Nikola Tesla Fell In Love with a Pigeon

Summary

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The Rest Is Science — “Nikola Tesla Fell In Love with a Pigeon”

Podcast Hosts: Professor Hannah Fry & Michael Stevens (Vsauce)
Episode Date: June 3, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this energetic and quirky episode of The Rest Is Science, Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens delve into the world of Nikola Tesla — his fascinating inventions, eccentric personality, and his love for both electricity and a particularly special pigeon. By bringing a Tesla coil into the studio, they explore the science of high-voltage electricity, resonance, and humanity’s ongoing pursuit to bend the forces of nature to our will. The conversation meanders from the history of electrical discovery to philosophical musings about consciousness, symbols, hypnosis, and the very concept of "nothing."

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Playing with a Tesla Coil [04:03–10:25]

• Presentation of Object: Hannah brings in a handheld Tesla coil, gifted by comedian Romesh Ranganathan.
• What is a Tesla Coil?
  • Explained as a transformer that steps up voltage via two resonant circuits, producing high-voltage, low-current electricity.
  • Analogy: Current is like the number of elves in a wire; voltage is how much water (energy) they carry in their buckets.
    (Hannah Fry, 06:40)
• Live Demonstration:
  • Observing plasma arcs and miniature lightning from the coil:
    "From the very tip of that needle...an explosion of what looked like miniature lightning." — Hannah Fry [08:27]
  • Visuals likened to plasma balls and jellyfish with fluorescent blue and pink flashes.
  • The cracking, popping sound is air being ionized into plasma.
• Safety Discussion:
  • High voltage looks dramatic, but current is what causes harm.
  • Reference to lightning labs: low-current high-voltage setups are visually impressive but less dangerous than unassuming high-current environments.

2. Tesla’s Vision and Eccentricity [10:25–15:38]

• The Wardenclyffe Tower:
  • Tesla’s dream: transmit electricity wirelessly using Earth as a resonant cavity.
  • Funded by J.P. Morgan, who later pulled support when the intent (free, unmetered power) threatened his business interests.
  • Feasibility: Doubted. Potential issues — electromagnetic disturbance, environmental hazards, health risks.

  "Birds who navigate using electromagnetic fields...bees also. Game over." – Hannah Fry [12:27]

• Tesla & Resonance:
  • Claimed to shake a building off its foundations with a small oscillator, referencing historic bridge failures due to resonance (Tacoma, Millennium Bridge).
• Personal Oddities:
  • Recited books from memory, was terrified of pearls, and reportedly fell in love with a white pigeon in New York.

  Quote: “I love that pigeon as a man loves a woman. And she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life.” [15:31]

3. The Early Era of Electricity [15:38–17:23]

• The “Electricity Boom”: Parallels drawn between the excitement for electricity in Tesla’s era and modern AI developments.
  • Reference to Volta, Faraday, Edison — the birth of practical electricity.
  • This transition transformed societies, shrinking the world much like the information age.

  “It was a Copernican shift.” – Michael Stevens [17:10]

• Electricity as “Witchcraft”:
  • What was once seen as unnatural and magical is now mundane.

4. Listener Q&A [21:30–37:38]

a) The Oldest Symbol Still Used [21:30–29:30]

• Question: What is the oldest symbol that still represents the same thing?
  • Michael’s Reasoning:
    • Distinguishes between symbols and icons/indexes.
    • Posits that tally marks (notches) used to represent “one” may be the oldest.
    • Mentions the iconic arrow as a directional symbol potentially predating language.
    • Spirals and swastikas cited as ancient, but meanings have shifted.

  “Those representing amount or representing an individual...would probably be the first step in symbolic thinking.” – Michael Stevens [25:49]

b) What Causes Hypnosis? [29:34–34:14]

• Both hosts share skepticism about their own hypnotizability.
• Science of Hypnosis:
  • Described as a focused state of attention, heightening suggestibility and reducing peripheral awareness.
  • Not “mind control”; people retain core volition, especially regarding harm.

    “They really does change your connection to...your own will.” – Michael Stevens [30:07]

  • Brain scans reveal shifting activity between planning and interoception during hypnosis.
  • About 15% highly hypnotizable; another 15% not at all.
• Personal Experience:
  • Hannah attempted hypnobirthing:

    “I definitely wouldn’t say...it’s a completely pain free experience. No, it’s like an earthquake in my soul. But...I would definitely do it again.” – Hannah Fry [33:53]

c) Is Nothing a Thing? [34:58–37:38]

• Linguistic Wordplay:
  • Distinction between “nothing” as an absence and “Nothing” as a reified concept.
  • Examples illustrating logical confusion: “Nothing is better than God; a ham sandwich is better than nothing, therefore a ham sandwich is better than God.”
• Philosophical Response:
  • No-thing exists only as an abstraction; perfect “nothing” unattainable, just as perfect circles and infinities are hypothetical.

