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This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids from Vermont Public. On this show... That sounds kind of cool. That doesn't sound very safe. But why?
From Vermont Public and Kids Imagination, this is But Why If World.
Hey there, folks, and welcome back to What If World, the show where your questions and ideas inspire off-the-cuff stories. I'm Mr. Rarick, your host, and today our theme song sounded a little bit different because we are teaming up with one of my favorite educational podcasts for kids, But Why? And of course, that means we get to answer questions with the host of But Why, Jane Lindholm. Hey, Jane, what's up?
Hey, Jane, it's me, Mr. Eric. Hi, Mr. Eric. It's such a pleasure to meet you. I've been wanting to do this for a long time. Me too. I'm so excited. And I just have to give a big shout out to my producer, Miss Lynn, who mashed up our theme songs in a wonderful way and also helped make this happen alongside Melody as well.
So special thanks to you all. And I want to play a couple of quick questions. We have so many questions today. We're really packing them in. Yeah, what are we even doing here, Eric? We'll find out soon. I'm just going to play this one. It'll give us a little taste. My name is Saif. I'm five years old. I live in the UAE. And what if what if world became why if world?
Safe! You might not be familiar with Safe, but Safe has been sending questions to What If World for ages, and I'm really happy that we're getting to do this mashup now. I like the idea of thinking about Why If World. We do a lot of science and serious thinking on But Why, but we really like to use our imaginations too, so this is going to be really fun.
Yeah, I think imagination is like the beginning of science, you know? Like, then you have to put in all the work, which is definitely not my forte, so that's why I'm so happy there are shows like yours. Now, we do have one more question from a listener named Bo. Hello, my name is Bo, and I have a new character suggested.
What if there was a character named Smertsy Fertsy? He was super smart and could walk and talk. Goodbye, I love your show. Oh, yes, I will be taking over as host and narrator and answering all the questions, I presume. Sorry, Smertsy, no, you're just, you are one, you and Jane will be answering the questions.
I'm going to be helping out, like, as a facilitator. Well, hello, Jay. It's very nice to meet you. Well, hello, Smartsy. Do I call you Mr. Fartsy or Smartsy Fartsy or is Smartsy okay? You know, some people call me Dr. Fartsy. Oh. I do have a doctorate in smartology and smartography. Wow. But really, also, Smartsy is fine. I mean, we're on the first day basis here. Okay, okay. And now I can see you, but not all of our listeners can. You're a pretty interesting looking dude.
Yes, indeed. I am an echidna. You see, echidnas don't have teeth. We just have a very long tongue that comes out of our snout, up to 15 centimeters, by the way. It's a little... Just to show off how smarty-fartsy I am, you know? So that's why my voice sounds like this. And some of our listeners in Australia may have met some of your friends and family members and...
I have met an echidna. They are pretty interesting creatures. That's true, that's true. And there is a long-nosed variety in New Guinea. Anyway, Mr. Eric, aren't you going to do your job?
Whoa. Yes. Thanks, I guess. Sure. So how this is going to work is I'm just going to try to stand back and let you two answer these questions and sometimes actually get the help of other experts as well, I imagine. Yeah, we brought some along from But Why. That's so cool. So let's find out what if What If World became Why If World? And what if there was a character named Smartsy Fartsy? Jay?
Jane Lindholm. Smartsy Fartsy, are you two ready for your first question? Can I ask you a question, Mr. Eric, before we do? Oh yeah, sure. Smartsy and I are living in YF world now, though, right? Right! No, yes, you are definitely in YF world, which...
Yeah, it's sort of an offshoot of what if world and but why. And it is existing in an extra dimensional space somehow connected to the two, I'm presuming. Oh, that sounds very smarty farty. I'm sure it's something like that. Good. All right. Great. And you know what? This is a write in question, so I will just read it. Lachlan asks, what if cereal could talk to us?
Jane, what do you think? Oh, Lachlan, you know, cereal kind of can talk to you. Have you ever heard it? Maybe when you're just pouring your milk in, you think, is my cereal talking to me?
Well, kind of. There are cereals that make noise when you pour in milk, and one cereal actually made this famous. The company that makes a cereal called Rice Krispies has been hyping up that cereal since 1932, which is almost 100 years now. And they talk a lot about how their cereal snaps, crackles, and pops. They even made some elves who like to sing songs on their advertisements about snap, crackle, and pop.
