NPR's Science Correspondent Joe Palca

it explains complicated science issues and music on the radio and kay mcentire and today on keeping our prisons npr science correspondent joe palka spoke at kansas state university on november ninth two thousand and seventeen as part of their science communication week stressing the need to convey scientific information in ways that are both informative and understandable joined npr in nineteen ninety two and has covered a broad range of science topics from biomedical research to astronomy he's the host and producer of the npr series joe's big idea exploring science and invention in just a minute we'll join talk that at his talk at kansas state university but to set the stage let's give a listen to one of my favorite episodes of joe's big idea this one aired on npr's all things considered in december two thousand and seventeen if the us were more like the rest of the world a mcdonald's quarter

pounder might be known as the mcdonald's one hundred thirteen grammar john henry's nine pound hammer would be a four point oh wait kilogram hammer and any growers in the room would weigh three hundred sixty two kilos as npr's joe palca explains we might have adopted the metric system of weights and measures if it hadn't been four pirates at the museum on the gaithersburg maryland campus of the national institute of standards and technology there's a small artifact that could very well have changed the course of our history actually is a little dull looking cars with you clearly not a salesman keep martin is in fact a research librarian at the standards institute and what did this dull looking but nonetheless remarkable artifact look like it's just a small copper cylinder with a little handle maybe about three inches tall and the same wide this object was intended to be a standard for wayne things part of the weights and measures system being developed in

france now known as the metric system the objects wait was one kilogram in seventeen ninety three the brand new united states of america and needed a standard measuring system because the states were using a hodgepodge of systems so for example a new yorker using duct systems in new england they're using english systems martin says this made interstate commerce difficult the secretary of state at the time was thomas jefferson jefferson knew about the new french system and thought it was just what america needed so he wrote to his pals and france and the french send a scientist named joseph don't they often jefferson with one of the new telegrams crossing the atlantic bombay ran into a giant storm it to his ship quite far south into the caribbean sea and you know who was lurking in caribbean waters in the late seventeenth hundred half bs pirates the pirates took joseph donned a prisoner on the

island of montserrat they weren't interested in bombay's kilogram but they thought maybe they could get a ransom for the french scientists unfortunately bombay died in captivity and the kilogram never made it to jefferson wouldn't really have made any difference if they had been able to deliver his kilogram we don't know for sure but it does seem like there was a missed opportunity this wasn't the only missed opportunity every so often there's enough futile push for america to go metric but for now we're stuck with quarter pounders and nine pound hammers and oh yes how did the kilogram bombay was carrying make it to a museum in gaithersburg maryland well it seems the pirates auctioned off the contents of bombay ship and the kilogram made it into the hands of one andrew ellicott whose descendants gave it to the museum in nineteen fifty two joe palca npr news that's joe palca from his series joe's big idea which aired on npr in december two thousand seventeen palca and his assistant producer dr mattie so fiat attended

kansas state university is a science communication week where he's spoken forum hall on november ninth two thousand seventeen years joe palca thanks very much for inviting me on i i guess where we were thrilled to see that there's communication we in kansas and i can tell you honestly that this is something that seems to be going around the country and and it occurred to me i'm not your balance of life it could do something to try to harness the energy enthusiasm that people seemed to have right now for science communication and does so we're here and we're talking about and one of the things that i like to talk about it so what amounted to today's to tell you a little bit about it's it's i guess it's sort of my version of an elevator pitch but it's not an elevator pitch as what a monthly fee is none of my my research at all but what i try to say to people is you can communicate

complicated stop in one minute two minutes seven minutes eight minutes five hundred pages of pieces it just depends on your audience and you're in your and your preference in terms of how much detail and specificity you wanna get into so for example if iran say about my doctoral research i studied human sleep physiology and what i was in particular study was my visor was a guy named upper iraq had become interested in the relationship between sleep in hibernation and the reason he was interested in that is that like tiger nation the sleepless a regulated decline in temperatures like turning down the thermostat in your house so it's not just i'm just lying here in my body temperature goes down it is something like the thermostat set point because it happens to be in the balance it's lower in my you know when you wake up it comes back up again the question is you know what happens when you stress that system on the hybrid at animal as the

