Learn how you experience the quantum world every day whenever you see or touch something; the one thing you should keep in mind if you want to make a great first impression; the next common English word that researchers say is going to go extinct; and how to interpret food expiration dates. In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: You Experience the Quantum World Every Time You See, Touch, or Smell — https://curiosity.im/2RViJMn To Make a Great First Impression, Keep One Thing in Mind — https://curiosity.im/2RXlbCp Food Expiration Dates Mean Almost Nothing — https://curiosity.im/2OKQVbV This Common English Word Is the Next One to Go Extinct, According to Research — https://curiosity.im/2ROWGqE Please tell us about yourself and help us improve the show by taking our listener survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/curiosity-listener-survey If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Learn how you experience the quantum world every day whenever you see or touch something; the one thing you should keep in mind if you want to make a great first impression; the next common English word that researchers say is going to go extinct; and how to interpret food expiration dates.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
Please tell us about yourself and help us improve the show by taking our listener survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/curiosity-listener-survey
If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron!
Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/expiration-dates-explained-how-to-make-a-great-first-impression-your-quantum-life-and-endangered-words
[MUSIC PLAYING] CODY GOUGH: Hi. We've got the latest and greatest from curiositydotcom to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today, you'll learn how you experience the quantum world every day. The one thing you should keep in mind if you want to make a great impression, and the next common English word that researchers say is going to go extinct. We'll also answer a listener question about food expiration dates.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity.
ASHLEY HAMER: So for most of us, quantum physics is almost imaginary. It's, essentially, something scientists tinker with in a lab somewhere that we've never seen.
CODY GOUGH: I know cats and boxes and poison are involved--
ASHLEY HAMER: Sure.
CODY GOUGH: --that's about it.
ASHLEY HAMER: But that's just a thought experiment. So that's not even real. But the thing is, we actually encounter quantum physics every day with the way we sense the world. So today, I'm going to give you a quick primer on the way you experience the quantum world every time you see, touch, or smell.
CODY GOUGH: That's a lot of the time.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, right? It's pretty much all the time. You can read all the details about how quantum physics helps you see, touch, and smell things on curiositydotcom and on the Curiosity app for Android and iOS. But I'll try to go through as many as I can in a few minutes. So sight is the easy one because light is a perfect example of the weirdness of the quantum world. Light exists both as a continuous wave and as a tiny little particle known as a photon.
Quantum objects existing as two things at once is something called superposition. And there was a really cool test done called the double slit experiment that showed how this works. This experiment showed that individual photons that pass through a wall with two slits produce patterns on a screen as if they're all waves interacting until you set up a photon detector to measure which slits each photon pass through and at that point, they produce two bright lines as if they're individual photons.
It basically says that they exist as both particles and waves until they're measured. At which point, they collapse into a single state. So are our eyes photon detectors? They might be. There are some studies that suggest that humans could be able to detect as little as a single photon at a rate better than chance.
So that opens up the possibility that our eyes can also detect quantum phenomena like superposition. Scientists are working on this. They've already tried to see whether human volunteers can detect quantum entanglement and there are plans in place to see if they can tell whether a photon is in superposition.
Probably, nothing will happen from these tests but you never know until you try. So what about your sense of touch? It's also based in the quantum world. Because even the densest object you've ever held is made up of mostly empty space. Matter is made of atoms and atoms are made of a very tiny nucleus surrounded by even tinier electrons orbiting at a huge distance away.
Seriously, if you blew the nucleus up to the size of a marble, you'd have to traverse the length of a football field to reach the farthest electrons. That is a lot of nothing in every atom. So things only feel solid because of quantum physics. Specifically, that's because of something called the Pauli exclusion principle, which, basically, says that there's a limit to how many electrons can hang out in a specific orbit around an atom.
For an electron, from an atom in your hand to get into an atom in your coffee cup, would require way more energy than your hand can exert. So instead, those electrons repel each other and to you, that feels like you're touching a solid object. It's possible that your sentences of hearing, and taste also come down to quantum physics but we don't have the experiments to really verify that yet. But who knows? We may find out that every classical physics phenomenon we experience is really the work of quantum physics. Who says there's a dividing line between the two anyway?
CODY GOUGH: They say first impressions are everything. And if you want to make a good first impression, according to research, there's just one thing you have to do to nail it. Can you do this?
ASHLEY HAMER: I've actually been consciously working on this, and it really does work. I feel like I'm giving away things to people who have met me recently, but yeah. I was definitely doing this when I was meeting you.
CODY GOUGH: All right then. Well, according to a 2009 study from the University of Waterloo, there is one thing you can keep in mind above all else to help you make a great first impression and get the people you meet to like you right away. Here it is. If you go into an encounter with a new person, thinking that person will like you, they probably will. Ah. The power of self confidence. Anticipating someone is going to like you can act as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The study's authors say, quote, "If people expect acceptance, they will behave warmly, which in turn will lead other people to accept them. If they expect rejection, they will behave coldly, which will lead to less acceptance." Unquote. But it's not easy to be confident in yourself. One way to help boost your confidence is with a little positive self-talk.
