Why Michael Abandoned Ink For Mechanical Pencils

What can be revealed about a person by their choice of…lead? In this gloriously nerdy episode of Field Notes, Michael Stevens arrives armed with an entire collection of mechanical pencils, sparking a series of passionate debates about graphite, the merits of ink, and whether the perfect pencil will ever really exist. Plus: what happens to fizzy drink bubbles in zero gravity? Why did early scientists believe sperm contained tiny pre-formed humans? Are gravitational waves the most beautiful thing in the cosmos? And are modern scientific discoveries becoming too complicated for any one person to fully understand? ------------------- For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/our-research/rest-is-science 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. Today on this episode of Field Notes, I've brought some very cool things that are important to me, and I'm going to just ask that you indulge me as I nerd out about mechanical pencils.

• 0:16Hannah Fry?

  Oh, this is a kind of nerding out I can get behind, Michael Stevens.

• 0:20Michael Stevens?

  I try to nerd out to everyone I meet about this, and by everyone I meet, I mean my wife and daughter. My daughter's into it. My wife is just done with all the little things that I need to say about mechanical pencils. But today, I'm going to get it out of my system.

• 0:34Hannah Fry?

  Okay, do we need to make this into a two-parter, a three-parter, a seven-parter?

• 0:38Michael Stevens?

  I think it's going to be a new podcast.

• 0:43Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, or we just have a third episode every week, you know, for the rest of time?

• 0:48Michael Stevens?

  Hopefully not. My goal is to get to a point where I'm exactly happy with all the features. It's exactly what I want, and I think I'm going to have to make it myself.

• 0:57Hannah Fry?

  Okay, all right. Well, this is something for us to look forward to.

• 1:01Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 1:01Hannah Fry?

  Let's get on with it.

• 1:08Hannah Fry?

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 1:11Michael 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.

• 1:32Hannah 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.

• 1:42Michael 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.

• 2:01Hannah Fry?

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

• 2:13Speaker 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 and easy transfer and no surprises along the way. 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.

• 2:58Speaker 02

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• 3:12Speaker 03

  Hey, listen.

• 3:13Speaker 04

  Power up your play with Nintendo Switch 2 and experience Link's legendary adventure, now reborn in vibrant detail on our fastest and most powerful system yet. And harness the power of the Ocarina with the built-in microphone.

• 3:34Speaker 04

  The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive. Game and system sold separately. Game rated everyone 10 and up.

• 3:49Michael Stevens?

  So I used to be a pen guy, okay? I've got one of those stories, one of those like conversion stories.

• 3:55Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 3:55Michael Stevens?

  I thought pencils were ridiculous. And honestly, it began with my father, who did crossword puzzles every day, the New York Times crossword. And you know how they get harder through the week? You know, he got, and he was very adamant that you do it in pen.

• 4:11Hannah Fry?

  Confidence, commitment.

• 4:12Michael Stevens?

  Confidence, commitment, being bold. Pencils were for people who were like, "Well, I'm not really sure. Is this the answer? Well, we'll race it later." And he's like, "Grow up." When you commit to a letter, it's the way it is.

• 4:25Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, he's a hardliner.

• 4:27Michael Stevens?

  And I said, "That's me." And I made this my mantra. And I got really into pens. And I had my favorite types of pens. And the pens said they were archival quality pens, that the ink was waterproof and fade proof. And that was all a lie.

• 4:41Hannah Fry?

  Go on.

• 4:42Michael Stevens?

  So I have a shelf of notebooks of all of my ideas and thoughts and everything. It's not really a journal and maybe it journals my thoughts, but I've I fill these notebooks up and I've got them on a shelf and they're all in pen. Well, one day I had like four of them that kind of all together had all my thoughts about some topic. Had them in a bag with an energy drink. I was an energy drinker back then and they were just in like a little plastic bag. And the energy drink exploded in the bag, spilled liquid all over the journals and it just washed the ink away. I'd say about two thirds of each journal lost.

• 5:24Michael Stevens?

  Like, I can't even tell what it used to say because it the ink bled through the pages. And these were Moleskine notebooks. I'm going to name brands, okay? It was a it was a sugar free rock star energy drink.

• 5:36Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 5:36Michael Stevens?

  That spilled on Moleskine notebooks.

• 5:39Hannah Fry?

  That's why you're not allowed to have energy drinks in libraries, you know?

• 5:42Michael Stevens?

  I know now.

• 5:43Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 5:43Michael Stevens?

  I know now, human knowledge, it's too fragile.

• 5:46Hannah Fry?

  All three of the notebooks.

• 5:48Michael Stevens?

  Many of the pages are just, I can't even recreate what they were. I had, I quickly dried them, I put them on a heater and I, they're dry, they're all crispy and wrinkled up now. They don't shut all the way. And so much of what was in them is lost. So I looked into it and I found that like pencils are just better.

• 6:07Hannah Fry?

  You can't wash them away essentially.

• 6:09Michael Stevens?

  They don't wash away, oh, but they erase. Here's the thing, they can be erased, but they scratch the paper so much, they leave a groove.

• 6:21Hannah Fry?

  You can see it.

• 6:21Michael Stevens?

  Like it is a frustrating part of pencils is that when you try to erase, you can always tell. There's always a ghost left, even like a mechanical, actual, like physical groove in the paper where it was scratched. But that means it's still there. Rock star energy drinks can't get rid of that.

• 6:36Hannah Fry?

  Okay, here's a question though, because what about the indelible mark that those notes made on your mind? Right? Because the thing is, is that if they were really, really good ideas, you wouldn't have forgotten them.

• 6:46Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I haven't forgotten the the details. I can kind of get a sense of like, oh. This is more stuff about philosophy of the past. But the exact words are important to me. In fact, some of the words I would scratch them out and I would like choose a different word. I want to see that process and that's all gone. With pencil, you're talking about carbon on the paper. It's not going to fade. Again, it can be erased, but there's still something left. Whereas my ink journals, gone.

• 7:16Hannah Fry?

  I mean, because there are some people, I remember talking to, I think it's Stephen Moffat, the guy who writes,

• 7:23Hannah Fry?

  who wrote Sherlock, the, the, the one with.

• 7:25Michael Stevens?

  Bendit, come back to it.

