When we started reporting a fantastic, surreal story about one very cold night, more than 70 years ago, in northern Russia, we had no idea we'd end up thinking about cosmology. Or dropping toy horses in test tubes of water. Or talking about bacteria. Or arguing, for a year. Walter Murch (aka, the Godfather of The Godfather), joined by a team of scientists, leads us on what felt like the magical mystery tour of super cool science. This piece was produced by Molly Webster and Matt Kielty with help from Amanda Aronczyk. It originally aired in March of 2014. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.
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Jad Abumrad
Hey, Fidelity. How can I remember to invest every month?
Stephanie
With the Fidelity app, you can choose a schedule and set up recurring investments in stocks and ETFs. Huh.
Jad Abumrad
That sounds easier than I thought.
Stephanie
You got this?
Jad Abumrad
Yeah, I do. Now, where did I put my keys?
Stephanie
You will find them where you left them.
Robert Krulwich
Investing involves risk, including risk of loss.
Walter Murch
Fidelity Brokerage Services, llc. Member nyse, sipc.
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Jad Abumrad
Oh, wait, you're listening.
Virginia Walker
Okay. All right.
Robert Krulwich
Okay.
Jad Abumrad
All right. You're listening to Radiolab Radio from wnyc. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.
Robert Krulwich
I'm Robert Krulwich.
Jad Abumrad
This is Radiolab.
Robert Krulwich
And what we're going to do in this particular show is we're going to.
Jad Abumrad
This is one of my favorites. Yeah, favorite.
Robert Krulwich
It should be, because you certainly gave it your all.
Jad Abumrad
Exactly. I don't know. What do we need to say here? I mean, this is a little bit of a tussle. We sort of wanted to bring it back. Cause, you know, winter's approaching. Things are kind of heavy right now. We could use a little lightness.
Robert Krulwich
So this begins with a very, very successful film editor with. Well, you'll meet him in a moment. Comes to us with an idea, which Jad loves, I hate, and things go from there.
Jad Abumrad
Perfect. Can you hear us now?
Robert Krulwich
Hello?
Jad Abumrad
Hel.
Robert Krulwich
Hello.
Jad Abumrad
Hello.
Robert Krulwich
Hello.
Jad Abumrad
It starts with Walter, my hero, Walter Murch.
Walter Murch
I'm a film editor and sound designer, and I've been working in film since the late 1960s.
Jad Abumrad
Resume includes.
Robert Krulwich
I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse. The Godfather.
Jad Abumrad
Apocalypse Now. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Ton of other films.
Robert Krulwich
The thing we're talking about in so youo Should Know is the.
Jad Abumrad
One of the more spectacular stories I've ever heard.
Robert Krulwich
How did you bump into this?
Walter Murch
Well, I was in Lyon in France, doing a film, Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Jad Abumrad
This is back in 1986.
Walter Murch
I was supposed to be there for a week, and it wound up I was there for a month and I ran out of things to read. So I went down the street from the hotel and there was a bookstore and I was interested, and still am, in cosmology. So I picked up a book by the Carl Sagan of France, a man named Hubert Reeves.
Jad Abumrad
Hubert Hubert, Actually, he's French Canadian.
Robert Krulwich
He translates as Carl Sagan.
Jad Abumrad
Anyway, Murch ends up buying Reeves book, goes back to the hotel, finds a cozy spot.
Walter Murch
So I was happily reading away and he was trying to explain, with some difficulty, because it's a difficult topic, how did matter condense out of the sort of cork soup that we believe happened right after the Big Bang? And he tried various attempts scientifically, but then he said, to give you a sense of the poetry of this moment, the best thing is the story that Malaparte tells.
Robert Krulwich
Who is Malaparte?
Walter Murch
Well, he was a journalist, a poet, diplomat, soldier, prisoner, film director, and somebody who got around. Yeah.
Jad Abumrad
And speaking of getting around, in 1942, a Milanese newspaper, Corriere della Serra, sent.
Walter Murch
Malaparte to report on the eastern and.
Jad Abumrad
Northern fronts of the war, specifically the Russian Finnish border.
Walter Murch
And he had a front row seat of the siege of Leningrad, the agony of the Nazi bombardment of that city.
Robert Krulwich
And it's from there that Malaparte tells his story.
Walter Murch
So this one day, this was in.
Robert Krulwich
The winter, Malaparty was posted with the Finnish army who were fighting along with the Nazis. And they were perched just north of.
