DARK vs LIGHT

Why are black cars more dangerous, white chess pieces more successful, and pandas apparently incapable of coping with minor inconvenience? Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens (VSauce) unpack one deceptively simple question - which would win in a fight between black and white? - and end up exploring everything from colour psychology and radioactive frogs to quasars, fantasy literature, and whether the universe itself ultimately sides with darkness. Along the way, Hannah invents a new category of “cool cult members,” Michael explains how light could theoretically form a black hole, and both attempt to avoid turning the entire episode into a Tolkien podcast. ------------------- For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit ⁠⁠https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience⁠⁠ Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ. ------------------- Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠ ------------------- Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack Meek Animator: Sam Benson Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe Producer: Simona Rata Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter Head Of Digital: Samuel Oakley Exec Producer: Neil Fearn ------------------- Advertise with us: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Hannah Fry?

  Welcome to The Rest Is Science, I'm Hannah Fry.

• 0:02Michael Stevens?

  And I'm Michael Stevens.

• 0:04Hannah Fry?

  Now, today's episode, actually, we're cheating a little bit. We're taking one of the listener questions, which we liked so much that we are not putting it in an episode of Field Notes. We are expanding it out into a whole entire, super duper long version of our podcast.

• 0:19Michael Stevens?

  The point is, we love this question.

• 0:21Hannah Fry?

  Adore it.

• 0:22Michael Stevens?

  I think we should get right into reading it.

• 0:24Hannah Fry?

  Okay, here we go. It's from Kelsey, who asks, "Hello Hannah and Michael. My seven-year-old is a huge fan and just asked me a question which I can't answer. Which would win in a fight between black and white?"

• 0:41Hannah Fry?

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 0:44Michael Stevens?

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

• 1:04Hannah Fry?

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

• 1:15Michael Stevens?

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

• 1:34Hannah Fry?

  For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org/the rest is science.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  Hi, this is Gary Lineker from Goalhangers, The Rest Is Football. This episode is brought to you by Wise. It's only when you start moving money between currencies that you really think about the exchange rate, the fee, and what might be hidden away in the small print. Whether you're living abroad, paying someone overseas, or just trying to manage your money across borders, you want a fair exchange rate, an easy transfer, and no surprises alike. Wise keeps things simple. Wise is a smart way to move the currencies you need around the globe. It works in more than 160 countries and with over 40 currencies. Most transfers arrive instantly. Wise uses the mid-market exchange rate, like the one you see on Google, with no markups or hidden fees.

• 2:30Speaker 02

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• 3:26Speaker 03

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• 4:19Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 4:20Hannah Fry?

  I mean, there's lots of different ways we can take this, isn't there?

• 4:22Michael Stevens?

  There are a lot of questions we get where we're like, next, next. This one, we were like, no, wait a second.

• 4:29Hannah Fry?

  That's not true at all, Michael. We adore every single question. Thank you very much.

• 4:33Michael Stevens?

  That's true. I was just joking. We treasure them all and we'll answer them all.

• 4:38Hannah Fry?

  Yes, eventually.

• 4:39Michael Stevens?

  Eventually.

• 4:40Hannah Fry?

  Before, as long as we live long enough.

• 4:43Michael Stevens?

  If you've asked us a question, we will answer it. Just do hold your breath about it.

• 4:50Hannah Fry?

  Now, I should say, Michael and I have not shared our answers with each other yet.

• 4:53Michael Stevens?

  No.

• 4:54Hannah Fry?

  Of, of what we think.

• 4:56Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, we both decided, look, how do you interpret this? What do you mean white and black? Do you mean color, radiation, good and evil?

• 5:05Hannah Fry?

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:05Michael Stevens?

  And we said, stop, let's just both come up with our own interpretations, figure out who wins each of them, and then we'll just come together and compare. And that's what's gonna happen today.

• 5:14Hannah Fry?

  Do you wanna go first?

• 5:15Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I'm gonna go first because I think we can start with a, like, I don't wanna say simple interpretation, but what if this is just about color? What if this is just a popularity contest?

• 5:25Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 5:26Michael Stevens?

  Well, thankfully, YouGov has the answer. They've polled people across multiple dozens of countries. What's your favorite color? And white and black never make it into the top spot, but, but here's the deal. Black wins the popularity contest against white pretty much everywhere. UK, Germany, US, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand. But white actually is more popular than black in China, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

• 5:55Hannah Fry?

  Okay. A small selection.

• 5:59Michael Stevens?

  A small selection, and I don't know why. And they didn't propose any hypotheses as to why. I will say, this was interesting. The number one top favorite color in every country they surveyed was blue.

• 6:10Hannah Fry?

  Was it?

• 6:11Michael Stevens?

  Even in places like China, where red is this very auspicious color. Blue was always the favorite.

• 6:16Hannah Fry?

  Every single coun-

• 6:17Michael Stevens?

  By quite a bit, actually.

• 6:19Hannah Fry?

  Every single country has blue as the favorite.

• 6:21Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, now, they did say that in China, the distinction between blue and green might be a bit different.

• 6:26Hannah Fry?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:26Michael Stevens?

  It might not be the same as what it means to an American or a Brit. But basically, for the purposes of this episode, black ranks above white everywhere, except China, Malaysia, Indonesia.

• 6:39Hannah Fry?

  I do also sort of wonder whether, I mean, look, if you, it depends on how detailed a color you're allowing, because I might say aubergine, you know, was my favorite.

• 6:49Michael Stevens?

  I know, and they didn't allow that. They just said of the traditional-

• 6:52Hannah Fry?

  Were you allowed purple?

• 6:53Michael Stevens?

  Seven rainbow colors, you were allowed purple, yes. So it's like the seven rainbow colors, black and white-

• 6:58Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 6:58Michael Stevens?

  Were allowed. So there was no gray, and there was no brown. So, I mean, look, we still need to do more research.

• 7:05Hannah Fry?

  You know what, though? This, this, this marries, actually, with the thing that I found, which is that in fashion, in the clothes that people choose to wear, I mean, black comes, wins by an absolute country mile.

• 7:16Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 7:16Hannah Fry?

  And not just at funerals, incidentally.

• 7:18Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, sure, everywhere.

• 7:19Hannah Fry?

  Across, across, across the board. There's one industry study that found that black was two and a half times more popular than white.

• 7:28Michael Stevens?

  At least, I'm not surprised.

• 7:29Hannah Fry?

  No.

• 7:30Michael Stevens?

  I mean, white has a disadvantage. It's gonna stain more easily.

• 7:33Hannah Fry?

  Sure.

• 7:34Michael Stevens?

  Just off the bat, that's gonna knock it down below black.

• 7:38Hannah Fry?

  It's less slimming as well.

• 7:39Michael Stevens?

  It's less slimming.

• 7:40Hannah Fry?

  See all your, your lumps and bumps a lot more on it.

• 7:42Michael Stevens?

  If it's snowy, no one will see you.

• 7:44Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, it's counter-

• 7:45Michael Stevens?

  But at night, no one will see you if you're wearing black, and that's good.

• 7:48Hannah Fry?

  Maybe that's an advantage.

• 7:49Michael Stevens?