• 7:26Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. I, I remember having, I was having a chat with him once and he was saying that actually, a lot of the time, he doesn't write down his ideas. For the purpose that the act of him managing to remember them or not demonstrates whether it was actually ever a good idea. And he said, he was like, having a really amazing idea is like being complimented by God. And like, what, you're just going to forget being complimented by God? No.

• 7:53Michael Stevens?

  I think that's a little lie he tells himself. I think that there are a lot of good ideas that you still don't remember.

• 8:00Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 8:01Michael Stevens?

  Even if they're good, I don't think that's enough to trust that the idea won't go away. And I also think that some bad ideas are worth keeping because of what they can inspire later.

• 8:13Hannah Fry?

  I mean, definitely a pencil and paper. It has this, I mean, you're right, you can't wash it away. I mean, you could burn it away.

• 8:22Michael Stevens?

  Yes, you can, but at that point you can also burn something written in pen away.

• 8:27Hannah Fry?

  But it's also, you know, like a hard drive, you can't magnet it away.

• 8:31Michael Stevens?

  No.

• 8:31Hannah Fry?

  It does, it is, you know, it's, it's one step below tablet and chisel.

• 8:36Michael Stevens?

  Well, right, so I haven't even mentioned tablets in the electronic modern sense.

• 8:42Michael Stevens?

  Tablet and chisel would be great. I think there's also something, for me at least, this is a personal episode. For me, I need to get as many different modules in my brain involved to really remember, own, and move forward with an idea. It can't just be, oh, I thought it, or I typed it, or I voice recorded it. I need the muscles to get into it. And then I really, I really have that idea. So I write, and I fill up notebooks of stuff. For, for the fiction that I read, I don't underline stuff because I didn't get indelibly deep enough into my brain. I copy down verbatim.

• 9:20Hannah Fry?

  Is it all longhand? Hang on, your writing is so tiny.

• 9:23Michael Stevens?

  It has to be tiny in order to.

• 9:26Hannah Fry?

  You've got two lines per line, people.

• 9:28Michael Stevens?

  Two lines per line.

• 9:29Hannah Fry?

  This is like, do you remember when, well, do you remember Darwin, when he went off on, on his voyage?

• 9:35Michael Stevens?

  I remember, yeah, yeah.

• 9:36Hannah Fry?

  You know?

• 9:37Michael Stevens?

  I miss him.

• 9:38Hannah Fry?

  And he, paper was really short, so he would write, you know, like this, and then he would also write like that, and then sometimes like that. And if you're really careful, you could, you could, you could actually decipher all of it.

• 9:49Michael Stevens?

  You can make it out.

• 9:49Hannah Fry?

  It's incredibly neat. I think pencils are just a bit smudgy, though, you know?

• 9:53Michael Stevens?

  Oh.

• 9:54Hannah Fry?

  Gandalf continues, "Other evils there are that may come for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary."

• 10:01Michael Stevens?

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:01Hannah Fry?

  You really are writing down the quotes.

• 10:02Michael Stevens?

  I really am writing down the quotes. So obviously, that's from when I was reading Lord of the Rings. And look at what kind of notebook I'm using, by the way. It's not that earlier brand I mentioned. It is Write in the Rain, All-Weather Universal.

• 10:15Hannah Fry?

  Oh.

• 10:16Michael Stevens?

  So this is waterproof paper.

• 10:17Hannah Fry?

  Ah.

• 10:18Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. And so pens actually don't really work on it. I think you can use maybe a permanent marker, but pencils work best. And the same company that makes these waterproof journals also makes pencils that, I mean, a pencil, it can get wet, whatever, you get a new one. But they, they make waterproof mechanical pencils as well. So that's what I'm using now. And I have, I, I, because I bike to and from work, and it'll rain on them while they're in my pocket, and they're just like, I don't care. And I'm like, finally, I feel so much stronger. And then the question became, what type of pencil do I use? And my favorite is wooden pencils.

• 11:00Hannah Fry?

  Sure.

• 11:01Michael Stevens?

  All right, I mean-

• 11:01Hannah Fry?

  Clean, classic lines.

• 11:02Michael Stevens?

  It's classic, the feel of it is great.

• 11:04Hannah Fry?

  What kind of softness we talking here, 2B?

• 11:06Michael Stevens?

  Oh, I'm talking 4H.

• 11:09Hannah Fry?

  Whoa!

• 11:10Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. Let me give some background to those of you who might be wondering. So pencil lead comes in different hardnesses and softness. And to distinguish them, they're given names. B is soft. B means black, because soft graphite will just, it'll smear off onto the page so thickly that the line is very black. B for black. In the other direction, you get into the H leads, where H means hard. These are hard, there's less clay in the graphite. So the line that it leaves is much fainter. It's almost more of a silvery color, but it doesn't, of course, wear down as fast. It'll keep a sharp point for longer. There are some 4Hs.

• 11:53Michael Stevens?

  Mark Art makes a 4H that is actually still quite dark, but it's like you're scratching a needle on the paper, and I love the physicality of like, I'm doing this to you! Ha ha! You know? But a soft, like, mm, you're using like a 6B? You're just smudging around paint on the page, basically. It doesn't feel as-

• 12:10Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, you're massaging the paper into something brilliant now.

• 12:13Michael Stevens?

  It's too kind, it's too massag-y. I need to be scratching and tattooing the page. So, problem. Wooden pencils, you have to sharpen. Eventually, they get too short, they don't really fit in your hand very well. Also, I became too obsessed with constantly sharpening my pencils. And so I was just, I would write a sentence, and then halfway, halfway through it, I'd be like, mm, I could, I could give this a few more cranks. So I moved on to mechanical pencils. And mechanical pencils, you know, you can get lead of any kind of softness or hardness that you want. But you can also get mechanical pencils with different lead widths.

• 12:55Michael Stevens?

  So you can get thinner and thinner leads, which simulate a sharper and sharper pencil. Now, where should I begin? Here's what I'll say. For the last few months, my go-to pencil has been the Graph Gear 500, 0.3mm with H lead.

• 13:13Michael Stevens?

  And it's this one right here. And here's what I'm proposing. I think that we should write with these on a sheet of paper. And I don't know if we can do this. The producers can tell me. But we should like, sign this and write on it, and then give it away to some listener.