season's the days get shorter the country people are they lower their temperature more more intently at her hibernation previously so the question is what happens in humans and could use that is so my job my pieces pasch project was to have humans sleep and cold room club i call it means sixty nine degrees fahrenheit which doesn't sound cold but they they were sleeping on cots without close an analysis that was a better thing so they were just essentially naked and sixty nine is very cold if you're in that circumstance and so it measured their skin temperature in their shoes with a rectal temperature and their tympanic membrane temperature and i put them in and the baseline condition that measured their sleep patterns before i put them in the cold room and i'll measure them for several days in a cold room and what i discovered is that if you put a healthy human adults into a cold room and asked them to go to sleep they asked for a blanket

thoughts about four hundred pages later i got my district it's a it's a it's a little more interesting that it turns out i think strengthened what was the only interesting thing from it this occasion for emily interesting thing i can tell you is that the body temperature does tend to drop more cold room will go but there's a spirit of sleeve sleeve and then ran he's associate with training that it's associated with greater brain activity you look at the median looks like the brains of the longer and what i found is that even though core temperature records temperature starts to go down and sticks going down for much of the night during rem sleep because i was measuring it using up their mr in the tympanic membrane which is right next to brain supposed to get rid of something that they can and so it's interesting to think that rahm maybe some people wonder what rem is forming they don't

really understand it even today and so the question for maybe something just this vigil like it's left over to eat your body up or keep your brain warm when you go through periods of the migrants call i don't i mean they're the reason i told her that story is that i just explained my research i don't think it was more than three minutes without whole little bit of stuff like children and i could not possibly have done that when i was in graduate school and so anybody who tries these three minute pieces which we've heard about is trying something that's really hard because the hardest thing to do when you're in graduate school is to not talk like a scientist when you're talking to people who aren't scientists because you are constantly being hammered to be specific an accurate and precise and not go beyond your date on what will so it's really hard and the posters out they're great example that i don't know anything about a grammy i don't know anything about that i don't really know anything

about car accidents in the state of kansas and you if you have this poster i look at it it's opaque to me it's a lot of things that i can interpret so okay so if i say what's your what's your project about well i wanna here the one sentence explanation that i'm not gonna become expert in and i'm not sophisticated enough to judge its science and that's why it's very hard to even in university setting when you know that the deal and you know the guys are going to become circling around to talk to serve more off the cuff because you might get nailed for so i think the message is first of all to make sure that people who try to talk the public can turn around and say to their there senior people look i'm not talking to you right now so take a break in a sit down relax go of a coffee and talking to members of the public and and that's hard to do its part get good at it but it's hard to do and because of the circumstances

that people are not grad school now as a big learning curve for me was to stop talking like a scientist when i got the journal so what i thought i'd do an anesthetic because they say oh you know npr so complicated that love love and i say well you know i'm not that adept at all by the way the stories i do in two minutes can convey quite a bit of information i am and maybe enough maybe all you really need to know on a particular topic so i'm in a play a couple examples maybe maybe three so actually this one's fairly timely although this particular story is more than a decade all leap seconds why they happen this is one of those things you know this is how stories get come on we need two minutes on the leap second you do it sure i ninety about leap seconds that i made some calls so here you can listen to

my take on this and decide whether mike says at two minutes i've tried to bring things that are only two minutes are you want you know you can you have to sit there saying when will the story ever and you know it's only been beaten here we go we're going to take a break from the day's big story to bring you decided which is about time you have more time to celebrate new year's eve this year but not much international body that started keeping time on track as decreed that there will be a leap seconds added to the end of two thousand five and here's joe palca explains why the reason is there's a time and then there's a time once upon a time a second was to find and one at six thousand four hundred of the time it took the earth to make one revolution on its axis with respect to the sun astronomers like that definition because of that the son was directly overhead at the same time every day high noon but sometime keepers don't care about things like stars and the rotation of the earth for that

time is and always should be a constant the earth's rotation is wobbling all over the place while the rotation is affected by things like melting glaciers el nino even the tide's they cried so the constantine crowd likes what the thirteenth general conference on weights and measures came up with for a reference in nineteen sixty seven namely that a second is the duration of nine trillion one of nineteen million six hundred thirty one thousand seven hundred seventy parents of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two high profile levels of the ground state of the cesium one thirty three now there's a number you can hang your hat on this left everyone with a problem the time based on hyper find levels of cesium and the time based on earth's rotation have a habit of skipping out of sync earth is rotating just that he used tiniest bit slower than it used to be so every few years the international earth rotation and reference systems service at a massive these international law will pass you'll not have id systems but also decrees that there will be a