  “There’s no perfect circle. And there’s no complete nothing.” – Michael Stevens [37:22]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Excitement of New Technologies:
  "We always have something like that in society today. Maybe it's AI...Before and until to this day, it was nuclear weapons, things where someone could threaten to rip the world in half with it. And it was changing society dramatically." – Michael Stevens [16:36]

• Tesla’s Pigeon:
  "I love that pigeon as a man loves a woman. And she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life." – Nikola Tesla, as quoted by Hannah Fry [15:31]

• Describing the Tesla Coil Demonstration:
  "From the very tip of that needle, the sharpest point, there was an explosion of what looked like miniature lightning." – Hannah Fry [08:27]

• On Hypnosis and Pain:
  "No, it's like an earthquake in my soul. Yeah. But. But all the same. All the same. I would definitely do it again. Yeah. Especially when you're doing something that has no side effects." – Hannah Fry [33:53]

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Important Timestamps

• Tesla Coil Demonstration and Explanation: [04:03–10:25]
• Tesla’s Vision, Eccentricities, and Historical Impact: [10:25–15:38]
• The Era of Electric Discovery & Societal Impact: [15:38–17:23]
• Listener Q&A:
  • Oldest Symbol Question: [21:30–29:30]
  • What Causes Hypnosis: [29:34–34:14]
  • Is Nothing a Thing?: [34:58–37:38]

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Episode Tone & Style

The episode is characterized by intellectual curiosity, gentle self-deprecation, and an enthusiastic willingness to explore the boundaries — and limits — of the hosts' scientific knowledge. Michael and Hannah’s on-air rapport is lively and accessible, making complex concepts both digestible and fun, often with memorable analogies or comic asides about elves, pigeons, and rituals of the scientific world.

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Summary

This episode explores Nikola Tesla’s scientific and personal legacy, demystifies the Tesla coil’s operation, and draws connections between epochal shifts in technology, from the electric age to the AI revolution. Rich with playful banter, tangible demonstrations, and thoughtful listener questions, it’s an episode for anyone curious about the strangeness hiding in the everyday — and the weird minds who try to harness it.

Transcript

[Michael Stevens]

Hello, and welcome to the Rest Is Science. I'm Michael Stevens.

[Hannah Fry]

I'm Hannah Fry. And this is an episode of Field Notes, which is where Michael and I empty our houses of any old scientific linked crap that we've got lying around and bring it to you for your entertainment.

[Michael Stevens]

You're welcome.

[Hannah Fry]

I'm speaking out of turn here. These are all carefully curated objects that are genuine scientific interest.

[Michael Stevens]

Very true.

[Hannah Fry]

And today I'm bringing in an object that was given to me as a gift by Ramesh Ranganathan.

[Michael Stevens]

Oh, it's right here.

[Hannah Fry]

The comedian. The brilliant comedian. He gives a gift to every guest who appears on his podcast. This is what he gave me. I would say it is somewhere between extremely boring and potentially lethal.

[Michael Stevens]

So I love that.

[Hannah Fry]

That's what we've got coming up. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research uk.

[Michael Stevens]

Here's something strange. Your DNA contains more ancient viral fragments than genes. The genes that build our cells make up only 2% of our DNA. And for years, that is what scientists focused on. They treated the rest, the ancient viruses and stuff, as junk.

[Hannah Fry]

But now we know that that hidden majority, sometimes called the dark genome, influences how our biology works and how diseases like cancer behave.

[Michael Stevens]

It's a reminder that progress rarely comes as a single breakthrough. It builds gr. Cancer Research UK plays a central role in that progress, supporting decades of research into over 200 types of cancer, work that's helped double survival in the UK over the past 50 years.

[Hannah Fry]

For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org thereestiscience.

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[Hannah Fry]

Do you know what this is?

[Michael Stevens]

It's a Tesla coil.

[Hannah Fry]

It is a Tesla coil.

[Michael Stevens]

I've seen many, many short videos about these where they're being used, but I don't know what it's doing or how it works.

[Hannah Fry]

Have you ever played with one?

[Michael Stevens]

I've never played with one. I've seen giant ones at science museums and I just watch and I go, oh, I better look that up someday to learn how it works.

[Hannah Fry]

But I don't know, maybe today is the day, Michael.

[Michael Stevens]

Today.

[Hannah Fry]

Maybe today is the day. Okay, so what it's doing is it's basically a transformer. So it's, it's a way to step up the voltage from a, from a current. So normal, normal transformers. I don't know if you, like, buy something in America and then use it in the UK or vice versa. You need a transformer because it's 240 volts in the UK and 120.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah, what is it? 220.

[Hannah Fry]

It's less in the US less. Anyway. Less. But what this is doing is it has two circuits that are tuned to the same resonant frequency. So what it does is it sort of sloshes the electricity backwards and forwards between them to just really amp up

[Michael Stevens]

and voltage goes, yeah, right. But it doesn't add more. The current is the same. It's the voltage that is increased.

[Hannah Fry]

I think the current goes down. Oh, aren't they connected to each other?

