 So my name is Gary Hynesky and I'm a business person basically. Thank you all for this. I'm a business person basically. Thank you all for this. My name is Jim Hynesky and I'm a business person. I'm a business person. I'm a business person. I'm a business person. I'm a business person. I'm a business person. I'm a business person. I'm a business person. I'm a business person. I'm a business person. I'm a business person. I'm a business person. I'm a business person. I'm a business person. I'm a business person. I'm a business person. I'm a business person. I'm a business person. I'm a business person. I'm a business person. I'm a business person. I'm a business person. I'm a business person. I'm a business person. I'm a business person. Now you guys can think about what people do for a living and it's really interesting that people do all sorts of jobs and my job is to organize and implement a holiday about a circle constant. I won the lottery for jobs. So another disclaimer is that what happens here at Nurnite stays at Nurnite. I'm not here representing the Exploratorium. I'm here on my own volition. Please don't tell me HR department or my boss. I should also say that if you put one and one together and you realize that this Herbie is the same Herbie who is responsible for the pie fights at the cable car turnaround in 2007 and 2009 please don't go around spreading that around. I think the cops are probably still looking for me. So moving right along we're going to talk about a quick review of what is pie. This is probably going to be very rudimentary because all of you guys are really smart in this room and so we're just going to go through it really briefly. Pie is the circle constant, Rick. The circle constant. It's A circle constant. So it's the relationship between the circumference of the diameter and what that means is that if you were to measure a hula hoop with a piece of string and you take the string all the way around the circumference of the hula hoop and then you take that same piece of string and you drag it across the diameter it would go one, two, three and a little bit times. Now this is going to... Like radio. Thank you. Thank you for correcting Rick. Yes, radio. That is the... So moving right along, if you were to do this to a thimble, same thing. You take a string around the thimble, you get the circumference, you drag it across, it's going to go three and a little bit times. You go to the Great Hadron Collider and you're there and you're like, hey, Morgan Freeman, what's going on, dude? Will you hold on the string? I'm going to go for a really long walk, just stay right here. You go for the entire circumference, you drag that circumference string three and a little bit times across the diameter. So every single time it's going to be the same. We all know this, right? We all know pi is 3.14. Everyone in this room has used a circle constant. You know pi r squared. I knew pi r squared before I ever started doing pi day. This is the stuff that we know about, but why and how do we know about this? So the Babylonians were keyed in. The Babylonians did a bunch of math and they tried it and they didn't do it by mathematics necessarily as repetition and guessing and trying, but they got to the point where they said 25 over 8 is the circle constant. Pretty good. Egyptians, 256 over 8, or 4 over 3 to the fourth power and 3.16 is the answer. That's also really pretty good. And we're talking 1900 BC. 1900 BC, that's pretty freaking amazing, right? I'm saying freaking, there's a kid over here somewhere. Oh, who left? It's pretty fucking amazing. I mean really, this is a long time ago and people were obsessed with circles for a long time and figuring out the constant between the circumference and the diameter and they got pretty goddamn close, speaking of God. Now if you guys are Bible believers, that's fine. I encourage you guys all to have whatever kind of faith you want to have, but pi is not 3. It's not. It's just not. It's not 3. It's 3 in a little bit. Everyone knows they've known for a long time before the Bible was made, but some people still go around saying if you believe that anything other than pi is 3, then you're a communist. Which if you know anything about the history of the exploratorium adds another layer of humor, because Frick Hoppenheimer was also a communist. So, moving right along through history, so we're talking about 600 BC. Finally we're up to 287 BC with Archimedes. Archimedes is our homie. He's the first guy who finally figured out pi using proper mathematics. And he did it the long way. He did it by using a bunch of polygons. He used the one in the middle to begin with. So a six-sided polygon to a 12-sided polygon to a 24-sided polygon to a 48-sided polygon. Finally, getting to a 96-agon. So he figured the upper and outer limits of pi. And he did so by drawing a polygon around the outside and a polygon around the inside and making a bunch of triangles inside and measurements and using the stuff that he knew to figure out the stuff that he didn't know because he was a fucking mathematician, which is awesome. So, moving right along, this guy, who's name I'm going to mess up, is a few years later, he used a 12,288-agon. You can say, wow. Oh, I forgot to mention earlier on in my slides that there's a drinking game built into this presentation. Every time I say pi, you guys can take a sip. To make things a little more interesting. So 1,480, we have 11 digits of pi. We're doing pretty well. We're moving forward now. 1,424, 16 digits. And now we get to loot off the red nose or the van cooling, who got to 35 digits of pi. Now, as somebody who deals with pi and pi day every single day, I talk about pi every single day of my life. I should tell you guys that that's real. As somebody who does that, I see pi enthusiasts. There's a person here wearing a pi shirt with pi earrings. I see people with pi tattoos. People love pi, pi bumper stickers. But no one's been as much of a die-hard pi fan as this guy. You see what I did there? Die-hard? You know, like that? Sorry. Also, special shout-out to Billy Jones, because Billy Jones would have been a marketing genius today. He's the person responsible for the pi symbol. Up until Billy Jones, it was just a circle constant. They were always trying to figure out squares and circles in their relationship, and that's why they were so obsessed with squares and circles and circle constant. But Billy Jones introduced pi, which is what makes pi day so popular, because pi sounds like pi, and pi is a delicious dessert, Rick. So, the modern era, we have in 73 a million digits of pi. It's a lot of digits of pi. Moving along a billion, a trillion, two trillion, ten trillion digits of pi. No, that's not it. Great question. Please hold on to your questions at the end of the talk. So, the same people who figured out ten trillion digits of pi recently did 12.1 trillion digits of pi. They were waiting around for somebody else to beat their record, and no one was trying, because I don't know why. Why wouldn't you try to get more than ten trillion digits of pi? So, they did themselves, and then they ran out of computer space and stopped at 12.1 trillion. No big deal. Took them 96 days. By then, I mean their computer. So, oh, I should also mention in this, oh no, I have to go through all these things again. So, I should mention in this that it's probably really important to get to like ten trillions or 12.1 trillion digits of pi because we want to be incredibly accurate in our mathematics. When we're developing circles, we want to build things that are super, super accurate, right? If we're going to make a space shuttle go to Mars and never come back, and their houses are going to be built off of mathematics, we want to be very precise. So, we want to use ten trillion digits of pi. It's important. That being said, let's just guess and say like we used 39 digits of pi. Just 39. If we did mathematics using 39 digits of pi, we would get to the accuracy where the error of margin would be the same as the diameter of hydrogen. I said this, but I mean this. Because hydrogen is floating around this room right now, we can't build anything more accurate than the diameter of hydrogen. We don't have those tools at this time. I think 39 places is fine. So, why ten trillion? Why tell twelve trillion? Because we're obsessed with infinities, humans, I think. I really don't know. It's just an obsession. So, pi has some special adjectives associated with it. Transcendental is one of those adjectives and you might be thinking to yourself, oh, so pi goes to Walden Pond every summer and writes essays and grows its own beans. That's really lovely. What I actually mean is that pi is a non-algebraic number. What does that mean, Harvey? Well, what I mean is that there's no way to put pi and algebra as an X and solve for it. So, when you're doing algebra, you can multiply, divide, add, subtract, square things and do square root of things. There's no number that you can take the square root of and get pi. There's no number you can square and get pi. Likewise, all those other operations. So, pi exists outside of algebra. It has some friends like E. You can't celebrate E-day because the math doesn't work for the calendars. But pi, you can, so it's pretty cool. Also, if you're a transcendental number, you're also an irrational number. They go hand in hand. And here's a bunch of words on a screen, so you're going to read those while I talk and get completely ignoring what I'm saying right now. It's going to be confusing. Irrational numbers go on forever. They're non-repeating infinite numbers. We're talking about infinity. Infinity goes on forever and ever, but the thing is that pi is three in a little bit. And between three and four exists pi. So, somewhere between three and four is infinity. That's not very rational, now is it? So, the idea is that it goes on forever and it doesn't ever repeat. And so, that brings us to the topic of our discussion today, which is pi-day. And not just pi-day, but the most significant pi-day of our lifetimes. So, pi-day, as I said, is March 14th, 3, 1, 4. This year is 2015, 3, 1, 4, 1, 5. As I mentioned before, 9, 26, and 53 seconds. 