leap second to make up the difference the last one was at the end of nineteen ninety eight and the next one is at the end of this year and joined joe palca npr news washington einstein i mean don't my spy on think to myself you know all that religion and directly overhead it by noon well depends on your latitude and i'm hearing all the things that that you could possibly nitpick about the story but that i explain why that's a leap second basically yes i did an the other thing is what it was silly nonsense about reading the international system serves the rough overalls man and and the entire frequency of the high profile levels of the cesium one theory that for finer they could be playful to be engaging it also works here because i'm in a row i'm in a little room with a microphone in front

of me and a nobody listening when i do these things sometimes as an engineer but he's usually look in a magazine when i'm recording and so i don't get any feedback but i've got a career of them fired nice i guess it's working for some people but i i i i have to say that this one pleases me a lot because of this they sometimes read letters on air they used to and this came and jump out the story about the leap second that's coming at the end of the year brought this comment i'm writing to congratulate you on a very clear presentation of the principles of atomic time and the need for veep second this is a difficult topic and your report handled it very well that's ben judah levine he's with the time and frequency division of the national institute of standards and technology in boulder colorado have had talked to deliver enough more recently he said in on pretty much nailed it and that was very flattering and i said that

right but you know i was trying to say that you can be you can give a bit of information you can do in a bit of a fun way and you can tell people something that ennobled for two minutes and you can add it really is true that there's maybe two senses of science in there and the rest is all pattern and entertainment for so oh i'm just here to tell you i mean obviously ok i've been working at this for twenty five years i didn't used to write like this when i was at nature and science there much more serious but that in terms of communicating science like i really feel there's a lot to be said for this level not hammering people with information on insisting that they understand it but just telling people stop because you can implement so let me play another example this is out of more recent one so i'll tell you a

funny story about about this so i was in a lab of a woman named that taste for your first and that will be in the piece i interviewed her when i was at berkeley and then i didn't get taken get on the air and i actually have it all stored on my computer for years and then she called me up to say that she had a paper coming out on the topic that we spoke about when i interviewed her a year earlier and i was able to hole cuts of tape from that one year old if you and put it into a story on the day that her publication appeared because that's what science is like great for incremental improvement i could make in this new paper could be handled in one sentence and i didn't have to be her saying it could be me saying its own you'll hear which was the sense because she doesn't give the payoff it the other funny thing about this story is it is it because she

called me when i was on a trip to california and i kept the cash coming in are pretty as the site of the communist ideal have a friend who's a correspondent for the kaiser news network and also for the newshour with me robin like yes robert macneil and jim lehrer or any of those people but the news hour and i said where do you record your stuff when you're not you know in a studio she was in sentences though not her when she said well i usually go to my closet is is get a good sound environment you know there's lots of clothes hanging and so you have to worry about echo and things like that so i said ok canadian she said sure i'm not the home of years really nitpicky and bubble by going so i wrote my story and then squatted down amongst her dresses with a flashlight and you read my script into my tape recorder and i started just yesterday or they move forward she was in the office in washington says i was a bizarre we record

store so think about that when you're listening to this one is a totally around but it just happens to be the circumstances in which this story we'll hear about scientists have just scratched the surface of another important problem why some things make his pitch today there's progress report researchers in california have found a molecule that may be crucial for our brains to sense itch npr's joe palca has more money go about discovering what makes us itch well if you're diana bautista at the university of california berkeley you ask what molecules are involved we say ok what are the possible molecular players out there that might be contributing to itch or touch bautista says it turns out it and touch and even pain all seem to be related at least in the way our brains makes sense of these sensations but how to tell which molecules are key players buggies this is basically you try everything you can we test a lot of candidates and they were really liking one of our candidates we can prove that it plays a really

important role and now she thinks she's found one working with colleagues at the buck institute for research on aging she's found a molecule that's made by a gene called h g r seven when there's less of this molecule animals with itchy skin conditions like eczema do less scratching when there's more of it itching gets worse the way this molecule works is kind of interesting it changes how sensitive brain cells are to a chemical called serotonin now serotonin is a chemical that's related to depression so barclays does research might explain why certain antidepressant drugs that boost serotonin have a peculiar side effect for some people the drugs make them itch bautista says the new research is certainly not the end of the story when it comes to understanding itch soon as you discover something nail it discloses more and more questions in other words it'll be a while before researchers scratch itch off their list of topics to study the cases work appears in the journal neuron

