Audio Transcript

[00:00:00]
Announcer: You’re listening to the Fizzics Ed Podcast. For hundreds of ideas, free experiments and more, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. And now, here’s your host, Ben Newsome.

[00:00:17]
Ben Newsome: Yes, welcome again to another Fizzics Ed Podcast. Hey, it’s a very big week this week. We’re speaking with Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, who is incredibly passionate about science and, I must say, incredibly prodigious when it comes to popularising science and getting it out there as much as he possibly can. He is currently the Julius Sumner Miller Fellow at the University of Sydney, where his total mission is to spread the good word about science and its benefits. And trust me, he really, really does this. He’s currently up to his 44th book. Yes, you heard that right, 44 books in science. Popular science that you can read, you can find online without a doubt.

[00:00:50]
Ben Newsome: And his current one coming up, Vital Science, you have a chance to win in this episode. You’ll have to listen on in and you’ll find out more about this. He’s been incredibly well known for popularising science in ABC Radio right across Australia. He’s been on the Midday Show, the Today Show, the Good Morning Australia Show. He’s done so many things. He was one of the first eight Australian Apple Masters, which is all about celebrating global changemakers when it comes to getting people to really start thinking about how to do stuff better.

[00:01:15]
Ben Newsome: And in 2002, he won the Ig Nobel Prize, which is awarded by Harvard University. And how did he do that? It’s all about his research into belly button lint and why it’s always blue. He’s a member of the Order of Australia. He has an asteroid named after him. There are so many things to discuss. He’s also a distinguished foreign guest for the United States Information Agency. Trust me, Dr Karl really has been doing lots and lots of stuff. And we get to hear about just how he thinks about science and how to keep those facts in his head and be able to answer these questions on the fly on ABC Radio stations. He really does a fantastic job with that. And also just about a mindset about learning and curiosity and knowledge and all that sort of thing. So, I hope you enjoy it. I certainly did. And listen on in, I hope you get a bit out of it.

[00:02:00]
Announcer: This is the Fizzics Ed Podcast. We’re all about science, ed tech and more. To see 100 fun free experiments you can do with your class, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. That’s physics spelled F I Z Z I C S and click 100 free experiments.

[00:02:19]
Ben Newsome: Dr Karl, welcome to the Fizzics Ed Podcast.

[00:02:22]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: Fizz Ed, we’re not talking pumping iron, we’re talking pumping the brain?

[00:02:26]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, in a lot of ways. I mean, let’s be honest, we can’t spell. I mean, physics should be with a P, not an F, but we do like doing a lot of science and, let’s be honest, so have you done for many, many years.

[00:02:37]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: Sure, that’s been a great pleasure. I’ve been a very lucky boy.

[00:02:40]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, so much so. And look, that’s why I really wanted to have a chat with you. I know this is your role, you do a lot of chatting with lots of places and a lot of people listening in have listened to you for many years and read your books and all that sort of thing. And what I really wanted to do is spend a little bit of time just getting my head around, how on earth did this even start?

[00:02:59]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: Ah, well it started with the anti-gravity machine, really.

[00:03:04]
Ben Newsome: Okay.

[00:03:05]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: So, a colleague and I were trying to build an anti-gravity machine. It didn’t succeed, but we talked about it on, way back then it was Double J. That was my first introduction to radio. But my real long-term commitment with radio began when I applied to go on the American Space Shuttle as an astronaut.

[00:03:26]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: So in 1980, I wrote a letter to NASA, saying, no, it was 1981, I’ve still got the letter. I wrote a letter to them saying, “Hi NASA, I’d like to be an astronaut. Can I be an astronaut? I’ve got a degree in physics and maths and a degree in engineering, and soon I’ll have a degree or two degrees in medicine and surgery. I’d be pretty useful on the Space Shuttle as a mission specialist. Do you have a position for me?” And they wrote a letter back to me, which I’ve still got today, and the letter said, “Sorry, we’re all full up, and anyway, we only employ Americans.” And it was written on a typewriter and it was signed by a human being in ink at the end and I’ve still got that letter.