  I think when it comes to what's your favorite color as well, I think, for reasons I haven't really investigated, white maybe isn't even really considered a color to a lot of people. It's the blankness on which you then get to see your favorite color. But black is, it's got an association with being, you know, the black belt, the heavy metal and goth, and it's like, it's a whole style. Whereas white is like, what are you, you know, Gandalf the White? Like, grow up, you know? It's just a little more-

• 8:18Hannah Fry?

  Nothingness.

• 8:19Michael Stevens?

  Nothingness.

• 8:19Hannah Fry?

  Even though in reality, when it comes to the colors, it's actually the other way around. Right? Black is nothingness and white is all of the colors altogether.

• 8:25Michael Stevens?

  That's interesting. Yeah. I mean, who wears white? Like cult members?

• 8:30Hannah Fry?

  Yep.

• 8:31Michael Stevens?

  But who wears black? Cooler cult members. There's the coolness factor there. And this is coming from a very specific Western perspective, but yet across countries, YouGov found that black was still usually more popular, only usually though.

• 8:47Hannah Fry?

  You know what, though? Actually, while we're on the topic of black clothing, you know, there was a study into the color uniform that athletes wear.

• 8:55Michael Stevens?

  Ah.

• 8:55Hannah Fry?

  And whether it changed how they played. And they came up with the conclusion that players are much naughtier and more aggressive when they're wearing black.

• 9:04Michael Stevens?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. When it comes to American football, look at the Raiders, right? They are the scariest looking team.

• 9:11Hannah Fry?

  Are they?

• 9:11Michael Stevens?

  Because they're in black and silver and their fans like are violent, famously and proudly violent. But I think if they were the Las Vegas tulips, that would not be their reputation. Yeah. So, okay, so so far, when it comes to popularity as a color in fashion, as a way to win as a sports team.

• 9:35Hannah Fry?

  Well, let me tell you the stats on this because it's really fascinating.

• 9:38Michael Stevens?

  Oh, you've got stats?

• 9:38Hannah Fry?

  Oh, I've got. Oh, I've got stats. Of course I have. Okay, so this is 1988. This is Mark Frank and Thomas Gilvoich at Cornell. They analyzed NFL and so football and hockey, basically, American football and hockey. And they were looking at penalty records specifically.

• 9:53Michael Stevens?

  Oh, so as a measure of how aggressive the team was, right?

• 9:56Hannah Fry?

  In the idea being that if you got more penalties, then you were you were playing a bit naughtier.

• 10:00Michael Stevens?

  Right, of course, yeah.

• 10:01Hannah Fry?

  Bit rougher, bit rougher around the edges. And the thing is, this is like a natural experiment in a lot of ways because there were a couple of occasions where teams changed the color of their shirts from one season to the next, from black to a different color. And they found that kind of across the board, the penalty average, right, was much higher, the number of minutes that you would get, you know, of penalties. I don't know how these sports work. You're gonna have to fill in the gaps.

• 10:27Michael Stevens?

  You're doing fine.

• 10:28Hannah Fry?

  Okay, fine. The number of minutes that your team were in penalty for increased if you were wearing black. So there was one team in particular, Pittsburgh Penguins. They went the other way around. They went from light blue to black.

• 10:40Michael Stevens?

  And they committed more penalties.

• 10:41Hannah Fry?

  And they committed more penalties.

• 10:43Michael Stevens?

  Oh, whoa, whoa. We need to point out, did they commit more penalties? Or were they penalized more often?

• 10:50Hannah Fry?

  Great question. I've got the answer for you. Because in 2012, there was a follow up study. And in this, they not only looked at, you know, tens of thousands of hockey games across different seasons, but they also then ran these controlled experiments in high school and college students. So that they would like essentially run, some teams would be in black and some teams would be wearing white. And then they would see how it would work out over and over and over again to see if it made any difference. And they found both things were true. Referees call more fouls on players who were wearing black.

• 11:24Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 11:25Hannah Fry?

  Um, but players in black were also behaving more aggressively.

• 11:29Michael Stevens?

  So they like objectively rewatched these games or something? Right, because.

• 11:34Hannah Fry?

  I think that's it. When you're wearing darker colors, you're like, hmm, maybe I can get away with this. Maybe I just sort of feel a little bit like, I don't know.

• 11:40Michael Stevens?

  Okay, so these researchers are pretty confident that it wasn't just that the referees themselves thought, ah, something happened. The player wearing the darker colors probably instigated it? Because I'm biased against that. They, they really studied this and found that it truly was the fault of the players wearing the darker colors.

• 11:57Hannah Fry?

  It was both things. So they were both being accused more often and also.

• 12:02Michael Stevens?

  Oh, it was both?

• 12:03Hannah Fry?

  Yes, it was both.

• 12:04Michael Stevens?

  Wow.

• 12:05Hannah Fry?

  Hmm.

• 12:05Michael Stevens?

  Okay, so if you think that's a good thing, then black wins again. I've noticed that as I've gone through my interpretations. It depends on what you think is better.

• 12:16Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 12:16Michael Stevens?

  Like, black and white have differences, but which difference you prefer determines which one wins.

• 12:23Hannah Fry?

  Look, I'll be honest with you. I, I think, I think black wins every single time. I, I mean, there's, there's the occasional one. This is in my analysis, right? There's the occasional time here and there where white sort of puts up a good fight. But almost always, I'm team black. In rugby, the All Blacks.

• 12:40Michael Stevens?

  Ah.

• 12:41Hannah Fry?

  New Zealand All Blacks.

• 12:42Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 12:42Hannah Fry?

  Terrifying. Have you seen them do the hacker?

• 12:45Michael Stevens?

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:45Hannah Fry?

  Oh, my lord.

• 12:46Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, and they're called the All Blacks.

• 12:49Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 12:50Michael Stevens?

  They wear black and like silver.

• 12:52Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 12:52Michael Stevens?

  Or white.

• 12:52Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:54Michael Stevens?

  I guess we're not the two people who are gonna know the answer to that.

• 12:57Hannah Fry?

  Maybe it's just all black. Maybe it is all black.

• 12:59Michael Stevens?

  They're also really good.

• 13:00Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, they're amazing.

• 13:01Michael Stevens?

  Their, their women's team is actually really good right now. My stepfather in law?

• 13:08Hannah Fry?

  Someone in your family.

• 13:09Michael Stevens?

  I feel like my mother-in-law's husband is really into rugby.

• 13:14Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 13:14Michael Stevens?

  And he loves the women's team because they're like blowing it out of the water right now.

• 13:19Hannah Fry?

  That's cool.

• 13:19Michael Stevens?

  And he's in New Zealand, by the way. Back when when Michael Jordan was playing basketball, he was so good. The Detroit Pistons had this idea of like, why don't we just really focus on stopping him from being able to do anything? Like, in fact, let's tire him out. Let's like penalize him, let's be mean to him and like break his will and force his other teammates to do it on their own. And it was really negative. They called it Jordan rules. And in my memory, the Detroit Pistons, who had this whole like strategy, wore black jerseys. But apparently they were more like blue, red and white.

• 13:58Michael Stevens?

  However, in my mind, they are the like angry.

• 14:02Hannah Fry?

  Baddies.

• 14:03Michael Stevens?

  Looney Tunes baddies.