[Michael Stevens]

I don't know much about electricity, which is even more reason for us to play with this.

[Hannah Fry]

Okay, I'll be honest. We're absolutely at the limits of my. My recollection from. From a level.

[Michael Stevens]

This is an important moment, though, to show that we're always learning.

[Hannah Fry]

Yeah.

[Michael Stevens]

Like, I'm still at the level of current is like the amount. It's like the flow amount, but then the pressure behind it is the voltage. Like, I have a Van de Graaff generator, and that produces extremely high voltages, like in the millions. And yet it can spark you. And it's not pleasant, but it doesn't kill you because the current is small. It's high voltage, but only a few electrons. Yeah, you can have a lot of electrons and barely a difference between two places, and you'll get very low voltage. But that current can be really dangerous.

[Hannah Fry]

Yeah, absolutely. That's the thing that you have to really worry about. The high voltage is the thing that looks really fancy, but it's the current

[Michael Stevens]

that is the thing makes a big difference.

[Hannah Fry]

Dangerous thing. There are two lightning labs, actually, that I've visited at various points for. For different TV programs. One of which is like this kind has a massive Tesla coil. Unbelievably high voltage looks incredible. Lightning in the sky. Right. It's amazing. And the other one, the high current lightning lab, looks pathetic. Extremely dangerous.

[Michael Stevens]

Extremely dangerous.

[Hannah Fry]

Extremely dangerous. Yeah. Okay. The way the analogy, actually, that I liked when I was doing physics at school, my whole class came up with this, like, fun idea that actually electricity is just elves. They're like little elves who are running around in. Inside the wires.

[Michael Stevens]

Is that not true?

[Hannah Fry]

I haven't seen it disproven. So, you know. And look, the whole point of science is it's falsifiable. So this is something. Maybe we should look into it, guys. Maybe we should. But the idea is that the current is the number of elves that you have, and the voltage is how much water they're bringing with them in the buckets.

[Michael Stevens]

Okay, cool. Yeah, that works for me too. Okay, for the purposes of this episode,

[Hannah Fry]

for the purposes of this episode, we'll do that. Okay, so what this is doing is caring about the voltage and reducing the current as a result.

[Michael Stevens]

Okay, so for those of you listening, this box Hannah has brought, it's a Plexiglas box. It's clear. You can see all the electronics inside, which there isn't much. There's mainly empty space in there. There's a couple transformers, and the box is maybe, I don't know, 2 inches tall. And then its depth and length is like maybe 4 or 5 inches. But on top, there's a golden disk, and a needle is sticking straight up, like a steel needle that gets quite sharp at the tip, and that's about, I don't know, 3 inches tall. Then there's two knobs. One says frequency and one says power. And it's plugged in.

[Hannah Fry]

All right. Should I turn it on? See? Happens.

[Michael Stevens]

Oh, I guess. Go ahead. Yeah.

[Hannah Fry]

Okay. Let's go. Watch this. Watch this move. My laptop.

[Michael Stevens]

Sliding. Okay. Probably a good idea.

[Hannah Fry]

No.

[Peyronie's Disease Informant]

Whoa.

[Hannah Fry]

Okay.

[Michael Stevens]

Yes.

[Hannah Fry]

Isn't that cool?

[Michael Stevens]

That's really cool. It was. It frightened me. Yeah. Okay,

[Hannah Fry]

so we should describe what we've just. What we've just witnessed.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah.

[Hannah Fry]

From the very tip of that needle, the sharpest point, there was an explosion of what looked like miniature lightning.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah. Lightning bolts in all directions. Like a ball. You know those.

[Hannah Fry]

The plasma things?

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah, like a plasma ball. When you touch the plasma ball and there's like this lightning bolt that comes from the middle out to the edges. We saw those. It was almost like jellyfish. Like, that describes the color. Well, it's like a fluorescent blue.

[Hannah Fry]

Yeah. Oh, I would say even pinky, almost.

[Michael Stevens]

Oh, there's some pink in there too. For sure. Yeah. So there's the voltage. What in that spike is getting so strong that the electrons are like, I gotta leave. But they have nowhere to go except into air, which they don't like to go through unless they really have to. That's why it's so explosive.

[Hannah Fry]

Yeah.

[Michael Stevens]

And I'm hearing pops.

[Hannah Fry]

Right.

[Michael Stevens]

That popping noise is what.

[Hannah Fry]

Well, okay, so what's happening is we are literally ionizing the air. All of those little arcs that you see coming out, and the purple, even you are turning the air into plasma, Literally, as it happens. I mean, that is pretty.

[Michael Stevens]

So you're stripping the electrons off the nuclei.

[Hannah Fry]

Stripping the electrons off the nuclei in the air.

[Michael Stevens]

So what if you lick it?

[Hannah Fry]

I mean, you're welcome to.

[Michael Stevens]

Am I. Do you really want that on your conscience? Cause I'll do it. No, I won't do it.

[Hannah Fry]

I think it's probably better not to, but, yeah, you can. Because I think technically you can touch it, but maybe don't.