[00:04:02]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: And so then a little bit later, Double J as it was then, was doing a special on the Year of Transport, which included something on the Space Shuttle, which was being launched that year in 1981. So I rang up Double J and I said, “Hey, I know something about the Space Shuttle. I’ve been following it for a while.” They said, “Sure, come on down and talk to us.” So they took me out to a back room, started hitting the record button, I started talking about the Space Shuttle and they said, “Well, okay, do you want to come in and talk when we actually launch the Space Shuttle?” When we, the Americans, launch the Space Shuttle.

[00:04:32]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: So I was there that night and we got to a certain stage with the launch and, by the way, this was difficult. This is not just sort of lie in bed, pick up your smartphone and then flip over and then you can see a rocket being launched into space coming through to you via Wi-Fi through the internet via the World Wide Web. Forget it. No, no, no. We’d had to, we, Triple J, Double J had had to get lines from NASA and then link from NASA directly up to the satellite, then down from the satellite into Terry Hills, and then another line across to the studio. And it was a really big and complicated thing. Trying to get vision? Forget it. The cost of getting vision off a satellite was way too expensive. We could just barely afford to get the audio lines booked.

[00:05:18]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: And so it was a big deal and at the end of the show, we got to the point where we were about to launch and then suddenly they said, “No,” said NASA, “we’ve got a problem with the fuel cell. Have to cancel.” And everybody said, “What’s a fuel cell?” And luckily I knew what a fuel cell was, which is basically a box and you put fuel into it, which is usually hydrogen, and out of the other end of the box comes electricity. No moving parts apart from the hydrogen. You put hydrogen in, the hydrogen combines slowly with the oxygen to give you water and electricity. And so it’s a box that makes electricity.

[00:05:51]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: And everybody was very impressed by that. So then we came back for the second launch, which turned out to be the first launch that went into space very happily. And people said after the back, “Well, we’ve got to have some hippie tea to clean out my kidneys.” That’s what the hippies believe, all sorts of wrong stuff. I was a hippie myself, I used to believe all sorts of wrong stuff. And I said, “Well, actually no, you’re wrong,” because I’d been studying physiology. “It’s not the case that the hippie tea cleans your kidneys, but rather that your kidneys filter a quarter of a tonne of blood every day and out of that they pull out one and a half kilograms of salt, which takes a huge metabolic cost. And then they put all of that salt back into the bloodstream except for eighty thousandths of a gram, 80 milligrams, which goes out in your urine. And the reason that you take it out and put it back in is because God made a mistake and we’re fish gone wrong.” And they said, “We need you for a show called Great Moments in Science,” which at that time was a lady talking topless on the radio playing music to black and white movies on Channel 10. And that’s how I got my break in radio.

[00:06:57]
Ben Newsome: And it just keeps on going and going and going. And look, the thing is that I mean, there’s lots of people that have listened to you over the years from Double J all the way through to Triple J and beyond. All that stuff’s brilliant. And I love that story about the Shuttle. Actually, there’s one of our staff right now who has just finished the grand tour of visiting the four Shuttles that are remaining.

[00:07:16]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: Ah!

[00:07:16]
Ben Newsome: Only just finished it only a week ago. She was actually putting it out on her Instagram feed only this week and very, very happy to just see simple words “mission was accomplished”. Just to see those things has been lovely.

[00:07:27]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: So they’re amazing technology and a bit flawed, but everything is. You do the first one so you can do the second one. And if we did it today, we’d do it differently. And so the people nowadays who are getting into the private rocket launchers, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and the like, they don’t admit it in public, but they’re riding on the shoulders of those who have gone before them and done all the mistakes.

[00:07:51]
Ben Newsome: That’s it. And I just even just thinking, even just now, and you write about that, I mean, getting to see SpaceX at Cape Canaveral earlier this year, seeing how it’s all set up. I mean, it’s…

[00:08:00]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: You saw it?

