Casting Smell Spells, the Quantum Slap, the Boniest Jigsaw Puzzle

This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. This month is all about gratitude, but there's a person we often don't say thank you to enough ourselves. Therapy can help you find and express that gratitude. I've been seeing an awesome therapist for years and I literally don't know what I would do without her.

If you're thinking of trying therapy and just don't know where to start, you can consider giving better help a try. It's entirely online. It's designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Let the gratitude flow with better help. Visit betterhelp.com slash weirdest today to get 10% off your first month.

That's better help, h-e-l-p.com slash weirdest. The weather is finally turning cooler, so there are a lot of autumnal rituals I'm looking forward to. Switching from ice coffee to hot coffee, just kidding, I would never. And slipping into a cozy sweater from Quince.

Quince is known for the Mongolian cashmere sweaters that start from just $50. I have a super cozy oversized cardigan from Quince and it's really well made and just super soft. Get cozy in Quince's high quality wardrobe essentials. Go to quince.com slash weirdest for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's q-u-i-n-c-e.com slash weirdest to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash weirdest.

For November only, Honeylove is giving up to 50% off site-wide. Visit honeylove.com forward slash weirdest to shop their sale and let them know we sent you when the survey asks. I spent years trying all different kinds of shapewear for special occasions, and Honeylove's superpower short is now my absolute go-to.

Treat yourself to the best bras and shapewear on the market and save up to 50% off site-wide at honeylove.com slash weirdest this month only. Inventory is limited and the sale ends soon, so don't miss their best deals of the year. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Elevate your comfort. Elevate your style. Thanks to Honey Love.

At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science.

I'm Rachel Feldman. I'm Jess Bode. And I am Cheeps. Yeah, Cheeps. Welcome to the show. Jess, tell us about, as always, you have brought on an incredible guest. Yes. So, Cheeps is a fellow Twitch streamer content creator extraordinaire. I followed Cheeps forever. Wonderful creator. Also science and nature enthusiast. Would you like to tell the listeners a bit about the stuff you make?

Yeah, absolutely. So I am a full time variety streamers, how I categorize myself. I love a wide array of different games, anything from from software to Stardew Valley to the Sims, to streaming myself camping outside on the rare occasion. As just said, I love those camping items. They're so silly and so fun. They're hard to put together. So they're like once in a blue moon kind of thing.

But they're a good time. I have an undergrad in biology, which is where the love of science and nature definitely comes from. And life just took an unexpected different turn into the streaming career, which is not what I had planned for my future, but such is the case with many of us streamers.

Yes, yes, that sounds strangely familiar. Yeah, I feel like, you know, my impression of streaming is that folks who are really like, this is it. This is what I'm going to do with my life are not the most interesting streamers. Yeah. Yeah. The ones with the weird, you know, curving paths.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, welcome to the show. We're so psyched to have you. Let's get into it. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, streaming, etc. And decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first.

Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was sort of. Jess, what's your tease? It's the shortest disclaimer yet. Yeah, I figure it's time to start just assuming people know. Yeah. My tease is I'm going to talk about how you can cast a spell in real life with science. Wow.

Halloween was yesterday, so I'm feeling inspired by something spooky. Absolutely. Mine is also a little bit spooky. I want to talk about a bone-based jigsaw puzzle from ancient history. What's your tease? My tease.

And I guess it's kind of creepy if you think about it. You could slap a surface with your hand and have it go right through the surface because of quantum entanglement.

Oh, man, physics is always boogie to me. I am going to get existentially scary. Jess, I really want to hear about your spells. Great. Great. Can we start with you? Of course.

Okay, so yeah, like I said, Halloween was yesterday. I'm feeling a little bit of Halloween magic still, although people are already talking about Christmas. I am strictly a post Thanksgiving Christmas enjoyer personally. Yesterday, I turned to Oliver and I said, isn't it crazy that tomorrow is Christmas? I'm not wrong. I mean, it'll feel like if we know it. Yeah, that's true.

So right now I'm in a hot pantry. So I don't, I don't feel very. Did you, I was wondering if you were at the Siam offices or if you are at your house, did you set up your. I did. I have my, I have my pantry set up. Amazing. I mean, I'm trying to noise going to plummet by at least 70%. This is huge. And with Kenola, this is big for us.