[Michael Stevens]

I'm not going to.

[Hannah Fry]

No. I mean, that was both frightening and

[Michael Stevens]

I didn't think it'd be so loud.

[Hannah Fry]

I know. Yeah. The way that this is working, though, is it's using resonance. So if you imagine a person on a swing. Right. If you're pushing a child on a swing, if you manage to get Them at the right frequency, they can go higher and higher and higher. So what this is, is effectively like two people pushing right back and back and forth in order to really elevate the, the voltage. I mean, you're getting like hundreds of thousands, if not millions of volts right. At that very tip. Enough to strip the electrons from the air.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah. Because electricity doesn't like to move through air. It's got to have really high voltage to arc like that.

[Hannah Fry]

So in this, in this lightning lab that I went to in Germany, where they had a giant, one of these, they put me in a Faraday cage.

[Michael Stevens]

Ah. To protect you.

[Hannah Fry]

To protect me. And then electrocuted me.

[Michael Stevens]

But you were okay?

[Hannah Fry]

I was okay.

[Michael Stevens]

So they shot bright blue arcs of electricity at you, but the Faraday cage protected. Protected you.

[Hannah Fry]

Yeah. How much do you know about Tesla, by the way? Because he is a. He's a wild guy.

[Michael Stevens]

Not as much as I should. So. So tell me.

[Hannah Fry]

Okay, so he has, he had these, these really quite bonkers ideas. One of the things that he really wanted to do was he wanted to sort of use this, these general ideas to broadcast electricity through the earth.

[Michael Stevens]

Oh, right. So rather than having to use a wire.

[Hannah Fry]

Yeah, right. You could just. Everything would just work. So in. And he managed to get funding for this as well. So he. In 1901, he was backed by J.P. morgan and he started to build something called the Wardenclyffe Tower on Long Island. And the pitch was that it was going to be wireless telegraphy, but what he actually wanted to do was to build a sort of planet sized Tesla coil. Right. That would use the Earth as this. This giant kind of resonant cavity.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah.

[Hannah Fry]

And then anyone would be able to just stick an antenna in the ground and then pull electricity kind of for

[Michael Stevens]

free out of the ground. Yeah.

[Hannah Fry]

And then Morgan found out about this. JP Morgan found out about this and he was like, actually, I'm making quite a lot of money from metered utilities at the moment, so I'm going to go with no. So he shut off the funding. That.

[Michael Stevens]

But would it have worked?

[Hannah Fry]

So no, probably.

[Michael Stevens]

No, not.

[Hannah Fry]

There's like all kinds of slight problems about how far this thing, kind of the level of power that you would need to put into it would have been so absurd.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah.

[Hannah Fry]

Even if you did manage to get it to work, which you probably wouldn't have done, it would have had all of these repercussions. So, like, you know, fences, for example, would start humming.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah. I was going to say, anything stuck

[Hannah Fry]

in the ground, bathtubs, you get a massive electric shock from your bathtubs, probably your fillings and your teeth, they would, like, start to rattle.

[Michael Stevens]

This doesn't sound good.

[Hannah Fry]

Birds also would have a terrible time. Birds who navigate using electromagnetic fields, essentially. Bees also. Game over. Yeah, it would. It would have been pretty bad. It also probably. Probably would have been strong enough to actually cook flesh in the immediate vicinity of the. Of the transmitter.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah, it's arm lung.

[Hannah Fry]

You know, it could be worse places. Tesla, though, he was really into resonance. Love this stuff. He claimed to have shaken a building off of its foundations using just a resonant device that was this kind of size.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah, yeah.

[Hannah Fry]

And, I mean, maybe not completely absurd. We do know the buildings can get taken down by resonance. Right. There's the. The famous bridge. What's it called? The Tahome.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah, The Tacoma.

[Hannah Fry]

Tacoma Bridge. Right.

[Michael Stevens]

Bridge.

[Hannah Fry]

Yeah. Then there's the Millennium Bridge as well, which had problems with resonant frequencies, which ended up being very wobbly. Didn't get.

[Michael Stevens]

And that one's here. That one's here. Exactly.

[Hannah Fry]

And so there is something in it that if you find the resonant frequency of a particular structure, it can sort of shake itself apart. His story was that he had this oscillator, it was kind of shaking this building, tuned it to the resonant frequency of the steel structure. And then nearby buildings started shaking, too. And then plasters started falling, and then windows started cracking. And then police were called, and he was like, no, this is awful, and got a sledgehammer and smashed it to pieces. And then he later told a reporter that he could see. Split the earth like an apple if he wanted to, using resonance.

[Michael Stevens]

Nice.

[Hannah Fry]

I mean, look, he was a salesman.

[Michael Stevens]

He was this.

[Hannah Fry]

What? That's definitely what we can say. He also. When you are in the room with one of these, if you have one of these, you can light up fluorescent bulbs without physically touching them.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah.

[Hannah Fry]

Because there is just enough charge that is in the air.