joe palca npr news what was the deal that we heard me say at all about this particular molecule and what was she saying she was saying for a more generic things about how you go about research and man is that a great tool but i mean it really it really works because if he does most of the time they say most the time the interesting bit about her researches can only be one or two sentences for the newport the more the bigger part is that she's trying to figure out the molecules that are involved in the world in the signaling that takes a sensation in the skin and turns it into a sensation the perception and the brain of the genus so i'm gonna stop there i have one more example but this was a story that a kid just recently and that and i shouldn't wait anyway because it's actually two minutes and twenty two seconds violated my own that rule so instead what eminent news of run through a bunch of things that i'm doing now about science education but at the end

i'm just looking in my lifetime i am and i'm really you know they get so excited that i'm talking and basically as soon as i stop and we'll go and get a free drink and so there's a quiz tension with this law so i got two for a little longer but i wanted to use some of the things i'm doing about science communication and some of my thoughts about about the way science is hold on that on the radio and then the trouble with telling signs in a new format because i think the prom is a lot of sciences is on it's not really doesn't really fit comfortably into them into the nude model so if i say to you what's the what's the big news of twenty seventeen i mean i can ask for names when outlets as soon we all can agree on some list i came up with this a couple months ago but you know no trouble we could come up with and was more you know sex

scandals don't even make it on the list and that's all people been talking about washington recently so you know news is we all got it this is not welcome at some point but i think we can operate in nuclear war that's news the president signing a trip to trade agreement that's the user news items but the question is one of the big science stories of constantly so does anybody wanna make a suggestion these are stories that i am mr science correspondent for npr and if it didn't cover these stories i wouldn't be able hold my head up high and call myself a science correspondent so does anybody have an eye suggestion about what are the most important science stories of twenty seven yes gravitational waves absolutely i think about that to this a little later in the talk i think that's a stunning piece of science at it again and the interesting thing is and this is just a misunderstanding so on

august seventeen was when the signal came in or maybe the fifteen are from the skull it neutron stars and they didn't announce it until august october sixteenth so when was the news with the news that they found it was that the news they announced that well was news that they announced that but i can just about every other science journalist on the planet knew this announcement was coming because astronomers were so excited they just couldn't put a lid on but they didn't want to speak publicly until it came out so it's an interesting question about the nature of news when this is a commons but gravitational waves anybody have another suggestion that so so if it i realized there was a lot of interesting science but it wasn't really a passion and interest in the eclipse had more to do with special education and and human

interest than it did with oh what a great scientific opportunity so i'm on it may get to be that when anybody else my point is it's harder there are not as many big science stories and so what tends to happen is things like this so or what that i can work with oh yeah i'll say genetically the crisper embryos without those convention but among them a bother so what's it so what science journalists are are stuck with is coming up with the big stories that they think people will be interested in and what a lot of journalists fall for is this whole problem of correlation and there's this whole area's website which i would point you to called spurious correlation that crime but this is like he's just just from fishing numbers out of out of the databases he's shown that the letters in the winning word of scripps national stockpiling be correlated highly with the number of people killed by venice spiders

from odd two thousand to two thousand nine cup i love this one is even better though this is the divorce rate in maine crew are laden with lead per capita consumption of margarine and and if you notice that there's an artist point nine nine now as a former scientist as we cause lots of recovering sciences it so funny but but those kinds of stories tend to get on the air not those particular that really recovered because any individual study may reveal something that is looks important work or or coffee is good for you coffee is bad for your red wine you name it i have a slide says that it's been shown to be good and bad for you because now most of the saudis are fraudulent or flawed they're just individual

studies and everybody knows who does science that a particular piece of research is probably not this positive for the way the world worked in fact one of my favorite quotes jon maddux was the editor of nature and he said somebody asked him how many stories in nature do you think are wrong and he said all and if you think about it that's how science works you know eventually to go back and look at nature a hundred years ago probably nine not maybe not all but a lot of them are going to be wrong ok so then science so that we journalists are called upon to come up with what is big news in science and gravitational waves with a governor but here's one that i just point to as an example this is the nobel prize in physics two thousand ten andrew graham constantine abbas of graphene remember that when this model where carbon that you can you can make by pulling scotch tape off a carbon graphite pencil and it's really cool anyway so