3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9, 2, 6, 5, 3. Now, I'm going to pause right here for a second. And some of you who know about pi are going to maybe say, well, it's a number, and the next number after the 5, 3 is 5. You round up, so why isn't it 5, 4? That's a great question, I'm glad you asked. So, speaking about irrational numbers, what that means is that if you break down the second into a tenth of a second, a hundredth of a second, a thousandth of a second, and you keep going on for one brief glimpse in a few short weeks, we're going to experience the most rational moment of our lifetimes. All of pi is going to happen on March 14th this year. That's why it's the biggest deal ever. 3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9, 2, 6, 5, 3, 5, 8, 9, 7, and so on and so forth. Look at the poster. So, the other thing about this is that this person's tattoo is going to become instantly relevant for one brief glimpse. Same with this person's tattoo. And this person, and also this person's tattoo. And I just like this tattoo, but they probably also like pie too. Because, like, pizza pie, you know? Like, pizza pie, right? Are you guys with me? Yeah. I know you're with me, right? Okay. So, we're going to talk about where Pi Day came from. So, everyone knows about Pi Day these days. Everyone celebrates it like Applebee's or something. You can go and get free slices of pie on Pi Day. The President of the United States of America last year tweeted on Pi Day that he was eating pie. Like, it's an international, well, it's an international holiday for everyone who celebrates month, date, year, holiday. Kind of always. So, at least it's a national holiday. And it actually is a nationally recognized holiday. Congress talked about it and stuff. It's cool. Well, where did it come from? The Exploratorium. The Exploratorium. Thanks for participating in my talk. So, specifically, it came from Get Ready for the Best Slide in my show, you guys. This man! Now, at this point in the conversation, I'm going to remind you guys that this stays in the room, right? We're cool. We're all friends here. Great. Okay. Don't come up on us. So, in case you guys aren't all familiar with the Exploratorium, the Exploratorium is a science museum. It's also a museum dedicated to art and human perception. People who are fascinated with human perception sometimes, what are you laughing about? Like, I was laughing already. Sometimes they have parties, is what I was going to say. And sometimes those parties that they maybe get fucked up. And I don't mean necessarily on the regular things. I'm not saying anybody like Larry Shaw would ever do anything like that. I'm just saying that at one of those staff parties in 1988, there was a group of people, and Larry led them to focus their minds onto a certain space, three and a little bit feet off the ground, and to use their minds to move the energy of that space into a circle. He was really fucked up on drugs. I'm just, it's my guess. I don't know. He maybe was totally sober and just a really cool weirdo guy. I have no idea. I'll just put that out there. The origin of the holiday is that they were all focusing on the space off the floor and moving the energy with their minds, and they decided that that energy needed to place a home, a special shrine. And there it was born, the Pi Shrine of the Exploratorium. And the Pi Shrine existed in the old Exploratorium for many, many years, and now it exists at the new Exploratorium, which is over at Pier 15. I'm not trying to be a promotional guy right now. I'm just letting you guys know location. So in front of Pier 15, here is the Pi Shrine. And we celebrate Pi Day. This is the 27th annual Pi Day, or the three to the third Pi Day, if you're interested. And we celebrate in a variety of ways. One of these ways is by having a Pi procession. So we have about 500 numerals of Pi on sticks, their yardsticks. Most of them aren't measured very well, so they're actually three at all a little bit. Conveniently enough. And then the Pi plates all have the numerals of Pi, and everyone circumambulates the Pi Shrine 3.14 times. And so it's a pretty cool holiday. Like, Obama's into it, the nation's into it, Applebee's into it, whatever. Lots of people like Pi Day. Everyone loves Pi Day, right? Some have said, yeah. That's cool. Who doesn't? So I should tell you guys that tau is the other circle constant. So there's a big thing online, the tau manifesto you saw when Rick was talking. And in case you guys aren't already familiar with tau, I'll tell you what tau is. It's 2 Pi. That's it. Yeah, that's the whole thing right there. It's just 2 Pi. So if you're really into Pi and the number 2, then maybe you'd be into tau. But then you'd just be celebrating 2 Pi, which is still celebrating Pi, but just twice as much. So then basically you're just celebrating Pi Day twice. Which, that's fine. Go ahead and eat 2 pies in June. That's no big deal. Eat 2 pies and celebrate 2 Pi Day. But don't get all pompous and righteous about tau. It is an elegant way to deal with radiance and I will acknowledge that. It's a very elegant mathematical solution to dealing with radiance and education and fantastic for that. But if you're telling me that tau day is better than Pi Day, you're wrong. Because on Pi Day you eat Pi. It's fantastic. You can learn how to throw pizza pies. There's all sorts of wonderful things you can do at the Exploratorium. We still have our roots based on that one cool, weird party. So there's a color association thing where you can string Pi based on colors and numbers. It's kind of weird. Pies for everybody. So Pi Day is one of our free days at the Exploratorium. So everyone can come and celebrate. I'm not telling you that you have to come to the Exploratorium again. I'm not trying to promote the museum where I work. Wherever you are, and this year, at 9, 26, and 53 seconds, both AM and PM, if you celebrate not using a 24-hour clock, is a great opportunity to raise a circular vessel and cheers your friends and hang out with everyone. And I hope that you've learned something interesting and entertaining about Pi during this talk. I would like to say special thanks to Ron Hitchman, a staff scientist at the Exploratorium, who let me kind of pilfer through a little bit of his slide show. If you ever want to hear a really funny talk from somebody who can answer all of your questions, this is the guy. Also, I would be doing a disservice to all of you if I didn't let you also know that it's Einstein's birthday on Pi Day. So, at this point, I'm happy to take any questions. The question was, do I know anything about what they did on Pi Day 1592? Because that was probably a pretty epic Pi Day. That's a great question. Unfortunately, Pi wasn't a term yet until 1700. So, that Pi Day was passed without all of the glory that it deserved. But thank you, that's a great question. Next question. Yes. So, if time is quantized, does that mean that we're not really getting all of the digits on Pi on Pi Day? Wow. That's intense, man. Next question. Oh, that's a great question. The question was, do I have an opinion about people who celebrate on July 22nd? So, I made allusion to the fact that here in the United States of America, we celebrate with the month, and then the day, and then the year, which is kind of weird, because everywhere else, they do it the other way. So, 22 over 7 is a Pi Approximation Day. Which... What was the question? So, the addition to the commentary here is that it's only an approximation. So, 22 over 7 is only a Pi Approximation. But honestly, every Pi, even the 12.1 trillion digits of Pi, is just an approximation. So, it's pretty legit. It's a way for Europeans to celebrate Pi Day, and I appreciate that. Next question. What's on Pi Day? Well, so everyone in the audience is telling me no. But that's reserved for Tau Day. But the thing is, that's actually reserved for June 28th, which is to Pi Day. Because on Tau Day, what do you eat? Tau. Okay. I don't know how much more time I have for questions. Couple of minutes. More questions? Anybody? 3141592653 The question was, what will I be doing at 3141592653? So, there's two of those, because I don't use a 24-hour clock. I use just a regular 12-hour, 12-hour. And so, the first one at 9, 26, and 53 seconds, there's going to be a very special Pi Procession. So, normally on Pi Day, the Pi Procession happens at 159, so it's 314159. But this year, it's already going to be 314159, or 15. So, then at 9, 26, we're going to have a very special Pi Procession. And if any of you are very, very enthusiastic, you can line up early to get into the Exploratorium and join 58 more people who are going to be 314159265358 and have gold-plated Pi Sticks and Circumambulate it, and then eat gold-plated Pi. And then at 9, 26, and 53 seconds, P.M., I'll be drunk. And that's it. Thank you very much. You'll be right up there. We're going to take a 15-minute break before we hear about science on screen, including an interstellar and Thor from Kevin Pickerson. See you then. Welcome back, everyone. I'm Kishore Hari. I run the Bay Area Science Festival, and I'm going to owe people some beers later for those woos. And I really love Nerd Night, and I'm excited to be here tonight to intro our next speaker. How many people here watched the Oscars last night? I think that's a pretty good call, because four hours in, I was like, what is this thing going to be done? But it was a pretty spectacular night for science. This is Julianne Moore, who won Best Actress for her portrayal in Just Alice, which was about an early onset Alzheimer's patient. And she studied with Mary Sano, who is a researcher at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York for the position, and she dedicated it to Alzheimer's patients. And then there's Eddie Redmayne, who won Best Actor for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking. Some physicist, I think? That's pretty awesome right here going on the vomit comment and going zero G, but how fucking baller is this? I didn't have a cane in my wedding photo, but that guy looks sharp. And Eddie Redmayne dedicated that Oscar to ALS patients and Mr. Hawking. This was a huge moment for science. We saw so much excitement and love. You know? All right. The crowd involvement's gotten started early in my laptop. Equal race for women, indeed, I like to think that Meryl Streep was given love to all the science winners that night. It was a spectacular night. This is the first time I remember science being so well meshed with Hollywood. We have great science and celebration of scientists. This is not the science of my youth, where it was a little bit different in Hollywood. Can you guys help me out? Do you remember this movie? Who knows what movie this is? We are in a movie theater. Come on, people. Look at this hat. Yes, okay. I heard the correct answer. This movie did not happen. This is Indiana Jones and the crystal skull or something or other. If you want to know how I actually feel about this movie, there's a really good South Park episode that I've seen it to really, really well. And spoiler alert, this movie sucks. So let's talk a little bit about how science is portrayed in movies of my time. So Indiana Jones sees a nuclear blast and he happens... I can't believe I'm doing this. Alright, so there's nuclear blast and Indiana Jones is in a house and he's like, oh, what do I do? So luckily there's a refrigerator that has a lead lining and I love the close up where it's like lead line refrigerator. So he hops in it and takes out the orange and banana. Why are they keeping a banana in a refrigerator? It hops in and nuclear blast has sort of three zones of danger. That is a weird statement. So there's an initial blast and then there's the actual shockwave and then there's