• 14:04Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 14:04Michael Stevens?

  And then you've got like Michael Jordan, this little guy who's like, I'm just a Bugs Bunny over here. I'm a good guy, but.

• 14:11Hannah Fry?

  Here I'm flying in the corner.

• 14:13Michael Stevens?

  This this association between aggression and and and black colors and blamelessness in white runs very deep.

• 14:23Hannah Fry?

  It really does.

• 14:24Michael Stevens?

  So black wins in terms of roughness, popularity, fashion.

• 14:32Michael Stevens?

  But it loses in chess.

• 14:35Hannah Fry?

  It does lose in chess.

• 14:36Michael Stevens?

  Fair or not, though, is I think maybe up for debate because when you look at who wins chess games? The person playing white or the person playing black? White has an advantage. This is like a known thing.

• 14:49Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 14:49Michael Stevens?

  Um, you can even, if if you look at chess games, uh, in the history of chess games? White wins, you know, four to 10% more often.

• 14:58Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 14:59Michael Stevens?

  By the way, that chance of winning is very complicated because there's two answers. It's like white wins 37% of the time.

• 15:08Hannah Fry?

  Oh, because of draws, of course.

• 15:09Michael Stevens?

  Because, yes, that 55 number is if you give them half a win for a draw.

• 15:15Hannah Fry?

  Right, I see.

• 15:16Michael Stevens?

  So, yes.

• 15:18Michael Stevens?

  It took me a long time to understand this. Cause they'd be like, white scores 55%. And I'm like, scores? I had to go look at a chess glossary to figure out the difference. But across chess games, white tends to win four to 10% more. It's usually like 37% of the time, white is the decisive victor. 27% of the time, black is. The rest of the time, it's a draw. And as the standard of play increases, you get more and more draws. But also, white's win percentage approaches 100%. Why? Because white gets to go first. White has this advantage. I want to talk about rainbow chess.

• 15:55Hannah Fry?

  Go on.

• 15:55Michael Stevens?

  Which is not a thing. My daughter says she invented it. And I don't, it's, it's kind of like Bobby Fischer's chess 360, his like Fisher random chess. But instead of randomizing the back row of pieces for each team, you put all the pieces, black and white, into a bag. This is how she explained it to me. And then you reach in and you pull out a piece and you put it where it should go on your side, regardless of whether it's black or white. Okay? So both players wind up with this randomized mix of black and white pieces. And yet you both still are either black or white. So some of you, if you're black, some of your black pieces are already on the other side of the board.

• 16:38Hannah Fry?

  Actually, sounds really fun.

• 16:39Michael Stevens?

  It sounds really fun and it means that there's a lot of like, okay, so first of all, you have to have the same arrangement of pieces. So if you've already drawn a queen, then the next time you draw a queen, you have to put it back in. Also, a pawn does not become a queen when it reaches the other side of the board because some of them are just one step away from already being there.

• 16:56Hannah Fry?

  Be a bit of it.

• 16:57Michael Stevens?

  So there's like some, some tweaks that she had to make to make this sort of work. I don't know if it's actually a good game. We have a lot of fun playing it, though.

• 17:05Hannah Fry?

  I think that sounds amazing fun.

• 17:07Michael Stevens?

  Now, white still gets to go first, though. So it probably still mathematically will have an advantage.

• 17:11Hannah Fry?

  I'm not sure, though, because I think that it would be, I think that the, the dominant thing would be that the, the luck of where your pieces ended up. You know, if you end up with a queen on their, their back rank, then, I mean, game over.

• 17:28Michael Stevens?

  Or not. Okay, yeah, that's another rule that the, neither king can begin in check.

• 17:36Michael Stevens?

  There's a lot of, there's a lot of rules that you have to make up because this doesn't work, but if you follow all the rules, then you get something that kind of works and is kind of fun, especially to play with a six-year-old.

• 17:46Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, that does sound very fun.

• 17:47Michael Stevens?

  But I don't know if there's something else like it, so let us know in the comments if you've heard of a variation of chess like this.

• 17:53Hannah Fry?

  When I was teaching my daughter to play chess when she was about six years old, we were like, okay, and this one is the little horsey, and then it jumps, it hops over here, da, da, da. Anyway, she then started calling it that piece, she started calling it the gallop. And I was like, oh, that is, this child's a genius.

• 18:10Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 18:11Hannah Fry?

  This is absolutely adorable. What a great name.

• 18:13Michael Stevens?

  There's a huge fly.

• 18:14Hannah Fry?

  A really fat fly.

• 18:15Michael Stevens?

  Just flew by my ear and it was like...

• 18:17Hannah Fry?

  Like a helicopter landing.

• 18:20Michael Stevens?

  So loud.

• 18:21Hannah Fry?

  Anyway, I went around thinking that she was a genius for a few weeks. And then a couple of weeks later, we just so happened to be watching an episode of Bluey in which they teach Bluey chess and she decides to call the horse the knight a gallop.

• 18:36Michael Stevens?

  Wait, so did she get it from that?

• 18:37Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, she got it from Blue.

• 18:38Michael Stevens?

  Oh, okay.

• 18:39Hannah Fry?

  She got it from Blue.

• 18:40Michael Stevens?

  Gallop is a pretty, it's a cute word, but it also helps you remember that the knight can go over pieces.

• 18:44Hannah Fry?

  Gallop and hop, yeah.

• 18:45Michael Stevens?

  The gallop and hop.

• 18:46Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, exactly. Okay, so in chess, true, the white does have an advantage. I'll concede that. But in Go, which is played by a lot of people, black moves first and it's the other way around. In fact, actually, in Go, there's so much of an advantage for black that there's some rule where you have to give away a certain number of points to white.

• 19:05Michael Stevens?

  I didn't know that. I don't know Go very well, but black goes first in Go.

• 19:09Hannah Fry?

  Black goes first in Go.

• 19:10Michael Stevens?

  And has the advantage. Wow.

• 19:12Hannah Fry?

  All right, well, we've done games. Let's turn to people, but after the break.

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• 21:00Michael Stevens?

  Okay, welcome back. So now, let's talk about black and white not as colors, but as names of people.

• 21:07Hannah Fry?

  Go on.

• 21:08Michael Stevens?

  We've got Jack Black, but also Jack White of the White Stripes.

• 21:13Hannah Fry?

  Let's make them fight.

• 21:14Michael Stevens?

  Let's make them fight. And so last night I did. And no, I didn't. But which surname do you think is more popular?

• 21:21Hannah Fry?

  Black, I reckon.

• 21:23Michael Stevens?

  Incorrect. By a long shot, white is more popular. It's the 24th most popular surname in the United States. Black, not even in the top 100. I had to go searching much deeper. It's the 149th most popular surname. In the UK, White is the 15th most common surname. It's the ninth most common in Australia, 21st in Canada. There's only 156,000 people with the last name Black in the US, but there's almost 700,000 with the surname White.

• 21:54Hannah Fry?

  Wow.

• 21:55Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 21:56Hannah Fry?

  I'd much rather be called Hannah Black than Hannah White.

• 21:59Michael Stevens?

  Well, you're not called either.

• 22:01Hannah Fry?

  I know, but I could be. I could change it by deed poll.

• 22:04Michael Stevens?