[Michael Stevens]

In the air for a fluorescent bulb to light up.

[Hannah Fry]

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, this idea of, like, wireless charging, it kind of does sort of work, if you don't mind your teeth rattling around in your head.

[Michael Stevens]

I do, though.

[Hannah Fry]

I sort of do as well. The other things about. Things about Tesla, he's a kind of a sort of really strange guy. So he could recite entire books from memory.

[Michael Stevens]

Okay.

[Hannah Fry]

What a skill.

[Michael Stevens]

He's ready for Fahrenheit 451.

[Hannah Fry]

He's ready for.

[Michael Stevens]

Let's burn all the books. We'll just have Tesla memorize it.

[Hannah Fry]

Just Exactly. Why not? But he was also really terrified of pearls. He would refuse to speak to any woman who was wearing pearls, apparently.

[Michael Stevens]

I didn't know that.

[Hannah Fry]

Yeah.

[Michael Stevens]

You've got a pearl right there on your laptop.

[Hannah Fry]

I do? Sorry. Tesla.

[Michael Stevens]

Sorry. Tesla. But you know, yin and yang. They have to be together.

[Hannah Fry]

Exactly. In fact, actually, I put that there deliberately. Just to sicken him.

[Michael Stevens]

I can tell.

[Hannah Fry]

Just to sicken him. He also fell in love with a pigeon, but, like, for real, a white pigeon that he had in New York. And when the pigeon died in his arms in a hotel room, he wrote, I love that pigeon as a man loves a woman. And she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life. That's very sweet. It's very sweet, isn't it?

[Michael Stevens]

I need to learn a lot about electricity.

[Hannah Fry]

The thing is, I've got to be honest with you. They are sort of a novelty item.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah. I mean, I don't know what else you're gonna do with it. You can stick flowers and stuff on the needle and watch them. They get damaged, possibly burned after a while from those arcs.

[Hannah Fry]

I think what's worth saying is that this is a point in time when electricity is so exciting. You know, first you had Volta, who was the first person really, to create a steady electric current. Then you have Faraday, who comes along and manages to reliably create it and harness it. In some ways, all of this stuff is going on, but this was really the point where it's like, actually, we can do stuff with this. You know, Edison is around. He's, like, looking at light bulbs and things. There's. There's telephone wires that are being strung up around the place. It's like this real age of excitement and thrill, and lots of people were just totally enamored with just the very power of electricity.

[Michael Stevens]

That's a good point. I think we always have something like that in society today. Maybe it's AI before. And until to this day, it was nuclear weapons, things where someone could threaten to rip the world in half with it. And it was changing society dramatically. And with electricity, that's a huge jump to go from. I can't speak to my cousin who's halfway across the country, unless I want to wait. Suddenly, with wires, with telegraphy, the world became so small so quickly. It was a Copernican shift.

[Hannah Fry]

Yeah.

[Michael Stevens]

And there was a time when this was part of that.

[Hannah Fry]

I mean, this. This was sort of witchcraft to the. To the generations that existed before.

[Michael Stevens]

That's right. It was unnatural.

[Hannah Fry]

Yeah.

[Michael Stevens]

And today we take it for granted.

[Hannah Fry]

Yeah. Godlike powers, lightning in your room, light

[Michael Stevens]

at night, cool light. Well, they were warm lights, but they didn't. They didn't. You didn't run out of oil?

[Hannah Fry]

No, absolutely. I have actually heard people compare the invention of AI or the, I guess the advances in AI to the discovery of electricity.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah, certainly.

[Hannah Fry]

Yeah, I think it probably is. You know, the first time I heard it, I was like, come on. But actually, as time's gone on, I think, I think it probably is actually as seismic as that, in the way that now it's really difficult to imagine basically anything without our use of electricity and how we've managed to harness it.

[Michael Stevens]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Hannah Fry]

Well, I hope you enjoyed that.

[Michael Stevens]

I really did, yeah.

[Hannah Fry]

It's cool, isn't it? We're going to be back after the break with some of your questions. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research uk. In the uk, nearly one in two people will face cancer in their lifetime. The question is, could science stop cancer before it begins?

[Michael Stevens]

And over the past 50 years, Cancer Research UK has helped double cancer survival in the UK. And that's proof of what research can achieve. Like take cervical cancer. Almost every case is caused by hpv, the human papillomavirus. And when scientists uncovered that link, prevention became possible.

[Hannah Fry]

Indeed it did, by vaccine and it's protection that works way before the cancer itself can actually grow. After the vaccine was introduced, cervical cancer rates in England were nearly 90% lower than expected in women in their 20s. I mean, we're now genuinely at a point where this is a disease that is disappearing in younger women in the uk. This is something that I really hope my daughters will never have to deal with.

[Michael Stevens]

For more information about Cancer Research uk, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org restiscience snoring, gasping

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[Hannah Fry]

Okay, Michael, first question is for you.

[Michael Stevens]

All right?

