Quirks and Quarks

00:00 All your favorite CBC Podcasts are now available on YouTube. The best in award-winning true crime investigations, hilarious comedies, vibrant pop culture conversations, and even more audio series are all available on CBC Podcasts' YouTube channel. You'll also find exclusive video first episodes, YouTube shorts, and behind-the-scenes content from our hosts and producers that you can't find anywhere else. So if YouTube is your go-to source for podcasts, just search CBC Podcasts and hit subscribe, and you'll never miss the latest updates. 00:30 This is a CBC Podcast. 00:34 Hi, I'm Bob McDonald. Quirks & Quarks is celebrating a half-century of science programming on CBC Radio. Here's an encore presentation of our 50th anniversary show recorded last fall. Enjoy! 00:49 Let me take you back to 1975. 00:52 It was the year Canada adopted the metric system. The CN Tower opened. 00:57 On a stormy night in November, the Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior. 01:02 Saturday Night Live debuted, created by a Canadian producer. And the Toronto Maple Leafs were mired in an eight-year drought of not having won the Stanley Cup. 01:18 And on October 8th of 1975, Canadians across the country heard this for the very first time. 01:35 Good evening, this is Quirks and Quarks. 01:41 I'm David Suzuki. 01:48 Welcome to my show, a weekly peek into the world of science and scientists. 01:53 Well, hi, I'm Bob McDonald, and welcome to my show. 01:58 And the 50th anniversary of Quirks and Quarks. 02:06 Yes. 02:08 We're here at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. And it's unbelievable, but it's been five decades and roughly 2,000 programs. So we're celebrating. And we're celebrating here at the Perimeter Institute, where they are marking their own 25th anniversary. Now, we're going to talk about the last 50 years of science that we've covered on the show, but we're also going to rocket into the future and talk about a group of Canadian researchers from a wide range of disciplines about what the next 50 years might hold. 02:40 So you're getting a full century of science. These people are putting a little bit on the line here because we might hold them to their predictions. 02:50 in our 2075 anniversary episode of the show. 02:55 But first, we have a very special treat for you. In early 1975, Quirks & Quarks was just a dream, a twinkle in the eye of a CBC producer named Diana Feiler. Now, Diana is still with us at the ripe old age of, as she says, 34 Celsius. 03:16 I think that starts with a nine. 03:19 50 years later, she agreed to tell us the origin story of Canada's favorite radio program. I spoke to her at her home in Vancouver just a couple of weeks ago. Here's part of that conversation. 03:30 I'm sure you've heard this before, but Diana, welcome to Quirks and Quarks. 03:37 Thank you so much. 03:40 Do you work there too? I do, yeah. I do do. I enjoy it. It's a wonderful program. So take me back to 1975. Where did the idea come from to do a science show on CBC Radio? 03:52 Yeah, science. I had a show called Jerusalem, and we would have science items in it. And I said, let's have a whole show and not just items. No, said everybody. But was it Peter Zosky? It was Morningside. 04:10 And Morningside had little items. And they said, we don't need a whole show. And I said, but the department is called Arts and Science. And you've got all these art shows. You've got music, drama, comedy. 04:24 I used to work on Morningside. I was one of the science contributors to Morningside, I believe. 04:27 Yeah, but you were an item. 04:30 Okay, so was it hard to convince management to do a science show? 04:34 It took two years, but at one point during that two years, I went to an old UBC reunion in Toronto, UBC. 04:44 And David Suzuki was there too. So... 04:49 After we'd had Chad and things, I asked him would he be interested in doing a science item for us on radio. 05:01 But then I gave him my card, and darned if he didn't answer it. 05:06 Somehow I got money for a trip to Washington for the AAAS meeting. Do I have to say what it is? 05:14 American Association for the Advancement of Science. 05:16 Thank you. 05:18 And while I was there, while we were there, so was Isaac Asimov. 05:25 Famous science fiction writer. Yes, that's right. And Suzuki got an interview with him, but the show hadn't even started. 05:33 Margaret Lyons, the then head of the department. One day I said, listen, Margaret, tonight listen to the show. The first hour is going to be a pilot for a science show. Okay. 05:46 And she said, all right, I will. And she did. And the next morning, I hear, she's very short, and she had very high heels, and she'd be coming down the floor, and you could tell by the gate what she was thinking. I said, oh, is that good? 06:04 She said, that was a good show. Why don't we try and do something with it? I had two names, Quirks and Quarks, or neither Margaret nor I could remember the other one afterwards. 06:14 But it's stuck, and it's the best name in radio. 06:17 Oh, it's a good name, isn't it? 06:18 Quarks and Quarks is a great launch pad for all kinds of people. We've had scientists say that they were inspired to get into science because they listened to the show. 06:27 Okay, so here we are half a century later. 06:31 Have you been listening to the show? 06:33 Oh, yes, from time to time, I've listened to the show, but don't ask me what's my favorite. Well, I want to know, how are we doing? Oh, you're doing brilliantly. 06:49 And I am very, very pleased and honored to announce that Diana Feiler is here with us tonight. Diana, stand up. Stand up and say hello. 07:00 Diana Feiler, everyone. 07:11 And we have another part of the Quirks & Quarks origin story in our audience today. 07:16 Diana might have pioneered the show, but Ivan Fatsan was the extraordinarily youthful showrunner in its first year. 07:24 And from that career highlights, he went on to less prestigious employment. 07:30 Things like CBC's Vice President of English Television. 07:35 and the president and CEO of CTV's Globe Media. Yvonne, we're happy that you could make it with us tonight. Yvonne, let's go. 07:51 Well, we promised you 100 years of science, and it is time to deliver. 07:57 One of the most significant concerns in the early 70s was population growth. 08:02 Global population had hit, wait for it, four billion souls and rising. And it wasn't all that clear to many that we could continue to feed all those hungry mouths. 