Walter Murch
Leningrad on the shores of Lake Ladoga, which is this big lake abutting the city.
Robert Krulwich
And on this day.
Walter Murch
The Nazis bombarded area around the lake. This started a forest fire.
Jad Abumrad
Everyone ran for cover, soldiers ran every which way. And in the middle of the forest there were Soviet horses that were locked up in a stable.
Walter Murch
And the horses panicked and broke out of the stables, hundreds of them.
Jad Abumrad
And they just started running, rushing to.
Robert Krulwich
Get away from the fire, right?
Jad Abumrad
So you have hundreds of horses bolting.
Walter Murch
Through this flaming, heading towards the open space ahead, which was the lake.
Jad Abumrad
And all at once they burst out of the forest and go barreling into the lake, stampeding one on top of the other as they all get deeper.
Walter Murch
And deeper up to their heads.
Jad Abumrad
And it is at this moment when they enter the lake that according to the story, something very weird happens. In the blink of an eye, the.
Walter Murch
Lake snaps them shut. It just freezes suddenly, turns to ice with a bang.
Jad Abumrad
It goes from water to ice with this violent snap. And suddenly the horses are entombed. Malaparte writes that even the waves on the lake were gripped in midair and sort of suspended there.
Walter Murch
Fade out the next Morning, when Malaparte and the Finns were woke up, they discovered the forest fire had burned itself out. And look at that. The lake has frozen solid overnight. And his Finnish friends said, yes, that sometimes happens. And then they look and see, what are those bumps on the ice over there? They go to investigate and they find themselves in this horrific sculpture garden of horses heads sticking up out of this solid marble, like floor of ice.
Jad Abumrad
You said hundreds. So hundreds of horse heads.
Walter Murch
Hundreds of horse heads.
Robert Krulwich
These are not going to decay.
Walter Murch
Right.
Robert Krulwich
Because it's freezing cold.
Walter Murch
So those horses stayed there all winter. And Malaparte was there in that region of the world during that winter. And every so often, he and the other soldiers would go and have a smoke and they'd go into the sculpture garden and wander around looking at this miraculous thing.
Jad Abumrad
So this image of the horses frozen.
Walter Murch
In this lake, this image, beautiful and strange and disturbing and profound in some.
Jad Abumrad
Way, made us wonder what Made me wonder, I should say.
Robert Krulwich
I told you at the time, don't trust this story. It's not scientifically impossible.
Jad Abumrad
And I, keeping an open heart, you thought, could this possibly be true? Could there be a grain, perhaps several grains, Perhaps a lake's worth of grains of truth?
Robert Krulwich
Your heart, your mind is like loose, like a sieve. Anyway, we've argued about this for a year.
Jad Abumrad
Yeah. And you know what? We're gonna reconstruct that argument right now and take this uptown.
Virginia Walker
All right.
Jad Abumrad
Let's do this.
Robert Krulwich
To a real scientist.
Jad Abumrad
To a real scientist. In the course of our argument, we ended up going uptown to Rockefeller University to meet a couple people who know about ice. So we're going to go play with.
Stephanie
Some super cool ice.
Jad Abumrad
Among them, this fellow. I'm Alexander Petrov. I am the Raymond and Beverly Sackler fellow.
Robert Krulwich
Do you ever wonder who are Raymond and Beverly Sackler?
Jad Abumrad
They occasionally almost show up, and I almost meet them, but I never have. Yeah. By the way, the Sackler family has recently come into a bit of controversy. We all know that now, we didn't at the time. In any case, Alex, who, it must be said is an amazing dude, graciously agreed to demonstrate that you can, in fact, create the conditions of that massive lake inside a tiny little test tube. Okay, could somebody hold this sort of in here? And I'll get the tube set up. He reached inside his freezer, grabbed his trusty falcon. Yeah, this is called a Falcon tube. Just a plastic tube filled with water. Now, this is not normal water.
Stephanie
This is the really nice water.
Jad Abumrad
It's very, very pure water. No minerals, no dust. In there, like, super distilled. And. And he says when you take water like that and you cool it down, you can get it far below its freezing point and it won't freeze. Unless, that is, you happen to have a horse. You have a tiny horse here.
Robert Krulwich
We have a tiny horse, and we.
Alexander Petrov
Are gonna drop that into the Falcon.
Jad Abumrad
Tube and do that.
Alexander Petrov
That's gonna be awesome.
Jad Abumrad
So he handed us the tube. I'm holding a little vial of supercooled water. Alex, what temperature do you think this? -20. This is min. -20 c c Celsius.
