Though certain generations may have grown up trained to take cover under their classroom desks in the case of a nuclear showdown between the United States and the Soviet Union, few of us today can believe that we’d stand much chance if we found ourselves anywhere near a detonated missile. Still, the probable effects of a nuclear blast do bear repeating, which the New York Times video above does not just convey verbally but also visually, deriving its information “from interviews of military officials and computer scientists who say we’re speeding toward the next nuclear arms race.”
The last nuclear arms race may have been bad enough, but the relevant technologies have greatly advanced since the Cold War — which, with the last major arms treaty between the U.S. and Russia set to expire within a year, looks set to re-open. Don’t bother worrying about a whole arsenal: just one missile is enough to do much more damage than you’re probably imagining. That’s the scenario envisioned in the video: “traveling at blistering speeds,” the nuke detonates over its target city, and “everyone in range is briefly blinded. Then comes the roar of 9,000 tons of TNT,” producing a fireball “hotter than the surface of the sun.” And that’s just the beginning of the trouble.
A destructive “blast wave” emanates from the site of the explosion, “and then… darkness.” The air is full of “dust and glass fragments,” making it difficult, even deadly, to breathe. What’s worse, “no help is on the way: medical workers in the immediate area are dead or injured.” For survivors, there begins the “radiation sickness, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea”; some of the deadliest effects don’t even manifest for weeks. “The immediate toll of this one warhead: thousands dead, exponentially more wounded. Damage to the ecosystem will linger for years.” Indeed, the extent of the damage is too great to ponder without resort to gallows humor, as evidenced by the video’s current top comment: “My boss would still force me to come into the office the next day.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
The mesmerizing video above lets you visualize the ocean currents around the world. Using data from spacecraft, buoys, and other measurements, the visualization shows the ocean in motion, with the currents creating Van Gogh-like swirls around the globe.
According to NASA, “the ocean has been [historically] difficult to model. Scientists struggled in years past to simulate ocean currents or accurately predict fluctuations in temperature, salinity, and other properties. As a result, models of ocean dynamics rapidly diverged from reality, which meant they could only provide useful information for brief periods.” This all changed, however, when NASA and other partners developed ECCO, short for “Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean.” “By applying the laws of physics to data from multiple satellites and thousands of floating sensors, NASA scientists and their collaborators built ECCO to be a realistic, detailed, and continuous ocean model that spans decades.” “The project provides models that are the best possible reconstruction of the past 30 years of the global ocean. It allows us to understand the ocean’s physical processes at scales that are not normally observable.” Watch above as years of ocean data come to life in a crisp, compelling visualization.
What you’re watching above isn’t your ordinary film. No, this film — A Boy and His Atom– holds the Guinness World Record for being the World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film. It’s literally a movie made with atoms, created by IBM nanophysicists who have “used a scanning tunneling microscope to move thousands of carbon monoxide molecules, all in the pursuit of making a movie so small it can be seen only when you magnify it 100 million times.” If you’re wondering what that means exactly, then I’d encourage you to watch the behind-the-scenes documentary below. It takes you right onto the set — or, rather into the laboratories — where IBM scientists reveal how they move 5,000 molecules around, creating a story frame by frame. As you watch the documentary, you’ll realize how far nanotechnology has come since Richard Feynman laid the conceptual foundations for the field in 1959.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.
Produced between 1956 and 1964 by AT&T, the Bell Telephone Science Hour TV specials anticipate the literary zaniness of The Muppet Show and the scientific enthusiasm of Cosmos. The “ship of the imagination” in Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos reboot may in fact owe something to the episode above, one of nine, directed by none other than It’s A Wonderful Life’s Frank Capra. “Strap on your wits and hop on your magic carpet,” begins the special, “You’ve got one, you know: Your imagination.” As a guide for our imagination, The Strange Case of the Cosmic Raysenlists the humanities—specifically three puppets representing Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, and, somewhat incongruously for its detective theme, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who plays the foil as an incurious spoilsport. The show’s host, Frank Baxter (“Dr. Research”) was actually a professor of English at UCLA and appears here with Richard Carlson, explaining scientific concepts with confidence.
The one-hour films became very popular as tools of science education, but there are good reasons—other than their datedness or Dr. Baxter’s expertise—to approach them critically. At times, the degree of speculation indulged by Baxter and the writers strains credulity. For example, writes Geoff Alexander in Academic Films for the Classroom: A History, 1958’s The Unchained Goddess (above) “introduces the viewer to bizarre concepts such as the possibility of ‘steering’ hurricanes away from land by creating bio-hazards such as ocean borne oil-slicks and introducing oil-based ocean fires.” These grim, fossil fuel industry-friendly scenarios nonetheless openly acknowledged the possibility of man-made climate change and looked forward to solar energy.
