylic. And one thing that acrylic is used is to make crystal-like globes. So the next time you're at a carnival and you walk into a fortune teller's tent at a fairground,

Nostradamus, without knowing it, accidentally is responsible for the crystal ball that they are supposedly telling your future from. I feel like we got a whole chapter of your next book. Well, actually, adapted from my current book is where this comes from. It's funny because Nostradamus in my head is just like a Rasputin

character in a cloak. He's got a big beard, shadowy eyes, and all he ever did was sort of wave his hands around people and convince them of things that weren't true. But no! He's important! I love it! he would have been huge

on tiktok also with his jams and his hair dye tips oh i'd love to watch nostradamus make jam on tiktok but look that movie worked out came out great it happened it was a great baby just fine Yeah. So let's see. You came into this in the lead, Dan. And if only for mere quantity of facts, regardless of their quality, I think you got to run away with this one. I think the quality was very high as well. The quality was also high, but there was a lot of facts in that fact off. Oh, sorry. But yeah, that was a cheat. I mean, yours was fresh. Mine was, mine comes. No, boo.

We've had enough of her. Edited, published. You win. Printed. If you want more of that, it's in the theory of everything else of Voyage of the World of the Weird by Dan Schreiber, which you could get all over the place. which you could get all over the place. And now that we know who the king of Halloween is, it's time for Ask the Science Couch,

where we've got a listener question for our couch of razor sharp. Spooky or spooky-tific is what the show says. Mine. Jan Rhett Sammies on Discord asks, why is it called theory of mind? It's not like a scientific theory, right? I don't know what theory of mind is. What is that? I'm not entirely sure what theory of mind it's not like a scientific theory right i don't know what theory of mind is what is that i'm not entirely sure what theory of mind is but i'm pretty sure theory that there's like mind in

there okay is that right sari well there's something in your noggin yeah yeah theory of mind investigates this idea that uh the mind is part of the human experience and they can't be experimentally measured in the same way as like taking a sample of our blood and analyzing the molecules inside. But we know that mental states and purpose and intention and knowledge and belief and doubt and guessing and all these like thinky things are swirling around in there and they manifest themselves in in our behaviors and actions and whatnot and specifically the the term theory of mind was coined to study chimpanzees which i think is very interesting so it like wasn't even a human thing at all to start with um Two scientists, David Premack and Guy Woodruff, in December 1978, in a behavioral and brain sciences journal, published a paper called Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind? And they specifically wanted to investigate what was in there,

what was going on cognitively, and specifically studied an adult female chimpanzee named Sarah, who was shown a series of videotaped scenes of a human actor struggling with a variety of problems. And then they asked this chimpanzee to select a picture with solutions. So the idea was, can this chimpanzee understand behavior in humans and then like understand and infer intention out of these things so like sort of understand like the chimpanzee is understanding that the person is trying to do things yeah and so like an example is like this actor would be struggling with inaccessible food either bananas bananas out of reach or behind a box or something. And then Sarah the chimpanzee had to pick out of a realm of photographs,

a human trying to attain out of reach food, the photographs would be moving a box, piling concrete blocks into a box or standing on a box to reach bananas and like that would be the answer but like she was able sarah the chimpanzee was able to successfully complete a lot of these tasks or pick what the researchers deemed to be the right answer so they concluded that this chimpanzee not only understood the problem represented in each video she understood the intention of the human actors in relation to it, that they wanted the bananas. And then therefore this is how they were going to strategize accessing it.

And that was 1978 and one paper and one introduced the term. So since then, we haven't gone very far. It's all been, we're like, okay, so chimps think something maybe. Yes.

