![]() In one of the chapters, you talk about how an MRI scanner near a hospital helipad had messed up an actual helicopter. Reading through What If? 2, I’m honestly just really curious about your research process. Until we find out that the hamster ball is leaving a residue on the road. We would save the world from being consumed by rubber, in that case. I have an illustration of, if we put the car in a giant plastic hamster ball and then drive it around. I know, it sounds really silly, and they’re like, “We know this is silly, but it’s the least silly thing we could come up with.” This seems like a really unsolvable problem. There are some people who have these wild schemes involving a thing that will capture the rubber from the tire, like a vacuum cleaner sitting behind the tire. It’s a problem that desperately needs current research, that we don't have a great solution for. Or maybe it's just that most of the rubbers have these bad consequences for water, in which case, that's a pretty big problem because no one has figured out a good way to make tires not leave rubber behind. Maybe it's some specific chemical that we could swap out easily if we can figure out what it is and determine that it’s definitely causing this problem. There's one paper from a couple years ago that linked one of the chemicals in tire rubber to salmon die-offs in the Pacific Northwest. We’re not sure how bad any of it is-we’re still figuring that out. You can find concentrations of tire rubber in fish tissues and in streams near roads. It also gets released as these aerosolized particles, which just drift on the wind or land in the water. And where all that rubber goes is everywhere.Įverywhere? Like, the rubber disintegrates and flies everywhere?Ī lot of it gets left on the road, but it gets washed off. So I started looking into whether used tires really are that much lighter. Then I'm like: Okay, well, I don't actually know the answer to that. (Reader, you’ll have to read the book to find out the rest.) The answer to that question was so surprising-because you’d probably be fine. One of the things you wrote about was what happens if you’re transported to the surface of the sun for a nanosecond. I've been just compulsively getting sucked into researching one question after another, and I'm really excited to share some of the results. The questions have, I think, gotten stranger overall, as people have realized that it maybe is possible to answer some of these. And then I can't rest until I know whether my first impulse was right or not. Okay, well, I think the answer is probably this-right? And then I'm like, Wait, I'm not sure that's right. But they asked the question, and I'm like, Huh, I've never thought about that. So people would send me questions- sometimes even before I started doing *What If?-*that I didn't have a plan to write up or anything. When people would send me questions I would feel really compelled to start researching them, whether or not I was going to write an article about it. Why did you decide to write a sequel to What If ? What’s the really important thing to get across here? This is a person who's interested, who maybe doesn't have the background, but they’re perfectly capable of understanding whatever it is I am trying to explain. Whatever else they're also paying attention to is also important. You have a moment of their attention on this thing. So the way I always try to think about it is: Don't think about it as if people aren't smart. I'll really make this like I'm talking to a child.” I think people can tell when they're being condescended to. People really struggle with this, because they'll say, “Okay, well, I'll really dumb this down. But it's hard to do that without being condescending. And that's true anywhere-whether it's to other scientists or people who aren't scientists. ![]() You want to talk in the language that people will understand. ![]() Sometimes scientists will use language that’s really tricky or specialized without realizing that not everyone knows, for example, what an oxidizer is. It’s like a Magic Eye picture or an optical illusion: You can look at it for a while, and you don’t see it and you don’t see it-and then you see it. It’s hard to put yourself in the shoes of the people you’re trying to talk to. One of the trickiest things about talking to people about something cool that you've learned how to do, or that you've learned about-whether it's science or something else-is that it’s hard to remember what it's like to not know something.
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