the radiation. So he survives the initial blast which just burns people outside to death. But the shockwave then propels the refrigerator at 200 miles an hour and if you...this is a great infographic, this is the best of the genre, where Indy has to goes weightless at this point because he's traveling so fast and so hangs with the weightlessness. This is the time he passes by the Russian car who had left him in this town, the bad guys because he's going 200 miles an hour. By the way, the blast wave is like going at 620 miles an hour, so that doesn't work. And then he flattens himself against the side of the refrigerator as he realizes he's coming in for a landing bounces a couple times and then rolls out to safety. My favorite is George Lucas said in an interview that there's a 50-50 shot of this actually working. The man that brightened Jar Jar Brinks. Oh right. And if you want to relive this moment, Shyke So Collectibles has made a dramatic action figure. I don't recommend this toy. But that's not my favorite bad science moment the movies. Who recognizes this quote? And my favorite part of this quote is you know what makes it sciencey? It's theoretically. When you add theoretically to the end of anything that gives it a lot of science credibility. What movie is this from? The Core. Yes, sadly it's from this movie The Core. The Core is a movie set back science in this country about 3.1415 decades. Any more digits to that would be welcome. Basically the idea is that the Earth's magnetic field is collapsing because the center core is stopped spinning and now solar radiation is going to come penetrate the lack of magnetic field and harm us specifically microwave radiation. There's one significant problem with this. I know there's a little bit more than one I'm going to get to 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Number one is that microwave radiation already kind of penetrates the magnetic field. It's not actually affected by the magnetic shielding so it just already comes through. But their portrayal of it was that the magnetic field magnetic rays which if anyone knows about electromagnetic radiation not visible and then of course because movies appears over the Golden Gate Bridge and melts it? I don't know. I don't understand what happened here. But that's what happened in a weak spot. But microwave radiation which is not it's just a form of electromagnetic radiation doesn't actually isn't affected by a magnetic field so that's wrong. Also if you actually calculated which these writers did not it wouldn't have reached the Earth with any strength that would have affected people on the ground. But let's talk about the whole like oh we have to jump start the heart of the Earth which stops spinning. So they build they build that drill and by the way it's called the Virgil. This is about as high resolution of a graphic as you can get on the Virgil because people want to forget this. And so they use the unobtainium in the shell to like capture the heat and pressure and turn it into energy because that's a thing. And they go down there the real problem with this is that if the Earth's core just stops spinning all that energy goes somewhere and so the Earth's core stops spinning if it stops spinning all that energy would like shift out into the planet's surface. So our issue wouldn't be the magnetic it would be that the Earth would just break the fuck apart from all of that energy. But you know the core but here but tonight we're here to celebrate science on the screen getting it right because we're back in the in the 21st century and thankfully we'll never remember this movie or that what was it fourth Indiana Jones movie? I beg to forget about that. So please welcome the stage to tell us about science on the screen. Kevin Peter Hickerson who's a scientist at UCLA and a stand up comedian. That was a great introduction right there. I'm going to talk about science in Hollywood in particular some of my favorites topics black holes wormholes time warps that sort of thing but first I'm going to talk about me because that's actually my favorite topic so I'm a physicist I study particle physics neutrinos dark matter that sort of thing at UCLA I also do a lot of stand up comedy I normally tell dick and fart jokes but you guys thank you it was the first guy that's awesome when you guys look like a really smart crowd you're here to be not just be entertained but to learn something am I right? So you probably want to hear more like enus and flatulence jokes am I right? I'll use big words a little bit more about me sorry I forgot this is important I have three degrees from Caltech because it's kind of like you know how some guys get like sports cars because they feel a little insecure it's like that with me in degrees so I've been a science consultant for a couple of movies I've done this through something called the science and entertainment exchange which is do you guys hear me better when I do that? oh yeah more intimate than I'm used to so the science and entertainment exchange is run out of UCLA and one of the things they do is they try and make movies like The Core not happen ever again and so far interstellar has been I think the greatest accomplishment that they've really worked on but there's a lot of other previous accomplishments one of the movies I worked on was Thor and even though that's a movie about a a god he still tried to make it as scientifically accurate as possible alright so you might wonder what my credentials for giving this talk today about interstellar are not very much except that I took general relativity science theory of gravity from this guy I kept form I was lucky enough to have one of the last few classes from him and he was an amazing teacher and it was an absolute privilege to do that here's a picture of me and a guy who later went on to teach the class and some people have called him one of the 10 smartest people in the world he was like half my age at the time and you can just in case you can't tell I'm the guy with the mouth breather right there I mean this captures everything right there we're doing homework from Kip's class in this picture here Chris Harada Professor Chris Harada yeah I was riding a bike and then I broke my cast thank you for drawing attention to that that adds a lot to the tonight's topic I just put this in I think I put this slide in just like hey I'm probably going to want to talk with myself more but I pretty much covered it already so okay so I worked on Thor one of the great things is that they didn't just want the movie to be scientifically accurate they really wanted to promote science as part of like a feature of the movie in particular in the original comic book Natalie Portman's character Jane Foster was a nurse and a suggestion by Sean Carroll who was also a science advisor in the early stages of Thor I was a science advisor in the later stages that they said hey why don't you make her like a real scientist and it makes more sense why she would be looking for a hammer in the desert and they thought that was great and in the sequel Natalie even went on to really promote this as like a way to say that women can be in the sciences and that actually really worked I think that's all I'm told okay so mostly what I did was set decoration and a little bit of improving the details of Natalie's character and one of the things I did was I set up the entire the lab that they worked in I'll tell you more about the backstory a little bit but the first thing I mentioned to them is the lab has to be dirty like every time I saw Hollywood movies you're just like oh this is a well-funded lab so everything's like glass and lasers and stainless steel fridges and everything you know it looks like it's like a decoration picture from my key or something and in reality everything's messy there's just tools everywhere because you're trying to get to the science you're not trying to clean up so I think this is a good example of them doing that they followed my advice there okay so what was what are they actually looking for in Thor so the main idea was that similar to interstellar they were looking for something called wormholes which in the movie they call Einstein-Rosenbridge which that comes that wording comes from Sean Carroll but a more accurate name for it is actually called Thorn Morse bridge and the reason is that it's a little different is that Einstein-Rosenbridge was an observation made way before wormholes were really explored theoretically and it just showed that if you take a certain black hole solution to Einstein field equations you can get this Einstein-Rosenbridge and Albert Einstein and Rosen called it that but then Kip Thorne the science advisor for interstellar went and said well what if we actually what if we actually just sort of bend that space around what kind of conditions do we need around the throat of that so that's he wrote a paper about that many decades ago and it became a Thorn Morse bridge oh okay so here was my backstory so I was just kind of handed this like oh by the way Thorne shows up in a wormhole so deal with it and I thought well I'm an experimentalist so what would I do if I was trying to find a wormhole and the thing I thought was like well the most likely case is that it was designed by some advanced technology so it's going to be giving off radiation that's more advanced than we normally hear about so like the Hulk is generated by gamma rays that's old school so I wanted to be something new and I wanted to base it on something that we're doing nowadays and one of the things we're doing is looking for dark matter and we haven't found it yet but dark matter is a theoretical particle that can be detected by a very sensitive detector so my idea was well hey so Natalie Portman was looking for dark matter as part of her research and she found way too much of it and it was all coming from New Mexico so there are only two options aliens no wait Thor's an alien so aliens by the way I drew that one I didn't draw that one that's from the comic and when I showed this to Marvel they're kind of like oh wow what do you want us to do with that that's the nurse right there so that's her nurse name tag okay so that's Jane Foster and then this is her dark matter detector okay so before I show you my version of that let me tell you a little bit about dark matter okay so we particle physicists have a really awesome theory called the standard model of particle physics the reason I have to say a particle physics is because other sciences have been like oh that's a cool thing so we're going to call our thing the standard model and ours is like the real standard model but occasionally we have to call it the standard model of particle physics and this includes everyday matter like on the bottom row so this is the stuff that makes up neutrons and protons the things that almost everything in this room is made up of and of course our friend the electron it's also made up of the thing that I studied most in my favorite