Do you want to know what's actually happening though, Smartsy, when your cereal is talking to you? I would love to know. Okay, so Rice Krispies and some of the other cereals that make noise are made from rice. The rice is cooked with sugar, salt, and a few other ingredients and then dried and rolled out and it's puffed up in an oven. So when you bake the rice to puff it, you're creating a lot of air pockets in each grain of rice.
Then when you add milk to that puffed up rice, all of those little air pockets start to... So sometimes if you look closely at the bowl, you can even see them popping and they burst open. So your cereal is actually talking to you. Do you know what it's saying? I don't speak cereal, so I don't know what the cereal is saying, but it sounds like Smartsy, you might. Well, that's where I wanted to jump in, you see. In What If World...
We do have a particular talking cereal. They're called mite crispies. One of the things that a kid does love eating is termites. We can eat up to 40,000 in a day. And so, yeah, so sometimes I just get a bowl of mite crispies and I pour all of them out and I say, hey, termites, how you doing? And they say, please don't eat me. And I say, sorry, it's what I do. And, you know, so on and so forth.
So your cereal really is talking to you. That's right, yeah. Well, now I'm getting hungry for some Might Krispies. I think I'm going to have to try that tomorrow for breakfast. You know, I'm kind of curious, too. They have lots of protein. Protein's good. We have another question. This is another one of our what-if questions, and this is one we get to listen to every
Hi, my name is Oli. I'm six years old. And my what if question is, what if rhinestones lay eggs? Bye, I love your show. Now, Smartsy, it would be your turn to answer this one first.
Well, I, as you may have already heard in Echidna, we are a very, very rare breed of monotremes, an egg-laying mammal like the platypus. So I think that if dinosaurs didn't lay eggs, then they wouldn't be like me in Echidna or like a platypus or like a reptile, that they would probably be more like space beans, you
You know, I met a rare species of space beans that reproduced by bumping their heads together, and then another space bean would just pop out right there. Ooh, I kind of like that idea. I'm liking imagining dinosaurs looking like that. You know, it's interesting to think about what if dinosaurs didn't lay eggs, and that's one of the questions scientists have been asking for a very long time as they've been trying to learn more about these creatures that lived way before humans existed.
You know how we kind of learn a little bit about dinosaurs though, Smartsy? Uh, reading. Reading, that's absolutely right. Yes. But also looking at animals today that are alive that evolved from dinosaurs and resemble dinosaurs like birdcats.
birds, or even crocodiles. Oh yeah, because they have those scoots on their backs which kind of look, you know, like stegosaurs just have the really big version. So they're sort of like related alligators or crocodiles. Yeah, and both crocodiles and modern birds lay eggs. So scientists are pretty sure that dinosaurs laid eggs. They have found fossilized dinosaur eggs and evidence of dinosaur nests to prove it. But...
Here's the cool thing and why I love Alex's question because scientists are pretty sure that most dinosaurs laid eggs but they've recently found one ancient relative of the dinosaurs that may have given live birth to babies instead of laying eggs. That's a
Amazing. Wow, Jane, I really didn't know that about there being a potentially non-egg-laying dinosaur. Well, and you know, it's still really unclear. So scientists were studying this one ancient dinosaur that lived in the water in what is now China, and they found evidence that it was carrying an embryo inside the fossil. So being scientists, they were like, what's happening here? We can't just assume. So they thought, well,
could this embryo actually have been the last thing a dinosaur relative ate? Like they weren't growing the embryo, they had eaten it. But then they said, well, probably not. And listen to this, because the embryo was facing the wrong direction. It sounds silly, but animals usually eat other animals head first. And this skeleton was facing the other direction. So they were like, maybe not. Maybe it wasn't in its stomach. What?
Wow. And they ruled out space being, right? I mean, I haven't seen any evidence that they even considered space being, so maybe we should call them up and see if they've thought about that. Okay, I'll get on the phone as soon as I figure out how to lick all the numbers.
You know, one of the most amazing things about this is that it's a reminder that science is always evolving and changing, that it's always shifting. And so we have scientific theories, we have ideas, and some of them have a lot of evidence. So we're pretty sure about it. But when we discover something new, you can bring that into the scientific evidence and say, what could this mean? And that's why we're always uncovering new things. So science is never something that is fully settled.
Coming up, more But Why If World. I'm Jane Lindholm, and this is not But Why, it's But Why If World.
We could talk more and more about dinosaurs. We could do a whole episode, but we should get into our but why question. Jane, do you want to tell us a little bit about this one? Yeah, sure. So we got this question from Oliver, and we love answering questions that are exploratory and scientific, and you can kind of imagine what might happen, but also there's some hefty science behind it too. So we thought this would be a good question for Why If World, and this is from Oliver.
