Is 100 Better Than 101?

0:00Hello, and welcome to The Rest is Science. I'm Michael Stevens. And I'm Hannah Fry. And this is our 100th episode. What a big deal! What a great big deal! Congratulations. Hannah, this has been, it's been a real pleasure, but today, I want to question that. Is it a big deal? Of course it's a big deal. What are you talking about? We're in triple digits. Come on. Triple digits. Yes, that feels like a milestone, but it also feels very decimal base system dependent. Today, we're going to debate what's a better number, 100 or, in my opinion, 101. So we're going for correct opinion, mine, 100, and incorrect opinion, Michael's, 101. Let's go. Do you want to go first? Well, yes, since you framed it so kindly to me.

0:50Also, here's the thing. Okay, right off the bat, we got to start here. 101 is better because, excuse me, it's bigger. Right, but hang on. Going purely off of greater than, less than, 101 is more. By the way, I looked into the etymology of the word 100. 100 used to be bigger. They don't make 100 like they used to. By the way, to be absolutely clear, me and Michael do not share our research until you are seeing us having a genuine conversation with each other in real time. Because I've also found something about how 100 used to be bigger. You go first. Okay, well, it might be the same thing. We'll find out. Go on. But I don't know how to pronounce it, but across Northern Europe, 100 began as hundroth, perhaps. I don't know how to pronounce it. You'll have to time travel to tell me.

1:36But the point is that 100 meant six score and a score is 20. So 100 meant 120, what we call 120 today. And the 100 being 10 squared was the short 100, which I just love. I'm going to be using that in casual conversation all the time. Whenever 100 comes up, I'll ask for clarification. Do you mean a long 100 or a short 100? Or the great 100. Sometimes they would call it the great 100. That's the other. Ooh, the great 100. That's the other phrase for it. Yeah. The long hundred is like the baker's dozen. It's 120. So today, a hundred means just five score, five groups of 20, which is 100. But the great hundred, the long hundred is 120. Twelfty. Twelfty is the other word for it. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

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5:40and so on so on there's also actually you know uh tolkien who was a professor of old of old english and bilbo throws a party for his 11th birthday i love that i know because the other thing i discovered about the long 100 is that there is this idea that the the survivor of the long 100 the great 100 the 12th is the the british hundred weight is 112 pounds, not 100. 112? Yes, I know, but 112 isn't 120, so it's a little bit murky. But why is the hundredweight 112 pounds instead of being 100? It doesn't make any sense. Do you know? No. No, that's the theory is that it comes from the Old Norse hundred. Which was 120, though. Which was 120. This is such a British thing to do, Hannah, by the way.

6:24They're always like, yeah, you know, we're going to call a quarter note a crotchet. You know why? You know why it's a British thing to do? It's because we've got history. We've been around for a long time. That's right. It's always history. It's like, look, I know it doesn't have a hook on it, but we're going to call it the hook, the crotchet anyway. I think this is all pointing towards one answer, which is that 101 is better. Why? Because math is taught like this is the answer and it's true because the universe or something unchangeable about it. When in reality, the fact that four times 10 is easy to do in my head is purely because of the decimal system. We've talked about this in a previous

7:02episode. I don't even know. I don't even remember which one it was, but I gave examples of problems in binary that would be just simple. Like someone who was a binary thinker would be like, well, that's just prima facie obvious, the answer to that one. But to us, it's weird. It's very easy for us to sort of think in clock terms that 13 is the same as one, 17 is the same as five, because we're very used to this idea that you go all the way around and then you start again, right? And same as five because we're very used to this idea that you go all the way around and then you start again right and it's only because we're using the base 10 numerical system to represent a base 12 clock system that it sort of gets a little bit confused if you

7:38instead had like some other squiggle some other positional mark that told you how many units of 12 hours you'd gone through, actually doing calculations in base 12 would be really, really simple. I think there's a strong argument that base 12 is vastly superior in all kinds of ways. I completely agree. I mean, base 10, you can halve it, right? You can divide it by five and you can divide it by two. That's about it. That's it. Yeah. You could break it into fifths and halves, but what can you do with 12? You got, you got halves, you got quarters, you got, you got sixths. You've got thirds. Lovely. Thirds and quarters. Thank you very much. Yes, I will. It is so richly divisible. Isn't it? Yeah. If only we'd been born with two extra fingers.