  You could change it.

• 22:06Hannah Fry?

  You know, I have a-

• 22:07Michael Stevens?

  Hannah Black. Yeah, I mean, look, Hannah Black. Again, why would you rather be called Hannah Black? Because it's cooler.

• 22:12Hannah Fry?

  It is cooler.

• 22:13Michael Stevens?

  Did you know that my mother didn't allow me to wear black shoes as a kid?

• 22:16Hannah Fry?

  Why?

• 22:16Michael Stevens?

  She thought that it was what? Like, the violent kids wore?

• 22:21Michael Stevens?

  This was during the like moral panic of the nineties around like, oh, kids are sacrificing cats at night and doing all these things because of Satan.

• 22:30Hannah Fry?

  What about school shoes, though? What color were your school shoes?

• 22:33Michael Stevens?

  They were white and blue.

• 22:34Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 22:35Michael Stevens?

  They were always very bright colors, very pleasing saintly colors. And I'd go to the store and I'd be like, oh, I want these black sneakers. And she'd be like, oh, oh, do not even, do not even think about them.

• 22:48Hannah Fry?

  Bless me, Father.

• 22:48Michael Stevens?

  Because you're gonna go to hell if you wear shoes that are black like the devil's thumb. And so I own black shoes now.

• 22:56Hannah Fry?

  When did you get your first pair of black shoes?

• 22:59Michael Stevens?

  Uh, I think I was about thirty-three. I got my first pair of black shoes.

• 23:02Hannah Fry?

  Did you feel super naughty when you put them on?

• 23:04Michael Stevens?

  I felt really naughty. I hid them in my closet, even though my mom lived a thousand miles away.

• 23:09Hannah Fry?

  Have you worn black shoes in front of her?

• 23:11Michael Stevens?

  I have now, but also, as we've established, my mom has softened over time. She now allows me to say some bad words.

• 23:18Hannah Fry?

  Piss.

• 23:19Michael Stevens?

  Whoa, yes, okay, yeah. And I can also say the C word, crap.

• 23:27Michael Stevens?

  And so, of course, I say it all the time around her.

• 23:30Hannah Fry?

  Adorable. I had, in terms of the surname thing, I have a very good friend, actually, who is a doctor. She's called Doctor Black. She was working in a doctor's surgery and there's another doctor there called Doctor White. And I think, and I still think, that the two of them should set up a surgery together and call it the Gray Doctors.

• 23:48Michael Stevens?

  The Gray Doctors, yeah.

• 23:49Hannah Fry?

  It's a good joke. It's a good joke.

• 23:51Michael Stevens?

  It's a good, good little, it was hilarious. It's a hilarious joke.

• 23:55Hannah Fry?

  Good and evil, though. Good and evil. There is, there is those themes along those.

• 23:59Michael Stevens?

  Should we kind of go through the tally up who's winning so far?

• 24:03Hannah Fry?

  Black's winning.

• 24:04Michael Stevens?

  I think Black is winning. Yeah, I think all that White has won is chess and surname. But Black has won popularity as a color. It's winning in fashion, what people wear. We should look up car colors.

• 24:18Hannah Fry?

  Car colors, uh, White wins in car colors. And White wins, actually, in more than one way in car colors. Because not only are there more white cars, you're also significantly more likely to die in a black car.

• 24:30Michael Stevens?

  Oh, no.

• 24:31Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 24:32Michael Stevens?

  I don't know. Okay, I don't know how you tally these up. Is it, because I don't think they're each worth one point.

• 24:36Hannah Fry?

  No, we need to wait them somehow.

• 24:37Michael Stevens?

  I'd rather have an unpopular color car than a car that I die in. So.

• 24:43Hannah Fry?

  I don't know. You would look cool when you die, though.

• 24:46Michael Stevens?

  Oh, you would. Wait, he died in a white car?

• 24:50Hannah Fry?

  In a white car. Okay, so here's some stats. In 2025, white cars, there were 33% of cars are white globally. Black is at 23%. It's the second most popular. However, if it's luxury cars, it's the other way around. So in North America, 29% of luxury cars are black. Um, and white is, is second. From Monash University Accident Research Centre, who were looking at crashes between 1987 and 2004. And they found white's the safest color, easier to see.

• 25:22Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 25:22Hannah Fry?

  Perhaps. Um, black cars are 12% more likely to be involved in a deadly crash.

• 25:27Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I know, I believe it. Um, I did actually talk to my insurance company about like, hey, we've got light colored cars. Can our, do you guys charge less for those? And they were like, no. But it is true that the, the lighter color of your car is, the easier it is for others to see. And you're in fewer accidents.

• 25:45Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. It makes sense. I'm still, I'm still going black here. I'm still going black nonetheless. This is, I think this is the reason why I just think black wins, full stop. Okay, piano keys. Yes. There are more white piano keys than black ones, but the only interesting music comes from the black ones.

• 26:01Michael Stevens?

  Well, now that seems a bit subjective.

• 26:02Hannah Fry?

  Come on, twinkle, twinkle little stars, that's about all you got.

• 26:07Michael Stevens?

  I don't know enough about music to, I don't know enough about piano to, to debate you on this.

• 26:13Hannah Fry?

  Look, bluntly, me neither, but that's not going to stop me being overly confident. Okay?

• 26:17Michael Stevens?

  I think, I think you are giving me fuel for my final conclusion.

• 26:21Hannah Fry?

  Okay, all right.

• 26:22Michael Stevens?

  But also I'll just grant you that the black keys are more interesting than the piano.

• 26:26Hannah Fry?

  They are much more interesting.

• 26:27Michael Stevens?

  But there are, there are more white keys.

• 26:29Hannah Fry?

  There are more white keys, but who cares if they're boring?

• 26:32Michael Stevens?

  Well, I think that we gotta give, we gotta give white a point for being the dominant color on a keyboard.

• 26:38Hannah Fry?

  Sure.

• 26:38Michael Stevens?

  And then we'll give black a point because it's cooler sounding. It's more fun.

• 26:44Hannah Fry?

  Going back to your, your idea about light. So I was also thinking about if you shine a torch into a dark space.

• 26:50Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 26:50Hannah Fry?

  Right, which wins there? Is it the brightness of the torch or is it the, the blackness of the, of the space? And I mean, in, in an Close space, you know, on Earth, sure, the whiteness might win. But actually, in the universe as a whole, the universe is very, very definitely black. This is Olber's paradox, by the way.

• 27:11Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 27:11Hannah Fry?

  You know about this?

• 27:12Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, this is the paradox that the sky is dark at night.

• 27:15Hannah Fry?

  And why should it be?

• 27:16Michael Stevens?

  Well, at first you would say, well, why shouldn't it be? But then, when you point out that there are stars everywhere, even between stars, that we can see. If you look with a telescope, you find more and more stars.

• 27:29Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 27:29Michael Stevens?

  So there should be light coming from every direction.

• 27:32Hannah Fry?

  This should be a very well-lit room, essentially.

• 27:34Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, but it isn't.

• 27:35Hannah Fry?

  But it isn't. It's black. Black wins out. The reason, incidentally, the reason it sort of essentially demonstrates that the universe had a beginning. The light hasn't been going forever and the universe is expanding, which is why blackness wins out. But blackness does nonetheless win out.

