History of Science and Technology Q&A (May 22, 2024)

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Q and A about history of science and technology. I see a whole bunch of questions saved up here. Well, let's start with the first one from anti. How are new words adopted into language? Can anyone invent a new word or are there certain processes? Well, I think it depends on the language. I mean, in English, for example, words kind of. Let's explain what do words do in languages? Words are a way of kind of providing an anchor for a concept. We come up with a word for things like live stream, for example. And there were ways to describe this process of streaming live, whatever it was before there was a well agreed word livestream for the process of what we now call live streaming. And it's always very helpful when a word comes into a language because it gives one a way to talk about a concept and usually gives a lot more oomph to that concept. It allows that concept to be used much more widely. But this question of how does a word get into a language? It gets into a language because people start using it and then other people begin to understand what it means and then it becomes a medium of exchanging concepts, so to speak. You know, it's a pretty typical thing that a word will start off as something a bit more complicated, like it could be a web log and then that gets shortened to become blog, for example. One of my principles often when I write things, we have a document quality assurance group that goes through and tries to make sure there aren't spelling mistakes and things like that. And there often there will be words like for example, years ago there was the word website. They always used to say, well, it should be two words. And I would say, look, if there's one thing we know about how language evolves, it's that word smoosh. If it's web site today, it'll eventually be website, one word in the future. So let's pre smoosh it. Let's expect to kind of jump a little bit ahead in the future of development of language. There are many such laws. There are many laws about pronunciation. Grimm's laws, for example, from the Brothers Grimm, who in addition to collecting fairy tales, studied language and had various rules for the ways that certain kinds of pronunciation tend to change over time. So there are some of these things that seem to be sort of general features of how language evolves. But in terms of how do new words get introduced, mostly it's because people start using them. Now there are some languages where there attempt to be at least central authorities to determine how the language should evolve. For example, French is one where there is some institute or something, presumably in Paris, that is supposed to say this is what official French should be. And there's often, I think, pressure there to keep out the English words that start seeping into French. They're places where. It's always a question for languages, where does the word for computer come from? I think in French it's audenter. And I think that's actually used and not just computer being used. And there are other languages, I think. Icelandic, I think, is another language where there is an attempt to sort of keep words sort of in the family of words that have been used before. And so I think a computer in Icelandic, I think is something like tova something or other. I think it's a constructed word made from something like. Wizardous of numbers or something like this. I forget exactly what the source is, but it's an attempt. That's a language where there's an attempt, I think, to sort of keep the set of words, or the set of at least word roots constant and just sort of shift around the meanings of those things. But in general, languages kind of are a social construct that emerge with words being introduced because different people understand that word to mean a concept where they sort of all agree on what the concept is. Now, there are domains in which there's an attempt to sort of standardize language. For example, names of critters, names of organisms. There's some effort to have a sort of standards body that decides what things should be called. Now, I don't think that's a completely successful thing because if you ask about names of plants, for example, they can be very regional, even within a single language. If you're in the south of a country, the north of a country, things like this, the very same plant can have been given different names. And those names are not names that have been sort of ratified by the International Commission on Biological Nomenclature or whatever it's called. But when you discover your new species of beetle in the rainforest or whatever, then there's a procedure for saying, well, there's this specimen that was put in museums somewhere and we propose this name. And there's sort of a general expectation that unless the name is totally ridiculous and some of them verge on the ridiculous, then that will be considered the official name, so to speak. So that's a kind of a bit of a controlled language setup. I mean, in general, kind of. It's a story of library science that there's sort of a trade off. You can have the anything goes sort of Keyword for things. Or you can have sort of a controlled vocabulary of there are 100 keywords you might use. And that's something where it's a good thing to have the. There's 100 keywords you might use. If you're organizing things, it makes it easier to organize stuff to know it has to be something that fits in one of these keywords. On the other hand, as time goes forward, those keywords often sort of don't. Aren't any more the right keywords. So, for example, if you look at something like the classification systems that are used for putting books in libraries, like the Dewey Decimal Scheme or the Library of Congress scheme, each of those were invented at a certain time in history. And there are sections like, I know the Q section of Library of Congress includes science and many other kinds of things. I think QC173, I think, is physics, if I remember right. But the fact that areas that become, I think computer science was something that sort of didn't exist at the time when that classification system was made and sort of got shoehorned in somewhere in the classification system. So it ends up with this very long, elaborate classification number. Whereas something like Naval Architecture, which was a big thing at the time when the classification system was made, gets its own whole letter, I think. But yet it doesn't have as much stuff that needs to be put there in modern times. Now, when it comes to computational languages like our Wolfram language, that's the main example of this. It's a language which is trying to describe the world computationally, so to speak, where you're introducing a large number of words to describe things, a large number of functions and so on. Like about 7,000 in Wolfram language, which is to be compared to. To about 40,000 common words in typical human languages. That's something which is. Yes, that is a very controlled setup where the things that we are sort of committing to in the language are things that, well, in the end, I'm kind of responsible for signing off on. Now, the advantage of that standardization is it's very coherent, very unified, much easier to learn because of its coherence, and very compatible for Wolfram language. It's, you know, you take a version, a program written for version one of Wolfram language in 1988, and it'll still run today, you know, whatever it is, 30, 36 years later. So that's. But that's a case where we have a very, very well defined, organized way of kind of adding vocabulary to the language. If you look at, for example, mathematical Notation Another example of kind of a language like thing, people will add pieces to mathematical notation when they write some particular paper or book or whatever, they'll say we are going to use this notation for this function, for this construct or whatever else. And usually what happens is that over the course of time some notation gets somewhat standardized. Sometimes there's a fork and there are some sort of two versions of the notation that are commonly used. And sometimes those versions of the notation are incredibly confusingly similar. And people. And sometimes in two different subfields the notation will end up being sort of the same but slightly different and meaning slightly different things. So this happens. For example, one that immediately comes to mind is elliptic functions which have various kinds of arguments. And the meaning of those arguments is kind of obscurely different with different conventions. And that's something that happens. And there's not really. There are some forces of standardization, but there's the perfect possibility of