Rainbows with Lulu Miller

Why are there so many songs about rainbows (and what’s on the other side)? A bridge between worlds, a map to a pot of gold, the centerpiece of a Lisa Frank trapper-keeper, and of course, an ever-changing symbol of the LGBTQ+ community, the rainbow has been a profound part of the human experience for thousands of years. For this early Pride Month episode, science correspondent and bisexual seagull Lulu Miller explains to Sarah the history of our understanding of rainbows: why they exist, what they are made out of, and what they have represented. Together they discuss the figures that have tried to pin down this natural wonder, the power of its spectrum of meaning, and the comfort and terror of the infinity it once represented. Digressions include the boring transcendence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the secret joys of trigonometry, and the best gay Hannibal Lecter. More Lulu Miller:https://radiolab.org/team/lulu-miller Lulu on InstagramLulu's book Why Fish Don't Exist Original music in this episode brought to you by Magpie Cinema Club featuring Brendan Liu Except for "Roy G Biv" from this episode of Lulu's WNYC show Terrestrials, which is written and performed by Alan Goffinski and included on The Bridge EPAnd also Spanish Flea by Herb Alpert Edited + Produced by Miranda Zickler:http://linktr.ee/mirandatheswampmonsterThe poem Lulu read was Singularity by Marie Howe More You're Wrong About:Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merch Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Sarah Marshall?

  Well, he's probably riding around on a Mongolian pony all day. You know, you get, you start thinking about infinity as you get bounced around on there.

• 0:20Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we are celebrating Pride Month with rainbows and Lulu Miller. Lulu, hello. You are a great legend of podcasts and a bisexual seagull right here with us.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  That is my bio.

• 0:42Sarah Marshall?

  I held out a fry and he flapped right over.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Exactly. You've shown a french fry on the moon. And here I am because a couple prides ago, we did the, we did the very homosexual and bisexual seagulls.

• 0:56Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm. Which I had such a good time with and everyone should listen to.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  So I thought, yeah, I could bring you some more queer wares in the form of a rainbow. And you know, I feel a little sheepish about rainbows because I'm like, I feel like part of what's so lovely about You're Wrong About is, you know, you get into these like dark, twisted corners and maybe everyone thinks rainbows are just gonna be puffy, frivolous, candy.

• 1:20Sarah Marshall?

  But we're big fans of puff and candy.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Okay, but don't worry, because I would argue rainbows, much like rats, are maligned and misunderstood.

• 1:31Sarah Marshall?

  Inevitably, you know?

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33Sarah Marshall?

  Like, for example, I feel like I'm Larry King. Tonight, rainbows. Do they really have a pot of gold at the end? Or is it all a bunch of hokum? Let's listen to Leon in Des Moines.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  So well, first, first of all, what are your, what are your associations with rainbows? Any, any and all, quick gut?

• 1:53Sarah Marshall?

  I frickin' love rainbows. And you know, the other day, and I don't think I even said this to you, I was driving to my mom's house and I saw a rainbow. And then I realized it was a double rainbow and it was also storming. And there was a, what's the?

• 2:10Sarah Marshall?

  Noun for a piece of lightning, a bolt of lightning. Oh my God, Sarah. And I saw a little lightning bolt next to the frickin rainbow, Lulu.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  Wow, that, I mean,

• 2:21Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  The power, the luck.

• 2:23Sarah Marshall?

  It was really cool. It was like driving into a Led Zeppelin cover.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  The amount of atmospheric things. Yeah, that's great. That's great. Okay, so for you, I don't know, when, when, what do you, I don't know, what do you, what do you think about with rainbows? Where do you usually, you see them in the wild? What do they stir in you?

• 2:43Sarah Marshall?

  Well, I guess, I just think they're great. And I think they often create a feeling in me of like, what did it feel? Cause I was raised by two parents who liked to explain things to me and generally did a pretty good job. So the rainbows, they're like, well, it's because the, you know, there's like moisture in the air and it acts as a prism and it makes this big rainbow. And then you could have that demonstrated to you by the fact that like, you know, you, I mean, we didn't have this when I was a kid, but today, you know, you have the like shimmery window film that makes little rainbows or like a, you know, piece of nicely cut glass, you know, like a sun catcher or something, I guess. So it was like something that you could observe as a kid and be like, yes, I, I understand this is happening on different scales and

• 3:27Sarah Marshall?

  having that information available as opposed to like, it always makes me think now of like, what was it like for people before we knew the science of like, you know, thunder and rainbows and stuff to sort of deal?

• 3:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:41Sarah Marshall?

  With these kind of weather events, especially when your ability to survive was so dependent on what the weather was doing generally.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Well, that's a great, that's a great place to start. So maybe we'll, we'll go back to at least some of the cultural associations, the indigenous cultural associations, the legends about

• 3:58Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  rainbows before we had, you know, the sort of more modern physicist take. But I will say like culturally, you know, I'm just realizing there's a rainbow on the You're Wrong About logo, isn't there?

• 4:08Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. No, there is. Yeah, exactly. It's the Rainbow Show.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  How did that get there?

• 4:14Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know. It was something that Mike came up with back in the day. It was like, probably like 2019 or something. Something because our previous logo, real ones will remember was just like a stock image of like a hand giving the thumbs down on like a salmon background and it was meant to emulate like

• 4:30Speaker 01

  I didn't know that.

• 4:31Sarah Marshall?

  Joaquin Phoenix in Gladiator, I think, which I haven't seen. But where he's a little gay boy who wants to execute hot men or whatever.

• 4:41Sarah Marshall?

  And we had the logo for a while and at a certain point we were like, we might be outgrowing.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:47Sarah Marshall?

  This logo.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:49Sarah Marshall?

  Which looked more like it was, I don't know. I don't know. And so the rainbow was like this. I think this idea that we both kind of intuitively recognized, I'm assuming as like feeling more expansive and optimistic and that it's crucially going up, you know? And this idea, I always interpreted it as like, you know, if you have more information, it's like a positive thing because it helps you grow as opposed to being like eh, wrong, you know?

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Right. Like eh, you're dumb. Yeah. I love that. Okay. Expansive. Put a, put a pin in that word. We'll circle back. Oh gosh. Fun fact about rainbows. They're actually fully a circle. They're not just an arch. It's just the horizon gets in the way.

• 5:30Sarah Marshall?

  You know, I've seen a couple where it's, you're like, you can kind of see it. Have you seen that?

• 5:35Speaker 01

  I've never seen it, but I guess if you are in an airplane, you could see it or like on a mountain, you'd be able to see a little bit more.

• 5:42Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. I feel like I've seen a couple of rainbows, maybe when I was at an elevation that are like, where you can kind of start to see that circle happening.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 5:51Sarah Marshall?

  I think.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  But like, I guess, I guess just culturally, I mean, they're often, I think they have become, you know, unicorns, My Little Pony, you see them on a cereal box. They're a little like frivolous vibes.

• 6:03Sarah Marshall?

  Well, and we also had the 20 teens when interestingly, we had this sort of like unicorns and rainbows coded sort of wave of, I guess, aesthetics and

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:14Sarah Marshall?

  It's hard to even define in retrospect. It's kind of like, we kind of said something. It was unicorn. If it was just like magenta.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:20Sarah Marshall?

  Which is interesting.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  But like Lisa Frank, Trapper Keeper.

• 6:24Sarah Marshall?

  Yes. Yeah. The little girl aesthetic and a big part of stickers, of course, as well.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Stickers is rainbow.

• 6:30Sarah Marshall?

  And the, uh, what, what else? Of course, the, um, the, the best section in Fantasia with, with the Pegasus's.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:39Sarah Marshall?

  And everybody, they had the like rainbow falling in the water and then it colored the different parts of the water, different colors and you could like dip them up, which was so cool. And very disappointing to not be able to do. Yeah, I think they're just, yeah, they've become like a part of cartoon aesthetic, too.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  And a little, but a little, I think a little frivolous, a little, you know, girlish, sugary, saccharine.