08:14 One of the loudest voices articulating these concerns was Paul Ehrlich, the author of the massively influential 1968 book, The Population Bomb. 08:25 Here he is from the February 18th, 1976 episode. 08:30 It is quite true that the worst population growth in the world from the point of view of our resources or the world's environment goes on in the overdeveloped countries because of the enormous impact we have on the environment and on the non-renewable resources. So you could say that Americans are busily wrecking the world, but... On the other hand, the Indian overpopulation is busily wrecking India because there's just no hope of any kind of economic development when you've got to keep plowing whatever resources you can scrounge back into trying to feed and take care of unsuccessfully more and more people. 09:02 Today, if the weather doesn't go bad on us this year or next, we would have enough if we divided it up evenly. But what about tomorrow, particularly when the population is going to double in something like 35 or 40 years? Clearly, you're coming close to absolute limits. 09:16 Well, here we are, 2025, and the population has doubled to more than 8 billion. 09:22 And we continue to worry about how we can feed the world's teeming billions without exhausting our poor planet. Well, here to tell us about just how we've done that and what the next 50 years will look like is Dr. Evan Fraser, geographer, food scientist, and director of the Aral Food Institute at the University of Guelph. Dr. Fraser, welcome back to Crooks and Cords. 09:41 Oh, this is fun. This is fun. 09:48 Okay, so why didn't the population bomb explode as we doubled our numbers since 1985? 09:54 Yeah, make predictions at your peril. Some context. 09:59 225 years ago, I'm even going back further in time, a very grumpy British clergyman named Thomas Malthus looked out at the rapidly filling British countryside and went, oh dear, we have a problem. And he said, food production is linked with land, so you only get a little bit more each year. Population growth is linked with the amount of babies we can produce. It goes really fast, and we're going to have a crisis. 10:21 What every Malthusian since Thomas Malthus or Paul Ehrlich, the mistake they made is to ignore the fact that we can innovate, that food production has stayed growing faster than population growth has. And there is more food on the planet per person than at any point in human history. There's 3,000 calories available for every man, woman, and child on the planet today. 10:44 So how did we do that? 10:46 Well, we did it through technology. We bred better seeds. We used irrigation. We used fertilizer. And we have increased the amount of food. But there's a caveat. There's a really important caveat. 10:57 The fruits and vegetables that we all ought to be eating more of, we don't produce enough of. So we produce lots of calories, lots of grains, lots of fats. We don't produce enough fruits and vegetables. 11:06 And what have been the environmental costs to all of that development? 11:10 Well, this is the negative side of the story. That was the positive side. The negative side is a third of the world's greenhouse gas emissions come from food and farming systems. 11:17 Agriculture and fisheries are our primary culprits in our losing fight to protect the planet's biodiversity. And agriculture is the biggest user and the biggest polluter of fresh water on the planet. So we have a lot of work. But... Agriculture could be a solution to every single one of those problems, and there's farmers around the world today who are part of the positive change that we all need as a planetary species. 11:40 Okay, so let's look ahead 50 years. What do we need to do from this point? 11:45 So I think to answer the 50-year forward question, we have to do a little bit more looking at where we've come from. We have focused on producing more food per acre in the last 50 years, and that has been a single-minded focus of big foundations, government programs, research corporations. If we broaden that focus to include sustainability and nutrition, climate mitigation, climate resilience, we can accomplish tremendous things. I was talking to a rancher recently who invested in two drones. 12:15 One drone goes out and can identify invasive weeds within hours of them germinating. The next drone goes out and sprays them with a minute amount of herbicide. And as a consequence of those sort of technologies, we can produce a lot more healthy, nutritious food with a lot less environmental impact. And those innovations are just coming. 12:36 What about things like we hear about vertical farming, that kind of stuff, aquaculture? 12:41 So I'm a big believer in the idea of vertical farming. We've got the opportunity now to do what we call controlled environment agriculture, producing healthy, locally sourced produce with a relatively small carbon footprint, very small land footprint, almost no water, available year-round, even in winter climates. Now, there's a lot of complexity in how to get those technologies used in those ways, but the technology is available to do that now. 13:10 Okay, but now what about reducing the amount of fossil fuels that are needed, because I know they're involved in making fertilizers, for example. 13:17 Oh, that's such a good question. So, fertilizer, for people's benefits, is largely made up of nitrogen. In order to create nitrogen that plants can use, it's an incredibly energy-intensive process. You have to heat air up, you have to squish it down to create plant-available nitrogen. There's a new generation of fertilizers coming onto the market where it essentially inoculates the plants with microorganisms to allow them to access their own nitrogen. Nitrogen on demand for plants. Some plants, leguminous plants, do this already. Increasingly, scientists are developing technologies and tools to allow other crops to achieve that same sort of feat. 13:53 I've also seen an electric tractor. So that's coming. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. So does this mean then that we're going to have to change our diet to farmed insects and vat-grown algae? 14:07 The short answer is no, not unless you want to. 14:10 But having eaten some pretty good algae burgers and some not bad insects in my life, I'm not opposed to that. Two things there. 