Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com. Hey guys, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: This is Alice Madam, the science editor from how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com. And this is Robert Lamb, signed writer
Speaker 1: from how stuff works dot com. And we hope you
Speaker 1: caught the first part of our series on world changing
Speaker 1: experiments because it was world changing and exciting and mentioned
Speaker 1: some good good stuff. And today we're going to continue
Speaker 1: with a couple of more experiments changing the world once more,
Speaker 1: one experiment at a time. Yeah. So the first one
Speaker 1: that we're talking about is primordial soup, which does not
Speaker 1: come in a bowl. Though it did, it would probably
Speaker 1: be pretty gross. Yeah, And here's why this boils down
Speaker 1: to the the theory that at one point there was
Speaker 1: no life on Earth is pre biotic, okay, and you
Speaker 1: just had the chemicals for life flowing around out there.
Speaker 1: You know, you had especially proteins and nucleic acids and
Speaker 1: these were formed, you know, early in Earth's primordial environment. Okay, Okay,
Speaker 1: So all the elements are there, right, it just needs
Speaker 1: to be cooked. So the theory was that did something
Speaker 1: say like a strike of lightning or um or um
Speaker 1: or radiation from the sun sort of you know, cooked
Speaker 1: the thing and set the thing off, got everything rocking,
Speaker 1: and you know that's the catalyst for life. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: a couple of guys, a couple of biochemists in particular
Speaker 1: John Haldane and Alexander Operan came up with this idea,
Speaker 1: and what do you know, a few decades later in
Speaker 1: n Harold Jury and Stanley Miller obliged and tested their hypothesis.
Speaker 1: And of course, how do you test something like that, Well,
Speaker 1: you just have to make an artificial environment with the
Speaker 1: with the same uh, you know, chemical properties. Right. Basically,
Speaker 1: they were intent on recreating the early atmosphere of Earth
Speaker 1: in carefully controlled, closed system. Does that blow your mind
Speaker 1: for a second. You're creating the early atmosphere of Earth,
Speaker 1: Like it sounds like it sounds like something from like
Speaker 1: Outer Limits or Twilight Zone. It's like they've created like
Speaker 1: the past in a in a in a little bubble,
Speaker 1: and they're going to make life evolved and it's like
Speaker 1: sand kings or something. You know, it's just so cool
Speaker 1: and it's so simple. Right today, they had a warm
Speaker 1: flask of water as the ocean. Yeah, the water vapor
Speaker 1: rose up from the water collected in another chamber. Uh,
Speaker 1: they introduced hydrogen, methane, ammonia. All this to stimulating oxygen
Speaker 1: free and atmosphere, right, and then what do you know
Speaker 1: if they discharge a couple of sparks, Yeah, representing lightning.
Speaker 1: Of course, they had to wait for lightning to strike
Speaker 1: the clock tower at the center of town. But then
Speaker 1: they had that run to their experiment. No, no, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: back to the future, reference spark. Just a few sparks.
Speaker 1: Just charge a couple of sparks into the mixture of gases,
Speaker 1: and finally the condenser cooled the gases into a liquid
Speaker 1: they collected for analysis. And they opened it up and
Speaker 1: there was a whole beaver in there. No, not not
Speaker 1: a whole beaver, no, but but organic compounds, right, And
Speaker 1: that was very exciting, almost as exciting as a beaver. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the organic compounds were abundant in the cool liquid. What
Speaker 1: did you find in particular that excited Miller? A whole bunch.
Speaker 1: In particular, they found amino acids, which are a vital
Speaker 1: component for life as we know it, right, so you're
Speaker 1: a Miller concluded that organic molecules could form in an
Speaker 1: oxygen free atmosphere and that the simplest of living things
Speaker 1: might not be far behind. Yeah, there you go. That's
Speaker 1: that's world changing. That's basically like the smoking gun, um,
Speaker 1: you know, for evolution if you will. Yeah, it's excellent.
Speaker 1: It's such a cool experiment. So let's talk about making light. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is really cool. Um. And it's not really making light,
Speaker 1: like measuring the more measuring light UM, kind of like
Speaker 1: capturing light. It's kind of almost like, you know, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna grab grab a beam of light and like force
Speaker 1: it to run a whole bunch of laps, and I'm
Speaker 1: going to watch it, measure what it's doing, and by
Speaker 1: measuring it, figure out exactly how fast it's going. So
Speaker 1: the light was still a mystery back when the nineteenth
Speaker 1: century dawned, and it inspired a couple of fascinating experiments,
Speaker 1: most notably Thomas Young's double slit experiment. But the one
Speaker 1: that we're going to talk about I had to do
Speaker 1: with a gentleman by the name of A. Michaelson, a physicist,
Speaker 1: a physics instructor who in seventy eight devised an experiment
Speaker 1: to calculate the speed lay. Yeah. I love this. I mean,
Speaker 1: can you not this is so cool any kind of
Speaker 1: a big experiment. It's kind of cool, yeah, and it
Speaker 1: but it's also it's big. But it also was fairly simple,
Speaker 1: and I think he made it with materials that cost
Speaker 1: less and ten dollars. I don't know what the equivalent
Speaker 1: amount would be back then, but he made it pretty cheaply.