But, but the way that they test, they frequently test or one of the easiest tests of theory of mind is called the false belief task, which is basically a test to see that, like, make sure that someone understands, whether it's a human child or a monkey or something, that someone's belief about the world may contrast with reality. So a common example of this is you're telling a story involving two characters, Sally and Anne, like two children or two dolls playing with a marble. Sally puts a marble away in a basket and then leaves the room. And then while Sally is out of the room, Anne is in the room still. while sally is out of the room and is in the room still and takes the marble out plays with it and then puts the marble in her pocket sally returns to the room so now ann has the marble in her pocket sally is in the room again and the the child or the study

participant is asked where sally will look for the marble. So where does Sally think that the marble is? And if this study participant has an advanced theory of mind or a theory of mind understanding, if they answer that Sally will look where she first put the marble, in the basket, and you fail the test if you're like, oh, Sally's going to look in Anne's pocket. Because you don't. She knows her friend Anne is a rat who's going to steal the marble. So the theory of mind isn't a theory of mind it's like like i am like it's it's a way of talking about whether people perceive

others to have minds yes to my experiences and and like sensations of so it's like outside of myself other things are also containing thoughts and sensations and experiences yes i think so as opposed to here is a theory of how our minds work. That's confusing. They should have named it differently. My favorite thing about this episode is how many names of different monkeys we learned. Seven at least. So many names of monkeys.

One of them was named Gum. I remember that. That was a good one. He was my favorite one, I think. Yeah, Gum. That's a great name for a monkey. Yeah. Well, Dan, thank you so much.

I will plug your things for you because I'm a big fan. No Such Thing as a Fish is an absolute blast, always. You can listen to the episode that I was on, and maybe that will be an intro to a whole world of enjoyment for you, listener at home. And The Theory of Everything Else, I'm downloading it on Audible right now. Or Libro.fm, whichever one I have a credit on right now. Is there anything else you're up to that you need people to know about?

Can I go see you in person, live in London or anything? No, I've started a new thing called We Can Be Weirdos. It's a new podcast where I chat to people about the weird things that they believe in. As I was saying before, I feel like we've been shoving that under the carpet. So I've created a list, which is called the batshit list. And I get people to fill it out. And we go through it. And it has everything from UFOs through to ghosts. And what's most interesting is when you talk to a scientist, finding out why they think people believe in ghosts or why they think people believe in all of these weird, culty

and paranormal supernatural things. So that's, yeah, 20 episodes into that now. I had Dan Aykroyd on. He scored very high on the batshit list. Yes, that makes a lot of sense. Well, if you like this show and you want to help us out, it's really easy to do that first you go to patreon.com slash sideshow tangents to become a patron and get access to our newsletter and our

bonus episodes and also we have passed our goal of 700 patrons which means that if it's not up there it will be soon uh a commentary of the movie minions so if you want to hear about all those piss-filled little guys, be sure to join our Patreon at any time to get access to that commentary as soon as it's released. That has got to be one of my weirder beliefs, that Minions are full of piss. Maybe we'll talk about all that on

We Can Be Weirdos. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That helps us know what you like about the show and also other people will see it. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly.

I've been Sam Schultz. I've been Dan Shriver. Tune in next time for one more spooky mystery guest. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Spooky Sam Schultz. Our associate producer is Eve Schmidt. Our editor is Seth Glitzman. Our story editor is Alex Billow.

Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz-Bazio. Our editorial assistant is Debuki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Buda-Medish. Our executive producers are Nicole Sweeney and me, Hank Green. And of course, we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you, and remember,

the mind is not a coffin to be filled, but a jack-o'-lantern to be lighted. But one more thing. But one more thing. Calling someone anal retentive isn't just an insult about being super meticulous. It's a holdover from Sigmund Freud's theory of psychosexual development, which, for the record, doesn't hold up at all in modern psychology. Freud thought that while humans are growing up,

we fixate on different erogenous zones and develop neuroses. For example, if a caregiver was overly harsh to a child from ages one to three during the anal stage of development and around potty training time, that child might become anal retentive. And if a caregiver was too relaxed instead, the child might become anal expulsive. Though that term for being disorganized and rebellious hasn't really stuck around That's too bad That's great I should have a sign at my desk

That says Don't mind me I'm just anal expulsive You don't have to be anal expulsive To work here But it helps But it helps