[Hannah Fry]

What is the oldest symbol that represented something when it was created and is still used today to represent the same thing? This is by Ethan, by the way. This question.

[Michael Stevens]

I love this question. I've looked at things similar like what's the oldest song that we all basically still know today?

[Hannah Fry]

Oh yeah.

[Michael Stevens]

And the answer there I think a good one. You know, we can't always be totally sure, but it's probably green sleeves. Really? It's a very old song and people might not know the name of it, but they'll recognize it when they hear it.

[Hannah Fry]

Is it this one? No, that sports. Wait, how does it go?

[Michael Stevens]

Look at my green sleeves. Aren't they cool? No, I. I wait. If you play it, I'll know it. I think you're. You think you were right.

[Hannah Fry]

No, I don't think I was. That's it, that's it. That's it. That's it. I remember hearing that was written by Henry viii.

[Michael Stevens]

It May have been. I don't even know.

[Hannah Fry]

Seems unlikely. But the question is much more likely he took credit for it.

[Michael Stevens]

What's the oldest symbol that we still recognize today? And this. First of all, it really comes down to what you think a symbol is. So the definition I'm going to use is that a symbol is something that represents something else through an arbitrary or conventional symbol connection. So, for example, a handprint. I'm not considering a symbol because that's an index. It iconically looks like a hand, and it's a sign that a hand had been there. A footprint. These things are not for me, symbols.

[Hannah Fry]

Agree.

[Michael Stevens]

Alphabetic letters are symbols. A, the letter A, and then what it means, what it's referring to are really different. And it's through convention, it's through our social rules that we learn a means. Ah, A. Those sounds. Anyway, I think that gestures came before graphical representation. Animals have body postures and things and gestures, but those are also not really symbolic. They kind of biologically happen. Even this meaning yes and this meaning no. There are hypotheses that those actually come from infant behavior that, like, to go like, this is to reject a nipple and that this is to, like, suck.

[Hannah Fry]

Give me the boob. Give me the boob.

[Michael Stevens]

I. Again, this is just a guess. We can't really be sure.

[Hannah Fry]

But it's not uniform, right? Because in India, this means yes, that's true.

[Michael Stevens]

But they still have no. I mean, this doesn't mean yes. This means like, I'm following.

[Hannah Fry]

I think he sort of does, though.

[Michael Stevens]

You know, I think this is like more of the yes of like, yes, I hear you, rather than the Yes, I consent kind of.

[Hannah Fry]

It can be all three, apparently. Let us know in the comments, by the way, because we're clearly at the limit of our. Of our.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah, yeah, we are. But I can see the. The origins of things like, no.

[Hannah Fry]

Yes, I agree.

[Michael Stevens]

Stop. And that is like, you're actually stopping something's motion.

[Hannah Fry]

Agree.

[Michael Stevens]

If it's too tied to physical things, then I don't find it very symbolic.

[Hannah Fry]

Sure.

[Michael Stevens]

So I think my answer to the question is going to be the connection between a mark, like a notch and the concept of number one. Notch means one sheep. Like, that is symbolic because that one notch doesn't have to mean oneness. And yet as soon as it did, notches could have meant days or how many sheep you. You moved here. And you want to make sure that you get a notch for every sheep that comes back. But even before those notches, there were, like, tally counters, like a little stone Every time you had a sheep walk by, you could put a stone in a bag and then when you brought the sheep back in, you would take a stone out for each sheep and you would know that they'd all come back because you were associating the pebble with one sheep. Like that coin being a symbol for the sheep is a big leap that to me basically number any kind of symbol, a notch, a dot, a pebble, a stroke. I don't know which came first, but those representing amount or representing an individual or any individual would probably be the first step in symbolic thinking.

[Hannah Fry]

Yeah, I think that's probably right. Actually, I was thinking about, I was thinking when the question came through, I was thinking about sort of physical marks on paper.

[Michael Stevens]

I know. And they may want an answer more like that. I am talking about physical marks like a dash for a one or just a slash for a one.

[Hannah Fry]

Because if it is, which letter symbol is the oldest? I mean, zero's got a good shout, isn't it?

[Michael Stevens]

Well, why did the Romans neglect it so much?

[Hannah Fry]

I mean, sure, but the Indians were way ahead.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah. So circles and squares and spirals we find in the most ancient cave paintings. And we find a lot more of those kind of like doodles than we do the more famous and well known depictions of bison and other animals. So what I was hung up on with geometric shapes is that although as a shape it's been around forever as a thing that we doodle, but as a symbol for something specific, it's change. And we don't really know what they were trying to represent with the spirals they drew. Right.

[Hannah Fry]

So what about in language? Is there a language? What's like the oldest language or oldest letters that have continually been in use? Do we know? Because you could reasonably pick up some ancient Greek text.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah.

[Hannah Fry]

And sure, the words might be different ancient Greek to modern Greek, you know, sort of there's a really big distinction in the languages, but the letters have some commonality. Right.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah. But I, I think we need to go further back than Greek letters. I'm thinking that you can go back, you know, a hundred thousand years to just literally like these notches represent one, one thing that I gave you. And this helps me remember. I'm externalizing thought.