Along with some dystopian weirdness, the series also contains a good deal of explicit Christian proselytizing, thanks to Capra. As a condition for taking the job, “the renowned director would be allowed to embed religious messages in the films.” As Capra himself said to AT&T president Cleo F. Craig:
If I make a science film, I will have to say that scientific research is just another expression of the Holy Spirit… I will say that science, in essence, is just another facet of man’s quest for God.
At times, writes Alexander, “the religious perspective is taken to extremes,” as in the first episode, Our Mr. Sun, which begins with a quotation from Psalms and admonishes “viewers who would dare to question the causal relationship between solar energy and the divinity.” The Unchained Goddess, above, is the fourth in the series, and Capra’s last.
Afterward, a director named Owen Crump took over duties on the next four episodes. His films, writes Alexander, “did not overtly proselytize” and “relied less on animated characters interacting with Dr. Baxter.” (Watch the Crump-directed Gateways to the Mind above, a more sober-minded, yet still strangely off-kilter, inquiry into the five senses.) The last film, The Restless Sea was produced by Walt Disney and directed by Les Clark, and starred Disney himself and Baxter’s replacement, Sterling Holloway.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
Neil deGrasse Tyson has spent his career talking up not just science itself, but also its practitioners. If asked to name the greatest scientist of all time, one might expect him to need a minute to think about it — or even to find himself unable to choose. But that’s hardly Tyson’s style, as evidenced by the clip above from his 92nd Street Y conversation with Fareed Zakaria. “Who do you think is the most extraordinary scientific mind that humanity has produced?” Zakaria asks. “There’s no contest,” Tyson immediately responds. “Isaac Newton.”
Those familiar with Tyson will know he would be prepared for the follow-up. By way of explanation, he narrates certain events of Newton’s life: “He, working alone, discovers the laws of motion. Then he discovers the law of gravity.” Faced with the question of why planets orbit in ellipses rather than perfect circles, he first invents integral and differential calculus in order to determine the answer. Then he discovers the laws of optics. “Then he turns 26.” At this point in the story, young listeners who aspire to scientific careers of their own will be nervously recalculating their own intellectual and professional trajectories.
They must remember that Newton was a man of his place and time, specifically the England of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. And even there, he was an outlier the likes of which history has hardly known, whose eccentric tendencies also inspired him to come up with powdered toad-vomit lozenges and predict the date of the apocalypse (not that he’s yet been proven wrong on that score). But in our time as in his, future (or current) scientists would do well to internalize Newton’s spirit of inquiry, which got him presciently wondering whether, for instance, “the stars of the night sky are just like our sun, but just much, much farther away.”
“Great scientists are not marked by their answers, but by how great their questions are.” To find such questions, one needs not just curiosity, but also humility before the expanse of one’s own ignorance. “I do not know what I may appear to the world,” Newton once wrote, “but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” Nearly three centuries after his death, that ocean remains forbiddingly but promisingly vast — at least to those who know how to look at it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
We made sand think: this phrase is used from time to time to evoke the particular technological wonders of our age, especially since artificial intelligence seems to be back on the slate of possibilities. While there would be no Silicon Valley without silica sand, semiconductors are hardly the first marvel humanity has forged out of that kind of material. Consider the three millennia of history behind the traditional Japanese sword, long known even outside the Japanese language as the katana (literally “one-sided blade”) — or, more to the point of the Veritasium video above, the 1,200 years in which such weapons have been made out of steel. How Japanese Masters Turn Sand Into Swords
In explaining the science of the katana, Veritasium host Derek Muller begins more than two and a half billion years ago, when Earth’s oceans were “rich with dissolved iron.” But then, cyanobacteria started photosynthesizing that iron and creating oxygen as a by-product. This process dropped layers of iron onto the sea floor, which eventually hardened into layers of sedimentary rock.
With few such formations of its own, the geologically volcanic Japan actually came late to steel, importing it long before it could manage domestic production using the iron oxide that accumulated in its rivers, recovered as “iron sand.”
By that time, iron swords would no longer cut it, as it were, but the addition of charcoal in the heating process could produce the “incredibly strong alloy” of steel. Certain Japanese swordsmiths have continued to use steel made with the more or less traditional smelting process you can see performed in rural Shimane prefecture in the video. To the disappointment of its producer, Petr Lebedev, who participates in the whole process, the foot-operated bellows of yore have been electrified, but he hardly seems disappointed by his chance to take up a katana himself. He may have yet to attain the skill of a master swordsman, but understanding every scientific detail of the weapon he wields must make slicing bamboo clean in half that much more satisfying.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
There have been many theories of how human history works. Some, like German thinker G.W.F. Hegel, have thought of progress as inevitable. Others have embraced a more static view, full of “Great Men” and an immutable natural order. Then we have the counter-Enlightenment thinker Giambattista Vico. The 18th century Neapolitan philosopher took human irrationalism seriously, and wrote about our tendency to rely on myth and metaphor rather than reason or nature. Vico’s most “revolutionary move,” wrote Isaiah Berlin, “is to have denied the doctrine of a timeless natural law” that could be “known in principle to any man, at any time, anywhere.”