• 13:28Hannah Fry?

  Auction it for charity.

• 13:29Michael Stevens?

  We should auction it for charity. Can you guys can't say no to charitable causes.

• 13:34Hannah Fry?

  Maybe leave your bid in the comments. And frankly, if your bid's one p, like, you're gonna win it. So you may as well start.

• 13:41Michael Stevens?

  You may as well start. I don't know if we'll bid that way. But yeah, leave us comments anyway, because it's good for engagement.

• 13:47Hannah Fry?

  This also, this feels a bit like, um, this feels a bit like, you know, that scene in American Psycho where they're comparing their business cards?

• 13:53Michael Stevens?

  Yes.

• 13:53Hannah Fry?

  It was, I think it was when you gave me the exact name of this. What was it called again?

• 13:57Michael Stevens?

  The Graph Gear 500. Now, that's 0.3mm lead, which is quite thin.

• 14:04Hannah Fry?

  It's very thin.

• 14:05Michael Stevens?

  Usually, a mechanical pencil that you might find like in an office supply closet is going to be a 0.7mm. That's still very thin. But I love the amount of control I have with such a thin lead. It's almost like, it slows me down, and it makes me write more legibly.

• 14:22Hannah Fry?

  Oh, I think it's quite scratchy.

• 14:24Michael Stevens?

  You think it's too scratchy? Well, that's H lead as well, so it's hard.

• 14:27Hannah Fry?

  For me. I mean, look, it was a continuous experience, right? Like, if you get a really hard pencil, I find it scratchy in, but it's sort of, the lead doesn't flow smoothly across the table, it sort of catches almost. But yeah, it is like writing with a needle.

• 14:42Michael Stevens?

  Yes, it is. Okay, so let me give you the opposite. Now, this is a pencil that is known as the Roche Ring 600. And it is a completely metal body. This is much heavier. This one has a lead indicator on the end. So I can actually dial in which kind of lead I've put in it, so you don't forget. Yeah. And it's 0.5mm lead. So this is thicker. Also, this is incredibly soft. This pencil, let me just make sure it's working before I hand it to you. Because some of the leads have broken inside.

• 15:15Hannah Fry?

  I don't actually know what lead is made from, because it's obviously not lead.

• 15:18Michael Stevens?

  It's not made from lead, the metal. Good question. It's made from graphite, which is a form of carbon, an allotrope of carbon, just like a diamond. But the atoms are arranged differently. But there are other things added to it to make it either stronger, or softer. Like, I think pure graphite would be extremely soft. That would be like a thing that you would, it's like a piece of chalk, and you would be... Really putting down a lot. Pure graphite, I think, would be too, a little too hard. But you can add like clay or something to it to make it soft enough.

• 15:51Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 15:51Michael Stevens?

  It's smooth.

• 15:52Hannah Fry?

  Cause if you get pure graphite and you rub it, I mean, you can basically get down to like incredibly thin layers of graphite.

• 15:59Michael Stevens?

  That's right. That's right. Okay. So when it comes to, again, just to, to give you context.

• 16:04Hannah Fry?

  Please.

• 16:05Michael Stevens?

  Pencil leads range from B to H and the number before the letter is a, a degree of, of blackness or hardness. So like a six B is much softer than a two B. But the number two pencil that we use in school is right in the middle. It's an HB.

• 16:22Hannah Fry?

  Mm hmm.

• 16:22Michael Stevens?

  So it's a hard black. It's right in the middle. If you want to get any softer, you're going to move into the two B, three B, four B. Any harder, you're going to be moving towards, actually F comes first. F is very close to a number two.

• 16:35Hannah Fry?

  Is F four first?

• 16:37Michael Stevens?

  No. F is for fine.

• 16:38Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 16:39Michael Stevens?

  Because it's a little harder than a number two pencil so that it keeps a fine point longer. After that, in hardness, is the, the pure H. And then two H, three H, four H, and so on.

• 16:50Hannah Fry?

  What does it go up to?

• 16:51Michael Stevens?

  Um, the biggest H I've ever seen is only four H. But the biggest B I've seen is like 12 B.

• 17:01Hannah Fry?

  Whoa.

• 17:02Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. And that stuff is goop.

• 17:04Hannah Fry?

  Like you're writing with a cloud.

• 17:06Michael Stevens?

  It's like writing with a oil slick. All right. So here, try the Roche Ring 600.

• 17:11Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 17:11Michael Stevens?

  And this has four B lead in it.

• 17:14Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 17:15Michael Stevens?

  That's what I use for underlining in nonfiction books.

• 17:19Hannah Fry?

  See, this is more my thing. Oh.

• 17:22Michael Stevens?

  You love that?

• 17:22Hannah Fry?

  I like that a lot.

• 17:23Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 17:23Hannah Fry?

  I didn't know we were doing this today. Otherwise I would have brought in my fountain pen collection.

• 17:27Michael Stevens?

  Well, we should do fountain pens in another episode.

• 17:29Hannah Fry?

  I am as nerdy about fountain pens as you are about mechanical pencils. And the thing that I like in a fountain pen is what's known as a wet noodle.

• 17:36Michael Stevens?

  See, I don't even know what that means. This is why we need to do this episode because I don't know fountain pens at all.

• 17:41Hannah Fry?

  Oh, fountain. Oh, the delight. I want to be like drawing with the sloshiest pen nib that exists. I want to be pouring ink on. To that paper.

• 17:52Michael Stevens?

  Wow.

• 17:53Hannah Fry?

  I want the paper to be like a sponge, like soaking it up.

• 17:57Michael Stevens?

  That's so great. I love this personal side of of writing implements because what my opinions that are being expressed today are mine. That might not work for you.

• 18:08Hannah Fry?

  What's interesting, though, is that my reasoning is exactly the same as yours, which is that I like the sloshiest pens because it makes me slow down.

• 18:16Michael Stevens?

  Oh, interesting. They make me speed up.

• 18:18Hannah Fry?

  Do they?

• 18:19Michael Stevens?

  Because it's just too much of a amusement park ride. Whoa, whoa. I need I need a surgical instrument where I'm like, I'm just delicately slicing into the brain. As I as I copy things down or as I write down my thoughts. Otherwise, I can't read them later because it's too sloppy.