[00:08:00]
Ben Newsome: I got… yeah, I got to see it. I didn’t get to see a launch though, I missed it. It was one of those things. But just to see the setup. I mean, and they’re not messing around. I mean, that’s a big deal to get it going. And you’re right, trying to get it going off the back of decades of effort from NASA and Russia and all those people, absolutely. But one of the things that struck me when I was looking at Holly, that’s the person who’s been overseas seeing the last four Shuttles, is just how they’ve tried to make that accessible to the public. I mean, you’re only within an extra arm’s reach. If you had long enough arms, you’d just be out to maybe just about touch it. Just maybe, maybe. And I guess in thinking that and paralleling that a lot with what you’ve done in your career is making science accessible, straight up. And I kind of think, I mean, have you ever had times where you’ve had this, I don’t know, I suppose you have to, you’ve got lots of people calling you in often asking outlandish questions. What’s been the toughest question to ever have to answer? Just trying to think, like, I mean, I know you’ve had a few questions that have come at you.

[00:08:59]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: What’s one where you’ve gone, “You know what, I don’t know”? Well, one came through today asking about concussion and I forgot one of the three membranes of the brain that hold the soft squishy stuff, which is like thick porridge, inside a case made of hard bone. And I could remember the one that intimately marries into the brain called the arachnoid mater, and I could remember the one that is outside just linking up to the bone, the dura mater, but I could not remember the pia mater. It just dropped out of my brain. So these things are hard to find on the run.

[00:09:35]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: And then also I was asked a question today about “do fish drink water?” And I knew there was a difference, but it was very complicated and I couldn’t think fast enough to get the answer. So I had to look up something that I’d written about two years ago and I got the answer, which is that with the freshwater fish, they’re more salty than the water around them and so water via osmotic action comes into their body. And so with freshwater fish, they don’t drink much, but they’ve got a huge amount of water coming into their body anyway and they urinate like crazy. The other sort is the saltwater fish living in salty water and they’re less salty than the environment, so water leaves their body through the skin into the ocean, so they drink water like crazy, but they don’t urinate much.

[00:10:24]
Ben Newsome: And actually, if you’re listening on in, you can totally replicate that experiment if you’d like. Get yourself two plates of water, one with fresh straight water, one with salt water, and just simply just put some jelly babies in them. Or if you haven’t got jelly babies, gummy bears look fantastic. And watch what happens. So you get the gummy bear, we’ll go with gummy bears, kids love gummy bears. So you put the gummy bear in the fresh water and you put the gummy bear in the salt water and you ask the kids, “What will happen?” And turns out that the one that is in the salt water… I mean, what’s going to happen to it? Is water going to go into it or is water going to go out of it? It comes down when you’re talking about osmotic potentials, really, is water’s going to want to sort of fill spaces that are chunked up. They want to fill it out a little bit. So what I want you to do is, if you’re listening on in, is put those gummy bears on the two plates and you will actually see that one will swell up a heap, and it’s actually the one that’s in the fresh water because the water rushes into the gummy bear trying to dilute it.

[00:11:16]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: Yeah, so the way I’ve always remembered osmotic action is that you’re trying to equalise the concentration of water. So the concentration of water in the fresh water is 100%, and the concentration of water inside the gummy bear is maybe 80%, so it’s trying to bring it up to 100%, so the fresh water rushes in to try to bring the water concentration up to equalise outside.

[00:11:41]
Ben Newsome: So this is the reason I sort of asked that question was, we come across lots of students—I mean we go to thousands and thousands of classes and shows—and people often think that you’ve always got to know everything off by heart, always. And the thing is that that takes years and years and years of reading and learning and everything else. And there comes a point when, like you were saying today, caught on three different membranes with the brain, I mean occasionally you’re going to get stumped and that’s okay. This is an okay thing to not always remember. You can always go back to your research. You looked two years ago for what you wrote about it.

[00:12:10]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: How can anybody possibly remember everything that has been known to the human race? It’s impossible.

[00:12:16]
Ben Newsome: So how do we—exactly—and how do we work with students who generally seem to think, they look up to their idols and everything else and think, “Gosh, they know so much.” How do we get across to them going, “You know what, it’s not always the case.” I always sort of wonder just thinking from all the educators listening on in. You’ll have students who are going up whether in year six or year 12, whatever they are, and there’s always this idea of perfectionism like what people think is this is the perfect ideal of people who know stuff. How do we get across to kids it’s okay not to always know stuff, go find the information on a well-sourced article or whatever? Because no matter how much we say it to the kids, we’ll often see them the following week and they still feel like they don’t know enough.