Speaker 1: And what Michaelson did was he proved that light was
Speaker 1: a finite measurable quantity. Quantity. Yeah, He basically set up
Speaker 1: a couple of mirrors um about in a mile long tube,
Speaker 1: all right, so that the light hit one of these
Speaker 1: mirrors and then then reflected towards the other mirror, and
Speaker 1: this mirror was was rotating. When the speed was correctly adjusted,
Speaker 1: light reflected from the rotating mirror struck a mirror that
Speaker 1: was in the fixed position, and a return to strike
Speaker 1: the next phase on the spinning mirror. So do you
Speaker 1: do you have a picture of that. You have light
Speaker 1: streaking the rotating mirror, then it's going back to the
Speaker 1: fixed mirror, and then it's going back again to the
Speaker 1: rotating mirror, right, And he had an observation screen set
Speaker 1: up as well, so he could you could measure these things.
Speaker 1: So According to the University of Chicago, they did a
Speaker 1: little right up on this experiment. The time needed for
Speaker 1: the next phase to rotate into position to reflect the
Speaker 1: light was the time required for the light to travel
Speaker 1: the known distance to the station is the stationary mirror. Basically,
Speaker 1: if you know how fast the rotating mirrors are rotating,
Speaker 1: and you know the distance between those two sets of mirrors,
Speaker 1: then you can figure out the speed of light. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He sat, he set up the situation where math could
Speaker 1: could calculate it, and he basically came really close. Is
Speaker 1: that recall. Yeah, he came in in two hundred miles
Speaker 1: of the actual value. Yeah. So more important, scientists had
Speaker 1: a better picture of light and a foundation upon which
Speaker 1: to build the theories of quantum mechanics and relativity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: with the speed of light. Without understanding the speed of light,
Speaker 1: there are so many theories about the universe. We wouldn't
Speaker 1: have listen to any of our podcasts to deal with
Speaker 1: space and you know, in big cosmological issues, and speed
Speaker 1: of light has a way of coming up a lot.
Speaker 1: It does, and so does radiation, which our next experiment
Speaker 1: is concerned with. Correct. Yeah, let's add to France. Let's
Speaker 1: head to uh the curies. So the year was a
Speaker 1: pretty momentous one for Marie. Curie should a first child
Speaker 1: with her husband Pierre, also a non scientist, and a
Speaker 1: few weeks later she went looking for a subject for
Speaker 1: her doctoral thesis and what she settled on was uranium rays,
Speaker 1: which were first described by Henri Becarel. And so Becarel
Speaker 1: had discovered that these rays accidentally because he left uranium
Speaker 1: salts in a dark room and when he came back
Speaker 1: he found that they had exposed a photographic plate. I
Speaker 1: love that story. So like simple and accidental, you know,
Speaker 1: and he's just leaving uranium lying around the house. That's always.
Speaker 1: That's good. So Marie chose to study these mysterious rays,
Speaker 1: and she wanted to see if there are other elements
Speaker 1: that gave off similar emissions. And she found them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she um, she discovered polonium would she name would just
Speaker 1: named for poland her homeland. And then she also discovered radium.
Speaker 1: So there's a pretty end. And and also she really
Speaker 1: narrowed down that you had radioactive compounds, but it wasn't
Speaker 1: the compound that was radioactive, it was an element in
Speaker 1: the compound. And so curity when to Nobel presses for
Speaker 1: her work. Quite a gal, quite a scientist. But let's
Speaker 1: talk about dogs. This is I think it's more exciting,
Speaker 1: and I think everyone's more or less familiar with this one,
Speaker 1: if not the actual experiment. Wasn't that cartion about Pavlov
Speaker 1: like a like the likes of Scooby Doo or something,
Speaker 1: no cartoon that ran into Sunday newspaper? Yeah, like a Marmaduke,
Speaker 1: A Marmaduke. Um, you know there's going to be a
Speaker 1: Marmaduke movie by that. I saw this crazy because I
Speaker 1: love the idea of Marmadude because it's like it's not
Speaker 1: really funny and like every but everyone is the same.