there being kind of independent branches there. I think in human language, when there is kind of speciation in the language, when there is sort of branching of different things in the language that's. Well, for example, between British English and American English, there are all kinds of differences which I suppose over time, if there's enough mixing between the sort of communities, eventually get smoothed out. I don't know what's happened with some in the past. At least there were pieces of American English which if you said them in England, people would not understand them. And I don't know whether that's still the case. Famous one was the pavement versus sidewalk. What's the thing you walk on at the side of the road in British English that at least used to be called pavement. It's too long since I lived in England. I'm not sure I would necessarily know the correct words anymore. But that was a typical kind of source of confusion where this, where, where those things meant something different in the two branches of that language. And when it comes to new things that get invented, like things to do with computers, there was a whole different vocabulary of things about computers in British English. Like for example, memory in British English was called store. I think the program counter in machine code was called the sequence control register. I think I'm guessing that at this point those original British English versions of computer terms are extinct, but I'm not sure about that. Let's see. That's an interesting question. I'm not sure I completely know the answer to this one from Jung, who discovered the dinosaurs. How has technology assisted with research? I think dinosaurs were a good example of where There was sort of a folk thing that was kind of circulating for a long time and people sort of dismissed it. And eventually it was like, yep, there's science behind it. People had talked about dragons for a very, very long time, and people. There were presumably fossils found of dinosaurs for a very long time. But it wasn't until, I think about the 1830s that the sort of definitive, yes, there's this thing, it's a fossil of an extinct animal or something, really was a thing that got established. Now, it didn't help probably, that in some traditions at least, although not in all, there was kind of this sort of assumption that, you know, religious texts that said the world was created in seven days or whatever it was, were really right and that there weren't, and that the species we have today were sort of the species that were put there at the very beginning. The concept that species would develop was something that really. It had been kind of hints of it had existed for a long time. But it really came into sort of serious scientific currency with Charles Darwin's 1859 Origin of Species book. And so the idea that there might have been species that were extinct that didn't exist today was not really a very well understood concept. And I think that probably the assumption when dinosaurs were first, when dinosaur fossils were first found, is, yes, it's a fossil, but somewhere in the deep ocean, underneath the ice cap or wherever else, somewhere in the world, there will be these creatures still alive today. And that the concept that there were species that were like, gone from the past, when you didn't have the idea that there would be sort of emergence of new species, it would be. That was something that was harder to understand. But I think it's sort of interesting because it really has repeated quite a lot of times in the history of science that there are these things sort of sort of folk believed about. Yes, there's got to be a way that this or that thing happens. And then it turns out there is some science behind it. Of course, that raises the question in modern times about what used to be called UFOs, now called unidentified Aerial phenomena, which people have talked about for ages, even though the actual pictures look goofy and things like this in many cases, but it's sort of one of these things that's sort of been in the air for a long time. And one kind of has a little bit this suspicion. There's a certain tendency to say if it's been in the air for a long time and there's no science that's been sort of found Definitively behind it. It must all be nonsense. But I have to say that the lesson of history tends to be that things that have been in the air, and I don't mean that quite literally with unidentified aerial phenomena, but things that have been sort of in the zeitgeist around for a long time, that it ends up that there's something behind it somehow, usually as opposed to. No, it really was just a misguided assumption. Now, of course, there are. Well, we can think of cases where there was sort of science that was believed kind of pseudo science. Actually a good example is sort of in the kind of Darwinism as sort of the description of how sort of organisms evolve versus Lysenkoism and Lysenko and his idea that during the life of an organism there could be things that would affect the organism that would be passed on to future generations. And that was something which somewhat. It got very entwined. For example, in the Soviet Union there was a big sort of political push that have Lysenko throw out Darwin type thing, which led to, I think, some craziness with agricultural development and so on there. Because the Lysenko story really wasn't quite the right story. But then you say, well, okay, that wasn't quite the right story. So there must be none of that anywhere. There must be nothing that can be passed from one generation to the next except by virtue of mutation of its genome. But that turns out not to be true. It turns out there are things that get passed in the actual structure of the fertilized egg or whatever. There are things like deficiencies in vitamins and so on that get passed that affect the next generation. It turns out there are things that can affect the next generation that aren't purely genetically determined. There are kind of epigenetic kinds of things that can be passed without determining, without it being part of the genome that you can pick up and identify and so on. So in a sense, that was a case where it wasn't so much in the public kind of impression. Well, maybe it was a little bit. I mean, there were. I remember the sort of a children's storybook, Rudyard Kipling's, you know, just Stowe stories. You know, how did the giraffe. I'm not remembering the details of these stories. It's been, oh, probably 60 years or something since I heard these. But it's kind of things like, how did the giraffe get a long neck? Well, because a particular giraffe kind of stretched out its neck longer and longer, so to speak, as opposed to the sort of Darwinian story of, well, there was a giraffe that had a slightly longer neck and one that had a shorter neck and the longer neck one was more successful. So it had more baby giraffes and then that sort of kind of cascaded from there. But so I think this, as I say, dinosaurs, I think were an interesting example of where there were sort of things that were generally believed. You know, people sort of thought there were dragons and thought, you know, and had an impression of these sort of things being around. But there wasn't. It was sort of a. Oh, no, that's not science. But then it turned out it was science. I mean, it's worth remembering. There were all kinds of things that happened, oh, probably around the same time. Like, I think Neanderthals were discovered around in the 1850s, right before Darwin's Origin of Species. And I don't know what the connection between those things, certainly Darwin doesn't mention that, but I don't know what the connection between those discoveries was. But the concept that there might have been a. A kind of a. Well, Darwin certainly talked later about the evolution of humans and kind of this notion of these links between humans and other primates and so on. But I think, let's see, what was being asked here is, okay, so dinosaurs were identified. It was realized that they were extinct organisms. And what was then figured out? You know, one of the things I, you know, lots of kids get interested in dinosaurs. I was interested in dinosaurs when I was a young kid and I sort of learned the names of all these dinosaurs and so on. I'm sort of shocked to discover when my kids were younger and interested in dinosaurs that the names of all these dinosaurs had changed. And it was like, no, the brontosaurus wasn't a real thing. It's now called the something or other else. So there was quite a lot of sort of motion in the thinking about dinosaurs. One of the things that I think was sort of a dynamic there was dinosaurs are pretty cool things to show in museums. And people wanted to have big dinosaur skeletons in