Speed
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Lulu. Latif. Radiolab. Today we got for you just, it's really a classic Radiolab. It's called Speed, but I would call it Timeless. Oh, it's totally great. It's a total classic Radiolab. It's about things moving faster than we can perceive. And also things moving slower than our patients can handle. And it includes moments like this one. Everything that I'm experiencing already happened.

So grab your lava lamp, sit back in your beanbag chair. Will you forgive me if I actually leave my phone?

on vibrate because uh my wife is pregnant and do literally really any day no kidding if this vibrates i might ruin your radio program no it's fine it's all worse so recently i had a conversation with this guy josh for yeah he's a journalist science journalist and he told me about something that's been obsessing him recently this very odd experiment well okay so this is uh

One of the longest running science experiments of all time, the pitch drop experiment. And you can actually see it online. How do I get to it? Just search for pitch drop. Pitch drop. So when you go to this website, what you really see is this funnel with some black stuff in it. And then descending from the stem of the funnel is this little tendril of this black stuff. And at the end of that tendril is a little teardrop of this black stuff. And that's it. It doesn't move.

do anything. But according to Josh, there are pitch drop junkies all over the world. People who are just have got this open in the background on their web browser. And he says they all just sit there watching and waiting.

And that's the thing. Once you understand what's going on here, you kind of can't look away. Okay, so here's what happened. In 1927, there is this guy Thomas Parnell who is teaching physics at the University of Queensland in Australia. And he's trying to show his students that, well, I guess that things aren't always what they seem. Okay. And so he takes a chunk of this material called pitch. Okay.

What's pitch? Okay, so pitch is a natural substance. In fact, this is actually really the question. What is pitch? Well, what does it look like? It's like... Is it gooey? No, that's the thing. It's like a rock. You can break it with a hammer and it shatters into a million little pieces. But it's not a rock. It's a viscoelastic polymer. A viscoelastic polymer. Which means that over many, many, many, many years, it moves.

Really? So what he did was he melted a handful of pitch and poured it into a glass funnel. And once it had properly settled, he snipped the bottom of the funnel and waited. For what? Well, for it to drip. You mean drip like a faucet would drip? Yeah, but much, much more slowly.

So 1930, Pluto is discovered. Bonnie and Clyde meet and fall in love, go on a crime spree, get killed by the police. 31, the Empire State Building is finished. No drip. 1933, the Nazis build their first concentration camp. Prohibition ends. It still hasn't dripped. 35, Amelia Earhart flies solo across the Pacific Ocean. Are you kidding me? Still no drip. 1936, five million barrels of cement turn into the Hoover Dam. No drip. For eight years, this rock is slowly, slowly, slowly stretching into this dangling drop.

And then suddenly one day, eight years after he poured the damn thing into the funnel, in the tenth of a second, the blink of an eye, boop, a drip. The pitch breaks. Now, nobody's ever actually seen this happen.

I mean, it's never, the drop has never dripped. No, no. The drop has dripped eight times. And we're all due for the ninth drop to happen any day now. So wait, why haven't they seen it? So imagine a science experiment, right, where the critical data that you want to gather happens in one-tenth of a second every 10 to 12 years. Right.

It is really hard to be there at that critical moment. Yes. I mean, yeah. This fellow, Professor John Mainston, he's been watching it. Yes. Religiously. Since January of 1961. For 50 years. I am still waiting to see this pitch drop. Just out of suspense or is there some question here? Well, first of all, during... Well, okay. The question is at that moment when this ever-elongating droplet gives way.

What happens? If you've got the drop itself held by four little fibers, call them fibers. What breaks first? How does it break? And there are lots of people who, like me, are waiting to see whether we can capture that moment and see the way in which, from a mechanical point of view, it becomes imperative that the drop then fall. So...

1962. Mainston missed a drop in 62. August 1970. Missed that one. April 1979. That one he looked at on a Friday, knew it was close. And thought, well, something might happen over the weekend. Came in on a Saturday. Saturday evening, checked the pitch drop. Nothing happening, I'm going home. And by the time I came in very early on the Monday morning, not having gone in on Sunday... It had fallen. Then...

1988, he's standing right there. And I decided I need a cup of tea or something like that. Walked away, came back. Oh, no. And lo and behold. He thinks he may have missed it by as little as 15 minutes. It had dropped. Did you take your tea and throw it against the wall in rage? Yes. Well, yes, one becomes a bit philosophical about this. And I just said, oh, well, let's be patient. The next time...

He installed a camera. And then 28 November 2000. Yes. What happened then? At the time, I was over on the other side of the world in London. Gets an email saying, Professor... This eighth drop, looking as though it might fall at any time. We've been waiting 10 years for this. It's about to happen. Because it was like...

I said, don't worry, we've got it covered. We've got a camera on it. I'll be able to see exactly what happened. When I get back to Australia. The next email said, well, it's dropped. Later that day, dear Professor Mainston, I've got bad news. Unfortunately, you will not be able to see this because the system failed. The camera went out. The camera went out? We don't have this on record.

Come on. That was one of my saddest moments, I might say. But right now, the pitch is getting ready to give birth to another drop. And this time, there are three cameras. Three webcams on there. And this is what Josh was showing me on the internet, this dangling little...

