Mika Ellison: It’s almost Valentine’s Day, and one thing everyone loves to talk about is love. From literature to journalism to the gossip students engage in on a regular basis, we are surrounded by the rhetoric of romantic entanglements.
[music]
Mika Ellison: It’s easy to be a hopeless romantic. But what if love really is all around us? It’s the air we breathe, the genes that make up our personalities, and it’s in the way we ask questions about the universe.
Mika Ellison: Today, we’re exploring the way love, and emotions in general, color the way we talk and think about science. In the vein of science communication greats like Carl Sagan, I’m bringing you just four of the ways science and math, the great “objective” disciplines, open up doorways into some of our strongest, most awe-inspiring emotions.
[music]
Mika Ellison: Peter Burtch is the Newspaper and Microform Specialist at University Library. When he was growing up, a present from his father unlocked a passion for the universe.
Peter Burtch: I started sort of being obsessed with the heavens above me in Wisconsin, I grew up in Madison, and I, my dad was nice enough to buy me a garage sale telescope was like salmon color orange.
I felt like astronomy sort of like was definitely a happy place. Even going out in the driveway when it was 20 degrees in Wisconsin, or 20. Below, effectively, and throwing that telescope because some of this was really cold, clear nights, you can see some things.
Mika Ellison: During the pandemic, looking at the stars was a way for him get out of the house without actually leaving: With a decent pair of astronomy binoculars, the entire universe is your oyster.
Peter Burtch: I went in the middle of my yard last winter on a clear February night and I can see the green fuzzy comet. I don’t know if it’s coming back, it probably won’t come back till I’m deceased.
Mika: Your green, fuzzy oyster.
Mika (on tape): what is the green fuzzy comet?
Peter Burtch: It looks like a green Fuzzy Ball. It’s a comment. But really, it doesn’t look green and fuzzy when you look at it through your naked eye from the ground or from from binoculars. But you’re looking at a green fuzzy comment but just looks like a really looks like a faded cotton ball a little bit bigger than a star and just a slightly misshapen object. So you know that’s not a star it’s not twinkling. So that’s that’s the the illustrious going green, fuzzy calm and I saw you know, I stayed up till three o’clock in the morning, waiting for it
they discovered it and then they’re not sure what the trajectory is for. They might not know what the orbit is, they might not ever make an appearance again.
Mika Ellison: So love, in the case of astronomy, might be standing in your freezing-cold backyard to see, for possibly, maybe the only time, a star that is billions of lightyears away.
[music]
Mika Ellison: Speaking of light, if you’ve ever turned one on in your apartment, you’ve tapped into the United States’ electricity grid, which is synchronized to an average of 60 Hz. As it turns out, humans aren’t the only ones who rely on a system like that. Most blue whales communicate on a frequency between 10 and 49 Hz. Most blue whales.
Yong-yu Huang: So whales communicate, like they have like a set like frequency for for communication. And apparently they can’t hear outside of that frequency. So apparently, the 52 hertz whale is this whale that, for some reason, is not like the words not broadcasting it’s, it’s not making sound at the correct frequency so nobody else can hear it. And so it’s just like, wondering, and like scientists have picked up on like, its frequency, but like, and like the noises it makes the whale calls. That’s what they’re called. Scientists have like heard its whale calls. But no other whales can curious whale calls.
Mika Ellison: That’s Weinberg sophomore Yong-yu Huang, who introduced me to 52 Blue, also known as the 52 Hertz Whale, or “the loneliest whale in the world.” Scientists have been hearing the 52 hertz whale calls since 1989, and the calls have been heard regularly every year since 2014.
[music]
Mika Ellison: Science also has the potential to actually change the way we live our lives, sometime within our lifetime. Weinberg junior Kate Carver has watched in real time as genome sequencing went from a dream to a reality.
Kate Carver: there’s been a huge rise and how we’ve been able to basically look at patient data and basically tailor care people based off of their data. So for instance, the best example I can think of, is my youngest sister has a genetic disorder. And for years, we know it was causing it. And then genome sequencing became a thing and implementing these screens in the clinic became a thing and they started researching how you could use this data to then identify certain dependencies in the genome that could make you have these disorders. And so I think thinking about how those sorts of technologies can go from being just an idea in somebody’s brain that can actually literally change the trajectory of a patient’s life. Like I saw that for my sister and for my family. So I think for me, it’s when science intersects with humanity, and seeing that impact, so it makes me emotional about science.
[music]
Mika Ellison: One of the greatest myths about love is that it is easy, because everyone does it. One of the greatest myths about math is that it’s difficult, possibly also because everyone has to do it at some point. It turns out the two subjects are more closely connected than you might think, at least for some.
Hwang: there’s a saying I’ve seen somewhere and I could not tell you where that that you need to be creative to be a mathematician and precise to be a poet, which is sort of the opposite of what you might think. And I think that’s right. I think you need a little bit of both for both.
