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- Yeah.

- Hello, welcome to After Dark Online: Cemetery of Dead Science. My name is Kathleen Maguire, and I'm part of the team that puts together After Dark Online. Well, tonight's program has been recorded remotely. We want to acknowledge that the home of After Dark, the Exploratorium, is located on the traditional lands of Ramaytush Ohlone People. We pay our respects to elders both past and present. Tonight's After Dark, concludes our month-long theme, Okay With DECAY. At the end of each October, the Exploratorium commences one of our favorite traditions, which is bringing out our Cemetery of Dead Science Ideas. Tonight, we're trying to bring an approximation of that to you through this program. The scientific method is a rigorous process that puts forth a best understanding of a concept, hypothesis or idea, based on evidentiary findings. That best understanding, can also be expected to evolve as new evidence, methods of approach, or further testing emerge, this leads to scientific theories being superseded. And our special Cemetery of Dead Science Ideas, we highlight in stories told in Limerick form, scientific concepts that over time, were disproven, or evolved through further evidence. It is important to note, when a scientific theory is superseded, the original theory was based on the best evidence available at the time, which is very different from pseudoscience, which has no basis in evidence or scientific grounding. Later on tonight, we'll be wrapping up our month-long Odd Salon DECAY Collaboration. Odd Salon shares stories from the odd corners of history, science, art and adventure. But before that, we'll be hearing from our staff educator, Ron Hipschman, who be digging into the Steady State Theory. At the Exploratorium, Ron has worked as an exhibit developer, author and teacher. He hosts two Exploratorium series, "Everything Matters", "Tales From the Periodic Table" and Full-Spectrum Science". You can find many of his talks online by searching our website. And tonight's talk, Steady State Theory, is part of his "Full-Spectrum Science" series. But I feel like one of the most important things to note about Ron, given the date this program first airs, is that in just a few days, he will be celebrating his 49th anniversary as an Exploratorium and staff member. So, congratulations, Ron. And to get you ready for Ron's talk, I'd like to share the epitaph from the study state theory's grave in our Cemetery of Dead Science Ideas. Steady State Theory, death, 1965. The universe has no beginning or end, the Steady State Theory contends, it was sent to its grave by some old microwaves. Now, Big Bang is the physicist friend. And here's Ron.

- Welcome to "Full-Spectrum Science shorts!", I'm your host, Ron Hipschman. This is the season when the Exploratorium constructs its graveyard of Dead Science Ideas. And I've resurrected, if you will, one of those Dead Ideas. The Steady State Theory. Our story begins with an astronomer I'll bet you've heard of, well, at least you've heard of the telescope that was named after him, the Hubble Space Telescope, Edwin Hubble, played a vital role in our understanding the size and evolution of our universe. Hubble arrived at the Mount Wilson Observatory in 1919, after serving in the army in World War I. Mt. Wilson is just North of Pasadena, California, at 5,700 feet above sea level. There, Hubble used the newly completed 100-inch Hooker Telescope to continue his research of Nebula. This was the largest telescope in the world at the time. Previous to arriving at Mt. Wilson, Hubble had written his PhD dissertation titled, Photographic Investigations of Faint Nebula, and he was going to continue his research at Mt. Wilson. Nebula is the Latin word for cloud, and indeed nebulae are giant clouds of gas and dust. Some of these clouds, like the Orin Nebula you see here, or the Triffid Nebula in the constellation of Sagittarius, are the birthplaces of stars. Giant nurseries, where gravitationally collapsing clouds are creating new stars and solar systems. Other Nebulae, like the Ring Nebula, in the constellation Lyra or the Harp, are displays of the end of a star's life. A star about the size of our sun, or maybe slightly larger, once it uses the bulk of its hydrogen fuel, collapses and simultaneously expels a shell of gas, exposing a hot, white dwarf remnant which illuminates the gas causing it to glow. This Nebula was also the result of a star's ending its life, but in a much more violent fashion. Large stars at the end of their lives, don't gently collapse and puff off their outer layers like the star in the previous slide of the Ring Nebula, they collapse and explode in a supernova. A star in the constellation of Taurus, the Bowl, exploded in 1054 AD and became bright enough to be seen in broad daylight, creating the Crab Nebula. That star is a pulsar, spinning 30 times a second. Other fuzzy patches of light in the sky had interesting spiral shapes. These were called spiral nebulae. This photo was taken by that 100-inch Hooker Telescope on Mt. Wilson. Hubble's namesake, this Hubble space telescope, in orbit around the earth, somewhat improves on the original photo. These spiral nebulae came in a variety of shapes and sizes like this rather open spiral. Sometimes, they seem to have a straight bar running through the center with spiral arms trailing from the ends of the bar. Others showed no arms at all and were elliptical blobs. While still others were irregular patches in the sky. This is the large Magellanic Cloud, visible only in the Southern Hemisphere. Hubble came up with a classification system, now known as the Hubble Tuning Fork, because of the shape of his diagram. The ellipticals were numbered from E0 to E7, depending on how elliptical they were. The spirals and barred spirals were labeled Sa, Sb and Sc, or SBa, SBb and SBc, depending on how open they appeared. Irregulars were just, well, irregulars. We need to divert and go off on an important little side story. When you look out in the sky, you may notice that not all stars shine with a constant brightness. Some stars change their intensity in regular ways over a period of hours or days. These were called variable stars. Some are double-star systems that eclipse each other from our point of view, in the solar system we don't see the individual stars, but when they move in front of each other, the combined brightness changes. Other variables are single stars that grow and shrink, changing their brightness as they do. If you chart their brightness over time, you may get a graph that looks something like this. This particular type of variable star, is one of those that changes its brightness intrinsically by repeatedly getting bigger and smaller, growing in brightness and shrinking and dimming in a cyclic fashion. The first one was discovered in the Cepheus, the King, and is the fourth brightest star in that constellation. This type of variable star is therefore called a Cepheid variable. Why is this important to our story? In 1912, Henrietta Leavitt, an astronomer at the Harvard College Observatory, made a remarkable discovery. She had cataloged almost 1800 variable stars in