14:19 Yes, consumers are going to have to adapt. And if we just imagine the Canadian Nutritional Guide, you know, the Canada Food Guide, with a mostly plant-based diet with relatively small amounts of protein, that's the sort of diet that most of us in the affluent parts of the world are going to have to lean into. 14:35 And there's a whole lot of really interesting innovations in the broad area of food science that are going to expand consumer choice while reducing environmental impact. Things like precision fermentation, where we, instead of producing alcohol at a fermentation, produce proteins or other food ingredients out of very fancy fermentation vats. That gives us a whole new set of... 14:57 opportunities a golden age of food science that will increase consumer demand not limited and there might be some algae and some insects who knows you're painting a very optimistic picture here about the future what kind of technologies are we going to need So I just mentioned something called precision fermentation, where instead of fermenting booze or other things, we ferment proteins. 15:20 That is an amazing technology. Five years ago, if we had this conversation, I would have said it was 30 years away. I can give you multiple companies working in Canada today that are doing precision fermentation. Vertical farming, another one that I think shows tremendous promise that will allow us to eat better. 15:38 What could sabotage our food productions? 15:42 Well, I mean, the technologies we're talking about work in the real world. Consumers could reject these technologies. Climate change could happen faster than we can innovate and adapt. 15:54 Politics could dismantle global trading agreements and leave entire populations out of lunch. 16:01 These things can happen, and they mean that for those of us who are working on the great challenge of feeding the future, this is one of the big challenges of the generation. But we do need to eat. 16:12 Three times a day, mostly. 16:14 Dr. Fraser, thank you very much. 16:23 Dr. Evan Fraser is director of the Errol Food Institute and professor of geography at the University of Guelph. He's also co-chair of the Canadian Food Policy Advisory Council, a fellow of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, and a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. 16:40 Now, one of the things that Quarks and Quarks has always promised our listeners is that we'll explore the mysteries of the universe. So, cosmology, the structure, origins, and evolution of space and time. It's a familiar topic dating back to the various early programs on this show. 16:57 And in our first season, we welcome one of science's great communicators, the cosmologist Carl Sagan, to explain one of the universe's most fascinating phenomena in his own inimitable style. 17:10 Here's Carl Sagan explaining the mystery of black holes. 17:16 The essential properties of black holes are that they're black and that they're holes. 17:23 Carl Sagan, everyone! Carl Sagan! Yay! 17:31 Okay, okay, okay. That wasn't one of the shortest interviews in Quirks and Quark history. Here's a little bit more from that interview. 17:38 Black means there's no light coming out of it. And the reason for that is that the gravity is so high, the local acceleration due to gravity, that even light cannot get out. Even photons, faster than which nothing can travel, do not have escape velocities. So, it can be plenty bright down here in this black hole. But from the outside, it's completely dark, nothing gets out. 18:03 However, gravity gets out. 18:05 And so, if you're not paying attention, and you blunder into the vicinity of a black hole, games all over, you get sucked right in. 18:13 So, we understood the basics of a black hole back in 1975, but in many ways since then, we didn't know how much we didn't know about the universe. And five decades later, we still don't know a lot about the universe, but we have a much more precise understanding about how much we don't know. 18:35 We even have a number for it. 95%. 18:39 And to help us unpack all this, let me introduce Katie Mack, the Hawking Chair in Cosmology and Science Communication, right here on her home turf at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Hi, Dr. Mack. 18:59 So how have we come to this precise understanding that we don't know 95% of the universe? 19:06 Well, the problem is that we have discovered a lot about what the universe is made of in terms of how it affects the things that we can see. So we've discovered that there is something called dark matter, which is some invisible stuff that seems to be holding the galaxy together. It seems to be sort of the foundation upon which all of the matter we see is built. It's about 85% of the matter in the universe. And we know that because of how it affects the things that we see, stars and galaxies, how they move around. how light bends in the presence of strong gravitational fields. 19:37 But it is invisible as far as we can tell. And that means it's very hard to figure out what exactly it's made of. We know how much there is. We can survey it. We can map it out. But we don't know what it's fundamentally made of because it's just very hard to see. It's very hard to detect. Okay. Then the other problem is that in the 90s, we discovered that the universe is expanding faster than we expected and speeding up in its expansion. And that is due to apparently something we call dark energy, which is some kind of invisible stuff that seems to be making the universe expand faster. 20:12 But we can't see that either. 20:14 Okay, so dark energy and dark matter make up 95% of the universe. And I know when a scientist says dark, that means... 20:22 I don't know. It means that we are in the dark, but it also means that it just isn't making any light. 20:29 Okay, so how are we going to untangle the mystery of dark energy and dark matter? 20:33 Well, there are a few things that we can do to learn about both of these. So for dark matter, we can look for it in terms of how it affects the motions and properties of things out in the universe, how it affects the shapes of galaxies, the formation of galaxies, things like that. We can also look for the possibility that dark matter might occasionally interact with regular matter through something other than gravity, which would be fantastic, because then we could actually learn something about what it's made of. So we can look for weird amounts of radiation coming from places like the center of the galaxy or sort of strange high energy particles emitted from other galaxies. 