Listener Questions #15

Daniel and Kelly explain itches, the Oort cloud and the geometry of honeycombs! See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hey there, extraordinaries. Kelly here. My book, A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space? Should We Settle Space? And Have We Really Thought This Through? Comes out in paperback on July 29. So, if you've been interested in reading it, but the hardback version was just too expensive or the waitlist at your library was intolerably long, then you're in luck. In this book, we answer questions like, where are we likely to settle in space? Can we make babies in space? Why do astronauts love taco sauce? And what's the legal status of space cannibalism? So grab yourself a copy of A City on Mars wherever fine books are sold.

• 2:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Conflicting advice is making me twitch. Is it good or is it bad to scratch my itch?

• 2:38Daniel Whiteson?

  If the Oort Cloud is filled with icy rocks, why isn't our view of the stars blocked?

• 2:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Are honeybees nature's mathematicians? Or can nature forge hexagons without cognition?

• 2:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Whatever questions keep you up at night, Daniel and Kelly's answers will make it right.

• 2:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.

• 3:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I love hearing questions from the public, what people are wondering about, what they're curious about, what they are confused about, right to be pleased, and share with me your confusion.

• 3:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Wiener-Smith. I study parasites and space, and I totally agree with Daniel. And also, I have to note that these questions have pointed out to me how many things I don't think hard enough about. Like, today, we have some very basic questions about, like, why do we itch? And I, you know, I must scratch 10 or so times a day, like, or maybe even more, without thinking about it. And I've never really thought about why. And so I am loving the opportunity to dig into all of these different questions.

• 3:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it's fun on so many levels. Like, we get an opportunity to learn more about areas that we've always been curious about, but never had an excuse to dig into. Like, when have you told yourself, "I have an hour free, I'm gonna read about itching"? But now you have a reason, right?

• 4:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep.

• 4:08Daniel Whiteson?

  You also discover how many basic things in science we're still pretty clueless about. You know, like, how many things we understand at really just the surface level.

• 4:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 4:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Which means that there's lots of things to figure out for all you young scientists out there.

• 4:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that's right. All the kids who are listening, there's a lot of work for you to do. And, you know, just keep a list, as we go through these episodes, of questions that need answers, that you might be the one to answer.

• 4:29Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right. The forefront of human knowledge is not that far away from where you are right now in lots of cases. I mean, yeah, we've been doing physics For a long time and we've made some progress and it takes a while to understand all the details of particle physics, but there's still very basic questions even about particle physics that we don't know the answers to. Why are there so many particles? What do they all do? What is the rest of the universe made out of? You know, basic stuff, everybody wants to understand. And so if you have a question about the universe or parasites or parasites in the universe, you might be asking a question right at the forefront of our knowledge. So don't be shy, ask away.

• 5:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  And let us do the research for you. So I have an answer I'm just itching to share with you. We got, we got, there must have been something itchy in the air because within a very short amount of time, we got two different questions about itching and scratching. So let's go ahead and hear the questions.

• 5:24Speaker 04

  I'd like to know what causes itches and why does scratching stop them? I don't mean itches that have a clear source, medicine side effects, bug bites, rashes, irritating clothing seams, et cetera. I mean, when you're just going about your day and suddenly some random part of you itches and when you scratch it, the itch stops. What's up with that?

• 5:47Speaker 05

  Hey, I'm loving the show. I wonder if you could answer a question for me? This might be one for Kelly. I've heard recently about a study which said, I think it was in mice, that if you scratch an itch, then it's beneficial because that allows antibodies to go to the site and to clear up any infection. But then there was another study, also in mice, saying that scratching an itch is problematic because it activates pain nerves, which then causes more itching and more inflammation. Which is it? Should I ignore the urge to scratch an itch? Or should I just go ahead and scratch it? Keep up the good work. Thanks.

• 6:29Daniel Whiteson?

  I think these questions are pretty deep. They're not really just surface level, you know? I think they're really dig down into what's going on underneath the skin.

• 6:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, and I had a ton of fun digging in. And actually, it turns out that our understanding of itching has apparently undergone some pretty major changes in the last few decades. So initially, we thought that itching was a minor form of pain, which would suggest that it's using the same pain receptors. And it's just sort of like, if you tickle the pain receptors just a little bit, you get an itch, but when you really hurt them, then you get pain.

• 7:04Daniel Whiteson?

  But back up and give me the bigger picture here. When you say pain receptors, you're talking about like nerve endings just under the skin? And I don't know enough biology to even know, like, are there different nerves for pain and for like cold and for other stuff? How does that all work?

• 7:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, yeah, great question. So there are different nerves for different things. And so we do have some nerves that specifically are there to tell us about pain. And so for anyone who's gotten tattoos out there, you know that there are some areas that hurt to get tattooed more than others. Daniel, you're shaking your head yes knowingly. Do you have tattoos?

• 7:35Daniel Whiteson?

  I do not, but I have a teenager who wants to get tattoos. And so we've had lots of conversations about making permanent decisions for your body.

• 7:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Got it, okay. So there are some parts of your body that have more pain receptors than others, and those areas tend to hurt a little bit more when you get tattoos. And what these receptors do is they deliver messages from like the surface of your skin up to your brain to say, oh, something hurts. And then you respond to it. And often you respond to it without even really thinking about it. You have sort of a reflexive response.

• 8:05Daniel Whiteson?

  And so, for example, I know that I have a lot of nerves in the tips of my fingers. So I could tell the difference between one needle and like two needles very close together. The tips of my fingers, but not like on my elbow, because I have fewer nerves there, I can't resolve it. But that's a different nerve system than the ones that help me sense pain?

• 8:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, so we're getting a little bit outside of my area of expertise here. But I think that those are touch receptors that you would be detecting there, unless you were like stabbing those needles into your fingers, which I assume you're not. I think we're talking about touch receptors there. And we've got receptors for cold and for hot and stuff like that.

• 8:38Daniel Whiteson?

