What happened to Einstein's brain?

0:00 Speaker 1 What is today is Steve Tates, otherwise known as Doctor Sky, And every Sunday morning he makes us our mind expand a little and we look up in the skies and say, what the heck is up there? Well, Steve Kates, it’s Sunday morning again. What is going on? Give us something exciting that that’s maybe good news versus all the other

0:22 bad news we hear.

0:24 Speaker 2 Well, John, good to be with you and the listeners as we open everybody’s mind this morning. We start off with Russia and their Luna twenty five moon mission. The Russians haven’t been back to the moon soft landing since about nineteen seventy six, about fifty years ago, they landed a spacecraft there. It blasted off the moon with six

0:42 ounces of moondust, and it returned here to the Earth. NATA made a trade with them way back when for about six ounces of that material and trading for some Apollo moon rocks. But the story on Luna twenty five, John is interesting. His spacecraft, launched on the eleventh of August, is attempting to make the first Here we go, the

1:02 first soft landing on the Moon in the southern pole of the Moon. Very difficult to do, but they’ve got competition. The Indian Chandrayan three spacecraft is also scheduled to do this, so there might be a small space race there. But if the Russians do it, they will try to do it on August the twenty first, which is probably tomorrow.

1:23 As we know, this is exciting because all activity on the Moon, as far as future exploration, is all going to be centered around the south pole of the Moon. So exciting times for spacecraft.

1:37 Speaker 1 Wow, I mean that is something. I mean, what does it mean?

1:44 Speaker 2 Well, it means more oftentive, like a bang on your chest than ego thing maybe for the Russians or the Indian nation of their space program, because to do it, the difficulty is it’s such a rocky place and it’s in pretty much darkness. But remember the Chinese did this.

2:00 This is even more incredible. They saft landed on the far side of the Moon with a thing called the Chung four back in just a few days of twenty nineteen. But this opens up the exploration of the Moon because if we’re going to have people living on the surface or exploring it, you have to first get there right

2:18 with the soft landing of the spacecraft so that’s quite fascinating. But here’s something else, John, we talk about. You know, we all watched Rod Serling in The Twilight Zone. Who hasn’t seen it, but it’s interesting to note that he made a big dimensional mistake in the opening narration of his first program. The first episode was October two, nineteen

2:37 fifty nine, and this is what he said. He mentioned in his opening that there’s a sixth dimension. Well, CBS executives pulled them aside and said, you know, we know that there are four dimensions. What’s four dimensions? There’s three to make a cube if you look at a cube dimensionally, and the fourth dimension would put it where it exists

2:57 in time. So he went on the air with his opening comments and said the sixth dimension, he actually skipped the fifth. Sadly, he believed in a fifth dimension, which there really wasn’t or anything like it. So guess what, John, They had to reshoot the whole opener. An interesting story from the world of sci fi trivia. But we also

3:18 had something.

3:19 Speaker 1 I remember those shows there were always one thing interesting.

3:24 Speaker 2 Yes, they’re so amazing even today. They talk about space travel, they talk about time and space. But it’s sad that Rod Serling. Oh great, a great guy of course, you know, always with a cigarette in his hand and looking at that camera with that stoic straight face, look right in the camera. It’s really one of the classics, other than

3:43 the other one which was called The Outer Limits, which was also quite fascinating. Yeah, but we always try to entice people as far as opening their minds. And here’s an interesting one. Our mystery of the week actually is something that’s quite phenomenal. The man who developed special in general theory or relativity we know is Albert Einstein. Well,

4:01 what happened to Einstein’s brain? Well, first, John, let’s talk about what happened to him. He died on April eighteenth, nineteen fifty five, a burst aortic aneurysm. Well, we’ll get doctor Michelos to comment on this in detail. I’m not a medical doctor, but a doctor named doctor Thomas Harvey allegedly did the autopsy on Albert Einstein. Whether he had

4:22 permission or not is still open to question. He removed the brain, and they also removed the eyes of the great Albert Einstein. He gave them to his up tomorrow. But what he did was he kept the brain kind of for forty years, kind of dissected pieces of it.

4:40 And it’s been such a quandary because when they weighed his brain, John, the brain of Albert Einstein weighed two point seventy one pounds. I guess that’s a little heavier than most. But from the science side, and I’m up the medical doctor here, he had more glial cells, but the concentration was on the left side of the brain.

4:58 That would be a doctor Michelos conversation. But the point is that brain was missing for so long. He was kind of the smaller pieces and it actually made a trip in a car, a Buick Skylark, when this particular man, doctor Harvey, traveled to California to give pieces of it to the granddaughter of Albert Einstein. That has to be

5:19 one of the most bizarre stories in the world, don’t you think, yes it is.

5:23 Speaker 1 I mean, how much more did it weigh than a normal brain?

5:27 Speaker 2 Then not sure? I think it weighed slightly more. But they said the shape of it was kind of a little different than most brains, but there were some sections in the brain that obviously were so unique when they looked at it that they said, wow, and this is not the only brain that’s ever been kept in history.

5:45 There were some other famous people’s brains who have been kept just to study to see. But what he was trying to do, search for their whole answer to the question what is genius? But again with this great Einstein, the father of relativity, special in uneral relativity, it’s just amazing.

6:02 There must have been something really special about his brain than an average person on the street, as we all know. So a great story to talk about. And always what we do is we talk about the live sky. We tell the people, you know, to encourage them to look at the sky, take our minds away from the planet

6:20 and all the political things that are happening and all the other things. Let’s have some fun. So you simply look into the northwest this week tonight particularly, you see the moon starting to grow in size again, a whole new lunar cycle. By the thirtieth, the moon’s going to return to the second full moon, to the moon of

6:36 the month, we call it, at least some people do a blue moon, but this will be a super moon. So it’s a super blue moon because it’s very very close to the Earth and Saturn, amazing planet. I’m watching it in the telescope. If people have a small telescope binoculars, you can at least mind it naked eye, you can

6:55 see it. Look in the low part of the southeast sky around nine pm. Gets close to the Earth, but still John, it’s eight hundred and forty seven million miles away on this magical planet, the first of the many ringed planets that was ever discovered.

7:10 Speaker 1 Fascinating stuff, Steve Kates, thank you for your briefing this Sunday morning. Look forward to next Sunday and let’s let’s something let’s find something else newt for next Sunday that really expands the mind. And thank you so much, Thank you so much.

7:27 Speaker 2 Have a good Sunday.