Almost. That all these people are watching. People from China, South America, Inuit people way up in the north of Canada. So everybody's waiting. Everybody wants to be the person who sees the pitch fall. And I gotta admit, I've been checking this thing online. Really? Like what? You like watching grass grow? I don't know. I think it's more than suspense. I think that this is

It's about time scale, is what it's about. We don't really have that many opportunities to interact with things that happen on these two very, very different time scales simultaneously. You see what he means?

Yeah. Because, you know, you're in this funny situation. You wait slower than you know how for something to take place that's faster than you can, you know... Catch. Exactly. So you're playing at the very edges of what you know how to do. But not if you catch it. Then you get this glimpse into this world that's usually... Unknowable. Exactly. Exactly.

So for the next hour, we're going to mess around with this idea because, you know, we're humans. We live in a human scale. But we've got a bunch of stories that are going to ask us to stretch that scale. To the breaking point. Yeah. I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolwich. Today on Radiolab, speed. Where things keep getting faster and then faster again and then faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and faster. Until we get to the fastest thing in the universe. Yes. And stop it cold.

Okay, so let's set the baselines here. How fast are we?

You mean like how fast we run? I mean, how fast do we interact with the world around us? How fast do we taste things? How fast do we feel something, see something, respond? Hello. Oh, hello. Hey there. Hey. How do we sound? That sounds better. Much better. Excellent. That's Carl Zimmer, of course, science writer. Regular around here. And he told us that question you just asked, how fast do people, humans, process the world? That question... Popped up in a really big way around... 1850. 1850.

with the invention of the telegraph. Because suddenly you could send a message across the country almost instantly. If you're in New York and you want to send a message to Chicago, it's going to take about a quarter of a second for that message to get there. That's 790 miles in a quarter second.

Now that's really fast. In fact, if you do the math, 790 times 4 times 60 times 60, it's 11 million miles an hour. That's amazingly fast. So fast, in fact, that some people, when they first used the telegraph, they just refused to believe that it was real. Because in 1850, you're doing, oh, 35, 40 miles an hour on a horse, 60 maybe on a steam engine, up to 80. You're not living too fast. No.

But more importantly for our story, the telegraph got people thinking about us, about our bodies. Right. Because, you know... Nerves and telegraph wires are remarkably similar. Nerves are long and skinny. They carry electricity from one place to another. Just like telegraph wires. So naturally, people wanted to know, well, if telegraph wires can do millions of miles an hour, well, what about our nerves?

How fast are they? Exactly. And so... One day, a German guy... A biologist named Hermann von Helmholtz... Took a frog... Because their neurons are kind of like ours. And basically what he did was he... He hooked some wires up to one of the frog's muscles. Now this was, I should tell you, a dead frog, but he sent an electrical jolt through the muscle and then using a very fancy timer, he was able to determine... That the signal was going down the length of the frog muscle at a speed of...

27 meters per second. What is that in miles per hour? Let's see. I can Google actually. I love Google.

27 meters per second is 60.3973 miles per hour. 60.3 miles per hour. Wait, this is a frog. Is this the same speed as us? Yes. 60 miles an hour? That seems so slow. Yeah. What's the name of the Jamaican runner, the fastest guy in the world? Usain Bolt. Usain Bolt. So Usain Bolt is running at half the speed of his nervous system. Okay, but bear in mind, actually, I mean...

There's a big range of speeds of your neurons. And actually, Usain Bolt is much faster than some of your neurons. I mean, there are some neurons that only go about a mile an hour. Which ones are those? Ironically, some of them are from the reward centers of your brain. Chocolate travels slowly? Yeah, relatively slowly. What about pain?

I mean, that would be fast, I imagine. Yeah, you'd think so. But paint actually runs kind of slowly. I am surprised to learn. He says it can be as slow as 1.3 miles an hour. Wait a second. So if I put my hand near a candle and then I go, ouch, shouldn't that happen very fast? Look, I mean, if you were like 70 miles tall, this might be a problem.

Okay. But still, I mean, what if we just take a really ordinary example, like Robert looking at the desk in front of him and grabbing that pen? What's involved there? Yeah, well, I mean, you just essentially need to kind of walk through this brain. You start at the eye. Okay, so the eye takes the light that's reflected off the pen, turns it into a little electrical signal, and then sends that...

deep into the middle of the brain. Takes a couple hundredths of a second. Bounces around for a bit, and then within... A few more hundredths of a second. The signal has made it... All the way back to the rear end of the brain, where you start processing vision. But this is just the beginning. Right. Now you've got to figure out what you're seeing. So our jolt is off again...

This time toward the middle of the brain and then down toward the bottom. To these other regions. That start to decode the signal. The first visual region is called V1. Next up, V2. V4 and so on. And they're going to sharpen the image, make out contrasts, edges. And then electricity goes back towards the front of the brain. After, let's see, another tenth of a second or so. We finally get to a place where we think... Oh! Oh!

That's a pen. We haven't gotten yet to, I want it. Exactly. For that to happen, the electricity has to jump from one part of the front of the brain to another and another before you can finally say... That's a nice pen. I could use a pen.

And we're still not done. You know, then, then, then. A little jolt. Heads north. To sort of the top of your brain. So we've gone from your eyes to the back of your brain, around, up to the front of your brain again. And now we're up to the top of your head where you set up motor commands. And then you can grab the pen. Christ. So, I mean, you add all this up and what are we talking about here? About a quarter of a second.