• 7:05Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, well, anything associated with little girls is considered to be dumb in, in American culture.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  It's of our view, yes, of young women. Okay, so, but rainbows historically were these things of huge power. So like, interestingly, in all kinds of cultures, you know, before they were connected, a rainbow was often seen as some kind of bridge.

• 7:31Sarah Marshall?

  It is brick shaped.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  It's bridge shaped and it's, you know, kind of goes from sky to earth or looks like it does. And so in Norse mythology, rainbows were seen as like a literal bridge that you could, you know, bridge from the gods, you could, you could like, the gods could walk down to earth or you could walk up to the gods. Like the Tualla of New Guinea side as a bridge to the dead, to the sort of afterlife. In Greek myths, iris, the messenger for the gods, maybe like a hand been to Hera would pass usually messages, but usually warnings down the rainbow.

• 8:06Sarah Marshall?

  Well, that, yeah, I mean, that's just practical. And I guess when you see a rainbow in the distance like you do, because of course, when I was a kid, you know, my dad would be like, oh, Sarah, there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And then he'd be like, oh, my God, it looks like it's ending in our house.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  And then you'd be like, yes.

• 8:22Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And then you're like, where'd it go? And he's like, I don't know. I guess it was in another house. And you're like, ah, these rainbows, they're hard to track.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're, they're pesky, they're, right, of course, the leprechaun, the pot of gold. Like, though the leprechaun myth, I guess, sort of was originally back in the eighth century. It was like a Celtic tradition of a water sprite.

• 8:43Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:45Sarah Marshall?

  That's a long timeline for leprechauns, but they're so small, they live longer.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they, I guess, were originally much more like the horror movie leprechaun. They were like very sinister, like their origin was in trying to drown a king. But then there in the 19th century, they're.

• 8:59Sarah Marshall?

  Well, maybe he had it coming, you know, I don't know.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm sure he did. I mean, a Celtic king in the 700s, props.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  But then he like got more sort of softened in the 19th century and his pranks became less deadly and, and more like, you stole the bacon.

• 9:17Sarah Marshall?

  See like an anti?

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:20Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 9:21Sarah Marshall?

  Like a brownie helps around the house and he does a little mischief around the house. He's like a little Irish poltergeist.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Yes, totally. And but then there was this sort of, I guess, the idea of the pot of gold really kind of blossomed, like when sort of Irish Americans were facing poverty. And it was this idea that like, maybe you could get some luck, like this like need for a pot of gold. If you see the rainbow, you might have some gold.

• 9:46Sarah Marshall?

  You're like, where's that fucking leprechaun? So it's the idea that when there's a rainbow, there's a leprechaun nearby and you gotta find him and get his pot of gold somehow.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  That's, yeah.

• 9:54Sarah Marshall?

  All right. Is a pot the best way to carry gold? Cause it feels like the pot is already a little heavy.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  That's a great question. Already pretty heavy. You know, he should have had, he was originally, he was a cobbler. So like, he could have had a shoebag.

• 10:09Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Or a quilt.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Okay, but, but sorry, that was my leprechaun digression. But the point is like,

• 10:14Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that was good.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  For a long time, you know, for cultures all over the world, a rainbow was like a very powerful thing. And it could mean, you know, storms ahead or some kind of divine intervention. It was often a bad omen.

• 10:29Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Well, that makes sense. Cause I feel like it happens when like crazy weather is on the way a lot of the time.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then another weird thing was like, again, in all, in a lot of not connected indigenous cultures, there was this, this idea that if you pointed at a rainbow, your finger could rot off.

• 10:48Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, no.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. And just this idea of like, I think the point is like, it's a powerful sacred thing. Be careful of how you interact with it.

• 10:56Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  And so I just, I just loved finding that out.

• 11:00Sarah Marshall?

  Maybe don't put it on all those stickers.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, because we've totally like, we've like drained that power out in a lot of ways and, and like stopped thinking about how they actually occur in nature, which you're right, often is around a storm, a very powerful, often deadly thing. So, okay. So that's kind of this idea that they were like this powerful bridge between worlds.

• 11:21Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Well, they really, they are really. And also between the present moment and the next. And I imagine they also occur sometimes before weather events where people die. So, you know?

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Okay, so meaning obviously is what you make out of it. That depends on your culture, your experience, but we are here. I want to move to the substance, the material of a rainbow, because regardless of what it means to you, there have been a lot of people, a lot of scientists, philosophers over the centuries, trying to really pin down what it is.

• 11:54Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, which would be very difficult back in the day, I would imagine.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, without a lot of tools and, and they are these weird things because they're not quite like a tree, but they're not, like, they're out there because you can both point at it, but like, but then they're a little, like, it's very hard to understand, like, are they, basically, one of the debates was, are they out, is it out there or is it in here? Like, is it a product of the mind?

• 12:21Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Like a mirage or like a, even like a dream? Or is it like a tree? But then it's not like a tree because you can't like, it was like this pesky, people just weren't sure.

• 12:32Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Now that you ask that, I'm like, well, what is it actually? Because it is like, light, which is a product of the sort of range in which we see. So, yeah.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  It's totally tricky. So that's, I'm gonna, I mean, most of what I'm gonna tell you today is gonna kind of build us toward answering that.

• 12:54Sarah Marshall?

  Great.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  Okay, what is it exactly?

• 12:57Sarah Marshall?

  What's a frickin' rainbow?

• 12:59Speaker 01

  What is a frickin' rainbow? Okay, so one of our first earliest heavy hitters to weigh in on the matter was Aristotle.

• 13:09Sarah Marshall?

  Of course. Hello Aristotle.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and he was big team exoestin, Greek for it's out there, like, it's out there. I think it's, I think it is matter.

• 13:19Sarah Marshall?

  The rainbow is out there.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  The rainbow's out there.

• 13:21Sarah Marshall?

  Was Aristotle Socrates a student? Does it go Plato, Socrates, Aristotle?

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Sarah, you're probably gonna know that more than me. I do know that he was publishing on rainbows in like, the mid 300 B.C. times.

• 13:35Sarah Marshall?

  Good for him. That's great. What was I doing back then? Practically nothing.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  Now I need to know. I don't know the order. I always, okay.

• 13:44Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, look it up for me. I got a cat here.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was Socrates, then Plato, then Aristotle. So Aristotle's the baby. So Socrates taught Plato, Plato taught Aristotle. And then like, isn't one of them fake or something?

• 13:58Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 13:59Sarah Marshall?

  I guess no, to quote real genius in the immortal last words of Socrates, I drank what?

• 14:08Sarah Marshall?

  Insert a little rim shot there.

• 14:11Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  So, student of student Aristotle.

• 14:17Sarah Marshall?

  Yep.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  His, basically, his idea was like-

• 14:19Sarah Marshall?

  Important Greek dude.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  Important Greek dude was like, okay, I think here's what a rainbow is. I think that the, I think sunlight is a pure white substance and that should it hit a patch of impurities in the air, like mist or dust or something, you know,

• 14:38Sarah Marshall?

  Ooh.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  an impurity of some sort.

• 14:40Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  That the light gets tinted or muddied into these colors. And so for him, basically, the idea of like, you see a rainbow after rain, because there's all this mist in the air, and so the, the pure white light gets muddied and like disguised and tinted.

• 14:57Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, that seems basically accurate to my understanding. I think I'm on the same technical level as like, a very smart person living over 2,000 years ago.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:06Sarah Marshall?

  It's my relationship to science.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  It's a very good guess and like, it's devil in the details of the way in which he's gonna be off is like, the difference between so much of our modern technology. So, he is close.

• 15:20Sarah Marshall?

  Right, because it feels like there's like, these concepts that recur in, in these kinds of, you know, periods of science where you're like, well, you're right about the outcome, but the logic by which you think that happened is a product of your times. Is that accurate for this?

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, absolutely. I mean, it's a stunning guess for the times. It's a totally great guess.

• 15:41Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, like, I guess we read Little House on the Prairie and there's a part where everyone gets malaria.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:47Sarah Marshall?

  And then someone is like, everyone who got malaria ate a watermelon. That's how this malaria spread. And it's like, well-

• 15:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:55Sarah Marshall?