So yes, I've brought you an autumnal story for the show today. I'm going to talk about witches. I've done a handful of witch stories on this show before. I've talked about Harry Styles, third nipple. That's exactly what I was going to say. Cheaps have you heard about how Harry Styles has an extra nipple? No, I have not heard of this. So you're with witches somehow?

Yes. Yeah. Back in the day, if you had an extra nipple, like during the Salem Witch Trials, people thought you were a witch because it was to suckle your demon familiar. And by the transit of property, that means that Harry Styles is a witch.

I would love to know who is familiar is. Is it like what we do in the shadows? Oh, I know. We're walking around. Oh, I hope. I hope so. Oh, that would be, that would be ideal. So yeah, I just really love which culture and especially like there's a really rich history of which culture, especially in America. So today I'm going to talk about smells, which smells and smells.

So I found a story written in Atlas Obscura by Britta Auger, I think is how you say their name. She's a professor of classics at Arizona State University, and she studies both magic and the senses in the ancient world, which like what a dream that is.

I was just saying that someone ASU they like they love their interdisciplinary like do they really they yeah every every time a researcher says what they study and I'm like oh yeah they're from ASU oh interesting I had no idea it's so funny because they have such a reputation for being like a such a party school maybe there's some correlation with that they can do both

Honestly, as a nerd who loves to party, I get it. So yeah, she wrote this piece about what witches smell like and how they used sense as part of their magic or, you know, at least historically what people thought. People people who people thought were witches, you know, how are they cast quote unquote casting spells?

So, you know, you might be thinking that's not very scientific, but consider this. You can't touch or see a smell, but they can affect us emotionally and physically. Is that not magic? It feels pretty magical. Perhaps.

feels pretty magical. And really, you know, when you think about how people perceive magic and cultures around the world, it is pretty similar. It's kind of this amorphous thing that can change the way someone acts or feels. So I'll give you some examples of how smells were used by ancient magicians and witches throughout history and legend. So back in 200 BCE, Greek magicians used fragrances and a lot of their rituals. So they wrote in scented inks, which really just reminds me of Elwood's

I think it's also so Elle Woods. Elle Woods was just casting spells when she was in law school. And Greek gods were thought to have smelled really sweet and pleasant. And anywhere they'd go, they'd leave behind this like wonderful smell, which just makes me think of Hades, the game. You know, like I was smelling good in that game for sure. Oh, yeah. Like I bet Greek gods smelled like Aphrodite looks

And he just looks like she smells delicious, if you know, you know. And then consider some ancient Greek literature. So there's the epic poem Argonautica, where the hero Jason is on his quest to get the golden fleece. And he enlists the help of Medea, I believe it's pronounced, who is often depicted as like a sorceress or a priestess or a witch. And she uses a lot of smelly magic.

Yeah. Medea classic, a lady with feelings. Yeah. A lady with. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Medea even puts like the fierce dragon that's guarding the fleece to sleep by chanting spells and then drizzling herbal potions in its eyes. That's a, that's a technique for sure. And the, the odor of her herbal concoctions is what overcomes the monster in the end. So sent magic saves the day or, you know, that's like me with a lush bath bomb.

Oh my God. And then there's also this ancient Roman poet Horace who wrote a few poems about a witch named Canidia. And she is like way scarier than Medea. She has like scary black teeth and long fingernails that she uses to dig up graves. And in these poems she used liver and bone marrow that she like digs up to put into a magical perfume to re-enchant her lover who left her. So she's making like love potions and stuff.

industrious. Yeah. And we've also got the Iliad where the goddess Hera distracts her husband Zeus from the Trojan War by seducing him. And she does that by perfuming herself with fragrant ambrosia. Zeus falls asleep.

doesn't does not aware that a battle is going on. Finally, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder, which we've talked about on this show, not infrequently, commented that the best perfume was one that made all the men in the area forget what they were doing when a woman wearing it walked by. So

This just makes me think about like patriarchal values and women, a lot of these wish and smell stories, especially way back in the day, you know, they're painting these like ancient sorceresses and witches as like temptresses, you know, and it's not the men's fault. It's the witch's fault. And you know, even today, like this is people people are quick to put the blame on women, especially when it comes to money and sex and that kind of stuff. And

Stories about magical sense encode these ideas too, especially like fears about the dangers of sexually-learned women, yada, yada. And it said that women who use perfumes and cosmetics could seduce men into behaving in ways they would not choose to if they were in their right minds, which like, to me, just kind of sounds like the other way to victim blame back in the day. Yeah, totally.