• 27:50Michael Stevens?

  It wins out. Also, there's light extinction. There's the inverse square law of light can shine and be very bright, but the further away you get, the dimmer and dimmer it appears.

• 28:00Hannah Fry?

  Absolutely.

• 28:01Michael Stevens?

  So ultimately, the blackness wins out.

• 28:05Hannah Fry?

  Blackness wins. I mean, look, if you are also pitting the black versus white against one another on a sort of cosmological basis, white dwarfs, which are essentially what happens when a star dies, everything kind of blows off and you're just left with like the really solid, bright core. Put one of them against a black hole. I mean, there's no contest. The black hole wins.

• 28:27Michael Stevens?

  Well, if we're going to be talking about electromagnetic radiation, here's something fascinating. This morning, I thought, oh, yeah, obviously, here's a good thing to bring up. The more and more darkness you have, no problem, right? But the more and more light you have, the more and more electromagnetic radiation you have, the closer you get to darkness.

• 28:50Hannah Fry?

  Go on.

• 28:51Michael Stevens?

  So, I've talked about this before, but I have an update.

• 28:54Hannah Fry?

  Go on.

• 28:55Michael Stevens?

  So there's this concept, it's a theoretical concept, which states that, I mean, as we know, if you get too much matter in one place, black hole forms. But what if you get a lot of energy, a lot of light in one place, what happens? Should be the same thing, as it turns out. And so a black hole can form if there's too much energy within one small area. And a black hole that forms not from matter but from light is known as a Kugel blitz.

• 29:23Hannah Fry?

  Oh, good name.

• 29:24Michael Stevens?

  A Kugel blitz. I know, I love this. And in an episode many years ago, I turned it into this really cool way to flirt with someone. Like, you're not just hot, you're a Kugel blitz. There's so much, you're just so hot that it cannot remain stable and it collapses in on itself, your hotness.

• 29:45Hannah Fry?

  Is there any evidence of that ever working on any human?

• 29:48Michael Stevens?

  I've never tried it on another human. But if you and your partner met because of that line, let me know in the comments below.

• 29:55Hannah Fry?

  You're welcome.

• 29:56Michael Stevens?

  Also, if that's how you guys met, I've got some bad news for you.

• 29:59Hannah Fry?

  Go on.

• 29:59Michael Stevens?

  Couple of years ago, Kugel blitzes were studied. And again, it's a theoretical thing. We cannot make one, okay? The amount of energy required to create one is 50 orders of magnitude higher than what we can currently achieve. But there was a paper that came out in 2024 that had this great name, No Black Holes From Light. That was the name. And the paper talks about how when you have that much light, that much electromagnetic radiation in one place, you need to start worrying about things like vacuum polarization, which is a dissipative quantum effect. I'm not going to pretend to know what all of that means, but I do trust that these people know what they're talking about.

• 30:45Michael Stevens?

  It's called the Schwinger effect.

• 30:46Hannah Fry?

  Schwinger?

• 30:47Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. And this is where...

• 30:49Hannah Fry?

  So we've got Kugel blitzes, and now we've got Schwingers?

• 30:52Michael Stevens?

  Schwinger effect. And this is the effect where I can only give you a very surface explanation, but where photons can decompose into electrons and positrons. And this process... Limits the potential for a black hole to form. Theoretically, we don't know one way or the other, but there's definitely a school of thought now that says that a Kugel blitz isn't possible. That before you could reach that critical amount of energy in one location, that energy density necessary for the collapse of a black hole, energy would be dissipated away. So.

• 31:27Hannah Fry?

  But then, but then, but then, but then, if you, does that mean that if you have too much energy, too much light, it will stay light? It won't, it won't become dark?

• 31:36Michael Stevens?

  That's, that's one conclusion you could draw from this. And so maybe white doesn't lose to black here. The idea being like, too much black, not a problem. Too much white goes back to black, black wins in both cases. That may or may not be true. Jury is still out. It could be that more and more light, you're just going to continue to have a lot of light. More and more black, more black. It's a draw.

• 32:01Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, but I mean, in the universe as a whole, once you kind of go to the heat death of everything, once you're kind of looking at entropy and, and the fact that we are tending towards disorder over time, I mean, everything's eventually going to die. Black, I mean, there's no doubt that black, blackness wins.

• 32:17Michael Stevens?

  I didn't come in here to fight for any particular side.

• 32:20Hannah Fry?

  I did.

• 32:20Michael Stevens?

  You did.

• 32:21Hannah Fry?

  I did.

• 32:22Michael Stevens?

  And I'm not even really going to disagree with you. I think you're bringing up a lot of good points that ultimately darkness is all there will be. It will be the one on the field of battle at the end, still standing.

• 32:36Hannah Fry?

  Absolutely.

• 32:36Michael Stevens?

  Because you've got the heat death, where eventually it's the same temperature everywhere, and there isn't a useful energy differential to take advantage of to do any work.

• 32:44Hannah Fry?

  There is no light.

• 32:45Michael Stevens?

  There is no light. That's the ultimate fate of the universe.

• 32:48Hannah Fry?

  Absolutely, that's the direction we're all heading towards. Enjoy the light, the light while it lasts, everybody.

• 32:53Michael Stevens?

  I mean, I'm, I'm going to definitely say that light does some interesting things.

• 32:57Hannah Fry?

  Sure.

• 32:58Michael Stevens?

  Energy and work mean that stuff can happen.

• 33:01Hannah Fry?

  Sure.

• 33:01Michael Stevens?

  But they're battling it out all the time, every day.

• 33:04Hannah Fry?

  That wasn't the question that was being asked there, was it?

• 33:06Michael Stevens?

  It wasn't, which one do you like more?

• 33:08Hannah Fry?

  It wasn't, please tell me which of these does interesting things. It was which wins.

• 33:13Michael Stevens?

  Which wins.

• 33:13Hannah Fry?

  Which wins.

• 33:14Michael Stevens?

  And yeah, you're right.

• 33:15Hannah Fry?

  I tell you what, if we're, if we're not going in quite so depressing a direction, if we're not going to the heat death of the universe, let's, let's look at the battles, not the wars.

• 33:24Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 33:24Hannah Fry?

  I still think, I still think darkness wins, I still think black wins. Um, I found this absolutely amazing story about Chernobyl.

• 33:32Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 33:32Hannah Fry?

  Since twenty sixteen and researchers who were near where the damaged reactor was, were looking at the wildlife that had, that, that, that still manages to survive.

• 33:43Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 33:43Hannah Fry?

  Close to, to, to where everything happened. And they found this really strange thing, which is that right close to the, to the reactor, all the frogs are black.

• 33:54Michael Stevens?

  Oh.

• 33:54Hannah Fry?

  Right? Isn't that strange? And then you go a bit further out, some of them, you know, the, the, they sort of tend to become a little bit lighter. And then if you go far enough out away, then they are, they are essentially back to, to normal frog.

• 34:06Michael Stevens?

  Normal frog color.

• 34:07Hannah Fry?

  But, but the frogs all around are very, very dark, sometimes actually pitch black. And they were.

• 34:13Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 34:13Hannah Fry?