• 18:34Hannah Fry?

  I think it is. You're right. It is a bit like an amusement park ride, but it's sort of like it makes me really take care of the beautiful shape of the letters, you know?

• 18:42Michael Stevens?

  So let's keep going. This is going to become a three hour long episode, which is fine. It's the way it's going to be, everybody. Now, you'll notice that those two pencils you've used are drafting pencils. They have really sharp points on them. And the lead comes out of what's called a lead pipe that's very long. And that's so that you can use thin leads, but also so that when you're using a ruler or a stencil, they fit in and the sides of the pencil don't get in the way. Problem with having a long lead pipe is that it's fragile. I mean, this thing is so thin. If you drop the pencil, that lead pipe gets bent. Lead's not going to come out of it again.

• 19:22Hannah Fry?

  You've broken your pencil.

• 19:23Michael Stevens?

  You've broken it, and it can be very difficult to fix. I dropped the Roadtray 600 on the third day that I had it, and that lead pipe got bent. And I had to bend it back, and I think I got it. It works now. It works again. But there's no cap. There's no way to protect it. That's how it is. You put this in a pocket, you're gonna reach in and stab yourself on that.

• 19:45Hannah Fry?

  Like a hypodermic needle.

• 19:46Michael Stevens?

  It's gonna rip into fabric and it's gonna bend itself again. So I have to use these little protective caps. Which fit on these pencils and that's how I carry it in my bag.

• 19:56Hannah Fry?

  Wait, where do you get the protective caps from?

• 19:58Michael Stevens?

  I got these at a craft store in London, actually. I just, I, I.

• 20:01Hannah Fry?

  But it's not a branded one. It's like, it's just a generic thing.

• 20:04Michael Stevens?

  It's a generic little thing. It's like a piece of aluminum that's formed into a cap with a little slit on it. So it can expand and then tightly hold on to whatever you shove in there.

• 20:13Hannah Fry?

  It looks a little like a bullet.

• 20:15Michael Stevens?

  It looks a little bit like a bullet shape. That's right. And it's curved here. And so it's protecting. You can use these on wooden pencils to protect the lead, but on this, it's protecting the pipe of the mechanical pencil. Now, here's what I want to say. I want to show you, uh, well, I want to show you 12 more things. Just kidding, but it's close to 12. So I, I do think you might love this. Now, this is Write in the Rain's mechanical pencil. And it uses lead that is 1.2 millimeters thick.

• 20:45Hannah Fry?

  Whoa, fat boy.

• 20:47Michael Stevens?

  It's a fat boy. And this came with 2B lead. And I'm sorry to say, knowing that you now like the soft ones, I've replaced it with 2H lead.

• 20:55Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 20:56Michael Stevens?

  Because I wanted it to hold a sharp point. So if you look, it's pretty sharp. And that's because I've sharpened it using a special sharpener that can sharpen mechanical pencil lead.

• 21:04Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 21:05Michael Stevens?

  Now try that out.

• 21:05Hannah Fry?

  What did you say this one was called?

• 21:06Michael Stevens?

  That's called the, uh, the Write in the Rain 1.2 millimeter. What do you think?

• 21:13Hannah Fry?

  I prefer it to the, uh, old scratchy, scratchy boy.

• 21:16Michael Stevens?

  Got it. Yeah. Well, and look how much darker your writing is.

• 21:20Hannah Fry?

  It also feels nice to touch.

• 21:21Michael Stevens?

  It's got a really, really nice weight to it. And the best eraser ever invented in human history. Try that eraser out.

• 21:33Hannah Fry?

  Oh, that is, that is actually quite good.

• 21:35Michael Stevens?

  That's really good.

• 21:36Hannah Fry?

  You know, I once, actually, I was reading the Japanese stationery awards.

• 21:41Michael Stevens?

  Hmm.

• 21:42Hannah Fry?

  Which I, which is the kind of thing that I do. And, um, there was a new eraser which won, or it clean sweep. Which is quite nice to imagine an eraser getting a clean sweep. But it, um, I, I think it rivals this.

• 21:57Michael Stevens?

  Okay. So I haven't tried every eraser. I shouldn't say that it's the best ever.

• 22:00Hannah Fry?

  This is a very good eraser.

• 22:01Michael Stevens?

  It's the best eraser I've ever experienced.

• 22:03Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 22:03Michael Stevens?

  That's why the, the, the perfect mechanical pencil for me is going to be Frankenstein out of all these. It's going to be the things I, it's going to be that, the eraser from Write in the Rain's mechanical pencil. It's going to be like the form factor of the Graph Gear 500. With a protected lead pipe. So, watch this.

• 22:22Hannah Fry?

  Mm-hmm.

• 22:24Michael Stevens?

  How do you protect the lead pipe? Well, one way to do it is to have a cap that actually comes with the pencil. On the market right now, there are only two mechanical pencils that are capped. One is the Kuru Toga Dive, which is like $120 if you wanted it in the color that I like.

• 22:40Hannah Fry?

  I feel like I'm having an out-of-body experience, everybody.

• 22:44Michael Stevens?

  I could work at a mechanical pencil store and never make a sale because I won't just stop, I won't stop talking.

• 22:49Hannah Fry?

  Right, tell me what it was called again?

• 22:50Michael Stevens?

  The Kuru Toga Dive.

• 22:52Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 22:53Michael Stevens?

  Are you familiar with the Kuru Toga mechanism?

• 22:55Hannah Fry?

  I have a feeling I'm about to be.

• 22:57Michael Stevens?

  You're about to find out. So here's, honestly, I don't like it, but it's changed a lot of people's lives. So imagine that this is the lead in the pencil.

• 23:05Hannah Fry?

  Uh-huh.

• 23:05Michael Stevens?

  As you're writing, what happens is that it hits the page and you draw and you pick it up and you draw another letter and blah, blah, blah. And it gets cut obliquely.

• 23:14Hannah Fry?

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:15Michael Stevens?

  So it actually becomes thicker.

• 23:16Hannah Fry?

  Hmm.

• 23:17Michael Stevens?

  And so your lines wind up being thicker and thicker as you draw because you're...

• 23:23Hannah Fry?