You know, I don't know for sure as I am not a classics scholar, and this was a very, very long time ago, but you know, it sounds very dangerously similar to the discourse around like, don't want to get cat called. Don't wear that outfit or don't wear the perfume. Like, you know, it's not the perfumes fault that you were violent. Come on now. But what is it? You know, bring it back to science for a moment. What is it about about smell that is so powerful compared to other senses? And there is some neuroscience to back it up.

So when you experienced like any sense, for example, like let's say there's a delicious warm, autumnal apple pie sitting in front of you. If you were to look at it or pick up a fork and cut into it, those visual and tactile signals would travel from your eye or your hand to a part of your brain called the thalamus. And the thalamus, it's basically like air traffic control. So it's like deciding where to send those signals to your brain, probably to your hippocampus for memory or the amygdala for emotional processing.

But with smell. So let's say you smell the apple pie. That signal skips the thalamus and goes straight to the amygdala and the hippocampus or wherever else in your brain. So it's thought to be a much it's right there. It's right there. So it's thought to be like, you know, it's it's it's much more direct, I suppose it might explain why smells trigger memories like much more quickly and so vividly. And it can explain how smells can influence our moods more intensely like, you know, these like they did in these which stories.

So finally, I'll bring us back to the modern day. I think a lot of folks myself included consider which stuff to be largely like reclaimed in the sort of feminist way. It feels like I find it empowering.

And, you know, for sure, like lighting a candle, picking out a perfume, like it can affect my mood and my mindset, or a lush bath bomb, you know, all of these things. It's our own little witchcraft. It's like I'm casting my own little spells when I light my Trader Joe's Honeycrisp candle on my living room coffee table.

And yeah, it's really fun also to decide which perfume to wear. It's kind of like it gives me the confidence to step into a different persona a little bit. Like, if I want to feel extra hot, I wear my favorite scent, which is Lolabo another 13. And if I want to feel extra hot, I have a little solid perfume. Have you guys seen the Glossier U solid perfume? Yes.

It comes in a little clam shell. If you see it at Sephora, you have to pick up the packaging, because it's like metal and heavy. It's so nice. Non-spon. I mean, Glossier, please, hit me up, but non-spon, it's really lovely. And it's solid perfume, so I just put it on the ends of my hair, and that is like a witchy.

Uh, ritual as well. And it gives me confidence. You know, it's my little confidence spell. So anyway, smell magic is real and you can cast it the end. I love that. That's wonderful. I mean, the sense of smell is so powerful. Um, like this is a really silly example, but my doc, he stinks objectively that little man smells bad, but I love the smell. Yeah. So much. And it puts me in a good mood.

We did a whole, somebody did a fact on that here about why we love like our stinky. Well, I think, well, stinky pets are stinky. I was like, why do I love sniffing my cat? Like, yeah. I said, just getting a big old whiff of, yeah. I said this to my partner as well. I was like, you know, I think one of the, like, I know that I love you because when you smell bad, it smells good to me.

which is EMI. But I was on this show, Burn Before Reading, that is hosted by some weirdest thing listeners. It's a great show. I definitely recommend checking it out. And I did an episode where the premise of the podcast is great. It's that you're reading or just talking about sort of like embarrassing writing from your past in this very like wholesome. I love that.

And I talked about an essay that got published in, I guess, the Atlantic. I don't remember if it was actually the Atlantic or one of the other sites under the Atlantic umbrella back when I was interning at Quartz, which was owned by the same company at the time. And it was literally about like, I stopped dating this guy and I think about how he spelled so good. It's like humiliating because I did this every 24 hours.