Things like, "They're going to really like me." A 2015 study published by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology found that self affirmations really do have the power to calm your jitters and boost your confidence. And keep in mind that confidence isn't a skill, it's an emotion. You can manage it. Get rid of thoughts like, "I'm lucky to be here and I hope I do well." Instead, say to yourself, "Confidence is a thing I can totally manage." You've got this.
Just imagine you're telling someone about Curiosity Daily. You just know they'll love it. In fact, why don't you go to that right now and see what happens? Wink wink, nudge, nudge.
ASHLEY HAMER: We got a listener question from Cola Samuel who writes, "I ran into an argument with my friends on when food goes bad and this led to a lot of research on sell by, expiry, and best before dates. A lot of sources online make it seem like it's just a suggestion and throwing food away simply because it's past its expiration date is wasteful. The source even claimed that it's safe to drink milk past its expiration date since it's pasteurized. How true is any of this? Should I really stop ignoring the dates?" Great question, Cola.
Food labeling can vary from country to country. So to keep things simple, I'm going to go with what we've got here in the United States. Well, it seems that we're not alone in our Weird labeling rules. I definitely suggest doing a bit of digging into your own country's food packaging regulations to know for sure.
So here in the States, you'll generally see at least one of three dates. Use by, best by, and sell by. Generally, the use by date is when the manufacturer thinks the product might be unsafe to eat. The best buy date is when they think it isn't going to taste good anymore. And the sell by date is to let stores know when to rotate their inventory.
But I did say generally. There aren't any federal standards for expiration dates. So this stuff varies from state to state and product type to product type. But there's a bigger problem. Expiration dates aren't even a good way to know if a food is safe. Studies show that most pathogens don't really care how long a food has been in the fridge. And an unexpired date can lull you into a false sense of security.
In the end, use your own best judgment. If something smells or tastes off, bulges or molds, or has been out of the fridge for more than two hours, throw it out. But if it's just past its best by date, it's probably fine. Thanks for your question, Cola.
CODY GOUGH: For our last story, we're going to ride into the sunset with the next English word that might ride into the sunset. Now look, I know English is not the first language of all our listeners, but this is a kind of interesting look at how language evolves. So I hope you stick around. Ashley, what word do you think is going to go away first?
ASHLEY HAMER: Probably something ancient like thou. Is it thou?
CODY GOUGH: It's not that. You'll be surprised. We all know that language changes over time. I mean, how often do you say stuff like, forsooth, I miss like thy flighty Swain. I mean, I say it kind of regularly. But you know what I mean. But did you know there's actually such a thing as evolutionary language scientists? Yeah. That exists.
And in 2009, a team from the University of Reading, appropriately, looked at the life cycle of words to figure out the next batch of words likely to go extinct. They analyzed the family of Indo-European languages. That includes most of the languages spoken throughout Europe and Asia. And they were looking to see how quickly different words have evolved in order to predict future changes to our vocabulary.
According to them, as much as 50% of the words we use today would be unrecognizable to our ancestors living 2,500 years ago. Keep that in mind before you jump in your time machine. So which words are on the chopping block next? First in line, apparently, is the word dirty.
ASHLEY HAMER: What?
CODY GOUGH: Based on their analysis, that word is just going to go away sometime in the next 750 years with the most rapid rate of evolution of all the words they studied. They say that adjectives and adverbs evolve quickly, which means they can die out and get replaced pretty fast. Other quickly evolving words are conjunctions and prepositions like and, or, but, on, over, and against. And the words with the most staying power are numerals and nouns.
After the word dirty, some of the other words due for replacement include throw, stick, guts, and squeeze. And they could go away within the next 1,000 years or so. To make these predictions, the researchers applied the theory of evolution through natural selection to language and use the IBM supercomputer team's Blue to crunch the numbers.
But really, only time will tell if the sentence, "Squeeze the dirty guts" will make any sense to people living in the 3000s.
ASHLEY HAMER: Before we wrap up, we want to give a special shout out to one of our Patreons for supporting our show. Today's episode is brought to you by Dr. Mary Yancey who gets an executive producer credit today for her generous support on Patreon.
CODY GOUGH: If you're listening and you want to support Curiosity Daily, then visit Patreon.com/curiositydotcom all spelled out. That's where you can join other curious listeners we love to thank for supporting our show like Paul Larson, Ryan Day, and Emily at any price that works for your budget. Even $1 or $2 a month. That's less than you paid for that expired gallon of milk in your fridge.
ASHLEY HAMER: Plus you can get Patreon exclusive rewards like bonus episodes and uncut interviews. And a shout out to our new Patreons including Jordan Sanford and Jon Friesen. You guys rock. One more time, that's Patreon.com/curiositydotcom.
CODY GOUGH: Join us again tomorrow for the award winning Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Stay curious.
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