museums. And they also had various views about how the dinosaurs, how they would get a great dinosaur display. Like, for example, you want the big tall dinosaur, but sometimes to get the big tall dinosaur, you had to break the back of the dinosaur because it didn't actually stand up straight like that. It was actually hunched over in its natural state. And so a bunch of the sort of dinosaur skeletons that you would see in museums, like when I was a kid, one is told now, were not accurate representations of what the dinosaurs were like in real life, so to speak. The other big thing with dinosaurs is the how did they die out? Question. And there was for a long time just sort of, oh, mammals were a better thing, and they ate the dinosaurs eggs and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But there was kind of a sneaking suspicion that maybe something more catastrophic happened to the dinosaurs, but nobody knew how that would be the case. And then couple of physicists kind of started. I'm trying to remember how this happened, Because I was certainly knew some of these people who were involved in this. Well, they discovered that there's this layer of, I guess, iridium. And if you look at the sort of geological layers that there's all over the Earth, there's this very thin layer of dust, basically, that sort of came into existence at a very fixed time about 65 million years ago. And then it was realized, well, that was perhaps, you know, that was an asteroid impact. And that was something that could have been the thing that ended the dinosaurs, so to speak. And it was kind of funny because there was a period of probably about 10 years when this must have been 1980s, so quite recent times when that theory had sort of was being introduced. And it was like, could that really be true? Was that really what happened? Or was the thing that was in all the sort of storybook textbooks about dinosaurs what really happened? And it was just, the mammals were better, and we're a mammal, so we should feel good about that. But then it became sort of, I would say, probably by the 90s, by the 1990s, kind of the asteroid impact theory Became pretty much the accepted idea. There was some entrainment of other kinds of concepts at the time, like, well, one of the things that probably was an effect of the asteroid impact Was that there was a bunch of dust put into the upper atmosphere, which is presumably what then fell down to be the layer of dust that was found in the stratigraphy of geology. But that that sort of was being discussed at kind of the same time that this concept of nuclear winter. You blow up a bunch of nuclear weapons and you raise a bunch of dust, and it will sort of COVID the Earth and. And make everything cold for a year or two or however long. But that was being discussed at sort of the same time, I think. And I don't know the relationship between those kinds of things. Even though the people who worked on the asteroid impact Were actually people, American physicists, who were actually also involved with the whole military effort, Particularly at Lawrence Berkeley Lab and so on. So I think. I don't know what the interplay between kind of the nuclear winter scenario, which I think is now generally viewed as not being very convincing, and the asteroid impact and it made the world cold for the dinosaurs type thing, what the relationship between those things had been. But kind of the notion that there's certainly much more to figure out about dinosaurs. And it's like, I have a friend who's got this whole. I think has established the theory that dinosaurs kind of whipped their tails at supersonic speeds. And you can tell that by looking at cracking in the bones and so on. But that's a very recently kind of recently established kind of thing. I will say one example of a curious piece of sort of paleontology. Dinosaur study is. Sort of One of the places that a lot of people were exposed to dinosaur study in recent times was movies. The movie Jurassic park and Chap called Jack Horner, who I know, who is a paleontologist, a dinosaur hunter, so to speak, who was a consultant for that movie. And one of the things he's told me, sort of regrets, is that into that movie he put kind of every theory he had about dinosaurs, including theories which turned out not to be true. But people are now convinced that those theories must be true because after all, they were in the movie. So one of the things that's there is a scene, I think, early in the movie with ground penetrating radar as a way to find dinosaur bones, which apparently doesn't work. It's used for other purposes, but apparently it doesn't really work for that. But the fact that it was in that movie meant that an awful lot of people tried in a way that they wouldn't have done if it hadn't been in that movie. So it's a strange case of what goes from the science to the movie and then back to the science again. I think the other thing that's always notable about, well, about things about the past is that as we get more and more sensitive probes, more and more sensitive kind of molecular level ways of measuring things, we get to learn more and more about the past. You would think the past, it's done, we'll never be able to reconstruct that again. But for example, in the case of dinosaurs, the kind of, can we find dinosaur DNA and can we. Or can we extrapolate back from the DNA of current organisms to deduce dinosaur DNA and then what can we do with that? And of course, Jurassic park introduced the idea. Well, it had been a known kind of science fiction idea, but it kind of highlighted the idea that maybe we could actually bring the dinosaurs back to life, so to speak. And kind of. I think the concept in that movie was maybe there was a mosquito that sucked some dinosaur blood and then the mosquito got frozen in amber and you could extract the DNA. Apparently, that doesn't really quite work. And a better possibility is to go back from current organisms and just sort of look at the Tree of Life and say, well, if you look at these two branches of the Tree of Life, you see this DNA on this side, that DNA on that side. Sort of the common ancestor is this. And we can kind of reconstruct what must have happened there. Maybe. I don't know. I have to say, it is my assumption that at some point in the future, sort of Jurassic park in some form will come true and there will be stegosauruses and zoos and so on. Maybe I'm wrong, but my guess is that will happen. The first sort of somewhat serious attempt to do that is with mammoths, which only went extinct in historical times, maybe a couple of thousand years ago and maybe even less than that. And there's been some fairly serious effort to reconstruct mammoths, but I don't think it's gotten that far. I think there's sort of a hope that, oh, yes, it's not so difficult. We'll kind of, you know, we'll gestate a mammoth in an elephant or something like this. But I think it's really only gotten as far as a gene or two. Like, the question is, can you make a woolly elephant, for example? That would be already kind of an achievement, even though there were other differences between mammoths and elephants. Like, for example, the ivory of the tusks is distinctly different, which is why, you know, it's. Even though there's this, you know, if you show up with some ivory somewhere and it's elephant ivory, that's really bad because you're not supposed to hunt elephants and so on. But it might be similar ivory, but actually it's mammoth ivory. And you can't really say you can't hunt mammoths because they've been extinct for a long time. And that's kind of an old story, so to speak. But I do think that kind of the molecular reconstruction of things and is presumably going to allow us to get sort of further and further back. And presumably eventually it'll be stegosauruses and zoos and we'll get to find out lots more about those kinds of organisms. It makes it an interesting question whether, when we worry about Kind of biodiversity and the extinction of species, whether at what point it's sort of enough to just keep the DNA, so to speak, or know, the digital version of the DNA. And that relates, you know, I was talking about Darwin and Lamarck and so on and sort of relates a little bit to that because it's a question of is it enough to just have the DNA or do you have to have sort of an unbroken line of things that will lead to the actual tissue with fertilized eggs and all this kind of thing to be able to actually reconstruct the species? And I think that's not completely clear, but certainly it will be easier if, if one has some of the ambient biological tissue in addition to the pure DNA. Let's see. Well, there are many, many questions here. Oh, gosh. Krista asks which ecosystem could accommodate woolly elephants. You