wins the nobel prize in two thousand and now when the nobel prize committee sends out its annual annual announcement also kindly sent out press releases and so the journalist like me you have to report on it within fifteen minutes of hearing about it have some idea where to get additional information and so this was a paper that appeared in science in two thousand for now as you may or may not know every edition of science and nature i get like four five days before they actually come out this is called the embargo system so that i'm allowed to look at the papers decide what i think is important to talk to people about to try and get some perspective the understanding is i don't report on it until the publication date so i got this copy of nature and science and so did all my smart calling sidney in the year in the science writing community and then so surely a paper that appears in two thousand for that was so significant that it won the nobel prize six years later would have

caught the attention of some of us more advanced sensors so i went along and i found seven a new sundance i think i can explain but what's there's a reason bridges but the point is what you don't see on there is new york times npr was imposed wall street journal although really major we're thought well oh very smart excellent science reporters will miss that and so the problem is that most of time we don't know what's going to be the really important story and it's hard even for scientists you know with the paper's by by hand the fire and craig mello have swam on by one they discovered rna interference oh by the way we all get it when it wins the nobel prize and this is another one is everybody recognize what this paper program more programmable dual are in a guided dna and the nucleus of adaptive the back no immunity yeah so this is this is the most important scientific paper probably of the

decade in biology and it was covered so i could find a state news and future of microbiology and that's the paper where jennifer doudna first presented the findings about the idea of this is the best known which i'm not to explain but i will it really wanted to believe in as vivian okay the other thing that happens a lot in the news is we get it wrong so this paper generated a ton of attention when it came out it was the idea that there were bacteria could use arsenic instead of phosphorus as part of its life cycle in the cycle maybe their extreme files and mars and places like that and cost a ton of attention until this paper came out absence of detectable arsenic be innocent completely debunked a year later and happily i wasn't taken in by that one but i was taken in by this one who will live to be a hundred genetic test like tell i was two thousand ten and almost a year to the date poor here of you cited

in the track would be amazed it now turns out there was a technical reason that the paper was retracted but it seemed interesting that seemed exciting to see nowhere they i don't think people criticize me at the time for reporting on it but a few weeks later in days in some cases people who read the supplemental material and knew about that after metrics chip that they were using to run their dna out of their genetic essays knew about a flawed bailout this particular law and realize that the skewing the results i didn't and i was sort of counting on these marker of years to catch those were the things possess with peer reviews posted no but i think he can film industries so then there's the question of why science does get in the news an eclipse is a good example of that i mean there was plenty of science that came about because of it but if i try to do the same story about the spectrum of the cross here and now but when you get on the air normally wouldn't you like anything i want to say about the clips were about the sun and solar physics

was fair game when the cops came out because we were around the car we were all over this tournament nothing about that eclipse escape your attention in the news media so this is a terrible slight anybody who's ever taught statistics are taken statistics know that i would get in africa or to put the slide into a report but you know i'm not teaching or taking statistics anymore so i put up here but i'll tell you what it is and the y axis the i remember what that's called this is the number of times a particular word or phrase is cited in madrid in something called lexis nexis which is a collection of all the news articles that come out the world and on the xx is there's one for each one of those lines represents a month starting in january of two thousand eleven and the inmate eleven thirteen so the question is and i i realized he says people think to guess what the term was pulling

out of people brca in the media that's the number of as a search term i put it so people know a brca is this the breast cancers it's the dream when modified or corrupted that makes people susceptible to breast cancer and what scientific breakthrough that happened in may of two thousand thirteen to make this brca appear in the news as anybody remember right he was enjoying a joy and i was in her scientific paper i'm sure she's written about now is because the famous celebrity you had made a decision about mastectomy based on her genetic test that showed that she was a carrier brca and so suddenly i mean like a club suddenly something that didn't want then usually get a chance to talk about it i'm ok with that i mean that's just the way things are but it the

intrinsic importance of science is sometimes not the main driver for why things going on the vote known as is big news this is this is a kind of a funny story i've had two blockbuster stories and my journalism career blockbuster in the sense that every other news organizations started covering them after i put them on the air and there were calls for hearings and what had not hearing in this case but what was the story well i happened to be at the mass is jet propulsion laboratory when some exciting data was coming down from the mars rover that was us soil sample that appeared to have carbon signature ann arbor and you know finding carbon carbon on mars nuncio to court the carbon atoms maybe there was like twelve or so very excited and i had been told this by an anonymous source and i went into the head scientist on the project and he wouldn't say any i mean i didn't want to