[00:13:08]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: Nobody ever knows enough. They’re right on that front. There’s always more to know. Where are you trying to get to?

[00:13:16]
Ben Newsome: I guess what I’m trying to think is advice for teachers who have that kid who just has got this incredible potential but is a bit hung up on just the way they feel down on themselves that they may not know enough stuff.

[00:13:33]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: Well, feeling down just is. It’s like feeling emotion over the fact that when you go out into a thunderstorm and it’s raining, that you get wet. There’s no moral values in it. It just is the nature of the beast. And the nature of reality is that you just don’t know everything and there’s no point in having moral anguish over the fact that you don’t know everything. I’m still trying to find a good answer to why the full moon looks so big on the horizon immediately after it rises and a few hours later it doesn’t look so big. I cannot find a good answer to that.

[00:14:08]
Ben Newsome: I’ve always wondered about that question about the moon versus supermoon.

[00:14:12]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: Well, the supermoon is related to the fact that the orbit of the moon around the Earth is not a perfect circle. So let’s just back up a bit there. The moon does not orbit the Earth. No. Rather, the Earth and the moon both orbit their common centre of gravity, which is 1,450 kilometres below the equator of the Earth. But from the frame of reference of the Earth, let’s just say that the moon orbits the Earth. Well, it varies its distance by about 10%. Some say, I forget the exact numbers, say 360,000 to 400,000 kilometres. So when it’s at its closest, 360,000 kilometres, and that happens to coincide with a full moon, of course it looks bigger than when it’s 400,000 kilometres away. Simple as that. It was some sort of new-age astrology person who said, “Oh, it’s not just distance, it’s magic. Let’s call it a supermoon.” And I don’t care, but the point is it’s just because it’s closer, it looks a bit bigger. Simple as that.

[00:15:15]
Ben Newsome: And over the years, we’ve tracked lots of kids in terms of what they think science is. It’s often known in journals as children’s science and looking at misconceptions. And actually, to be honest, it’s not even misconceptions. It’s often ideas they’ve formulated based on their own observations which haven’t been guided from others. And so there are all sorts of things you hear. Like, for example, it’s quite understandable for a child who is four years old to think clouds are made out of cotton wool because the white fluffy stuff looks like the stuff up in the sky. Or they will think that perhaps when electricity is running around a circuit, it may—does it get used up, does it not? I don’t know. It kind of, it all depends on how they’ve been exposed to these sorts of things. And these misconceptions are out there. I mean, often you hear questions a lot is “Why is the sky blue?” and those sort of questions. But there are all sorts of things. Like, for example, heat. Heat always rises. We go, “Well, if you hold a rod with a blowtorch going across the top of it and the rod is upright, so the rod’s poking out the top of your fist and 10 centimetres up in the air and you put a blowtorch across the top of it, and that rod’s made out of metal, that heat’s going to go down into your hands. You’re going to learn real fast heat can go down.”

[00:16:29]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: So the statement “heat rises” is too simplistic. So simplistic it’s wrong. It’s about as simplistic as oxidants—whatever they are—are bad and therefore antioxidants—whatever they are—are good. And that’s so simplistic it’s wrong.

[00:16:46]
Ben Newsome: And it’s tough, isn’t it? Because you look at the misconceptions that often we as educators are trying to help kids as much as possible understand how the world works, and not even realising that our language just by slight nuances in words can create either the right idea or the wrong idea. And it’s quite the challenge.

[00:17:07]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: Well, it helps if you can formulate the question, because then you know what you don’t know. Sure. Well, let me give you a bit of an illustration how I got to where I am, and it’s a three-part process. The first part of the process was that the Australian Government saw education as a worthwhile investment in the future. And so therefore I’ve had 28 years of education essentially for free. And I think that’s very good because it pays back. I’ve seen written over the front gates of a university in Latin, it was written, “The state glories in the educated citizen.” In general, people who are educated do better for the state and give it more financial payback than people who are not educated, and it seems a worthwhile investment in the future to give everybody a free education as much as they want because it pays back.

