Hey, Thoughty 2 here.
Through science, our civilisation has developed faster than anyone could have imagined and
we’ve made great leaps forward in our understanding of the universe, our minds, nature and everything
else.
But that journey has sometimes taken us in a pretty weird direction, so today we look
at the five most bizarre scientific experiments ever conducted.
The USA has the largest prison population in the world, with over 2 million people behind
bars.
They prop up a lot of American industries, with prisoners making everything from books
of braille for the blind to lingerie to canoes; all of which sounds like a rejected story
line from prison break; who needs a map of the prison tattooed on your body when you’ve
got braille, a sexy bra and a paddle?
So with all these people locked up, we should really know more about how incarceration affects
us and how it affects the guards because, as Alan Moore asked in his award winning comic;
“Who watches the watchmen?”
This was the purpose of the Stanford Prison Experiment.
For 6 days in 1971, psychology professor Philip Zimbardo paid 24 volunteers $15 a day to play
the roles of guards and prisoners.
He was aiming to look at the causes of abusive behaviour; was it down to the personality
of the people involved or was it down to the system itself?
The prisoners and guards were given appropriate uniforms and prisoners were arrested from
their homes and then put three to a cell.
They were given a number and only referred to by that number from then on.
Prisoners also had a chain around one ankle, to remind them of their lack of freedom.
The results were pretty shocking.
Within just 36 hours, prisoner #8612 had to be removed due to going into a wild rage.
All in all, 5 prisoners had to be removed early from the experiment and the whole program
was stopped after just six days; the plan had been to go on for two weeks.
Some of the guards were actually disappointed it got stopped early; they were beginning
to enjoy their roles.
In fact, one third displayed genuine sadistic tendencies.
Punishments included removing mattresses, making prisoners be naked, not allowing them
to empty their toilet bucket, locking them in cupboards and many more.
Power is a dangerous thing.
Even Zimbardo was forced to admit that he had lost perspective as the experimenter,
and was surprised by what he allowed to continue.
Post-experiment, there were serious concerns about the human rights violations carried
out during the experiment and Zimbardo even stopped some of the prisoners from leaving
the experiment early, after they had had enough, even though he told them before it started,
that they could leave at any point.
It was only the objections of his girlfriend Christina Maslach that made him finish the
experiment early.
She was mainly worried about the mental health of the prisoners.
Or maybe, she was just sick of him torturing prisoners all day, instead of helping her
with the housework.
Our next experiment came about as a result of a huge amount of physical labour; a gold
mine dug almost 2.5 kilometres into the earth.
The Homestake mine in Lead, South Dakota, was started in 1876 and operated for over
100 years, finally stopping production in 2001.
During this time, it produced over 1.25 million kilograms of gold, along with some silver
as well.
There’s still more gold down there but now the mine is so deep that it was costing more
money to extract it than its sale price; kind of the whole point of mining.
As you know, scientists are basically like moles and love doing stuff underground.
So in 2007, they moved in and started looking for something much more rarely seen than gold,
and far more valuable when it comes to the mysteries of the universe.
The Large Underground Xenon experiment is set about 1.5 km underground and was designed
to find evidence of dark matter.
Dark Matter and Dark Energy make up around 95% of our universe so only 5% are the more
tangible atoms we deal with on a daily basis; the air we breathe, the ground beneath your
feet, left over take away food, hats, you know; stuff.
In 1932, a physicist called Jan Oort realised that the stars and planets in the milky way
were orbiting at the wrong speed, if they are the only mass in the galaxy.
He put forward the theory that there must be something else that we can’t see that
is adding a huge amount of mass to the universe.
And so the idea of dark matter was born.
The problem with Dark Matter is, that, although it’s everywhere, since it’s far more common
than anything else in the universe, even Starbucks, it’s really really weak.
That means we never see it interact with any normal matter.
The world we see around us is extremely noisy; there are particles bouncing around all over
the place.
Imagine you are holding a kid’s party and you have 30 little kids, all full of cake,
sweets and destructive tendencies.
And now imagine, amongst all this chaos, you’re trying to listen out for a tiny hamster, scratching
its nose.
You’ll just never hear it.
Plus, the hamster will probably get crushed, or covered in paint or something.
When you look up into space, it looks empty but actually you are being bombarded with
cosmic rays, constantly; around 3 or 4 a second.
So when you’re looking for something as shy as dark matter, this constant attack will
make it impossible to find.
You need to block out the rays and what better way to do that, than by building your lab
under a mile of thick rock.
Here the cosmic rays drop from 3 or 4 a second to just a couple a month.
The scientists took a 370 kg box of xenon, an element that is extremely unreactive, and
put it into a big tank of water.
Scientists call it “the quietest place in the universe.”
So what have they found in 2 years of watching this very quiet box?
Um… nothing.
But are they going to give up?
Of course not, this is science; they’re going to build a bigger box.
Now if you think 2 years is a long time to sit about while nothing happens then you are
in for a surprise; a very very slow and boring surprise.
The Pitch Drop Experiment is designed to show that “pitch” is indeed a liquid.
Pitch is a form of petrol, also known as asphalt or bitumen, and although it looks like a solid
and you can smash it with a hammer, it’s actually just an extremely viscous liquid,
like the thickest blackest honey you could imagine.
In 1927, at the University of Queensland, Australia, Professor Thomas Parnell heated
some pitch and put it into a sealed funnel.
