Pop Science: Serious Answers to Deep Questions Posed in Songs - Hardcover

James Ball has worked in political, data, and investigative journalism for the Guardian, BuzzFeed, and the Washington Post in a career spanning TV, digital, print, and alternative media. His reporting has won the Pulitzer Prize for public service, the Scripps Howard Prize, the British Journalism Award for investigative reporting, the Royal Statistical Society Award, and the Laurence Stern Fellowship, among others. He lives in London.

HOW MANY ROADS MUST A MAN WALK DOWN?
BOB DYLAN

There have been various rituals around manhood throughout history: for the Bukusu tribe of western Kenya, it is the sikhebo circumcision ceremony; for the people of Vanuatu in the South Pacific, it is the yearly harvest ritual of “land diving,” as they leap a hundred feet from crudely built wooden towers with vines tied around their ankles.

Dylan, B., characteristically chooses an unusual measure of child development, contemplating how many roads a man must walk down, before you can call him a man. Despite significant research effort, we have been unable to find evidenced answers to this matter “blowing in the wind” (unless the cryptic answer to his question is “nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide, and other trace gases”) and so have focused instead on what Dylan surely must have been driving at: childhood physical activity.

The lack of any standardized road length, plus ethical (and insurance) considerations, prevented us proposing that young children walk down actual roads, so instead we have focused on recommended step counts for children. While adults are advised to walk 10,000 steps a day, children—at least those aged five or over; for hopefully obvious reasons younger kids are excluded—are advised to walk more. Girls should be aiming to walk 12,000 steps a day, but boys need to average 15,000 steps each day. Therefore, a simple bit of math suggests a boy should have walked 71,175,000 steps between his fifth and eighteenth birthday, when we can (legally) call him a man. However, most children fall short of this: the average boy will have walked just 52,195,000 steps by this point.

The Dylan, B., study sadly is vague on practical advice on what to do at this point should we wish to maintain our current age of majority. We could either reduce the requirements for roads (or steps) walked down, or, if we wish to protect the 71-million-step goal, we could instead begin to call boys “men” at the average age of just over twenty-two and a half. It is of course likely that this additional exercise would cause them to be blowing in the wind.

CAN YOU KILL SOMEONE WITH A SONG?
ROBERTA FLACK

Flack, R., repeatedly makes a number of serious accusations against an unnamed individual over the course of this report, most notably alleging attempted murder, softly and with a song.

Given the damaging nature of such allegations—they could easily result in lifetime imprisonment—it’s important to examine the evidence behind Flack’s claim. Initially, Flack’s claims stand up well: it is entirely possible to kill someone with a song, or any other appropriately loud noise. Anything over 150 decibels is enough to rupture an eardrum, while anything rising to around 200 decibels is enough to prove fatal to most of us. For comparison, a pneumatic drill is around 100 decibels, and chain saws are only around 120 decibels—to hear a fatal level of noise you’d generally need to be near an explosion.

Flack, however, specifies she is not being killed by volume: her accusation is that she is being softly killed. Here too, though, she may have evidence to support her claims. In 1933, a Hungarian composer penned a song called “Gloomy Sunday,” initially about the despair of war, then rewritten to be about contemplating suicide. The song provoked a (badly evidenced) international media panic through the decade that it was provoking a swathe of suicides—and the composer did eventually kill himself, although decades later. An examination of the case of “Gloomy Sunday” in Gizmodo—we assume this to be a peer-reviewed journal—noted that Hungary has a historically high suicide rate, as do other countries with its cultural history, leading to speculation about genetic causes of the phenomenon.

The effect of a piece of music or another suicide provoking a copycat act is known as the “Werther Effect,” after the 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The book’s eponymous protagonist kills himself over doomed love, and its publication was followed by a spate of suicides, provoking huge debate as to whether they were related.

So, if Flack’s lover is softly singing “Gloomy Sunday” into her ears, she may have a good case against him for attempted murder.

ARE THERE 4,000 HOLES IN BLACKBURN, LANCASHIRE?
THE BEATLES

Some thinkers tackle love, some tackle betrayal, and some tackle politics— but few have tackled a pressing issue that causes fury among drivers everywhere: potholes.

Perhaps their willingness to address this issue is why Lennon, J., and McCartney, P., have endured in the public imagination for so long.

In their 1967 address, they not only note that there are 4,000 “small” holes in Blackburn, Lancashire, but also that someone had to count them. Today, trying to assess whether their estimate at the time was accurate is impossible, but it is still the case that someone in contemporary Blackburn has to try to calculate the number of potholes and deal with them.

A recent estimate of potholes in Blackburn can be gathered from the local council’s figures. In 2018 the council received £178,000 from a central government fund to tackle potholes. The average cost of fixing a pothole in Britain is £53, which means Blackburn got enough funds to tackle 3,358 potholes—not too far from Lennon and McCartney’s historical estimate, especially given that budget measures in Britain mean the council was likely underfunded in its efforts.

It seems like in the case of Lennon and McCartney science’s gain may have been road maintenance’s loss.

As to how many holes it would take to “fill” the Albert Hall: we know its internal volume measures 113,512 yards, so if all the holes were the same size they would be 28.38 yd.3 , which is roughly two-thirds the size of a standard shipping container. It is unlikely that there were 4,000 holes this size in the roads of Blackburn, Lancashire, especially as the study itself says they are “rather small,” so though one may have led to the calculation of the other, we must reluctantly conclude that the collaborators may have made some serious errors in their math.