Like six months later, he was, you know, just another dude. I knew he's a nice guy. There's nothing wrong with him. But that was the embarrassing part of the article was that I really feel like, why does he want to date me? And why does he smell so good? He's got his own little potion going. He smells so good.

Yeah, he had you under his spell. Oh my gosh, it's so true. But yeah, I did talk a lot in there about like, you know, why sense are so evocative to us and how humans don't have pheromones in the way other animals do, no matter like what people try to sell you on the internet. But that doesn't mean we're not super susceptible to smell. To me, it's like the pheromone thing is kind of our red herring. Like, yeah, we don't make pheromones that we know of that people can detect, but that

That just means you get to just pick what random thing you smell like that is going to drive people nuts. And that's really powerful. Totally. Totally. I like to smell like a swamp witch. I have a bunch of different. Oh, yeah. From Alchemia. And I've seen that. Yeah, just like I love weird grassy earthy. Oh, I love that. Yeah, I love that. Yeah. Well, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts.

This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. This month is all about gratitude. But there's a person we often don't say thank you to enough, ourselves. So here's a reminder to send some thanks to the people in your life who matter, including yourself. Therapy can help you find and express that gratitude.

Therapy isn't just for people who've experienced serious trauma, it can help with everyday boundary setting, coping, all that good stuff. I've been seeing an awesome therapist for years and I literally don't know what I would do without her. If you're thinking of trying therapy and just don't know where to start, you can consider giving better help a try. It's entirely online.

It's designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Let the gratitude flow with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash weirdest today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, h-e-l-p dot com slash weirdest. The weather is finally turning cooler, so there are a lot of autumnal rituals I'm looking forward to. Eating pumpkin spice flavored.

Everything switching from iced coffee to hot coffee, just kidding, I would never. And slipping into a cozy sweater from Quince. Quince is known for the Mongolian cashmere sweaters that start from just $50. In fact, all Quince items are priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. That includes beautiful leather jackets, cotton cardigans, soft denim, and so much more.

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Get cozy in Quince's high-quality wardrobe essentials. Go to quince.com slash weirdest for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's q-u-i-n-c-e.com slash weirdest to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash weirdest.

OK, we're back. And I'm going to talk about this bony jigsaw puzzle. Oh, yeah. So this story starts back in the 1970s in part of Belgium. And researchers were tooling around this second century Roman cemetery. So in Belgium, but the Romans spread out at that time.

And they found a body, as you might expect, in a cemetery. And it had this bone pin, like a pin made of bone that was like very Roman, very typical of the second century. And they were like, you know, easy peasy. That's what this is, a body from a

member of the Roman Empire buried in the second century, it ended up in a museum in Belgium, case closed, except no case not closed, case wide open. Recently, researchers started to be like,

there is something weird about this skeleton. First of all, it was curled up on its side, like on its right side with its legs tucked up. And in the second century, the Romans were not bearing people that way. They were generally flat on their backs. So that was one sort of red flag. But then also, they were like, the bones don't really match. They're a little miscellaneous.

For example, looking at the vertebrae, they were like, some of these look like they're from an elderly person, some of them look like they're from an adolescent in terms of the state of the vertebrae. And then there were like,

the femur, they said looked like it didn't fit the pelvis. So researchers were like, let's investigate. That's so creepy. Yeah. There is something a little creepy about this. And they knew that they had all of these tools that were not available to archaeologists in the 1970s. And they were like, we're going to do a full radiocarbon dating on this so that we know when all of these bones are from, and we're also going to analyze their DNA.

And of course, as we've talked about on we were saying a bunch, analyzing ancient DNA is really hard, DNA degrades. So first of all, the conditions have to be right for there to even be DNA to study, but we weren't good enough at analyzing DNA to study really old DNA until like quite recently. So there was reason to hope that we would learn stuff that had not been possible to learn back in the 1970s. But kudos to the scientists who were like,

We're not just leaving the skeleton with this skeleton. Something is afoot. Yeah, exactly. Something is afoot. Something is a femur. You set them up by Nagum now, Jess. They sure enough.

They found that the dates did not match and the DNA did not match this skeleton actually contained bones from seven different people and.