21:11 Then we can also do experiments in the lab. We can build big underground detectors and hope that dark matter will come through and bang into something in the detector. And we can do experiments with particle colliders where we smash particles together and hope that something that comes out is able to escape the detectors, and maybe that was the dark matter that we just proved. 21:32 And some of those detectors are here in Canada, in Sudbury. Yeah, there's no lab. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so far, where's all this leading? 21:39 Well, hopefully it's going to lead us to a better understanding of the universe. So if we understand what dark matter is, then we know what most of the matter in the universe is. If we know what dark energy is, we know what most of the sort of stuff, the energy density of the universe is. But more importantly for me, I think, is that if we understand both of these things, then we understand the fundamental physics of the universe better because neither dark matter nor dark energy are included in our standard model of particle physics. They're not part of the sort of theory of all of the particles we've ever detected. 22:12 So if we can figure out what they are, that leads us to the next theory and a better understanding of fundamentally how physics works, and who knows where that could lead. 22:20 Okay, so we're mapping it out. We know it's there, but are we getting any closer to understanding what it is or what they are? 22:28 Well, I think so. I think so. 22:30 We're getting clues in various ways from observations, from experiments. With dark energy, we're learning about it with galaxy surveys. We're getting weird hints of possible anomalies with galaxy surveys. The problem is that... Unlike something like the Higgs boson or even gravitational waves, there's not a sort of place where we're pretty sure we're going to find it at a particular spot. Like with the Higgs boson, that was discovered in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider. We were pretty sure it was going to be there. Or at least we had sort of a range of energies where if we didn't find it there, then we'd have to rewrite everything, but we're pretty sure where it was going to be. 23:06 Okay. With dark matter, dark energy, we don't really have that. There are a lot of possibilities. We're exploring all of them, but we don't know when we will either find it or find something completely different. 23:17 Okay. So can you say then that 50 years from now, we'll know what dark energy and dark matter are? 23:24 I can't say that for certain, but I'm very, very optimistic. I think that we are getting so many clues. We are being so creative about how we look for these things. I really think that we're going to find something amazing. 23:37 Dark. 23:37 Yes. 23:40 Dr. Mack, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Katie Mack is the Hawking Chair in Cosmology and Science Communication here at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. 23:58 I'm Bob McDonald, and we're celebrating half a century of science programming on CBC Radio, and you're listening to a special encore presentation of our 50th anniversary show. 24:09 Okay, so there are millions of podcasts, and maybe you're cool to stick with the ones you already know you like. But if you're just a little paranoid about missing out on the best new stuff, we can help. 24:22 Every other Thursday, the Sounds Good newsletter will bring you one must-hear show from CBC Podcasts. And because we're true audio nerds, we'll also tell you about shows that we love that we didn't make. Go to cbc.ca slash soundsgood to subscribe. 24:40 Now, the first season of Quirks and Quarks was in the dawn of the personal computing era. In 1976, in fact, was when the Apple I computer first appeared. 24:51 Of course, in industry and government, larger computers were already ubiquitous. Here's David Suzuki introducing a segment from early in 1976 that should resonate with us today. 25:04 Could we have predicted how incredibly useful computers would be, how dependent on them we'd become, and how rapidly computers would evolve? 25:13 Now there are very sophisticated computers whose central brains are as small as the head of a match, and they're cheap enough for most people to buy one. 25:22 Tonight, Richard Rosenberg of the University of British Columbia discusses his field of specialty, which is artificial intelligence. 25:30 First, exactly what is artificial intelligence? 25:33 Okay, well, I guess a simple definition would be something like trying to program computers so that they exhibit behavior, which if humans did it, you'd call it intelligent. 25:46 Well, artificial intelligence was certainly not the buzzword back then that it is today. And to help us understand the last 50 and hopefully the next 50 years of computer technology and AI, I'm joined now by Dr. Luke Stark from the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University in London, Ontario. Dr. Stark, welcome to our celebration show. 26:06 Thank you for being here. 26:13 Great to be here. 26:14 So obviously, AI was much closer to a concept than a reality back in the 70s. What got us to where we are here today? 26:23 You know, I think AI has always been closer to a concept than a particular technology, right? The idea of creating artificial life, it goes back actually 5,000 years, not just 50 years. 26:34 And there have been various different imagined ways you're going to get to that goal of an AI, a sentient machine or a living machine. 26:43 In the 80s, it was one set of tech computer tools. 26:49 Then in the 90s, actually, and 2000s, a totally different set came in, machine learning. Maybe you've heard this word, machine learning. 26:56 The idea that computers can take a whole bunch of data, a whole bunch of information, and look for patterns in that data. And then they learn those patterns and they can apply that learning to other sets of data. So really fundamentally, that's what today's AI is based on. This is machine learning. These are sophisticated pattern matching computers. 27:17 But now it's hard to tell. 27:19 When you ask a question and you get a voice coming back, it's hard to tell that's a machine. 