  No, but I mean, how, how are you gonna know?

• 15:58Speaker 01

  But how are you gonna know? I know, yeah. The wa, the, just take out the melon part and-

• 16:02Sarah Marshall?

  And maybe when you go to go eat watermelon, you get bitten by a mosquito, you know?

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Um, so that was his idea. It was like tinted, muddy, changed, dirtied, something like that.

• 16:14Sarah Marshall?

  It's been adulterated.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Adulterated, adulterated light. And so then, you know, throughout that, kind of that idea is going to stick for centuries, for a long time. It's pretty much the one hand. But there was a person who doesn't get as much credit in the rainbow history as I think he should. Who is a medieval Persian scholar, Nasir al-Dun al-Tusi. And this guy was like Da Vinci pre Da Vinci, like he was an intellectual giant. And you could do a whole year wrong about him. I don't know a ton, but I just did kind of like a deep dive.

• 16:50Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, I would love to do a Matthew wrong about. I would be so out of my depth.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  But this guy is like, okay, let me send you, can I send you just what he looks like? Cause he was.

• 17:00Sarah Marshall?

  He cute too.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  On the 700th anniversary of his death, he got an Iranian stamp. And he just, yeah, well, let's just picture him because he's a, okay, let me, uh, he's so smart and so ahead of his time. And it's just, I just want to like, consider him for a brief moment. Okay. So let's give him a face. And I'm kind of thinking about this guy for a totally different reason right now, which will be worth a digression, I hope.

• 17:25Sarah Marshall?

  Oh yeah, I'm always willing to try. Well, yeah, he looks like Michael Gambon. Or like, um, he, he looks like, uh, uh, wait, who's the main Roy, Logan Roy, Roy Roy.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Oh, he, yeah, he's got Logan Roy. Totally. Yeah. But maybe a little younger.

• 17:44Sarah Marshall?

  He looks exactly like Logan.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Oh, fabulous beard. Um, he's.

• 17:52Sarah Marshall?

  Which yes, is very hot to me. Look, everyone knows that Brian Cox would be sexy to go on a rubber boot hunting weekend. We all know this.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Yes. Okay. So.

• 18:05Sarah Marshall?

  Have you seen him as Hannibal Lecter? It's like the most overtly gay portrayal of Hannibal Lecter, which I think is saying something. In my opinion, I will take other analyses.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Um, okay. So, so, okay. So, Aldu, Nasir Aldu, Al Tusi. So he was born in 1201 and like, he is gonna basically become the forefather of trigonometry. And then he's also gonna be huge in astronomy. He publishes all these star charts, these astronomical atlases that will be used for hundreds of years. And he's like, also does all this stuff on ethics. So he's just.

• 18:43Sarah Marshall?

  He's just inventing math right now.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's just inventing math and he's doing it by watching the world. Like, he figured out a lot of this stuff by watching stars and observing them.

• 18:53Sarah Marshall?

  That's really cool. And you know what? I always kind of liked trigonometry. Did you like trigonometry at all? I think that's a fun one.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  I did. I was gonna say, I did. What did you like about it?

• 19:04Sarah Marshall?

  Well, I guess that it's like, an actual thing that I care about, which is triangles and how tall things are.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it was like, it felt like a secret code. It was like puzzle vibes. It was just like, you do this, you do this, and then it works. There's something satisfying. Whereas calc suddenly got so abstract that I, that it kind of started to short circuit me.

• 19:25Sarah Marshall?

  And I never got that far. Yeah. After, that was when my school let you quit math and I was like, thank you. Good night.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Cool. Great. Love a hypotenuse.

• 19:33Sarah Marshall?

  It's been fun.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:35Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Um, okay. So he's just this like incredible thinker and he's doing it at a time of incredible upheaval. So he's like, for about a decade, he's working in this place that sounds incredible. It's like an intellectual castle. It's like a library across the castle called Alimut. And there's all these visiting scholars and he's teaching. And then comes the Mongolian invasion.

• 19:56Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  And they smash it. They smash the castle. And it's, at this point, Genghis Khan's grandson, Hulegu?

• 20:05Speaker 01

  And anyway, and but, okay, it's making me think about institutions getting absolutely smashed by like,

• 20:12Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, like right now.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, okay. So like, science getting like totally smashed. So, but so then instead of just like crying and bemoaning the state of the world, this guy, our guy, Aldine, Aldine Altusi, our astronomer, what does he do? He joins Khan's army. He like joins the army, but then he ends up getting really close to him and convincing him to build an even fancier scientific observatory castle thing.

• 20:42Sarah Marshall?

  God, how did he work that, though? How do you like side up and be like, hey? I mean, I realize it would take a while. Is it like a Dread Pirate Roberts type situation?

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he, yes. And he like, I guess stroked his ego enough to be like, this will be such a good, like you built it. Anyway, so then he built an even better. But so just instead of being like, you hate science. He was like, I think you really love science. And then he built this incredible observatory and that's where he observed all these planetary movements, which helped him write this thing called the Tuji Couple, which like talks about how a circle moves within a circle, looks like a line. I'm not quite sure. But that helped him pave the way for the realization that the earth is not the center of the world. And those observations, many scholars believe, made their way to a guy named Copernicus. Yeah. Okay. So this is a man who is like not afraid to look at the scary, like just like hard to understand stars, things like that.

• 21:34Sarah Marshall?

  He's like, listen, Gaius Khan, you can't stop science.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  You can't.

• 21:38Sarah Marshall?

  None of us can.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay. So, but what are we talking about today, Rainbow? So he also, you know, he's this like, I'll think about anything. Stars, cool. Trigonometry, great math, cool. Colors. Let me take on colors. And he basically starts like flirting with this idea that maybe there are actually infinite colors.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  And because like infinity is this notoriously hard concept.

• 22:03Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  I don't know. I feel terror when I think about it, but so do a lot of people.

• 22:08Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. You know what I've always thought about when I think about infinity is,

• 22:12Speaker 01

  No, tell me.

• 22:12Sarah Marshall?

  There's this quote from, I think, an Amy Tan book about one of her characters as like a sixth grader being terrified by the thought of infinity and also being equally terrified by. The antithesis of it, which she envisions is like

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 22:27Sarah Marshall?

  The universe coming to an end, like, and the image is something like, like a frayed tennis ball bouncing off a wall.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 22:34Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, right? There's something really dreadful about that in a great way.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  There is.

• 22:40Sarah Marshall?

  Here's what I think about a lot, and I might have mentioned it before on this show, but I like really love 2001: A Space Odyssey.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 22:47Sarah Marshall?

  I really love it when movies are boring, um, which to be clear, I think it is trying to be on purpose. God bless it. Um, I really love the Dawn of Man stuff, and I love the middle part, which I think, oh, I, I for one did not really remember until I watched it more recently, which is like this man traveling boringly, um, on a commercial flight to the, you know, airport just outside the moon, the moon base, and then traveling to the moon. And the thing that he's dealing with is a secret project because they found this monolith on the moon, which is the same one that we saw

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 23:23Sarah Marshall?

  Um, in the first sequence, which shows up and then, you know, early man or, you know, Lucy figures out how to use weapons. And it's like this big, big moment.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 23:35Sarah Marshall?

  As you would imagine. And it's also like interesting on the subject of innovation, because I feel like as you're talking about this, like, there's this very sort of like American history book way. And also I'm sure, you know, very British way of teaching history that's like, and then one man out of all the men, one man who happened to be well bred and well educated and well connected thought of something and he thought by jinx. And, and that's how science works as opposed to like a lot of people in different places noticing things. You know, often somewhat simultaneously, or, you know, innovation sort of layering on innovation in a way where like nothing is entirely one person's idea, I think, most if not all of the time.

• 24:20Sarah Marshall?

  But you know, but this is how it works with, with the apes.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:24Sarah Marshall?