I'm eight years old and I'm from Philadelphia. And my question is, if the world suddenly stopped, would everything and everyone go flying? Would everyone and everything go flying? Smartsy, what do you think?
Ho ho ho ho ho! I bet what would happen is a giant, squidapus-like character, like Thunkle, he's very strong, and roughly planet-sized whenever he needs to be. Anyway, he would grab the entire planet with his many slimy tentacles. But it'd be moving pretty fast, so we'd probably get some tentacle burn as it slowed down.
And then he'd need to go ice his tentacles or get some good oozy bomb from Squid Lake where he lives. Yeah, he would have to be mighty, mighty strong to be able to stop the Earth from spinning because the Earth is spinning really fast and it takes a lot of energy.
So when I was imagining this, I wanted to know a little bit more about the science. Like what would literally happen and could this happen in the real world, not just in YF world? And one of the things we do at But Why, when there's a question we don't know, which is most of them, is we reach out to people who do know, who study this stuff. And there's a guy out in Hawaii. His name is John O'Meara, and he's the chief scientist at a place called the Keck Observatory.
And his job is to learn all about outer space. He's called an astronomer. So when we have questions about gravity or why the moon looks like it's following you when you're riding in the car at night or what the Mars rover is doing on Mars, we call up John O'Meara. So we called him up and we asked him this question from Oliver. Do you want to hear what he had to say?
I would love to! Okay, let's hear John. Wow, this is a really cool question. And it's cool because for a second we have to think about what's going on with the Earth. The Earth is spinning around
once every day, but the earth is actually really big too. And so because the earth is so big and because it spins around once a day, if you go all the way around the earth, that's like 25,000 miles. But it takes about 24 hours in a day to spin around, which means that the earth is actually spinning around at about a thousand miles per hour. And that's really fast.
So the question is, what happens if the Earth suddenly stops spinning? And the answer is kind of like when you're in a car and somebody slams on the brakes, or if you're walking and you suddenly stop walking. What happens?
you get kind of thrown forward because even though the car is suddenly stopped, you're still going at the same speed as the car. And if you've got your seatbelt on, that stops you. But if you don't have your seatbelt on or something like that, then things keep going forward.
And this is what would happen with all of the stuff which isn't physically attached to the Earth. So the air, the water, all of that stuff would suddenly go flying at about a thousand miles per hour. And that's really too fast for most things on the Earth. So if the Earth suddenly stopped spinning,
everything else on the surface and above the surface would keep going for quite a while, and it would be going way too fast, which isn't really good. Now, the good news is that this wouldn't happen. This can't happen to the Earth. In fact, you know that this can't happen to something as big as the Earth if you've ever played with something like
spinning wheel or anything like that. It takes a lot, a lot of energy to slow that down. And so the good news is that you can't suddenly stop the earth from spinning. But you could ask the question, well, say what happens if we could slowly stop the earth from spinning around? And that's a very, very different question because
because if you were to be able to do that and suddenly stop the earth from spinning over maybe a long period of time so that you don't have to worry about things going a thousand miles per hour then the earth would look really really different part of the earth would have the sun on all the time and another part of the earth would have the sun off all of the time or if the earth was spinning really slow you would have very very very slow seasons where a day
was a really, really long time instead of just being 24 hours. And things like the seasons would be totally different. And things like hurricanes wouldn't exist anymore because the Earth wasn't rotating. And parts of the Earth would be much, much colder than they are today. And other parts of the Earth would be much, much warmer. Wow.
Wow, it would turn into a pretty much an uninhabitable planet before long. Yeah, I mean, you would either be on the part with all sun or no sun, and neither of those are good. We kind of need both. We need day and night, right? That's what I love about your silly planet. Somehow it all works. There's a million little factors, you know, your moon and your tides and your sun, and they all work together, and somehow this life...
It's amazing. Well, you know, actually, we got another question that's kind of a similar one to the one we got from Oliver. Do you want to kind of think about that one too, Smartsy? Oh, wow. My thinker is still ready and reared up. Yes. Okay. So here's a question from Ira. I'm nine years old and I'm from India, but I'm living in Bahrain.
