The other just amazing thing that was sort of discovered, really, in my father's lifetime, my grandfather's lifetime, is radioactivity and how you can work backwards. And people throw out the word "carbon dating." Carbon dating, it's fine, but that's not what we're talking about.
For example, we believe that the law of energy conservation was being violated in the 1920s in a certain kind of radioactivity called beta decay. Did that mean that God was intervening?
going into a clean room. In fact, it's worse than going into a clean room. Even ambient radioactivity , your bodies are radioactive enough that the detector will pick it up. And so, uh, the detector itself is shielded in, umm, uh, you know, inches thick of lead and lead itself has a radioactive isotope, lead 210, which decays, so in order to protect that, uh, sort of decaying lead from the
And I pushed a button here, and as I pushed the button, it started stretching into two dimensional directions. Just like there is natural radioactivity going from the ground going through you right now.
So every product that could happen from a reaction that you're like, oh, this is hard to clean up, will be happening in this cloud. So in addition to all of the radioactivity and all of everything, if you just flip through a chemistry book, and you can point like anything, you will have that problem to deal with too.
And that's particularly important nowadays when you need to do structural analysis of how receptors fit into molecules, and also, in the case of penicillin, creating As you know, they described the process of radioactivity in great detail.
And then there were two others after me, before Obama. But that would be very expensive, with radioactivity alone and so forth.
With hydro, people are using explanations like, well, they're interfering with free-flowing rivers, and with nuclear, well, it's just-- we shouldn't-- it's unnatural. You know, it creates this radioactivity . And you say, OK, well, radioactivity exists everywhere.
have no experience with them. One is the strong nuclear force, which holds the nucleus of the atoms together, and the other one is what we call the weak nuclear force, which is responsible for some types of radioactivity . And since most people don't play around with nuclei, and most people don't play around with radioactivity , they don't know what that is. But by the '30s, scientists had done enough experiments, done enough theorizing
call the weak nuclear force, which is responsible for some types of radioactivity . And since most people don't play around with nuclei, and most people don't play around with radioactivity , they don't know what that is. But by the '30s, scientists had done enough experiments, done enough theorizing to say that there were these four forces, and that was already a triumph. I mean, we, in our goal for a theory of everything, we'd like to think that there is one force, which is what we're talking
That's not at all how it happened. And at the turn of the 20th century, we got radioactivity . We started to understand that the atom was mostly empty space.
Mike, you expressed concern. since 1895. So in 1895, people discovered radioactivity .
Mike, you expressed concern. And it wasn't until the 1980s that we actually discovered the particles responsible directly for radioactivity .
germanium and, uh, silicon, they're hockey puck-sized crystals that are put inside this copper tube. This copper tube is ultra pure. Uh, it's, uh, oh. Lots of stories about how everything has to be pure enough that no amount of -- they are essentially trying to negate any radioactivity in the vicinity -- this thing is then cooled down to near absolute zero and then shielded with all the layers of lead and stuff to prevent, uh, environmental noise. And the idea here
It still is literal. So a lot of what I'm talking about in my book is actually this interconnection between literal residue, literal lasting radioactivity in the body, and what that means metaphorically-- that we do carry the effects of what happened to our ancestors and our cultural companions,
You know, it creates this radioactivity . And you say, OK, well, radioactivity exists everywhere. What's wrong that? And it's like, no, but we shouldn't make it.
But if you did this, there would be no way-- if it were a smaller amount of energy coming from the astatine, you might be able to cover it up. You could just-- if it was a well-built room and sealed away, and then you'd have charred walls, a lot of radioactivity , but you could in your 20 percent time discretely work to clean that up, and maybe the news of what happened would not reach your immediate superiors.
They couldn't do it, even incrementally. The EPA, again, has a problem with anything that has to do with radioactivity .
And then , close the loop by sending the results back into the cloud. Now, these are some of the devices, that are used today, to achieve, to guide the radioactivity into place.
that the best possible way for the world to end would not be an asteroid strike or a nuclear war, because it would leave the world in tatters. You'd find devastation around you, and it would be very, very hard to reinstate farming when the fields themselves are poisoned, when there's radioactivity from the fallout. So the starting point for the thought experiment that I picked up on, the best possible way for the world to end
So my point is, that gives you an idea of how distorted our views of nuclear power and radioactivity and nuclear accidents really are.
Experiment That Detects Nothing" is, uh, not to demean the experiment but it's basically -- the idea of the experiment is that it should be built in a way where all the noise that is present on earth, from cosmic rays, from ambient radioactivity , all sorts of things -- should be excluded from the experiment. In the sense that you should be able to filter out everything that could possibly create a false signal so that it detects nothing from the environment and at that point
We know on Earth that there's microbes that create methane that are subterranean. It's warm enough for them to exist because the heated -- the heated crust from radioactivity . So it's impossible to tell right now whether