the large Magellanic Cloud. Of those 1,800, 25 were Cepheid variables. Since all were in the same small galaxy, she knew that they were all at about the same distance. She discovered that the longer they took to get bright, that the brighter the star actually was. If you know how bright a star actually is, its luminosity, and you see how bright it looks to you in the sky, you can figure out its distance. Think of it this way, you know how bright headlights really are. If you see a headlight and it looks dim, you know it's far away. Likewise, knowing how bright a Cepheid really is, gives you a measuring stick to figure out how far away it really is by how bright it looks to you. Cepheid variables will play an important part in our story of the universe. If you go outside and look up in a dark sky, away from city lights you'll notice the dim trail of the Milky Way. From our point of view, inside the Milky May, it looks like we're near the center of a flattened disc of stars, it surrounds us completely. Here, in this horizon-to-horizon fish-eye view, you see the Milky Way as it rises over the Paranal Observatory, high in the Atacama Desert in Chile. If we could from the outside, it might look like this, a flattened disc of stars, with us in, or near the center, surrounded by the stars and nebulae that made up our entire universe. Hubble observed the Andromeda Nebula and photographed it in great detail. This is a modern photo of Andromeda. Hubble's photos had far less detail and were in black and white as you'll see. On the night of October 6th, 1923, Hubble took a photographic plate of the Andromeda Nebula using the Hooker, 100-inch telescope at the Mount Wilson observatory. Here he is guiding the telescope for the long exposure this required. Here's the plate he took that night with identification number H335H, meaning Hooker, plate 335 by Hubble.

- Of course it's seen here as a negative. Let me reverse it for you, so it looks a little more familiar. Note that aside from labeling the date on this plate, he also labeled stars with an N. These were stars that did not appear in previous plates, they were new stars or Novas, actually stars ending their lives in spectacular fashion. One of the stars in the upper right of the plate that he labeled as a Nova at first, turned out to be one of those Cepheid variable stars. He crossed out the N and relabeled it. You can tell he was excited by the exclamation mark after the VAR designation. This was the discovery of the first Cepheid variable star in the Andromeda Nebula. Why the excitement? If he could measure the period of the Cepheid variable star, he would know how bright it really was. And by comparing that to the brightness it appeared to him, he was able to determine that the Andromeda Nebula was really the Andromeda Galaxy, another complete Island universe, similar to the Milky Way. Hubble calculated that the Andromeda Galaxy was over 800,000 light years away, it's actually 2.3 million light years distant. That also meant that all the other spiral nebulae were also galaxies. Can you imagine how Hubble felt making that discovery? The universe became a lot bigger on that day. In addition to variable stars, Hubble also looked at the spectra of galaxies. Dark lines in the spectrum are absorbed by various chemical elements. The dark lines occur at very distinct colors or wavelengths. Hubble noticed that the lines he saw in the spectra of galaxies were almost always shifted toward the red. This was due to the Doppler Effect and is called a Redshift, it indicated that the galaxies were moving Here is an animation of the Doppler Effect. Circular waves are emitted from a moving source marked by the yellow arrow. Behind the source, the waves are stretched out and spaced wider, or Redshifted. ahead of the source, the waves are compressed and closer together or Blueshifted all because of the emotion of the source. The faster the source moves, the bigger the Red or Blueshift. Hubble looked out and measure the spectra of many galaxies. By looking at the shifts of their spectral lines, he was able to learn how fast they were moving. Stunningly, virtually all the galaxies were moving away from us. Using Cepheid variables, he could measure the distances to the near galaxies with some accuracy. Assuming the galaxies were on the average about the same size, he measured the distance to farther galaxies by looking at their sizes. When he charted the distance versus the velocity, he found that the farther away a galaxy was from us, the faster it was moving. That's the lines sloping up and to the right. It was as if the entire universe was expanding. The slope of the line, the Hubble Constant, tells you the speed of expansion. It's like baking a raisin bread, the dough starts small. Let's say that we are in the middle of the loaf, the blue dot, we don't have to be in the middle, this works no matter where we locate ourselves. We can mark a few raisins around us, some close, some far, and measure their distances. We bake the bread and it doubles in size. The loaf is twice as large and all the raisins are twice as far as they were before baking. Let's add the original distances. Every arrow has grown to double the size. Can you see that the farther raisins had to move much faster to cover the increased distance than the closer raisins? This is what Hubble saw with galaxies. So, Hubble made the observation that the universe was expanding. How do we fit that idea into a theory of the history and future of the universe? Something called a cosmetology. A couple of camps arose, the Steady State Theory and The Big Bang Theory. The Steady State theory was one of the first hypotheses. It stated that although the universe is expanding, it nevertheless does not change its appearance over time. This is called the perfect cosmological principle. The universe has no beginning and no end. I personally find this theory vary aesthetic. You don't have to worry about where the universe came from, it's always been there, nor do you have to concern yourself about its eventual fate, it'll always be there. In 1928, Sir James Jeans, was the first to propose a Steady State cosmology. Here's the problem. If the universe looks the same throughout us history and yet it's also expanding, to keep looking the same, you have to create new matter from nothing. This new matter eventually form stars, and the stars form galaxies, and the universe continues to expand and look like it always had with the same density of stars and galaxies, no beginning, no end. In 1948, Bondi, Hoyle and Gold, refined Sir James Jeans idea into a more rigorous Steady State Theory, which holds, as I've stated, that the universe is constantly expanding, but matter is constantly created to form new stars and galaxies to maintain a constant average density in the universe. Georges Lemaître, published a paper in 1927 with the very long title, quote, "A Homogeneous Universe of Constant Mass and Increasing Radius accounting for the Radial Velocity of Extra-galactic Nebula", unquote. In this report, he presented his new idea, that the universe is expanding, which he derived from Einstein's general relativity. This later became known as Hubble's Law, and is