Learn about what it would be like to travel through a wormhole, how the pumpkin became North America’s Halloween mascot, and how social isolation can fuel conspiracy theories.
Learn about what it would be like to travel through a wormhole, how the pumpkin became North America’s Halloween mascot, and how social isolation can fuel conspiracy theories.
What Would It Be Like to Ride Through a Wormhole? By Ashley Hamer
How Did Pumpkins Become Halloween’s Go-to Decoration? By Kelsey Donk
Social Isolation Could Breed Conspiracy Theorists by Anna Todd
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/why-social-isolation-could-breed-conspiracy-theorists
ASHLEY HAMER: Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity.com. I'm Ashley Hamer.
NATALIA REAGAN: And I'm Natalia Reagan. Today, you'll learn about what it would be like to travel through a wormhole, how the pumpkin became North America's Halloween mascot, and how social isolation can fuel conspiracy theories.
ASHLEY HAMER: Let's satisfy some curiosity. Wormholes are everywhere in science fiction from Contact to Interstellar, to Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. But are they science fact? No one actually knows. There are powerful theories that predict them. But if they do exist, many scientific hurdles stand in the way of actually writing through one. But that doesn't mean that we can't imagine what it might be like.
Wormholes were originally suggested by physicists Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen in 1935 to avoid a messy detail in physics, the singularity. Singularities are points where the math reaches infinity, like a particle with all of its mass concentrated into an infinitely small point. Einstein and Rosen argued that you could technically avoid a singularity by extending that point into a path that leads to a second location.
Like if you had a balloon with a dot on either side to each represent a singularity, Einstein and Rosen's solution would be to push them inward toward each other and connect them, forming a tube-shaped path from one side of the balloon to the other. This was dubbed the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, what most people know as a wormhole. Theoretically, a wormhole could connect any two points together, whether that's two ends of a solar system or two completely separate universes. That's great for any space travelers who are limited by the pesky fact that, you know, faster than light travel is physically impossible.
Unfortunately, wormholes aren't really stable on their own. They open and close so quickly that not even a subatomic particle can make it through. To fix that, you would need to buttress the wormhole from the inside with exotic matter, which has negative pressure and energy density. There are other problems, too, like the fact that at least one end of the wormhole is a black hole, which could spaghettify you the moment you enter.
But say, we live in a sci-fi universe, an alternate reality where physicists have fixed all of these problems and wormholes are an everyday travel method. What would that look like? Well, you'd begin by freefalling through the outer horizon of a black hole. Once you reached the event horizon, you'd see a super bright flash of light from the outside world containing an image of the entire history of the universe. No big.
As you entered the wormhole itself, things would look warped, kind of like an extreme fisheye lens. Eventually, the flow of space would turn around. And instead of being pulled inward, you'd be pushed outward until you saw another flash of light, this time containing the entire future of the universe. After a third flash of light upon reaching a white hole's outer horizon, you'd reach your destination. Sign me up, that sure beats public transit.
NATALIA REAGAN: Feel like I've been through some wormholes lately, man. 2020 is like a giant wormhole, wouldn't you say?
ASHLEY HAMER: Right, yeah. I feel like I see my entire past and my entire future. And I'm stuck doing nothing and going nowhere.
NATALIA REAGAN: All while being spaghettified.
ASHLEY HAMER: Exactly.
[LAUGHTER]
NATALIA REAGAN: [SIGHS] It's that time of year again. Pumpkins are showing up in the front of grocery stores. Social media is awashed in pumpkin patch pics. And you can practically smell the pumpkin spice wafting from your local coffee shop. But how did pumpkins become Halloween's go-to decoration? Although pumpkins are native to North America, the tradition of putting pumpkins out at Halloween traces its roots back to Ireland and Scotland. And it all has to do with the Jack in jack-o'-lantern.
According to Irish myth, there was once a man named Stingy Jack. Stingy Jack invited the devil to come out for a drink with him. But Stingy Jack was, well, stingy. And he didn't want to pay for the drink. Instead he tricked the devil into turning himself into a coin Jack could use to buy the drinks. Pretty clever actually.