Robert Krulwich
When does water freeze? In zero. So it's 20 degrees below freezing point, and it's still water.
Jad Abumrad
But not for long because we unscrewed the cap. Are you. Are you filming? We held the little plastic horse over the tube.
Robert Krulwich
Countdown or something.
Jad Abumrad
Okay, on the count of three. Guilty.
Robert Krulwich
All right, three. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
Jad Abumrad
Point for Jad. Because the moment that little plastic horse hit the water, the water slammed into ice. I got excited. Suddenly, that little guy was trapped in an ice cube. Oh, my God. The horse is frozen.
Walter Murch
That's amazing.
Robert Krulwich
Please remember, the horse was plastic. No animals were harmed in this experiment.
Jad Abumrad
It is honestly breathtaking. Like, it happens so fast.
Virginia Walker
Catastrophic ice formation. Just like that.
Jad Abumrad
Did you hear that C word, Robert? Say it again. Catastrophic. This is Virginia Walker, and I'm in.
Virginia Walker
The Department of Biology, Queen's University.
Jad Abumrad
Virginia was one of the many people that we called up to ask, what the hell? Like, why does this happen? Shouldn't this water just freeze gradually the way that most water does? You know, at 32 degrees Fahrenheit or whatever?
Virginia Walker
No, actually. So you see, this is why we have to start at the beginning. As Julie Andrews says, a very good place to start. Right. All right, so the only reason that water freezes normally at 0 Celsius and 32 Fahrenheit is that there's something there that makes it freeze. We call that a nucleator.
Jad Abumrad
Sounds like a superhero.
Virginia Walker
Yeah. All right, so it's a nucleator.
Jad Abumrad
A nucleator is like a seed, right? Didn't know this, but it turns out water almost always needs a seed in order to grow ice.
Stephanie
It turns out water by itself is not actually that good at remembering how to become ice.
Jad Abumrad
That is Erin Pettit.
Stephanie
She's a glaciologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Jad Abumrad
And what she means is that when water cools down, the molecules start to slow their movement.
Stephanie
They get a little bit closer together.
Jad Abumrad
And at that point, they want to all hold hands. And become ice.
Stephanie
But the water molecules don't quite remember very well how they're supposed to be organized.
Jad Abumrad
They're like, wait, do you stand here? And I stand here? How do we do this?
Stephanie
Again, they need to be shown what combination of angles work the best to create a nice, stable structure.
Jad Abumrad
What they need is, say, a speck of dust. That's the nucleator. If you throw in some dust into otherwise pure water, now they have a.
Stephanie
Guide, because ice can start to mimic whatever the shape of the dust particle is.
Jad Abumrad
But what happens is that the water molecules start to form a cage around the dust particle, and that cage shape is very similar to the shape they need to make ice. And suddenly they're like, oh, that's how we do it. So in a sense, the dust particle is reminding the water molecules how to freeze.
Virginia Walker
Well, no, I don't think of it like that.
Jad Abumrad
Virginia says it's actually not quite so gentle, really. What's happening is the dust particle is forcing the water molecules into the right shape around it. It's like a command.
Virginia Walker
It's nothing about memory. It's a physical thing. They just get jammed in there.
Robert Krulwich
Wow, this is like Julie Andrews, like a Nazi. So then these start at the very beginning. Start at the very beginning.
Jad Abumrad
Okay, so if, as we just learned, water needs a catalyst, a nucleator, in order to freeze, doesn't this at least raise the possibility that that Finnish Russian lake had reached a supercooled state? Along come these horses, and they were the nucleators. Maybe they had dust on their hair or whatever. I don't know. Whatever it was, it started a chain reaction. Ice spread outward from these horses, shot across the entire lake, and froze the whole damn thing at once.
Robert Krulwich
If you'll excuse me for just a second, because this is like a touretting, like, impulse. I have. Excuse me. Now we can continue.
Jad Abumrad
Hold your horses there. We're going to take a break, and we'll continue this meaningless tussle in just a moment.
Stephanie
This is Alicia Bridges calling from Saskatoon in Saskatchewan. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan@www.sloan.org. radiolab is supported by BILT. Nobody wants to pay rent, but if you have to, BILT works to make it more worthwhile. By paying rent through bilt, you can earn flexible points that can be redeemed toward hundreds of hotels and airlines, a future rent payment, your next lift ride, and more. But it doesn't stop there. You can Dine out at your favorite local restaurants and earn additional points. Get VIP treatment at certain fitness studios and enjoy exclusive, exclusive experiences just for built members. Every month earn points on rent and around your neighborhood, wherever you call home by going to joinbuilt.com Radiolab that's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T.com Radiolab.