now known as The Hubble-Lemaître Law. Four years before Lemaître's paper, Hubble discovered using the spectra of galaxies, that it appeared the universe was expanding. Hubble was reluctant to accept this idea. Because of errors in his measurements, it looked like the universe was only 2 billion years old. Evidence for the geologic age of the earth seemed to contradict this. However, once the issues with Hubble's calculations were addressed, the universe became sufficiently old. However, in a universe that was expanding and not creating matter between the galaxies, it appeared that when you ran time backward, there came a point when all the matter in the universe was crunched together. It looked like the universe was created at some definite time in the past. Fred Hoyle, proponent of the Steady State Theory, laughingly call this The Big Bang Theory. And much to his chagrin, the name stuck. The Big Bang Theory states that around 13.8 billion years ago, for reasons we don't yet understand, the universe came into being, creating time, space and matter. After about 375,000 years, the universe cooled enough for atoms to form. And after another 400 million years or so, the first stars formed, then galaxies, galaxy clusters, and the universe became, as we now know it. Light from distant galaxies, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, takes longer to get to us, the farther out the galaxy. So, we're looking back further in time when we look at galaxies that are farther away in space. Here, we're seeing thousands of galaxies in a very long exposure taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. This one frame contains about 10,000 galaxies. Hubble the astronomer, could not have imagined a scene like this, by the way, this photo is actually a very small piece of the sky only one 10th, the size of the full moon. One of the first problems for the Steady State Theory came up when we were able to detect and measure very distant objects in the universe. We could see galaxies out to about six or 7 billion light years, here, marked in yellow. Beyond the galaxies, were extremely bright and small objects called quasars or quasi-stellar objects. We now believe that quasars are galaxies with extremely active cores, powered by massive black holes. Those are shown here in red. The problems, well, as you can see, the universe isn't the same throughout its history. Now, we see galaxies and galaxy clusters, but we only see quasars when we looked out further in space and time. And eventually, if we look out far enough, even the quasars disappeared before about 12 billion years ago, it looks like the universe has evolved, not what you'd expect from an unchanging universe. The next problem involves that muddled-colored strip you see on the right side of the diagram. 13.8 billion light years out, and 13.8 billion years ago. If we look out far enough, we look back in time to only 375,000 years after The Big Bang. This is the time when the universe, because of its expansion, had cooled enough for neutral atoms to form. Before this time, the universe was a white, hot opaque plasma, we cannot see beyond or before this plasma wall. As the universe continued to expand, this plasma continue to cool until today, when it is no longer glowing in visible light. This leads us to the last part of our story. Some time ago, our televisions look like this. And we received our information through radio waves with a rabbit-ear antenna on top of the set. When you tuned to an unused channel or frequency, you'd see and hear noise. Part of this radio noise was coming from the universe itself. It took us somewhat larger antenna to scientifically investigate this noise. Which brings us to a very special sensitive horn-shaped antenna in Holmdel, New Jersey. In the early 1960s, Bell Telephone Laboratories built this antenna to aid them with their research into satellite communication. It was used to capture extremely weak radio reflections from the Echo balloon satellites in low-earth orbit in 1964, a pair of astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson seen here, started using the ultra-sensitive anten to look at astronomical sources of microwaves. Oddly, they saw a microwave noise coming from every part of the sky, North and South, day and night, summer and winter. Thinking they had a problem with the telescope, they troubleshot all their instrumentation and the telescope itself, even removing nesting pigeons and their droppings from inside the horn, all to no avail. This noise was 100 times more intense than they could account for. It was as if the entire universe was heated to a temperature of 3.5 degrees above absolute zero. Penzias and Wilson were in need of an explanation for these microwaves. Luckily, a physicist friend of Penzias, Bernard Berg, told him of a pre-print paper by three astrophysicist at Princeton Robert Dicke, Jim Peebles and David Wilkinson, reasoned that if The Big Bang had occurred, that there should be some leftover radiation from the event, but now cool down from the white, hot plasma to something giving off only microwaves, they were about to embark on experiments to find this cosmic microwave background. Meanwhile, Penzias and Wilson upon reading the Princeton paper, realize the significance of their measurements. What they had seen in their horn antenna, matched perfectly with what Dickey peoples and Wilkinson had predicted. The cosmic microwave background was there, was real and evidence for The Big Bang was solid. Penzias and Wilson received the Nobel prize in physics in 1978 and peoples in 2019, for their contributions to the field of cosmology. These measurements were not the last word however. The 1964 measurement by Penzias and Wilson with the Bell Lab's horn antenna, was very low resolution and really only gave a single temperature for the entire universe, 3.5 degrees above absolute zero, no detail at all, Only the fact that the universe was still glowing with microwave radiation. From 1989 to 1993, the CoBE, or Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite, mapped the microwave radiation from The Big Bang in a bit more detail. Structure of the early universe was becoming a bit clearer. From 2001 to 2010, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP, named after David Wilkinson, provided even more detail of the structure of the early universe. Things were becoming a bit clearer, And most currently, from 2010 to 2013, the Planck Satellite has given us our highest resolution view of the early universe, as it was only 375,000 years after The Big Bang. The temperature variations seen in these maps is very small, only two, 10 thousands of a degree between dark blue and bright red. But this is an indicator of the forces that set up the universe to form its vast webs of galaxies and superclusters, making the universe we see today, 13.8 billion years after The Big Bang. The detection of the cosmic microwave background sealed the deal for The Big Bang Theory. The Steady State Theory could not account for the microwave background, or the structures we see here. According to Stephen Hawking, the cosmic microwave background was the final nail in the coffin of the Steady State Theory.