Just having a grave with multiple people in it, not that unusual, as you can imagine. But this had been a really well-articulated skeleton. These bones had been put together with enough anatomical accuracy that in the 1970s, researchers had been like, yeah, that's just a person. That is one person. And that's interesting. What's up with that?

But the thing is, this isn't the first time that's happened. There've been a couple other incidents of finding like bones arranged into something resembling a single skeleton. There were some excavations around like 2009, 2010 in like some Scottish aisles that found basically

several burials where remains that came from like different times and different people had been sort of put together as if they were one body and there was another instance of this in in Scotland as well, but it's still not it's not common and it is something that like begs the question.

why. And researchers don't have a good answer for that. And I love this kind of archaeology story because it's the kind of thing that we almost certainly will never know why. The sort of evidence that would have to emerge from somewhere to be like, this is it. This is the definitive explanation for why they put these bones together like this. Very unlikely too.

I want to know. It's so weird. I know. And that is frustrating, but I feel like it's also really cool to be like, all we can do is speculate and like, yeah, you know, archaeologists will like come up with stories to try to explain it. And anyone who says.

they are certain about or even like quite sure about why this was done is that's a sign that they're not a great archaeologist. What's really fun is that we can just like put together different explanations for why this may have been. And as I've talked about a lot on readers thing, it would be a huge mistake to try to come up with some unified explanation for why several graves around the world have skeletons put together almost certainly different stuff was going on in different places at different times.

We got there's something extra weird about this particular grave. So the DNA analysis showed that there were these seven unrelated individuals. They spanned different generations. They probably were between like 4,200 and 4,500 years old.

But the skull, the radiocarbon dating on it was not conclusive. But when they analyzed the DNA, they found that it belonged to a Roman woman who was like very closely related, relatively speaking, to some other people buried in a Roman cemetery, like

100 kilometers away. And that was 1800 years ago. So we're talking about like most of the skeleton is around 4,200 years old. And then the skull that's in there and the pin that threw them off initially that made them be like, this is just, you know, your standard second century Roman grave. That was 1800 years ago, give or take. So yeah, who knows? I've seen researchers, you know, sort of spitball on why

people might put the bones together in the first place. My mom, a physician was like, it must have been for medical training. And I'm like, I think that's a very speculative mom and you're not an archaeologist, but it's fair. It's a fair guess. It's like one of the schoolroom or classroom skeletons that just got buried. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how much anatomical training they were doing like 2000 years ago in the Roman Empire.

But maybe, maybe that's what this was. I've also seen some researchers say like maybe this was sort of a symbolic thing to like combine people from different lineages as like a way of saying like we are all now one people. This is like the symbolic grave that unifies our people or even that like maybe

there was something that actually related these people to one another. And there was some symbolic reason for putting them in a grave together, even though they did not die at the same time, or it could have been like a prank, like we really don't know. I think that's, you know, we have this bias to try to assign like higher meaning to things people did in agent times when like truly it could have just been somebody messing around. Who knows? There was not a lot to do at that time. And the skull being, you know, from

Like 2000 years later, the researchers behind this new study were saying, you know, maybe Romans like found this grave and had inadvertently destroyed the skull that was in it. Or maybe it was skullless and that bothered them. But like, yeah, it's possible that for whatever reason, they were like, we're putting this here. I don't know. So something about it kind of reminds me of somebody like, like, yeah, making a graffiti tag being like, yeah, I like what they did here. I'm going to add my yeah, my signature.

But again, we we simply won't know, but the researchers behind this study and similar studies looking at, you know, composite graves of multiple bones, always reiterate like.

This is just a reminder that people were doing complex and varied things with their dead. There are so many rituals that existed that we just have no record of. And that's just really cool. People have always been doing interesting things for their funeral rites.

And I just, I love this study. Obviously it's a little spooky. The researcher was like, don't call it a Frankenstein. That's disrespectful. And that's fair. But I will call it a spooky friend who I respect immensely. Yes. A whole pile of spooky friends who I respect immensely. Wow. That's been after a pretty short run.

I want to know why. I know. Because the why just isn't there. That's that's what makes it so fascinating and probably will never definitively be there. But I had no idea that this was a thing that has been found to have been do have happened ever. I mean, either. I'm that's I. Yep. I want to know why, but I will accept that I will never know why. I like the theories too. It is fun to speculate.