Quarter of a second. It feels like one month later, Robert's hand begins slowly to move toward the object of his desire. Quarter of a second. So that's the same amount of time it takes a telegraph to send a message from New York to Chicago. Yeah, so your eye to your hand, New York, Chicago. Oh, man.

The sad truth, says Carl, is that our neurons, when it comes to communicating and sending signals, our neurons are... They're terrible, actually. I mean, compared to our, you know, broadband networks. Particularly because when one neuron bumps into the next one, there's actually a little space between them. So the signal to get across has got to jump.

And then jump to the next one. And jump and then jump. It's kind of like doing hurdles. It's not smooth. And the spooky part about this slowness, says Carl, the deeper thought here is that if you think about it, because we have this built-in delay in processing the outside world... Everything that I'm experiencing already happened.

You know how you look out at the stars and you think, oh, that light's been traveling for thousands, millions of years to get to me. And what's happening on that star or the planet around that star right now? Does it even still exist? You can say that about everything around you. Because, I mean, by the time that you become aware of something in front of you, it's been sitting there for a while, relatively speaking.

I'm stuck in the past. But it sounds like if you want to be in the moment, then what you do is you stare up at the sun and you let the light just be light entering your eyes. And you don't think anything about the light. You don't try and comprehend the light. You just let the light be light. And that's as close as you're going to get to now. Yeah. Well, you're looking at old light.

It's eight minutes old because it's from a star. No, it's old light even if you switch on the light and you're looking at the light bulb across the room. It's old light because it had to go from your eyes through your brain to you to be aware that there was light there. So what I would suggest is that you close your eyes and you stop thinking about the chair you're sitting in and just focus on your own thoughts.

Because that's the fastest stuff you've got. It's right there. You don't have to wait for it to be delivered into your brain. It's already in your brain. So I think your thoughts are the fastest things that you can experience. So my fastest thought that I could ever have is, where are my keys? You've got to have faster thoughts than that. What's a faster one? This is an interesting question, though. I think it would be non-narrative. I don't think it can be a keys or something. I think it would just be like a...

Someone has thought about this. Well, it wasn't me, because I had no idea. Don't you think somebody has an answer for us on this? Hello, hello. Hello. Somebody somewhere. I'm here. In fact, we found a guy. Are we recording right now? We are, yeah. His name is Seth Horowitz. I'm the... He's a neuroscientist. Author of The Universal Sense, How Hearing Shapes the Mind. So we were talking...

And we ran Seth through the question, you know, if we're all trapped in the past by the slowness of our nervous system, what would be the most present, the most in the now that we could be? And he actually disagreed with Carl's guess. He said, even if you think the simplest thought that it is possible to think. It's probably still going to be on the order of a quarter of a second, half second. Oh, man. You have to get away from the conscious brain. No thinking, no seeing. Hearing is the fastest sense because it's mechanical. It normally operates on the millisecond.

range, thousandths of a second. A sudden loud noise activates a very specialized circuit from your ear to your spinal neurons. You mean it bypasses the brain? Yeah. It's the startle circuit. If you suddenly hear a loud noise within 50 milliseconds, it's 50 thousandths of a second, so you're talking 20 times faster than cognition, you're

Your body jumps, will begin the release of adrenaline. No consciousness involved. It's five neurons. And it takes 50 milliseconds. 50 milliseconds. So you're already getting into a faster, much faster paradigm by using sound. So if we're going to jolt ourselves as close to the present as possible, then we'd have to play a really loud noise. Right. Like, wait for it.

I know that was annoying. I know, I know. But look, think what we just did together. We were all in the moment.

In the present tense, together. Well, not quite. Not as we now understand it. We were just shy, just an itsy bit shy of the moment. Close, close. But enough time, if I spoke fast enough, for me to say thank you to Carl Zimmer, thank you to Seth Horwitz, and now go to break. There's no way you could even form the the of thank you in 50 milliseconds. But I tell you what, in this next segment, we're going to make 50 milliseconds feel like 50 years.

Oh, that's a really, really nice promo there. That'll make everybody lean in. That's actually a terrible, terrible promo. Terrible.

We will amaze you by slowing down time so that you will find a millisecond generous. You will surprise yourself in all kinds of ways if you just stay listening to this program. Believe me. Thank you. Good save.

Ready? Mm-hmm. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolwich. This is Radiolab. Speed is our subject. You beat me to it. Actually, that's what this whole next segment is about. See, I had it in my bones. Just to set it up, I got this idea from my friend Andrew Zolli, who is a fantastic writer, wrote the book Resilience, Why Things Bounce Back. We were at a diner. I was telling him about this show, and he says, you should do something about the stock market. And I was like,

I'm the last person should do something about the stock market. He's like, no, no, no, no. Forget everything you think you know about the stock market. Most of us, when we think about...

stock markets. If you just close your eyes and you think about the financial world, what you imagine is a bunch of people in a room and they're all wearing funny colored jackets and they're shouting at each other. Waving bits at people, right? This kind of raucous... People screaming, trying to figure out what a price is. And we have this sort of iconography, this cultural iconography.

of how the financial system works that is in large part completely divorced from reality. Because he told me, here's my first surprise, that somewhere between 50 and 70 plus percent of all the trades that happen on what we think of as a Wall Street are not executed by a human being as the result of a human decision. They're actually executed by an algorithm.

at a speed, rate, and scale that is beyond our comprehension. So I decided I would try and comprehend this new world that he was describing. And since this is a subject matter that generally makes me frightened, frankly, I decided to call up David Kestenbaum from Planet Money. Hey, Jet. Hello. The David Kestenbaum. Indeed. There could be more than one. There probably are on Twitter.