27:23 It's true, right? And there's been a lot of work by AI companies, especially these days, to make these systems seem human, appear human, be like a human. When people think of AI, they think of ChatGPT these days. That's the thing right into their mind, right? Well, ChatGPT is based on what's called a large language model. It's a big, big, big, big database of words, parts of words, and through a lot of very powerful computing power, you can kind of put together the relationships between those words. 27:53 What word is most likely to come next and after? And there's a lot of other stuff that goes in there too, but the key point is that these systems are really being designed by companies like OpenAI that develops ChatGPT to mimic humans, right? You know, that, like, first person, you know, I'm just a chatbot. That thing, that's a design feature. The actual LLM doesn't do that. So it's hard to tell, and I think, you know, there are some business reasons why that's the case, right? I think these companies would really like us to assume, to think that these tools are sentient. 28:25 They pick up on something that's called the Eliza effect, which is this, you know, effect that was named after a chatbot actually back from the 70s called Eliza. 28:35 No fancy machine learning, nothing like that. But it was really enthralling. People would play with it and they would think they were having these kind of in-depth conversations with it. So the Eliza effect is when people project sentience, complexity, emotions onto a chatbot. These days, a lot of people are. A lot of people are in thrall of the Eliza effect. 28:56 Of course, Hollywood's always had fun with that, with AI. It's usually something evil. And interestingly, Rosenberg from UBC, who we heard from in that clip from 1976, he was a pioneer in thinking about the ethics of AI. 29:10 So how well has research into the ethics of AI come along? 29:14 You know, I think one of the interesting things about the history of AI is that there's actually a really long story about the research into ethics, social impacts, which is what I do. 29:24 The guy who invented ELISA, Joseph Weizenbaum, who I mentioned, he was so kind of taken aback by how much people were taken in by this very simple program that he wrote a whole book in the 70s about things, you know, what computers can do and can't do related to humans. And every decade or so, there's a big upsurge in that work. What seems to happen, though, is that when a new technical innovation, a new thing, maybe it's the personal computer, maybe it's the internet, maybe it's social media, maybe it's smartphones, maybe it's the first wave of AI about 10 years ago, maybe now it's LLMs. 29:58 When those come in, For whatever reason, politicians and the media, they tend to forget there's been all this other research on the impacts of these tools. And all of a sudden, everything is shiny and new and amazing and great. And so you have to kind of rediscover that research over and over again. So it's there. It's there. 30:16 And people have been thinking about these problems for a long time. But we don't always realize that when we hear it in the media. 30:22 Okay. So where's it going from here? 30:25 Yeah, I mean, I think AI tools are very in vogue right now. Everybody knows this. A lot of people listening might be having intimate conversations with ChatGPT. 30:37 And I think the more these tools get put into various facets of our lives, into our smart appliances, our fridges, certainly in our phones, we're going to see more and more people interacting with these systems like they're social, right? 30:52 I think that's dangerous for a couple of reasons, one of which is that actually you're giving an awful lot of personal information to these chatbots, right? You know, you're having this conversation that feels like it's with a person, but it's collecting a lot of information. More generally, you know, so people talk a lot about AI sentience, about artificial general intelligence or AGI. I'm going to put my prediction out here. I don't think we're going to see artificial general intelligence in the next 50 years. I don't think so. I think that the conceptual challenges to that are so big that unless something really, really major happens in computing, the fundamentals of computing, we're not going to see that. 31:30 Wow. So if I'm wrong, you can send – David Suzuki can come and make me eat my hat. 31:37 You don't even think quantum computing is going to make it? 31:40 I think quantum computing – The thing about quantum computing is that right now it's so detached from the applications that it's not clear how it's going to affect it. But I think my big prediction for the social impact of these systems is that there are going to be a lot of disagreements and a lot of fights about who gets to develop them, who gets to control them. And who gets to regulate them? Who gets to decide what role these powerful computational tools, these powerful statistical tools with little human voices, how much power they have in our society? 32:17 Okay. So you don't think it's going to come to the point 50 years from now when my AI avatar is talking to your AI avatar, wondering about what happened to biological intelligence and how we can bring humans back to thinking? 32:34 I think it's more likely that you and I will be having this conversation. 32:38 Let's hope so. Dr. Stark, thank you very much. 32:41 Thanks so much. 32:52 Luke Stark is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University in London, Ontario. He's also a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Azri Ali Global Scholar with the Future Flourishing Program. 33:07 I'm Bob McDonald, and this is a special edition of Quirks and Quarks. We're celebrating our 50th anniversary in front of a live audience at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and we're discussing the last 50 and the next 50 years of science. 33:33 Now, Quarks and Quarks didn't shy away from contentious science in its early years. Here's one example of how we were on the cutting edge in our fourth program in 1975. 33:46 There's a lot of controversy right now over whether we're in for another ice age or whether the Earth is heating up. 33:52 It would be very helpful if we had accurate records of the weather for the past thousand years or so, so that we might see if there are any obvious cycles or trends. 34:02 Scientists in New Zealand have found a way to infer very accurate temperatures up to 9,000 years ago. 34:10 The technique involves the measurement of deuterium, which is a form of hydrogen with an extra neutron. I think Asimov is going to tell us about deuterium in one of our later shows. 