Why Social Isolation Could Breed Conspiracy Theorists
Curiosity Weekly
Warner Bros. Discovery
4.6 • 964 Ratings
🗓️ 19 October 2020
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Learn about what it would be like to travel through a wormhole, how the pumpkin became North America’s Halloween mascot, and how social isolation can fuel conspiracy theories.
What Would It Be Like to Ride Through a Wormhole? By Ashley Hamer
- Lindley, D. (2005). The Birth of Wormholes. Physics, 15. https://physics.aps.org/story/v15/st11
- Nola Taylor Redd. (2017, October 21). What Is Wormhole Theory? Space.Com. https://www.space.com/20881-wormholes.html
- Ceurstemont, S. (2012, March 13). What a trip through a wormhole would look like. New Scientist TV. https://web.archive.org/web/20120415112903/http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2012/03/what-a-trip-through-a-wormhole-would-look-like.html
- What does a journey through a wormhole actually look like? (2014, November 13). Physicscentral.Com. http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2014/11/what-does-journey-through-wormhole.html
How Did Pumpkins Become Halloween’s Go-to Decoration? By Kelsey Donk
- History.com Editors. (2019, October 25). How Jack O’Lanterns Originated in Irish Myth. HISTORY. https://www.history.com/news/history-of-the-jack-o-lantern-irish-origins
- Butler, S. (2013, October 25). The Halloween Pumpkin: An American History. HISTORY. https://www.history.com/news/the-halloween-pumpkin-an-american-history
- Why Do We Carve Pumpkins at Halloween? | Britannica. (2020). In Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/story/why-do-we-carve-pumpkins-at-halloween
Social Isolation Could Breed Conspiracy Theorists by Anna Todd
- Graeupner, D., & Coman, A. (2017). The dark side of meaning-making: How social exclusion leads to superstitious thinking. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 69, 218–222. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2016.10.003
- Hutson, M. (2017). A Conspiracy of Loneliness. Scientific American Mind, 28(3), 15–15. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamericanmind0517-15b
- Social Exclusion Leads to Conspiratorial Thinking, Study Finds | Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. (2017). Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. https://spia.princeton.edu/news/social-exclusion-leads-conspiratorial-thinking-study-finds
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Curiosity.com. |
| 0:06.7 | I'm Ashley Hamer. |
| 0:07.7 | And I'm Natalia Reagan. Today you learn about what it would be like to travel through a |
| 0:12.0 | wormhole, |
| 0:12.8 | how the pumpkin became North America's Halloween mascot |
| 0:15.8 | and how social isolation can fuel conspiracy theories. |
| 0:19.3 | Let's satisfy some curiosity. |
| 0:21.3 | Wormholes are everywhere in science fiction, |
| 0:25.0 | from contact to intersteller to Bill and Ted's excellent adventure. |
| 0:30.0 | But are they science fact? |
| 0:32.0 | No one actually knows. There are powerful theories that predict them. |
| 0:37.2 | But if they do exist, many scientific hurdles stand in the way of actually writing through one. |
| 0:43.0 | But that doesn't mean that we can't imagine what it might be like. |
| 0:47.0 | Wormholes were originally suggested by physicists Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen in 1935 to avoid a messy detail in physics the |
| 0:56.4 | singularity. Singularities are points where the math reaches infinity like a |
| 1:01.7 | particle with all of its mass concentrated into an infinitely small point. |
| 1:07.0 | Einstein and Rosen argued that you could technically avoid a singularity by extending that point into a path that leads to a second location. |
| 1:16.0 | Like if you had a balloon with a dot on either side to each represent a singularity, |
| 1:21.0 | Einstein and Rosen's solution would be to push them inward toward each other and connect |
| 1:25.8 | them, forming a tube-shaped path from one side of the balloon to the other. |
| 1:30.8 | This was dubbed the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, what most people know as a wormhole. |
| 1:37.0 | Theoretically, a wormhole could connect any two points together, |
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