In any case, it did not click for either of us just how fast, how inhumanly fast trading had gotten.

Until we visited this firm called TradeWorks. Hi. David. Nice to meet you, David. So we go into this little building in New Jersey. It looks like it's a startup or something. And this guy says hello. My name's Mike Beller. I'm the chief technology officer of TradeWorks. And Mike set us down at this computer, opened up this little program that logs exactly what is going on at the market at insanely specific times. You could pick a stock. We could look at...

Yahoo, for example. We can literally pick some time of day that we're interested in. So what time is this? So this is at 11:35, 26.979 seconds. Really? And in fact, that's not enough precision for us because we really deal in microseconds. That would be millionths of a second. So we have another way of measuring time, which is the number of microseconds since midnight of the previous day. Can you read that 417 number?

Sure. 41,729,979,559 microseconds since midnight. So do you always have lunch at like 2,305,000? No, that would be really early. How many trades do you do in a day? I think it depends a lot. A high-frequency trader might do 1,000 trades in a minute. It's about that tempo. But it's kind of very bursty. Now what happens during those bursts...

is a bit of a mystery. It's very hard to see what's going on. Often, says Andrew, it's the computers testing the market. Testing to see if they can find a nibble on the other side. They'll fire out a bunch of buy and sell orders and then when another computer bites on one, they'll quickly cancel the ones that didn't stick. Nope, sorry. Didn't want to do that. And they're doing this on a microsecond basis. Buy. Nope, sorry. Sell. Nope. Buy. Nope. Sell. Nope. Sell again. Nope. Forget about that. Buy. Nah. And they create huge volumes of transactions...

that just disappear into the ether. There are some computer algorithms, he says, whose whole job is to combat other algorithms. Fake them out. For example, a very good example happened about a month ago in Kraft. That's Eric Hunsander. He tracks high-frequency trading for the firm Nanex. Kraft, like Kraft cheese, Kraft? Yes. He says what they saw was this algorithm jump into the market, buy up a bunch of Kraft, which... Jammed the price up. Which allowed that algorithm... To sell at much higher prices...

to the other algorithms. And we calculated out, it cost them $200,000 to push the price up, but they were able to sell about $900,000 of stock, netting a gain of over half a million dollars. In a matter of seconds. ♪

Now, to put that in context, back in the day, you know, 20 years ago when the humans still ran the trading pits? According to this guy, I'm Larry Tabb, founder and CEO of the Tabb Group. The average time that it took to execute a trade was around 11, 12 seconds back then. And when you ask people, how did we get from 11 or 12 seconds to 41,729,979,559 microseconds? Phrases like that.

The answer is kind of surprising. But I'll just start with the obvious part, at least the part that's obvious to people who work in finance. It wasn't obvious to me. But a basic law of the market is that the fastest person will usually win. There's always a benefit. That's Andrew again. To getting information faster than the other guy. Absolutely. This has been going on since Julius Reuters used carrier pigeons. To send a bunch of stock quotes. Faster than a guy on a horseback.

That was in the 1850s. Here's a more modern example. Say the latest job numbers come out. U.S. employers added 227,000 jobs in February. If those numbers are good, that means the stock market is going to go up. So if you can get the numbers and rush to the market before anyone else gets there and buy the stock before it goes up, you could make a lot of money, right? On the, you know, buy low, sell high principle, basic law of getting rich. But...

When the markets turned electronic, which began to happen in the early 90s, this basic law created a situation that was totally bananas.

What do you mean? So imagine it's the year 2000. You've got this market in New York. It's electronic. It's basically just a building on Broad Street near Wall Street with a giant computer inside of it that's matching buyers and sellers. And you have a bunch of traders in different parts of the country that are connected to this market, to this building. And some of them are using automated trading bots. And one day, this guy Dave Cummings, who is in Kansas, notices that his robot keeps getting beat.

Like when it would send a trade to New York, like say a buy order, often right as that buy order was about to get to New York, some other robot would swoop in, get there first, and snatch up the trade. And it occurs to this guy, Dave, wait a second. Is it because I'm in Kansas?

If the other guy's closer to New York, then his cable would be shorter, so I need to move to New York. No, no, no, because we're talking about the speed of light. Well, close to the speed of light. Yeah, still. Obviously, it's because he's in Kansas. What do you mean, obviously? Because the speed of light is like a foot a nanosecond. You're going to get your ass kicked if you're in Kansas. Do you know this for a fact? Yeah, it's a foot a nanosecond. It's a foot a nanosecond. It takes a billionth of a second to go a foot.

It's three times 10 to the 10th. You act like this is something everybody knows. I know this because when I was in physics, like if I needed to delay a signal by a nanosecond, by a billionth of a second, I just added an extra foot of cable.