34:21 The secret is the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen found in tree rings. 34:27 Climate change. Have you heard of that? 34:31 Arguably, it is the scientific issue of our age, with enormous implications for the future of our planet and our species. Dr. Laura Tozer is studying what's necessary for the climate transition we're going to have to make in the next 50 years, if not sooner. She's from the Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. Dr. Tozer, welcome to our program. 34:54 Thank you so much. 35:01 So David was talking about the climate debate in the 1970s. Some were saying we're in for another ice age. Others were saying it's going to get warmer. 35:10 What's happened in the intervening 50 years? 35:14 Yeah, it's really been a masterclass in physical science. A way that we have settled and we have known for so long that humans have caused climate change. And it's really amazing the scientific work that went into this. You know, the example from the quote, but there was the same kind of signal being found in all sorts of records all around the world, all by independent scientists, who then came together in international spaces to... 35:43 collect that work together to call for action for decades. 35:47 Unfortunately, it's also been a masterclass in what social scientists call fossil fuel obstruction or carbon lock-in, where basically fossil fuel interests have been lying to us for pretty much all of those decades as well, trying to make it appear as though there's uncertainty. 36:03 Well, pessimism is pretty easy, especially when you consider that we've missed all of our climate goals. 36:10 And climate denialism, as you say, is part of the many, including certain administrations at the moment. 36:16 So where do you think we'll go from here? 36:19 It's really easy for people to picture apocalypse when we talk about this topic. And so I really want to talk about the future, looking ahead 50 years where we've succeeded, where we've done what we need to do in order to address climate change, and really tried to find all the ways that we can make that reach everyone. I did some work with some young people last year, and the mental health burden of trying to kind of grapple with the climate crisis is really serious. Yeah. And so I think we need to do more work imagining what flourishing looks like over 50 years. 36:53 And the transition away from fossil fuels in our energy system will be a fundamental part of that. 36:58 So what kind of technologies will we need to do that? 37:01 The nice thing about it is that we have a lot of the technologies that we need already. It's one of those things where we have all sorts of renewable energy solutions, we have all sorts of components of it, but a lot of them need more innovation to become cheaper. 37:17 easier, smaller, more accessible. Things like balcony solar panels that you can move when you move apartments. That's the kind of innovation that will make these energy technologies available for everyone. But I think there's still going to be a lot of development in a few different areas that will help us make this transition to fossil-free technology. energy and that'll be things like batteries you know the way that batteries have developed over the last few years has really been astounding and so i think that will continue because it's a really important part of our energy system and this will include this will be about improving their performance but there are a lot of people that are also working on innovating with how batteries work fundamentally so that we can remove some of that dependence on critical minerals linked to social and environmental injustices. 38:04 I've already met several people who put solar panels on their roof, they drive an electric car, and they charge the car from the house, and they drive for free. 38:15 That's a nice feature to think about, isn't it? So what kind of transition do we need to go through to get there? 38:26 We're looking at a transition that has a few key parts. One of the fundamental parts of it, though, is what we call electrification. This is the way that we move a lot of the things that we do in our life away from fossil fuels and on to electricity instead. This is another area where I think there will be a lot of innovation over the next 50 years. 38:46 all the different components that go into this electrification transition. And so it's things like modernizing our electricity grid so that they can be 100% renewable energy and we can take advantage of that free fuel. You know, it's the wind, it's the sun, it's always there. 39:03 Energy is really supporting our lifestyle here, so are we going to have to make sacrifices to make the transition? 39:11 Short answer, no. 39:12 What we're looking at here is a fossil energy system that's actually really inefficient. It wastes a ton of energy to live in this fossil dependent system that we do. And the sustainable energy system is one that will be much more efficient just because of the technologies that we use. 39:31 They're much more efficient than some of the fossil fuel combustion, for example. But it's combined with that efficiency and renewable energy that has that free fuel. So you're looking at an energy system that's actually based on abundance rather than scarcity. But the other part of it is that we choose the way that we design our energy system and what it does for us. So we can decide we want it to give us hot showers and cold beers. It's an Amory Lovins quote from the 70s. Still true today. You know, people don't care how it got hot or how it got cold. And so why don't we do that in a way that doesn't cook our planet? 40:04 Yeah. 40:04 Dr. Tozer, thank you so much for your time. 40:14 Thank you. Dr. Laura Tozer is an assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Toronto and director of the Climate Policy and Action Lab at the Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. 40:28 Well... 40:29 One of the features of the first season of Quirks and Quarks was a very special weekly guest, the legendary scientist and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, recruited by producer Ivan Fitsin. 40:42 He came on each week to explain and unpack the science behind a particular word. So here's an example from one of his appearances in May of 1976. 