- Thank you, Ron. Ron's discussion of Edwin Hubble, reminds me of another Limerick from our Cemetery of Dead Science Ideas. This one's for the NASA Space Shuttle Program, birth, 1981 death 2011. Since NASA's funding was scuttled, retiring the last of its shuttles, all trips to space stations involve other nations and no one's returned to the Hubble. Up next, we'll pass it over to my colleague, Kate O'Donald, who's part of the environment team at the Exploratorium. She's also the curator for our Odd Salon Collaboration. And she'll be sharing more about that, as well as introducing tonight's speakers, here's Kate

- Hello, and welcome to the third and final installment of Odd Salon DECAY, an Exploratorium residency. My name is Kate O'Donnell, I'm a senior project specialist with the Exploratorium, but come to you tonight with my Harvey hat as an Odd Salon fellow and the fortunate curator of Odd Salon DECAY. This has been such a wonderful collaboration for us. And by us, I'm speaking on behalf of both the Exploratorium and Odd Salon. In many ways, one of the core values that both organizations has, is the notion that anyone can learn anything. Whether that's science and art, or storytelling and public speaking. It's been a fantastic pairing and I wanna give the big thanks to both the Exploratorium and Odd Salon for this opportunity. Now, for the newer Oddlins among us, Odd Salon is much more than a program. We are a beautiful community of amazing nerds, and the love for you to join us. We are made up of Odd Salon fellows, speakers and our incredible rowdy shouty audience. Now, during these bizarre pandemic times, we are doing a series of online programming. We look for announcements about our upcoming Odd Salon: SHORTS! in November, as well as private community events for our members and patriot supporters You can find info about all of that @oddsalon.com, or join our mailing list there, or find us on our Facebook group, called somethingweird. If you would like to speak at Odd Salon, watch for curation announcements there, or send your genius ideas to oddsalon.com/speak. And we have a mascot Harvey, Eva Potinger, who loves to travel the world, though these days he's sheltering in place at home like the rest of us. If you can find your own adventure Harveys to travel with, whenever we are allowed to do that again, including plugged up to Harvey. At the Odd Shop, you'll also find the irregular, Odd Salon's new print journal, and these amazing applied Harvey patches. Now, if we weren't in the middle of a pandemic, we'd all be in the same room and it would be a loud one. This is not a quiet show, we have a number of callbacks, or in this case, excuses to shout at your computer, including science and ships and art, pumpkin arts. Now, as I mentioned, this is our third and final installment of Odd Salon DECAY. On October 8th for After Dark Online: Dust to Dust, Odd Salon fellow, Amy Widdowson, shared the story of the first female American geologist, Francis Bascom. And first-time Odd Salon speaker, Kate Rackley, questioned the Anthropocene. On October 15th, at After Dark Online: All That Remains, Odd Salon fellow Christina Lou, regaled us with a tragic tale of the world's oldest tree. And Odd Salon fellow Egan Hirvela, told us about the strange, but true phenomenon of some saints' none-decomposing bodies. Tonight, we conclude our Odd Salon DECAY residency with After Dark Online: Cemetery Of Dead Science. The Exploratorium own Marc Wilson, will be speaking about Soviet farming failures. And odd salon fellow Kristin Hugo, will discuss how our understanding of dinosaurs has evolved over time. But first, let's talk a little bit about this idea of Dead Science. The Cemetery of Dead Science is one of my favorite annual traditions at the Exploratorium. If the museum was open right now, you'd see a graveyard of tombstones with outdated scientific theories on them all explained via Limerick. I love Limericks, so, yeah, you're getting one, just wait. Now, Odd Salon DECAY, we've been following the story of the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, and his immortality ideation. First, we explored his astonishing tomb and its rivers of mercury, then his court alchemist's epic quest for the elixir of immortality. But packing all the things for the afterlife and searching for the elixir of life, we're the only weapons Qin Shi Huang's fight against decay, this man took supplements, mercury supplements. Which brings us to our first Dead Science Theory of Odd Salon DECAY tonight, Mercury is Good for You. Now, mercury was known to many ancient civilizations. It mostly occurs as deposits in cinnabar, this beautiful shiny stone. And cinnabar was used to make the red pigment for million, as far back as 9,000 years ago in Turkey as well as an ancient Greece and Rome, the middle East and across ancient parts of America. Mercury in its pure liquid state, was known to ancient Chinese and Hindus over 4,000 years ago and has been found in ancient Egyptian Bureau ill sites from 3,500 years ago. Mercury was used in ointments in ancient Greece, in cosmetics in ancient Rome and in ancient China, it was used as a health supplement to extend life. Thus began a trans continental millennium-long obsession with the element and faith in its therapeutic healing properties. There's just one thing about that though, as I'm