  In the movie. Yeah. What I like about the boringness of it all is, well, A, I just think that it's kind of nice to be. Forced to sit and look at things for that long. It's not that long, but it feels longer. And then also that the middle part is then we're going to the moon to see this monolith where these guys in space suits like stand in front of it and take cheesy pictures of this monolith they found. And then this like high pitched ringing starts and the premise of that apparently is that which I don't think you could necessarily figure out just by watching it.

• 25:01Sarah Marshall?

  Is like, what if the monolith is like a baby gate that's been placed there on the moon to tell the aliens or some something, somebody, God? Question mark, aliens, God, same diff as far as the movie is concerned, that humans have like figured it out enough to get to the moon and that we're ready for the next thing. And I guess, I don't know, I guess I love that idea for some reason, because it implies this sort of like, I don't know. This idea of this almost if, if I would keep calling it a baby gate, it's because I'm envisioning it as like alien mommy out there being like, look at you and like watching humanity grow.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Like you think you've traveled so far.

• 25:47Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And we've just gotten to the bottom of the stairs and we're still at the bottom of the stairs. And there's also something so nice about that because Earth is really special and it's where all our stuff is. And there aren't really other planets like it that we're ever going to be able to get to before we destroy this one, you know? And so I think, I don't know, I think it's just like, we have, there's a sort of maybe like spasming capitalist idea right now of like, well, we'll just get a new hotter, younger planet. You know, it'll all be fine. And it's like, no, we're little babies. We barely understand the universe we're in like we're so, we, we, we're at the baby gate and we need to really, you know?

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:29Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know. I just think it's so nice that everything is so much bigger than us. I'm, I'm at a moment in my life where humanity is behaving so badly that I'm like, it's so great that we're, that we're so, um, that we know so little about the shape of things.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. So in that way, does, does the concept of infinity, this, this greatness of space and time and even knowledge, like?

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Is it comforting or what's your?

• 26:57Sarah Marshall?

  You know what I think is that I think infinity is scary because it so eludes our perceptions. And maybe at this moment, I'm like, it's so great that there is so much truth and reality out there that eludes our ability to perceive it because our perceptions as humans, we're really having so much trouble.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, like our, our, our intentions keep like returning us to the same messes.

• 27:18Sarah Marshall?

  If the universe were within our perceptions, it would be really tiny.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah. Yes.

• 27:26Sarah Marshall?

  Or something. I don't know. It's just nice. It's, and it's, it's humbling and I don't know. Anyway, that's my digression. Everyone, give 2001 A Space Odyssey a try. It's also as my mom and my ninth grade English teacher would have, you know, a movie that can envision no role for women in the future, aside from being stewardesses. And that's also very true. Maybe some, maybe that eighth was a girl. Probably not, but I can think so.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Can I do one more digression in the digression, in the digression?

• 27:55Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Yes. Always.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Okay. So you talked about the tennis ball thing and the-

• 28:00Sarah Marshall?

  This is what's called the golden mean.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay. So the, the fear of the opposite infinity of infinity, which is like the teensiest speck of everything, maybe you could argue is that?

• 28:12Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  And that, that reminds me, I just wanted to read a poem by Marie Howe.

• 28:16Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Because she writes about this, that, that it's often called like the speck is often called the singularity, which is just like before we were this infinite thing, we were like everything pressed together. And I just think it's a really beautiful reframe of that terrifying opposite of, okay. So I'm just going to read it.

• 28:36Sarah Marshall?

  Yes.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  It's not very long. Okay. So Marie Howe, it's called, how, it's called this, it's called the singularity. "Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were? So compact, nobody needed a bed or food or money. Nobody hiding in the school bathroom or home alone, pulling open the drawer where the pills are kept. For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. Remember? There was no nature, no them, no tests to determine if the elephant grieves her calf or if the coral reef feels pain." Trashed oceans don't speak English or Farsi or French. Would that we could wake up to what we were when we were ocean and before that,

• 29:21Speaker 01

  when earth was sky, an animal was energy and rock was liquid and stars were space and space was not at all nothing before we came to believe humans were so important, before this awful loneliness. Can molecules remember it, what once was? Before anything happened, can our molecules remember? No I, no we, no one, no was, no verb, no noun, yet. Only a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny dot brimming with is, is, is, is, is, all, everything, home.

• 30:03Sarah Marshall?

  I love that so much.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  Isn't that beautiful?

• 30:07Sarah Marshall?

  Yes, that's so beautiful.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:09Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And I, I don't know. I, I feel that. And like, I don't, what if, cause like, there's all these things that kind of, as you're telling the rainbow history, that started off as folklore and then off, you know, and often too, science is like, no, that's insane.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:25Sarah Marshall?

  Right? But often as well, there's, but often as well, there's, there's, you know, some kind of finding where it's like, yeah, this thing that people always said, and often that like indigenous people always said, and that then, you know, colonizers were like, no, that's silly. We're going to act in ways that will kill us and all of you too. And that of course, science then later supported as having, you know, as being proven by things that we didn't have the ability to conceive or analyze.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  Sarah, don't steal my ending.

• 30:57Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, I won't, I won't, I won't. I shan't. I'm backing away. I recently touched an electrified fence without really thinking about it. It was very low voltage. It was around a bunny paddock, but I was looking right at a sign that said, do not touch electric. And I was like, I'm just gonna rest my hand. I would not have lasted long in, in the past.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  What did you feel?

• 31:21Sarah Marshall?

  Very little.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 31:22Sarah Marshall?

  You know?

• 31:23Speaker 01

  But enough, enough to jump back?

• 31:25Sarah Marshall?

  I was like, oh shit. That's the feeling of I'm not supposed to be touching that.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 31:29Sarah Marshall?

  But anyway, but my thought, hearing, my thought hearing that poem, and this is like, Me bearing my soul to you, but that's what, you know, this show is about is that like, what if in some far off scientific finding, there's evidence that, you know, love is not just a pro-social impulse that we need to feel in order to raise young and et cetera, and protect ourselves from predators and each other. And also, I think us talking about coyotes, I've thought about that a lot and really come to the conclusion that like, as much as we like to visualize ourselves as being alone, we really thrive in packs. And I think a lot of our trouble

• 32:10Sarah Marshall?

  has come from not knowing what group we belong to, or having any group that we belong to.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, and craving a group, missing it.

• 32:21Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, and then creating groups out of, you know, hate or whatever, or whatever we can find. And apparently, you know, mutual fear is like, we'll put you together as a group quickly, but then, you know, but then the goals that you have will be destructive. And the sort of, anyway, that's a whole conversation.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Wait, but what were you saying? Love? What if love wasn't about lions?

• 32:45Sarah Marshall?

  But what if love, what if love is like, not just all those sort of practical things that of course makes sense, but also this sort of like collective atomic memory of this time when we were all one thing, you know?

• 32:58Speaker 01

  That's so beautiful.

• 32:59Sarah Marshall?

  Why the heck not?

• 33:00Speaker 01

  It might be. It might be. And that feeling of reunification, like those little molecules glimmering and welcoming each other back. I like it. I like that.

• 33:13Sarah Marshall?

  I'm thinking a lot lately about just sort of like what it means to approach life as a universalist and to see all religions is like, yeah, you know, because like, I think that like, the same way that we can't conceive of the universe, it's, you know,

• 33:30Sarah Marshall?

  Any kind of faith that isn't based on controlling other people, I think is, you can see them all grasping at the same thing.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:40Sarah Marshall?

  That might be getting too much into my personal spiritual journey, but, but we're talking about rainbows. I mean, it's inevitable probably that we get here.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  No, but I think that like, I mean, I personally have had in the last five years or so, a massive, like absolute change in what I think the job of a reporter is, which was going into it. I mean, I now admittedly going into it, I didn't have any journalistic training and I came into it through a weird side door of loving story. So for a long time I was like, the goal is to find a story, find an amazing story, find a story, find a story, make it. And then like, as I came to come up around incredible reporters and people who really kind of did go to J school and do think about it in other ways, I came to see how like story is often the, the enemy because you know, stories about like cutting off details and disfiguring

• 34:35Speaker 01

  reality to make a nice narrative and that actually like, I do think increasingly my job, and I'm not good at it, but what I'm at least trying to do now is to like capture more and more complexity and then just like present that in a digestible way. So obviously there's, but I do think, and that, that's why I like to go back to, you know, just like what have religion said? What have traditions said? Like, science doesn't have a monopoly on truths. To really do good science, let's look at all kinds of different things. And so I, I do think, you know, people always talk about braiding indigenous wisdom, and I think that's just such a profoundly amazing

• 35:15Speaker 01

  way to like get a deeper and more accurate understanding of, of nature and science. So, so I, I think your, your, your, you, you church dreams, your universalist vibe is, is all, it's like, it's not just good for spirituality, but I think it's very good for science, like very, very good.