  The lead is not wearing down evenly across its entire surface.

• 23:25Michael Stevens?

  If you wrote straight up and down, the lead would hit the page and it would just get shorter. But because you write it at an angle, it's getting cut this way and you wind up with a much larger surface area at the tip. Kuru Toga fixes that by having a little, a little mechanism inside such that each time it touch, the, the lead touches the paper, the lead is actually rotated a little bit. So you draw, lift, and it comes up, and then you go back down, and it keeps going around and around. So the lead, that tiny 0.5 millimeter lead, is actually being sharpened by being used.

• 23:59Hannah Fry?

  Amazing. Um, that is pretty good.

• 24:02Michael Stevens?

  That's pretty amazing.

• 24:03Hannah Fry?

  That's pretty good.

• 24:03Michael Stevens?

  For me, it's too much movement. I don't want to feel the lead moving a little bit every time. You can feel it. And I'm a guy who wants that scratch. I want to be doing old-school cuneiform, like enclae on stone type work. I don't want this like delicate little, hello, I'm doing a little dance for you, right? But Kuru Toga Dive has that mechanism in a cap. The Pintel Carry...

• 24:30Michael Stevens?

  Has a cap and it's just a more standard one.

• 24:32Hannah Fry?

  This looks like a fountain pen from afar.

• 24:34Michael Stevens?

  Check it out. What's cool is that when you put the cap on the back and you push it all the way in, the lead can still be advanced even though you've put a cap on the back of it. The button goes through.

• 24:47Hannah Fry?

  I think the feeling of thi- this is like, this is sort of like what I would describe as a, as a lady pen, you know?

• 24:53Michael Stevens?

  I do feel ladylike with it, especially the sparkliness, the, the shininess.

• 24:59Hannah Fry?

  I think Montblanc actually, literally make lady-sized pens for smaller hands. I'm not actually joking.

• 25:07Michael Stevens?

  My hands are pretty small. Your hands, though.

• 25:11Hannah Fry?

  Gi- they are absolutely ginormous.

• 25:13Michael Stevens?

  Famously ginormous.

• 25:15Hannah Fry?

  Ginormous.

• 25:15Michael Stevens?

  I'm kidding. There was ones where you were like hiding your hands because you were showing, showing, showing something up close to the camera and thought it made them look too big. Now that has, that also has like three or four B lead in it.

• 25:26Hannah Fry?

  What, what's this one called again?

• 25:27Michael Stevens?

  That's called the Pentel Carey. It's one of the oldest continuously manufactured mechanical pencils. But you can buy that today for about six bucks.

• 25:37Hannah Fry?

  Um, yeah, I don't like it as much. It's too small.

• 25:40Michael Stevens?

  Too small. Fair enough. I do appreciate that it's got a cap. So I can throw it in my pocket, walk around, never worry about the pen getting damaged.

• 25:47Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, this, this one, I feel like, you know, it could sort of, um, double up as a screwdriver.

• 25:52Michael Stevens?

  Yes. So that's, that's the Write in the Rain 1.3 millimeter pencil. And it, it is for like work outdoors. It's for, you're doing construction, you need to draw lines on boards and whatnot. That's why it has thick, soft lead.

• 26:04Hannah Fry?

  Not to gender your pencils, but this one feels very manly.

• 26:07Michael Stevens?

  It's a manly pencil. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so the last thing I'll say is that I reached the end of my journey by discovering that you can get lead that's even thinner than the 0.3 millimeter you tried with the Graph Gear. Now, you might actually enjoy these because when lead, when lead gets that thin, we're talking a fifth of a millimeter, these look like hairs. They break way too easily. You can't put them in a normal mechanical pencil. They need to have some special protective mechanism. And so here, I'll give you this one first. This is called the Pentel Orins and they're the only people at the moment who sell a 0.2 millimeter lead pencil.

• 26:51Michael Stevens?

  Now, when you look at it, you won't see any lead sticking out. And that's because the pipe protects the lead and it's got a little bevel on it. So that when it touches paper, it moves up a little and exposes the lead.

• 27:04Hannah Fry?

  Oh.

• 27:04Michael Stevens?

  See how thin that is?

• 27:05Hannah Fry?

  This is incredibly thin. What's this one called again?

• 27:08Michael Stevens?

  That's called the Pentel Orins. And it has the ability to hold the thinnest mechanical pencil leads being made right now. And because it protects it so well, you can put in very soft lead. So you are right now writing with a fifth of a millimeter thick lead that's 2B softness. So it's a quite dark compared to the stuff at the top, the Graph Gear 500. The Graph Gear's H lead looks like gray.

• 27:34Hannah Fry?

  It does. It does. Even though it's incredibly thin, you're just putting way more.

• 27:39Michael Stevens?

  Way more graphite atoms per stroke, right? Then this is the same pencil, but with a metal grip. And so that's been my go to, and I think I'm kind of done.

• 27:52Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 27:53Michael Stevens?

  It's got a little bit of a different weight distribution. It's a little bit heavier. Now, Pentel also makes an advanced version of the Orins called the Orins Nero. And it automatically shoots more lead out, so you don't have to push the button. I don't like it. I think a lot of people will agree that the mechanism that moves lead out is too sensitive. So when you use the eraser on the pencil, it shoots more lead out and you have to keep fixing it every time you erase.

• 28:21Hannah Fry?

  This one's your absolute favorite?

• 28:22Michael Stevens?

  That's my favorite.

• 28:23Hannah Fry?

  How much actually are these?

• 28:24Michael Stevens?

  My favorite pencil, that metal grip Pentel Orins, that was $9.

• 28:29Hannah Fry?

  Oh.

• 28:30Michael Stevens?

  Well, $9.90, so 10 bucks.

• 28:33Hannah Fry?

  How about the one that looks like a screwdriver?

• 28:35Michael Stevens?

  That one, uh, that one was more. That was like $17, I think.

• 28:40Hannah Fry?

  Okay. I mean, look, I'll be honest with you. Before we started, I was quite jealous of the number of options that you had here to show me. Because I was like, wow, he's really invested here. Knowing that my fountain pen collection is not as extensive as yours. These are substantially cheaper than fountain pens in a good way.

• 28:58Michael Stevens?