know, there was a very, I thought, rather silly claim by the company that was trying to do the mammoth DNA reconstruction. The claim was, we'll introduce mammoths into Siberia and they will. What were they going to do? They were going to trample the tundra and solve carbon sequestration somehow. So I think it was kind of Siberia was the, the ecosystem of choice there. But I don't really know if that all works at all. Let's see. Oh, Gosh. All kinds of questions here. Maud is asking, isn't it so strange that every kid has a passion for dinosaurs? Yeah, it is an interesting thing, isn't it? I don't know why that happens. There might be some strange Freudian theory for it, or it might just be. It's always hard to tell. When adults think things are really cool, the kids kind of get the idea they're cool too, which has both positive and negative consequences in some cases. But maybe it's just a thing that's an unbroken line of sort of wonder about dinosaurs that's been unbroken for 100 years or so and gone through multiple generations. And people then just assume kids are going to find dinosaurs cool. And so they kind of are channeling this idea that comes from adults. I'm not sure. I think it doesn't hurt that there are all these sort of interesting illustrations of, of big animals doing interesting things. So maybe that's part of the story. Let's see. Jimmy comments. A subset of dinosaurs evolved into birds. Yes, that seems to be true. And one of the things that at various times there have been sort of theories. Well, maybe all the dinosaurs had feathers. Probably not. You know, what color were the dinosaurs? What kind of pigmentation do they have. We don't know that yet, although, but I bet that will be determinable. And there were lots of things that people would say about dinosaurs in the past, which people were then saying, no, no, that's just not true. Like when I was a kid, for example, the stegosaurus. Well, okay, there are questions about. Stegosaurus has all these plates on its back. It's like, what were the plates for? Were they armament, were they for cooling? Nobody really quite knows. Were they for some kind of ornamentation, for some mating display? Probably not. But then people would say the stegosaurus is too big for its brain to be able to give signals to its legs. And it must have had a second brain. And you could find in sort of the stegosaurus skeleton, there was this place where you could have sort of a second brain in the base of the spine of the stegosaurus. And I remember being told the stegosaurus had multiple brains. Well, actually, probably it's a ganglion, just like we have, that allows us to sort of send signals for walking without sending every single step straight from the brain, so to speak. So really not as dramatic as one might have thought. And also people have these ideas. The Tyrannosaurus rex, which has a very dramatic name, what really was it? Was it kind of a scavenger that came along behind all these other little creatures that would be the real attack, dinosaurs and so on, which made it a lot less Rex. Rex being king in Latin. Know Rex like, so to speak. Much more like the vulture that came along after the battle, so to speak, which is not nearly as, you know, not like the king leading the troops, more like the vulture coming along after the battle has happened. But, you know, a lot of what it is a funny thing that, you know, sort of dinosaurs became popular in the public perception. Museums would have dioramas of dinosaurs, pictures of dinosaurs, lots of children's books about dinosaurs, and that developed a notion of truth about what was going on with dinosaurs, some of which I think was probably not correctly stated. And I think that's a thing that it's an interesting dynamic of where sort of the popularization of science then takes on sort of a life of its own, which then drives back into the science itself. And sometimes, sometimes I think dinosaurs may be one of the cases where this has happened, more so than quite a few others would be a case where then there's some effort that needs to be made to sort of break out of the. No, no, no, it really didn't happen that way. Let's See, there's a comment here from Iam saying, aren't bees considered too fat to fly? Don't know about that. I do know that insects, you know, the flying motion for insects is a bit different for birds. I mean, it's also always an interesting thing in technology. You know, we know birds fly. So if you're trying to make an airplane, should you just copy the bird or should you do something different? And for quite a while, people were trying to copy the birds and having flapping dino, you know, flapping winged airplanes and so on. And in the end, when the Wright brothers actually made it work, the wings didn't flap. But the thing that was really important, which people hadn't really internalized, was that the really notable thing about birds is that they have brains and the brains can affect. They are like flight controllers. They can affect sort of what the wings do. And that's like a drone, for example, couldn't fly if it didn't have active control through its flight controller, microprocessor or whatever of rotor speeds and things like that. And similarly, a bird wouldn't successfully fly if it didn't have a brain controlling the details of what its wings are doing. And when the Wright brothers were developing their flyer, they had all this mechanism for kind of warping the wings to add that control done by a human who was, know, lying on the airplane. But that was kind of the critical thing. It wasn't a question of noticing the birds flap. And so you should have flapping wings for your. For your airplane. I mean, I think there's a. There are strange, you know, movies already existed at the time when people were. Well, let's see. Is that really right or is that. Let's see. There are. I. There are genuine movies of people sort of having their flying machines that were flapping flying machines. But I'm trying to think whether that's really right, because, yes, I guess photography certainly existed for a long time by 1905. Was that when 1902. I'm forgetting my precise year when the Wright brothers did their thing. But. But certainly still photography exists. I think some movies existed, but certainly one has seen these. Maybe they're recreations of people with sort of flapping airplanes which didn't work out, obviously. I mean, although it's one of those crazy things where maybe the technology will evolve and in the future everybody will be excited by flapping flying machines again. Even though for a long time that hasn't been the story. But about insects. I think insects may have, I think in the tree of Life. I think their sort of discovery of flight was independent of birds. And I think that insects have this feature that when they flap their wings, their wings, when a bird flaps its wings, the wings just flap a bit. But for an insect, I think the wings actually close at the top. They flap high enough that. That the wings actually touch at the top of the sort of stroke. And I think that that produces some complicated aerodynamic effects that maybe now are understood. Certainly a few decades ago were not well understood. That adds a lot more lift for insects than you could get by just pure flapping of wings without that effect of having the wings kind of touch and then pulling air in to create some additional lift, I think. Let's see. Gosh. 420 asks, how has our understanding of the asteroid impact theory evolved since its introduction in the 1980s? Well, I think things like, where was the asteroid? Where did it hit? You know, well, Gulf of Mexico. Type, type area that wasn't known at the beginning. Where the impact crater was. Something wasn't very clear at all. And for example, how big it was, wasn't very clear what size of asteroid it needed to be. Then there are questions about, well, were all the mass extinctions in history caused by asteroid impacts? I think that's still not clear. And there were theories that said, for example, maybe there was some. Oh, there was one theory that maybe there was a hidden planet far out in the solar system that was kind of, every few million years was doing an orbit and it was kind of pulling more asteroids into the picture. And that was leading to the higher probability of an asteroid hitting the Earth. There are even theories more recently about supernova explosions. And, you know, the Earth is sort of gradually moving through the galaxy. I think it rotates around the center of the galaxy every. What is it, 150 million years, maybe something of that order. But it's constantly being in different sort of local environments of stars. And occasionally one of those stars will have a supernova. And there's sort of a question of what effect does