• 35:33Sarah Marshall?

  Ooh.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:34Sarah Marshall?

  Nice.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Okay. But so, okay. But so you're, but the concept of infinity is where we kind of left off. So this idea of like, A lot of people, especially before we even had it well termed linguistically and mathematically, like it was this idea that was, that was frightening. Like, you know, Aristotle, I guess, apparently like absolutely rejected the idea of an actual infinity. He believed you could count forever. Like, he was like, okay, maybe there are infinite numbers, but I think the universe is finite. So he was like a strict, as I understand, a strict finitist. And there's just this idea of like, thinking about infinity has really broken a lot of people.

• 36:15Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  And there's, there's a very famous case of this scientist, George Cantor. He, he like, was obsessed with the, a certain kind of infinities, this idea of like, infinite infinities. And he basically glimpsed that truth, he published on it, but he, it really broke him. Like, he went mad.

• 36:33Sarah Marshall?

  This is like when he, before acid had been synthesized and he had to just do it yourself over years of study.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, you just, you just had to think about. And there's, it's sort of apocryphal that he took his life. It looks like he, he probably died of a heart attack, but in, in asylum.

• 36:48Sarah Marshall?

  Well, and also there's so many other things to, you know, drive a person beyond the point of no return if there's, you know, no real mental health availability. But infinity doesn't help.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  It doesn't. And the George Cantor thing, like a, I actually couldn't find these notes, but a while back I looked into him and I did, I was like, I had watched this documentary called, it was a BBC documentary called Dangerous Knowledge. And it was about like, knowledge that drove scientists mad.

• 37:14Sarah Marshall?

  So many people watched that thinking it would be about sex somehow. And then it was a math documentary.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, not at all. And that's, that one, that documentary kind of makes it a little bit too much look like it was a suicide. And I think that was a misstep. But then I looked into the stuff and it's like, he was try, he was writing these letters, like, trying to, he's like, I want to stop thinking about this. It is, but I can't. And so I think there was like, The heart attack may have done him in, but he really ended up in an asylum and thinking about infinity was really a torment, but like an addiction. So anyway, my point is thinking about infinity is hard.

• 37:48Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  Aristotle didn't want to do it. George Cantor went mad, but our guy back, Nassir al-Din al-Tusi was just like, bring it on. I want to think about it.

• 37:56Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm. Well, he's probably riding around on a Mongolian pony all day. You know, you start thinking about infinity as you get bounced around on there.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  You do. And you look at the stars. So he was, I think, really ahead of his time. Not only did he like predict the Copernican shift or pave the way for that idea, he also was like, I think that there are in colors, there are like infinite pathways of mixing them. And he just was like more into this idea of sort of there might be infinite colors in the rainbow. And but the idea, it didn't really take off. It didn't get traction. Aristotle with this idea of like, this more kind of rigid idea about light and rainbows took hold for a long way. But he was, I don't know, I just want to give him his due because he was a kind of ahead of his time. So, okay, so then we jump ahead. We're gonna get there. We're coming to the end of our scientific story. Don't worry.

• 38:47Sarah Marshall?

  I'm, look, I'll go on whatever. I'll go on like an Indiana Jones itinerary of scientific story with you. Don't worry about it.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  Great. All right. Well, pull out your rope because we are swinging to 1665, England. A plague sweeps the land.

• 39:03Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  And everyone kind of had to go into lockdown. I don't know if you remember anything about that?

• 39:09Sarah Marshall?

  You know, we had, we had cable and stuff. And I imagine that they didn't.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  They did not.

• 39:14Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  And so a young, a young man named Isaac Newton, not yet a sir.

• 39:18Sarah Marshall?

  I knew Newton was gonna turn up. Hello.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  Here he comes.

• 39:23Sarah Marshall?

  Here he comes. Walking down the street, just the busiest virgin that you ever did need. Hey, it's Isaac Newton. An apple didn't fall on his head. Here comes Isaac Newton. Don't try and jump in his bed.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  Woo!

• 39:41Sarah Marshall?

  I'm sorry to make so many jokes about him being a virgin. I just don't know that much about his life.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm feeling like he probably was at this time. He's a young man. He, he's crashing for lockdown. He goes home as, as many a millennial did to live with his parents.

• 39:53Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  In the English countryside.

• 39:56Sarah Marshall?

  It's hard to picture him without a wig.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  It is hard. I wonder if.

• 39:59Sarah Marshall?

  Cause we've only seen him in a big curly wig, right?

• 40:02Speaker 01

  Isaac Newton. What did he look like?

• 40:05Sarah Marshall?

  He was very attractive from what I remember of depictions of him.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  Quite the bro.

• 40:10Sarah Marshall?

  I wonder if the milkmaids were all over Isaac Newton and he was like, let go of me.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  He, he kinda looks like, um, you know, more like, kinda like Kate Winslet as a young, as a young, as a young, um, anyway, but so he, yeah, okay. So he's just like in the English countryside. No, yeah, no cable, no Tiger King for him to watch. So he just is like, I don't know. I picture him like tinkling the harpsichord and playing backgammon. And one day he is just fumbling around with a prism.

• 40:41Sarah Marshall?

  I would imagine so.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Now, did you BYOP?

• 40:44Sarah Marshall?

  I did get a prism and wait, I think, uh, not to name names, cause I didn't see which cat might've done this, but I think Werner probably knocked it off the table. So wait, let me look real quick.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  Classic.

• 41:01Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, here it is. This is like a classic triangular prism.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  Great. Yeah. Can, now can you, I don't know if you have a window in your room?

• 41:09Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm right in front of, I'm right in front of a window. It is a very cloudy day though.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  Okay. So we might not get it, but see if you can just, just angle it for a second and see if you get any action.

• 41:18Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  Or just describe what you see.

• 41:21Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Well, I got, I'm not able to like bounce light through it right now, but if I just sort of like, look into it, I can just sort of see little reflections of, of details of my surroundings with little rainbows all over them.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Oh, great. Really?

• 41:36Sarah Marshall?

  You know what I mean?

• 41:37Speaker 01

  Good. Okay.

• 41:38Sarah Marshall?

  Well, not like rainbows all over them, but like the sort of, this cast of like rainbow color. Like I'm, I'm looking into it and I can see the tree that's outside my window through it. And there's like rainbow colors in the sky that I can see through the, the leaves.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  That's great. Okay.

• 41:56Sarah Marshall?

  You know, faintly. Yeah, it's very cool. And I don't know if that's sort of, you know, historically accurate, but.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  That's okay. Well, what, when you say rainbow colors, what, what colors, if you had to? If you had to like name them, what do you see?

• 42:08Sarah Marshall?

  Well, I've had a little practice in there. And I would say descending from top to bottom, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Kind of subtly.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Some Roy G. Bivin around. Okay, got it. Okay.

• 42:22Sarah Marshall?

  Didn't we add or remove one or something, though?

• 42:24Speaker 01

  You have been, you are hallucinating, you are, you have been sold alive, young, young Sarah Marshall. Okay, but we'll get to that. So, okay, but, but, but, okay, so, yeah. Myth busted, myth about to be busted. But, okay, so Isaac Newton.

• 42:39Sarah Marshall?

  It's a very violent thing.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was, he was doing that. And, um, and he, he saw those colors. And then he eventually twisted it in such a way, and it was a bright enough, direct sunlight day, that he also got those famous, like, just little rainbows on the wall, you know, like a little rainbow.