Speaker 1: It's like like, oh my god, goodness, the dogs so big.
Speaker 1: Look how huge that dog is. And it's like the
Speaker 1: same thing every time, and it's it's kind of it's
Speaker 1: so bad, it's awesome, you know. Yeah. It reminds me
Speaker 1: a family circus where, um, did you ever read Family
Speaker 1: circus movies before your time? I used to read the
Speaker 1: comics and there was that one comic that the whole
Speaker 1: joke was the child was asking what was for dinner
Speaker 1: and said pisketti and meatballs. That was it. That was
Speaker 1: the joke pisketti and meat balls. Then he like just
Speaker 1: specifically or he like milk that joke. For like twenty years,
Speaker 1: like something. That cartoon was pretty popular. I think I
Speaker 1: might even seen it posted up at my dentist's office. Yeah. So, anyway,
Speaker 1: back to Pavlov of the Russian born physiologist and chemist
Speaker 1: responsible for the salivating dog's experiment. So Pavlov it all
Speaker 1: already noted that the stomach won't start digesting without salivation
Speaker 1: occurring first, right, He wasn't actually interested in psychology behavior.
Speaker 1: He was interested in the bodily functions, digestion and blood circulation. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: but the experiment itself involved feeding dogs and like having
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of flashing lights and noises going on
Speaker 1: at the same time. And then you feed them without
Speaker 1: those noises or the lights, et cetera. But then you
Speaker 1: don't feed them that hit the lights and they start salivating. Anyway,
Speaker 1: a conditioned reflex. Yeah, it's so. It's it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: you hear people talking about a something having a Paplovian effect.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like I have a certain ring tone
Speaker 1: that goes up in the morning that wakes me up
Speaker 1: and so there's like a response it's like, oh goodness,
Speaker 1: I have to get out of bed. So if you're
Speaker 1: ready to hear that ring tone it other times, yeah,
Speaker 1: I hear like occasionally office will have that ring tone
Speaker 1: go off and yeah, my heart jumps and I'm like,
Speaker 1: oh my goodness, I just dreamed half my day and
Speaker 1: I'm not really out of bed yet. Well. The interesting
Speaker 1: thing that Pablo found was that this type of reflex,
Speaker 1: like you're running for the shower when you hear that
Speaker 1: ring tone, um, it dies out if the stimulus is
Speaker 1: wrong too often. So if you hear it in the
Speaker 1: office too much, then you're not You're not going to
Speaker 1: have that urge. So so yeah, if you So, if
Speaker 1: he pulled this on the dogs too much, they'd be like, hey,
Speaker 1: I don't actually get fed every time you sound an
Speaker 1: air horn. Yeah, the canon's got smart and Pablo published
Speaker 1: his results in A year later, he won a Nobel
Speaker 1: Prize in medicine, but it wasn't for his work with conditioning,
Speaker 1: but rather in recognition of his work on the physiology
Speaker 1: of digestion, through which knowledge on vital aspects of the
Speaker 1: subject has been transformed and enlarged. That comes to you
Speaker 1: compliments of the Nobel Prize dot org site, which is
Speaker 1: such an awesome site. Have you been to the Nobel
Speaker 1: Prize I have. It's pretty cool. It just contains a
Speaker 1: wealth of information. I just love it. The other great
Speaker 1: thing about this experiment is that, aside from maybe being
Speaker 1: old freaked up on the noise, like, nobody was like
Speaker 1: mean to a dog or or any kind of an animal.
Speaker 1: You know, I mean not only mean, you know, just
Speaker 1: kind of messing with them a little, but no more
Speaker 1: than your average dog under my vivisection. Yeah, like so
Speaker 1: many of these animal experiments, it's like even if for
Speaker 1: if it's for a good cause, it's like you're like, oh, man,
Speaker 1: you're gonna blast another chimp into space. That's great. So really,
Speaker 1: he didn't do anything. He didn't engage in any animal cruelty.