Really? Did you really do that? Yeah, because the proton-antiproton would collide, and then it would create a muon that would go out, and you only wanted to measure. You wanted to filter out all the junk, so you knew when it was going to arrive roughly. So you had a little window. It had to arrive in the window, but you had to get the timing of the window right. So it meant adding a delay, and we just would add cable. That was the easiest way to add delay. So you would literally go get some cable and just splice it in? Not splice. They're LEMO connectors.

Oh, there's LimoConnect, of course. Here's another way to think about it. Like, say the time it takes for information to get from Kansas to New York is something like this.

Did you hear that? I did. First beep is when it leaves Kansas. Second beep is when it arrives in New York. Yes. I actually slowed that down just a bit so we can hear it better. But the point is, that is fast, but there's still a little space in there between the beeps, which is the travel time. Very, very little space. But even if these signals are traveling at millions of miles an hour, close to the speed of light, if somebody is a few hundred miles closer to New York than you, and they leave at the same time as you, well, then it's going to be like...

You hear that? Yeah. That beep in the middle is some other dude beating you by a few milliseconds. These little differences matter? They're trying to get in and out super fast, and maybe each trade they're only making... A fraction of a penny. That's it, says Andrew. But if you're making a fraction of a penny, millisecond after millisecond after millisecond... Can add up. Right. But you have to be able to react really fast. So when this guy in Kansas decided to move his robot to New York to get closer to the big market computer... When this happened...

it started kind of a land grab. - There was a real estate bubble around some of these buildings.

Because people were trying to buy physical real estate next to the exchanges so that the cables that they would run into the exchanges would be just a few feet shorter than the other guy. Wait a second. So does this mean like if I'm like one stop up on the elevator and you're two stops up that I have the second floor advantage? I mean, how far do you do this? Theoretically, yeah. I mean, that's what it means. But

I don't know how far this real estate jockeying got because pretty early on the people who run the market stepped in and they were like, okay, this could get crazy. So they told the machine traders, okay, you want to be close to us? Fine. Pay us some money. We'll let you come inside.

Inside our box? Inside the mothership. Is there like some room where all these computers are keeping each other company now? Oh, yes, there is. If you visit the New York Stock Exchange now, which we did, after going through months of security checks, what you see is amazing. Wow.

So this is, what, a 20,000 square foot hall. This is Ian Jack. He's head of infrastructure at the New York Stock Exchange. He showed us around. With a number of rows of racks for customer equipment. In 2006, New York Stock Exchange opened up this room. It's the size of three football fields filled with nothing but... Rows and rows of servers, different specifications. So these are owned by banks, hedge funds, brokers? Yeah, a whole number of financial institutions.

Are these things trading right now? Absolutely. Each of these computers, and there were close to 10,000 in the room, give or take, were at that moment analyzing the market, making a decision as to whether to buy or sell, sending that decision over a cable into an adjacent room where it gets bought or sold. No people involved. If you stood still for a few seconds, the lights went out. They automatically went off if nothing moved because the assumption was there were not going to be people there.

And the whole idea of this place, says Ian? The whole premise is a level playing field. So any firm can come in here and they'll have the same access as anyone else. And to make sure of that, this is my favorite part. Every single rack within this facility has the same length of cabling to get to the network points at the end.

Exactly the same length? Exactly the same. Everybody gets the same length cabling. Whether you're one foot away from the network hub or a thousand feet away, you get the same length. I'm sure they send synchronized test pulses from both your trading computer and Jad's trading computer and they make sure they arrive exactly at the same moment. I like to imagine they have a guy with a tape measurer.

That's the guy you bribe. That's the guy. Anyhow, you would think that since all machines can now be inside the exchange, literally inside the market building, that the speed race would be over, right? Yep. No. Actually, it only gets worse. Because the place we visited, the New York Stock Exchange, that's just one market of many.

I didn't know this, but apparently when all trading went electronic, the markets fragmented. It used to be that the trade stocks, there was the New York Stock Exchange and then there was NASDAQ. Really just those two markets, says Larry. No, no.

There are 13 regulated exchanges. There are roughly 50 what they call dark pools in the marketplace. Those are non-public, basically. Yeah. So you've got these 60-some-odd different markets, and that's created all these different speed races between them. Yeah. Here's a super basic example I talked about with Andrew. This is actually...

In Chicago, you've got this thing called the commodities market. Commodities are basic goods like corn, oil, soybeans, zinc, pork. That's what they do in Chicago. Here in New York, we do equities. And equity is a share of a company. So you have basic goods in Chicago, stocks of companies in New York. Those are different kinds of things.

But they're connected to each other. You know, because like take oil, which is traded in Chicago. A lot of companies depend on oil and they're traded in New York. So say oil goes up in Chicago, you can pretty much bet that right after that, a company like Exxon is going to go up in New York. But it won't be instantaneous. Right, because information has a speed. Back in the days of the telegraph, as we've learned, it took a quarter second.

About that long to get from New York to Chicago. Now, with fiber optic cables, about 15 milliseconds. I love that. I had no idea you could actually hear the time difference. That one I think is pretty accurate. 15 milliseconds. But say you're in Chicago, oil goes up, you know it, and you can get to New York in 14 milliseconds. Well, you've got one millisecond where you know the future.

You know exactly what's going to happen. You're not even betting at this point. This is easy money. So what happened over time was a race of people to provide the straightest fiber line between Chicago and New York. Cool.