Alexander Petrov
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Walter Murch
I'm Alex Honl, professional rock climber and.
Janna Levin
Founder of the Honl Foundation.
Jad Abumrad
I wanted to let you know about a brand new season of the Planet.
Walter Murch
Visionaries podcast in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. This is the podcast exploring bold ideas.
Jad Abumrad
And big solutions from the people leading.
Walter Murch
The way in conservation. Join me in conversation with the likes of climate champion Mark Ruffalo, biologist and photographer Christina Mittermeier, and one of the most successful conservationists of our time, Chris Tompkins. Join us on Planet Visionaries wherever you get your podcasts.
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Jad Abumrad
Okay, so, Jad, Robert, Radiolab. Before the break, we posited what I thought was an interesting theory. Robert, not buying it. We'll get to your skepticism in a moment, but I want to talk a little bit more about nucleators for a second, because when we were talking with Virginia, she told us something kind of cool. We asked her, like, what else nucleates ice? Like, we learned about dust, but what else can do it?
Virginia Walker
Okay, so the best nucle is ice itself.
Jad Abumrad
She says if a little bit of snow falls into some water or a little bit of ice forms in the water organically, the water molecules will rush around that, and bam.
Virginia Walker
If you don't have ice, what is the second best thing to nucleate? This ice happens to be bacteria.
Jad Abumrad
Turns out, she Sundays, there are three different kinds of bacteria that can generate these special proteins, big honking proteins that can instantly turn water into ice.
Robert Krulwich
In fact, when we were reporting this story, a video started circulating on the Internet that showed a scientist taking a bottle of water, squirting a little bit of this bacteria in, and then the thing just shocked into ice.
Virginia Walker
And the cool thing is these bacteria are actually plant pathogens, plant killers. So you've probably seen grass growing in your backyard or whatever, and it can be all covered with frost, but then, you know, the frost can melt, and it's still green. Yeah, but if those bacteria are present.
Jad Abumrad
She says, they'll spit out their proteins onto the plant, which generates these ice crystals. The ice crystals then slice the plant.
Virginia Walker
Open and expose the inside of the plant. And the bacteria say, mmm, yummy. Here's lunch. And they eat the inside of the plant.
Jad Abumrad
It's a good strategy, but that's not the cool part. Virginia says she has also found these proteins in bacteria that don't kill plants. So that made me think, made her wonder why, like, why would they need to make ice? And that's when it occurred to her and a few other researchers, maybe it's about transportation.
Virginia Walker
Exactly.
Robert Krulwich
What?
Jad Abumrad
Well, think about it. These bacteria are just sitting on these.
Virginia Walker
Plants, and what happens is the wind comes along, blows up these little bacteria.
Jad Abumrad
Into the upper atmosphere, blows them literally up into the clouds.
Virginia Walker
They're not particularly cold, hardy, so now.
Jad Abumrad
They have a situation. They do not want to be all the way up there.
Virginia Walker
They gotta get back down to the earth. And unless they hitch a ride on those horses that you keep talking about, they're so light, they might not come down to Earth.
Jad Abumrad
So what they do, she suspects, is they use the plant trick. They spit out these proteins into the cold, wet cloud which galvanizes the water molecules around them to form. A snowflake around their body. So now they've got this little hovercraft that they can use to coast on down.
Virginia Walker
If they make ice, they can get back down, and they can get back down in a different place and start a new colony of bacteria somewhere else. And so by this way, they get dispersed around the whole Earth.
Jad Abumrad
Think about that the next time it's winter and it snows.
Virginia Walker
Apparently, if you melt each snowflake, you'll find a little bacterium inside it.
Jad Abumrad
You're saying all of them?
Virginia Walker
All the snowflakes? I haven't looked at every single snowflake, of course, but it makes perfect sense, doesn't it?
Jad Abumrad
But that's a very, very cool idea.
Virginia Walker
Yeah.
Jad Abumrad
I suddenly like the bacteria movie a hell of a lot better than the horse movie. So at least I, you know, and it at least has a shot of being, Yeah, the horses. So when we were reporting this story and talking to Aaron Pettit and Virginia Walker and a bunch of other scientists, when we asked them, could an entire lake have flash frozen in an instant, trapping all those horses uniformly, the answer that we got was no.