sure you know, mercury is highly toxic. If say, hypothetically speaking, you were that clumsy kid in chemistry class who broke their big beautiful mercury thermometer and your teacher freaked out, there's a reason why they did. And I'm sorry again about that. Now, mercury is so harmful, that in a lot of areas, pregnant women have to watch the amount of fish they eat to avoid harmful amounts of it. Mercury expose their damages to the nervous, digestive and immune systems, it damages the kidneys, and if inhaled in the lungs, and can be fatal. Almost inexplicably and despite this, throughout history it's been used as medicine. In ancient China, beginning in the warring states period and going through at least the 1,700, cinnabar, mercury pills, were used as a means of extending life. It was used as a skin ointment in ancient Greece and the middle East, and rose to widespread popularity for treating syphilis in the 16th through 19th Century Europe. Hence, one of the popular modes of treatment was being rubbed all over by mercury appointment, then place next to a fire in a confined space to inhale the subsequent mercurial vapors. Managing to poison both your outsides and your insides. It was taken in pill form in Europe and America up through the early 1900s. Mercury was lotted to treat everything from constipation to smallpox, cholera, malaria, gout, melancholy, parasites, you name it. Someone was probably saying mercury could treat it. Mercury was a key ingredient in a couple of different, very popular medicines, including Calomel and the Blue Mass, Abe Lincoln was known to take the ladder. And it was a key ingredient in, and yes, this is utterly horrifying, a teething powder for babies that you would rub on their gums, which maybe work cause it causes nerve damage, I don't know. It was also advertised as making your baby fat as a pig. We're just gonna move on because of image is the stuff of nightmares. Scientists didn't really start studying mercury poisoning until the 1920s. So, what took us so long? Well, there are different theories and reasons, but one is, that people mistook the effects of mercury poisoning as worsening symptoms of whatever ailment they were taking the mercury for. How is it possible that so many people got it so wrong? It's a complex answer, 'cause the rationale for mercury use, varies with time period, geography and ailment. When used for syphilis, it's primary purpose was to make someone salivate more, as that was believed to help rid the body of the peas. With other ailments, it seems like it's more a matter of tradition or past practice. Like it'd been known to generations as a healing element, so continued to be thought of as such. And let's face it, mercury is pretty amazing, it's the only metal that's liquid at room temperature and it looks like liquid silver. It's used to purify gold. And that process has been discovered in China before its first documented medicinal use there. It's really not hard to imagine the mental leap from this incredible substance having the power to purify gold, to it having the power to remove impurities from human bodies. Unfortunately, it did the opposite. Qin Shi Huang's cinnabar supplements are most likely what ended up killing him. And in a sense, Qin Shi Huang did achieve a different sort of immortality. His legacy and accomplishments have uniquely lived on in the country he helped unite. It's not the flavor of immortality he was looking for. Sadly, Qin Shi Huang was about the first of a long line of Chinese emperors to die from mercury poisoning, most recently, in the 1700s. It is pastime to raise the tombstone of Dead Science for therapeutic mercury, Which means it's lyric time. When you are laid off and so very sick, there's one thing to heal you and fix you up quick. Mercury's the cure, but don't be so sure, it's fatal and highly toxic. That made me happy. All right, now, it is easy to look back with horror, or sometimes even the laughter at the things people once thought were true. But I wanna make a couple quick notes before we get to this evening speakers. The first point is that science is a process. Everything we know now, is built on things we knew or thought we knew before. It's part of the process of evidence-based thinking. When new evidence arises, conclusions can change. We know now that mercury is poisonous. The issue isn't whether theories get disproven, it's what we do with that information when they are. Unfortunately, despite all evidence to the contrary, mercury is still used in some health supplements today, including this popular over-the-counter Chinese supplement where one dose has than 100,000 times the recommended daily limit for mercury exposure. Which brings me to the second point. Just because new evidence and knowledge arises that conflicts with prior theories, that doesn't mean science isn't to be trusted. In fact, that evolution is exactly why we do trust it. Holding on to theories that have since been disproven is anti-science. And we're gonna see examples of both 0.1 and 0.2 tonight. And so, I would like to raise a toast with tonight's invocation from The Great Carl Sagan. "Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge." Cheers. And with that, I'd like to welcome to the proverbial stage, the Exploratorium own Marc Wilson, here for his second time on the Odd Salon Stage. Welcome Marc.