  It's amazing. So they worked out that what's going on here is that melanin, which is a pigment that you get in your skin, but also in the, the skin of, of frogs, is the thing that gives you a tan color.

• 34:26Michael Stevens?

  Uh huh.

• 34:26Hannah Fry?

  But it doesn't just absorb UV, it also dissipates ionizing radiation.

• 34:33Michael Stevens?

  Of course.

• 34:34Hannah Fry?

  Right? So there's all this radiation that's floating around. And so essentially what was happening is that it forced this survival pressure on darker frogs. So the frogs who had much lighter skin, who had less of the dark pigment in, in their skin already, you know, would, would die out much more easily. Only the darker frogs would remain. And then they reckon within about fifteen frog generations, the pigment had sort of sorted itself into the population. And there was this natural selection for darkness kind of happening in, in real time. And so like, but I mean, also as a person who has no melanin in my skin.

• 35:11Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 35:11Hannah Fry?

  You know, this is one of the, the downsides of the MC one R mutation, having red hair. There is no melanin. I, if I go out in the sun, it goes red and then back to white. Um, I, I have to say darkness wins again, right? You put me outside on a, on a sunny day and unless I've got a bottle of factor fifty with me, I'm over. It's game over for me.

• 35:32Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 35:32Hannah Fry?

  You know?

• 35:32Michael Stevens?

  I can put you in a radioactive fallout zone and you are going to be hurt more.

• 35:37Hannah Fry?

  I'm done, I'm done. Of course, there are, I mean, there are some creatures that are, that have both, both black and white. Orcas, for example.

• 35:44Michael Stevens?

  Hmm.

• 35:44Hannah Fry?

  I mean, they're pretty cool.

• 35:46Michael Stevens?

  Zebras.

• 35:47Hannah Fry?

  Zebras, zebras.

• 35:49Michael Stevens?

  Zebras.

• 35:50Hannah Fry?

  Pandas.

• 35:51Michael Stevens?

  Pandas.

• 35:52Hannah Fry?

  They're less cool.

• 35:53Michael Stevens?

  Tuxedo cats.

• 35:55Hannah Fry?

  Pa- pandas, by the way, side note, pathetic creatures, pathetic. You know how much space they need to have um in order for them to agree to to mate?

• 36:06Michael Stevens?

  Too much.

• 36:07Hannah Fry?

  It's but also if you have this like gigantic land space where you're like, okay, panda, chill out, all right? Have fun. And then somebody does like a little tiny track road through it that's not even taking up any space. They're like, no, no, no, no, no, you've encroached, you've encroached, I'm not having babies anymore. They are absolute drama queens. That's how I like my diary to be, by the way, when I'm writing, say, I'm going into panda mode.

• 36:32Michael Stevens?

  Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 36:34Hannah Fry?

  I need nothing encroaching. Okay, it's a one panda, uh, seven square kilometers.

• 36:42Michael Stevens?

  So the the the pair needs seven square kilometers.

• 36:45Hannah Fry?

  So I think that detailed field studies say that female giant pandas have about five square kilometers and males about seven square kilometers. And if you go anywhere near that, then they're like, no, I'm babies, thank you.

• 37:00Michael Stevens?

  Really?

• 37:00Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 37:01Michael Stevens?

  So they need just the two of them within their little zones and then they can come together and as long as no one encroaches.

• 37:08Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, but not even not even anyone encroaching. It's like any evidence of any building or any track, nothing, it's got to be like completely untouched. It's a bit like, you know, they're just really, really, really want privacy.

• 37:21Michael Stevens?

  They really want privacy, they really need the mood to be right or it's ruined.

• 37:25Hannah Fry?

  Exactly, they don't want anyone to find out they're playing Barry White in the jungle.

• 37:28Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, fair enough. But like, it's a lot of work for us to accommodate that.

• 37:34Hannah Fry?

  It is a lot of work. Barry White, though, didn't think about him, did we?

• 37:37Michael Stevens?

  Barry Black.

• 37:38Hannah Fry?

  Barry, who is Barry Black?

• 37:40Michael Stevens?

  Exactly. That's a win for White, I think.

• 37:42Hannah Fry?

  It's a win for White.

• 37:44Michael Stevens?

  Here's something interesting that is kind of related that I've just been wanting to share. So it's kind of related, like if darkness, if blackness is nothingness, like empty, then we should talk about the words ought and not.

• 37:59Hannah Fry?

  Go on.

• 38:00Michael Stevens?

  They both mean nothing, right? Like knots and crosses, the not refers to an O, nothing. People will call the 2000s the naughties because the year ends with the zeros. But ought, A U G H T, also means nothing.

• 38:15Hannah Fry?

  Give it in a sentence.

• 38:16Michael Stevens?

  In a sentence, it might be something like, well, if ought is learned, meaning if nothing is learned. And I would see these in books. I'd see ought meaning nothing and not meaning nothing. And I'm like, how, it's kind of strange that ought and not both mean zero. Why are they different words? They didn't used to be different. Ought came first, meaning nothing. Not for ought, not for nothing. But there's this thing in linguistics called a faulty separation where people who are speaking to each other misinterpret what your word is and what the article is because they've been smashed together. So when someone said, I don't give an ought, it sounds a little bit like, I don't give a not.

• 39:00Hannah Fry?

  Nice.

• 39:00Michael Stevens?

  And so people started to think that ought means nothing, but there's also a thing called a not. I don't give a not, I don't give an ought. They were just so similar that we wound up having not as well mean zero.

• 39:14Hannah Fry?

  The other one I've heard is a napal.

• 39:16Michael Stevens?

  Yes, there are a lot of these faulty separations. A napkin is one. I think an apkin was what it was called before. People would be like, oh, can I have an apkin? And someone was like, oh, a napkin? Sure, this must be called a napkin. I think other words like that, I've got a whole list of them and I don't have them actually here on my page. But apron, umpire.

• 39:40Hannah Fry?

  What, so it was a prawn?

• 39:41Michael Stevens?

  I think so.

• 39:42Hannah Fry?

  Oh, I like that.

• 39:43Michael Stevens?

  Now, don't, I mean, look this up because I only, I only have the list of these words. I don't know what they originally were, but they got smashed together because of the A N, the an article before them.

• 39:54Hannah Fry?

  Go on, what were the other ones?

• 39:56Michael Stevens?

  Okay, you ready?

• 39:58Michael Stevens?

  Nickname, an icname.

• 40:02Michael Stevens?

  Apron, orange, umpire, humble pie. It was umble pie, augur. But I, with augur, I'm like, was it a ger before? Could you give me a ger? Augur, like a thing that you, a screw that you dig a hole with?

• 40:21Hannah Fry?

  I've never heard that before in my life.

• 40:24Michael Stevens?

  Well, you don't dig enough holes.

• 40:25Hannah Fry?

  Evidently, or know enough words.

• 40:27Michael Stevens?

  Drill enough holes.

• 40:29Hannah Fry?

  On the word thing, um, I'll tell you what I found out when I was researching this. The word candidate.

• 40:35Michael Stevens?

  Yep.

• 40:35Hannah Fry?

  Do you want to know where that came from?

• 40:37Michael Stevens?

  Let me guess.

• 40:37Hannah Fry?