little particle the electron neutrino but then at places like the LHC they can make the large hadron clutter they can make all these other things up atop and then of course finally they have the Higgs boson that was the last piece of the standard model yeah it was right so thank you thank you I had nothing to do with it but I like your applause so unfortunately though this doesn't explain a lot of things it doesn't explain gravity there's no gravity in this model and it also doesn't explain huge chunk of the universe called dark matter and when I say huge chunk of the universe I mean most of the matter that we see when in the orbit of the galaxies and things like that it cannot be explained by anything in this entire table that we can make at the LHC so one of the ways we can tell that is when we watch galaxies they rotate in a way that looks a lot like they contain far more matter than is visible so you can go and count up all the stars and they simply rotate together like the entire galaxy almost rotates like a solid object and that's not the way the planets on the solar system rotate so there's something hiding in this galaxy and even more good evidence is that gravity as I'll talk a little bit later acts like a lens on light and when you go and peer out at distant galaxies we see this lensing effect the lensing effect can't be explained by the visible matter so we know that something is causing gravity to lens this light but we can't actually see what it is okay so I was like hey let's mix those two they also they wanted it to be related to Thor's hammer too but like in a if you weigh it's like oh yeah throw in the hammer so I was like okay so this seems perfect like there's alien technology and there's alien technology behind Thor's hammer which has all sorts of amazing properties like you know only the worthy can pick it up and stuff like that so I said these would all be things that she could detect with her dark matter experiment mostly because I'm the closest to people with those detectors and I'm like yeah if aliens show up it's gonna be okay so this is one of the things I built for the lab so I picked out a bunch of electronics that we really use in real physics experiments and I built this thing this was so awesome this is actually the main thing underneath is covered in tape right here but the main thing the main structure was a fuel tank from the Apollo era and it was made out of some sort of unobtainium like stuff because I tried drilling holes into it and it was like impossible and I don't know what they had back then but it's probably still classified but it was amazing anyway it made a great profit and I glued things to it okay so so what I decided is I wanted this to be a liquid xenon detector and I called it that it was like oh this is a liquid xenon detector and the reason is because that's actually the basis of real dark matter detectors and where I work and do my research not in dark matter but on something related to the neutrinos I work in a laboratory that's about a mile underground I did the ice bucket challenge speaking of ALS I did the world's deepest ice bucket challenge and like 50 people saw the video and liked it or watched it world record no attention but it probably didn't help that I did like a month after anybody gave a shit about the ice bucket challenge but maybe now the new Oscar for the theory of everything will help I don't know or maybe once it's hot again then people will be into that so this is actually a real dark matter experiment this is called a xenon one ton it's a very very big version of what I was basing Jane Foster's experiment on and you might say like hey Kevin how come you're in all these pictures of the detector do you ever take like a picture that's not a selfie in front of the detector and he says no I don't do that okay so here's more stuff where oh there's the detector back there that's like their lab okay and here's a great shot of the detector ladies ladies pay attention it's right here it's the blurry thing in the background my wife loves this good job okay okay so I talked about Thor that's old news now I'm going to talk about the science of interstellar so as I mentioned the only qualifications I have for that are that I know Kip Thorne anybody else know Kip Thorne anyone you do because no you don't know oh cool that's great okay so let me just warn you two things again number one I'm going to spoil a plot yeah sorry and number two is I really really really love this movie a lot and I know that this is a very polarizing movie like some people loved it and then just randomly people hated it because they hate earth but I thought it was great and I was so proud that Kip worked on this okay one of the greatest things about this movie is it had an amazing amount of black hole eye candy and what's so cool about this is that Kip Thorne actually wrote a lot of software and equations to simulate this black hole as realistically as he could now just to warn you a little bit Christopher Nolan did turn back a little bit of his calculations because it was like too awesome so the science was like like America's not ready for that like interstellar two level stuff so like one of the things is his equations showed that if the black hole is spinning really fast that it couldn't be it wouldn't look round and Christopher was like it needs to look round because we don't have a lot of time to explain why it doesn't look round so look out for that in the sequel okay so what is a black hole? it's a lot like a warm hole except that if you go away and you don't come out and you've probably seen these pictures it's kind of like this picture is a little not completely realistic because they always show it as a 2D slice and the reality is it's happening in three dimensions and just what was that guy's name? straw? who was your boss? Larry Shaw if you want to visualize three dimensions from a two dimensional picture talk with Larry Shaw pretty sure you could hook that up okay but this is a very helpful diagram for seeing what happens to light around a black hole so one of the things that because space itself is warped light actually takes a different path that goes along the curve and oh man I hate to do this I hate to do this but one of the things General Relativity says is that the diameter of a sphere to the circumference is not pi I probably should have been scheduled in a different week but that's one of the coolest things that happens because General Relativity is a theory of non-Euclidean geometry and yeah so that's one of the reasons why light goes in that path is because it's not that light is feeling the force of gravity because it doesn't have mass so it doesn't feel it gravity is actually bent space so that it takes the shortest path but in this case it's not a straight line anymore and that was stuff that Einstein did so another fun thing is this is actually the 100th anniversary of the black hole it was discovered by some guy named some Schwarzschild I don't remember his first name I'm just trying to think of German names I don't hate off that probably lost popularity but he actually solved it in the trenches of World War I and this is the 100th anniversary of him solving that it was not Einstein who solved it he just came up with the problem and he left that for the penons so one of the things so light bends around and then if it gets too close it actually gets sucked in one of the equations that Kip put into the interstellar simulations to make it look awesome was that when you look at a black hole you're not just seeing the black hole you're seeing its interaction with light and everything so one of the demos you can actually see this on the internet but I'll just play it here this is an example of some of the solutions that Kip and the video effects team came up with being distorted by the path of light around a black hole and a lot of astronomers didn't even represent this it's not that they didn't know this was happening it's just like if you go and look at old representations of a black hole by science documentaries or astronomers they didn't really show it that way anyway the county was thrilled about this I'm like I don't know what the earlier was awesome last night oh okay well those guys you can look it up whatever and so at the academy awards they actually honored Kip Thorn by saying and thanks to the smartest people on earth you and one of the smartest people on earth Professor Kip Thorn of Caltech and all the explorers of science group I'm trying to figure out a way that I deserved their award you know it's amazing and terrifying beauty I don't know why they had to throw in the terrifying part and then we can go get some beer so some of this stuff so what was really awesome I don't have a little summary of it I didn't have time to throw that in but a paper came out about last week an actual scientific paper about the work on interstellar because these were actually very useful results for astronomers who are trying to observe black holes and I don't think in history there's been a movie that has the potential to win an Oscar and a Nobel Prize I'm not saying that Kip's work so far is going to be win a Nobel Prize but you know it's still pretty nice so one of the things I had to deal with is that a lot of people were objected to some of the science very quickly and I got into some tweet wars with some prominent scientists about this because since I took Kip's class I was very aware of what he was thinking when he did this because a lot of those problems that show up in interstellar are actually were like homework problems in his class like even like for example when one of the characters falls through the event horizon of the black hole a lot of people said oh he'd be crushed at the horizon well that was actually a homework problem in Kip's class he said how big would a black hole have to be to not crush somebody when they fall through the horizon and I knew that it was 10,000 solar masses and they stated very clearly in the movie that this was called the gargachua it was a super massive black hole so other people said well the planet would be torn apart well Kip actually wrote a lot of papers about the tidal forces on a planet and that was demonstrated really cool in this tsunami that they had in the movie and some people said well that tsunami didn't look very particularly realistic this is actually a real computer simulation that was done before the movie about how tsunamis appear when they go on shallow land and they looked pretty much like everything yeah is there a vote? can we vote? yeah like one guy raised his hand alright do you vote again? oh okay okay so I'm going to tell you a little bit about the event horizon that I just referenced oh oh oh sorry before we go further I flew it from LA and they sell Oscars there and so I wanted to get Kip a present because I don't think he gets an actual Oscar he totally deserves it and this says world's greatest super star and that's the closest thing I could find to