  So you were saying that people used to think that itching were stimulating the pain receptors, the nerves that tell us when something hurts? That doesn't really make a lot of sense to me, because itching doesn't feel like pain. It feels like uncomfortable and it drives me crazy, but doesn't hurt the same way.

• 8:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, well, so I wonder if it was because sometimes if you itch for a really long time, you scratch and then it starts to hurt. And so maybe people were just like imagining a continuum there that doesn't exist. But also, it's not so surprising we got these two systems sort of mixed up because they have a lot of crosstalk. There's a lot of times when you stimulate one system and it sort of interacts with the other. For example, when I got an epidural, when I was pregnant with my second, the first one was natural, second one I had an epidural.

• 9:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Not just like a Friday night epidural?

• 9:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, yeah, right. No, I mean, fun.

• 9:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Not recreational.

• 9:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Not recreational, yeah.

• 9:31Daniel Whiteson?

  No judgments to anybody out there who does that, you know, just clarifying here.

• 9:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, fair enough. But that would be an expensive habit, I'm guessing, because I think you'd need to get insured. But anyway, so when I got my epidural, I started itching like crazy. And I didn't find like a paper that specifically said some people who get epidural scratch like crazy. But I found a couple of papers that were referencing how sometimes when you do something for pain, you get this weird itchy side effect. And sometimes when you do something for itching, you get this weird pain side effect. And so these two systems seem to have a lot of crosstalk and they interact, but they are separate.

• 10:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Interesting.

• 10:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so we do have specific receptors for itch.

• 10:10Daniel Whiteson?

  We do. So we've like evolved the whole system to make you uncomfortable.

• 10:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, okay, so I would say that a lot of times, it does seem like our itch system does things that are maladaptive.

• 10:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 10:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Give me a second to do a little bit more explaining and then we'll get back to that. So you've got these itch receptors and they can be stimulated externally or internally. So externally would be like, there's a tick crawling on your skin, and you feel itchy and your immediate response is to try to brush it off. And that is pretty adaptive. You know, you move it off and now you don't have that tick on there anymore. And I'm very proud of my body because I feel like I am really tuned to ticks. I've almost never had one bite me, but I've taken loads off of me. So like, I feel them when they're moving around. So that's good.

• 10:56Daniel Whiteson?

  That's definitely a plus. I understand that like your body wants you to feel uncomfortable having that critter crawl over you.

• 11:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, exactly. Like, your attention needs to be drawn to that, and you need to take care of it right away. We also have responses to internal things like histamines and various things that your immune system does. So, for example, if you, in the winter, have really dry hands and you like make a fist and your skin cracks and bleeds, like mine does, your immune system responds to those cracks and it recruits to where those cracks are. And the presence of those immune system cells trigger your itch receptors. And that's why your hand gets itchy when it's all broken and bleeding.

• 11:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Help me understand why internal histamines trigger the same receptors as a tick crawling across my skin. Does that make sense for some reason?

• 11:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm not sure that it does make sense. So, there's a couple of different hypotheses here. So, one hypothesis is that our species itches as sort of like an evolutionary holdover. So, we used to have fur and it used to be that we would, when we would itch, we wouldn't damage ourselves because the fur got in the way. But now we don't have fur. And so, when we itch, we damage ourselves. And so, it could be that most of the time when there was an immune response, maybe it was because, for example, there was a tick that had bit and the immune system was responding to it. And so, if you scratch and you scratch through your fur, you get that tick off. And, you know, I can still imagine the immune system drawing your attention to the presence of a tick.

• 12:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  And, you know, the sooner you remove a tick, the better, because some of them don't give you the diseases they're carrying until they've been on there for a while. And now I feel like I'm crawling with ticks because we're talking about it.

• 12:41Daniel Whiteson?

  I hope everybody out there is not getting all itchy and ticky.

• 12:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, sorry, guys and gals. So yeah, I mean, I think it sometimes scratching is good because it removes something or maybe it recruits more immune cells, but sometimes scratching is just bad.

• 12:55Daniel Whiteson?

  So I think you're saying that itching on the surface is very clear. It's to help us get rid of something that's crawling across us and might bite us and is bad for us. And that itching internally might also be good because it's a signal that something has already bitten us. And if we scratch it, we could get rid of it. So it's not that they trigger exactly the same mechanism. It's like two ways to protect us from critters. But are they biochemically the same mechanism? Like, does a tick crawling across your skin trigger the same histamines and that whole same channel? Or are they two separate mechanisms?

• 13:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Both mechanisms trigger the same itch receptors to send a message to your brain that says, "Scratch." And I think in both cases, you can get good information that tells you to scratch when you should scratch. But both externally and internally, you can also get bad information. So for example, your skin might be particularly sensitive to certain kinds of allergens or, you know, certain kinds of compounds in soap. And then you might start scratching for no good reason. And, you know, same thing with your body responding internally by releasing histamines at places where you really don't need to be scratching. And additionally, when you start scratching, you can initiate what's called the itch-scratch cycle. And here's what happens there.

• 14:07Daniel Whiteson?

  This sounds like a nightmare.

• 14:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  So you start itching. And when you start itching, we all know that it feels amazing often. And so what's happening there is that your itch signal is being overridden by a pain signal. Because when you scratch, you're causing yourself a little bit of pain. And I think the rest of this explanation is a little bit like, here's what we think is happening, but we're not 100% sure. But they think that after you scratch and your pain signal overrides the itch signal, you also release some serotonin, which makes you feel better and sort of makes the pain eventually go away. And so scratching feels good. But when you scratch, you often damage the skin a little bit, especially if you're giving it a really strong scratch.

• 14:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  And if you give it too hard of a scratch, now you've caused damage and that damage recruits more. Immune cells, which makes you itch even more. And so by itching, you can make yourself itchier. And so there are people who have chronic itching issues and they get stuck in this itch scratch cycle. And you know, if you tell someone who's itchy, oh, just don't, don't scratch it. The scratching is what's causing the problem. That's like maddening, I think, to tell someone because once you've got an itch, how do you avoid scratching that itch? That's like all you can think about.

