It's hard to believe, but the words “time” and “travel” were never really linked until H.G. Wells' 1895 novel,  “The Time Machine.” James Gleick, author of “Time Travel: A History”  discovered that everything from Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine to Doc Brown's DeLorean can be traced back to Wells. “He wasn't trying to say anything about science,” Gleick says. “In order to tell his story, he invented this gimmick.” And “The Time Machine” explained this gimmick with another bit of sci-fi whimsy: that time is the fourth dimension of space. “That was ten years before Einstein's first publication of the special theory of relativity,” Gleick says. And once Einstein validated this view of space-time, it inspired countless stories about characters visiting the past and the future.

Science and Creativity from Studio 360

How Time-Travel Stories Borrow from Einstein

In 2012, Studio 360 aired a story about a pair of artists — a husband and wife team named Leonor Caraballo and Abou Farman. In 2008, Caraballo had been diagnosed with breast cancer and created an artwork about the experience titled Object Breast Cancer. Her husband and artistic partner Abou Farman told us that her final spiritual and creative journey began when he introduced her to Ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic and medicinal plant used in the Amazon. She wanted to make a feature film about a woman who goes to the Amazon in search of the plant. Just as they began pre-production, Carballo learned that the cancer had returned in full force, but she was determined to finish the film, even if the production process wore her down. Sadly, Leonor passed away in 2015. She worked on Icaros until the end of her life, although she didn’t live to see the film completed. ”Icaros: A Vision” screened at Tribeca and several other film festivals.  

Abou Farman on Leonor Caraballo’s “Vision”

When artists and scientists collaborate, it’s usually because an artist wants to make a piece of art inspired by some scientific concept. But in Chicago, an artist is helping a biologist uncover something about the climate. Shane DuBay is an evolutionary biologist and Carl Fuldner is an art historian, both getting their PhDs at the University of Chicago. The two have been photographing bird specimens at The Field Museum from the last century and a half — and they noticed something strange: The feathers on the birds from a long time ago looked dirtier than newer specimens. DuBay and Fuldner used software to analyze their photographs of the birds and figured out that dinginess of their plumage correlates to the changing amount of air pollution. Which suggests that during the age of impressionist painting, all those magnificent landscapes, the new coal-powered factories were making the air dirtier than ever before — or since.

Canaries in the Coal Smoke

Nothing clears a dinner party faster than talking about math. But maybe what the subject needs is a friendly ambassador. Someone like Eugenia Cheng, who teaches math to artists studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She’s found the ideal vehicle for teaching math to people who don’t think it’s for them: baked goods. Her book is called "How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics" The book is full of real recipes that Cheng uses to explain math concepts. She visited Kurt at his home to talk math and bake one of the recipes from the book, for chocolate lava cupcakes.

Now We're Cooking with Math

Dr. Eric Kandel is a neuroscientist at Columbia University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute who won the Nobel Prize for his research into how we form memories. He’s also an avid art collector. In his latest book, "Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures," Kandel combines his two passions in an explanation of how our brains process art. Stemming from his decades of researching snail brains and memory, Kandel’s research breaks down how our cognitive functions perceive, process and appreciate art.

This is Your Brain on Art

When you hear a singer like the late Whitney Houston belt out a song like“I Will Always Love You,” you’re listening to a marvel of vocal skill, but what happens when a singer damages their voice? Singers of all ages come into Dr. Steven Zeitels’ medical practice with trauma caused by breathing dried-out air in planes or singing in towns or buildings that have unfamiliar allergens. One of his patients. Aerosmith’s lead singer, Steven Tyler, is nearly 70 and has been torturing his vocal folds since he was a teenager, but with Dr. Zeitel's treatment, Tyler can sing “Dream On” as loudly as when he was 25 years old.   

The Science of Singing

Talking about building an interstellar space ship makes you sound like a sci-fi fan who’s lost touch with the real world. Unless you’re Mae Jemison, a former astronaut and the head of 100 Year Starship, an organization the home page of which boldly commands, “Let’s make human interstellar travel capabilities a reality within the next hundred years.” The problem: space is big, and our current rocket technology isn’t cutting it, says Marc Millis, the head of the Tau Zero Foundation. The heads of yet another interstellar organization, Starship Century, think they are on the right track. The technology is the beam sail, pushed with microwave beams, instead of wind, to extremely high speeds.