[00:18:03]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: So I’ve got 12 years starting off in baby jail and working my way up through kindergarten, primary school and high school, and then 16 years at university, including degrees in physics and maths, which is a good mental toolbox to start with, followed by some practical stuff in engineering when I got a Master’s degree in that when I designed and built a machine to pick up electrical signals off the human retina to diagnose certain types of eye diseases. I did that for Fred Hollows. And then two degrees in one medicine, one in surgery, but then to round me off I’ve got several years of non-degree study just for fun in computer science, astrophysics, electrical engineering and philosophy. So that’s the first part.

[00:18:47]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: The second part is I’m always educating myself by reading my way through about $10,000 worth of scientific literature, which is a pile about a metre thick every month. So Nature costs me $750 a year, Aviation Week and Space Technology $700 a year, etc., etc., etc. I pay for education, I pay for coffee. I’m prepared to pay for both of them.

[00:19:10]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: And then the third part is the most important part—well, they’re all important—the third part is very important. If you just read stuff, after a while you’ve got all this stuff running around in your head like a big mush. Is Mount Everest 28,000 feet or metres or what high? You know, you just don’t know. And so what I do is I turn it into stories, four of them every week.

[00:19:35]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: So this week, reaching over to the side here, I’ve written stories on how black holes have no size. They’ve got mass, but they have no size. Their size is zero. That’s pretty crazy. Another one about how with regard to occupational health and repetitive strain injury and working with keyboards and mice, the amount of science behind the field called ergonomics is essentially zero. People come in and tell you to do stuff. Have they got any hard data to back up what they do, that what they do is useful to you? No. We got nothing. Very close to nothing.

[00:20:13]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: Thirdly, there’s a new field of knowledge called space law—new in that it’s been around for a while—and the space treaty says you shouldn’t have nuclear weapons in space. And interestingly enough, it mirrors the Antarctic Treaty, the space treaty, except it’s about half a century ahead. So you start off with a heroic phase where people just barely get in space and come back alive, or people head for the North and South Poles and just barely get back alive, and sometimes they don’t. And then you have the nationalised period where it’s a lot safer, we’ve got a lot more knowledge, and the governments are throwing their weight behind it. And then you have the cooperative activity phase where the politics has been supplanted by science. And so that happened with both the Antarctic and space treaties. And then open for business, where you have technological advances so that you can have the private corporations going in there. And that’s happened both in the Antarctic where people are fishing in there, which I think is a bad thing, and in space where you’ve got the private companies going in there, which is so far a good thing. And then you have the threat to the accepted order. So they then, in the Antarctic, had big companies trying to mine in Antarctica and trying to do a lot more fishing. And under the Antarctic Treaty, we’ve said no. And the corresponding activity in space is that Trump wants to set up a space force with brackets nuclear weapons. And that’s where we’ve stopped.

[00:21:42]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: And then we set up a pristine wilderness concept and that varies where with regard to the Antarctic—it’s a pristine wilderness that should be preserved, or it should be something that we should exploit the heck out of. In space, well, on one hand it’s this pristine, wonderful, magnificent wilderness, or we have the Kessler syndrome where one bit of space junk runs up against another bit of space junk and you have the scenario in the movie Gravity. So that’s my second story. So I’ve actually read a whole lot of stuff and then written it down as a story.

[00:22:14]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: And the third one is how dangerous is it from the point of view of acidity to drink sparkling mineral water as opposed to just sparkling water? And then the fourth one is the story about the black holes. So I write four stories every week. And then you do this every week for a couple of months, for a couple of years, for a couple of decades, and then gradually you build up a body of knowledge. You don’t do it just by simply saying, “Oh, is mineral water safe to drink?”, Google something and then tell somebody the first thing that you read on Google. That’s not the way to do it.