- Hi, I'm Marc Wilson, I work at the Exploratorium in Institutional Advancement, and I'm really happy to be able to give an Odd Salon talk about Lysenkoism, so, I'm gonna jump right in. On August six, 1940 in the Ukrainian town of Chernivtsi near Romania, Nikolai Vavilov was intercepted from field work by four men in a black car. He was an agronomist, geneticists and botanist of International Repute, Director of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences from 1924, until this ulcer a few years earlier. He was never on "Magnum, P.I" however. More than one person has told me that my little drawing here looks like somebody called Higgins, let's put that out of our heads. Because Vavilov was the voice of agricultural expertise in the Soviet Union, which was, if you don't know, forever famine struck. His job now, was to plan for putting land captured from the Nazis under cultivation. This was the middle of World War II, so it was important. But he snatched the job over the head of a dangerous secret-police-connected rival, Trofim Lysenko. Vavilov and Lysenko had fought for years and for Lysenko, this was the last straw. "Cause in the USSR, even farm science was a bloodsport. Two weeks later in Lubyanka prison, after a 12-hour interrogation, Vavilov falsely confessed to a decade of sabotage against the Soviet agriculture that he'd actually done so much to improve. Worst irony of all, he start off to death three years later in the gulags. 3000 Soviet biologists and Ag experts would join Vavilov as victims of lyLysenko, or already had. Solzhenitsyn, in his "Gulag Archipelago", describes waves and waves of foreign criminals sent to the camps as far back as 1931, bad harvests were treated as sabotage. Farmers refused to put into effect the profound instructions of Trofim Lysenko, others carried out Lysenko directives to precisely exposing their absurdity. In the City of _, agronomists sewed, flax on the snow, exactly as Lysenko had ordered. Well, hold on, flax on the snow, but that was not all, all over the USSR seeds were ordered chilled, heated, soaked in water before being planted at unusual times of year. It's what the plants crave. Unsurprisingly, Solzhenitsyn continues, these seeds swelled up, the grew moldy, died, the big fields lay empty for a year. Lysenko could not say that the snow was a peasant saboteur, or that he himself was an ass, and the agronomists were sent off to Siberia. So, who the hell was this Lysenko? A Kulak or peasant-class Ukrainian, who would let it be nicknamed the barefoot scientist. He was only taught to read at 13, got a correspondence school education from Kiev, and at 26 became a junior researcher in Azerbaijan deep in Borat Country, Okay? Borat's from Kazakhstan. But it was a great time to be a peasant-born person of revolutionary ideas. The country was being run by a peasant-born dictator, who loved the Kulak-makes-good story. And Stalin was a man of ideas himself. Before the revolution, Stalin wrote and edited at a Bolshevik Newspaper, weighing in on philosophy, political theory, biology with biology, Stalin hated Darwinism. He favored an alternative account of evolution that did not depend upon the random and was all about the power of collective will. What was this exciting philosophy that says reality is shaped by our intentions? Okay, it wasn't that stuff, but there are similarities. What Stalin liked was Lamarckism. Lamarck's ideas of the inheritance-acquired characteristics was wrong, but don't blame Lamarck for that. He died a quarter century before "On the Origin of Species" was published. It was Lamarck's 20th century Soviet Revival that spelled trouble. Lamarck's idea hardly sounds scary, is that we pass our experiences onto our offspring, a bodybuilder will have more muscular children, for example. Or consider the giraffe, Lamarck's classic example, was that each generation of giraffe straining for leaves, cruise kids who had longer and longer necks, as depicted in this ridiculous cartoon that I made. Why did I make this ridiculous cartoon? Well, I could. And you might remember Lamarck a little better because of it. So, what should we remember? That this is not a theory of natural selection, but one where the experience of the organism guides it's evolution. That is what Soviet science believes could inform its seed development and its foreign policies. Quick aside. I've been throwing around fighting words like pseudoscience, and many of you have heard of the current and very, very real theory in biology, called epigenetics, in which experienced traumas can be passed down. Epigenetics, which again, very real, studies system shocks affecting the genetic system which reproduce, but aren't genes. Examples could be methyl ions clinging to the spine of the DNA chain, changing how DNA is read out, or Histone groups, which are nodes in the chromosomes that steer how DNA chains wrap and pack up. These are not in the DNA code, but affect how DNA is expressed in developing cells and bodies. In other words, science stuff, technical, nuanced, detailed driven stuff. Which is a big difference because Lamarck did not know about and Lysenko did not ever wants to know about genes or any mechanisms of heritability. Soviet biology was all about the belief, that more than genetic machines, plants, act in accord with dialectical materialism, wheat and peas are socialists too. Lysenko's key program was called vernalization, an assertion that by temperature treating seeds, crops could be retrained or even shifted in species to grow a new climates or new times of year, opening up a whole second harvest cycle. And the stakes were dire. The USSR, hoping to do capitalism one better during its