How to Fly to Alpha Centauri

Will Your Next Car Fly?

Amateur paleontologist Jon Halsey isn't afraid to turn over a few rocks. By digging in areas near his home outside of Dallas, he's been able to amass an extensive collection of fossils which he stores in his garage. He calls the collection "The American Museum of God," revering the power he believes is behind his discoveries. Lindsay Patterson went digging with Halsey in the bed of the Sulfur River..

Museum of God

The desirable robot has been a trope in science fiction for almost a century, from the femme fatale Maria in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to Gigolo Joe in Steven Spielberg’s A.I.. Despina Kakoudaki is the author of Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People. She says a robot lover is an appealing fantasy because it can be perfectly beautiful, ageless, and brilliant. “It’s indestructible, it has replaceable body parts,” she says, “as if it is the alternative to the vulnerable, very fleshy, very gooey, very sometimes smelly human body.” An android can take physical and emotional abuse that a human being often can’t … or shouldn’t. And some social scientists have actually advocated for the creation of robot prostitutes or soldiers. But Kakoudaki says when we buy into that fantasy, we still don’t get it. “We treat objects with quite a lot of fascination and we treat objects really well. We treat people badly as a matter of course in culture,” she laments. 

Sexy Robots

At the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, they have curators for everything you would expect, like telescopes, missiles, planetary science and space shuttles. But Margaret Weitekamp’s collection is completely different. It includes things like ray guns, board games, pins, hats, t-shirts, and lunchboxes, all having something to do with space or space science fiction. Weitekamp’s title is Curator of the Social and Cultural Dimensions of Spaceflight, with a collection of more than 4,000 pieces of space-related ephemera to show for it. The Buck Rogers XZ-31 Rocket Pistol isn’t even the coolest piece of super-nerdy space stuff in her collection. Weitekamp’s principal obsession these days is an object that may resonate more deeply than anything else in museum’s collection, at least for the generation that grew up when America was going to the Moon.

Boldly Going Where No TV Prop Has Gone Before

After piano music helped him recover from brain surgery, Dr. Richard Fratianne became a true believer in music therapy. In the burn unit at the Cleveland MetroHealth Medical Center, Fratianne is measuring patients’ stress hormones during procedures to try to prove that music therapy reduces pain and anxiety.

Music Heals

Since the dawn of humanity, more or less, people have used representations of animals to tell stories. We drew pictures of them on the walls of caves, told stories about hapless spiders and mischievous rabbits, watched cartoons of coyotes running off cliffs and fish looking for lost sons.  But some artists have wanted to buck that trend, depicting animal stories from the animals’ point of view.

Two Artists Let the Animals Speak for Themselves

What makes us have especially productive sessions — those minutes or hours when you’re so immersed in what you’re doing that everything melts away? What exactly is going on in our brains to make us feel so focused? These are exactly the questions that drive Dr. Heather Berlin, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She studies the neuroscience of imagination, creativity and improvisation.

The Neuroscience of Creative Flow

Lots of kids have imaginary friends. (A young Kurt Andersen had a gaggle including Robbie Dobbie, Crackerpin, Jimmy the Cat, a poodle called Genevieve — which he pronounced in the French manner.) Marjorie Taylor, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon, has been looking at imaginary friends and the children who have them. “They tend to be more social, less shy, and do better on tasks which require you to take the perspective of another person in real life. We have found that they are more creative on some kinds of tasks. Other people have found that their narratives are richer.” Taylor is exploring the idea that these children are more creative — in particular, the kids who build a paracosm, a country or place for their friends “where children think about all kinds of things like entertainment, the food, the clothes, the transportation, the money.” Maxine, who is eight years old, walks us through her paracosm and the friends in it. Some are a little creepy, like Devil Man and Betchaboo, who takes the shape of a gun, but they’re not frightening to her. “They’re not the kind of people who will go and kill people. They’re not like gangsters, they’re just tricksters.” Besides, Maxine says, if imaginary friends caused trouble, “then they would be deleted. Because then you don’t exist. Sometimes when I forget about them they die, but they’re not deleted.” When you imagine the world, you get to set the rules.

Imaginary Friends Forever

Science and Creativity from Studio 360: the art of innovation. A sculpture unlocks a secret of cell structure, a tornado forms in a can, and a child's toy gets sent into orbit. Exploring science as a creative act since 2005. Produced by PRI and WNYC, and supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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Science and Creativity from Studio 360

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