[00:22:49]
Ben Newsome: That’s it. And actually just listening in on that, it reminds me, parallels with long time ago, prior to education, long time ago, I used to work in bushland regeneration and used to do a lot of work in just trying to fix our local Sydney bushland areas from invasive weeds, etc. And anyone who’s ever worked in those areas can fully attest that you’re not talking like 5, 10, 15 species, you’re talking hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and they’re all out there and they all come in different guises, whether it’s spring, summer, winter. Are they big, are they small, are they juvenile? What is it that’s impacting these plants? And we’d have these trainee bush regenerators start and they’d go, “How on earth do the botanists know so many different species and all the things about them?” and go, “Well, just learn one a day. Just just do one. Don’t try and learn them all, just one. And then the next day, remember the one you did yesterday and then do number two. Then on number three go, remember the one and two, now it’s time for three.” And you’re right, over time it builds up.

[00:23:48]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: Well, I’ll give you an example with Chris Hadfield, the astronaut. Okay, so he wanted to be an astronaut ever since he saw at the age of nine, in 1969, he saw people walking on the moon. And so he decided to go down that pathway and then very quickly realised that he could join the air cadets, like the scouts. And very to his surprise, quickly realised that you could fly an aeroplane at the age of 16 by yourself, two years before you could drive a car by yourself at the age of 18. And so he then went into that and then into the military and got degrees in engineering, and still kept on going. And then suddenly it’s a whole bunch of years down the line. It’s 1989, he’s 29 years old and he’s still not an astronaut. And he sees on the TV the Berlin Wall fall down. Okay, question for you without notice, Ben, what does he do? The Berlin Wall falls down, he wants to be an astronaut, he’s watching it on TV, he was born in 1960, it’s now 1989, 29 years later. What does he do? Yes, you’re dead right. He decides to learn Russian. Because suddenly, with the Berlin Wall down, the competition, the Cold War is over between the Soviet Union, which declares itself to not exist, and then we’ll enter a period of cooperation. And how can he benefit from that? By learning Russian because the Russians have got a space programme.

[00:25:24]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: So he learns 10 words of Russian. And the next day he learns another 10, on top of the 10. And by the third day he’s got 30. And you do this for a couple of years, and then suddenly he ends up being so knowledgeable in Russian and also so skilled as a pilot that when it came time to come back from the International Space Station on the Russian capsule, he was chosen to be the captain, not a Russian. Because he had as good a control of the Russian language, but on top of that, he also had the skill. So he was just a bit ahead of the Russian, so he was chosen there. So it takes time. He describes if you read his book and listen to his podcast, how as part of training to be an astronaut, you learn everything about everything on the spacecraft because everything could kill you. Everything’s out to kill you, nothing personal. And so you spend a day with some person who really knows about the oxygen system. Now this is not about the carbon dioxide system, that’s completely different. You learn about the oxygen system and you go into it and my god, at the end of eight hours of spending time with this one woman or man, you’re beginning to get a hint of what’s taken them 10 years to learn. And then this person, she turns to you and she says, “But look, Chris, if it all boils down to one thing, here’s one thing I want you to remember,” and they give you this one thing to remember and then you repeat that every day for the next five years. So on top of learning Russian, there’s one thing you’ve got to remember every day for the five years, and then that’s on top of all the other stuff. So basically it’s just you get in there and you realise you’re in there for the long haul and you start putting in the time, you put in the hard yards.

[00:27:06]
Ben Newsome: That’s it. And actually I really like what you said earlier on, which just simply just as a toolkit.

[00:27:11]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: You build up this mental toolkit in your brain, and that’s a good thing about, for example, physics and maths. But depending on how your brain runs, it might be chemistry, it might be botany, it might be something that will be the mental toolkit that your brain happens to like. Like you might like classical music, you might like the Young Rascals, you might like the angry young people from Western Sydney. There’s all different types of music and it’s your choice what you like and then go with that.

[00:27:41]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, fantastic. And actually that actually dovetails nicely with something we’d love to try and do, which is a bit unusual here, but the you’ve got a brand new book coming out. Yet another one, book number 44, Vital Science. Interestingly, they…

[00:27:56]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: They put an ECG on the front and when they picked one off the web to chuck on, they picked up somebody with pretty terminal and fatal heart block. Oh. And when my wife and I looked at it, we said, “No, let’s have one where I keep on living.”