• 42:53Sarah Marshall?

  Yep. Yeah, I haven't been able to do that with this one, but it was probably, you know, sunnier at the time.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  So, okay, so many, by the time Isaac Newton has done this, many people have seen, you know, rainbows come out of prisms or chunks of glass. And the theory, again, of why, went back to Aristotle, this idea that the prism, like the mist, was tinting, changing, muddying, what was your word?

• 43:15Sarah Marshall?

  Ooh, adulterating, yeah.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, adulterating, dirtying pure sunlight. And so that the, the rainbows on the wall, they were evidence of change. They were evidence of impurities of the light being changed or disguised. And he thought, okay, well, if that's true, then if I take a second prism, and I pass the rainbow parts through a second prism, you'll get even more tinted light. So maybe you'll get different colors or darker color. I'm not sure what exactly, but it will change it even more.

• 43:46Sarah Marshall?

  Why does he have prisms? Do we know? What are they for? Is like a household item? Or is it a school thing?

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a great question. I don't know. I have no idea.

• 43:56Sarah Marshall?

  That's interesting. All right. Well, we'll return to that in a future show.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  The listener can write in and tell us. So.

• 44:03Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  So he does, so he takes a second one. And again, if Aristotle's right, it should get tinted even more. But then what happens? Any guesses?

• 44:12Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, oh my God, I don't know. Does it make, uh, does it cancel it out?

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, it goes back inside. The rainbow disappears.

• 44:21Sarah Marshall?

  Interesting.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  And so what he.

• 44:23Sarah Marshall?

  The first man in 1900 years to put two prisms next to each other.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:30Sarah Marshall?

  Although I guess that glass making is a relatively recent thing. Anyway.

• 44:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. So basically what he realized is, look, when I see the colors of the rainbow, this is not evidence of impurities. This is evidence of the light's ingredients. These are the colors that make up a beam array of what appears to be pure white sunlight, but for some reason isn't. Like when those all, when those all smoothie together, they make white light.

• 44:58Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. God, that's cool.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was a really great.

• 45:02Sarah Marshall?

  And that's like, and that is a wild leap to make too.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  Totally, totally. And like the way that I've heard, he has not yet figured out that it's waves, but just to jump ahead for a second, like the way that I've heard it described is that like what a prism does, or what a little raindrop does up in the sky, which is how you get rainbows, is that like the lights coming down, it has all these different colors inside. Red is kind of these slower waves, violet are these faster waves, medium greens and stuff, yellows. And they're all kind of like a shopping cart is like the ray of light is like a shopping cart full of colors. And when that shopping cart

• 45:37Sarah Marshall?

  That's so cute.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  hits a corner, like hits a prism, hits a curb, all the ingredients, just kind of the oranges and the red apple, you know, whatever, they all toss out. They just like,

• 45:47Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  they break out because the different speeds like spill out at slightly different angles.

• 45:53Sarah Marshall?

  That's wild that we can do that.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:55Sarah Marshall?

  You know, who would think that you could use a piece of glass and disrupt a light wave to that extent?

• 46:01Speaker 01

  And then put it back to, put it back in.

• 46:03Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so he, so he, this like will eventually, I mean, this will pave the way for massive breakthroughs in technology, development of lasers, fiber optics, even telescopes will get, all kinds of things will get better. But there's one last thing he needed to do, which was count the colors in the rainbow, which you already, you did for us. And so what he eventually, he kind of at first was like, maybe five. No, no, I think it's seven. And that's how we get Roy G. Biv, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Okay. But the thing, the little like, my favorite part of this is like, he didn't get there because he was like closely squinting through a magnifying glass or using rulers. He just was like, seven's a really pretty number.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  Because

• 46:51Sarah Marshall?

  That is so him.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  It's so classic Newton vibes. So he, because there's how many notes in a traditional Western classical scale?

• 47:00Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  Do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti.

• 47:03Sarah Marshall?

  Do, is that seven?

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Seven. And at the time, there were seven known planets. And there were seven known metals, gold, silver, mercury, copper, iron, tin, lead. Now there's over 90, but in Newton's day, there were how many days in a week?

• 47:19Sarah Marshall?

  Seven. Oh, my God.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  How many continents were like called it that time? Seven. So it just felt

• 47:26Sarah Marshall?

  Seven. How many seas at the time? Seven.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so it was like this sci, it was like this nature, this mystically pure number. Like he, he, it just, there was just this idea that there were like these accordances, like things move in sevens. And so he was basically like musical scale seven, colors seven. That feels good. That feels

• 47:45Sarah Marshall?

  It's gotta be seven.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  It's gotta be seven. And that thing like was just pressed into textbook. I mean, like I was taught roji bib for sure.

• 47:55Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah. I don't know if I was taught it in school, but it was like my parents taught it to me. It's like basic human knowledge.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that it just is, those are the seven colors that make up the rainbow, that make up light. Case closed. Case not closed.

• 48:09Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God. We gotta reopen the case.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  So we did a, we did a terrestrial about, for kids about these concepts. They weren't, didn't go into all that stuff. But we did, Alan, my amazing collaborator and friend and musical genius, made this little thing about roji bib. Okay. So I'm just going to play you this. Okay. So this is the moment of discovery. And this is like the industrial lie getting printed into our minds.

• 49:28Speaker 02

  Are these all the colors of the rainbow?

• 49:31Speaker 03

  All the colors of the rainbow.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  The point is, it got like, it was this handy way to remember colors in the rainbow that was maybe so handy, it just like got.

• 49:55Sarah Marshall?

  Sometimes things are too handy.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes.

• 49:58Sarah Marshall?

  Because the truth is sometimes less catchy. Also, I was never totally clear on the difference between indigo and violet, if I'm being honest here.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Same. I think that's a big, I think indigo is like a bit of a Emperor's New Clothes, like, is that a thing? But, but, so, so this goes on and it's kind of this idea that like, light has been, we have cracked the rainbow, we've literally cracked it open, seen its insides, it's seven colors, cool. But then there were like, a lot of painters and poets and like, stoners all over the world who weren't fully convinced that this was accurate. So Keats very famously wrote this poem, like, being like, how dare, like, like, he basically accused Newton of having killed the magic of the rainbow.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  There's a line about how he like dared to quote, "unweave a rainbow" by like, reducing it into these cold colors. And then Goethe like, had all these kind of poetic theories about like, well, when I feel purply, the purple is different than the purple I see. Like, no colors come from feelings. And then Turner, the, the storm painting guy, like, painted all these rainbows with all these tons of colors as kind of like a F you. And just people being like, how do we know my blue is your blue? And are we so sure? Like, colors are concrete. And like, really? How is my blue your blue?

• 51:18Sarah Marshall?

  These are worthwhile questions, for sure.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:21Sarah Marshall?

  And the only way we can determine is by describing our blues to each other, probably.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. And so then along comes. Uh, another bro, a big bro of 10 kids in a British family. He's a med student named Thomas Young, another Brit. And he's like, you know, doing your classic, he's dissecting the eyeball of an ox, as you do. And he's wondering about like how, how eyes focus and process light.

• 51:47Sarah Marshall?

  For science, or if you're Salvador Dali, either one.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 51:51Sarah Marshall?

  Or no, Ben, Benwell, who did the eyeball slicing, maybe. I don't know. Ooh, one of those dudes.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  One of those. Yeah, but wondering like, what's the connection between? Of course, a painter would wonder that. What is the connection between the colors out there and what I perceive? And this eye seems to be the medium, you know, through which, the interface through which all those things happen.

• 52:12Sarah Marshall?

  It was both of them. They both did the eyeball movie. Good talk.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  And, and so Thomas Young eventually devises an absolutely ingenious experiment that we are not going to go into because that is too complicated. It's the double slit experiment. Which is a whole quantum mechanics, realizing why that light is both a particle and a wave. And it's like a total universe changer, but along.

• 52:36Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, come back and explain that one to me on another show because I would like to hear more about how light works and stuff.