Yeah, I think there's there's something really satisfying to me about like.

researchers having to admit at the end of the day, this could have just been somebody being weird person doing a weird thing. And again, I think it's like, it's so important to remember that that is always possible because we have this tendency to be very like, ah, the ancient times, what was the spiritual significance? Yeah.

Yeah. And some people are people. So yeah, beans, teas did pray. Yeah, or like the equivalent of your weird neighbor. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, we're going to take one more break and then we'll be back with one more fact.

Did you guys know there are butterflies that drink blood? Or that there's a species of beetle that can shoot boiling liquid out of its butt? Or that blue whales are so big that you can swim through their arteries? But there's a species of bat that's so small that it weighs less than a penny. My name's Maya. And my name's Connor. And we are the co-hosts of World's Wildest Podcast. If you guys love nature and you love learning about how crazy it is,

Connor and I have over 30 years of experience in wildlife conservation and we're here to tell you all about them. World's Wildest will take you on a journey to meet Earth's most extreme creatures from the world's strongest to our world's smelliest. Make sure to subscribe for new episodes every Thursday wherever you get your podcasts.

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Okay, we're back. And cheap's talked to me about some spooky physics, please. Yes. Okay. So when I was getting my undergrad in biology, I hated physics, like my least favorite. I just couldn't understand it. And it made me so mad that it was so important in our day to day life. And it was so beyond my understanding. So this, this topic is coming from a very surface level understanding of these things, which is good because I think that's the best way to explain it in like a concise manner of 10 minutes.

OK, so we are going to be diving into the mind-bending world of quantum mechanics a little bit, but primarily focusing on the phenomenon known as quantum entanglement. So both of you, like, look at a surface nearby, just like a flat surface. There is a non-zero chance that at some point, with you slapping your hand, your entire hand could go through the solid surface.

So this concept challenges only your understanding of reality completely, but leads us to some bizarre ideas, including possibility that if you, you know, slap the surface, your hand could just go right through it. So what is quantum entanglement as a whole?

So let's say, OK, you have a pair of dice that are somehow linked in a special way. When you roll one die and it lands on a six, the other die instantly reflects that outcome, no matter how far apart they are. In quantum mechanics, entangled particles behave in a similar manner.

When two particles become entangled, the measurement of one particle state, whether it's spin polarization or a different property, it will instantly determine the state of another particle, even if they are light years apart. So like, I'm just going to be a weird analogy, maybe.

Potentially not allowed to be on the podcast, but it's like when you and our friend are hanging out and you're like, hey, we should. Maybe eat this fun little treat at the same time. So we're on the same page, no matter what. So it seems kind of like the same thing, but not really.

So for some historical context on how this came to be, this concept puzzled many physicists, including Albert Einstein. He famously referred to the entanglement as spooky action at a distance.

because it seemed to defy the classical ideas of locality and causality. Einstein, along with his colleagues, presented this paradox questioning whether quantum mechanics could provide a complete description of our physical reality. And they argued that if entangled particles could communicate instantaneously, then quantum mechanics must be incomplete in some weird way. That's like,

saying a lot with to me not really saying anything at all. So to get into the mechanics of quantum tunneling a little bit further, this phenomenon describes how particles can pass through barriers that according to just classic physics that we know and love, they shouldn't be able to cross.

picture a ball rolling towards the hill. Classically, if it doesn't have enough energy to reach the top, it rolls back. But in the quantum world, there's a probability that the ball would simply tunnel through the hill to the other side, just through it, despite not having the energy to overcome the barrier. Okay, now let's go back to the slap, the idea of the slap. Let's entertain this wild idea. If you slapped a solid surface,

In the quantum realm, there's an extremely tiny, super small chance that your hand could just quantum tunnel through that wall or whatever you're slapping. This isn't something that like you should just sit at home and just like slap until it goes through. Although there are 10,000 accounts of people doing this. It's like day 100, do you have 400 of slapping your surface to see if my hand goes through it.