8:25That's all it would have taken. And instead we're stuck here in a world that is predominantly decimal based in. And so we're supposed to sit here and celebrate our hundredth episode. Give me a break. All right. And you know what? I'm so grateful for Bilbo and for Tolkien writing about the eleventy first birthday because it allowed me to show my daughter how numbers work. I was like, eleventy first makes sense. Why don't we say it that way? Well, because we decided not to. But I think her appreciating the arbitrariness of the system allows her to go, aha, okay, well, I get it now. It's not a mean monster I need to submit to. It is a tool that we made and I can make and I can handle and control. So here's the deal. We've established right now that bases make everything murky and

9:13arbitrary, but there's something about 101 that makes it special no matter what base we're in. What is it? Something 100 doesn't have. 101 is prime. I mean, that's the opposite of the dividing by three, divided by four, divided by six, divided by two, isn't it? Yes. It is the opposite of what 12 gives us, which is this super rich amount of divisors. 101 is like, look, you got me and you got one. That's it. You've got nothing else. Are you allowed to do that? Are you allowed to simultaneously argue that you don't like base 10 because it hasn't got divisors and then argue that you don't like it because it's not prime? It feels like cheating. You tell us below in the comments if you think that my rubric is contradicting itself. But all

9:55I'm trying to say is that I think an alien, okay, who came from some other planet and had a different number of fingers would go, why is 100 special? If we told them 101, at least they could go, oh, I see, it's prime. Yes, I can recognize the specialness of this anniversary. All right. I accept that. I accept that that is something. You're right that actually 101 is something much more fundamental, regardless of whatever you call it, regardless of whatever you, however you write it, regardless of however you write it down, whether you're using Arabic numerals or not. Irrespective of what the number looks like, there is something innate about that number. Yes. By being prime, it transcends number systems.

10:36Yeah. It's not just in base 10. Yeah. It can transcend cultures, but even species and even intelligences. Right. And I haven't even rested my case yet. Okay. You know what? My phone just dropped as a sort of mic drop moment. You know what? Boom, you win. End of the episode. No, don't let me win. We've got at least 40 more minutes. Okay. Here's the thing though, right? Sure, yes. To an alien species, fine. If we're talking about pistachios, fine. But I think that there's something psychological about the number 100 that's just... Okay, I agree. Go on. ...that's nice. It just feels nice. And I think that this isn't just sort of a hunch that I have. I think that you see this in the data. I think a really nice example of this is that there was a group of economists who looked at 22 million used car sales in sort of wholesale auctions.

11:34And what you would expect is that the price of a vehicle should fall smoothly as the mileage goes up. Right. The more miles the car's done, the less it's worth. Not what happens. I think I see where you're going with this. Right. And with this sample size of millions and millions of cars, you can really clearly show that a car with 79,900 miles will sell on average for $210 more than one with 80,100 miles. So even though it's like 200 miles extra on the clock is nothing because it takes you over that threshold. That's right. It's threshold psychology. And actually, incidentally, the car with 79,900 miles will only sell for $10 less than one with $79,800. So if you go the other way, it's like it barely

12:27makes a difference. Yeah, yeah. And I think that that's a really clear indication of just how much we actually put value, as it were, in all of this. Yeah. And I don't want to underestimate that psychological value, whether it is universally important or not, the fact that we have for so long pegged numbers on this base 10 system means that they mean something to us. If a car has over 100,000 miles, there's that 100 again, that means something. It puts it in a whole different category. Even if to a base 12 person or a hexadecimal person, 100,000 is probably not going to be some nice round number that divides cars into two groups. So I'll admit that we could just embrace tradition and say 100

13:12matters for that reason. But that's not my job today. Well, it's my job. I'm going to argue strongly in favor of that. It's a bit like, do you remember we were talking about rectangles? Someone sent us in a photo of their poster and it was a bit of a honk we were talking about rectangles we someone sent us in a photo of their of their poster and it was a bit on the wall and we ended up on a very long conversation about their sort of history of rectangles and how they don't appear in nature and yet wherever you look in every human made space it is brimming it is brimming with the shape of choice, the shape that we fundamentally created and have put literally everywhere. I think this is the same thing. I think that rectangles are

13:53important by virtue of the fact that humans use them all the time. And I think that 100 is important by virtue of the fact that humans care about it. Well said. However, I'm looking beyond humans. I think that an intelligent life form from another solar system would also appreciate rectangles because we just don't see rectangles in any place in the universe, but where there's an intelligence that is rectilineifying things. However, I don't think a hundred has the same kind of claim because the bases that other intelligence use, you could find it or you could not find it. It's not like a rectangle. Your numbering system isn't like a straight line. It doesn't immediately flash this is something important.