Speaker 1: I I don't know, or well, the experiment itself is
Speaker 1: what I'm The experiment itself is not overtly based in
Speaker 1: animal cruelty, as some experiments definitely are, right, I guess
Speaker 1: it depends on your definition of animal cruelty. But oh,
Speaker 1: there's some experiments definitely animal cruelty. Well, somebody classified this
Speaker 1: one else. Well, but it's a far cry from say,
Speaker 1: cutting a dog's head off and then trying to sew
Speaker 1: another dog's head onto the stump. That's a little Butchers
Speaker 1: in my mind, there is a disparity between the two.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about authority figures. Yeah, let's move on
Speaker 1: to more human cruelty, because that's what this this experiment
Speaker 1: centers around. And Stanley Milgram was a pretty famous experiment
Speaker 1: and sure you guys have heard of it. Yeah, his
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties obedience experiments, and they're some of the most
Speaker 1: famous and controversial science experiments. So what did Milgram do? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so basically, you know, he's sitting around his laboratory and
Speaker 1: he was thinking, you know, you know what I would
Speaker 1: like to do. I would like to to know how
Speaker 1: far ordinary people will go in delivering painful electric shocks
Speaker 1: to a friend or just your peer, when commanded to
Speaker 1: by a scientific authority. Can you imagine that's his laboratory thought,
Speaker 1: just sitting there, musing upon the newspapers headlines, and then
Speaker 1: he thoughts wander over too, Yeah, or he has like
Speaker 1: a lab assistant and he's like, how far would this
Speaker 1: idiot go if I just told him to do it?
Speaker 1: And Uh, as we find out pretty far. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: kind of disturbing, right. So this is his experiment. Milgram
Speaker 1: recreated a couple of volunteers just ordinary to deliver the shocks.
Speaker 1: You created the actors to be the subjects who had
Speaker 1: received the shocks. So there's no actual shocking, no actual
Speaker 1: shocking going on. They're just pretending to be shocked. And
Speaker 1: but the people that are employing the shock don't know it.
Speaker 1: Can't pretend I just gave you a shock, Okay, I
Speaker 1: just I just amph why jerryus listening in the headphones.
Speaker 1: If I scream into the headphone, I mean into the mic,
Speaker 1: she's gonna at right. So you have your actors, you
Speaker 1: have your ordinary residence, and then you have an authority
Speaker 1: figure of scientists who would remain in the room for
Speaker 1: the study station. And the authority figure was the one
Speaker 1: who began each experiment. They showed the volunteers how to
Speaker 1: use the mock shock machine. That's a kid name the
Speaker 1: mock shock machine. The machine allowed the volunteers to deliver
Speaker 1: up to four, which was a shock light labeled as
Speaker 1: highly dangerous. What happened next? So next the scientist told
Speaker 1: the volunteers that they were testing to see how shocks
Speaker 1: might improve word association recall, which I don't know why
Speaker 1: they fell for that, because it it was kind of like, oh, man,
Speaker 1: I stuck my finger in that lightstock, and I totally
Speaker 1: better with my vocabulary. Um. So I instructed the volunteers
Speaker 1: to shock the learners, who again were actors for wrong answers,
Speaker 1: and raise the voltage as the experiment progressed. Man. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so the learners cried out whenever they received a shock,
Speaker 1: and at about a hundred fifty volts they would demand
Speaker 1: to be freed. Well, the scientists, the authority figure encourage
Speaker 1: volunteers to continue delivering the shocks, no matter how agitated
Speaker 1: the learners became. Yeah, some of the volunteers stopped at
Speaker 1: about a hundred and fifty volts, but most kept going
Speaker 1: until they reach a maximum shock level of a four
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty. It's crazy, It is crazy. So yeah,
Speaker 1: the the the the lesson here then is that if
Speaker 1: a scientific authority figure tell somebody to do something, uh,
Speaker 1: you can really push them pretty far, you know. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: the power of authority most definitely a lot of people
Speaker 1: later called into question the ethics of the experiment, as
Speaker 1: you might guess, but the results were really fascinating. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean it's often a were shadowed by by some
Speaker 1: of the crueler psychological experiments like the Stanford prison experiment.
Speaker 1: Definitely think about the Stanford prison experiment. Didn't they have
Speaker 1: to call that one off early? I forget how that went. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So we have a ton of really good experiment articles
Speaker 1: on the site if you want to check them out.
Speaker 1: On the home page. We have how human experimentation works.
Speaker 1: That's a pretty good one. Yeah, we have five crazy
Speaker 1: government experience and we also have this one that Bill
Speaker 1: Harris wrote on ten science Experiments to Change the World.
Speaker 1: And if you want to hear about even more experiments,
Speaker 1: do check out our blogs because we're always covering experiments
Speaker 1: there because they're constantly doing something fascinating out there in
Speaker 1: the world of science. And uh and we'd like to
Speaker 1: cover the really snazzy ones. Yeah, and a lot of
Speaker 1: times we'll cover them on Twitter or Facebook as well
Speaker 1: if we don't get around to posting on them or
Speaker 1: written in an article. Yeah, that's lab stuff on Twitter
Speaker 1: and on Facebook, you can just you can look up
Speaker 1: lab stuff or stuff from the Science Lab and you
Speaker 1: will find us and of course, if any of you
Speaker 1: guys are listening here in the labs, we'd love to
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