  You can spend more money if you want. Like, there are Pentel Orins with like new fangled metal grips that'll cost you like 23 bucks.

• 29:09Michael Stevens?

  I mean, that's a lot more than a wooden pencil.

• 29:11Hannah Fry?

  I agree.

• 29:12Michael Stevens?

  However, it's worth it in the long run. So I think, yeah, today, when I walk around, I carry the Pentel Carry. And I also carry the Pentel Orins. If you hold down the button, you can push the pipe all the way in.

• 29:29Hannah Fry?

  Oh, so it doesn't stab you?

• 29:31Michael Stevens?

  So it doesn't stab you, and it also doesn't get bent. So this is like, you know, nice and protected. And so I keep this in my pocket.

• 29:38Michael Stevens?

  And this one. And so if I need to write something, I'll use this. But because it's a bit weird, you have to like, just push once and then don't look for lead coming out. I don't want another person to have to use it. They'll think it's annoying and they'll think that I'm being difficult and fancy. I'll just give them

• 29:53Hannah Fry?

  Never.

• 29:53Michael Stevens?

  This non-fancy one. I give them this one because this works like you would expect a mechanical pencil to work.

• 29:58Hannah Fry?

  And that works even if they've got lady hands.

• 30:00Michael Stevens?

  Even with the lady hands? This won't overwhelm them, you know? Yeah, so I love it. And this is the one I've been like, I just love fidgeting with it too. It's got like the perfect size for my hands to just kind of have some fun with.

• 30:12Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, thank you for that tour. That was, um, I think that that will have, uh, what I'm interested in looking at is the retention statistics on this episode. To see how much we split our audience.

• 30:23Michael Stevens?

  It's gonna be one of those rare episodes where viewership goes up the longer it lasts. Like, people are inexplicably like showing up. Their friends are saying, you have to join.

• 30:34Hannah Fry?

  Where did you come from?

• 30:35Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 30:36Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. Well, if you are still watching, you're a hardcore pencil fan, like Michael. You need to sign this as well in order for

• 30:42Michael Stevens?

  I know, I realized I wasn't writing, because I mean, the microphone's in the way of the table. What did you write down?

• 30:48Hannah Fry?

  I just wrote down what the name of the pens were.

• 30:49Michael Stevens?

  What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put my own handwriting on here with all the pencils. And when we come back, we're gonna get to your questions.

• 31:05Michael Stevens?

  I live 7,636 kilometers away from Hannah, so we rarely get to see each other in person. That's what makes this such genuinely thrilling news for us. And maybe for you too. Because for the first time ever, you can see both of us live onstage at Goalhanger's inaugural festival. It's gonna be amazing to be able to reach through the screen and meet those of you who watch and listen to the show in the flesh. The Rest Is Fest runs from the 4th to the 6th of September at London's South Bank Centre. General sale goes live on the 2nd of June at 10 a.m. So get some tickets and get ready for some fun. Some serious fun.

• 31:47Michael Stevens?

  Go to southbankcentre.co.uk to find out more.

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• 32:59Hannah Fry?

  Okay, welcome back. We have, uh, we've got some questions from you guys. First up, we've got a question from Justin, who asks, what happens to the bubbles inside a soft drink when you open up a bottle on the International Space Station?

• 33:12Michael Stevens?

  Hmm.

• 33:13Hannah Fry?

  On Earth, they flow upwards, seemingly against gravity.

• 33:15Michael Stevens?

  True.

• 33:16Hannah Fry?

  What happens in space when there is no up?

• 33:20Michael Stevens?

  It's funny, I was just watching a British astronomer, astronomer, a British astronaut.

• 33:26Hannah Fry?

  Was it Tim Peake?

• 33:27Michael Stevens?

  I don't know.

• 33:28Hannah Fry?

  Was he ginger?

• 33:29Michael Stevens?

  I don't remember. I don't see.

• 33:30Hannah Fry?

  There is only one British astronaut.

• 33:32Michael Stevens?

  You guys in this country are so obsessed with hair color.

• 33:34Hannah Fry?

  Like. Hair color and class.

• 33:36Michael Stevens?

  Right, yeah. Where I grew up, you were a redhead and that was like what it was. And here, it's all like gingers and the whole, like, they don't have souls. And I'm like, what the heck?

• 33:45Hannah Fry?

  Excuse me, that was on South Park. That is very much from your side of the pond.

• 33:48Michael Stevens?

  I first heard about it from them and it was like out of nowhere. My whole childhood, I'd never heard that gingers were like.

• 33:55Hannah Fry?

  Outcasts.

• 33:56Michael Stevens?

  Worthy of derision and outcasts.

• 33:58Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, but you know, you know why? It's because, I mean, I have not fact-checked this to be absolutely clear.

• 34:03Michael Stevens?

  Okay, good, good.

• 34:05Hannah Fry?

  But it's, uh, we had like invaders from, you know, like the French and the Nordics. And then all the Celts were like pushed to the outer borders. So like up in Scotland and over in Ireland. And so they're really considered the sort of savages.

• 34:21Michael Stevens?

  That they're the, they're more indigenous to these Isles.

• 34:24Hannah Fry?

  Maybe not more indigenous, because I think there were, you know, Europeans floating around the whole time. And when did this isle become an isle, et cetera?

• 34:32Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 34:32Hannah Fry?

  Um, but yeah, the sort of the Celtic blood was considered sort of savages.

• 34:39Michael Stevens?

  Beneath the, like, who, the Normans, the?

• 34:42Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 34:42Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 34:43Hannah Fry?

  I'm not just saying that that bit is absolutely completely true, by the way, that, um, for example, there was lots of stuff during the Irish famine where in Britain, they were sort of like, well, it's because they're just. Just a bit lazy, you know? So that's why gingers were considered genuinely subhuman. You know, in Iceland, when they, we've gotten to gingers now again.

• 35:05Hannah Fry?

  Just it seeks out the edges. But yeah, the ginger people who came from Ireland, that the Viking stopped off in Ireland on the way to Iceland, picked up loads of women, which you can see in the DNA of modern Icelandic people, that it was females from Ireland. Anyway, when they like had churches and stuff, all of the ginger people had to sit at the back.

• 35:26Michael Stevens?