That's Mike Beller again from TradeWorks. He's part of this race. A couple of years ago, a company came along. Not his, unfortunately. And spent some eight-figure sum to cut a straighter fiber line between those two points. According to some reports, they blew through a mountain to do it. They did a lot. And where the state of the art for communication lines at the time between the two locations was about 15.5 milliseconds.

They came along and they made that state-of-the-art 13.3 milliseconds. A savings of about one millisecond each way. Which is just an, it's just an eon. It's a thousandth of a second you're talking about. That's not an eon. Well, it's an eon when your computer system is able to make a decision in 10 microseconds, which ours are. That's 10 times faster. So your computer's like, I can do this so fast, but I'm just waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting for the news from Chicago. So a lot of us were sitting around thinking, what can we do about this problem?

Turns out there was a way to get from Chicago to New York a little faster because the speed of light through air, it's a little faster than when you're going through a fiber optic cable. And so what they're doing now is they're building a series of towers so they can beam the signal through the air from one tower to the next tower to the next tower all the way from Chicago to New York. And that would bring the travel time down to about... In the neighborhood of around 8.5 milliseconds. If you're going from 13 to 8.5? Yeah. That would be going from this to this.

I mean, come on. That's a lot of potential savings. I can totally hear the difference. Is it helping? Is it, are we fast enough now? Can we stop? Here's the thing.

That's Manoj Narang, the CEO of TradeWorks. He joined us for part of the interview and he told us, actually, we would love to stop this arms race. Yeah, absolutely. The arms race is a huge drain on resources. But he says we just can't. As it stands, when a new technology comes out that makes it possible to be faster, if I don't adopt it and my competitors do, I will lose out to them. I have to do it.

And looking at Minoge in particular, you could kind of tell at this part of the job. It's just like the plumbing. Yeah, it just kind of makes him weary. Yeah, I couldn't care less. Why not just call it truce and everyone say, we're not going to try and go faster. We're already way faster than any human can think. It's fast enough. We're going to stop. Why not call it truce? Because there's a such thing in game theory called prisoner's dilemma. Someone will cheat, you're saying. Yeah.

You can't put a gun to everyone's head and force them to abide by this truce. Even though we'd all be better off if you could. Well, who would be better off? And here, Minoj told us, look, even though this speed race sucks for us, it's actually helping you. Because on a basic level, anytime you replace a human with a computer, things are going to get faster, they're going to get cheaper. And now that the machines are competing, getting cheaper still. In 1992, it would have cost you about $100 to trade 1,000 shares. Now...

Ten bucks. So, yes, humans have been completely supplanted when it comes to short-term trading. And humans who complain about that are being disingenuous. They have not been displaced by anything other than the fact that they can't compete. You seem defensive. Well, just because I can explain the economics of the business doesn't make me defensive. That also sounded defensive. Oh, thank you.

If Minoj did sound defensive, it's only because he and Mike and everyone in their industry have had to answer a lot of questions over the past few years about where all this speed is taking us. And those questions always come back to one particular day, May 6, 2010, when things got a little fruity. Ha ha ha!

We hadn't had a down day in a long while. The market had been slowly creeping up for quite a while. That's Eric Hunsander again, the analyst who's been tracking high-frequency trading. He says that day, even though things had been going really well... That day it started off down pretty hard. Which made some sense because there was bad news coming out of Athens, people were nervous. But then, at a very specific moment...

2.42 in the afternoon. 14.42 in 44 seconds. All hell breaks loose.

Okay, Neil, let me just interrupt for a second because this market is dropping precipitously. It just went negative 500. It is now negative 560. They need an offer. Seven need an offer. Six have dark trading here now. Six even dark trading. As you can see it on the screen, the Dow is losing about 653 points. Now Dow is down 707 points. We want even dark trading here now. There's 79 dark trading here.

Boom, there it goes. Look at this market. It continues to slide. Look at it. 835. This is the widest we have seen it in years. Now it's down 900. Wow. Wow. Almost 1,000 points. This will blow people out in a big way like you won't believe. Cancel all orders. Down 1,000 points. Cancel all orders. At 2.45 and 27 seconds, an emergency circuit breaker shuts off.

For five seconds. And that was the end of the slide. When it went out and stopped for five seconds, that was the bottom of the market. 1,000 points down. Several hundred billion dollars vanished. Two and a half minutes. Equally weird. When trading started again, the markets bounced right back up. About two and a half minutes later, it was 600 points higher than the bottom. It was like, boom, boing. Now, these kind of swings had happened before, but never that fast.

And the speed is one thing. Arguably, what's more troubling is that we still, two and a half years later, don't really know what happened.

I mean, the SEC investigated for months, released this giant 84-page report where they essentially blame the whole thing on one bad algorithm. That this guy in New York was trying to sell a bunch of stocks, told his computer to do it. His computer just did it a little too aggressively. No, that's not how it went down at all. Eric doesn't agree. He thinks what happened is that all the high-frequency computers just clogged the network. Really, the cause of the flash crash was system overload. Because he says a basic feature of these computer algorithms is when they detect that the network is slow...