Then Stingy Jack just pocketed the coin. He kept tricking the devil like this until the day Stingy Jack died. God wouldn't let Stingy Jack into heaven for obvious reasons. But the devil also wouldn't take him in because he'd been so mean. Imagine being so mean the devil doesn't even want you.
Instead, the devil sent Jack off on his own with a burning coal to light his way. Jack put the coal inside a turnip he carved out to make a lantern. Ever since, he's roamed the world with his turnip lantern. The Irish call his ghost the Jack of the lantern or the jack-o'-lantern. People in Ireland and Scotland used to carve their own turnips or potatoes into jack-o'-lanterns in the tradition of the Stingy Jack legend. They'd carve scary faces and put their lanterns in the window to scare away the ghost of Stingy Jack.
When it came to North America, immigrants from Ireland and Scotland found pumpkins, which didn't exist back home. They started carving up these as jack-o-lanterns for Samhain, the Celtic fall festival that was the precursor to Halloween. We know people were carving pumpkins in 1866. And by the 1920s, Halloween had become a fully American holiday. People started having parties and wearing costumes. And then children started trick or treating. Then, of course, farmers started growing pumpkins specifically for carving.
By the 1960s, a farmer in Massachusetts had developed the perfect carving pumpkin with a thick stem, shallow ribs, and thin flesh. And that's still the pumpkin most of us use for our jack-o'-lanterns today. How do you like those pumpkins?
ASHLEY HAMER: In learning about this, I also learned that, yeah, North America is pretty much the place where we use pumpkins for Halloween. I don't think they do it a lot in Australia or many places in Europe. It's mostly an American thing.
The pandemic has made a lot of people lonely. It's also led to a whole new crop of conspiracy theories. According to research from Princeton University, these two things may actually be related. Social exclusion may make people more likely to believe in conspiracy theories.
For a study published in 2017, researchers had volunteers write about a recent unpleasant experience they had with friends and rate how excluded they felt. Then they answered questions relating to their search for purpose in life and their beliefs surrounding various conspiracies, such as pharmaceutical companies withhold cures for financial reasons and events in the Bermuda Triangle constitute evidence of the paranormal. You know, the classics.
The more excluded the participants felt, the more they desired meaning in their lives and the more likely they were to believe in the conspiracy theories. That showed the link between feeling excluded and harboring alternative beliefs. But a second experiment went a step further.
For that experiment, researchers told half of the volunteers that appear had chosen them as someone they wanted to work with on a project. They told the other half that no one had chosen them. Next, they had everyone read two conspiracy scenarios and a fictional good luck ritual. All stories that were ambiguous about whether some action by the characters had an effect on an outcome. The students made to feel excluded thought the characters were more accountable for the outcome of the story than those who felt included.
But why does this happen? Researchers suggest that it could be that social exclusion leads to feelings of meaninglessness. People feeling excluded and lonely may search for meaning elsewhere, which could lead them to endorse certain conspiracy beliefs. That's dangerous since conspiratorial thinking itself can further alienate a person, creating a cycle that can be very difficult to escape. The best fix may be for people, both loved ones and lawmakers, to help make people feel more included in society.
NATALIA REAGAN: Let's recap what we learned today to wrap up starting with, well, we learned that a wormhole links two different points in our universe or even separate universes. And since one end of the wormhole is actually a black hole, you would get fettuccinified the second you entered.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, there are theories about wormholes that say that the other end of a wormhole is a white hole, which many people may not have heard of. It's basically the opposite of a black hole. While a black hole has so much gravity that nothing can escape, a white hole doesn't let anything enter. So that's why you would be turned around and pushed out.
NATALIA REAGAN: OK.
ASHLEY HAMER: It's wild, though. It seems like wormholes are our best bet for actually traveling to distant places in the universe. And that's really sad because they're a very theoretical, probably not real, though.
