Have you ever wondered what it would be like to create a utopia, a place where all your wants and needs were taken care of and there was never any fear of harm?

Creating such a world for humans may be far off, but one man did try to create a utopia for rats. He created a world that had everything

they would ever want and were all their needs were taken care of. But it didn't turn out like

anyone expected. Learn more about universe 25 and how a utopia turned into a

dystopia on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. If you take a strict definition of the scientific method, you first create a hypothesis

and then you conduct an experiment to test the hypothesis.

While it's great when science works this way, often the most interesting results will come when

someone just says, let's try this out and see what will happen.

This was the impetus behind the study, which was the subject of this episode.

An ethnologist by the name of John B. Calhoun, who worked at the National Institute of Health,

devised a study in 1958 that would take place on Norwegian rats.

In a barn in rural Maryland, he created what he figured would be a rat paradise.

In this rat utopia, there would be no shortage of food or water.

There would be no predators.

Plus, there would be plenty of space for the

rats to live and build nests. The area for the rats was divided into four

parts that were three meters by four point three meters by two point seven meters in

height.

There was a hallway around the structure and all of the rooms had glass ceiling so the

researchers could see what was happening.

He ran these experiments for a total of four years before having to cease the experiments to take a sabbatical at

Stanford. He wrote up his findings for Scientific American and the results became

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