world's largest super massive black hole simulation guy so I want to thank all the little people at the Burbank airport okay so okay so let me tell you a little bit of what an event horizon is the event horizon is the place on a black hole where nothing can go slower than the speed of light and where time effectively stops and just to give you an idea of how that would work with earth right now we're stuck to the earth but the center of the earth is actually 4,000 miles below our feet so we're nowhere near the horizon the event horizon of the earth so there's just stuff taking up room so we don't get to see that because it's simply not dense enough but if you did shrink the earth down it would be about the size of a coin that's the event horizon diameter of a coin and it would be really obvious why being sucked into one of those would be really unpleasant I mean just imagine right now if a coin was here because all of my body was pulled into it it's very obvious that would be really painful but then you could do something like the sun so the sun also could be crushed down to a point and if it did it's event horizon would be about the size of San Francisco now it's not as obvious but it turns out if you calculate it it would still actually be very unpleasant you'd have an experience called spaghettification your entire body would be stretched out all the atoms going all like in a line it would be okay but then there's something that we know now is at the center of basically every galaxy we can see which is called a supermassive black hole there's one at the center of our galaxy it's called Sagittarius A star I don't know why it has that long name but it's 4 million solar masses so it's enormous and that one actually it's radius is very very big and you actually can fall through the event horizon and not be spaghettified in the horizon you'll still get spaghettified as you fall in but you get to at least break a record on the way in so this is so this black hole was discovered by an astronomer at UCLA using the Keck telescopes in Hawaii and the way it was discovered is it's hard to look for black holes because they're black they don't give off very much light and so what she did is she looked for the path of stars moving around something and all the stars at the center of our galaxy all rotate around some point that's invisible and that's a great model for that's basically what a black hole is and it's located at this spot and we can aim our telescopes at it and in particular this star S2 whips around it all the time very quickly and it just takes we know that there's something there it's very straightforward what's going on there so okay now we're dealing with astronomers about the depiction of black holes in her cellar one of the things I pointed out is why don't you go out and explain what the hell's going on with ours because a lot of weird things were happening while this movie was coming out that was so great that this happened if you're following black hole physics you'd be like whoa what a coincidence this is a simulation of an event that was supposed to happen and everyone thought they knew it was going to happen but it was an event horizon of Sagittarius A star it was supposed to give off this huge burst of light and gas and nothing happened and while this movie was coming out if you were saying interstellar didn't do this right there was actually real science not doing it right at the same time and so the reason that's exciting is just like black holes are actually really an important part of modern astronomy so it has a lot of work to do okay so thank you very much I'm Kevin Hickerson you can Facebook me or listen to my tweet kind of like this but stretched over weeks and weeks okay thank you I guess I'll take questions oh that's a good question can you read it? oh yeah the question is if a black hole is bigger it should be going to find you more and part of the cool that's a really good question part of what's cool about black holes is the center of the black hole is a point so making it bigger or smaller doesn't matter it's only the field around it that represents the mass of black hole so in terms of going into the black hole that makes sense no matter what size it is it's going to get specified but title forces if you calculate the title forces of it of an object a gravitational object it's like 1 over r squared so for example if the moon were twice as close to the earth our tides would be four times as big but the event horizon of black hole goes like radius so the bigger the mass of the black hole the more mass that has fallen in it grows linearly so you actually get less title forces at the event horizon so the main thing that's happening is that you're further away from the black hole when those title forces affect you and the reason I mentioned the earth radius is just because I was trying to show the visual representation of how that works it's very clear why if something's this big if my entire body were squeezed into it it'd be very unpleasant whereas if there was a black hole that was let's say it's a short child radius was the size of the earth approximately flat so there's not as much squeezing me inward does that work? I'll figure it there's one up there to be fair my job is usually pretty boring day to day and it would make a bad movie an important part of storytelling is that it's science fiction because it's the fiction that makes it exciting and that's true of whether it's science or not science it doesn't make sense, science fiction is usually an exploration of what if, what if this happens so an important what if in Interstellar was if wormholes can even exist and actually if you go and ask more scientists they'll say probably not but we don't know that they can so you wouldn't say that the law was broken because we don't have any evidence one way or the other it's just probably that doesn't happen but what's beautiful about the way the movie is set up is you can look at it as like almost 50-50 and I think somebody said that about Indian shows I was thinking like damn that's what I was going to say about Interstellar it's 50-50 but I mean really the reason that's important is there's two ways this movie could have happened way one is the movie could have been about the blight that just kills off humanity and that's a depressing movie I mean and it would have been really short but like it said it was okay we're gonna you know what if this whole sequence of events happens what if wormholes are possible then the movie can happen so I'm okay with movies exploring something where it really gets you is when it's just like oh come on like a third grader knows that can happen and you know like the core I know I yeah I think it will be better I mean the fact that I'm invited to give this talk there's a great example no I mean yeah that's true you guys are nerds but when I talk to comics who aren't necessarily nerds for example like this movie was really amazing to a lot of people and it really sparked an interest in science and so that like I can give you an example here's an anecdote so a guy at the UCLA is a science advisor for the Big Bang Theory and so he takes one of his colleagues once and as I was lucky enough to get to go and these high school kids came backstage afterwards and there was flanking on Leonard's name the guy who plays Leonard what's that Johnny Galecki was there and the high school kids just ran over to me and the advisor and just started asking us about CERN or good stuff and we're just like we were blown away and I even asked I was like so confused like don't you guys get beat up and stuff like when I was a kid they're just like no man like no being a nerd is super awesome so I thought that was awesome and Hollywood knows that now so let's I just keep thinking it's gonna like I'm gonna wake up and it's not gonna be true and I'm gonna be pantsed oh yeah yeah two more ah okay because dark matter does not interact with regular matter very often that sounds like a good question for another talk that I give sometimes on dark matter nutrients but I'll answer it here so oh oh I'm sorry sorry the question was why is looking underground a good place to look for dark matter the reason is because dark matter is very very weakly interacting or at least we think it is so we know that it doesn't interact with everyday matter normally the problem is right now you're being irradiated by particles from space particles from the stuff that's been mined the concrete a lot of us don't realize that we're being irradiated all the time but if you're a particle physicist you're like scared of crap like concrete you're like holy shit there's a lot of stuff so the only place to go an analogy I heard this really good is imagine like there's a loud party on the surface and you're trying to hear a pin drop so you're just gonna go underground underground to the basement until that pin drop is not drained out by the party above and so the only way to do that is you go away underground last question you don't have three questions the plot with what oh yeah that's kind of the point of my talk that's what I'm saying it's weird but yeah that stuff is like what's possibly possible I mean we don't know okay well okay the feedback on the feedback on my analogy there are two options the two options are one humanity dies the second object the second option is that we learn how to manipulate gravity and multiple dimensions and we already know there's really good evidence there's probably at least one extra dimension and even if there isn't space and time does work and once you realize that that can happen if you think about the kind of inventions that you could do if you understood those laws you could do something like build the test rack where you have a bookshelf that represents multiple dimensions in a certain way to tie an interstellar with Thor one of the things they say in Thor is they say they quote I think they say that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic so to me if you can build a wormhole you can build a bookshelf interface that swipes left and right or something so you can ask Kevin more questions you can sort of follow the radius 10 right there we're going to take a short break but I want to make sure everyone has a chance to check out the Oakland Public Library right there Mona's ready to issue cards has a reading list which is kind of like buried in the new layout so please check that out we'll be back in like seven minutes with a talk about starting hey everybody sorry to cut your break short but we want to get on with our show get your asses in the seats alright this is really exciting a lot of these talks are very relevant to my interest yeah I I love pie the food not going to get into it but if you get a chance to track me down you should ask me about my universal theory of pie the food and also obviously I like Thor I love comic books if you know me at all and movies that's one of my master's degrees he's in cinema so yeah it's all