14:44That's what I'm saying let's let's leave that where it is and move on to arguments that don't depend on base go on or pro or against 101 is also a palindrome in base 10 okay and there's someone called someone called hannah i like that as someone called hannah with an H on the beginning and the end, there are some Hannahs that don't, and I am calling you out. The incorrect ones as well. Your name, there's clumps off at the end, and I can't make it a circle. I still love you though. But 101 is a palindrome. And it's pretty cool in base 10. It's not the first palindrome and it's it's pretty cool in base 10 it's like it's not the first palindromic prime because technically i'd say 11 should get that but it's the second one and we don't know

15:33if there's an infinite number of them there could be a point where there just isn't another one fine found out one way or the other yet so there's something third 131. Okay. And then 151. Like down at the low numbers, they're not that rare. That is, it's an unsolved question whether there are, whether there are an infinite number of palindromic primes. I like that. I'm going to throw a curve ball at you. Because I'm supposed to be here arguing for 101. Sorry, can I just, I'm so sorry. I'm just looking at. Please. Forgive me. I'm just looking please forgive me i'm just looking at the wikipedia page of palindromic primes because i have never seen this page before this is i'm really i'm delighted okay the palindromic prime ready one zero

16:17six six six zero one oh that's nice isn't it yeah that's cool it's a palindrome bell for gore's prime yeah it's named after a demon it is one of the seven princes of hell yeah i like that so much who was the guy who introduced me to that number? He wrote like the big book of math. Very well-known, recognizable name. Clifford? Clifford Pickover? Yes, Clifford Pickover. That is a big math book. That is a big math book. I think he's done a lot to popularize that prime. What is it called? Bafalgars or something? I don't know all the demons. Belfagor. Bafalgar, probably. Belfagor. What is it called befalgers or something i don't know all the demons belphegor befalger or it's a it's what is it it's like a few ones a bunch of zeros and then the number one on both sides six six six thirteen zeros thirteen zeros either side thirteen on either

17:18side so it's six six six sandwiched between thirteen zeros on either side and a one at the beginning and the end. I love it. That's a great palindromic prime. It's in base 10. So hang on a second. You're trying to argue for 101. We don't even think 101 is the best palindromic prime. No, it's not. It's not even the first one, because I think 11 should count. I'll get excited. I'll get excited when we get into our Belforgoric prime episode. Okay, let me throw you a bit of a curve ball. Let's ignore primes for a while and just talk about palindromic numbers. Because again, whether a number is a palindrome, it does depend on the base, but it doesn't always have to. Here's the thing. Let me throw in a different idea. Not 100, not 101, but 99.

18:0699 is a palindrome. It's the same way backwards as it is forwards. Not prime. It's not prime, but it's a palindrome in base 10. It is also a palindrome in base 2. Is it? In base 2, 99 is 1100011. Oh, okay. That's nice. Yeah, that's nice. So how many other numbers are palindromic in both base 10 and base 2? I think the next one is 313. That is a palindrome in base 10. You nerd. 313. I like this so much. And it's also a palindrome in binary, 1-0-0, 1-1-1, 0-0-1. So as you can see, I got pretty deep into this this morning. I love it. Okay. All right. Look, so can I find a number that is a palindrome in base 10, base 2, and hexadecimal? You're talking my language. Tell me. Such a number has never been found.

19:08So Rick Reagan over at a website called exploringbinary.com became obsessed with finding a number that was a palindrome in base 10, 2, and 16. And he searched two to the 32 numbers. It taxed out his machine and he couldn't do it. Now, this was back in 2010. Maybe we can start the adventure again. But he could not find one. It stressed out his machine. It took like 60 hours and he suspended the search. I feel like there's a lot more data centers now than there was back then. I think that we should put the might of our collective compute as a planet onto this very important problem. All I'm saying is 101 is not a palindrome in base 2 or 16. Neither is 100, though. But it's also confirmed that there's no number around 100 that is a binary decimal and hexadecimal palindrome.