Oh, that's awesome. So for macroscopic objects, like human hands, the probability of this happening is virtually zero because the effects of quantum tunneling are significant only at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. But it's like fun to entertain the idea. I mean, there's like a non zero chance. So you're saying there's a chance it could have. So I mean, this, this topic

Obviously causes some implications for our understanding of reality at large. It goes beyond technology. They challenge our understanding of reality itself, and it raises philosophical questions about the nature of space and time. If two entangled particles can affect each other instantaneously, does that mean information can travel faster than light? I don't know. And what does that say about our perception of the universe?

At large, so like in conclusion, quantum entanglement is a striking reminder of how intricate and strange our universe can be. And it forces us to reconsider the fundamental rules that govern reality. And while you're probably not going to slap your hand through a wall.

just the interplay between entanglement and quantum tunneling illustrates how bizarre the quantum world truly is. And you could probably sit here and talk for five hours and not even scratch the surface of quantum mechanics. But it's fun to entertain the idea of it all. Totally. I love this stuff. Have you played Alan Wake too?

Yes. Okay. So I haven't done this yet. Okay. Yeah, but still, it's so cool. Interesting. It makes me think of all of that. Unless there's, if you haven't played that game, you should play it. It's so good. And Rachel, you should play. I've heard good things. I haven't played it, but I have a confession about physics, which I almost never confessed to people, which is that technically I never had any physics classes because I had like physical science in middle school, you know, the sort of like, you know, very basic, like, police systems kind of stuff.

And then I only did two years of high school before I went to college, and that was bio and chem. And then I actually think maybe I just took chemistry twice in high school because I switched high schools. But anyway, then in college, I did environmental science as my major. And I was like, I bypass physics. I was like, it's not technically required.

I would have done the same. But then that really came back to bite me in the butt because like when I was working at the Washington Post and I had to cover the Nobel Prizes, which means like waking up at like 4 a.m. and you know, churning out an article about something you've had no heads up about neutrinos one. And I was like, great. And you know, I have learned a lot about physics and I think learning how to

learn about science is a skill that applies to any field of science. And I've done a lot of, you know, reading to catch up. And now I'm sort of comfortable writing about physics. But yeah, no, sitting on my couch at 4.30 in the morning being like neutrinos. Great. I really want like, wow, this is this was entirely preventable. I could have taken but one physics class.

in my higher education. A lesson to you children. Yeah, I was going to say, you know, I don't even know how much this class taught me about neutrinos. Yeah, that's fair. But I was like, oh, do I even know what a subatomic particle is? I did. But it was really easy at that moment to be like, I messed up. I messed up. And it's just so interesting to think how much we don't know about the world we live in.

Yes, you know, there's so much going on. And I'm just so. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh. So true. Agreed. Even the smartest people are like, with like, with the quantum stuff, they're like, Oh, yeah, there's a lot of this going on, probably maybe that is really weird. Yeah, that doesn't make sense. You know,

quantum physics. That's a lot of like, this could happen. This also could not happen. We don't really know. That's basically all of quantum physics. Yes. Which, um, another good movie in our cellar.

Yeah, I love and her stellar really I feel like hits home The fascination for quantum mechanics at large because it's like it then goes into the other dimensions that you know some physicists like Albert Einstein have confirmed to be true We just can't perceive these things perceive these things and how quantum mechanics plays into that and like

you could go on tangents of like, oh, the ghosts or spirits that people see, is that just, are those dead people or are those people in another dimension that we can't perceive? Who knows? My friend Ryan Manalum, who's been on the show a couple of times, now writes about quantum stuff for IBM, and has a physics background, but loves, loves talked about quantum physics. And they are one of the weirdest people I know, so like, try.

Brian's great. How is Brian? I miss them. Yeah, right? It's good. I need to. I'm actually I'm going to try to get them back on the pod soon. Huge. Cheaps. Thanks so much for coming on. It was great getting to chat with you. Would you remind folks like where they can find all of your content?

Yeah, for sure. Thank you for having me. This was so fun. I mean, I would love to sit here and talk about these things for another two hours. Like it's just, it's just so interesting. Um, you can find me at twitch.tv slash cheaps. And then my, uh, other handles on Twitter and Instagram are Chilbo Baggins with a Z.

The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Saltman, along with Jess Bodie, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cannon. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, weirdos.