  Go on.

• 40:38Michael Stevens?

  Can, candidate.

• 40:41Hannah Fry?

  I've given you a bit of a clue, given that it's related to this episode.

• 40:44Michael Stevens?

  Shoot, now I'm even more kid, I was not thinking that way, but I should have been. Where does it come from?

• 40:49Hannah Fry?

  Roman.

• 40:50Michael Stevens?

  Uh huh.

• 40:51Hannah Fry?

  It means the one wearing white. Because if you were wearing a white toga, then you were a political candidate.

• 40:58Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 40:59Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 40:59Michael Stevens?

  Where does white in there? Can't candidate.

• 41:02Hannah Fry?

  Cause I think it means shining.

• 41:03Michael Stevens?

  Oh, does it?

• 41:04Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, like chandelier is another.

• 41:06Michael Stevens?

  Oh, interesting.

• 41:08Hannah Fry?

  Candle, candid.

• 41:10Michael Stevens?

  Candle, provides light, candidate. Incandescent, oh yeah, candela, a unit of light.

• 41:17Hannah Fry?

  Anyway, that's all white stuff.

• 41:19Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, it sure is.

• 41:20Hannah Fry?

  I'll tell you what we haven't touched on though, good and evil. Because, because it feels like in stories, black and white do end up taking those two different sides. It's kind of, we've sort of touched on it a bit, but haven't really gone there.

• 41:33Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, and in stories, good often wins. Not all the time, but certainly more often than not. Stories are instructing us that good will prevail and that evil doesn't pay. Right? These are cliches. That topic, in my mind, it's like way too big to jump into when it's just supposed to be one little interpretation of a question in a podcast. But as you all know, I just finished reading The Lord of the Rings and I also read the Earthsea trilogy from Ursula Le Guin, who by the way, I love this. She describes herself as a irreligious Puritan and a rational mystic. Which talk about like opposites colliding, right?

• 42:13Michael Stevens?

  I love that, but anyway, Lord of the Rings and Tolkien is often criticized as being just like way too black and white. You've got the like amazingly. Just pure Gandalf and the hobbits and like, they don't even poop. And then you've got Sauron, who is just evil incarnate. And it's just, it couldn't be more obvious. I don't think that's entirely fair. I think, for example, that if you really dive into like, what's going on here? You see that the elves kind of made their own bed? They were the ones who were like, yeah, I want rings. Give us three so that we can stop things from decaying. We don't want anything to change. We want everything to stay the way we want. Well, Saruman even says, look, when you, when you destroyed me,

• 42:58Michael Stevens?

  you destroyed yourselves. And where are they all going at the end of the book? They're not going to the white lands. They're not going to the black lands. They have to all leave Middle Earth for Grey Haven.

• 43:10Hannah Fry?

  Somewhere in between the two.

• 43:11Michael Stevens?

  A new age begins, the age of man, and magic is like, gone. I'm not a Tolkien scholar, but I just wanted to say it's a bit more complicated than that. But in, in Le Guin's fantasy, it's very rich. So like, in The Wizard of Earthsea, the first book, there isn't a battle of good and evil. There's a battle of a wizard against a shadow. Seems like good and evil, right? But how does he defeat the shadow? I won't, I won't, I won't spoil it. But he has to embrace the shadow.

• 43:41Hannah Fry?

  As in, he's got to accept that darkness exists?

• 43:44Michael Stevens?

  Not only does he have to accept that it exists, he has to name it.

• 43:49Hannah Fry?

  Hmm.

• 43:50Michael Stevens?

  And what does he name this shadow that's been terrorizing the world? His own name.

• 44:00Hannah Fry?

  I think there's something quite deep in there, you know?

• 44:02Michael Stevens?

  That took a very long time to explain to my daughter. Because she gets the like, bad guys, good guys.

• 44:08Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 44:08Michael Stevens?

  But for the good guy to have to say, I am the bad guy.

• 44:12Hannah Fry?

  Hmm.

• 44:12Michael Stevens?

  You're just another part of me. Because at, at the end of the day, the shadow only exists because of the arrogance of the wizard in the first place. And so if he runs from it and denies those bad parts of themselves, the shadow gets stronger, but as he hunts it and thinks about it and considers it, it gets smaller. And so by embracing it and understanding and being conscious and mindful of his darker side. He wins.

• 44:36Hannah Fry?

  Do you know what? That is so interesting because this is something that if you go through therapy, I think that this is something that happens a lot, right? Is to accept that you have a shadow side, that everybody has a darker side to themselves. And it's not like, oh, you have to try and repress it or imagine it's not there. It's like you have to really embrace it and almost love it, if that makes sense. You have to have to really sort of have empathy for it because that's the only way that you can really exist as a whole, complete person.

• 45:05Michael Stevens?

  That's exactly what The Wizard of Earth sees an allegory of.

• 45:08Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, yeah. The other thing that I really noticed as you were talking then, when grayness, right? The way that we sort of think about grayness is very flat, very boring. It's almost like black and white are two extremes. It's the way that we, it's a dichotomy that is sort of an analogy for a dichotomy. But but they're definitely not boring. Black and white, neither of them are boring. Gray, the combination of the two, the land in the middle is something that that feels quite dead and flat. And actually, I think that there is something in this because I think we fall into this trap quite often of binary thinking when we shouldn't, where actually the reality is everything is a process. Everything has good and bad in it. Everything has good and evil in it.

• 45:52Hannah Fry?

  The acceptance that you have both of them isn't gray at all. It's just actually a much richer version of reality.

• 45:59Michael Stevens?

  Well, yeah, exactly. And so, again, this is something that Le Guin investigates, like almost in some of her stories, too much. You're like, oh, my gosh, like, I get it. You mentioned that white light is all the colors, all the wavelengths, whereas darkness is nothing. Now, this is the opposite of what Tolstoy told us in Anna Karenina.

• 46:24Hannah Fry?

  Go on.

• 46:25Michael Stevens?

  So the famous first line there, which I'm just going to paraphrase, is that every happy family is happy in the same way. But every unhappy family is uniquely unhappy in their own way. This became the Anna Karenina principle that Jared Diamond pushed a lot, saying, look, you've got systems in in the world and these systems have a lot of parts and every part Has to work perfectly for everything to go well. Okay, so goodness is this really fragile thing that can only happen in one way. But if one little thing goes wrong, or that little thing, or these two, or these three, there's so many permutations of things in which everything goes wrong. So there you go. Unhappiness is very complex, but happiness is very simple.

• 47:08Michael Stevens?

  However, in physics, that's not true. In physics, there's just darkness and it's kind of just nothing. But white requires everything.

• 47:21Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, wow, that's such a nice way to think of it.

• 47:23Michael Stevens?

  And at the end of Le Guin's Dispossessed, can you tell what I've been reading a bunch of?

• 47:29Michael Stevens?

  There's this brilliant line, it's almost like a throwaway line, where this guy goes, man, there's all these different planets and so many different kinds of intelligent beings live on them. And the sunlights on all of these worlds are all different. The stars have different chemistries, different temperatures, different sizes, different orbital distances to the planets. They're all different, and yet darkness is the same everywhere.

• 47:55Hannah Fry?

