Damn thing into the. Head the 2nd. 'd the pitch breaks RINGBACK now nobody's ever actually seen this happen I mean it's never the drop is never dripped No No The drop is dripped 8 times and we are all due for the 9th drop to happen any day now. So imagine a science experiment right where the critical data that you want to gather happens in 110th of a 2nd every 10 to 12 years. It is really hard to believe there at that critical moment. I mean the the method is Philip Professor John Winston he's been watching it yes religiously since January of 1961 for 50 years still waiting to see this pitch drop just out of suspense or is there some question here well 1st of all during Well Ok the question is at that moment when you ever elongating droplet gives way what happens if you've got the drop it so off Oldboy for fibers comb fibers what breaks 1st how does it break and there are lots of people who like me waiting to see whether we can capture that moment and see the way in which from a mechanical point of view it becomes imperative to drop in fall so. 962 means to miss a drop at 60 to 70 and it's not 1979 he looked at on a Friday knew it was close and thought well something might happen over the weekend came in on a Saturday Saturday evening checked the pitch drop nothing happening I'm going home and by the time I came in very early on the Monday morning not having gone in on Sunday. Then. Standing right there and I decided I need to cover things like that they came back oh no and lo and behold he thinks he may have missed it by as little as 15 minutes it had dropped you take your tea and throw it against the wall and rage. As one becomes a bit philosophical about this. Just that I will let this be patient the next time . Install a camera and. Then 28 November 2000 is what happened then the time on the other side of the world in London gets an email saying Professor. This drop looking as though it might fold in the time we've been waiting 10 years for this is about to happen because it was like. We've got it covered got a camera on it be able to see exactly what happened when I get back to Australia the next day he said well it's dropped. The later that day to Professor mains then I've got bad news unfortunately you will not be able to see this because the system failed and camera went out the camera went out we don't have this on record go on watch that was one of my saddest so I might say. But right now the pitch is getting ready to give birth to another drop and this time there are 3 cameras 3 webcams on there and this is what Josh was showing me on the Internet this little. Almost that all these people are watching people from China South America you know it people way off in the north of Canada is everybody is waiting everybody wants to be the person who sees the pitch. In a code bit checking this thing online. Or you like watching grass grow I don't know it's I think it's more than suspense I think that this is it's about time scale is what it's about we don't really have that many opportunities to interact with things that happen on these 2 very very different time scales simultaneously. Because you know you can you're in this funny situation you wait slower than you know how for something to take place that's faster than you can you know catch exactly so you're playing at the very edges of what you know how to do but not if you catch it then you get this glimpse. Into this world it's usually unknowable Exactly. So for the next hour we're going to mess around with this idea because you know we're humans we live in a. Human scale but we've got a bunch of stories are going to ask us to stretch that scale to the breaking point yet I'm Jad Abumrad I'm Robert Krulwich Today on Radio Lab speed where things keep getting faster than faster again and faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and faster until we get to the fastest thing in the universe. And stop it. Cold. But before we do that quick update and happy news in a bit of sad news about that pitch drop experiment 1st up the drop finally dripped and it was caught on camera this time and you can watch that moment in time lapse at Radiolab dot org Now the sad news Professor Mayne stone missed it again after 52 years of watching over that tar filled beaker waiting died never actually seeing it dropped. But on the bright side I guess the experiment still going the 10th drop is expected to fall sometime in the next 14 years or so so in honor of him keep an eye on that live feed and your super ration you might just catch it. Ok so let's set the baselines here how fast are are we you mean like how fast we run I mean how fast can do we interact with the world around us how fast do we taste things how fast we feel something see something respond to Hello there hey how do we sound that sounds better much better excellent That's Carl Zimmer of course science writer regular around here and he told us that question you just asked how fast do people humans process the world that question popped up in a really big way around 850. With the invention of the telegraph because suddenly you could send a message across the country almost instantly if you're in New York and you want to send a message Chicago. Let me stop there it's going to. Take about a quarter of a 2nd. For that message to get They're coming tell us that whole problem with that 790 miles in a quarter 2nd. Now that's really fast in fact if you do the math 7 or 8 times and 60 to 60 it's 11000000 miles an hour that's amazingly fast so fast in fact that some people when they 1st use the telegraph they just refused to believe that it was real because you made 150 you're doing 3540 miles an hour on a horse 60 maybe on a steam engine up to 80 you know living too fast but more importantly for our story the Telegraph got people thinking about us about our bodies right because you know nerves and telegraph wires are remarkably similar nerves are long and skinny they carry electricity from one place to another just like a telegraph wires so naturally people want to know well if the telegraph wires can do millions of miles an hour well what about our nerves How fast are they exactly and so one day a German guy biologist named Herman von Helmholtz took a frog because their Durand's are kind of like ours and basically what he did was he he hooked some wires up to one of the frogs muscles Now this was I