Robert Krulwich
Did you hear her? No there. Did you hear the sound of it? It seemed somewhat summery. Let me ask it to a different way. Would you say absolutely not, or is it just a kind of a gentle no?
Stephanie
I'd say that's an absolutely not.
Virginia Walker
Okay.
Robert Krulwich
Because as Aaron told us, when you're talking about freezing an entire lake, well, you've got a lot of problems to consider.
Stephanie
First, the process of freezing actually is a source of heat itself, because like.
Robert Krulwich
When water molecules form bonds to make ice, that's a lot of activity, and activity produces energy. And now that's gonna make things a little bit warmer. Not to mention the fact that horses are warm blooded animals, so they also would slow down the process of freezing.
Virginia Walker
Right.
Robert Krulwich
Also, the water would never have been pure enough to supercool in the first.
Stephanie
Place because there's too many things in the lake that would provide that initial nucleation. Plants, organisms, dirt.
Jad Abumrad
Damn it.
Stephanie
Did somebody actually see this? What is the actual evidence that.
Walter Murch
No, nobody saw any of this as it actually happened.
Jad Abumrad
When we told Walter Murch what the scientists told us, in typical Walter Murch fashion, he was icy, calm. And he reminded us that he never told us it was true. That Malaparte often mixed fact and fiction, and that the real reason he was attracted to this story was because it offered a metaphor for cosmology, right?
Walter Murch
The beginning of the universe, really.
Robert Krulwich
I mean, if you'll excuse me, if a small bit of skepticism. Now Walter thinks it's true for the universe.
Jad Abumrad
Metaphor. Metaphor.
Robert Krulwich
Even so. Even so.
Virginia Walker
Come on.
Robert Krulwich
What does he mean? What does he mean?
Jad Abumrad
Here's what he means. And if you're a physicist listening right now, just turn off the radio.
Robert Krulwich
We're just talking among ourselves here, right?
Jad Abumrad
So you can think of it in one of two ways, right? The first is that idea of super cooling that we saw at Rockefeller, where under the right circumstances, water can cool down way below its freezing point, not freeze, and then all of a sudden, And it can suddenly do that, which we saw at Rockefeller in the test tube. Now, according to Janna Levin, professor of.
Janna Levin
Physics and astronomy, Barnard College, Columbia University.
Jad Abumrad
The metaphor holds because that bizarro flash freezing phenomenon actually happened repeatedly, she says, in the moment after the Big bang.
Janna Levin
Yes, super cooling is definitely something that happens in the early universe.
Jad Abumrad
She says, right? When the universe got its start, it was still small, like the size of a grapefruit. Inside that grapefruit, it was extremely hot.
Janna Levin
Back then, it was probably a million trillion, trillion, trillion times hotter.
Robert Krulwich
A million trillion, trillion trillion times 10.
Janna Levin
To the 32 times hotter.
Jad Abumrad
But as a little grapefruit began to expand, the temperature started to drop, and it dropped and dropped to a point where the universe should freeze, so to speak. But it didn't. And it's waiting and it's waiting to freeze. And you're like, what's happening? Why aren't you freezing? Then suddenly, there it goes. Phase change.
Robert Krulwich
Go ahead.
Jad Abumrad
Okay.
Robert Krulwich
I don't know exactly what you're saying, but keep going.
Jad Abumrad
All I'm saying is there's a lot of phase changes. Some of them were super cool. Don't worry about it. Okay. There's another parallel which I think is actually even more interesting, has to do with those seeds we talked about. So if you go back to the grapefruit, okay, inside, it's very, very hot. You've got this wash of energy. And this energy is uniform, right? It's all the same thing, spread evenly everywhere, the same. But then as things cool, you begin.
Janna Levin
To get these tiny fluctuations, little variations.
Jad Abumrad
In temperature and density where it's a.
Janna Levin
Little bit hotter and denser in one point than another.
Jad Abumrad
We're talking about clumps. Like maybe over here, there's a little bit more matter and heat than over there. And these are our seeds, see?
Robert Krulwich
I Don't think that you're describing seeds like I understand seeds. Seeds are little things that attract other stuff.
Jad Abumrad
No, no, but these behave just like seeds. Because as the universe cools down and expands and begins to add all these new forces and all these new particles, gravity, electron photons, atoms, those little bits of variation from the beginning are still there, and now they're growing bigger because now we have gravity, right? So little concentrations of stuff are now attracting more stuff and then more stuff and then more stuff. And as the universe expands, they expand until ultimately those little brightness have become these massive objects.