• 15:22Daniel Whiteson?

  This is fascinating to me to understand exactly what happens when you scratch an itch because I do this all the time. I'm the kind of person who's very sensitive to mosquito bites. They like torture me. And if I have one that's like really buzzing and I scratch it, it's like the greatest relief in the world. Oh, my God, that feeling is just like, it's not just that the itch goes away, right? Like actually feels really good. But you're right. If you scratch it hard, then that relief fades and then the pain comes through and then it gets itchy again. And scattered through my house are like dozens of these itch relief sticks.

• 15:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh.

• 15:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Which I totally rely on and they're little Benadryl sticks and they are antihistamines. So I think that personal piece of data, that anecdote supports your hypothesis there. But it's fascinating to hear about like the serotonin, like that's why I feel good, right? It's not just that the itch has stopped and the discomfort has gone, but there's something in my body that is making me actually enjoy it.

• 16:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  That is the current hypothesis. Yes. I don't know that we've absolutely nailed that down. And it's interesting that you mentioned antihistamines because one of the reasons that we know we don't really understand itch well is that you can give someone antihistamines in a case where you think that should solve the problem.

• 16:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 16:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  And it doesn't.

• 16:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh.

• 16:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so it is more complicated. And, you know, for some people, if you've got an itch, you scratch it, that that's the end of the story. But for other people, their immune systems are a little bit more sensitive. You scratch it, that recruits more immune cells and you start getting in the cycle. You also can get chronic itch for reasons that, you know, we again, don't understand really well. So for example.

• 16:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Chronic itch?

• 16:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  I know, chronic itch.

• 16:53Daniel Whiteson?

  I would never wish that on my worst enemy.

• 16:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  I was listening to an interview on NPR's Fresh Air from a woman who has a disease, I think it was of her liver or kidneys. And it creates chronic itch. And we don't understand why that particular issue should result in chronic itch, but she itches all the time. There's also folks who have chronic itch related to mental health issues. So like when they get depressed or anxious, it kind of makes them itchy and so they scratch a lot more.

• 17:22Daniel Whiteson?

  What's the connection there?

• 17:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't think we know.

• 17:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Just another amazing mind body connection. You know, it's incredible to me how much your mental state influences your body's health and vice versa.

• 17:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I mean, the only reason I ended up on anxiety medication is because I went to my doctor and was like, everything hurts, my stomach hurts and what, why is it? And she was like, I think it's, she didn't say, I think it's in your head. She was much nicer about it, but yes, when we're stressed out or anxious or depressed, it impacts our body in weird ways.

• 17:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 17:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  So yeah, the studying of chronic itching and how to relieve it is a big area where there's a lot of work that we still have left to do. So the first question that we had was, why do you itch when there's nothing there to make you itch? And I think part of the answer could be that, you know, for some people, it's a mental health thing. Maybe they're anxious and stressed and there is nothing there. But I think a lot of the times it's something did cause you to need to itch, but maybe it's just escaping your consciousness. So for example, maybe there is like some fiber in your shirt that your body is confusing as a tick. Or there was something in your soap that's creating a little bit of an allergic reaction in your back that you didn't know about.

• 18:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  You know, I think in general, something usually initiates this need to scratch, but we just can't always tell what it was.

• 18:42Daniel Whiteson?

  And the second question I think is one that's close to my heart, which is tell me, Kelly, from the point of view of science, should I scratch or should I resist? Am I a bad person for scratching my itches?

• 18:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, one, you are not a bad person for scratching your itches. There is no judgment here. Two, I think it depends on why you're itching. So the listener mentioned that there was a study in mice that found that if you scratched, it recruited immune cells to the area and that maybe that immune cell helped you deal with an infection or something. So it's possible that under some conditions, maybe you're able to recruit more immune cells if you've got like an infection or something that's itchy. But I think in a lot of cases, itching will feel good, but there's some chance that something bad will happen afterwards. And that something bad would be you could maybe open up a wound and give yourself an infection, or you could start off a new round of the itch scratch cycle. And so, well, I think there's nothing wrong with like,

• 19:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Giving a light scratch to a mosquito bite, or if you've got an itch, making sure you don't have an insect crawling on you or a tick crawling on you. But in general, I think the answer, because it's biology, is it depends. And if you are gonna scratch, if you can scratch with like, I don't know, your knuckles or something to try to like, not break the skin so much, that would be great. But you know, just at the end of the day, some of us, we can't help but scratch. And it's, it's just hard to avoid.

• 20:05Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, well, now I have a question, which you may be the only person in the world qualified to answer.

• 20:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  What?

• 20:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Because it connects itches and space. Are there cases where astronauts had crazy itches they couldn't scratch because they were in a space suit? And what are you supposed to do?

• 20:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, oh, my gosh, that must have happened. So you know, you can like, I guess you could try to like, rub your skin against the inside of the suit and so like.

• 20:31Daniel Whiteson?

  I wish you all could see the dance Kelly is doing right now to mimic how to scratch your back inside a space suit.

• 20:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, there are so many things that sound uncomfortable about being in a space suit. And the most uncomfortable of which is delamination. Have we talked, do you know what that means?

• 20:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Uh, no, it sounds like you're removing your skin, maybe?

• 20:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  You're removing your nails. So those gloves.

• 20:54Daniel Whiteson?

  No.

• 20:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm so sorry. So those gloves are really hard to bend. And there are some cases where people have tried to bend it and their nails have kind of gotten stuck and their nails have pulled up from the nail bed. I know, so gross. So anyway.

• 21:08Daniel Whiteson?

  And then you can't scratch your itches because you have no more fingernails.

• 21:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, my gosh. Oh, so many layers of horror. Don't go to space.

• 21:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I haven't been to space, but I've had the situation where I had a cast and had itches inside the cast. And you know, we've all devised that long, scratchy tool. You can stick underneath the cast.

• 21:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep, chopstick.

• 21:27Daniel Whiteson?