They pull out. You know, one of the maxims on the street is when in doubt, stay out or pull out. And so if you've got this one computer selling a ton of stock and no computers left to buy, that creates a vacuum. Now, there were people who argued that high-frequency trading had actually made the situation better. Because, you know, Andrew says the markets did bounce back. Right up to the top. The computers self-corrected, perhaps. But the point is, nobody had any idea. And that's what gets him.

That we're in a situation now where when things go wrong, they go wrong in the blink of an eye. And then it takes us years to figure out what happened? The question that comes up is, have we crossed some kind of Rubicon where we've passed into a realm where the complexity, speed, the volume of all this stuff makes it no longer human-readable? We just don't know what the system is doing and can't, in principle, find out when things go wrong. ♪

Big thanks to David Kestamom for joining me. If you don't listen to NPR's Planet Money, you definitely should. Definitely. Check them out at npr.org slash money. And thanks to Chris Berube who carried a heavy load with the reporting on this segment. And also sound artist Ben Rubin who lent us the sound of those floor traders.

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolich. This is Radiolab, and today, do you want to say today? Uh, speed. See, this is a perfect example of what we've been bumping into all hour. Humans are slow. We're just too slow. But now. Yeah, hello. Is this Lena? It is. All right. Now we have a story that should make us all feel a little better. Can I just say, I didn't even think this was remotely possible, what we're about to talk about.

And the heroine of our story is Lina... Vestergaard Howe. Is that a hyphenate? No, Vestergaard is my middle name. Howe is the last name. And my first name is Lina. So Lina is a physicist at Harvard, and she has done something with speed that is just remarkable. It's the only way to say it. Well, if we sort of step back once... We asked her to walk us through what she does, step by step, because it's totally worth it. We start out with a clump of room temperature sodium.

And at room temperature, sodium is actually a nice, shiny metal. Lena and her team, they take the sodium, they put it in an oven and heat it up. Exactly. And as it heats up, atoms in the sodium start to vibrate faster and then faster. And when the temperature gets to around... 350 degrees centigrade, the atoms form a vapor.

Super high pressure. And then... She forces the atoms to this little pinhole. We have a little hole in the source. So this thin stream of atoms now comes zipping out of the hole and... We hit them head on with a laser beam. So you bang them right in their pathway. Yes. Kick them in a direction opposite to their motion. And that slows them down. Exactly. And now we can load them into what we call an optical molasses.

Optical molasses. This is so Baroque. I love it. In the optical molasses, the atoms will be hit by laser beams from all directions. Is that your way of saying, don't go this way, don't go this way, don't go this way, stop. That's right. Yes. You corner them in from all angles. Yes. Then we can get them to really slow down.

It feels a little bit like you've enslaved these atoms. I feel bad for them. It's going to get worse. Yes, because that's not good enough. Now that she has these atoms trapped, she needs to make them sit as still as possible. So she turns off the lasers. Total darkness in the lab. And then we turn on an electromagnet. Use the fact that the atoms are small magnets to hold them in a particular point in space so they don't all fly apart. Then we can flip them.

the magnet of these small atoms and selectively kick out the hottest, just the hottest of them, so they will fly out of the magnet and we just keep the lowest energy. By flipping the magnets, you could say to the, there's one atom that's a little bit too jumpy, so you say, get out of here! Get out of here, exactly.

Because you want just the quietest atoms to stay. That's right. So now, after all this, Lina has this teeny little cloud. 0.1 millimeter in size, typically. Of just a few million atoms. Like 5, 10 million. And she says at this point, they're all very, very still. And because temperature is really just a measure of speed, really, you know, when atoms are moving quickly, we call that hot. When they're moving slowly, we call that cold. These atoms, because they're so still...

These atoms are really cold. Colder than anything on Earth. Colder than the middle of empty space. Basically, these are the coldest things that have ever been cold. Yeah, and at that point, we have a totally new state of matter. And of course, she was curious about this new state of matter. That's right. I'm a curious lady. And now we get to the part where, well, this is the whole reason we're telling you this. She now decides to... Poke these atoms.

basically send a light pulse in. Shoot a beam of light into this cold atmosphere.

Adam Cloud. And see how it reacts. Why? You know, you have a total... What was it that... Well, you know, light fascinates me. I mean, she says, here's this thing that goes 671 million miles an hour. You know, nothing goes faster than light. And the question just occurred to her, like, what would happen if I took the fastest thing in the universe and stuck it into the coldest thing ever made? Exactly, yes. So she points her laser at the Adam Cloud. Beam, the laser beam. Hits a switch. Beep.

So here you have this light pulse coming in. Zooming through space. Then the front edge will reach our atom cloud. And unbelievably, the light pulse in that moment goes... From 186,000 miles per second to 15 miles per hour. Are you kidding? No. So the light is going like... That's right. Wow. It's inside our atom cloud. Amazing.

And then it just chugs along at a leisurely speed. Something you could beat on your bicycle. Yeah, you mean ride your bike faster than the light. I mean, exactly. You can sort of think of this race between a bicycle and a light pulse. I mean, imagine you could just bike next to this blob of light and you could reach out and...

Maybe pet it a little bit. Then bike on ahead. But then you'd be in darkness. You can go maybe to the edge of the cloud and wait for the light so that when it comes through, you can just catch it. Well, no, you can't catch it. Because when the light gets to the other side of the atom cloud... The front edge will accelerate back up to this enormous normal light speed...