[Hannah Fry]

Yeah.

[Michael Stevens]

In a symbolic way.

[Hannah Fry]

Yeah.

[Michael Stevens]

Though it is still a cool question, like which doodle. Which, like, graphical symbol has always meant what it means, even to this day. The problem is there are a lot of old ones. Like, the swastika is super old. And if you look this question up, the, the spiral or A swastika is like super old, super ancient. But what it has symbolized has certainly changed a lot and meant different things to different people at different times. So I kind of didn't include that one. I was really like, I want this to be so the same still.

[Hannah Fry]

Yeah, I like that a lot.

[Michael Stevens]

So I'm going with a notch.

[Hannah Fry]

Absolute lol. If your answer had been this foster kind, that would have been.

[Michael Stevens]

I know when I saw that one, absolute careful. I was like, oh, I hope that's not the answer.

[Hannah Fry]

Yeah, well, thankfully it isn't because we've got little pebbles.

[Michael Stevens]

Oh, can I just say that?

[Hannah Fry]

Oh, yeah, go ahead.

[Michael Stevens]

Like, there's a good argument to be made that. That an. An arrow is quite old because the arrow, meaning direction, would have come from the use of spears even before graphical language. So. And. And arrows have always meant to direction. Look here, they draw attention. And that's very much what. What symbols do. They draw your attention to something else. And the arrow is trying to do that, even if it's drawing your attention to something else on the surface. So if you're looking for an actual shape you can draw, I think arrow.

[Hannah Fry]

I think. I think you're probably right. Yeah. Arrow's gotta be older than written language.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah.

[Hannah Fry]

Yeah, definitely. I like that a lot.

[Michael Stevens]

I don't know if any of this is correct, but it's hard to know because we're talking about prehistoric things.

[Hannah Fry]

Absolutely. Okay. Here's another question from Sam, who asks, in a recent episode, you briefly mentioned hypnosis, but I was wondering what causes hypnosis. Have you ever been hypnotized?

[Michael Stevens]

No, I haven't. I don't think I'm. I resist too much.

[Hannah Fry]

I resist too much as well. I did actually do an episode with the BBC where me and my co host, Adam Rutherford were hypnotized. And it didn't work on me, but it absolutely did work on him.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah. And I believe it. I believe that it's a real thing.

[Hannah Fry]

I mean, the evidence is really, really strong that it properly works.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah. It really does change your connection to, like your own will.

[Hannah Fry]

Yeah.

[Michael Stevens]

And you do things, but you just don't know that you're doing them. It feels like you're being controlled, but

[Hannah Fry]

actually you're sort of complicit. You're sort of playing along nonetheless. So the sort of best understanding of it is that it's like a focused state of attention, essentially. It's like you. You kind of reduce your peripheral awareness. You kind of heighten responsiveness to suggestion. Yeah. It's like the opposite of multitasking, essentially.

[Michael Stevens]

Oh, interesting. Yeah. That's a good way to look at it.

[Hannah Fry]

But you see this. You know, you can hypnotize people and put them in brain scans, and you can see that they have, you know, reduced activity in certain parts of their brain and then increased activity in other parts of their brain. This sort of more. More communication between the brain's planner, as it were, the. The prefrontal cortex and the part that tracks what's going on inside of your body, which, you know, it might be one of the reasons why it's so effective for pain control, which it is.

[Michael Stevens]

Whatever it's doing is really fundamental to the concept, the experience of consciousness. Because, you know, they found that you cannot hypnotize people to do things they wouldn't normally do. There's a wonderful study where they. They took, like, actual acid, and they demonstrated to people who were not hypnotized that this will hurt someone if this splashes on them. Then they hypnotized the people, did a magic switcheroo, and gave them just water. And then they said, when I say, snap my fingers, you will throw this acid all over this researcher. And they wouldn't do it now. If they had done it, no one would have been hurt because it was water. Yeah. But significantly, even though the hypnotized person felt that they had no sense of will over their actions, some deeper part of them still did and was like,

[Hannah Fry]

no, I don't want to do that. I remember you saying, I think probably off camera, off microphone once, that you thought that consciousness was essentially our own body's ability to have a veto on our behavior.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah.

[Hannah Fry]

I really like that idea.

[Michael Stevens]

And you lose that veto power when you're hypnotized.

[Hannah Fry]

Right. Right.

[Michael Stevens]

You cannot say no to your unconscious. Your unconscious, or I think non conscious is a better word to use. But it still can say no to stuff. It still will refuse to harm others, for example.

[Hannah Fry]

Yeah.

[Michael Stevens]

But you don't feel like you vetoed that instruction, by the way.

[Hannah Fry]

About 15% of people are highly hypnotizable.

[Michael Stevens]

Okay.