[00:28:11]
Ben Newsome: Please do. So you can’t miss it. It’s a green cover and it’s filled with magnificent detail. And the one thing I’d love to do is, Dr Karl, you always get asked all the questions, all the time. It’d be nice to actually ask the people listening a question, which you might… I know…

[00:28:32]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: Okay, here it comes. Right. So you get a little shoot, a little seedling, and it weighs nothing. It’s tiny. And you chuck it in the ground and you add a bit of water to it and you know, just sits there in the ground and it keeps on getting bigger and bigger and after five years it’s 100 kilograms. You know, if you were to dry it out and get rid of the, you know, the water and the sap, you got 100 kilograms of this dry tree. Here’s a question: where did those atoms that make up that tree, where did they come from?

[00:29:08]
Ben Newsome: Air, water, soil, somewhere. Okay, so here’s what you got to do. We’re going to put this out up onto various social media and we’d love you to answer said question. And what we’ll do is in the next episode we’ll let you know what Dr Karl’s answer is for that. But I tell you what though, if you do want to answer it, make it a good one because we’d love to choose the best one, or the closest one to the answer, would be fantastic. And look, thank you very much for coming along to have a chat with me.

[00:29:40]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: Ah, thank you Dr Ben, it’s been a lot of fun.

[00:29:41]
Ben Newsome: And I hope that you can inspire your kids listening on in that no, you don’t have to know everything. Just one at the time. Work with our astronaut Mr Hadfield or Dr Karl or anyone else. Just do one at a time, one at a time and you will learn more and more.

[00:29:56]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: That’s very, very true. Just like your botanists who know thousands of plants, and I’m always astonished where they look at two plants that to me are perfectly identical and say, “Oh, no, obviously look over there. See how that is 1/10 of a millimetre different from that,” and you look and you say, “Yeah, it is, isn’t it? Yeah.”

[00:30:13]
Ben Newsome: Absolutely. And that’s the thing. Sometimes people go down a minefield of one particular area. My wife works in biosecurity and the people that she knows in entomology, the amount of information they know about one particular fly is astonishing. It’s just how it is. So look, exactly. So look, thank you very much. And again, personally thank you for inspiring an entire generation of people to get into science. And I hope that you continue to do that for a very long time.

[00:30:39]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: Well, it’s not just me. There’s all the other people in the ABC Science who are doing so, because most of the science communication comes out of the ABC in Australia. Very little of it on commercial radio. A little bit in commercial radio and TV. Good on everybody who’s going in there.

[00:30:52]
Ben Newsome: Brilliant, brilliant job. And if you want to get more involved with that, just check out Inspiring Australia. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that you can be getting involved in no matter where you are in Australia. And if you’re overseas, look out for your own communities. I’m sure you’ll have stuff going on around your own area and if you don’t, at least go check out what Inspiring Australia is doing and perhaps you might be able to become that seed that might grow into that magnificent tree, which in this case may be born out of water, soil, sand, something that makes it up and grows in this case. Get your science going in your community. Thank you very much. Have a fantastic afternoon.

[00:31:22]
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: Thank you Dr Ben.

[00:31:23]
Announcer: You’re listening to the Fizzics Ed Podcast. Why don’t you book us for a science show or workshop in your school? We love seeing students get excited about science, and you will too. Go to fizzicseducation.com.au and click on schools for more info.