Janna Levin
Amazingly, the largest structures that we know about in the universe have their seeds in these tiny fluctuations.
Robert Krulwich
Does that mean when you go on a Star wars kind of voyage, so you're in your spaceship and you're going at some incredibly high speed, you're rushing through the universe and you see huge clouds of gas with nurseries for stars, and you leave them and you go to a galaxy and then another galaxy. There's a galaxy over and a galaxy over there and a galaxy over here. You're saying that these massive structures, walls of galaxies, neighborhoods of stars, are reflections of a very early moment when something went in the initial broil of stuff.
Janna Levin
Like these beautiful structures that you're describing are like the snowflakes around the little bit of D.
Robert Krulwich
So does that mean that the empty spaces that we see when we gaze at the current universe are actually filled with something that hasn't cooled yet or that isn't visible to us or is working under a different rule?
Janna Levin
Well, if I can hijack your question, I can say we might not have seen the last of the phase transitions. Our universe is absolutely continuing to cool.
Jad Abumrad
Is it really? Yeah, it's cooling down.
Janna Levin
It's very cold right now. We have this dark energy driving the universe to expand at an ever accelerated rate. And it's conceivable that in the future that energy will endure some phase transition and it will go away or decay to something else. In this new state of matter, it might do something different to the evolution of the universe. So we might have a phase transition in our future.
Robert Krulwich
Suddenly, I feel a little. Oh, dear.
Jad Abumrad
Hello.
Robert Krulwich
We have many people to thank who helped us on this particular podcast.
Jad Abumrad
Totally. Producers Matthew Kielty, Molly Webster. Woo. Also Amanda Aranchak, Atish Batya, for sure.
Robert Krulwich
And Marine Budeau.
Jad Abumrad
These super cool people at Rockefeller University. Jeannie Garberino, Philip Kidd, and of course, Alexander Petrov. Thanks also to Jeffersonstrom, Inger Herberg, Mark.
Robert Krulwich
Martin, Martin Truffer, Mark Tuckerman, and Jason Wexler. And sincere thanks to all the listeners from Facebook and Twitter who helped us translate Russian and Finnish books.
Jad Abumrad
Oh, and certainly last but not least, Walter Murch for being my hero.
Robert Krulwich
Chad loves you.
Jad Abumrad
I love you. And more importantly, he released a book translating Malaparte from Italian to English, which is where we got the story of the. Of the horses falling in the lake. It's called the Bird that Swallowed Its Cage. The Selected Writings of Curzio Malaparte.
Robert Krulwich
All right, so that's, that's us saying.
Jad Abumrad
Oh, wait, one more thing, one more thing. Go to our website, Radiolab.org and you can see videos we shot at Rockefeller of water turning into ice in a flash, super cooling, right in front of your eyes. It's amazing. Radiolab.org, i'm Jad Abumrad.
Robert Krulwich
I'm Robert Crowart.
Jad Abumrad
Thanks for listening.
Stephanie
This is Stephanie calling from Bushwick, Brooklyn. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Maria Matassar Padilla is our managing director. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, David Gabelle, Bethel Hapti, Tracy Hunt, Matt Kielty, Robert Crowwich, Annie McKeown, Latif Nasser, Melissa O', Donnell, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Amanda Arancik, Shima Oliay, David Fuchs, Nigar Fatali, Phoebe Wang, and Katie Ferguson. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris.
Podcast: Radiolab (WNYC Studios)
Original Air Date: December 5, 2017
Hosts: Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich
Special Guest: Walter Murch
In "Super Cool," Radiolab explores the science and mythology of supercooling—how water can remain liquid below its freezing point and then transform into ice instantaneously in the right conditions. The episode is sparked by a chilling wartime story involving horses and a lake that supposedly flash-froze around them. Through debates, experiments, and insights from scientists, the episode unpacks both the plausibility of the story and the underlying physics, before leaping into the ways these phenomena provide metaphors for the birth and structure of the universe itself.
Radiolab’s “Super Cool” is a masterful blend of storytelling and science: a haunting, possibly apocryphal wartime tale leads to a real laboratory demonstration of supercooling, a primer on nucleation (from dust to bacteria), and finally a grand cosmic metaphor explaining the birth and clustering of matter in the universe. The episode ultimately debunks the legend while marveling at the awe-inspiring phenomena that inspired it.
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