• 52:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would too, but you might need somebody else because I have done like a whole piece about quantum mechanics and I still don't understand it. But light is not just part, that what you need to know is light behaves like a particle and like a wave, like an ocean wave, like a sound wave, like a whoa, whoa. And that's the big insight there is that rainbows, that the, that the colors within a beam of light coming from the sun are oscillating at all these different waves. And the way that our eyes process those waves and send information to the brain is that we like perceive those, those wavelengths as different colors.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  And so the low, long, slow waves, we tend to see as red, the middle kind of medium waves we see as greens and the really fast ones we see as violet. But also on, on every rainbow on either side, our way, our, is light we cannot see, ultraviolet, infrared, microwaves. Like that, that's just like, um, and where we divide it into colors, like the waves are just like the ocean. They're just like some big ones, some medium ones. Where we divide it depends on the person, where we draw the line.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  And so the poets, the painters, Nasir al Doun al Tusi, our guy, this idea that like the lines are subjective, like there aren't seven concrete colors. There are really, there are really infinite colors in the rainbow.

• 54:09Sarah Marshall?

  God damn.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  And so sort of like what colors we see, where we divide the lines, which ones appear strong, which ones we happen to see maybe because of associations or moods. Like the little conclusion there is that, you know, the, all those long ago traditions were right, that like the rainbow sign, it is a bridge. It's out there and it's in here. It's like a bridge between worlds. It's a bridge between an inside and outside kind of being like a thing, which I think is why they, they are so like slippery and wonderful.

• 54:43Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  So that's the, that's the story of the rainbow.

• 54:48Sarah Marshall?

  Lila, that was so good.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  And once we figured it out, that the rainbow, that the colors of light are, that are waves and are these kind of infinite colors, then we could like discover new elements based on what frequency of waves they were emitting or refracting. So like helium, thallium, gallium, cesium. And we could discover new things in space because we figured out stars emitted radio waves that we couldn't see. We could invent like the radio techno, passing information over radio waves, technologies like laser. So like, once we figured out that, it's just been, we, you know, it's like so much that we can do.

• 55:24Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  And I think in a real way, like, you know, this rainbow again, that we see is so frivolous, was like the site of serious scientific contention that finally like rumbled and built to insight that, that truly like really, really freaking transformed our world just by people wondering what that pretty thing was in the sky.

• 55:44Sarah Marshall?

  And this phenomenon that we kept being confronted with and trying to understand and that drove us toward all these other realizations, maybe.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:54Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that's so cool.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's my rainbow. Okay. I have to, to end, end, I have a choose your own adventure of three options.

• 56:01Sarah Marshall?

  Okay. Oh my gosh. Okay.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  Okay. Option one is like, So this sat, I don't know if you are experiencing this, but in, I got into radio because I hate like visual judgments. I think it's a sacred thing to just be voices, but increasingly they're like, make videos, post Instagram reels and do things.

• 56:19Sarah Marshall?

  I will never find it necessary for people to see my face while I'm saying something, for them to listen to me say something, you know?

• 56:26Speaker 01

  Okay, but I've been like fighting, fighting, fighting that. But then I finally on this piece, I gave in to like a music video about the concept of infinite color. So I could show you that. It's a minute long.

• 56:36Sarah Marshall?

  Well, that's a really good reason to give in to something. Yeah.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  I was like, you can't beat them. Let's really join them. So there's that. That's door number one. Door number two is we could do a little pride coda, just about the rainbow becoming the, on the flag, the rainbow being the pride, the gay pride flag, the queer pride flag. Or we could do a butterfly coda of just that butterflies are shady as hell.

• 57:02Sarah Marshall?

  All right. Well, I want to have a link to the infinite color video. And I think we have to end on the pride coda. And then if we have time, I want just one little tiny butterfly fact on top, please, perhaps.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  Okay, perfect. Okay. Okay. So the pride coda is like, how did this, how did this rainbow become a part of the queer pride flag, become the queer pride flag? So there have been, you know, different emblems of queer pride throughout the era. There was, you know, a time where the pink triangle, which was on the Nazi uniform, was reclaimed as like a gay pride thing. There was, I guess, Oscar Wilde had a whole green carnation situation. There were other things. But in 1978, we're in San Francisco, and Harvey Milk asks his friend Gilbert Baker, a gay activist, and also someone who's very big into tailoring,

• 58:00Speaker 01

  seamstressing. What is a male seamstress?

• 58:03Sarah Marshall?

  Seamster, I guess.

• 58:05Speaker 01

  A seamster?

• 58:07Sarah Marshall?

  And a female teamster is a teamstress.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  So there's gonna be a big gay pride parade. It was called like the Gay Freedom Day Parade. And he was like, Gilbert, you love fabrics. You're always making, you're always sewing things for our drag queen friends. Like, can you just make some kind of fun flag for, a banner, basically, for the parade? And I guess he'd made banners for Harvey Milk before that are just like, you know, whatever, gay rights now, justice, like that kind of thing. And he was like, but can you make us like a thing? And so Gilbert Baker worked with this woman who would call herself the Tie-Dye Queen, Lynn Sogerblum, who was very good at like colors and fabrics. And they came up with the idea of, well, let's use a rainbow.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  And the reason why was, yes, it's beautiful and also it represents the diversity of sexuality and genders in the queer experience, but mainly the fact that it was found in nature. Cause queerness is natural and this idea that it's like this thing that encompasses the beauty, the celebration, and the diversity and naturalness of queerness. And so each color had its, originally it had eight colors. It now has six, but it also used to have like this, this great pinky, magenta, pink, and a very cool turquoise, which they then took out because of like, it was hard to reproduce those with dyes or something.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  But each color had its own sim, like its own symbolic thing for like something it expressed about the queer experience. So pink was like for hot sex, or just sex, but you know, hot sex. Indigo was about serenity and they each, I can do all the colors if you want or not, but they, they each had a different thing.

• 59:56Sarah Marshall?

  That's beautiful.

• 59:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so with Lynn Sogerblum, they like, he felt very strongly, he wanted all the dyes to be natural, organic dyes. And so they did this like extensive dyeing practice and they had something like 30 people working on those first few flags. And they stitched them all together and Gilbert Baker was like, oh, I don't want to make this in my house. I want to go make it in this queer community center, because it's like the day. It will be born. And he didn't know it was gonna catch on. There were other flags, other things, but it caught on and I think really took on big power because there's only a few months later that Harvey Milk was assassinated. And like, he had been the one to request, you know, let's have these flags, let's have a parade. So then it just, it really took off. And then,

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  you know, and I think some people are like, eh, rainbows tacky, I don't care. But and then it just continues to evolve. And in 2017, in Philly, they added for a queer pride parade there, they added the black and brown stripes for LGBTQ people of color who had like, are sometimes left out of the experience. And then a year later, it became the progress pride flag, which you've probably seen, which has that like arrow, which also has white, blue, pink, and black and brown stripes also for trans individuals, communities of color. And I'm sure it will continue to evolve. And it's still like, you know, again, we think of rainbows as like cheesy and happy, but it is this, apparently Gilbert Baker, when he made it,

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  he had been noticed a couple of years before had been the American bicentennial, it's been 1976. And so there were American flags everywhere. And he had been really thinking about flags, and how they express like, a peoplehood and a power. And I was just, I don't know if you saw this news, but a year ago, like, there was a ordinance that came down from the federal government to like, paint over all rainbow roads and sidewalks. And the, the big like, Rainbow Road outside the Pulse nightclub, which had been this memorial, got in the middle of the night, got painted over black. And I feel like it's just this, it's still a symbol,

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  like, the flag is evolving, and I'm sure it'll continue to evolve. And all kinds of people, I've heard people be like, oh, we need to redesign the rainbow flag, it's ugly, or whatever. But I think it's like, I don't know, just the power, the cruelty of that act and then the sort of resistance of people kind of guerrilla painting the rainbow back in Orlando is a beautiful thing. And yeah, that's the rainbow.

• 1:02:28Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, yeah. And it is, I mean, you know, and of course, I think for a lot of people in, you know, maybe more Biden administration years, there was this feeling of like, yes, it's so great that we're painting pride flags on things in a way to avoid, you know, making real infrastructural change. But then I think like when those got taken away.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. The rainbow washing.