that have on the Earth? And maybe that has some effect that, for example, increases the asteroid impacts that can occur. Probably not directly, but probably as a result of some shock front going through the solar system and knocking orbits of things that are otherwise sort of stably going around for billions of years, knocking them out of those orbits and making them more likely to then collide with the Earth because they're no longer in their sort of stable orbit position. So there were theories like that. Then there's much more detail that's been Sort of uncovered about exactly what happened. I think it was some particular afternoon. We can't say the date because our date system certainly doesn't go back that far. And even so, we wouldn't be able to at least yet know with that precision when it occurred. But the notion that, you know, there was this definite event and you could see tidal waves that went across North America, for example, and that there was kind of a. It's kind of a dramatic thing that you can imagine. You know, within minutes, certain things happened. And you can tell that from fossils. And that's been a fairly recent thing, last decade or two, that that's been something that can be uncovered. And I think there's still all sorts of questions about sort of how ecology was changed by that impact. And I think also I must say that I am not familiar with. Maybe it's known, but not to me, the impact crater for the KT, the Cretaceous Tertiary boundary from 65 million years ago, that's known. But the ones for earlier periods, when most of the geological periods are distinguished by mass extinctions, because that's the sort of most dramatic thing that changes the kinds of fossils you find from the Cambrian period to the. What is it? Ordovician, Silurian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous. Gosh, I haven't thought through that. Did I get that right? I'm not sure I did, but I think I got that roughly right. The. But those different periods are. In significant measure determined by mass extinctions. And I don't know whether it's like. I don't think that it's sort of localized where those occurred. If they were due to asteroid impacts. Let's see. Oh, there's a question here from des. If it were technically possible, would submarines be more efficient if they copied fish or aquatic mammals? Yeah, I mean, there are, you know, there's all kinds of stuff about submarines and how the kind of surface materials on submarines affect the way. The extent to which they can kind of slide through water. And I think the kind of your typical aquatic mammal, for example, or fish, for that matter, it's kind of slimy. It's kind of slippery. And that was a thing that certainly has been attempted to be imitated with submarines of having some additives, some polymers put into the water that would be kind of secreted from the surface of the submarine, just like the fish do that be able to slide through the water more easily. I don't know about. I mean, I would suspect that you can be, you know, you can be more sort of hydrodynamically effective if you can kind of, if you have more flexibility and you're able to kind of twist and turn. Certainly robotic fish, of which I've seen several, you know, do tend to have that feature. I don't know. I don't know to what extent it's just imitating what fishes do as a way to study that and to what extent it's successfully optimizing things. It may not be so easy to determine. Let's see. Oh, Maud is commenting that in the background here there are all kinds of fossil Y type things. Yeah, I mean, I've got a whole collection of these things. Maybe one day I'll show them. All right, let's, let's show one of them here. Let me not drop this guy. This is a very cool shell that has, if you see it, it has a kind of a nested pattern on its surface. Actually, I think it even better right there. And this was a, you know, where did I find this? I found it in a shell shop. I can't claim that, you know, it was found by diving and noticing it. It was noticed, but in a shell shop. But yes, I have a bunch of collections of things like that, partly because I've studied them. For example, I studied pigmentation patterns on mollusk shells. And so I have quite a collection of these things that I've made over the course of time. Let's see. Oh, let's see. Eclipse comments is a long comment. In popular culture, dinosaurs are often portrayed as solitary, aggressive creatures. However, research suggests that they had complex social behaviors. Could you share an example of a dinosaur whose social behavior has been discovered or hypothesized based on fossil evidence? How do these discoveries influence our perception of dinosaurs and how they're portrayed in the media? Well, you know, there are places, I think in Montana where kind of whole herds of fossilized dinosaurs were found. I mean, one knows, you know, sometimes only one fossil survived from something, and sometimes whatever produced that fossilization fossilized a whole collection of organisms. Like, for example, I even have a slab of rock which has a whole bunch of trilobites on it. Little trilobites fossilized probably 400 million years ago. And, you know, you can tell probably something about kind of the social life of the trilobites by looking at their configuration on this fossilized rock. In modern times, we can see schools of fish, flocks of birds, things like this. If those were fossilized, we would know that, well, these fish came in schools and so on. There are a whole variety of different ways that One can sort of see where the animals were. One of them is, you look for tracks where there are lots of tracks that got fossilized, where know, the dinosaurs were hunting in packs or something with a lot of different tracks together. Another one is, you know, you look for dinosaur poop and things like this and you see, you know, where that went. Another one, actually there's an interesting one with fossilized worms. I think that's. Is that worm poop or is that something else? But anyway, there are these worms where you can kind of see the tracks that they made and you can kind of see to what extent their foraging behavior. Like if you're, oh, I don't know, a caterpillar, you're eating a leaf, you kind of want to go to different parts of the leaf and you kind of want to eat the whole leaf. Well, similarly, these prehistoric worms wanted to kind of fill an area, forage an area, and they wanted to kind of COVID that area. And they had to kind of, they had to essentially make a space filling curve. A curve where they're kind of just tracing out and covering every place on the plane. I mean, it's sort of the same problem as if you have a robotic vacuum cleaner and it's trying to clean your carpet. There's a question of what path should it go in. You know, it could go up and down like a plow, know, like a typical way that one plows a field where you go up and down in lines. Or you could have a more elaborate pattern where you first. Where you kind of make some kind of nested pattern with lots of little sub pieces which eventually will succeed in covering the ground, so to speak. And I think some of these prehistoric critters were a little bit closer to the space felling curve kind of approach than just the pure. I'm going to be systematic and go one line at a time, so to speak. But I don't know, I mean, when one observes something like a school of fish, there's sort of a question of how does the school of fish work? How do the flock of birds work? Well, there's this kind of model called Boyds that chap called Craig Reynolds invented. Oh, gosh, in the 1980s. Originally, I think it was invented for special effects, maybe for a Batman movie, I'm not sure. But it became sort of a piece of science and it was kind of like you have each critter as kind of an agent and each critter is kind of looking at where the nearby critters are to it and it has Certain rules that say I'll be a certain distance away from the nearby things. And then if you then sort of perturb the flock by saying you'll sort of scare them all away from this direction, you can kind of see how these different sort of agents move as you go, as that effect sort of propagates through as one bird sees that the next bird has turned and then it turns and so on. And there are various parameters about the delay and so on that determine how that will work. And it's a pretty simple model, but it does a fairly reasonable job, I think, of reproducing, at least qualitatively, what happens in flocks of birds and so on. And no doubt similar mechanisms existed in much earlier organisms. Now, I think by the time it got to Jurassic Park 2, they were portraying herds of dinosaurs. I know one trivia fact is our Wolfram language, Mathematica technology was used for pretty much