  But I can't imagine what you would do if you were on like a six hour EVA and you had an itch and you just had to keep going.

• 21:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  I would be so distracted. It would be so hard for me to finish the mission.

• 21:38Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, well, let's check in with Jane and Kay to see if we scratched their itch. And then we'll take a break before we come back and go into outer space to answer more questions.

• 21:48Speaker 06

  Oh, Kelly, I'm so sorry for asking such a controversial question. I do hope people weren't scratching too much whilst listening. Did you answer my question? Well, you seem to say that I need to resist the urge to scratch, so I'll try my best. But Kelly, I was so proud of you that you resisted the urge to combine poop and parasites in the answer. I understand the itch resulting from scabies mite infestation is mainly caused by their waste products. But thank you for answering my question. This is another reason why you're my favorite podcast.

• 22:36Speaker 00

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by breakout singer-songwriter Alex Warren.

• 22:56Speaker 07

  I'm like a kid when I play music and I make music and I'm constantly asking questions. You know, whether it's an instrument I haven't played or it's a melody that seems foreign. You know, there's every night you play a show and it's the same set, but it's not the same show. At a certain point, your brain kind of goes on autopilot. When I'm in the studio or if I'm making music, that's where that curiosity kind of comes back, you know? I haven't lost it yet, but I'm also on my sophomore album. So, and you, you obviously are an expert here.

• 23:22Speaker 00

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 24:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, we're back. So imagine you are an itchy astronaut heading towards the Oort cloud. And Tim from the UK has a question about what that would be like.

• 24:58Speaker 10

  Hi, Daniel and Kelly. Tim from the UK here. Love the podcast. Here's my question. The Oort cloud surrounds our solar system and is filled with trillions of objects, is one to three light years thick. So then surely our true view of the universe outside of the cloud must be getting obscured or obstructed. And why is our view of the night sky relatively permanent, fixed points of light coming in from the stars? Surely there should be times when the stars are completely obscured by the massive objects in the cloud. If the cloud thins, then more of the stars should be visible. If the cloud thickens, then some of the stars should disappear. That's it. Keep up the good work. Bye.

• 25:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Thanks, Tim, for this wonderful question and for giving us an opportunity to scratch your orty itch.

• 25:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So when I was looking at your outline, there was a fact in your outline that absolutely blew my mind. So let's, let's get to it. Let's jump into what is the Oort Cloud?

• 25:58Daniel Whiteson?

  So the Oort Cloud is a theoretical cloud of icy mini planets, meaning-

• 26:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  I thought we knew it existed. The fact that it's theoretical is blowing my mind. The Oort Cloud is a maybe?

• 26:11Daniel Whiteson?

  It's a maybe for exactly the reason that Tim is asking, because we can't see it.

• 26:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 26:17Daniel Whiteson?

  We can't see it. We've never seen it. There's like one observation of a thing people think might have come from the Oort Cloud, and people think comets maybe, probably come from the Oort Cloud, but the Oort Cloud itself is not something we've ever seen. And it's a shame because it would be amazing. So let's back up and remind people, what is the Oort Cloud, anyway? So we're talking really far out in the solar system. So, you know, the sun is at the center and the Earth orbits at what we call 1 AU, and the big planets are at like 5-ish AU. And if you go all the way out to Pluto, it orbits at a radius of like 40-ish AU. So like really far out there in the solar system, right?

• 26:58Daniel Whiteson?

  But the Oort Cloud, if it exists, is 2,000 to like 100,000 AU from the sun.

• 27:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 27:05Daniel Whiteson?

  We're talking about like 1 to 3 light years. This is a big blob of objects that are very, very, very far away from where we are currently. So they're not technically part of the solar system. They're sort of like captured by the sun's gravity, but very, very far out there.

• 27:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  So when you say 2,000 to 200,000, is that a huge error bar or just a huge area that's occupied by the Oort Cloud?

• 27:32Daniel Whiteson?

  It's a huge area. So like if you were gonna go visit the Oort Cloud, it would start at like 50,000 AU, and you'd still be going through and come at the other side, somewhere around 1, maybe 200,000 AU.

• 27:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 27:46Daniel Whiteson?

  So it's a huge area, exactly. And it has lots and lots of objects in it. Like the Oort Cloud is not like 2 little pieces of ice. We think it has like trillions and trillions of little icy bits. Out there, a lot of them bigger than like one kilometer wide, billions of them bigger than 20 kilometers wide. So it's a lot of stuff, but space is really vast, you know, volume grows very quickly with radius. So as you get far out there, we're talking about an incredible amount of space. So even though there's a lot of stuff in there, it all adds up to like five times the mass of the earth. If you clump it all together, it's spread out really, really far. So you wouldn't be like dodging asteroids like in Star Wars.

• 28:30Daniel Whiteson?

  You'd be like using telescopes to find an object, even if you were in the middle of the Oort Cloud.

• 28:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow. So I had imagined that the Oort Cloud was dust and small rocks. But it makes more sense that the cloud is made of water, or you said ice. Is that ice made of water? And how did water get out there?

• 28:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, water is actually everywhere in the solar system and in the universe. It's not just water ice, though. There's like methane ice and other frozen stuff. And it's not unusual to find ice or frozen water or frozen other stuff out there in the far solar system. You know, Neptune and Uranus have a lot of these things in them as well. Anything past the frost line in the solar system, which is the inner part of the solar system, where the sun's radiation is going to melt or vaporize any sort of water that's out there. You're going to find a lot of it. That's why Jupiter and Saturn are bigger, for example, because as those planets started to form in the early solar system, they could gather ice because it was around and so they could grow faster than the inner planets.

• 29:28Daniel Whiteson?

  So the sort of more solid stuff out there because the sun's radiation hadn't blasted it into vapor.

• 29:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So there is maybe a massive cloud of ice, but maybe not.

• 29:42Daniel Whiteson?