He allowed it to settle for 3 years and then cut off the tip of the funnel so the pitch
could flow out.
And it did, in 1938, taking just 8 years.
It’s a good thing it fell when it did or the whole world might have been too distracted
watching the world’s most boring experiment, to get on with the war.
The professor didn’t get to see it drop himself, as 8 years is quite a long time to
concentrate on something, so he left the experiment alone to do its thing.
The second drop took just one month more than the last one but he missed it again, and so
on it went, and it’s still going.
It now holds the record as the longest continuous running experiment of all time.
So what happened when he finally saw it drop?
Nothing, because he never did.
He sadly died in 2013 having missed every one of the 8 drops the experiment had made.
In 1988, he saw that it was super close, went to make a cup of tea and missed it.
In 2000, he was away but the wonders of modern technology allowed him to set up a camera.
But guess what?
The camera malfunctioned.
And we’re still waiting to see it.
The 9th drop, in 2014, had stretched all the way down to the base and it was broken when
they tried to empty out the catchment dish, so it was broken artificially and doesn’t
count as a drop.
The drops have taken longer since they installed air conditioning, you know, to really ramp
up the tension.
What this really proves is that people will keep doing something, no matter how boring
or irritating, just because they can.
Just like level 350 of Candy Crush.
But if you want an experiment that really shows what people are prepared to do, then
The Milgram Experiment is certainly one to read up on.
In 1961, Adolf Eichmann, one of the Nazis who orchestrated the Holocaust, was put on
trial for war crimes.
It was a hot topic at the time and one of the big questions going around was “what
if he was just following orders, the same as any other soldier?”
Well, Jewish psychologist Stanley Milgram, wanted to put this to the test and he designed
an experiment that has given us great insight into the relationship that people have with
authority.
Why is it, for example, that if a doctor told you to take off your pants, you’d think
“okay”, but if the bus driver told you, you’d probably be calling a hotline?
The Milgram experiment was conducted at Yale university in July 1961.
There were three roles, the experimenter (who was the person of authority), the teacher
(who was the volunteer), and the learner (who the teacher believed was another volunteer
but was actually an actor).
The teacher sat in one room with a microphone and the learner sat in another room.
There was no window between the rooms.
The teacher told the learner a word and then gave a choice of four other words and the
learner had to choose the correct pair.
If the match was incorrect, the teacher pressed a button and gave the learner a small electric
shock.
At the beginning of the experiment, the teacher was given a small test shock, to demonstrate
what the learner would be experiencing.
But every time the learner made a mistake, the teacher had to increase the voltage.
The learner was an actor, of course, so there were no real shocks.
But as the voltage increased, they would make louder and louder noises and screams and complain
about their heart condition, which had been mentioned earlier on.
They would bang on the walls and beg to stop.
If the voltage went over a lethal dose, around 300 volts, they were told to make no noise,
as if they had died.
So, how high do you think the teachers went?
How many of the volunteers would refuse to continue in their role as the teacher when
they heard the pain of the learner?
Shockingly, 65% of teachers ended up giving the maximum 450 volt shock; probably frying
the corpse of their poor dead learner, if the shocks were real.
How is this possible?
Do we live in a world full of psychopaths?
No, it’s all about the relationship of the volunteer and the experimenter.
Because the experimenter is there and telling them to continue, most people feel like what
they’re doing must be okay.
We are taught to trust people in authority.
In variations of the test, they realised a lot of things make a difference to this trust,
such as being in the same room as the experimenter, the type of clothing they wear and so on.
Imagine you’re outside an electronics store and there’s a TV in a box.
A guy walks up, points at the flat screen TV and tells you “that’s yours, it’s
free - go on, take it”, you’d probably think he was a criminal.
But if he was in a police uniform, boom; you’d be enjoying Netflix in 70 inches, quicker
than you could say “The Milgram Experiment”.
Our final experiment takes us into the animal kingdom.
In 1962, as the swinging sixties were just getting going, a group of scientists wondered
“what happens if you give an elephant acid?”
I wonder if this question actually answers another question; “what happens if you give
a group of scientists acid?” because this is probably how all of this madness came about
in the first place.
Warren Thomas, who was the director of Oklahoma zoo, took 297 milligrams of LSD and shot it
into Tusko the Elephant.
Did Tusko begin to taste colour?
Did he begin to …like… understand the universe, dude?
No, he went on the greatest trip of them all; he died.
He ran around for a couple of minutes, then keeled over and was dead in an hour.
An important discovery was made; don’t give acid to elephants.
The world is a more enlightened place, thanks to poor Tusko.
Actually, this isn’t the only case of animals being given LSD around this time.
A NASA funded project, led by John Lilly, was set up to see if we could communicate
with dolphins.
Due to its reputation as a “mind expander” they tried using acid but it didn’t seem
to have any real effect.
Interestingly, they also built a human/dolphin cohabitation space so that a woman called
Margaret Lovatt could live with Peter the dolphin and try to teach him English.
The sixties were pretty weird, weren’t they?
That’s the thing about science though; it can seem pretty crazy, until you learn something
important, and then it’s not so crazy after all.
There is an idea that every great discovery is an accident, since if you knew exactly
what you were looking for, then you wouldn’t need to discover it.
So I guess we’ll just have to let the madness continue.
Thanks for the view, subscribe for more Thoughty2.