very interesting to me but of course also relevant to my interest is urine as a human being I do urinate as I'm sure many of you know what you may not know and I just learned this evening is that the greek letter pie in greek is actually pronounced he he so before I begin just a little warning I'm going to be talking a little bit about pie so as the speaker I'm introducing um and not just like I'm not really talking about the chemistry and science of it I'm talking about some stuff that's a little gross just FYI you're super sensitive yeah okay so um well okay so um he has many uses and that's what I want to focus on a little bit or has had many uses over history um so the urea in urine when stored for long periods of time turned into ammonia and that's great for cleaning so if you were here last month which I hope you were you heard me talk about emperor vispasian his urine taxes p-tax there were p-collectors that used to go and collect urine from the public urinals and sell it and they were taxed on it um and uh just led to the apparently widespread saying money doesn't stink that I never heard before I researched that but um the question is why were they collecting people's pee doesn't seem entirely self-evident so apparently it was used for a number of things one of which was laundry so that's what we're seeing here this is uh from a painting uh found on the wall of a felonica which is a laundry um and this is a different version of the same painting they they watched their laundry and peed literally like literally these are people stepping in that p to clean people's laundry um yeah what else do we have oh okay so tanneries pee was also used in the treatment of leather um so this photograph has special importance to me because this is from Fez, Morocco um this is a leather tannery that has been in operation for basically a millennium um and is still using the same techniques that used in the 11th century and I visited here uh during my study abroad here and um it stinks like so much worse than you can possibly imagine uh because they they still use urine um the uh the high pH of urine breaks down material making it the perfect substance for use in softening and tanning animal hides um and it also makes it easier to remove the hair and hide from the skin so one of the first steps in ancient tanning techniques was to soak the animal hides in urine and if you ever get a chance to go to Fez, Morocco and visit here they'll give you like a sprig of mint to hold to your face to try to um avoid having to smell what it smells like there um and also our tour guide kept making jokes about how if we didn't tip him well enough to work in the tannery so it's not like uh very highly regarded work because of the odor lastly yes teeth whitening apparently the Romans yeah yeah okay yeah uh use urine for this purpose this is from a famous poem by uh catalyst the Roman poet um criticizing a Spaniard name Ignatius um in which he notes that uh the dude smiles too much because he wants to show off his white teeth obtain from washing them with piss okay so okay you're like oh be gross but that's the ancient Romans like don't google urine and teeth cleaning because it's not just the ancient Romans people are doing this alright are you sufficiently grossed out I know if you are because here to talk a lot more about urine from a scientific perspective we have Lee Bishop how are you feeling tonight that is good to hear alright things are gonna get weird so I um yeah I'm gonna talk to you about some stuff that it's gonna be it will come clear what's gonna happen as it happens so uh I'm gonna tell you the last time I've given this talk was to children but I figure some like drunk adults are pretty much the same so I'm gonna start it out just the same so I'm gonna I like to build things is like how that's like this is me growing up stacking uh stuff on my kitchen table and he constructs fans in the house yes yes awesome more than awesome more than Legos you can build bigger stuff faster and so I really like geometrical shapes and stuff like this and I also love to play with like dirt and rocks and breaking rocks in half and seeing like what's on the inside and breaking it half again and see what's on the inside again and like yeah I also to this day love staring at fire it is my favorite thing to do around the campfire especially uh so because of this I became a scientist and I can make some other fucking pink fire up here so this is yeah and the specific kind of scientist here's when you realize that I've tricked you into coming to a talk about chemistry because I am a chemist this is the kind of thing that I love to do this is an upper left hand corner this is right now this is the stuff that is chemical in your head that allows you to see things this is uh and in uh the lower left there's uh pine piney and I think is the thing it was like what goes into your nose when you walk through a pine forest which is so nice and then uh hydrogen sulfide is the the fart chemical it's in the bottom anyone know what the upper right one is any biologists in the house this is chlorophyll in the upper right hand corner this is the thing that makes everything green makes the whole world turn around so I love chemicals so let's talk a little bit about what the hell chemicals are so chemicals indeed are the things you've seen in the lab like colored chemicals that are like bubbling and all this crazy stuff chemicals are also are also the cleaners there are no non chemical cleaners ever in existence ever anywhere there are there there's dirt dirt is a chemical um the the pure water and clouds and skies and balloons and trees are all chemicals this cat this cute as cat and all other living beings are made 100% of chemicals so that is high on chemistry because everything is made of chemicals so alright so in addition to this one main thing that is chemicals that is relevant to tonight's talk p is also 100% chemicals so we are going to talk a little bit more about chemicals so this story for real starts when I was I got up one morning I just I lived in Madison Wisconsin the story starts in Wisconsin I was started Nerdite Madison there and I got up one morning I saw my pee and I was just like this pee is more yellow than other pees that I've had before and so this and I was just like alright I've noticed this before I've never really bothered to figure out what the answer is to this and and so I was just like this really bothered me there's this gotta be a yellow chemical inside there that is like somehow explaining this alright so I was just like well I just I'm just gonna Google this and that's what it's so that the first question here is like why is P yellow but this is kind of broadens out into a bigger question like what the hell what the hell is P made of what is in it so the first thing do anyone have any guesses about the main thing in P come on softball water right what goes in must come out so factor number number one P contains water there will be a quiz later there will be a quiz later so the other things in P pretty easy to look up the main constituents of P you look at this you look at this list of P and I could just look at this knowing the shit that I know from spending too long in chemistry class and see that not a single one of these are yellow there's not a one of them that are yellow I'm just like well that's kind of weird so but then it turns out that when you dissolve things like a colored chemical in anything it's like doesn't take much of it to give it a real big chemical color so it's just it just it happens that there's a yellow chemical in there just in a very small concentration so it took a little digging to find out it's just so it turns out that P is yellow for the same reason that your blood is red which is pretty crazy so yeah your your your the magic shift that happens in your body your body does the most amazing chemistry turns your red P into red blood into yellow P so I'm gonna dwell on this for just a second so the the blue things are all when you see alternating single and double bonds when you see that this is the chemistry thing that you're gonna learn coming away from this when you see that things are gonna have colors to them you have alternating single and double bonds you're gonna have some colors and if you fuck with those double bonds you're going from here with some double bonds and you mess with the double bonds and going to the right so what your body does you take those double bonds it breaks this ring open and like fucks with the double bonds you make yellow P so you turn the red molecule this he molecule looks a lot like chlorophyll pretty cool turns it into this like yellow molecule so that's what happens in your body and it turns out to be the same thing that happens when you when you poop this same thing goes into goes into your in your colon which has much less oxygen so it kind of changes the oxidation of this molecule just changes color into brownish which is pretty cool but poop is another topic entirely so when you wake up in the morning and your pee is intensely yellow it turns out just what you've been doing all night is you've just been breaking down pee all you've been breaking down he molecules all night but you've not hopefully if things are going well been peeing them out and so another thing another reason I'm sure you're familiar with why your pee can become yellow is because you're taking a lot of vitamins so it turns out the two main culprits for your pee being super yellow vitamin B2 and B12 anyone notice the alternating single and double bonds in these so these are both intensely colored one more like a little bit vitamin B12 is red orangeish I got some grant money to buy these which is pretty cool talking about that later but then these just like you just take assholes of these when you're taking the vitamins pretty neat so it turns out yellow is not the only color your pee pee can be it can also be orange which is pretty nuts one reason that's going to be this maybe unfamiliar is you take these various antibiotics there's two kinds one of them right here alternating single and double bonds rifampicin this antibiotic you just need to take a lot of it and it just kind of gets washed out into the pee and it can turn into orange which is pretty cool another one that is my favorite I always forget that I had beats for dinner until the following morning and I can let your pee turn pee in your poop because it comes out in your poop too and you see the alternating single and double bonds yeah and that's the beautiful chemical that is in there so orange but that's not the only one it doesn't stop there it gets weirder green is another color and this comes from methylene blue you might say blue why did you just say blue isn't that pee green blue but when you mix it with the yellow pee blue plus yellow I'm pretty sure it equals green I'm pretty sure I fact-checked that one recently I don't know why they don't give this to the people anymore for malaria so I