  And it's sort of the third cloud in our solar system. Like we have the asteroid belt, which is past Mars, and it's a bunch of rocks left over that we think can't coalesce into a planet because of Jupiter's gravitational pull and the tidal forces. Then there's the Kuiper belt, which is out there that provides short period comets. And it's just like a bunch of icy rocks. But the Oort Cloud is maybe a thousand times further out than the Kuiper belt. So it really is like a halo for the whole solar system.

• 30:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so the stuff that's out there in that cloud, can you give me a sense for like how much stuff is out there? Like if you mushed it all together? How much would you have?

• 30:20Daniel Whiteson?

  So it's like five times the mass of the earth. So it's not a tiny amount of stuff, right? It's just spread out over an incredible area. You know how like when you start with a tub of frosting, you're like, oh, this is definitely going to be enough frosting for this cake. And then you start spreading out the cake. You're like, oh, this might not be enough frosting. Like the Oort Cloud is spread super duper thin. You know, it's like the sun is the most lightly frosted thing you've ever seen.

• 30:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  I thought you're this will, this is a bit of insight into me. Maybe I thought you were going to say, when you sit down with the frosting and a spoon,

• 30:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  this is definitely more than enough desserts. And then you're like, no, I wanted more.

• 30:57Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, there's a warning on the side of the frosting that says not to be eaten on its own.

• 31:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Are you serious?

• 31:03Daniel Whiteson?

  I am serious.

• 31:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Why? Do they, are they like prohibiting joy?

• 31:07Daniel Whiteson?

  And there's a whole episode of the Hyperfix Podcast about exactly that. You should go dig into it. It's a fun story.

• 31:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, all right. My family might be in a lot of trouble. I'll dig in.

• 31:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Anyway, I'm not a doctor, but I don't recommend that you eat a whole tub of frosting by yourself. At least share it with your family.

• 31:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  I share it with the kids. All right, so moving on.

• 31:25Daniel Whiteson?

  And we're not 100% sure what the Oort Cloud is made out of because we've never seen it directly. Right? If we could see light bouncing off of it, we could understand how it reflects and absorbs light. And we could get some spectrographic information. Or if we had a great theory for how it formed, we could understand it. But we have a few various ideas for like how one gets an Oort Cloud. One is that it's sort of the detritus from the formation of the solar system. There's a lot of like gravitational interactions. And sometimes things get sort of tossed out of the center. You know, we think, for example, there might've been another gas giant that in the early part of the solar system, because of the push and the pull of the various other planets could have gotten tossed out. It's not that easy to stay in orbit.

• 32:06Daniel Whiteson?

  If you get a big enough push from something else, you might find another orbit or you might just be lost. And so these Oort Cloud objects might be like little bits that were formed closer to the solar system and then got kicked out and ended up in a stable orbit very far from the solar system.

• 32:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow, so we could have had like another Saturn. But now it's out in the Oort Cloud. That's crazy.

• 32:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. Or it could have been that as our sun was forming, there was another star that was forming nearby. Stars tend to form in clumps, right? You have a huge cloud of gas that collapses into a solar system, but doesn't usually collapse into one solar system. It collapses into several based on where the over densities were in that gas cloud. And so it could have like exchanged material with sister stars. And this Oort Cloud could be like, you know, the last bit of that tug of war between the stars.

• 32:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Huh. So we've got theories for why it exists. But what is our evidence that it exists? Do we just think that it exists because we have some theories saying it should? Or has someone like looked through a telescope and been like, kind of looks like a cloud out there?

• 33:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. Why would anybody imagine this thing exists if we've never seen it, right? Well, one of the original reasons for this concept was to explain long period comets. So comets are ice balls that plummet towards the center of the solar system, go around the back of the sun and then zoom back out. And they can have shorter periods, you know, years, decades, or they can have longer periods, hundreds of years. And people wonder like, where do those ice balls come from? They take hundreds of years to orbit the sun. And so they imagine maybe there's a huge cluster of these balls out there, sort of floating in distant space. And sometimes one of them gets perturbed and falls in towards the inner solar system and becomes a comet. So this is where the hypothesis of the Oort Cloud comes from.

• 33:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, interesting.

• 33:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. And it highlights something which I think is often overlooked, which is comets are a real danger. You know, people think about asteroids hitting us and we will monitor the asteroid belt. And that's cool, but like asteroids, we can see, we can predict. And mostly we know where the big ones are. But they're also not that far away from us. So if they hit us, they're not going that fast. But comets, they come out of the darkness, right? We have no idea. There's trillions of them out there. They can just get perturbed, come suddenly out of the darkness. And by the time they hit the earth, they're going incredibly fast. And so like in terms of existential danger, like comets in the Oort Cloud are a huge gun loaded with trillions of bullets pointed at the earth.

• 34:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  And if existential dread is your jam, you should check out our earlier interview with Phil Plait, where we just talked about the many ways the universe is trying to kill us.

• 34:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. And so we've never seen the Oort Cloud, but we've tried, you know? The Oort Cloud is so far out that it's past Voyager 1, which is the probe the humanity has sent out into space and is the furthest, fastest human ship. It might reach the beginning of the Oort Cloud in 300 more years, though the power on that thing is rapidly running out.

• 35:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, no.

• 35:01Daniel Whiteson?

  But of course, we can also try to see the Oort Cloud from Earth. And this gets really to Tim's question, like, why isn't it blocking our view? It's not blocking our view because it's a lot of really, really tiny objects super far away. It's like if an astronaut threw sand into space, it wouldn't block your view, right? And that's effectively what's going on here. They're really small. Each object, because it's so far away, would block the tiniest little portion of the night sky. So even though there are so many of them, they don't add up to blocking much of your night sky. But it's something that people are looking for. The way you could see the Oort Cloud is exactly that, is to see like, can we see an object pass in front of a star?

• 35:42Daniel Whiteson?

  These little mini star eclipses would give us a hint that the Oort Cloud is real and that it's out there. And there is one tentative observation, this object called Sedna, we think is 140 billion kilometers from the Sun. It's a tentative observation of this thing.