My question is, what will happen if the Earth starts spinning backwards? Wow. I think I need a minute to think about this. I mean, no, I know the answer. I just want to hear what you think the answer would be. Well, I talked to John O'Meara about this, too, and he reminded me that if the Earth was spinning in a different direction, there are some obvious changes, like the sun would rise in the west,
and set in the east instead of what it does now, which is rise in the east and set in the west. - So all our sunglasses would have to be backwards! - Well, I'm not sure about that. - Me neither, Smartsy, but you could do that just for fashion sense, I guess. - Yeah, I mean, I like the idea, Smartsy. You could do it anyway right now and see what happens. - You know what? Now I'm wearing them upside down and I think it's very fashionable. - You look great. You look fantastic.
Thank you. So some other things that would happen if the Earth was spinning backwards, the seasons would be different over different times of the year. And in fact, our whole climate would change because the ocean currents would reverse. Some weather patterns would change. The direction the wind tends to go in would change. It would probably go the opposite way. So that means if you can picture it, we would see deserts disappear in some places and crop up.
in other places. Grasslands would appear where there are now deserts. You'd see ice where there isn't ice now. And actually, we partly know or think we know what this might look like because scientists have done modeling where they pretend this is happening and imagine what are the knock-on effects, the things that happen next after the Earth starts spinning backwards.
And they presented it, in fact, in front of a group of other scientists at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Austria, which sounds incredibly official in 2018. Which means that there was parallel thinking between our young Ira and scientists several years ago. Yeah, I mean, you think this is like a fantasy.
fantastical question about some wild thing. But in fact, you can be a scientist and ask these questions because it's kind of important to know, even if we think it couldn't happen, to just say what would happen. Then we can start to picture things that are changing in our world today.
you know, our entire existence would be different. I wonder if the abominable snow people would have to move to the other side of the mountain or maybe move to Southern California and wear Bermuda shorts. You know, it's...
Probably a good thing that this can't happen in the real world because we have all adapted to the world spinning like it does now, not spinning backwards and not stopping. So I am really glad that this is something that can only happen in YF World.
Me, too! I actually, I do feel like the world has been slowing a little bit, our YF world, while we've been talking, and I kind of just got thrown in my chair just a little bit. Are you feeling it? Oh my gosh, I think it's going in the opposite direction. It's smartsy. It was wintertime in Vermont when we started this, but...
I'm getting really hot. I think it's summertime now, and it might be winter in Australia. You were supposed to be in summer. Oh, no! Jane, do you have your Bermuda shorts? Always! Oh, good. Well, now I have to take mine off. I was going to mail them to you, but... Just toss them to me. Okay, here. Whoa! Oh, much better. Thank you. Here, here's my sweater. Oh, it's so cuddly warm. I hope you don't mind a bunch of echidna spine holes in it. I was hoping for that fashion statement.
Wow, I have learned so much about astronomy and dinosaurs. Food science. And food science. And that's...
That's just answering four questions. How many questions do you usually answer and but why? Sometimes we tackle just one and sometimes we tackle as many as 20 or 30. We've gotten about 13 or 14,000 questions since we started the show. I'm so grateful to all of your curious listeners and all of ours. All those thousands of questions. I wish I could answer them all.
Same. I want to know the answers to all of them. Well, you two have a lot of work in front of you then. You've got to only make about 13,000 more episodes. So you should probably get back to it. Yeah, you're right. It's about time to get started researching some new ones. Jane, thank you so much for bringing But Why into What If World or vice versa. I'm not really sure...
I already told you the science behind the extra-dimensional imaginary linkage. You need a degree in Smartography, I think.
Well, I'll get working on that. Yeah, I think I'm going to enroll in a new school. Where do I go to get a degree in smartology? Oh, you're going to go to the observatorium. There's a wizard named Abacus P. Grumbler who will try to teach you magic, but you're going to say no because he's not very good at magic. And just enroll in my classes where I'll teach you how to think the deepest thoughts like space beasts.
I gotta get going. My bolo, Mike Crispy's, is trying to get away. Oh, you better catch him. Oh, yeah. Bye, Smartsy Fartsy. Jane, maybe we could do this again sometime. This was so much fun. I had a great time. And is Smartsy coming back? Because that dude is kind of wild. I have a feeling there will be some Smartsy Fartsy questions in our future. Yes.
Thank you for inviting us, Mr. Eric. This was so fun. Likewise. All right. We'll see you soon. See you soon. Bye.
That's it for this episode. Thanks so much to everyone at What If World for suggesting this episode and making it with us. We had so much fun. But Why is produced at the studios of Vermont Public by Kiana Haskin, Melody Beaudet, and me, Jane Lindholm, and distributed by PRX. Our theme music is by Luke Reynolds. We'll be back in two weeks with an all-new But Why episode. Until then, stay curious. ♪
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