don't know where this picture comes from but somewhere on the internet but this is my favorite purple pee purple pee in people so crazy not only because it's purple another reason this is my favorite is because this comes from an infection in your bladder which is really cool and they take these two molecules these doxal sulfates and link them together and make indigo indigo this was like 7th century BC this chemical that they discovered this and it's made in the same fashion it was made by the people who discovered it in the 7th century in the same fashion as the bacteria that colonized the bladder of purple pee in people which is pretty nuts so the same exact thing so cool so purple pee alright so your pee can be a lot of colors we've kind of answered a little bit about color and we haven't mentioned anything about smell so I was also wondering kind of like what happened why things smelled why pee has kind of a just you know it over a certain kind of characteristic pee odor so I decided at being a good scientist to do some very poorly controlled first preliminary experiments so the results of this experiment were inconclusive there was no control group so and again waft never directly inhaled so let's talk a little bit about how smell works first so in order for things to get into your nose they need to come out of the liquid and go into your nose so in order for you to smell things you need to come out of the liquid and into your nose so when people fart the chemicals that were in their butts are now in go into your nose so that's what happens when you smell a fart and that's the same thing when you smell pee when you look at kind of this mixture of chemicals that is pee it's only the small chemicals that are going to in general kind of come out of the liquid and go into your nose so let's look back at our list of things that are small that are in pee there's water you don't really smell water I don't know why I talked to a biologist but there is ammonia there's NH3, just four atoms small, very small so ammonia is one of the primary constituents that gives pee its smell but there's also plenty of other things there's like a paint thinner chemical, toluene these are in very small quantities smell is just very we're very good at smelling stuff it turns out and like this almond flavor stuff this nail polish remover stuff these kind of all come together that gives like a species specific smell to each kind of chemical so like cats have kind of like another specific chemical in there that gives it the cat pee smell talk to me about that later smell really complicated but one of the main things that gives pee its smell is ammonia so why is ammonia in there well ammonia is in there to get rid of nitrogen but the main thing that is in there to get rid of nitrogen mainly is urea than ammonia so why is urea in there, why are we need to get rid of nitrogen well because what comes in must go out so we have, we take in the nitrogen from beef and other vegetable protein or whatever you like to eat and it comes in and it's got to go out via urea so this brings us to fact to remember number two for the night pee contains nitrogen so pack that one away folks alright so we have had lots of questions about pee and did like some google searching and a lot of just obsessive writing and talking and did got some answers about pee there's lots of things up here I'm not going to go through all of them but this kind of I just want to kind of go through this is similar to the way in which kind of ancient humans looked at the earth and were just like what the fuck is happening with this I don't know what anything is made of I don't understand anything what is this fire what is this air what is this earth what is this water is it are these the four main elements of life and I'm going to come up with some crazy ass theories that have to do with like alchemy and all this other stuff the only thing I know about this what's the coolest thing on this we'll see 69 on there number 69 hopefully you guys are drunk enough to appreciate that it sounds like it so but alchemy gets a real bad rap but they really started off trying to figure out what the hell anything is made of and so the Royal Society of Chemistry I have a Royal Society of Chemistry t-shirt filming me that like it has all these alchemical symbols on it very respected organization right now but kind of has its roots in alchemy so this is the beginnings of people trying to figure out what shit is made of or what piss is made of because that's what they that's what they started off with because when you're doing experiments you're doing eventually they started writing stuff down in ways that people could repeat which is very important and so but they also needed something reproducible to start with that everyone could get their hands on and that was pee that they really started with so this goes back to the enlightenment this is some early very ancient pee chemistry they start with just buckets of pee because there's also they have like lots of it on hand because they have like cows and horses and all this stuff and they just collect buckets of pee from cows and horses this is straight up how it's done and they let it they let it age until they didn't write it down too well their experimental sections were not excellent back in the day but they did it out do you take buckets of pee and you let it sit until it gets worms this is what they said and so that's when you know it's done when there's worms going into pee you're ready to move on to the next step and the next step are very I'm going to talk about them a little bit but they eventually get phosphorus from pee the stuff that glows the stuff that that's all this is actually phosphorus thank you yes phosphorus bands in the house this is the stuff this is phosphorus chemiluminescing phosphorus does not force phosphorus bummer yeah but you take more importantly 121 gallons of pee and get one gram of phosphorus one paperclips worth of phosphorus so very inefficient process if you want to get phosphorus but not bad for 1700s or 1600s and so what is going on here so let's talk this is the picture of the dude headache brand discovering this he's like kind of kneeling around this retort or this is a collection collection vessel here and he's seeing the phosphorus react with the oxygen and create this beautiful white light and this is yeah so awesome he's just like freaking the fuck out some shit that's happening so where did this phosphorus come from how can you make phosphorus for pee let's go back to our hand in any chart the things that are in phosphorus there are phosphates in the things are in P there are phosphates in P so how do you turn phosphates into P you've got to get rid of those pesky oxygen you can and because atoms are not created or destroyed you have to just kind of move them to something else the thing that they do there are small amounts of like these organic chemicals in P and you kind of swap them but let's talk about the setup first you have sand and the P syrup and you just heat the shit or rather the piss out of that and then you kind of collect it in the collection it kind of just distills over and you collect it in the collection flask so what's going on there I'm not going to stay on this long so don't freak out but basically you've got the sodium and the oxygen just kind of swap places and they go on to some of the organic stuff that's in carbon and some of the sand so really crazy reaction very inefficient not the way you do it today but eventually you get phosphorus out in the end which is pretty cool so this brings us to fact to remember number three of the last fact to remember P contains phosphorus so write it down alright so this we're getting on to my favorite stuff here this will melt your minds I promise so this is Herman Bohob he discovered so the polyvalor chemistry done on P he discovered urea he isolated urea from P and the way that he did that was took a bunch of P I don't know how much exactly let it sit for a year this is a patient P P chemist here and he and then he was just like and then he got some liquid at the end he was like oh I guess I don't care about this liquid maybe and he pulled off the liquid and they took that solid he recrystallized it and he did that in like in like chemistry class no recrystallizations okay thank you I was just like oh my god what are they teaching now today so they recrystallized that this urea from modern he made these beautiful urea crystals these are actually urea crystals why is this a big deal this is a big deal because back in the day this was a pure substance from living beings so they were just like what is life made of is kind of the shit that they were trying to answer right then we're still trying to do that and this was pure matter from the living world this is a pure substance from the living world which is a big even bigger deal because people thought that kind of the living world chemicals were totally different from the non-living world chemicals they just lived in different realms back in the day so if there was a a Venn diagram of like a matter back in the day there would be no overlap zero overlap so then 100 years later 100 years later 100 years this dude Friedrich Voeller came along and kind of and really kind of threw people for a loop there it took a while for the ramifications to really set in so it wasn't immediate but this dude he did he was a rock chemist he did stuff with just very boring inorganic chemicals which is just why are you messing with rocks man we're trying to figure out what life is all about but he was doing it and he was just like one of these ions to swap place he was just like these ions are just going to swap place in my experiment but that is not what happened some ions swap place but there's another reaction that happened after that and it made urea just like holy shit holy shit I just turned matter from the non-living world in a matter from the living world so this guy this guy did it man and so he turned he turned matter from the non-living world and matter from the living world the atoms that make up our bodies and then we pee out every day onto the ground or wherever we choose to pee are the same atoms that are on that ground and then we have drunk in earlier the same exact atoms so I like to think about we're like walking talking peeing little particles of like earth's crust walking around here doing whatever we like to do pretty weird that we're walking at all you know so alright so this and this actually has kind of like real effect we actually kind of participate in the movement of stuff around the earth in very real ways so the water cycle is one of them we work with the water as you know this is probably the first cycle you learn about it evaporates off the surface of the ocean drains onto the mountains and then runs down into the streams and all this other really complicated stuff apologies to any hydrologists in the house and we so we drink that in and we pee it out into