the always used for the walking motion of the dinosaurs. Somebody in the special effects company had written a bunch of differential equation code solved with Mathematica and so on, to mimic the gait of the dinosaurs, so to speak, the walking motion of the dinosaurs. And so lots of, lots of running of our technology to produce the walking motion for all these dinosaurs. And I'm suspecting that the herd behavior was done using this kind of Boyd's type technology of each dinosaur is kind of an agent that's looking around at other dinosaurs to figure out where to go. And the result of that is that you can see these dinosaur herds in the movie. And let's see. All right, let's see. I think we had a bunch of other questions about things like dinosaurs, including the question from rbs, what came first, the dinosaur or the egg? That is a good question. And I think the answer is yes. In fact, the egg definitely came first before amphibians and fishes have eggs, and they were before dinosaurs. So by the time you got to dinosaurs, the egg was a well established idea. But good question. PRT asks how much does computational irreducibility affect DNA engineering? I think a lot. So that's the question of if you know the rules, if you know kind of what the base pair sequence is in some genome, to what extent can you predict the critter that will be produced by that? It's really hard to predict that even if you know what that sequence of base pairs will determine, the sequence of amino acids in a protein. And even predicting what shape that protein will fold into is a difficult thing with all sorts of techniques nowadays, machine Learning based techniques and LLM based techniques that do a decent first approximation, although certainly not the whole story of even just knowing what shapes the protein will fold into, how you combine those proteins functionally to do the things that organisms do or to make kind of the shapes of organisms. That's still far in the future and certainly full of computational irreducibility. To know what will happen is to kind of require actually explicitly running the rules. In fact, just recently I happened to do a little piece of work on studying kind of the foundations of biological evolution. And there's some really quite dramatic examples there of kind of the critter, the artificial critter that gets generated by running these rules. And it's really hard to predict from these rules what the critter will be like. And in particular, in that case, I was trying to evolve it so that the rules will be tweaked, mutated to the point where the organism would live as long as possible, so to speak. And what you see are these very, very ornate structures being produced. More ornate even than that mollusk shell I have back there. But. And that, that's something that would be very hard to predict just knowing the rule. All right, let me see. Gosh, there's a question here I don't know the answer to from Des. Do you know what the first written description of human handedness was? There are deficient depictions and artifacts. When did we realize that people have different handedness? I don't know. I had always heard that. So in modern times, roughly 10% of people are left handed. I'm one of them. I think the handedness percentages were kind of skewed because up until the 1950s, 1960s, it was pretty common to try and convince kids to write with their right hand, whether or not that was the natural hand for them to write with. And certainly some of the technology of writing, at least in a language like English, was not well suited to the left handers. I mean, when I was a kid using an ink pen, there was a great tendency, if you're writing from left to right, that you write and then you smudge the thing you wrote. And I never really quite figured out, I mean, a lot of left handed people have this strange way of holding a pen that's sort of backwards, which I never did. And it's kind of like, I guess I was held at the right angle so that what you had written one's hand was below that line rather than trailing that line. But the standard way that I think right handed people, I don't know Because I'm not right handed that write things. Their hand is right on top of where the ink is going to go. So there was a certain sort of selection effect against left handedness in left to right written languages back when people were using ink pens that would smudge, which was certainly the case in the 1960s and so on. But I had always heard the claim that the ancient Egyptians had a lot of left handers. But I don't know if this is true. I mean for all I know at that time it was really cool to be left handed, Whereas in the 1950s it was uncool to be left handed. So maybe there were depictions of the king is left handed because it was cool to be left handed in those days. Just as there were certainly sort of portraits of before photography and so on. It was always a big issue, sort of almost a political issue was the portrait of the king. Did the portrait of the king make the king look cool, so to speak? Because that was the only way most people knew what the king would look like was to see portraits. I know for example, in the colleges in Oxford and Cambridge there was a whole campaign around the time of, I think Charles I in the 1600s of, you know, have these great portraits of the king that would be hung in all these colleges making the king look cool in some way or another. I don't know exactly what it took to look cool in those days. I think, for example, when you see pictures of Henry VIII looking very fat in those days, it was thought to be sort of cool and, and showed how wealthy you were that you could eat enough to get fat. Times have changed and people have different views about that and sometimes rather extreme views about those kinds of things that have happened through history. But it's sort of, in any case, I think that. So I don't know the answer to when people started talking about human handedness. Certainly in Roman times, the word for left in Roman is sinister and that obviously became a word that was sinister. And by the Middle Ages it was kind of a. If you're left handed, you must be kind of a witch or something like this. I don't know to what extent. I mean when before there was widespread literacy, I'm not sure how significant handedness will have been seen to be because by the time you're actually writing with a pen, it's pretty obvious if you're writing with your right or left hand. But if you're operating some piece of machinery or something like this, well, not that there was so much technology, but if you're doing something that involves some sort of manual thing, it's probably not so obvious whether you're leading with your left or your right hand. And I know, for example for myself kind of trivia fact is I write with my left hand. But when for motor motions bigger than a few inches, few centimeters, I tend to use my right hand. So I'm kind of left handed for small motor motions and right handed for large motor motions, which is not a particularly uncommon situation. But in the time before one was really doing fine motor control of that, that won't have been so obvious, I think which handed people were and I think, you know, it's kind of the test case for modern times is the mouse because that's kind of a, a size of motor motion that's sort of a little bit intermediate. It's not as small as handwriting and it's not as big as sort of gross motor kinds of things. And for me, I've kind of landed right on the edge of that. And I have two mice, a left mouse and a right mouse and I kind of use them interchangeably. So that's extreme case. David asks, did Isaac Newton get the idea for the inverse square law from reading a book by Giovanni Borelli? I do not know. I mean, it's often said that Hooke, Robert Hooke, was a big part of the origination of the inverse square law, which I think is probably somewhat convincing. I mean, Newton rather unkindly made this comment often quoted. If I've seen far, it's because I have stood on the shoulders of giants. He said that unkindly because Hook was kind of a dwarf and he wanted to make it clear that he hadn't stood on the shoulders of Hooke. And in fact, Newton, in his various positions in the Royal Society and so on, was pretty mean to Hooke. And Hooke was most famous. I mean, he's known for the, the springs, Hooke's law of springs, but also his book Micrographia, which was kind of an early what you see under a microscope, organisms and so on and a bunch of other kinds of innovations. I don't know that much about Hooke. He lived in London. He was kind of of a slightly lower social stratum than Newton. And I don't really quite know even how he made his living. I mean, Newton made his living because he was the Lucasian professor of Mathematics in