Mika Ellison: That’s Weinberg sophomore Scott Hwang.
Scott Hwang: I am a math major. I’m also a stats major, but I’m a math major by in my heart. And the reason is, is the same reason that I also like writing and I also like art is and music is that? I think that there’s parts of math that if you you know understand it enough, and then you really get into it. It did, it just feels really beautiful, at least to me.
Mika Ellison: When I asked him about love and math, the first story he told me was actually a proof. It starts with a sphere.
[music]
Hwang: So you have any sphere. So we’re talking the surface of a ball, and you have any five points on the sphere. And I claim that you will always be able to find a hemisphere that has four of those points. Which seems, I think if you were to just guess, improbable that that should always exist. And the kicker is we have to define hemisphere a little bit. A hemisphere, if you is half a sphere, essentially, if you if you were to cut the sphere in half through the center, you would get a hemisphere but but that line on which you cut it is going to count for both. That’s that’s important to the proof. And so here’s how it works, you will always be able to draw a plane, basically draw a cut through two of the points because you do have to have the points in the origin and the center. And that that way you can cut it through there. And so those two points are going to count for both hemispheres. And then you have three points leftover and two sides. So at least one of the sides has to have two points. And then you have your four side, your four pointed side. And I just think that’s so elegant.
Hwang: part of the beauty too is when you’re really digging into the proof without having heard it. You’re just trying to figure it out for yourself. And then you finally hit that moment where it all clicks. And you’re like, oh my gosh, isn’t that wonderful?
Mika Ellison: Hwang’s favorite book is called Letter to a Young Scientist (it’s by E O Wilson), and it encapsulates how he feels about science.
Hwang: He talks about how creative creativity, and curiosity and all these sort of, like he’s talking about the soft skills of being a scientist and just really wanting to learn. It’s just so inspiring the way that he looks at the world and says, Okay, it’s not about your math ability. Four, it’s not about you know, your ability to necessarily learn how to, I don’t know us a PCR machine. It’s, those things will come after your sort of ability to just ask questions, pursue questions, and really, just sort of dig into it again, spend a lot of time spend a lot of time just trying things
Mika Ellison: For people who love math and science, love is about wanting to know more. It’s about dedicating the time and thought to something worthwhile, and then being able to communicate that sense of wonder to others. It’s about taking light from those ever-distant stars, and turning it into a story about us.
Hwang: When you read about astrophysics, just from a layman’s perspective, the enormous enormous distances involved and just the sort of unknowability or at least you would think that it’d be unknowable of how you can learn about something so far away using basically the projection of what that is onto our surface through light and it’s not even that Clearing projection because light loads sort of curve. And it’s just so I think humbling.
Mika Ellison: I had him read one of his favorite speeches about astrophysics, originally said by Carl Sagan. It’s pretty famous, and it’s basically describing the Earth, as seen from the Voyager spacecraft as it exited our solar system.
Hwang: Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering,
[fade out]
Whether you’re an amateur astronomer, a budding astrophysicist, or just someone who appreciates a nice, elegant proof, you probably have experienced love, if not for a specific other person who lives on this pale blue dot, but for the Earth itself. And for many people, the way to show that love is to ask questions; to investigate; to do science.
[fade in]
Hwang: It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
[music]
Mika Ellison: To close us out, I asked Peter Burtch to explain the scientific concept of the Northern Lights,.
Burtch: it’s basically just charged particles hitting the Earth, upper atmosphere, and that’s what’s causing the glow. And it can vary from just kind of like a little bit of a faint glow to almost electric curtains that are colored.
Mika Ellison: and then I asked him to explain how it made him feel.
Burtch: Just the uniqueness and just, the feeling you get to see this. How it’s just you know, it’s something you can’t you can’t explain. You just have to see it once, especially where you’re laying at appear like I was at a friend’s house in northern Wisconsin. His whole cabin was asleep. And I’m out there again. It was maybe midnight one in the morning and I woke up I must have doze off and it was completely electric green pulses of light going over my head. So like straight over. Add from the horizon. It just you have to isn’t so you have to be you have to see it to believe it.
Mika Ellison: So what is love? It’s waiting until 3am to see one star out of a hundred million that you might never see again. It’s spending hours on research just to figure out the answer to a part of a question. It’s a devotion to a concept that doesn’t exist except in the mind. Or maybe it’s just that we are trained, as humans, to love things that are beautiful.
Burtch: But yeah, that’s the draw for me. The beauty of it.
Mika Ellison: And the universe, however you slice it, is beautiful.
[music]
Burtch: clear skies that’s a great that’s a new sign off on people in astronomy, the geeky astronomy Forum is a clear skies, Pete, that just sign off, you know, wishing everyone clear skies
Mika Ellison: Signing off and wishing you clear skies,
Mika Ellison: For WNUR News, I’m Mika Ellison.