ask him i was told not even let on that i knew it i didn't say i've heard this i just said what's happening with the mission and he went on about how great it was and how the court was working from three great and then my tape recorder battery ran debt and i said the coal on a second time change batteries and he jumped up at that moment i ran to his desk and looked on his computer terminal and what i also happen to know was that they were getting a second pass of data that day that moment when i was doing the interview and so when i got the batteries in and asked him so i said what's what what you looking up he says organism really exciting day of pounds of this is going to be one for the history books i sit and and he said yeah go on killing you but i can't for a while so here i am knowing what he saw but not able to say i know what he saw so i spent several days trying to find somebody who

knew what was happening and wasn't told by him as an icon and then i realized wait a minute i'm doing joe's big idea i can do a story that merely says you know every once in a while scientists come across something that's really exciting really compelling they get really excited about that there and they know they have to double check and triple check especially for things that are extraordinary and so that on talk about in public at it gave an example about one example from the on hills near it is anybody remember that that was that one from more people got excited thinking that maybe have a senator like side of the story and all anybody in the news media heard was nasa has discovered something on mars and that won't cost an nasa was swat nasa was very upset with me for doing a story i was upset with him for not just tell me what they were doing or saying because i would've done a boring three and a half minute piece

trick and you are saying you know there's exciting preliminary data but it's way too soon to say it's for sure and nobody would have paid any attention but by saying they had a secret ok so the flipside of that is that it i get really pissed off you know i didn't i didn't say that i take it all back i had no opinion in the matter but i felt that we underplayed the first announcement of the gravitational waves the very first one that was announced this is a rundown for all things considered on the mike that the gravitational announcement was vague there's a story about the surfers that got eight minutes there's a story about that city actor shooter active shooter training at work that that horn a half minutes and then weather several stories out there that the four five six seven minutes and here's

jeff got three and a half minutes for the most important sign story of the year for sure maybe of the decade and i just thought whoa okay you know it's not the intrinsic importance course when he got the nobel prize a couple of mortgage so that brings me to what we're doing now and my project is called joe's big idea one of well and then that's marilyn safire doctors of listening in the back laughing at the moment but what we're trying to do is eight talk about stories that we've stopped saying this is the most important thing since sliced bread are being detained and this is just a really interesting science in that's why my pieces don't always get on the air when they expected to because they don't have that means quality and so they air and they can be what we call evergreens which which means oh well we have the bomb them for something for some hang nails discovers and i'm not i don't i'm not

and i'm only partly complaining because i really understand that it's a happier not pretending my science stories are news once in a while i'll tell you this is really important we should be covering this but most of the time i'm prepared to say this is quite interesting but it might not be that important so what we are going is trying to do that and what what mandiant is working with me on as these things called for job he's i'm a fan of acronyms stupid acronym and for job is probably the stupidest thing ever come up with what it stands for friends of joe's big idea and then why why isn't there another all in there others float jovi and there seems to be a movement now among the reform church of photo be the sage of the fight be for any way what they are friends adjusting it had these are people such as your good selves who want to get involved in graduate and

grad students mostly wanting and public get involved in public education and were basically trying to encourage help provide resources provide community do what we can to increase a people's access and this is one of the things that has worked out pretty well we invite photo be used to submit articles not necessarily about their own work or they can if they want to undo it because i worked in journalism for now hundred and fifty years and i know everybody and i can call the editor some blog at scientific american and say hey i've got this weird interesting paper would look at macy's your number two for three with that guy so we don't okay so critical of your first published thing appears in the scientific american boyle says were out with this and that's in michael the fat joe palca npr science correspondent and the host of the npr series joe's

big idea joe palca's spoke a kansas state university on november ninth two thousand seventeen as part of case states' science communication week we'll hear more from joe palca and another episode of joe's big idea right after this for your listening to kbr presidents and kansas public radio broadcasting from the university of kansas we are ninety one five lawrence and eighty nine fab and emporia you can find us on the web at kansas public radio dot org support for kbr comes from recent move laura featuring a full lineup of all wheel drive several new and subaru set revised real look at the twenty nine foot i would reward suttles was a corporate subaru dot com the strongest voices in the community business and government are those look at our listeners want to be hurt get your message out by becoming a look at our program's sponsors