20:02So we're not going to be close soon to having an episode number that has that special property. No, no. You're right. Should we go for a little break and then come back and continue this argument? Let's go for a break. And I can't wait for what comes next. Hi, everyone. It's Katty Kay here from The Rest Is Politics US. The midterms are almost here. It's the biggest political moment of the year. And Anthony Scaramucci and I will be right there with you making sense of every twist and turn as the results come in. That's right. We're going to be live on YouTube covering the midterms as we get the results. Will Donald Trump be a lame duck for the next two years or walk away with a mandate to do whatever he wants?

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23:23All right, we're back. And so far, Hannah and I have been debating 100 versus 101. I think I'm going to let her go next because I'm so clearly winning this debate. I think it's almost unfair. What else do you have? Okay. That's pro 100. All right. Here's the thing. Okay. Everything you're talking about, right? All of this whole stuff about, you know, other numbers that you like. I think you're thinking too linearly here michael that's what i think i want you to tell me what what number is halfway between one and nine halfway between one and nine uh i guess that would be five no i don't think it is i think it's three why because actually a lot of the time our brains don't think in linear scales we think in terms

24:08of fractions and actually the fraction of one to three is the same as the fraction of three to nine and you see this over and over again in the way that we react to different stimulus is stimuli stimuli stimuli thank you okay So if I handed you. Stimulus. Sit up and listen because 100 is better. All right. Okay. So if I gave you two weights, okay, and asked you which one of these weighs more and the weights weighed, let's say 10 grams and uh 30 grams okay you'd be like oh well it's obviously this one it's obviously the 30 gram one right however if i now handed you two weights and they were one kilo and 10 grams and one kilo and 30 grams you'd be like uh i'm not really sure i can't really tell between the two. The bigger the baseline

25:05number, the smaller that difference is as a fraction of the whole. And thus the harder it is for you to tell the difference. And this is, I think, a really clear demonstration that actually our brains that, you know, it's still the same 20 grams, right? It's still the same 20 gram difference, whether you're on teeny tiny weights or really big weights. Uh, it's just that our brains aren't, don't work like that, right? Our brains work in terms of fractions. It's the same thing. If you send somebody to jail for three months or six months, um, it's, it is the sort of same extension of the sentence as if they're there for 25 years and three months or 25 years and six months, you're still in prison for the same amount of time, you're still deprived of your liberty for the same amount of

25:47time, still cost the same amount of money to the taxpayer. And yet you see this evidence of the way that judges give out sentences is that they are so much more careful about extra days when they're down at the other sort of smaller end of the spectrum. So here is the reason why I think 100 is important. We think logarithmically, right? We think in fractions. That's how we experience the world. And the thing about 100 is that it's sort of the same distance as 1 to 10. It's from 10 to 100. So it's sort of the second number really in a lot of ways, isn't it? Yeah. No, I get it. You're making a very, very good point. I think what you're doing is you're taking the roundness of it that I was just considering was a consequence, an artifact of the base. And you're saying, no, no, no,

26:37it is very deeply in our bones. And you're right. I made a whole video about this whole logarithmic thinking, not only logarithmic thinking, but logarithmic feeling and sensing. The world comes to us logarithmically and in fractions. I mean, think about how you experience your life. Your childhood seems to go on forever because every new year is such a big fraction. A large fraction of what you've already lived. Yeah. And as you go on and you're older and older and older, it's just it starts to whisp by. And like some of this is about, you know, the way that your brain processes information. But part of it is because, again, this evidence that our experience of reality is fundamentally logarithmic, is that it's just as much smaller and smaller, smaller fraction of what you've experienced thus far. Yeah. I mean, it's no accident that we use a hundred to talk about fractions and completeness.

27:30We could be talking about completion amounts in per mil, you know, per thousand or in per deck, I guess, but we use percent, cent meaning a hundred because it's just this like, it's kind of a lot, but it's not too much. It's enough for us to kind of go, aha, I get it. If you talk about a 10th, two 10ths, it's a little too rough, but 25%, 27%, it gives us just this perfect amount of human size specificity. It does. It really does. There's something very human about it. And I think if anything, you're making this really good point that we aren't trying to talk about how to impress an alien. We're talking about the only intelligent species we have, and it's us. So we should focus on what means something to us.