great depression, launched their first five-year plan, including farm Collectivization. This was a seizure of all produce from the Kulak or peasant class meeting fierce resistance, harvest yields plummeted. The secret police expanded and the Gulag System was formed. A drought and famine and Ukraine were weaponized by Stalin in a campaign called The Holodomor, or a great starving. Political resistance and Ukraine to Collectivization was crushed by withholding food. This is one of the atrocities of world history that was pretty effectively hidden by its perpetrators. So, estimated death tolls very wildly, but probably 4 million people starved to death. That's the world of agriculture into which Lysenko began to fail upward. In Azerbaijan 1928, he went to rise to peas, then wheat, then verbalized wheat planting it on spring, and went from heating seeds to chilling, remember sewing them in the snow, then switched over and tried it all in potatoes. Most of it didn't work. The findings were cherry picked and appeared more often in prov than scientific journals, but Lysenko had a talent for announcing a success and jumping to the next project before the last one caught up with him. By 1938, even as total food output was declining in the USSR. The Head of VASHKhNIL, Nikolai Vavilov, was fired and Lysenko was running the joint. Meanwhile, failures continued. After the war, Stalin announced to be turning Siberia into an even-like bread basket. Lysenko led the charge with an idea about planting trees in dense single-species clumps, so they could help each other out communistic. The trees did not cooperate with this idea and all died. But and very lovely oratorial about the plan. But that same year as the tree gig, 1948, Lysenko made a bland announcement to the Academy that he ran. Which the great Stephen Jay Gould called, the most chilling passage in all the literature of 20th Century science. What Lysenko announced was just, the central committee of the party has examined my report and approved it. This meant in context, that Lamarckian and Lysenko views of biology and agriculture, had Stalin's ironclad support and were state policy upon pain of death. There was the fate of Vavilov. There was Hermann Mueller, not the airon chair guy, but the Nobel Laureate, who narrowly escaped the USSR from Lysenko alive. Here's a before and after of Geneticist Vladimir Efroimson, before and after a 20-year prison sentence. Biologists Zhores Medvedev, wrote secretly for years to compile this book about Lysenkoism, published at the seemingly safe date of 1969. But the state figured, even then Medvedev had gone one step too far and institutionalized him for paranoid delusions of reforming society. Science victims of Lysenkoism are estimated at over 3000 in all. Here's a list of some from the book, "The Lysenko Affair", 11 pages of Exile, Jail or Kill the Scientists. But the number of people who died of famine during the siege of Leningrad, or the drought of 1948, is inestimable. Trofim Lysenko probably killed more human beings than any individual scientist in history, wrote the author of a 2017 piece in "The Atlantic". Finally, during the 1960s, with Stalin in the rear-view mirror, and Khrushchev's thaw, Lysenko's influence finally wavered. Andrei Sakharov gave perhaps, the most appointed public denunciation of him in 1964, he said Lysenko's responsible for the shameful backward as a Soviet biology, he said Lysenko is responsible for the defamation firing arrests, even death of many genuine scientists. So, ouch. Lysenko's horrible fate, he had to go work in this hellhole. True, his institute of genetics at the Lenin Hills Estate outside Moscow, was stripped of its title and name, and he was left simply running an experimental farm there, he died peacefully in 1976. The Soviet Union was not big on admitting embarrassments. But the global reach of Soviet Communism, meant the Lysenkoism had long been spread around the world. China, to take just one example, where 30 million died of famine in the 1950s, used Lysenkoist planting schemes. And today, part of Putin's current whole over Russia lay in Ostalgia, you might call it, make Russia great again. Be it the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church, or the quiet, but real celebration of Stalin, Russia today is heavy on Ostalgia. And the very legitimate new science behind epigenetics in the way that it sort of rhymes with Lamarckism Evolved, has offered a toehold for dozens of writers in Russia, who want to look back to Lysenko as a vindicated visionary, even if it looks to the rest of us like a Halloween zombie coming back from the grave. So, in our fraud present, I would like to give a toast to the ever luminous Carl Sagan. Considering the Lysenkoism, Sagan wrote, and I am sorry, but I've gotta do the voice. Americans tend to shake their heads in astonishment with the Soviet experience, the idea that some states endorsed ideology, or popular prejudice would hog tie scientific progress seems unthinkable. For 200 years, Americans have prided themselves on being impractical, pragmatic, non-ieological people. And yet, their political and psychological pseudoscience has flourished in the United States, on risk for example. So, let us toast then to Sagan. And to reason, to government non-interference in science, to anti-racism, and to wearing your damn mask.

- Oh wow. You did the Sagan voice way better than I ever could, thank you so much Marc. You all should know that Marc did every single one of those illustrations, they're so great. The next step, our final speaker for our Exploratorium residency with Odd Salon DECAY, here to tell you about Derby dinosaurs, Odd Salon fellow, Kristin Hugo.