  Really?

• 35:27Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:28Michael Stevens?

  It's fun that we can all have a little bit of fun insulting gingers. And it's like safer.

• 35:37Hannah Fry?

  Safer than insulting other people.

• 35:39Michael Stevens?

  Because we don't really mean it. Like, I guess to me, it just never felt like it was real. It was like a South Park joke. I thought they'd, I thought they'd made that up. Until I met people from England, from Britain, and they were just like, oh, no, like.

• 35:53Hannah Fry?

  Oh, it's real?

• 35:54Michael Stevens?

  It's real.

• 35:54Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, I think it's less real than it used to be.

• 35:56Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 35:57Hannah Fry?

  I think like in the eighties, it was much more real than it is now. Yeah. Anyway, but that's why Tim peaks, the ginger guy.

• 36:03Michael Stevens?

  I just, I don't remember because, yeah, again, I see everyone as a human, okay? Point is though, that he had a big blob of water there in the weightless International Space Station, and he stuck an Alka Seltzer tablet, a busy tablet in it. And the bubbles form, but they don't go up. Instead, they just go around.

• 36:24Hannah Fry?

  They just expand.

• 36:24Michael Stevens?

  They just expand. So on the International Space Station, a can of carbonated liquid will expand. And it'll be like a kind of a foamy mess, but it's going to all come out as that pressure change causes the gas to come out of solution. And now it's, it's going to be probably quite quick. I don't know if it's, they've actually done this. I haven't seen if they've done it on the ISS. It would make a mess. I think it would be like if you'd shaken it up and opened it.

• 36:51Hannah Fry?

  And then just the explosion. But this is what's happening inside the human body. I mean, because gases are released when you're when you're digesting.

• 36:57Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 36:58Hannah Fry?

  And on earth, you know, it's fine. It's sort of like it kind of comes up to the top and you you end up burping it out. But on the ISS, it's like incredibly uncomfortable, apparently, the the bloating that you end up getting. They they they they talk about having like sort of wet burps, where it's kind of all coming out of the edges, which is a bit disgusting.

• 37:15Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, it makes you thankful for gravity keeping things down.

• 37:18Hannah Fry?

  Right, exactly. So yeah, there you go. There's your answer, with a little bit of ginger stuff thrown in. Okay, here's a question for you, Michael. Okay, Adam asks, I've been reading Bill Bryson off the back of Michael's recommendation, and I had been wondering, if you could be alive in any era of science, when would it be?

• 37:35Michael Stevens?

  Wow. Can it be in the future?

• 37:38Hannah Fry?

  Sure.

• 37:39Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I mean, I just-

• 37:40Hannah Fry?

  He hasn't stipulated, so I think you can do whatever you like.

• 37:42Michael Stevens?

  I think there's so many cool historical eras of science, but I feel like I'd be there and I'd be a little bit like, ah, we've moved past this, but also I can't really explain to you how we did, so I'm of no use. But I think that it'd be cool to go, I don't know how far, though. I'd like to go to where we've paradigm shifted away from our current thinking, where someone's someone's come along and said, guys, all this discussion of quantum electrodynamics and cosmology at really big scales, like all of that is actually part of something else, kind of like what Einstein did and Copernicus did.

• 38:27Michael Stevens?

  I want-

• 38:28Hannah Fry?

  Another level of abstraction.

• 38:30Michael Stevens?

  When, yeah, when there's that new way of looking at reality, where we go, oh, of course.

• 38:37Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 38:37Michael Stevens?

  Of course, Newtonian physics and Einsteinian physics are all just approximation still, and there's still something else there. And that's what's going to push us over the the edge to- Faster than light travel, creating wormholes, stuff like that.

• 38:55Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, I hear you. I hear you. I sort of think that there's, I don't know, I think if you look back through the history of science, you get these eras where, I don't know, I think that a lot of the really simple stuff to discover has sort of maybe already happened. You know, I don't think that there's an equation of biology in the same way there's an equation of E equals mc squared. I think that the systems that we are, that are now at the frontier are so phenomenally complex that it's probably beyond the human brain to be able to understand the full intricacies of the entire systems all simultaneously.

• 39:32Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 39:33Hannah Fry?

  I mean, even really, I think even if you go back a hundred years or so, it was possible for you as one individual person to pick up on a piece of science and make one breakthrough that actually ended up having this gigantic repercussions.

• 39:48Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, by yourself.

• 39:49Hannah Fry?

  By yourself. But I think now we're really in an era where there's like, it just doesn't really happen anymore. You need gigantic teams of people.

• 39:55Michael Stevens?

  You need gigantic teams. You need gigantic equipment. You need like neutrino detectors and particle accelerators the size of a country or telescopes that take a decade to build, right?

• 40:05Hannah Fry?

  And having big teams of people is exciting in itself, but it also means that you as an individual only ever get to like, fully grasp one tiny bit of it, you know? I like the idea of being able to fully understand literally all of it. I just prefer pulling apart things that are mechanical.

• 40:21Michael Stevens?

  Yep.

• 40:21Hannah Fry?

  Because I can really understand how they're made and how they're designed. Whereas pulling apart something that's, I don't know, like a laptop or a smartphone or whatever, it's like, they're just too complicated for one person to understand it.

• 40:32Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, you could be a real Renaissance woman if you went back to a time when you could know a bit of everything.

• 40:38Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 40:39Michael Stevens?

  I think historically, I would like to go back and hang out with Lewin Hook and his microscope. When was that? Like the 1600s? Late 1600s?

• 40:47Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, a little bit later, maybe? 1700s?

• 40:50Michael Stevens?

  Let's check it out.

• 40:51Hannah Fry?

  Lew Irvin Hook. But he was the one who first saw sperm, right?

• 40:55Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, he is.

• 40:57Hannah Fry?

  That's, imagine that. You just get, just get like a little instrument. It's just like, whoa, what shall I put under it next?

• 41:02Michael Stevens?

  Famously, Lewin Hook did not invent the microscope, but made some adjustments to make it like 300 times stronger magnification wise. And like scooped out some gunk from his infected tooth and looked at it and saw microorganisms. And he called them animalcules.

• 41:22Hannah Fry?

  Like molecules.