Cambridge University. He was a professional mathematic, you know, a professional professor, which is not very common in those days. And I, I don't know how Hooke did, did what he did. But you know, Newton, it's worth remembering that the inverse square law of gravity, Newton got that right. But in the same book, Principia Mathematica from 1687, he. He also had things like, I think inverse fifth power laws for gas molecules. Now lots of kudos for kind of figuring out there might be gas molecules because that certainly wasn't known at the time. But he had kind of a inverse, I think, fifth power law for how those things would repel each other. And that was not right. And so Newton threw more dots than most people know about this thing. This thing. This thing is the way it might be or must be. And the ones which were right are well known and well celebrated. But there were also a bunch that weren't right that were of the same general character. I have this recollection also that Ren. Christopher Wren, architect, was also somehow involved in the whole inverse square law story. It's worth remembering that in those days kind of there was a lot more people doing lots of different things. So Christopher Wren, the architect, was also a person who did lots of stuff in geometry and mathematics and so on. I mean, architects today occasionally are involved in more mathematical things, but not so much on mathematical research. And Newton was, for example, in addition to studying his physics, he was also doing alchemy, pre chemistry, was also doing some slightly wacky kind of religious theological studies, and also became controller of the mint. Kind of was a Federal Reserve type character or something. And this was pretty common in those days for people to do a diversity of things. It's become much less common in today's world. And it's perhaps to the detriment of the world. I think it's always, you know, it's always worth remembering that new things usually emerge on the boundaries between existing kinds of knowledge. And you know, the more, you know, the bigger the range of things you know about, the better your chance of being able to sort of unearth these interesting new things that are, you know, require sort of different kinds of knowledge to be able to identify them. Let's see. Gosh, there's a question here. Are there good simulations of warm periods in the history of the Earth? I don't know the answer to that. I mean, people worry right now that the Earth is getting warmer, which it probably is, but you know, it's been much warmer at many times in the past. There's been much higher amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at times in the past, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, the very early Earth, there wasn't much oxygen. It took a long time, billion years or something for there to be a decent amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. But the question of what the Earth was really like in those earlier warm periods, in terms of kind of the flora and fauna, I mean, we certainly know examples of that. I suspect in the Carboniferous period, for example, which is when lots of the trees came on land and there were gazillions of trees, more than there are a couple of trillion trees on the Earth right now. There were probably a large factor more than that to trees at that time, which then got fossilized into oil and so on later. But I suspect, I think that was a period of much warmer period. And what one knows about kind of what effect that had on features of the Earth, I'm not sure. I mean, certainly there's a certain amount known about the configuration of continents and maybe a bit about sea level, for example, from that time, but I don't know in more detail than that. Let's see, RBS is asking how come there were these big creatures like the dinosaurs, they must have had a lot of food, or gravity must have been different. Gravity wasn't different. We know that pretty much for certain. There are various theories in physics that, particularly one due to Paul Dirac, that suggested that various fundamental constants of nature might have been gradually changing over time. And those theories would have implied differences in the effective strength of gravity and the distance of the Earth from the sun, the size of the Earth, things like this. And there's pretty good evidence that gravity has been the same as it is now on the Earth throughout the sort of history of the fossil record and so on. So I don't think gravity changed. Now the question of why, when there are big creatures versus smaller creatures, that's more of an ecological question. And there are usually a much smaller number of big organisms. That's not terribly surprising because the total biomass might be constant, but you're putting it into a smaller number of larger organisms rather than a larger number of smaller organisms. And in the current state of the world, the vast fraction of the biomass on the Earth is in tiny, tiny organisms. I mean, we represent, among mammals, we represent, I don't know, like 40% of the biomass, I think is humans and most of the rest is domestic, is farm animals. And then a tiny fraction is wild animals of the mammals. But that's a small fraction of the whole biomass of the Earth. And most of it is in very small kind of microorganisms and things like this. So I think this question of when do you get big organisms? There's kind of a whole ecological theory about sort of trophic levels and who eats who and so on that lead one to have sort of a few big organisms and mostly lots of little ones. I think on land there are fewer trophic levels, fewer levels of who eats who, maybe five levels or something. Whereas in the ocean there are much more like 15 levels or something. And that leads to the kind of aphorism there's always a bigger fish. Why there are more levels in the ocean than there are on land, I'm not sure. And from the whales to the shrimps to the plankton to whatever else, there's just a lot of different levels there. And I think, yeah, so I don't know. And the question of why there aren't bigger organisms in the world today, why we don't have kind of things that are five times the size as there were when there were dinosaurs, I'm not sure. And that's whether that's a feature of whether there's anything that can be said theoretically about that or whether that's just an accident of biological history that at some point big became good and later on it didn't. Maybe there's some climate related aspects of that, I'm not sure. I mean people have said, but I don't know if it's true that when things got colder, the little mammals with their own internal heat regulation, but they were small, could, I don't know, I mean, you know, you clearly can do heat regulation for big organisms. Look at whales for example. So I'm not sure quite how that, how that works out. All right, I should. Comment from left handed. Okay. There's nothing, I don't know what that refers to. Sorry, there's not enough data log for that to be predicted. When did they start keeping track of the average temperature? No, actually. Well, you say the 1920s. No, actually it was much, much earlier than that. The central England temperature record goes back to the 1650s, I think. I mean, it pretty much goes back to when thermometers were invented. I mean, thermometers were invented in the 1600s. Like Galileo had a version of a thermometer, other people had versions of thermometers. But the basic idea of fluid expands and fills up a bunch of glassware, which was the. Until modern electronic thermometers, that was the thermometer idea. I mean, when I was a kid, for example, and you wanted to take your temperature, so to speak, you would have this glass thermometer with mercury inside it, and you'd stick it in your mouth and you better not bite it, because otherwise you'd end up with mercury in your mouth, which would be really bad. But the mercury expanded when heated, and so it would go further up the tube, and so you could read off the temperature that way. That was an idea that came from the 1600s, and the central England temperature record goes back to that time. I mean, one could try and deduce more distant kind of records of temperature by looking at, for example, tree rings and seeing sort of how much growth there was in a particular season between two rings and a tree, or going to look at ice cores and looking at sort of how much ice formed in different years and so on. But this whole question about sort of systematically keeping records of temperature. Yeah, I think in the. I mean, for example, weather stations and the idea that one would sort of try and do weather prediction, that was a thing of the 1850s or so. And I think. What's his first name? Fitzroy, the chap who. Oh, my gosh, I don't remember