40:53 Let's go straight to our New York expert on science words, the internationally renowned science fiction writer and popularizer of science, Isaac Asimov. What's the word tonight, Isaac? How about transistor? 41:04 There's something that we're all familiar with. Now, it was in 1948 that an English-American physicist and two co-workers first worked out this little solid equivalent of the radio tube. 41:17 It transferred electrons across a material that resisted it you had a transfer across a resistor and a transistor. These days, you can make them so tiny that you can take a small chip of silicon and put thousands and thousands of different electrical devices on it. 41:39 Now, one of the electrical devices that we all have in our pockets, but not here in the theater, of course, is our cell phones. 41:47 So, how many transistors do you think is in a common smartphone? Anybody have a guess? 41:54 1,200? 12 million? 41:56 20 million? 41:58 It's about 10 billion or so. Yeah. 42:01 Ten billion. And that's just in a cell phone. So when it comes to computer technology and things like automation and robots, we've come quite a way in 50 years. Well, to help us understand how far and where we're going, I'm joined by Dr. Ana Luisa Trejos. She's a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the School of Biomedical Engineering and Canada Research Chair in Wearable Mechatronics at Western University in London, Ontario. Hi, Dr. Trejos. 42:32 Welcome to our show. 42:32 Thank you so much. 42:39 Okay, so a smartphone is just one example of how far technology has come, but I want to talk to you about your field of technology that operates in the world more physically. So how far has automation and robotics come in the last 50 years? 42:54 Yes, so 50 years ago, robots already existed, but they were very basic and simple because their control systems were very primitive. With the invention of the transistor and the advances in integrated circuit technology, we have come so far in the miniaturization of microcontrollers that allow the robots to be intelligent and the sensors that allow the robots to perceive the environment to the point that now we have robots pretty much everywhere, right? So when we think about the most advanced robots right now, a lot of us will think of an airplane that pretty much flies itself or self-driving cars, but we don't necessarily have to go that far. 43:31 We can think of assembly plants where robots are pretty much doing everything from moving parts to assembling parts to painting quality control And they're doing all of this in a very automated way. 43:45 Well, we also have these amazing videos of robots dancing, doing backflips, and robotic dogs running through forests and all of that. 43:54 So what can we expect from robots in the future? 43:56 Yeah, so I'm going to start by thinking about how things have changed. So in the last 50 years, machines were very much a one-size-fits-all. So you have one machine, and everybody has to deal with what that machine can do. I think the future, our machines are going to be a lot more customized or tailored, not just to the person, but to the task that they have to do. For example, in my field of wearable exoskeleton, I think the idea of the bionic person is very real. 44:27 There's been a lot of advances in prosthetics where there will be an implant that is put on the brain of the person, and that will detect what the person wants to do, and it allows them to feel like the prosthetic is part of their body. So that's going to continue, but I think there has to be a little bit of a revolution in the way that we power these devices. So my theory is that we're going to get to the point where we can use our own energy, so human energy, to power these prosthetics, and not necessarily just for limbs, but any part of our body that needs to be replaced could be replaced by a robotic system that is worn on the body. 45:05 We would just wear something that feels like clothing, and it has all of the sensors and the actuators around it, and it allows us to move better or perform whatever action we can't perform by ourselves, And then it could even enhance our performance. So go beyond our natural abilities and create sort of like a superhuman that allows us to perform way beyond. 45:29 So will I ever get my robot butler? 45:32 I think that's a very real possibility. 45:35 Robot butlers are, the way that I envision them, I think they're going to be more for the disabled or the elderly who not just need help with their day-to-day tasks, but also need that social companionship. 45:49 You know, you're reminding me with these power prosthetics of a program I watched back in 1975, the $6 million man, right? 45:56 Yes, exactly. 45:57 He had a bionic eye, one arm and two legs. $6 million back then was, what is this, $36 million today. Yes. 46:08 can we bring that price down a little and make this stuff accessible for everyone? 46:11 Yes, absolutely. So some of the work that we're doing is trying to come up with more traditional manufacturing techniques to create these devices. For example, simple things like sewing and embroidery, where we can create sensors and actuators that are made from conductive thread, again, going back to our clothing, but that don't cost that much more than a regular outfit. 46:33 Wow, good news. Dr. Trejo, thank you so much for your time. 46:36 Thank you so much. 46:41 Dr. Anna LaVise Trejo is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the School of Biomedical Engineering and Canada Research Chair in Wearable Mechatronics at Western University in London, Ontario. 46:57 Well, David Suzuki, the first host of Quirks and Quarks, trained as a geneticist, and he brought that experience to bear on the program. But in the last 50 years, perhaps no area of science has been transformed more than his field, the science of the blueprint of life. 47:14 Here's David in March of 1976 with an efficient summary of genetic science at that time. 47:21 Humans probably have between one and two million genes. Fruit flies have about 100,000, and bacteria, 500 to 1,000. 47:31 There are exciting new techniques for cutting up strings of genes and sticking the pieces into bacteria. And all hundred thousand genes of fruit flies have now been inserted in little pieces into bacteria. And there the pieces replicate perfectly well. 47:48 That turns out to be extremely interesting because it's possible now to study what turns these genes on and off. And eventually, scientists talk about being able to isolate genes from humans, sticking them into bacteria, and getting the bacteria to make things like hormones, insulin, or blood clotting factors for hemophiliacs. 