  It absolutely is. There's only one way to be dark. There's only one way to be dark.

• 47:59Michael Stevens?

  But there are so many ways to illuminate.

• 48:03Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, all right, white can have that one. I'll let it go.

• 48:06Michael Stevens?

  White can have that one, but I think that maybe they both should take a W here. I think there's another side of this, the Daoist side, which is that we need both. And I'm not a scholar of Daoism, but that's what the yin yang is about. It's about you've got the white and the black, and they are inside each other and they're both necessary. But they're not combined into a dull gray. In The Lath of Heaven, Le Guin, basically a guy creates, he improves the world by solving all race relations by having everyone just be the same color, battleship gray.

• 48:44Hannah Fry?

  No, thanks.

• 48:45Michael Stevens?

  There isn't any judging people based on how they look, because they all look the same. But in changing the world that way, a lot of the really interesting characters have gone. Because they were only interesting because they were biracial, bicultural, they became who they were. Their boldness, their courage, their timidity, all these interesting things about them only existed because of that tension. And by getting rid of it, the only people left? Are the main character because he's so boring. He realizes I am just a lump of clay. And so I'm still here, but like this woman I loved is gone.

• 49:21Hannah Fry?

  I mean, it's the same as what we were talking about with entropy, you know? Like, the universe is interesting because it has variation, because it has like differences. That's the thing that is allows for energy, allows for matter, allows for light, allows for everything. You know, without it, if you strip out the variation, all you end up with is nothingness.

• 49:41Michael Stevens?

  So you sort of need both of them. And this isn't just a Taoist thing. This is also, you find this in Christianity. When the lion lays down with the lamb, that's an important scene, not because the lion becomes lamb-like or the lamb becomes lion-like, but because it's a lion and a lamb, both bright and burning. Some of you may have noticed I'm quoting G K Chesterton here.

• 50:05Michael Stevens?

  All, all one and a half of you. It's a wonderful essay, Paradoxes of Christianity. And he mentions this very thing, that you've got both of these powerful things together, not mixed into some undifferentiated middle that's very boring and orderly, but the complexity of the opposites together.

• 50:23Hannah Fry?

  Heaven and hell.

• 50:24Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, and, and I think Le Guin puts it really well in one of the Earthsea books. She, she has the wizard mention, look, in order to hear the word, you need silence on either side. You need darkness to see the stars.

• 50:36Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 50:37Michael Stevens?

  So picking just black or just white, what does it get us?

• 50:41Hannah Fry?

  I mean, sure, let's have both, but also let's secretly know the black ones. Okay? I'm not letting that go.

• 50:50Michael Stevens?

  I don't want to make this a podcast where Michael defends Lord of the Rings and, and talks about every single book Ursula Le Guin ever wrote, but it might become that. Basically, it is true that in the Lord of the Rings, you've got the good guys and the bad guys and it's very stark. But at the same time, just like the yin yang, they, they're never done. One never beats out the other. The story continues forever. Here's my notes where I've written down quotes that I really like. And I'll say that one, at one point, Sam, Frodo's friend realizes, hey.

• 51:25Hannah Fry?

  He's the one with feet like yours, right?

• 51:27Michael Stevens?

  Well, all the hobbits have feet like mine, but they realize that their journey is not like a unique part of history, that it's just a continuation of a story that's been told forever. Sam asks. Do the great tales never end? And Frodo responds, no, they never end as tales. But the people in them come and go when their parts ended. Our part will end later. Or sooner.

• 51:54Michael Stevens?

  But the point there is that like they don't even anticipate actual victory, white over black, good over evil or anything. They just anticipate that there will always be both of them together. And in The Hobbit, the most courageous, brave thing Bilbo does isn't anything except to just be courageous enough to explore both. So Tolkien himself says that when Bilbo walks down the tunnel to see the dragon for the first time, which everyone's afraid to do, but he does anyway. In Going On, that was the bravest thing Bilbo ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterwards were as nothing compared to it.

• 52:37Michael Stevens?

  He fought the real battle in that tunnel alone before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait. What's really celebrated in literature, not just in Tolkien, but everywhere is more the confrontation than it is the end. I mean, the end is the, like, there's nothing else to say.

• 52:55Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, it's, everything is a process. Everything is a process. Yeah, I think this is it, right? I do think that there is something about this that is really relevant to the way that people live their own lives. Because so often, I mean, I've been guilty of this myself and often still am, actually, frankly, of like, oh, I'll be happy when this happens. As soon as I get to this bit, then my life will be, that will be the end. That will be the sort of the conclusion. I will have decided white or black, right? It's like, no, everything is a process. You don't get to cross the finish line. You have to accept that there is everything in everything. There is goodness and darkness in everything.

• 53:35Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, there is no end that you're reaching where it'll be good or bad. There's just the means to an end. All we have are those means, those efforts, the trying, the practice.

• 53:46Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 53:46Michael Stevens?

  And the universe knows this too. What's the brightest thing in the universe? A quasar.

• 53:52Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 53:53Michael Stevens?

  The brightest things in the universe are quasars. How, what are quasars?

• 53:57Hannah Fry?

  Oh, don't test me. Go on.

• 53:58Michael Stevens?

  Okay. Well, I'm asking this, I'm asking this rhetorically to the, to, to, to everyone. But what is a quasar? A quasar is a black hole. Matter falls into the black hole. It can't all cram in there together. It pushes against itself. The pressures increase and enormous amounts of energies are released. And that's a quasar. Just like the yin yang symbol. In the universe, the brightest light comes from the darkest depth that eats all light. It's, they're all together, not separate, not mixed, but both bright and burning and dark and void.

• 54:32Hannah Fry?

  And definitely not gray.

• 54:34Michael Stevens?

  And definitely not gray.

• 54:35Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. So there we go. That's what wins, not gray.

• 54:39Michael Stevens?

  Not gray. I love that. I love that. That should be a T-shirt.

• 54:43Hannah Fry?

  Thank you for wearing a gray T-shirt today, just to, just to.

• 54:46Michael Stevens?

  Oh yeah, I'm wearing my, if, if Uranus, the whole planet of Uranus was compressed into this shape, it would become a black hole. This is its short child radius.

• 54:53Hannah Fry?

  Very nice.

• 54:53Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 54:54Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, there we go. We've, we've come to a conclusion. Not gray.

• 54:57Michael Stevens?

  Not gray. So thanks for not being gray. And, and thanks for watching. And as always, keep sending in questions because look what it does.

• 55:07Hannah Fry?

  We had so much fun with this, Kelsey, and we hope that your seven-year-old is suitably pleased that, that Michael and I have whittled on about this for nearly an hour.

• 55:16Michael Stevens?

  That's right. Kelsey, you've got a bright seven-year-old or maybe a dark seven-year-old.

• 55:20Hannah Fry?

  Or maybe both.

• 55:20Michael Stevens?

  Or maybe both.

• 55:21Hannah Fry?

  But definitely not gray.

• 55:23Michael Stevens?

  Not gray. So stay not gray. And by the, by the way, you can send questions to.

• 55:29Hannah Fry?

  [email protected].

• 55:31Michael Stevens?

  That's it. Thank you. And we'll see you next time.

• 55:33Hannah Fry?

  Bye-bye.