[Hannah Fry]

And about the same on the other end. About 15% of people are unhypnotizable. And then everyone else in the middle is, like, moderately responsible, responsible, responsive, responsive, suggestible, suggestible. I mean, they do say that it sort of works better on people who have better imaginations. That it's kind of a compliment.

[Michael Stevens]

Sure.

[Hannah Fry]

To get yourself in this state.

[Michael Stevens]

Sure.

[Hannah Fry]

I did try it for childbirth, actually. Okay.

[Michael Stevens]

To lessen the pain.

[Hannah Fry]

Yeah. So hypnobirthing it's called.

[Michael Stevens]

It's called what?

[Hannah Fry]

Hypnobirthing.

[Michael Stevens]

Hypnobirthing, yeah.

[Hannah Fry]

So you do it essentially to yourself. You practice it for ages and ages before. And I definitely think that it would help to calm yourself, sort of like help you to get yourself into a much better mental state of mind. Because the thing is, when it comes to pain, especially pain is not this objective fact. Much of pain is actually constructed within your own mind. Right, right. There are really extensive experiments on this where you. Where you subject an individual to a sort of quantified amount of pain. Right. Like a particular needle pressing a particular point and a particular strength over and over again, and then change the environment that they find themselves in, change the mental state that they're in, and their

[Michael Stevens]

experience of it completely changes.

[Hannah Fry]

Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I think that there was free analgesia, as it were, to tap into by. By, you know, harnessing the power of the mind.

[Michael Stevens]

So did it work?

[Hannah Fry]

Yeah, kind of. It, definitely. Yes. I would do it again. Okay. I definitely wouldn't say, oh, yeah, it's a completely pain free experience. No, it's like an earthquake in my soul. Yeah. But. But all the same. All the same. I would definitely do it again. Yeah. Especially when you're doing something that has no side effects.

[Michael Stevens]

Right.

[Hannah Fry]

There is almost no medical interventions that have zero side effects. Well, yeah.

[Michael Stevens]

I've never met someone who was like, oh, I hypnotized myself too much and now I can't walk. Right. Like, doesn't happen. But altered states like that I would need to learn so much more about because they are so important. Automatic writing is another one. And the thing is, I can't get myself to do a lot of this. Even under ayahuasca. I couldn't let go. But the Ouija board too, is one of these, like, people kind of get into a state where they disconnect their actions from their sense of will.

[Hannah Fry]

Absolutely love that. You just dropped in that you were on ayahuasca once during that conversation. Okay, last question. This is from Kayden. Is nothing a thing?

[Michael Stevens]

Ah. Is nothing a thing? I'd love to hear what you think about this too. I mean, I think that the word causes a lot of confusion because you've got like two types of nothing. You've got nothing. The pronoun which refers to no thing. For example, in the sentence nothing is better than God. Okay. I'm saying there is not a thing that is better than God. But then there's the reified nothing, where you treat it like it's its own noun in the sentence. Like, well, look, a ham sandwich is better than nothing. Now we know those two uses of nothing are different. Because if nothing is better than God, so nothing is better than God and a ham sandwich is better than nothing, then a ham sandwich is better than God. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that there's no thing better than God and a ham sandwich is better than the set. A set that's empty, which is a reified a made into a thing thing.

[Hannah Fry]

It's the difference of defining something as the absence of something and the absence itself. Right.

[Michael Stevens]

But that conceptual leap from no things to what if we called no things nothing? Then you can start building and having nothing, but also the container I've put it in, and then I can have a different container of nothing and suddenly you're constructing numbers from nothing. I think that's the Van Neumann set theoretical way of constructing all of the cardinals.

[Hannah Fry]

All of the numbers above. Yeah. Hey, look, we did three parts on infinity. You think you're getting away with us talking about zero as though it's one part of a question and one part of a field notes? Absolutely not. No, we're coming back to that. I think, though, the short answer is I think that no thing is obviously a thing because it's defined in relation to the absence of a thing. But nothing as in sort of the absence of anything, the absence itself. I think it is only hypothetical. I think you can't ever actually have it.

[Michael Stevens]

I agree, I agree, I agree.

[Hannah Fry]

Yeah, in the same way as I think circles are only hypothesis.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah, we can imagine a circle. We can imagine nothing. But there will never be a circle.

[Hannah Fry]

There's no perfect circle.

[Michael Stevens]

No perfect circle. And there's no complete nothing.

[Hannah Fry]

Yeah, maybe no infinity either. Maybe nothing. Maybe nothing is real. Maybe no thing is real. Maybe I'm not sure.

[Michael Stevens]

Maybe there's no zero and there's no infinity. And there's also no seven.

[Hannah Fry]

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[Michael Stevens]

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[Hannah Fry]

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[Michael Stevens]

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[Hannah Fry]

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[Michael Stevens]

that should be its own belief system. I'd like that one.

[Hannah Fry]

It certainly should. Well, okay. Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of the Rest is Science. As ever, you can send us your questions. Therese is sciencellhanger.com and we'll see you next time. Sally Will.

[Michael Stevens]

Sam.