48:08 The technology for all of this is first being worked out with fly genes. 48:13 Well, we've learned that the best informed minds in genetics in the 70s had just a few things wrong. 48:20 Five decades of work later, we now know humans have only between 20,000 and 25,000 genes, not 2 million. And there's a little less difference than we might have thought between us and fruit flies, who have something like 15,000 genes. 48:36 We vastly increased our knowledge of how genetics shapes us and contributes to our health. 48:41 But if our next guest is right, we're in line for another kind of genetics revolution. Dr. Yvonne Bombard is professor at the University of Toronto. She's also a scientist and Canada research chair at St. Michael's Hospital, Unity Health Toronto, where she directs the Genomics Health Services Research Program. Dr. Bombard, welcome to our program. 49:09 So what have been the major leaps forward in genetics in the last 50 years? 49:14 The leaps have been bountiful, luckily, and we've seen genetics and genomics science really penetrate public health and day-to-day healthcare of all Canadians. For example, did you know that every baby that is born in a hospital in most of the industrialized world is actually getting their very first genetic test, the little heel prick test that takes a little sample of blood from the babies to do the very first genetic screen on all of the babies that are born? 49:46 Wow. 49:47 And that's been happening, and that's one of the premier examples of public health reach of where genetics has come. 49:54 We've also seen the technologies like sequencing, where we're reading people's genetic codes or their genomes, also advance in leaps and bounds. For example, did you know that it took hundreds of millions of dollars and years to to sequence or map or read one genetic code. And now we're doing it for a couple hours, for a couple hundred, all the time. 50:20 I remember the Human Genome Project, and it took years. It was an international effort just to identify all the genes in the human DNA. They were comparing it to going to the moon in terms of how much effort it took. Now they're doing it when a baby's born. 50:34 Absolutely breathtaking, yes, and we're doing it every day for patients in the hospitals. 50:38 Okay, so that's identifying the genes. How has this been turned into human health and medicine? 50:44 Right now, genetics is a quasi boutique specialty where it is quite limited now to hospitals that are in urban centers, academic centers, tertiary hospitals, and you would be hard pressed to find a doctor or a specialist or a practicing community health provider that has the confidence and uses that technology or the test results in their practice for their patients every day. But that's changing. It will become part of mainstream routine care, where doctors will be using the genetic test results that have already been generated for every single person to actually dose the medications tailored to the patient. 51:25 They'll be using your genetic test information to give you very specific lifestyle modifications to actually prevent and treat disorders earlier than what we are doing now. 51:35 So can you give me an example of how genetic work might help in diseases like cancer? 51:41 Well, we're already using genetic testing quite routinely. We sequence cancer patients' tumors, and increasingly we're sequencing their blood to find out, do they have cancer running in their family? Because if we know if the cancer patient sitting in front of us not only has cancer, which is a terrible predicament, but if we can actually identify what type of cancer, we can actually identify tailored medications that for some individuals, they will respond much better, have better outcomes, better survival, if we can actually genetically test them. 52:15 So how powerful of a tool do you think this will be in the future in terms of human health? 52:20 It's already a powerful tool. The issue is getting into routine mainstream health care. I mean, we already have gene editing, which is a breathtaking technology. Like my fellow scientists in the past, these are technologies that have been innovated anew today, providing new opportunities for treating disorders where we never had hope for treatment, like Huntington's disease or other blood diseases. disorders like hemophilia and sickle cell anemia, which can actually be treated at the point of care in individuals. 52:51 Well, it seems that we have a theme running through our show here about trying to bring the cost of these new technologies down. Can we do that with genetics as well, or is it going to remain in the realm of the wealthy? 53:02 Yeah, I think the costs are dramatically reduced now. 53:08 What is it? If you build it, they will come. We are at the place where we need people to come. When we study a person's genetic code, what we're doing is comparing it to a reference. The problem right now is the reference sets that we have to compare are mostly made up of individuals of European ancestry. Therefore, our genetic science and our tests can't be as accurate for non-European ancestral groups. And so in the future, other than the cost, we need to have full participation of society so that full societies can benefit from the realization of genomic medicine. 53:46 Dr. Bombard, thank you so much for your time. 53:47 My pleasure. Thank you. 53:56 Dr. Yvonne Bombard is a professor at the University of Toronto. She's also a scientist and Canada Research Chair at St. Michael's Hospital, Unity Health, Toronto, where she directs the Genomics Health Services Research Program. 54:10 Well, I just got a signal from the original producer of Quirks and Quarks to wrap it up. 54:17 Diana, you're still active. You're still active. 54:21 Well, that's it for our 50th anniversary episode of Quirks and Quarks. Thanks to our amazing guests. Thanks to the incredible staff here at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics for welcoming us so warmly. And thanks to you, our audience, for sticking with us for 50 years. Thank you. 54:43 Quirks and Quirks is produced by Rosie Fernandez, Amanda Buckowitz, and Sonia Biting. Our senior producer is Jim Levins. 54:51 I'm Bob McDonald. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week. 54:55 Thank you, everyone.