Vico’s theory of history included inevitable periods of decline (and heavily influenced the historical thinking of James Joyce and Friedrich Nietzsche). He describes his concept “most colorfully,” writes Alexander Bertland at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “when he gives this axiom”:
Men first felt necessity then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance.
The description may remind us of Shakespeare’s “Seven Ages of Man.” But for Vico, Bertland notes, every decline heralds a new beginning. History is “presented clearly as a circular motion in which nations rise and fall… over and over again.”
Two-hundred and twenty years after Vico’s 1774 death, Carl Sagan—another thinker who took human irrationalism seriously—published his book The Demon Haunted World, showing how much our everyday thinking derives from metaphor, mythology, and superstition. He also foresaw a future in which his nation, the U.S., would fall into a period of terrible decline:
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…
Sagan believed in progress and, unlike Vico, thought that “timeless natural law” is discoverable with the tools of science. And yet, he feared “the candle in the dark” of science would be snuffed out by “the dumbing down of America…”
…most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance…
Sagan died in 1996, a year after he wrote these words. No doubt he would have seen the fine art of distracting and misinforming people through social media as a late, perhaps terminal, sign of the demise of scientific thinking. His passionate advocacy for science education stemmed from his conviction that we must and can reverse the downward trend.
As he says in the poetic excerpt from Cosmos above, “I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.”
When Sagan refers to “our” understanding of science, he does not mean, as he says above, a “very few” technocrats, academics, and research scientists. Sagan invested so much effort in popular books and television because he believed that all of us needed to use the tools of science: “a way of thinking,” not just “a body of knowledge.” Without scientific thinking, we cannot grasp the most important issues we all jointly face.
We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
Sagan’s 1995 predictions are now being heralded as prophetic. As Director of Public Radio International’s Science Friday, Charles Bergquist tweeted, “Carl Sagan had either a time machine or a crystal ball.” Matt Novak cautions against falling back into superstitious thinking in our praise of Demon Haunted World. After all, he says, “the ‘accuracy’ of predictions is often a Rorschach test” and “some of Sagan’s concerns” in other parts of the book “sound rather quaint.”
Of course Sagan couldn’t predict the future, but he did have a very informed, rigorous understanding of the issues of thirty years ago, and his prediction extrapolates from trends that have only continued to deepen. If the tools of science education—like most of the country’s wealth—end up the sole property of an elite, the rest of us will fall back into a state of gross ignorance, “superstition and darkness.” Whether we might come back around again to progress, as Giambattista Vico thought, is a matter of sheer conjecture. But perhaps there’s still time to reverse the trend before the worst arrives. As Novak writes, “here’s hoping Sagan, one of the smartest people of the 20th century, was wrong.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
One would count neither Elon Musk nor Neil deGrasse Tyson among the most reserved public figures of the twenty-first century. Given the efforts Musk has been making to push into the business of outer space, which has long been Tyson’s intellectual domain, it’s only natural that the two would come into conflict. Not long ago, the media eagerly latched on to signs of a “feud” that seemed to erupt between them over Tyson’s remark that Musk — or rather, his company SpaceX — “hasn’t done anything that NASA hasn’t already done. The actual space frontier is still held by NASA.”
What this means is that SpaceX has yet to take humanity anywhere in outer space we haven’t been before. That’s not a condemnation, but in fact a description of business as usual. “The history of really expensive things ever happening in civilization has, in essentially every case, been led, geopolitically, by nations,” Tyson says in the StarTalk video above. “Nations lead expensive projects, and when the costs of these projects are understood, the risks are quantified, and the time frames are established, then private enterprise comes in later, to see if they can make a buck off of it.”
To go, boldly or otherwise, “where no one has gone before often involves risk that a company that has investors will not take, unless there’s a very clear return on investment. Governments don’t need a financial return on investment if they can get a geopolitical return on investment.” Though private enterprise may be doing more or less what NASA has been doing for 60 years, Tyson hastens to add, private enterprise does do it cheaper. In that sense, “SpaceX has been advancing the engineering frontier of space exploration,” not least by its development of reusable rockets. Still, that’s not exactly the Final Frontier.
Musk has made no secret of his aspirations to get to Mars, but Tyson doesn’t see that eventuality as being led by SpaceX per se. “The United States decides, ‘We need to send astronauts to Mars,’ ” he imagines. “Then NASA looks around and says, ‘We don’t have a rocket to do that.’ And then Elon says ‘I have a rocket!’ and rolls out his rocket to Mars. Then we ride in the SpaceX rocket to Mars.” That scenario will look even more possible if the unmanned Mars missions SpaceX has announced go according to plan. Whatever their differences, Tyson and Musk — and every true space enthusiast — surely agree that it doesn’t matter where the money comes from, just as long as we get out there one day soon.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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