28:17If you are an alien listening to this, then I'm sorry for us excluding you, okay? But that's the argument I'm fundamentally making here. However, Hannah, humans do like 101. According to books in print, Go on. more book titles begin with 101 than begin with 100. Do they? Why? Because they know I'm right. 101 is better. They do. Yeah. Have you checked this? I'll caveat this by saying I do not have the original source for this fact. Okay. It has been repeated in a lot of different locations. Books in print is always the one credited. It's even on Wikipedia with no citation. So I could have to eat my words. This might not be true anymore. I haven't searched a database of all titles, but the thrust of the

29:05argument is that it makes sense because a book titled a hundred great recipes is like, okay, but a hundred and one great recipes psychologically feels like, man, there wasn't even enough to give me a round number. You had, there's one more, it's a bonus. And so more books begin with a hundred and one than a hundred, a hundred. 101 implies abundance. It applies, what do you want to say? That our show has done 100 episodes or more than 100 episodes? The latter sounds better. Is it also just because of the wording of it? Like room 101, you know, it's like there's something about the palindromic nature of the word. You know, the thing that you just described about 101 recipes sounds so much better it reminds me of a story about an advert in the paper selling 10 beautiful puppies

29:51and they were really struggling to get any takers so they changed the advert reprinted it with nine beautiful puppies and one ugly one oh and then and then sold the ugly puppy 10 times over oh because people felt so sympathetic to it. Yeah. It's just like a weird, there's something, you're right. It's like, it's sort of the just noticeable difference, right? It's like just there's something like a little bit weird about 101. A little bit weird. Exactly. So I think even 101 has something psychological to it too. It's not just about pure math. It's also a little bit more than 100. It's a little bit, we can't handle it too. It's not just about pure math. It's also a little bit more than 100. We can't handle it all.

30:27Our round number system is overflowing with 101, but 100 just fits in there all boring and square. I think sometimes you need boring and square though. I mean, you've got to draw a line somewhere and 100 is the place to draw it. I'm thinking here about the Karman line, which we have mentioned many, many times on this, that the official line of where space starts is 100 kilometers up into the sky. Only 62 miles, which I think is actually less. I mean, you could walk there. Yeah, you could easily walk there. If gravity wasn't in the way. Yeah. But the problem is with this, there was a bit of an argument about this, about where the edge of space should be drawn. Because the point at which lift really stops mattering is actually somewhere between 66 and 88 kilometers.

31:17It's not 100. Oh. Right. It kind of depends a little bit on different latitudes that kind of thing um so there were some suggestions that it should be more like 80 right or give or take 10 which sort of matches the the previous definition the u.s had a definition of 50 miles before also by the way satellites on elliptical orbits can dip to about 80 kilometers at their lowest point and be fine carry on surviving and go back around again oh interesting i mean i knew the the Carmen line was a bit arbitrary. It is. But I didn't really know where lift really ceased to be a method of propulsion. It's kind of around there. It is around there, but 100 is arbitrary. And they said that they actually, they chose 100 because it's nice and round.

32:02They literally did. And in doing so, by the way, there were some people from the U S air force, the U S air force would give out astronaut wings to any pilots who flew above 50 miles. Right. Yeah. And some astronauts, so there's one guy in particular, Robert White, who in 1962 flew to 95 kilometers up, unfortunately he doesn't count as he doesn't doesn't count as an astronaut sorry hun got to give them back but incidentally in 2018 there was a big discussion about moving the line to 80 kilometers instead purely because of this this point about it being the the point at where uh where lift stops mattering. Okay. Well, thank you because I think that you are emphasizing why I'm right. No, I'm not. I'm emphasizing that it's standard practice in

32:53human nature to draw a line somewhere and this is where you draw the line. Exactly. Okay. That's what Celsius did with his system as well. He's like, oh, 100, that's going to be where water boils. 100, fine. That's where space begins. Here's the deal. You're calling it standard. I'm saying that that's proof that 100 is overrated. Okay. It's just used. We always just, it's like a magnet and we get sucked towards it. And I'm saying we need to stand up for our own individuality and say 101. Gosh, darn it. Okay. But then we've got to do all this episode all over again next time. Yeah, I know. I guess I didn't think about that. What is our 101th episode going to be? It's going to be a Field Notes episode from you. Oh no. Damn.