• 35:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, my gosh. That's, I mean, to be able to see a teeny tiny object passing in front of the Sun seems to me like it would require amazing telescope abilities.

• 36:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. And Sedna is really hard to spot. It's 20 times further away from the Sun than Pluto. So its orbit is at about 1,000 AU. And it's a very, very elongated orbit. But, you know, it's just probably one of like zillions and zillions of things that are out there that we can just barely spot. But as we improve our telescopes, we'll get a clearer view of what's out there in the Oort Cloud, which is important because the better we understand the Oort Cloud, the better we're able to model it and predict what might happen. You know, every once in a while, another star comes near our star. And when they approach each other, they can gravitationally nudge on each other's Oort clouds, potentially stimulating like a shower of comets into the inner solar system.

• 36:51Daniel Whiteson?

  And yeah, doesn't that seem like something we'd like to understand?

• 36:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  When you say every once in a while, I hope you mean every like few billion years not in my lifetime? Or what does every once in a while mean?

• 37:01Daniel Whiteson?

  There is prediction that in 1.3 million years, another star is going to come within around 20 or 30 light days of our star. And so, yeah, it's not going to be for a while.

• 37:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's good. Yeah, I don't suspect I'll still be around by that point.

• 37:17Daniel Whiteson?

  But you know, the sun oscillates relative to the galaxy. It doesn't just go around the center of the galaxy. It goes up and down through the plane of the galaxy, like every 30 million years or so. So it's not like our galactic neighborhood is constant. You know, we're always zooming through the galaxy and changing our neighbors. And so they can come and go, and that affects the Oort cloud and you know, life on Earth.

• 37:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's so amazing to me, how many things are happening at this very tiny scales and absolutely huge scales that you miss. Like the other day I was walking and I saw this little shimmer in front of my face. And it was a baby spider. When they eventually go off to start their lives, they release a tiny little bit of silk that catches the air and they, it's called ballooning and they sort of balloon off. And there's all these little things that like are happening that you only get a glimpse of very rarely and you're missing it on the micro scale. And there's all this like, I just now learned that we're on a carousel around the galaxy. And I hadn't, I was missing that too. It's amazing.

• 38:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, you're right, there is so much going on in the universe. We perceive a tiny little bit of it. We pay attention to an even smaller slice and we understand an even smaller slice of that. And so we hope this podcast helps open up your eyes and your mind to what's going on in the rest of the universe. And so Tim, tell us if we have successfully stretched your brain out to the edges of the Oort cloud and explained why it doesn't block your view of the beautiful night sky. Let us know.

• 38:44Speaker 10

  Great answer, guys. Thanks very much. Keep up the good work.

• 38:58Speaker 00

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• 39:17Speaker 11

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• 41:13Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, we're back and we're answering questions from people like you who are curious about the universe and want to know how things work. Please send us your questions to [email protected]. We'd love to have you on the pod. So we've talked about itches, we've talked about space, and now we're going to zoom back in to talk about something that's happening right in your backyard. Humans aren't the only clever engineers on the planet.

• 41:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Maybe, we'll see. That's the payoff at the end. So, uh, so let's go ahead and listen to a question from Eric in Idaho.

• 41:47Speaker 14

  Hey Kelly, I was inspired by your passion for biology on the show and came across something called the honeycomb conjecture. Bees create hexagons for a fascinating reason, and in the last couple of decades, a gentleman named Thomas Hales proved the conjecture using math. I had a few questions for you that I'd love to get your thoughts on. What is the history behind the conjecture? Why, why do bees create hexagons to begin with? What are the advantages to doing this? Also, do biologists see any other species creating hexagons? And also, I've been thinking a lot about math, and we all know math and physics go hand in hand. However, I don't hear much about math and biology going together. How prevalent is math and biology? Do you use it daily in your research? One thing too,

• 42:30Speaker 14

  I've been thinking about a lot is that some physicists believe that the universe, nature, is inherently mathematical. What do biologists say on this matter? What is their opinion? Is, is the universe, is nature inherently mathematical, or is this just the language that we human beings create to describe such crazy things like hexagons and nature? All right, I certainly appreciate everything you and Daniel do. Thank you for considering my questions.

• 42:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Eric is a long time listener to this show and a frequent emailer, and we love hearing from him. If you would like to email with us and have us answer all of your science questions, please, please, please write to us to [email protected]. We mean it. Anyway, Kelly, what can you tell us about the honeycomb conjecture and bees? How long have people been thinking about this?

• 43:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, first of all, I love this question because it's a nice intersection of physics and biology. And so, you know, I'll expect you to give most of the answer here, Daniel.

• 43:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Uh oh.

• 43:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I did my research. All right. So this is a question we've been asking ourselves for a really long time. So around 36 B.C., this guy Marcus Torrentius Varro, sorry about my pronunciation, as ever, was writing a book about agriculture. And he mentioned that honeybees make hexagonal honeycombs and that there was some debate about why this happened. And one of the first options was, well, bees have six legs, honeycombs have six sides. Maybe bees are just like using their legs to kind of determine the like vertices of the honeycomb. And so maybe it just has something to do with the fact that they have six legs. There was some connection there.

• 44:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Interesting. Well, I mean, you notice simple patterns, you draw dotted lines between them. Sure, it makes sense.

• 44:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, sure. Then you test your conjectures.

• 44:15Daniel Whiteson?

  So what do you, how do you test that? You like cut some legs off of bees and see if they make square honeycombs?

• 44:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, yeah, that you could do that. You could, but we don't, it turns out, we don't need to, because actually, the first thing you should do is make careful observations. And as we're gonna get to later, if you make careful observations, you'll see that actually bees are making circles that then melt into like a hexagonal shape.

• 44:36Daniel Whiteson?

  What?

• 44:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so, so if you just watch, you'd be like, oh, actually, it doesn't matter that they have six legs because they're just making circles.

• 44:43Daniel Whiteson?

  You're saying that bees, when they originally make their honeycomb, they're making perfect circles or very close to it, and they just relax into honeycombs?