And then it rushes off, so it stretches out again. Wow, cool. So here's my... Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry. So if you've got it down to 15, is that a kind of, like, a limit? I mean, can you... We could bring it lower. Can you stop light? Can you actually stop light? We can. What? So the laser goes in and doesn't come out? Yes. I mean, you hold it like a... We hold it. How do you do that? Huh?

Okay, so what we do is it's actually... Okay, so things get a little technical here, but basically, probably too simply, Lina has figured out a way to tweak the properties of this atom cloud. She can make it like a brick that light bounces off of, or she can make it clear so light cruises through. In this case, what she does is she shoots the light into the atom cloud. So we slow it down. And then right at that moment, as it's chugging along... Chug, chug, chug at 15 miles an hour. She tweaks the atom cloud to make it...

Well, thick. And the light pulse will say, oops. It'll come to a halt. Almost like it's frozen in a block of ice. In this. Oh, so it just sits. Yes, it just sits. When you realized what you'd done, did you do a little jig or what? Did you have... Oh, yes. That was amazing. It's like sitting in the lab, of course, in the middle of the night and just knowing, whoa, you are the first one who has been in this part of nature. Yeah, it was joy. Yeah.

You know, of course, to some extent I'm an engineer, but this whole idea that I can take this light pulse and bring it down to a human scale, that's something you just, at a very personal level, get excited about. This is more like, you know, I mean, you can sort of say, you know, like a sculptor will create a beautiful sculpture. For me, as I was thinking about this, I actually think of it in terms of painting.

Like Vermeer, you know the painter? Like he could create this illusion that light was just suspended there on the canvas, just shimmering. Like he somehow captured the light. But that was just an illusion. Lena actually did it. Mm-hmm. Yes.

Do you ever wonder, do you ever like, you know, after this night you walk out into the, well, I imagine next day and the sun is shining and you just look at the light and you think, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha,

Yeah, you have a whole lot of it, or then a whole lot not. Maybe you could do something about that. Maybe you could store the light. Hold it on for the wintertime. You could store it up, and then you could unleash the cloud, and suddenly there would be sunshine when there was darkness. Save it for the wintertime, yes. Yeah. We've been doing this for a number of years, but this is one of the more remarkable conversations we've ever had. Amazing.

Thank you very much. This is wonderful. Yeah, it really is. But you didn't get to the real important stuff. Oh, wait. What? So we can play a trick. The trick is we can stop and extinguish a light pulse in one part of space and revive it in a totally different location. You mean you can transport it? Yeah.

At this point, we were like, what weird-ass science fiction movie did we just slip into? Lena says when the light hit those atoms back in her cloud there... The light pulse cloud will create a little imprint in the atoms. It's like if you were to punch soft clay with your hand and then you could see the imprint of your knuckles there in the clay? That's what happens when the light hits those atoms. The light pulse will change the atoms a little bit.

That's how it imprints its information in the atoms. And according to Lina, that imprint, it's like a physical impression of the light. All the information about the light, its frequency, energy, whatever. All that stuff is copied. In the atoms. So there's shadow of light? I mean, what does that mean? It's a shadow of light, yes. And now we can pull that imprint out. So now what we have out in free space is a perfect image.

matter copy. You mean like physical matter? Yes. And then we can move that around. We can put it on the shelf or we can move it around. We can squish it and then we can take it over. She says if she wants to, she can then make a few tweaks to the cloud. Then the light pulse will come back to life.

propagate slowly through the cloud and then exit and speed back up. So you could store, I mean, if you were President Obama and you said, I would like to put the light around me right now in a time capsule for later generations to experience, he could take it using your process, put it in an archive somewhere, and then... You put it in a bottle. And a thousand years later, they would know the light that surrounded him. Yes. No.

No. That's what she just said. No, no, no. I know she did. How would you know the difference? Light is the same. How do you know, oh, that's the same light? Well, it's contained in my matter copy. That preserves the information. So when the new light turns on, it identically copies the light from before in a way that makes it as specific as saying, that's Mary Kay Jones again. Yes, that's right. Oh, man.

I've also wondered about, you know, because we could in our lab in Cambridge, we could send a light pulse and stop it, extinguish it, make our little matter copy, put it in a bottle. I could put it in a suitcase, say, bring it to Copenhagen, turn it into light. But I've thought about also, how do I get that bottle through security in the airport? What would it look like? Would it just be a bottle full of emptiness? It would be a vacuum, but there would be a little clump of atoms in there. Well, it would have to be less than three ounces of atoms or they would.

would happen. Well, it's so much less than 300. Yeah, you could just walk through the airport. You've got no problem there. Okay. Or you can open it and be like, you want to see something cool? Pew! Blind him. That would probably be also against the law. Yes, yes. How am I going to get my light through security?

Lulu here, one last quick thing before we go. Latif put together a little gift, a little audio gift for members of the lab. And it is a gem. It is really fun. So if you're already a member, keep an eye out on the member feed. You'll see it there. And if you are not a member of the lab, think about signing up, supporting us in this new way. Just head on over to radiolab.org slash join.

Radio Lab was created by Jada Boomrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Susie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez,

With help from Carolyn McCusker and Sarah Sonbach. Our Fact Checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Adam Schibill.

This is Timothy Franza calling from Stillwater, Minnesota. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.

Science Reporting on Radiolab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science.

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