should tell you a dead frog but he sent an electrical jolt through the muscle and then using a very fancy timer he was able to determine that the signal was going down the length of the frog muscle at a speed of 27 meters per 2nd what is that in miles per hour meters purse. And see if I can. Google actually it's. 27 meters per 2nd is 60.3973 miles per hour 61.3 miles per hour we this is a frog is the same speed when us yes 60 miles an hour that seems so yes yeah what's the name of the Jamaican runner the fastest guy in the world Hussein bolt Hussein both so in the same boat is running at half the speed of his nervous system Ok but I would bet him bear mine actually I mean. There's a big range of speeds of your neurons and actually Hussein bald is much faster than some of your neurons I mean there are some neurons that only go about a mile an hour which ones are those of Ironically some of them are from the reward centers of your brain Chocola trouble slowly Yeah relatively slow What about and pain that would that would be fast I imagine Yeah you'd think so but pain actually runs kind of slowly I was surprised to learn he says it can be as slow as 1.3 miles an hour and so if I put my hand near a candle and then I go out shouldn't that happen very fast look I mean if you are like 70 miles tall this might be a problem. But still we would have to take an really ordinary example at Robert looking at the desk in front of him and grabbing that pen what's involved Well I mean you just need to kind of walk through this brain. You start at the I took a so the eye takes the lights reflected off the pad and turns it into a little electrical signal and then sends it. Deep into the middle of the brain takes a couple 172nd around for a bit and then within a few more hundreds of a 2nd the signal has made it all the way back to the rear end of the brain where you start processing vision this is just the beginning right now you've got to like figure out what you're seeing. This time toward the middle of the brain then down toward the bottom to these other regions that start to decode signals the 1st visual regions called the one mixed up between the 4 and so on and they're going to sharpen the image make out contrasts edges and then block tricity goes back towards the front of the brain. After another 10th of a 2nd or so we finally get to a place for think. Oh that's a pen we haven't gotten it to I want it exactly. The electricity has to jump from one part of the front of the brain to another and another before you can finally say that's a nice pen I could use a pen. And we're still not you know then you then then little jolt heads north to the top of your brain so we've gone from the eyes to the back your brain around up to the funny your brain again and now we're up to the top of your head where you set up motor commands. And then. Christ so you add all this up and what are we talking about here about a quarter of a 2nd quarter of a say feels like one month later Roberts has been slowly moved. Quarter of a say so that's the same amount of time it takes a telegraph to send a message from New York to Chicago yet so your idea and New York Chicago Oh man. The sad truth is Carl is that our neurons when it comes to communicating and sending signals on your own They're terrible actually I mean compared to our you know broadband networks particularly because when one neuron bumps into the next one there's actually a whole space between them so the signal to get across has got to jump. And then jump to the next one jump and then jump kind of like doing hurdles it's not smooth and the spooky part about the slowness as Carl the deeper thought here is that if you think about it because we have this built in delay in processing the outside world everything that I'm experiencing already happened. You know how I like you look out at the stars and you think oh that light's been traveling for thousands millions of years to get to me and what's happening on that star of the planet around that star right now is even still exist. You can say that about everything around you. Because I mean by the time the. You become aware of something in front of you it's been sitting there for a while relatively speaking I'm stuck in the past but it's sounds like if you want to be in the moment then what you do is you stare up at the sun and you let the light just be light entering your eyes and you don't think anything about the light you don't train and comprehend the light you just let the light be light and that's as close as you're going to get to now yeah well you're looking at old light but. It's. Going to star you know it's old light even if you switch you know even if you switch on the light you're looking at the light bulb across the room it's old light because it had to go from your eyes through your brain to you to be aware that there was light there so what I would suggest is that you close your eyes and you stop thinking about you know the chair you're sitting in and just focus on your own thoughts because. That's the fastest stuff you've done it's right there you don't have to wait for it to be delivered in your brain is already in your brain so I think your thoughts are the fastest things that you can experience so my fastest thought that I could ever have is where I'm Mikey you've got to have faster thoughts than that with a faster one. Interesting question though I mean when I think it would be the narrative I don't think it can be a keys or something I think it would just be like. Someone has thought about this what it was in May because I don't know if. They do you think somebody has an answer for something. Hello hello hello in fact we found a guy his name is Seth Horowitz He's a neuroscientist author of the universal sense how hearing shapes the mind so we were talking and we ran through the question you know if we're all trapped in the past by the slowness of our nervous system what would be the most present the most in the now that we could be well if you and he actually disagreed with Carl's guess he said even if you think the simplest thought that it is possible to think it's probably still going to be on the order of a quarter. The 2nd half 2nd you have to get away from the conscious brain no thinking no seeing hearing is the fastest sense because mechanical it normally operates on the millisecond range 1000th of a 2nd a sudden