• 44:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes.

• 44:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow, I had no idea.

• 44:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, wait till we, uh, we're gonna get to it a little bit more detail. So one of the interesting questions that arise here then, I think, is are bees purposefully making hexagons or not? Are bees nature's mathematicians? Or, you know, is that giving them too much credit?

• 45:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 45:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  But so the reason it's exciting that they're making hexagons is the second option, which is that they are purposefully making hexagon shapes through some mechanism that we'll get to later, because hexagons maximize the area inside. So since Pythagoras's time, we've known that some shapes do what's called tile the plane, which is to say they fill a flat space without overlapping one another or creating any gaps. Some of the shapes that we've sort of studied the most in terms of tiling the plane are triangles, squares, and hexagons. There are some other shapes that do this, too.

• 45:42Daniel Whiteson?

  And this is actually a really fascinating area of mathematics, like finding shapes that tile the plane and new shapes to tile the plane. There was recently this crazy discovery of an object that can tile an infinite plane without ever repeating a pattern, which is super amazing.

• 45:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  What?

• 45:57Daniel Whiteson?

  It's called an Einstein shape. And the best part of this story is that it wasn't developed by like a professional mathematician, but like a craftsman, a guy who's just like good with stuff and he built like a physical model to explore this. Anyway, super fascinating.

• 46:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's amazing, though.

• 46:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Total digression, though. So you're telling us about people thinking about tiling the plane way back in the time of like Greek geometricians.

• 46:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, right. So people have been talking about tiling the plane for a long time. But one of the cool things about hexagons is that, you know, say you're considering triangles, squares, and hexagons to tile the plane. If you want to maximize the volume inside of the shape, then for the same perimeter for each of those shapes, hexagons maximize the volume inside, which you would want if you're storing honey or babies or something and put that in there.

• 46:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Or babies in honey or something.

• 46:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Honey babies.

• 46:46Daniel Whiteson?

  And I guess the idea here is you want to be economical. And so you want to store as much as possible while using the minimal amount of building materials.

• 46:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right, because the building materials is wax that they have to make.

• 46:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 46:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so you want to minimize the building materials you need and maximize the space inside.

• 47:02Daniel Whiteson?

  So I love when mathematics intersects biology and it gives us a reason. The hypothesis, I guess, is that bees have somehow evolutionarily discovered that this is the most efficient way to store their honey by building hexagons.

• 47:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, right. And it wasn't actually proved mathematically that this was a good strategy for the honeybees until Thomas Hales did it in 2000.

• 47:24Daniel Whiteson?

  2000 A.D.

• 47:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  A.D. Yes.

• 47:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 47:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 47:27Daniel Whiteson?

  I love these mathematical questions that are like open for millennia.

• 47:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 47:31Daniel Whiteson?

  And then some dude's like, I'm gonna tackle that. Yeah, let's do that tomorrow.

• 47:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. I'm guessing it was more than just tomorrow, but it was like 36 page proof, which I will admit, I just kind of like scan, scan, scan, scan, scan, scan. I didn't check his math.

• 47:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow. I love that. That's incredible.

• 47:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, I think for some of these questions, it could be because nobody was like, I have to know if the honeybees are doing it right. Like, there might have been more pressing questions, but it's a fascinating question to answer.

• 47:56Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so we know now that hexagons are the best way to store honey. Do the bees know that?

• 48:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, so the answer at the end of the day is that we really don't know. So I watched some videos where people were like, oh, bees are nature's mathematicians. They make hexagons. And I'm like, oh, I like that. That really sounds beautiful. But so then the question is like, what do the bees know in terms of what they're doing? And of course, you know, we can't ask the bees what they know, so we'll never really know. But as we mentioned a little bit earlier, they do start by making circles out of the wax. And as things sort of heat and then cool, they end up sort of changing their shape into hexagons over time. And I think you see this also with bubble rafts. And Daniel, maybe you can explain why this is the case. This is where I thought Daniel's gonna chime in here, but maybe I'm wrong.

• 48:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  So, so you make a bunch of little circular bubbles and they sort of find the spaces in between. And over time, they sort of settle into hexagons. And I think that's like surface tension, pulling them together.

• 48:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 48:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Into more efficient shapes. Does that? Sound right?

• 48:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. So what's happening there is the universe is optimizing it, right? Not the bees, not the bubble raft designer. It's just like, if you're going to squeeze a bunch of bubbles together, they're going to end up forming a hexagon shape because otherwise they're going to pop. Right? And so if you want to keep bubbles open and minimize the amount of popping, then you're going to pack them as hexagons. That just sort of makes sense.

• 49:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 49:18Daniel Whiteson?

  And so it seems like we can't give credit to the bees for that, right? If they're building circles and the universe is like, yeah, we're going to turn these into hexagons. That's just the mathematics of the universe, isn't that physics?

• 49:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, that would be boring, but so, uh, no, just kidding. So, so, hold on. So when the bees are putting their circles in, they have to place the circles in certain ways so that you get the hexagons. If they put them in there all randomly, then you wouldn't necessarily get like the linear perfect hexagons that you get. And so I don't think that they are saying, oh, we've got to do it this way because if you place them this way, when they finally make their final form, they're going to be a hexagon, which is the mathematically ideal shape for our honey storage needs. But I do think they have some programming in there that helps them make sure that they put their circles in in a certain way

• 50:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  so that when the wax settles, it will create a hexagon. But here's an interesting side thing. Paper wasps, which make their nests out of like fibers. So for example, I was sitting on a bench the other day and a paper wasp came by and it was, it's an old wooden bench and it was starting to like scrape the wood off of the top of the bench. And then it went back and it used it to make its paper nest.

• 50:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Cool.

• 50:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  And you're yawning and I can't believe you're yawning at paper wasps, Daniel. They're so interesting, but.

• 50:39Daniel Whiteson?

  That's not a judgmental yawn. That was like woke up too early yawn.

