Thing You Thought You Knew – Red Hot, Blue Hot

Hey, StarTalkians. We've got yet another Things You Thought You Knew episode. We're talking about small molecules, the temperature of light, and food gone bad. Check it out. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Do you have any idea how small molecules are? Well, seeing, as I can't see them, I'm gonna say I do not. Right. And even if you did say you knew, I would say you didn't know. I'm just pulling rank here. I'm just saying molecules I mean, think about it. Our understanding of the existence of atoms did not even come into age until the twentieth century. Atoms were were still a hypothesis, alright, that there'd be this sort of smallest unit of a material called the atom. By the way, the word atom from the Greek means indivisible. So they imagined that there was some indivisible minimal part of a thing. But, of course, we break out bust atoms all the time. So, no, they're not indivisible, but we kept the term. Right. We kept the term atom to describe the electrons, protons, neutrons, the classical particles you learn about in in high school chemistry and maybe physics. So, so molecules are I I could give an example. Okay? And and this is my favorite example of them all. So I ask you think about how much water there is in the world, in all the oceans. Okay. And if you go in the middle of the ocean, it's miles deep. Okay? The Titanic was, like, three and a half mile. I forgot the exact number. Multiple miles below Earth's surface. Okay? That's a lot of water. It's a lot of water. And what is the water molecule? H two l. H two l. Okay. So two hydrogen, one oxygen, h two l. So it just salts and dissolved salts and fish poop and stuff like that, but by it's basically h two o all over the world. Alright. I love that you threw in the fish poop. I'm so proud of you. Thank you. That's the juvenile part. The the eight year olds will wanna know that. Yes. Exactly. There's also fish poop Right. In in the ocean. So where else does it go? Right? And just to recite the title of a book they may have grown up on, everything poops. Yeah. And it shows it's just a story. It's for little kids. I know. Because they poop and they know they poop and they're fascinated by it. And it's just an account that everybody poops. And all the fish poop in the ocean. Okay? They don't go onto land to poop. Yeah. I I read that book to my daughter. She thought it was crappy. I couldn't help it. Alright. So they don't have outhouses on the land. Right? Right. All in there. That would be amazing, though. They poop poop in situ. Would that be oh, god. You …