33:46Damn. I think we need to work out a way that I win and then we don't have to return to this topic. What else you got? Come on and hit me. Okay. You can't talk about 101 without talking about its slang usage to mean introductory. Right? English 101. Right. Right. Calculus 101. Yeah. Where did that come from? People aren't exactly sure. The OED, which I wish I had my big OED right over here so I could, you know, show it off, floss my giant dictionary. But they say it began at the University of Buffalo, or at least the earliest known usage of 101 in like 1929. But then I read Buffalo University was like, no, no, no, We used it way back in like 1924. Here's the deal. Before the 20s, a lot of college courses or a lot of just school courses would just

34:33be kind of given a label, a number. And it was really hard to know what those numbers meant. So it was standardized in the 20th century, according to a system that said, look, let's do it this way. Let's have the first number be the sort of the level or the year. Yeah, the year. And then the next number could be the actual course number. And since we might have more than nine courses, we'll need to have two digits for that. Other schools would say first digit is the year. Second digit is the topic. second digit is the topic, third digit is the specific class. That's why we wound up with these three digit numbers. And then I don't know, I don't have a good answer to this, but people love to start counting with

35:15one and not zero. Incorrectly. Yes. I mean, it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. It turns into some confusing things. And it's why we have 101 as the beginning of a course, because you'd have, okay, so the freshmen, the first people to be learning in this topic, they should be, you know, zero, but actually they start at one. So we start at one. We're already at the hundred level. And then the very first course at the hundred level isn't numbered zero. It's numbered one. So you get 101. If we were to say, okay, the first class at level one is class zero, then 100 would be the beginning class. But instead, it's 101. And so, yeah, 101 has become like a thing that people use in all kinds of contexts.

36:04Like, oh, that is such a baseball 101 kind of thing. Or here's everything you need to know about online gambling, 101. It's got a little bit of fame for that. Okay, you know what, right? Okay, I actually really disagree with counting starting at one, okay? I much prefer counting starting with zero. There's a few reasons for this. Some programming languages, by the way, are correct in starting at one okay i much prefer counting starting with zero there's a few reasons for this some programming languages by the way are correct in in starting at zero python for example is like structures where it's like the first item in the list is the zeroth item and then the the next item is item number one right because it's like how many items have there been already right

36:41it works really well this by the way is the main reason why um i think america is going down the pan uh and that is that you're the way that you number the floors in your buildings starts incorrectly right we have ground floor then we have the first floor you start on the first floor and then have the second floor which is the first floor you're incorrect okay start at zero. It's ground. Then you start counting. I am sympathetic to this. I will say as someone who grew up in America and still live here, it is just more natural to me to say, oh yeah, first floor is the ground floor. And then when I go to the UK, it's so confusing. We're on the first floor and I'm like, cool, let's go outside.

37:21Well, we have to go down first. And I'm like, the heck? Starting at zero though, I do appreciate. So I will admit that 101 having this cool meaning of like introductory, it only has that because we start counting at one instead of zero. But I thought there was something kind of beautiful about when we, the rest is science, hit our 101th episode it's 101 and i i like that the the vibe of being a 101 where it's accessible to everyone you have to begin you have to all begin together don't underestimate anyone's ability that kind of a thing i like so i'm not buying it i'm sorry i'm not buying it because we've been doing this stuff for a year. And if you're only starting at our 101, I'm afraid you've missed out on a lot of stuff.

38:06You've missed out on, you know, well over 100 hours of me and Michael talking. Yeah. I mean, look, I agree. I agree that this is not my strongest argument, but I couldn't discuss 101 without discussing its meaning of introductory. Yeah, no, that's fair. That's absolutely fair okay i've got one i've got one argument of why 100 is important that isn't arbitrary okay because i think actually nature cares quite a lot about the number 100 and and not in a base 10 kind of way yeah during the uh first successful hydrogen bomb in the fallout. This is 1952, by the way. This is in the Pacific at one of the atolls in the Pacific, like 10 megatons explosion. In the blast, some of the uranium-238 nuclei were hit by so many neutrons at once that they