the streams because it's the funnest place to pee but they tell you not to do it so don't do it but yeah so we're actually when we're doing you know we're actually participating in the water cycle which is pretty cool so even cooler though the nitrogen cycle so where we eat the nitrogen in the plants we pee them out the decomposers kind of do their magic and they turn the ammonium and stuff in the ammonia into nitrates and kind of move it around this kind of inner cycle but then another thing we do is the either the nitrogen can go back into the atmosphere and it can also come into the back into the earth from plants from plants are also from factories so we're actually you know very we're pee is the minor way that we contribute to this this cycle of this element around the planet making fertilizers the big way that one percent of the world's energy goes from taking nitrogen in the atmosphere to putting it into the dirt which is pretty good one percent of the world's energy consumption pretty nuts but it gets better the favorite my favorite element cycle here is the phosphorus cycle so the phosphorus and phosphates are kind of moving around in a similar way in the soil but where do they come from they come from just kind of like weathering and like erosion down on the from the mountains and stuff like that and they move around in this like a cycle on the earth for a while and they found themselves in the in the bottom of the like cement in the bottom of the ocean and they sit there and this is not much of an element cycle is it no we in this element cycle is only completed is only completed when the bottom of the ocean becomes the tops of the mountains so this this element cycle the phosphorus in our body that spends like maybe a day in our bodies are probably longer I don't know I'm not a biologist again caveat so it comes spent maybe a day but it spends like a million of years kind of going through this like this this cycle on the earth which is pretty crazy so here we are we're mining it out of the out of the mountains and we're like peeing it out online so really really cool so I just want to leave you with that with that thing whenever you're peeing just kind of remind yourself that this is you're actually kind of helping move the elements around the earth and it's just like a beautiful thing when you're peeing the most underappreciated of all the experiments I would say so with that I will leave you with it I want to tell you maybe I have a science blog I will I will update this soon it's not interrupted in two years I have a poop post coming as soon but poop is so complicated relative to pee trust me really really complicated so with that thank you so much for your attention I'll be having to take your pee or non pee related questions what's the deal with breaking the seal is the question I have I have no idea it's really I guess it's definitely it has to do with the brain which is super complicated yeah I don't know yeah further investigation needs to be done lots of it being done tonight so I saw what up here first asparagus asparagus thank you so much it's like a plan of you all right all right so asparagus what's the deal with asparagus pee so it turns out this asparagus acid is in pee things that have sulfur in them tend to smell weird and so one of the things so we break down the asparagus acid some of us break down the asparagus acid it's it sits in here than the smaller sulfur containing things kind of migrate their way out of the pee and let's do a raise of hand who know who who appease out and smells the weird asparagus smell all right so it's like maybe half or so that's that's pretty cool so half of you can smell it half of you can pee it so half of you don't do this whole breaking down process and half of you can't actually smell it once it's broken down so if you don't know ask your neighbors afterwards but yeah so pretty there's like also the weird kind of genetic stuff that's going on whether you can pee it or smell it which is pretty cool so that's the basic thing your body just breaks it down and it floats up out so I love to eat asparagus yeah please so you're saying that all humans throughout all history piss and shit blood every day of their lives all humans have yeah all uh yes all yellow pee is blood that is the answer to that question things got weird all right yes what else can you do with pee that's useful if you're in a but giver situation so the number one thing to do which I don't uh I wish I knew a better answer to this question the number one thing you can do is drink it but you can't do that forever because it will kill you in the end because you're trying to get rid of all these like salts and everything and you're just going drinking salt water will will kill you um so what else can you do you can dye your clothes you can the cool thing if you can leave it what's that you can rust through handcuffs perhaps that's nice and um and you can also leave I had a friend who um who uh yeah college so like left his uh left his pee in a 40 ounce in the elevator and like and then he went no he left this on the um on the what is it called next to the window the window sill or whatever right and it just and it just looked nastier and nastier and it smelled awful and the janitor like poured it out and he's like got really weird after that and like but it smells worse right does anyone else know this that it's pee old pee smells worse is this not an uncommon I probably should stop telling this story so yeah okay so old pee smells worse and that happens because like the thing like eventually it becomes very like high in the morning they turn the bacteria that colonize it break down the urea into the morning so it can develop I'm getting back to your question it can develop a very high pH so it's very basic and so you can do many things that bases can do and I don't know what else those are they can probably clean stuff really well is like one one other thing they can do yeah so cleaning dishes and rinsing them in something afterwards I guess yeah so that is that is correct yes there's an interesting soap connection that I'm going to restrain myself like well maybe I don't know yeah never mind all right so yes jellyfish jellyfish okay so what's the deal with jellyfish burns why do you pee on them so a lot of weird chemicals that do weird things are big protein molecules that have kind of this weird three-dimensional shape and it turns out that urea is really good at disrupting the three-dimensional shape of proteins and once you mess with the shape of a substance generally you'll mess with its function and so that's one of the things that you can do with peeing on a jellyfish burn is you the proteins are the things that cause the peeing and when you pee your urea on there like and also the basic nature of the high pH will mess with the shape and it'll stop the like burning sensation yeah gun yes oh okay I'm gonna look that right go there yeah and then why did it put urea I have never heard of them putting urea in animal shim I have no idea yeah probably because it sounds cool and natural but everything's coming yeah yeah are there something up here you know yes yes yes way back gunpowder alright the other side's like gunpowder alright so let's see I'm gonna have to alright so alright so I'm gonna start here so basically when your urea breaks down in the you saw the nitrogen cycle basically you'd have ammonia and it breaks down into nitrates and the plants use the nitrates but if you can trick those plants into not using nitrates by putting shade over top of them in the form of a barn then things get interesting and you've got a bunch of animals in that barn who are peeing out the nitrogen and then the barn is over top and it's causing no plants to go to take up the nitrates so there's things that turn the ammonia from the urea into nitrates and those nitrates are pretty interesting so they will collect as these crystals will grow in the bottom in like underneath the floorboards and stuff in barns and these crystals are nearly pure nitrates they're like sodium and potassium and calcium nitrates and what you really need for gunpowder is potassium nitrate and so this is really straight up where so you take some wood ash and mix these with to get potassium nitrate and then you can also make these via you can actually do this dump urine on a pile of straw and stuff like this and dump some ashes on it and then cover it from any sunlight and you can actually and the crystals that grow off the top of it which appears to be detectable by taste people use to detect the chemicals by taste they'll grow up off the top and you can collect it and they use to send Peterman by to collect these to take these potassium nitrates and mix them with the charcoal mix them with the charcoal and and you could take this charcoal you need so to make charcoal burn you need oxygen right but nitrates are kind of a very concentrated form of oxygen do you just need much less volume to make it happen so if you if you burn something you need to kind of wait it's the oxygen you're waiting for the oxygen to get in which is why you blow on fires they get bigger and better the nitrates with them they had all the oxygen they need and so they just fucking explode right and so this is this is old gunpowder was discovered from urine related chemicals which is pretty awesome thank you so much last question who wants to do it yes can you please answer that question why did they give this to kids with we're getting supposedly excited you know I have no idea I've never heard of that I love it one more one more yes I am not a doctor or anything like that but like I would say definitely yes don't hold your pee in for too long just definitely let it out some people suggested that I pee my pants during this talk I like when things get weird but if anyone wants to come up and kind of demonstrate the safety that are related to not holding it in please now's your chance alright things got weird thank you so much awesome I wanted to thank all of our speakers Herbie, Kevin, and Lee I wanted to thank the Okaphobe Library Citizen's Inn, the new parkway and I want to tell you a little about what's coming up next month TEDx is up in Berkeley we had to talk here last year about rock paper scissors there's actually going to be a big tournament for charity it's all the way in Santa Cruz but you could be one of the world champion rock paper scissors people so like might be worth going to lots of nerd night the Martian is the fact book I read last month so like you should check that out and we'll be back next month again sign up for our list we only send out two emails a month and we'll tell you when you can learn about the A's playing baseball when you can get free samples of delicious cured meats as well as to learn about all of the dynamite production that happened out here in the East Bay so that's next month so thanks for coming again talk to all of our speakers no around drink a little bit more see you next month