NATALIA REAGAN: I mean, it, is awesome to think about the actual existence. I mean, Bill and Ted's was a huge part of my growing up experience. And honestly, I would love time traveler, even moving through different dimensions if there is the possibility going to an alternate universe, where 2020 is a wonderful year, and we're all just happy and doing fantastic. It would be pretty cool, right?
ASHLEY HAMER: Right. Well, 2020 was the year where the new Bill and Ted came out. So that was good. I actually had a whole Bill and Ted evening, where I watched the first one because I had never seen it. And then I watched the second one right afterward. And it was, oh, it was really good. It was really good. And I mean, Keanu as his teenage self, like, I mean, he wasn't his teenage self, but as that character as an adult was just, oh--
NATALIA REAGAN: I'll never get past Socrates. Socrates was a personal favorite. Oh, my goodness. But yeah, that movie. And I thought it was such a good job teaching history to an audience that maybe would not be jonesing and ready for some Joan of Arc action, you know?
ASHLEY HAMER: Absolutely. And we learned that the story of how pumpkins became the go-to decorative gourd for Halloween, at least in North America, began in Ireland with the tale of Stingy Jack, who is sentenced to live out his afterlife as a ghost because he was so stingy. At first, folks carved scary faces in turnips and potatoes to scare Stingy Jack away. But then once they came to North America, they found pumpkins, and the rest is history.
Have you ever seen a carved turnip? It is so much scarier than a carved pumpkin.
NATALIA REAGAN: I can imagine because it's got the pointy little chin and the big hair and everything.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, and it kind of already has like wrinkles in it. It's just, oh, boy, it looks like a very scary old man.
NATALIA REAGAN: Hey, Ashley, do you think that maybe Stingy Jack just wouldn't turn up? That was for you Cody. Would you drink a turnip spice latte?
ASHLEY HAMER: [LAUGHS]
NATALIA REAGAN: Come on.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, wow, that's an alternate dimension I don't want to visit.
NATALIA REAGAN: Noted. So we also discovered that conspiracy theories can be best spread through social isolation. This is because social isolation can foster feelings of meaninglessness. And that can lead to developing or adopting conspiracy theories. This also supports the idea that if you want to combat conspiracy theories, it's best to tread lightly and maybe be more inclusive, not too inclusive if it is the Unabomber, but somewhat inclusive, you know?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yep. Shaming people, making fun of people has never convinced a person to change their mind in the history of the world.
NATALIA REAGAN: Well, I mean, sometimes I react to a small amount of shame. But I've made videos in the past about herd immunity and vaccines. And this is very important when it comes to people who are uncomfortable with vaccines, especially because right now, obviously, we're working towards a COVID vaccine, you want to make sure everybody is on board. If we do have a vaccine, they will take it. You don't want to make people feel like they're idiots or morons because they don't have the same beliefs as you. It's about really sort of spreading the science communication in a way that's inclusive and palpable and easy for them to understand, but not because they're dumb, but because maybe they just have a different belief system than you.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. A thing that I've thought about a lot, like a personal theory of mind for conspiracy theories is like it makes people feel special, right? Because they've found the secret that nobody else knows. And usually, that secret involves some government agent taking a lot of time and interest in them or in them and the people like them. That actually is sort of in a weird way could be comforting, especially to someone who's very lonely.
NATALIA REAGAN: But yeah, they do feel like they cracked a code.
ASHLEY HAMER: I mean, that's exciting.
NATALIA REAGAN: Yeah.
ASHLEY HAMER: I get it.
NATALIA REAGAN: Essentially, they can be their own Mulder.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
NATALIA REAGAN: Today's stories were written Ashley Hamer, Kelsey Donk, and Anna Todd, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who's the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: Scriptwriting was by Natalia Reagan and Sonja Hodgen. Today's episode was edited by Natalia Reagan and our producer is Cody Gough.
NATALIA REAGAN: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY HAMER: And until then, stay curious.
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