loud noise activates a very specialized circuit from your ear to your spinal neurons you mean it bypasses the brain yeah it's the startle circuit if you suddenly hear a loud noise within 50 milliseconds it's 50000 service seconds he's talking 20 times faster than cognition your body jumps will begin the release of adrenaline no consciousness involved it's 5 neurons and it takes 50 milliseconds 50 milliseconds so you're already getting into a faster much faster paradigm by using sound so if we're going to jolt ourselves as close to the present as possible then we'd have to play a really loud noise right like Wait for it. I know that was annoying but we just did together we were all in the moment in the present tense together not quite not as we now understand it we were just shy. Of them all the. Time if I spoke fast enough for me to say thank you thank you and there's no way you could even form the thought of thank you if it's true but I tell you what in this next in this next segment we're going to make 50 milliseconds feel like 50 years oh that's really. Make everybody. 2 or. I'm going to redo the credits. I'm going. I'm going to redo the credit and that. 6 6 public understanding of how you in the modern world 6. Ok well. This is from Kalamazoo Michigan Radio Lab is supported by Progressive Insurance. A device designed to reward safe drivers learn more at progressive dot com or 1800 progressive That's progress. Support for you comes from u.c. 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Ready I am Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich This is Radio Lab indeed as I said if you do it well this whole next segment is about saying I had it in my bones just to set it up I got this idea from my friend Andrew Zolli who is a fantastic writer wrote the book Resilience Why Things Bounce back we were at a diner I tell him about the show he says you should do something about the stock market and I was like I'm the last person to do the most basic No no no forget everything you think you know about the stock market most of us when we think about stock markets if you just close your eyes and you think about the financial world what you imagine is. A bunch of people in a room and they're all wearing funny colored jackets and they're shouting at each other and I got it I raving It's Ok here I got $71.00 right this kind of rock. Why did you want to break people screaming trying to figure out what a crisis was and we have this sort of I cannot refuse this culture. Of how the financial system works that is in large part completely divorced from reality because he told me he was my 1st surprise that somewhere between 50 and 70 plus percent of all the trades that happen on what we think of as a Wall Street are not executed by a human being as a result of a human decision they're actually executed by an algorithm at a speed rail and scale that is beyond our comprehension. So I decided I would try and comprehend this new world that exists grabbing and since this is a subject matter that generally makes me 1st frightened frankly I decided to call David Kestenbaum from Planet Money jet the David Gest of it indeed there could be more than there probably aren't Twitter in any case it did not click for either of us just how fast in human lif fast trading had gotten. Until we visited this firm called trade works Ok you just mentioned it so we want this little building in New Jersey it looks like it's a start up or something and this guy says Hello my name is Mike dollar and the chief technology officer of trade works and mike over here says don't this computer opened up would be this little program that logs exactly what is going on at the market insanely so I said Think time if you could pick a stock. We could look at. Yahoo for example. We can literally pick some time of day that we're interested in what time is it really it's what time so this is at 113526 point 979 seconds. Early And in fact that's not enough precision for us because we're really dealing microseconds that would be millions of a 2nd so we have another way of measuring time which is the number of microseconds sense midnight of the previous day can you read that for once have a number sure 41729000000 979559 microseconds since midnight so us have lunch at like 2000000000 300000. Really early. How many trees do you do in a day. I think it depends a lot to trader might do 1000 trades in a minute. About that but it's kind of very bursty. Now what happens during those bursts is a bit of a mystery it's very hard to see what's going on often says Andrew it's the computers testing the market testing to see if they can find a nibble on the other side they'll fire out a bunch of buy and sell orders and then when another computer bites on one they'll quickly cancel the ones that didn't stick so no sorry didn't want to do that and they're doing this on a microsecond basis by sorry sell sell not sell again for. About that by now and they create huge volumes of transactions that just disappear into the ether there are some computer algorithms He says his whole job is to combat other algorithms take them out for example we just a very good example happened but a month ago when Kraft That's Eric Cantor he tracks high frequency trading for the firm Kraft like Kraft cheesey Yes he says what they saw was this algorithm jump in the market by a bunch of craft which jam the price up that algorithm to sell at much higher prices to the other algorithms and we calculated out it cost them $200000.00 to push the price up but they were able to sell about $100000.00 of stock in netting a gain of over half a $1000000.00 in a matter of seconds. But that in context back in the day you know 20 years ago when a human still ran the trading pits. According to this guy. Founder and c.e.o. Of the temper the average time that it took to execute a trade was around 1112 seconds back then and we asked people how did we get from 11 or 12 seconds to 4X1W7C2X9W 107551 like seconds with phrases like that the answer is kind of surprising but I'll just start with the obvious part at least the part that's obvious to people who work in finance it wasn't obvious to me but a basic law the market is that the fastest person will usually win there's always a benefit that's Andrew again to getting information faster than the other guy absolutely this has been gone since Julius Reuters carri