his first name, but anyway, the captain of the. Famously, the captain of the HMS Beagle, the sort of survey ship that Darwin went around the world on. He later on became, I think, Admiral Fitzroy and was responsible for setting up kind of the network of weather stations that the British Navy used to get weather information to make predictions about weather. And I think that was the 1850s that that happened. That was a sort of systematization of keeping track of weather information that I think started with. Maybe it's because I grew up in England and you learn all the things that happened in the country you grew up in. But I think that was a British Navy innovation, so to speak. And certainly that was a time. The 1800s was certainly a time when the British Navy was kind of a big force in the world. But, yeah, I think that that's a time when one started to get really systematic records subsequently by. Well, nowadays There are about 30,000 professional weather stations in the world. A lot of them are things like airports. Some of them are at things like post offices in the us by the time there were airports being systematically constructed in the early decades of the 20th century, I think that was pretty early that there were weather stations of some kind there. There were certainly wind socks showing you the direction of the wind, but it was clearly important to airplanes that you know what the weather is like at the airport that you're trying to land at or whatever. And so I think that helped in the systematization of weather Recording. I mean, one of the confusing things about weather recording is that there are sometimes differences in conventions about how the weather is recorded. And there will be differences between different countries, between different states and so on. And so when you look at the data, there are these weird discontinuities, like there'll be a weird change when you go across a country border. And that's because of different conventions about how the weather data is taken and recorded and disseminated. And so in the analysis of that data, it's pretty tricky. I mean, there are some things that are much more systematic. If you have a satellite that's looking at the, know, Overall levels of CO2 or water vapor or whatever it is, that's something that sort of works the same all over the Earth. But if you're saying, you know, what was the temperature at this particular place over the last hundred years, that's a tricky thing. Because, for example, one thing that happened is that there were places where, well, originally when that weather station was set up, it was in the middle of the countryside, but later on it was in the middle of a town and there's asphalt all over the over the place and there's black roads that absorb lots more heat from the sun and cities are typically a couple of degrees warmer than the countryside, so to speak. And that then got reflected in what these weather measurements would see. Okay, there's a comment from Capper and saying at the time of the dinosaurs, atmospheric oxygen levels were significantly higher, which contributed to the existence of very large insects. Interesting. Yeah, certainly oxygen levels have gone up and down and I don't know. Next question is why? And there's some geological features from volcanoes and so on that have led to that. I don't know what the other determining factors have been or whether that's known, but one can tell things about those oxygen levels by looking at growth of, oh, marine sediment and things like this, I think. Let's see. All right, maybe one more question and then we should probably. Wrap up here. I'm seeing a question from eclipse. When a space shuttle reenters the Earth's atmosphere, does it affect our protection from solar and cosmic radiation? Could this piercing of the Earth's barrier impact the stability of the magnetosphere like a wound that closes gradually or immediately? Interesting question. I never thought about it. Certainly what happens when a large object re enters the Earth's atmosphere? It gets very hot because of friction from the air. And it gets hot enough that it's producing a plasma and it's ionizing the air around it. It ionizes it to the point where so it's pulling the electrons out of the atoms. So that just like happens in lots of places, like a lightning strike. You know, you're seeing ionized air in that case as well. But you know, in the case of spacecraft entering the atmosphere, you get this whole sheath of ionized air around the spacecraft. And so, for example, if it's trying to communicate with radio, that doesn't work because the plasma is conducting and the radio waves just get absorbed by the plasma. So that plasma certainly will affect the magnetosphere, which is also kind of a. Kind of made of plasma. And. Yeah, I mean, certainly it will have some effect. I can't imagine it's a very large and a long lasting effect. Actually. It makes me wonder. There was an experiment some friends of mine were involved in about the ionosphere during the recent solar eclipse. And I actually didn't hear the results of that. I need to find out what the results were of to what extent the solar eclipse. Because the ionosphere is affected by whether there is solar radiation and light hitting the atmosphere. And that determines. That's why in the early evening you can bounce radio waves from the, what's it, the appleton layer, F layer, whatever it's called, of the ionosphere. You can get long wavelength radio waves will kind of bounce many times between the surface of the Earth and the ionosphere. And so you can kind of hear that distant radio signal from the other side of the Earth at a particular time of day. But when the. When the sun kind of. The sun kind of burns off that layer. And so you don't. You're not able to get the bouncing of radio waves from I guess the plasma layer in the upper atmosphere. And the question was, during the eclipse, when the sun was sort of switched off, how quickly would the ionosphere would that feature of the ionosphere that is typical of the evening, how quickly would it form? Does it form in a couple of minutes or does it take much longer to form? I don't know the answer to that experiment, but that will be sort of related to this question, I think. I mean, I think this whole issue of what disrupts the Earth's magnetosphere and so on. Interesting question. I mean, recently there was a bunch of solar activity that disrupted the magnetosphere, I guess, and led to auroras in lots of places. And I saw not a very good aurora. Where was I? I guess I was. Where was I? I think I was where I normally am, near Boston. And it wasn't terribly convincing. I mean, you always have to wait a While to see the colors in aurora for one's eyes to get dark adapted. But that's the result of the disruption of. Well, I guess it's the, it's the presence of a lot of charged particles which then interact with the upper atmosphere to produce the light from exciting oxygen and so on in the upper atmosphere. That's not quite the same thing as disrupting the magnetosphere. And I guess a question would be if you have something like a coronal mass ejection, a big lump of plasma thrown by the sun out from the sun. When that happens, the bad news is if that hits the Earth, usually it doesn't because the Earth's pretty small relative to the whole all the angles that the coronal mass ejection could be sent in. And I think the last time and that probably happened big time was 1859, the so called Carrington event where there was a kind of the. That was sort of a substantial sort of big ball of plasma that hit the Earth's magnetosphere and produced all kinds of effects of, you know, shorting out telegraph lines and all kinds of other things. Maybe shouldn't go into all the physics details of that, but I don't know. Interesting question is how long did it take after that coronal mass ejection for the whole kind of magnetosphere of the Earth and so on to reform itself the way it was before? I don't know the answer. I would guess it happens fairly quickly, but I don't know for sure. Like in a matter of days, for example. And I doubt it's the, I doubt it's the biggest risk in that situation. The biggest risk is you destroy a bunch of satellites, you short out a bunch of power, you know, local power grids and those kinds of things. All right, well, we should probably wrap up there. Thanks for asking all kinds of interesting questions and telling me different things here. And okay, I should wrap up, go back to my day job here and look forward to seeing you another time. And you know, I'm about to say bye with my right hand and I've been commenting on, you know, I'm left handed but for larger motor motions I use my right hand. So this is an example of a larger motor motion. So bye for now.