[00:31:41]
Ben Newsome: So what do you reckon? Is it air, is it soil, is it water? What is it that makes the vast bulk of trees that you see actually be there in the first place? It’s a great question and Dr Karl will answer that question on next week’s episode of the Fizz Ed Podcast. Now, by the way, if you want to answer that competition, we’re going to be running that on Facebook. So look at Fizzics Education. That’s badly spelled Fizzics Education, F I Z Z I C S Education, on Facebook and look for the competition question which is, what is it—air, water, soil—that makes up a tree? And answer it. And I tell you what, those people who get it right, we’ll choose those people who get it right at random, five people at random will get the book sent out to you. And it’s really cool that Dr Karl was able to provide those books, courtesy of Pan Macmillan Australia. Now, by the way, speaking of science, Dr Karl runs a bucketload of podcasts as well. Check out Shirtloads of Science. Now I did say shirt, like loud shirt. Shirtloads of Science. Now Dr Karl is actually well-known for his very loud and vibrant shirts that his wife makes, and it’s really quite cool. Shirtloads of Science does talk about science in all different ways. He’s definitely on Triple J Science on mornings. He’s also been involved in the ABC Great Moments in Science, and the BBC Five Live Science, and Sleek Geeks, and the QI Elves. He was on that as well just for a moment and it’s really quite cool how much effort and real passion that Dr Karl really has for science to the public. It’s very, very cool. Now, by the way, if you love your science, check out the Physics Twist podcast as well. Now Quill and Duncan have been doing a lot of interesting episodes on the stranger side of science, and it’s a bit of fun there too. So anyway, I hope you enjoy this episode, and don’t forget to enter that competition. It’s worth it. Jump on Facebook so you can get the copy of Vital Science. Why not? It’s vital. It’s worth your time and it’s a good read coming into the end of the year. You’ve been listening to me, Ben Newsome for Fizzics Education. I do hope you’ve enjoyed this and I hope to catch you next week.

[00:33:36]
Announcer: You’ve been listening to another Fizzics Ed Podcast. We’re excited about science. Subscribe to us on iTunes to download the next episode as soon as it’s released. And don’t forget, for hundreds of ideas, free experiments, our new Be Amazing book and more, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. That’s physics spelled F I Z Z I C S.

[00:34:03]
Announcer: This podcast is part of the Australian Educators Online Network. AEON.net.au.

Frequently Asked Questions

How did Dr Karl Kruszelnicki first get his start in radio broadcasting?
His career began with an interest in an anti-gravity machine project on Double J. However, his long-term radio commitment truly sparked in 1981 when he offered his scientific expertise to cover the first American Space Shuttle launch. This occurred after NASA rejected his astronaut application because they only employed American citizens.

Do fish actually drink water?
It depends on whether they live in fresh or salt water. Freshwater fish are saltier than their environment, so water enters their bodies via osmosis; they urinate frequently and don’t need to drink much. Conversely, saltwater fish lose water through their skin to the ocean, so they must drink constantly to stay hydrated while urinating very little.

What is the story behind Chris Hadfield becoming the first non-Russian captain of a Russian space capsule?
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Hadfield recognised that space exploration would shift toward international cooperation. He began learning ten Russian words a day, every day, for years. This long-term dedication, combined with his piloting skills, eventually led to him being chosen as captain over Russian candidates because of his mastery of the language and the technology.

How does Dr Karl manage to remember and process such a vast amount of scientific information?
Dr Karl invests heavily in continuous self-education, reading approximately $10,000 worth of scientific journals yearly. To ensure this information doesn’t become a “mush” in his head, he turns his research into four distinct stories every week, a practice he has maintained for decades to synthesise his knowledge.

What advice does Dr Karl give to students who feel overwhelmed by how much they don’t know?
He encourages students to view science as a mental toolkit and suggests an incremental learning approach. Instead of trying to master everything at once, he recommends learning just “one thing a day” and reviewing previous knowledge, noting that even experts like botanists or astronauts build their expertise through this slow, consistent process.

Discussion points summarised from the Dr Karl Kruszelnicki on continuous learning with AI assistance, verified and edited by Ben Newsome CF

Extra thought ideas to consider

The “One-a-Day” Learning Compound
Dr Karl and astronaut Chris Hadfield both highlight the power of incremental progress—learning ten words or one plant species daily. How can schools move away from “cramming” for assessments and toward this model of lifelong, consistent knowledge building?

Pristine Wilderness vs. Commercial Exploitation
In the discussion regarding Space Law and the Antarctic Treaty, Dr Karl raises questions about how humanity protects frontier environments. As private corporations enter the arena, how should international law evolve to balance scientific preservation with commercial advancement?

Science as a Universal Mental Toolkit
Dr Karl describes his various degrees and non-degree studies as building a “toolkit” for his brain. How can we shift the focus of STEM education so that students see these subjects as versatile problem-solving tools rather than just paths to specific, narrow careers?