find out more about business sponsorships and marketing partnerships at sponsorship that kansas public radio die for it today on k pr press that's npr science correspondent joe palka from his november ninth two thousand seventeen talk a kansas state university i did a two way with the host of morning edition just a month ago about the nobel prize for that was awarded gravitational waves and most of the time these two ways or you know we've done enough time to put together a peace and be covered and so most people just going to worry no need to to wait and they hear him in this one for some reason like dozens of people from around npr and friends said that was a really great and i went back and i listened to it and i haven't been able to figure out why it was great so i wondered if you guys want to hear it and then a comma here we

go three us physicists have been awarded this year's nobel prize in physics they won the award for building a remarkable device that can detect something called gravitational waves here to tell us more about the wording of the social physics lesson is npr science correspondent joe palca has a physics or something different about gravitational waves that some complicated it's going to be very short but basically this is what most cases writer to say something that sounds like science fiction but it's actually really have if the waves are would like to be referred to as weathered all the people i cared for them as ripples in space time and two at that time they were predicted a hundred years ago by a chap named albert einstein and when he wrote it good theory of general relativity basically he came to the conclusion that space rather than being a flat thing was kurt and that the consequences of thinking of space is a curve singing opera that you get kicked out of that came this notion that there were something called gravitational waves and you can think of it

as a smooth surface where occasionally there are ripples and the ripples are cause for cataclysmic events like black holes colliding and the transfer of colliding and he said these must exist but will ever detect and that's there to fight but they didn't let people who are the people who care about the people who did i will they build a machine called like oh and their names are rainer weiss from massachusetts institute of technology kip thorne and gary parrish from the california institute of technology so we have mit and cal tech and they build an instrument called light of the laser interferometer interferometer gravitational wave observatory just now it's tricky but anyway what it is is it's a basically to measuring sticks for kilometers long at right angles to one another says like an outright panic and when the gravitational wave comes along like the ripples in space time because of the length of these arms about to change by the tiniest amount i mean tiny were talking atomic scale changes in light

and the way we detect that as you shoot a laser beam backboard back or backward down the down the length of these things and using a technique called an interferometer e you can tell whether the laser beams are in sync which means the late lee two arms of the same length for slightly out of sync which means they've changeling finally so what does it mean what is it need for us that they found these ways oh god i got to go what it means is that there's a whole field of physics and astronomy that have been silent up until now i mean nobody actually could detect directly the collision of two black holes before so the universe has suddenly much richer because we have this technique this technology to detect the zen like those just the first there's another one that to start operating on ergo there's others that gonna be coming online and so suddenly and this is the great thing there's a new device that could be able to make protections of things in the

universe nobody knows what is you have the backup player gosh we never knew this is here but there it is so it's one of those basic things where it's a systemic change it says change our world which is that you can't say that about many discoveries but this is really one of the more one of these inventions which i did i am piers joe palca talking about the three american physicists were awarded this year's nobel prize in physics for detecting gravitational waves hey joe thanks so much so one of the things i just want practical things so i completely stumbled then bumble my way through a lot of that and one of the things that you know after you've done this for twenty five years it doesn't throw your mean i started i got very nervous and i never made a mistake you could i would the pencil with arrest their way through the american lawmakers they can say oh sorry we can't go back and the other thing was that question she asked was what does this mean wasn't in the script as i write the questions and she asked him and that was

an incident and i was pretty sure my first thought was that was in the script but iraq is a great question to me why not and this is part of a science education is listening to what the person just ask you or just that and so really that funny answer again well it i don't know was that a way of saying when you think about this for six which is what i was doing when i said the answer of formulating an answer on that and i think maybe that was the moment that she she was ten only pickles by what i said was a very genuine conversation at that point where he was living anyway it interested does anybody hear something in that that work for them particularly or such as more well if the others respond maybe i mean i i agree i think i met susan stamberg once said that good radio's like overhearing an interesting conversation in the next table and dinner and restaurant ahn i think live radio has a quality that you know

it wouldn't talk with me to warn about something i mean it as it happens lot of people thought that they should always with that when the prices here so i phoned up on it and i had some things i was going to use another ellen the unknown ripples in spacetime i had was sort of in my head but it was just it was just us talking and i'm as i said i learned about the prize announcement five forty five i actually was in the studio this is where it was in the studio about to go on your lives when the phone rang and it was very bearish returning my call that we won't talk and so i said that rachel and the producers i said instead of in irving maybe one interview the nobel laureate and they said oh we're little unsure about the solutions to that that was as crazy moment but you know what i like about radio's the spontaneity that happens the spontaneity and any other thoughts yes see what i what i hear this is just i mean when i hear is my own very genuine