- Hi, I'm Christine, I'm from the New York chapter of Odd Salon. Although I just moved to the fossil fish capital of the world in Wyoming. And today I'm doing a presentation on Terrible Lizards. So, how dinosaur art used to be really really terribly wrong and how maybe it still is. I want to show you the evolution of animal called Iguanodon. Here's the oldest Iguanodon. Here's a little bit newer, but still very, very old, like hundreds. And here it is standing up right with his tail dragging. And here's the most recent one. But these are not changes that the actual animal underwent in time, these are the changes of how we viewed the animal. Now, if you ever go to the Crystal Palace in London, England, in the garden, there are all these dinosaur statues. And you might not really learn very much about how actual dinosaurs lugged because they're all wrong, but you will still learn something very important. You will learn that this is an important part of our history of how we used to reconstruct dinosaurs. And the fact that bad interpretations are just part of the scientific Follies that are part of the history of any type of science. Now, when I say dinosaur reconstructions, I mean drawings, sculptured, emotions, movies, games, toys. And no like actual necromancy yet. Creating reconstructions for dinosaurs is almost kind of like speculative biology, because there's so much that we don't know. And it's kind of a miracle that it even happens, how are you gonna look at something like this and figure out how much fat and this animal had? The color, the sounds the behavior, did this thing raise its young? How would I know? It's just a pile of bones, and with dinosaurs, it's not even bones, it's just rocks. And also this is a trick question, because this is a combination of other and coyote bones. Now, surprisingly, we can sometimes find evidence of all these things, it's just pretty rare and pretty significant when we do, but at first we got a lot wrong. So, for starters, here is a reconstruction from 1663, the paleontologist, they found some place to see bones. So, like "Ice Edge" kind of animals. And they made this unicorn steel thing. Now, what could they have gotten wrong? It was actually a wooly mammoth and wooly rhino, these are the bones that they actually were. in there herds since they are not too dissimilar from actual elephant and actual rhino bones, but that's what they reconstructed. And it is pretty fine to laugh at these terrible drawings. Especially this one, I'm pretty sure they put their eyeball in the wrong hole, the eye socket is like up here, and then in the front you have an intermural fenestra, it's just what has happened here. And for real, there was a time when people believed that dinosaurs would drag their bellies on the ground, just like this. And it kinda makes sense, 'cause alligators do that, right? And they're pretty close to dinosaurs, but that's very very wrong, that reconstruction. And a lot of this changed in the dinosaur Renaissance of the late 1960s. During this time, dinosaurs were imagined as more active warm-blooded animals, they also became more popular in pop culture. Here's some covers of some 1987 books that were full of dino art. That was getting much closer to what we see as dinosaurs today. Now, we're not quite there yet though. Dinosaur science and pop culture became sort of cyclical, where when you have these new discoveries, getting people excited and there's movies about them and then there's more interest in paleontology and more people go into it, maybe there's more funding for it, then you get more paleontology. And then there's more stuff to put in the news, because we have more discoveries. Now, we have more bones and eggs and footprints that now we can more accurately reconstructing animals from the remains. For example, this is a very important Archaeopteryx with the exceedingly clear that Theropods like Velociraptor, are related to birds. And most likely, at least to some extent, in this case, to a large extent, had feathers. So,` this is also a really important picture from 1969. So, kind of at the beginning height of the dinosaur Renaissance, it would show these theropod dinosaurs is fast and agile and active, but of course still naked. Here's another Raptor from 2015. So, this is much more accurate by Emily Welby, but things like the color, I don't know how accurate that is at all. It seems to make sense, it's kind of like a modern bird. And this is one of my favorites. So, this is a Scansoriopterygid, that's the family of dinosaurs. And this is from 2010, is a National Geographic reconstruction and it had the long fingers and like, we need to go long fingers or maybe it was trying to get grubs at the trees or something. And then five years later, paleontologists discovered this guy, et Yi qi. And it's also a Scansoriopterygid. So, it probably had the same physical features. But this time we were able to see that it actually had skin between his fingers that would make bat wings. So, now we have this much more updated version without the weird gang-grief finger things. But to be fair, I don't even know if there's much less ridiculous if you think about it. So, with some animals, we actually do know a lot about them. Here's an example of something called Psittacosaurus, and sometimes melanosomes will fossilize. So, those are little pigments. And you can see if you have a very, very complete fossil, that this animal had all these colors on it, and we even know that it had that weird tail ornamentation. So, this is probably like one of the two or three most accurately known dinosaurs of all time and you've probably never heard of it, but its closest famous relative is Triceratops. And surprisingly we can actually even tell behavior of dinosaurs by looking at what amounts to rocks that are just casts of their whole bones. So, here's something called Maiasaura, mia meaning mother. And so, they found his adults Maiasaura by a nest of hatched babies. And so, if the babies weren't going out and fending for themselves, and they're all hanging out in the nest, that means the mama was bringing them food. And that tells us a lot about the social lives of this dinosaur, that they were good mothers. And so, then we also have some, we still have a lot of not really good art today, but I consider quintessential American to be these weird incorrect dinosaur statues. To me, accuracy is really, really important, but getting people excited is important too. So, if you wanna throw up a freaky monstrosity for your neighbors to climb on, good for you. And to be fair to the Terrible Lizards, imagine that we are maybe 65 million years in the future, or you're an alien or something, for some reason all the animals on earth, you've never seen one, maybe they're extinct, and you find a swan skeleton. If you're lucky, you'll put it together correctly like this, but you might do it completely wrong. And how are you gonna know from that that it had feathers, how are you gonna know that they were white feathers? You wouldn't know at all. So, you would just have to do your best guess. And you might notice that the hands are very, very pointy, and you throw some skin on it, and you make something like this. It makes sense that the hands are there for stabbing the prey, I don't know, you have to draw it somehow. And there was even a set of memes going around called, How Aliens Would Reconstruct This Animal. And my favorite example is the hippopotamus, here is what a hippopotamus skull actually looks like. If you're just gonna throw a skin on it, and you don't know if it has a lot of fatty tissue on it, or what color it is, of course you're gonna make this horrible monstrosity. And I need to be fair for those are quite dangerous, but they don't look like that at all. So, there's something of a poetic parallel between dinosaur fossils and dinosaur of reconstructions. We look back on extinct animals to see how life has changed, and we look back on old art to see how knowledge about life has changed. So, the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, they do contain important information. And we can kind of laugh at how weird and incorrect they are and sluggish, but remember, we're gonna continue to be wrong every day until we actually go back in time and see the dinosaurs. So, until then, cheers to being wrong.

- Thank you so much, Kristen. I am all about that unicorn seal. Well, thank you to all of our speakers and the Exploratorium for Odd Salon DECAY and Exploratorium residency, this concludes this program. Thank you so much for joining us. Please keep in touch, join our community. You can find out more @odd, O-D-D, salon.com, thanks.