• 50:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, I get that. None of us get enough sleep. And so anyway, they also make hexagonal cells and they don't get the like, you know, wax melts into the right shape. They start as circles. So the circles are sort of like up at the top point where the nest starts. And then as they build it out, you get hexagons. And so to me, that's even a little bit more impressive because they do end up building the hexagons. But anyway, so it's all about positioning and not necessarily about going for hexagons in particular.

• 51:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Interesting. And so in the end, are you going to give the bees credit? Do you think the bees are geometers?

• 51:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  I give bees a lot of credit for a variety of reasons. Studies have shown that bees are really good at making economical decisions about which flowers to visit and how many times to visit them. They're good at communicating with one another where the great food sources are. And they are able to pull this trick off that maximizes the volume where they, you know, store their stuff. So I think they're impressive, maybe not as impressive as we had initially imagined. But, you know, nature doesn't need to find the most complicated solution to a problem if an easier mechanism gives you the right solution.

• 51:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Amazing. The real question in my mind, though, is are bees geometers or geometricians? Which is the correct word?

• 51:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  It feels like it's more your wheelhouse than mine. I think they're geometricians.

• 52:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Maybe in 2,000 more years, somebody will come along and figure that one out.

• 52:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  You know what's really cute, though? There's these moths on my property, the inchworms. And the, I think it's the family of inchworms are called geometer moths because they are like measuring the earth the way they, they move along, which I thought was super cute.

• 52:21Daniel Whiteson?

  That is cool.

• 52:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's cute. So our listener had a couple of different questions. One, he wanted to know about the honeycomb conjecture. Two, he wanted to know if other species create them. And we've talked about how paper wasps do. My husband Zach sent me a picture of tadpole eggs in our pond that had naturally come together to form a hexagon.

• 52:41Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh.

• 52:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Pretty cute. You see some plants make sort of hexagon shapes. So we do see this in nature in a couple of different places, including in the bubble raft example. And then the final question was, you know, math and physics go hand in hand, but you don't hear much about math and biology.

• 52:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 52:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  You know, yeah, Daniel jumps in there. I've heard Daniel critique biologists for not having error bars on our graphs and presentations.

• 53:06Daniel Whiteson?

  That's the difference. I'm criticizing biologists, not biology.

• 53:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, okay. Got it. Got it. All right. So biologists do think a lot about math. So for example, theoretical ecologists think a lot about how we can write equations that describe dynamics in a system, like predator prey equations, or how an epidemic moves through a system. And so that requires a lot of math. So they're thinking mathematically there. We use a lot of statistics to try to understand what we observe. And, you know, there are a lot of people who think about the world mathematically. And I think over the course of my 20 year career where I've, you know, been an ecologist, I've seen a much greater emphasis on trying to describe what we see, not just in terms of, you know, a qualitative description that's maybe a little poetic,

• 53:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  which, you know, I love reading those qualitative poetic descriptions, but also trying to capture what you want in a more quantitative way and describing what you're seeing mathematically, and then trying to explain why nature has resulted in that sort of equation. So yes, biologists do use math a lot.

• 54:08Daniel Whiteson?

  On his last question, that's sort of a philosophy question, you know, is nature inherently mathematical? And it's sort of an important philosophical question that we don't know the answer to, which is why we can use math to describe the universe? You know, you might imagine that math naturally describes the universe at the smallest scale, that fundamentally, there's some equation you can write down to describe fundamental physics. But then why can you use math to describe like, you know, the predator prey reaction, or the geometry of hexagons, or, you know, the shape of birds' eggs, or something? And that's the sort of mystery, like why these fairly simple mathematical stories emerge from the crazy chaotic combination of fundamental bits of the universe? It's not something philosophers really have a handle on.

• 54:52Daniel Whiteson?

  So we don't know if it's something that is inherently part of the universe, or sort of the way we are framing these questions, the way we think about things, you know, and the sort of our mental language.

• 55:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, and one of the most popular phrases amongst people who do modeling and biology is that all models are wrong, some are useful.

• 55:10Daniel Whiteson?

  That's exactly correct, even of fundamental physics, right? As far as we know, our description of the tiniest particles, it's not the end of the story. It's a model, and it's not true in the sense that it's not describing everything that's happening inside of it, but it's still useful. And, you know, from a philosophical point of view, you might argue like, what's the difference between true and useful? A model is just supposed to be useful, is just supposed to predict the results of experiments. There's no deeper truth than that, but that's a whole nother philosophical rabbit hole.

• 55:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. All right, well, Eric, this was a fantastic question. It was great to hear from you again. Let's see if we scratched your itch on this bee question.

• 55:49Speaker 14

  Hi, Kelly and Daniel. I just wanted to say a huge thank you for taking the time to answer my questions about the honeycomb conjecture on your show. I was fascinated to learn more about why bees create hexagons and the advantages of that structure. It's incredible to think about how nature organizes like that. Hearing about whether other species create hexagons was really eye opening, and your insights on how math plays a role in biology gave me a whole new perspective. I've always thought of math as more tied to physics, but now I can see how deeply it connects to the natural world and the universe in ways I hadn't considered before. I did share what I learned with my wife, hoping it might ease her discomfort around bees, but I'm afraid she still doesn't feel any better about them. She says they're buzzing in geometry ways that gives her the creeps.

• 56:34Speaker 14

  Even so, your passion for biology really shines through, and I'm so grateful to have my curiosity spark in such an amazing way. Thanks again for sharing your knowledge on the show.

• 56:43Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, thanks very much, everyone who engages with the podcast and sends us your questions. Why don't you join their ranks? What is the question that you most want an answer to that you think maybe it's impossible to answer? Send it to us, we'll give it a shot. [email protected]. Thanks for tuning in.

• 57:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thanks for listening, y'all.

• 57:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you.

• 57:13Daniel Whiteson?

  We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.

• 57:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.

• 57:26Daniel Whiteson?

  We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at [email protected].

• 57:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky. And on all of those platforms, you can find us at D and K Universe.

• 57:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

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