excitement about what this is allowing us i mean it just did not be out you know it's like one of these things where we really are learned about a world that we we still have no idea we're going to see these things and there's other kinds of gravitational waves these are the ones that are caused by rapid events but there's also gravitational waves at her on a much slower time scale and there's this other experiments i think it's really crazy weather trying to measure the rate at which quasar spin all sorts when spin because gravitational wave should be affecting the speed that they're spinning out and so there's this huge of measuring like the lions are these to see if they can see a signal of them slowing down in some sort of pattern i would predict that they were well i think this is greatest singers all either way second a cure anybody of anything lead to discovery pay back its cost you know who know is going to make the human race about or entity i think so

cause i think that's what science can do i think that's why people started on and you know let's figure out what were made of and what the war was over and if that isn't a fine enterprise you've never fill in the black but even so i mean i get nervous when ice you know there is a big study about you know why i was a consciousness but it was about blood pressure control in men or people over sixty years old and whether it was say whether that was ok to let their systolic pressure climb up to one forty or whether you should treat them and bring them down to one point he thinks the audience that issue trade and that's going to affect people's so that one on the air law places government should i go out and start taking blood pressure medication and actually to talk to my doctor what i mean i might actually giving people enough information to make a responsible

decision and was this study as well done this i think it is a good enough to make a decision about you change your medical practice so yes applied things are much instance much easier to talk about you are rocket going up landing on mars because those are concrete events that have a real visible applications and then if you wanna start talking about that water cycle on mars because a lot more hypothetical about its importance and this under saying that any one single story it's really hard to tell just how important is one of yours that's that's my point that your image of fairfield how tough npr science correspondent and hosted npr's fine series joe's big idea we close out this hour with an episode of joe's big idea a remembrance of theoretical physicist stephen hawking there are very many scientists who've achieved rock star status albert

einstein okay but after that well stephen hawking was definitely a contender here he is we lost lives of observational early early universe is evolving when he came to scientific conferences like this one in nineteen ninety nine the audience hung on every word and it wasn't just like the scientists who warren all the public flock to him as well his popular book about his work was a huge bestseller degree that that book a brief history of time was probably the please read most bought book ever leonard lot now is a physicist and science writer he and hawking collaborated on a less technical version of hawkins first book called a briefer history of time and that title hints at what malott now says was a central part of his character hawking sense of humor as hard as it was meant to communicate he would sit there sometimes he would take five or six minutes to be typing something out and then we had speak and this and that and his distant voices his words it would be a

joke that sense of humor along with his fame allowed hawking to land some pretty unusual gig for a physicist at all my iq of two hundred and eighty the world's smartest man hocking appeared in the simpsons cartoon show several times as well as a number of other popular shows including star trek the next generation so what did this man who re envision the universe really do what was his science all about well physicist was thought that the immense gravity of a black hole would drop everything in and nothing could escape but by combining quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity hawking showed something astonishing that theoretically at least some kind of particle had to defy what physicists classically expected from gravity and radiate out of black holes hawkins work up ended scientists understanding of gravity and raised questions that have yet to be resolved toward the end of his life talking's disease left him

virtually paralyzed it took an enormous effort for talking to make the tiny movements that allowed them to communicate using a computer interface it's tempting to say that talking achieved his fame in spite of his physical challenges but in a way talking to physical challenges may have contributed to his mental prowess kempthorne is a nobel prize winning physicist at the california institute of technology who frequently collaborated with talking and because it had a cat that he developed new ways of thinking new ways of tracking his brain around things that enabled him to out think anybody else and yeah i thought people with great regularity throughout his life talking was up for a challenge for example in two thousand seven he accepted an offer from zero g corp to experience weightlessness the company uses a plane that climbs and dies in such a way that for twenty five seconds at a time everyone inside the plane is weightless talking spoke at a news conference before his flight i have been

wheelchair bound for almost four decades of zero g will be wonderful pictures taken during the flight showed what appeared to be a very happy physicist floating carefree around the plane's cabin fighting really for the scientists to change the way we think of gravity to spend a few minutes of his life without it joe palca npr news that's npr science correspondent joe palka from a remembrance of physicist stephen hawking that aired in march two thousand eight seen before that we heard palca speaking at kansas state university is oren hall on november ninth two thousand seventeen as part of k state's science communication week and stick a state or audio of this event i came back entire k pr presents is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas

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