39:01swallowed up 17 of them before decaying into new elements. And these new elements were sort of picked over by scientists and they discovered all of these new elements. So element 99 was found first. Element 100 is a fermium, it's known as. Named after Enrico Fermii i would guess so yes they found it in contaminated coral at the site this all by the way was like uh classified until 1955 so for for really long you know for a few years anyway they had found element 100 but as as far as the world knew it didn't exist meanwhile over in stockholm there's another group who made fermium in 1954 without realizing that the americans had already done it the normal way that you build heavy elements is that you sort of

39:58you stuff loads of extra neutrons into a nucleus and then it gets into sort of unstable and then it will convert into the next element up okay but fermium 257 is the end of that road so if you add one more neutron in there to get fermium 258 it will just tear itself apart its half-life is 370 microseconds. So the neighbors, fermion 259, 260, they end up doing the same thing. Okay. So there's like what they call a fermion gap here. So there is no known fermion isotope that will decay into element 101. So fermion, it's basically the heaviest element that you can make by just adding neutrons, right? So it might be in a reactor, it might be in a bomb, but it's the end of the line for building elements with neutrons

41:00because after that, you have to then start smashing big nuclei together. Oh. Just, you know, by handfuls of atoms at a time. Can't just like, have a little bit more, Oh, that is very cool. So 100 protons in the nucleus is like this kind of magical cliff. Yes. Okay. I will say that is pretty neat. I'm not saying I'm totally swayed. I like that you keep pointing to humans and the physical world, whereas what I've got are these kind of like, oh, it's prime, it's a palindrome. How has it worked out this way that the mathematician is the one anchoring it in reality? Well, you just never know. After 100 episodes, Hannah, everything gets topsy-turvy. Maybe Biles Mosif with swapped personalities. I'm nervous now because all I have left is an argument that actually helps out your side.

41:56Go on. There's something I love about the number 100. It's the only thing I like about it. And it's the fact that in the Roman numeral system, 100 comes first alphabetically. Go on. C. Yeah. Because in the Roman numeral system where you start with, you know, one is I, and then you have I, and then IV, one before five, which is V, we can alphabetize all the numbers. And 100 comes first alphabetically as a Roman numeral, C. Yeah. Of all of the numbers, of all of the numbers. Yeah, of all the numbers. No, it cannot be bigger than 100 because otherwise you've got to put something in front of it. It cannot be smaller than 100 because otherwise it doesn't have the C there. Of all of the, every single number alphabetically, it is the first.

42:48What's the first number in English? Alphabetically, the first number in English is eight. I was thinking 11. Yeah, you're right. And now I found David Pierce. There's this whole 79 page PDF where he investigated alphabetizing the Roman numerals. And here's the list. Number one is C, 100. Number two, CC, 200. Coming in in third place, CCC, 300. Okay, so here's the list. Yeah, you guys can peruse this on your own. 101 is the 302nd Roman numeral alphabetically. Pretty poor performance there. Interestingly, not only can we figure out the first number alphabetically in Roman numerals, we can also figure out the last one. Alphabetically, the last Roman numeral is 38, which in Roman numerals is XXXVII.

43:51Yeah. But hold on, why can that? Oh, because if you put, I was thinking, why can it not be a bigger number? Why can you have XXXX? But then it wouldn't be because then it would be, what's 50V? L, right? L, right. So 400 is going to get you into the XL, 10 before 50. Right. It really is the last one. Yeah. 38 is the last number alphabetically, unless you use the non-standard Roman numeral for nine. Normally nine is IX, one before 10. But sometimes you will see it, even in the ancient world, written V-I-I-I-I. So a five with four ones after it, in which case XXXVIII would come last, which is 39. But using the most standardized Roman numeral system, 38 is last alphabetically. And 100, your number, comes first.

44:53I think we've reached a conclusion, don't you? From here on in, we're going to change our numbering system to the Roman one. I think that, wouldn't that be funny? We began debating 100 versus 101 and we ended with a petition to the World Mathematics Association to convert us to the Roman numeral system. To get rid of the Arabic numeral system. Goodness gracious. Yeah, look, you know, it's not where I thought we'd end up, but I'm willing to back it all the way. Okay. Where do I sign? What a perfect opportunity for all of you out there listening to let us know in the comments below what's better, 100 or 101. CI 101. CI. See you later. That's in the Michael numeral system. It's like the Roman one,

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