• 41:23Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, like molecules, but animals. And he was the first human to see a sperm. And he was like convinced because there seemed to be a lot of detail in them. He was convinced that there was an entire little baby person in it.

• 41:36Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 41:36Michael Stevens?

  And that this, this, this proved the notion of preformation.

• 41:42Hannah Fry?

  Absolutely.

• 41:43Michael Stevens?

  That when life began, every individual that ever would be already existed. And that like my children are in my sperm as little tiny things.

• 41:53Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 41:54Michael Stevens?

  And inside them, the, the, the boys have some sperm.

• 41:58Hannah Fry?

  They're Russian dolls, my friend.

• 41:59Michael Stevens?

  It's Russian dolls all the way down.

• 42:01Hannah Fry?

  In the shape of a human, this is as well. And then when it goes into the woman, it's like tiny little human and then it just gets slightly bigger and slightly bigger.

• 42:07Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, and it gets bigger and, and the, the woman's egg provides some kind of, maybe it's a life force. Maybe it's just whatever. Uh, it turns out that's not true.

• 42:16Hannah Fry?

  No.

• 42:17Michael Stevens?

  On the, on the way over here.

• 42:19Hannah Fry?

  A bit more to do with it.

• 42:20Michael Stevens?

  Maybe they may have a little bit more to do with it. Um, but on the way over here before the show, I finished Ted Chang's Stories of Your Life and Others. And he's got a short story in here. This is all sci fi.

• 42:31Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 42:32Michael Stevens?

  Where he imagines a world where preformation is true. And the story is set in Victorian times where some scientists have found a way to, I won't give too much away. They found a way to look closer and closer at all these like nested homunculi, little people that are inside the sperm. And they realized that after the next five generations, it doesn't keep going. That the whole human species.

• 42:56Hannah Fry?

  It's about to come to an end.

• 42:57Michael Stevens?

  Is about to come to an end.

• 42:58Hannah Fry?

  That's a great idea for a story.

• 42:59Michael Stevens?

  Because when it formed, however it formed, uh, its creator or nature only gave it, whatever, two hundred.

• 43:07Hannah Fry?

  Generations.

• 43:07Michael Stevens?

  Nested generations. And they're like, how are we gonna fix this? And I won't tell you how they fix it, but it's a pretty neat story.

• 43:13Hannah Fry?

  That's a great story. Yeah, good answer. Good answer. I think being there at the beginning of the microscope is a really good one. Okay, last question. This is from Otis, who asks, in your opinion, what is the most beautiful phenomenon of the cosmos?

• 43:26Michael Stevens?

  Oh.

• 43:27Hannah Fry?

  Now, okay, on this, I think that, I mean, sure, there's like supernovae and stars and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I think we're really biased towards vision in all of this. Um, I think that the most beautiful phenomenon, I'm gonna go gravitational waves.

• 43:42Michael Stevens?

  Hmm.

• 43:43Hannah Fry?

  Because I think, I just think that's really pretty spectacular, actually. This idea that you can have something like two black holes colliding together and it has these measurable ripples.

• 43:56Michael Stevens?

  In spacetime.

• 43:57Hannah Fry?

  In spacetime.

• 43:59Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 43:59Hannah Fry?

  That you can get lasers that are ninety degrees to one another and then measure the difference. I mean, that is, it's also the fact that, you know, we turned on SETI to, to listen, you know, the bias towards vision has always been there, but we turned on SETI to listen, to hear if there was sounds being made by alien civilizations. And there was nothing, really. We haven't heard anything. There's no cacophony of sounds. But with, uh, when LIGO was turned on to look for gravitational waves, it took about, how long was it before they detected the first wave? It was like forty-eight hours or something, wasn't it?

• 44:35Michael Stevens?

  I don't know. It'd be really funny if I pretended like, oh, I, yeah, at most.

• 44:40Hannah Fry?

  Hang on one second. It was really quick. Oh, okay. This is interesting.

• 44:45Michael Stevens?

  Hmm.

• 44:45Hannah Fry?

  So they hadn't, they were supposed to turn it on to do the first official observation on September the 18th. They actually found the first gravitational wave on September the 14th, four days before the original start date, when it was in engineering mode.

• 45:04Michael Stevens?

  Wow.

• 45:05Hannah Fry?

  How cool is that?

• 45:06Michael Stevens?

  Very cool. I mean, what a feeling for you to be like, guys, this is working so well. Like, we're detecting the target and we haven't even started.

• 45:16Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, I mean, they literally turned it on and were like, oh, no, there is one.

• 45:19Michael Stevens?

  Wow.

• 45:20Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, that's, I think, that's really cool.

• 45:21Michael Stevens?

  And gravitational waves, right, it's not like a wave in water or in, it's a wave in, whatever it is we are on, the stage that all the matter is set on.

• 45:32Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 45:33Michael Stevens?

  Not a wave in matter, a wave in the thing that we're in and are moving through, space and time. I think someday we'll get a better idea of what spacetime really is.

• 45:44Hannah Fry?

  It's such a shame that we can't conceive of things in the fourth dimension, isn't it? Because the two dimensional analogy is where it's like, oh, it's like you live on a curtain and then the curtain is being rippled, blah, blah, blah. Like, sure, okay, fine, but it just doesn't, it's not satisfying.

• 45:58Michael Stevens?

  No, because it makes you think of a curtain and how a curtain will bend and fold into a third dimension. And that doesn't exist for, in our minds, for a three dimensional spacetime. So it just winds up becoming, like, it feels made up and it has to be too mathematical for everyone to really appreciate.

• 46:16Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, agree, agree. Okay, well, that's a bit of a depressing point to leave on. Sorry, guys, the most beautiful phenomenon in space you can't imagine.

• 46:25Michael Stevens?

  Which I think is kind of beautiful in its own way.

• 46:27Hannah Fry?

  Hey, hey, there you go, there's the philosophical A.

• 46:29Michael Stevens?

  It's always a good answer.

• 46:30Hannah Fry?

  Thank you for joining us for this episode of Field Notes. As ever, you can write to us, [email protected]. You can leave comments for us under the videos in whatever app you happen to be accessing this, we read all of them.

• 46:45Michael Stevens?

  Thanks for watching, guys.

• 46:46Hannah Fry?

  Thank you.

• 46:54Speaker 03

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