• 1:02:55Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:57Sarah Marshall?

  It was like, wait, no.

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:59Sarah Marshall?

  Don't stop doing that.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:02Sarah Marshall?

  Let's not walk it back even farther. That was my feeling.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  I would take rainbow washing over rainbow blackening out.

• 1:03:08Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  Painting over.

• 1:03:10Sarah Marshall?

  And I feel like kind of a, I don't know, a common, and I, you know, I don't, this coming from many different motives, but I feel like people have also complained like, oh, if you put like so much on the flag that at a certain point, like, isn't it just sort of, I don't know, this, this kind of gripe that I feel like I've seen of like, at what point is there, there too much inclusivity? I don't think that people are really saying that out loud, but sort of, I don't know, acting as if there's a little bit of absurdity to it. And I think what you're saying is making me realize that that's exactly the point is to like,

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:45Sarah Marshall?

  have a flag that is trying to have so much stuff on it and an acronym that, you know, as, I don't know, again, like, I feel like people have been making this joke since the 90s, the like, L G B T Q, too many letters.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:59Sarah Marshall?

  It's like, but that's the point is that it's too many letters.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:02Sarah Marshall?

  Is that there's too many letters to say. And that's a good thing to be attempting to say too many letters, you know?

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  And that, like, a lot of the resistance to the change in the flag is like, oh, but it wasn't that way. It's just change, change. We don't like change.

• 1:04:16Sarah Marshall?

  Right. We keep finding more colors.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  I even had a little of that reaction. I was like, oh, the rainbow, it was so simple. So, but then like, if you really.

• 1:04:22Sarah Marshall?

  Well, yeah, because everybody gets attached to things they were. Remember and that's okay. But yeah.

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  But then if you really look at it, it's just like, I do like how it's like this air, like it gives it a little arrowhead. It gives it some like, ah, like, yes, the beauty of nature, but also like, we gotta fight.

• 1:04:37Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  And the work is not done.

• 1:04:39Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. But and I guess it's like, if your symbols are getting busier, then that means that you're trying to embrace more, you know, and that's to, I don't know, to, I think that like, the American left is like a complicated thing to be a part of because there's a lot of young people coming from pretty fundamentalist backgrounds who have yet to get out of the mindset of purity and punishment. And you can see, you know, and Portland is famously a place where if you want to have one of the worst experiences of your life, like, live with a community organizer is the joke. And it's, you know, I think there's a lot of truth to it. And like, right, like, there's a lot of like, lefty communities that I have lived in and experienced the gossip of. And yet I would like, I would always

• 1:05:22Sarah Marshall?

  pretty much choose them over any alternative, you know, because I think that the kind of, like, there's a lot of toxicity that emerges inevitably just in human relationships between people who have been through a lot. And yet, if you have sort of a basic social goal of like, ultimately coming back to wanting to be more expansive and wanting to embrace more and wanting to challenge yourself and wanting to build community rather than find ways to police it and who gets to have one than like, I don't know, I think it's okay for people, especially who have changed their minds about a lot of things in life, which is difficult work to do to like, struggle with how to live those values. Like, it's inevitable that people are gonna

• 1:06:07Sarah Marshall?

  to struggle with that. And yet, it's, it's better to struggle to live good values than to just embrace horrible ones. No one's ever gonna convince me of that. I have been a proud resident of Portland, Madison, and West Philly. All right. I'm irretrievable.

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, totally. Yeah. And like, I do think, but I do think inclusivity, which was the original rainbow, and which we have now learned is inherent in the rainbow, infinite ways, infinite colors, and is the move in the progress pride flag, like it or not aesthetically, like, it is just about showing, making sure. All the colors are shown and represented. And so maybe really what the flag needs, if we really were to respect the rainbow, maybe it just needs to be a sequence and it's like reflecting all the infinite colors of the light. Q E D.

• 1:06:59Sarah Marshall?

  Beautiful. Lulu, you're so great. I love you.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  I love you. You're so great. Thank you.

• 1:07:07Sarah Marshall?

  What are you up to and where can people find you? And what kind of stuff are you making for the folks?

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  Well, definitely come check out Terrestrials, which is the podcast I make for kids and families. But you don't have to be a kid or have a kid to listen, as long as you don't mind me occasionally singing. And it's all about nature. We did do a rainbows episode that's called The Bridge. But another one the queers might like is one we just put out called The Forest Fairy that stars a certain indigo girl named Amy Ray talking about aphids. Very cool. That one's really cool. She was incredible. And it leads us to like all the kind of secret harmony. It leads us to something about, it leads us to the fact that plants are talking, which is incredible. And yeah, so I do that podcast about nature. And then I also am on Radiolab where we are doing science stories all the time.

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  And I'm working, slowly chugging away at a second adult book that's all about biomimicry.

• 1:08:03Sarah Marshall?

  That's so exciting.

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  Which may be finished someday or may not.

• 1:08:08Sarah Marshall?

  But either way, you know, I don't know. I think that the work you do reminds me and so many people so often just kind of like, what kind of a world we're living in, in the best way possible, you know? Oh, and I asked you for a little butterfly fact. May I have one?

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. Okay, let me decide.

• 1:08:25Sarah Marshall?

  Or I take an aphid fact as well, actually, now that those have come up.

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  Aphids are so cool. Um, oh, okay. I'll give you, okay, I'll give you an aphid fact that is great. So you know how we're often taught that you need a male and a female to have a baby?

• 1:08:40Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm. They're trying to legislate that one, I think. Yeah.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. Afids can reproduce without males. They can make all female societies where they reproduce. And that is called parthenogenesis, where the females, in a pinch, or just like for most of the year, they can just reproduce without males. They basically like shoot out clones of themselves and become these big, wonderful communities of daughters and sisters and cousins and grandmas and hang out. And some of them dance. The ones we're talking about, woolly afids, are also called boogie woogie afids.

• 1:09:11Sarah Marshall?

  God damn.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  And I just think what I love about that is like, nature is, it's what you were saying with infinity. It's so much wilder than we think. It's like, yeah, in many species, you do need a male or female. But like, you don't have to. And we've seen that in the California condor. And we've seen it in certain snakes. Like, in a pinch, there is a pathway to create new life. Like, that is, I think more people need to be talking about parthenogenesis. Like, the fact that that can happen?

• 1:09:39Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  That alone is amazing. Like, the pathway is there evolutionarily. Yes, in bugs. Yes, even in vertebrates, in birds and in reptiles. And so I just think like, that is so wild. And like, I just, why is everyone not just like, walking around every morning like, parthenogenesis can happen? So that's your aphid fact.

• 1:10:03Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, I know some people who are doing parthenogenesis. You just have to pay a doctor a bunch of money to give you some hormones and harvest your eggs and stuff. But it's, you know, it's, it's, so it's, we're getting there. And I'm just, I'm just so excited for everything that you're doing.

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 1:10:18Sarah Marshall?

  And I love being on this planet with you. So thank you.

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  I love being on this planet with you. Thank you. I can't wait to hear whatever is coming from here next. That isn't me.

• 1:10:30Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  Bye, Sarah. Bye.

• 1:11:03Sarah Marshall?

  And that was our episode. The original music you heard in this episode was brought to you by Magpie Cinema Club, featuring Brendan Liu. We have a new bonus episode coming soon also on Patreon and Apple Plus, where Chelsea Weber-Smith and I are gonna read your doll mail. Emails you sent us about the things you've made dolls out of, to be clear, not mail from dolls. Although I cannot be certain that any of those emails were not sent by dolls, now that I think about it. Thank you to the people who helped make this show. Miranda Ziegler is our producer and editor. Nicole Ortiz is our administrative assistant. Thank you to our amazing guest, Lulu Miller.

• 1:11:47Sarah Marshall?

  Please check out all of her work wherever you can find it, and especially on Terrestrials. You can find her website and more information about her books in the show notes. And most of all, thank you for listening. We'll see you in two weeks.