Big mysteries explained through your senses

Episode of TED Radio Hour · September 18, 2026 · 50 min

Manoush Zomorodi talks with astronomer Mark Whittle, smell researcher Paule Joseph and artist Yiyun Kang about perceiving hidden realities through the senses.

Summary

On this episode of TED Radio Hour, host Manoush Zomorodi explored how hearing, smell and sight can make imperceptible phenomena comprehensible. Astronomer Mark Whittle explained that the Big Bang was not an explosion into space but an expansion of space itself, and was therefore effectively silent, though an "acoustic era" of pressure waves followed almost immediately and lasted roughly 400,000 years. Whittle described translating those waves—whose natural frequency is about one wave every 50,000 years—into audible sound by compressing 400,000 years into ten seconds and raising the pitch some 50 octaves, and later into music performed by choir and organ with sound artist Ander Mikkelsen and composer Caroline Shaw.

Chemosensory researcher Paule Joseph, co-director of the National Institutes of Health's National Smell and Taste Center, described smell as an evolutionary early-warning system and as an underused clinical signal. She recounted noticing that her mother-in-law's cooking had become oversalted, testing her with scratch-and-sniff stickers, and a diagnostic process that ended in a frontotemporal dementia diagnosis. Joseph said reduced smell can precede other symptoms of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and frontotemporal dementia by years, argued that primary care should screen for smell loss, and discussed COVID-related anosmia and parosmia, her lab's fMRI study of parosmia, and emerging findings on GLP-1 medications, detection thresholds and "food noise."

Artist Yiyun Kang discussed rendering invisible systems into physical experience. Her project Passage of Water, made with Google and using NASA satellite data, visualized global freshwater loss between 2002 and 2023 and was presented at COP28. Her newer installation Light Architecture places viewers inside a circular room of 24 illuminated rods representing "neural pods," giving AI computation a bodily form. Kang said she turned to AI after ChatGPT-era interfaces removed technical barriers, and described her own mix of excitement and anxiety about the technology, arguing that art is a bridge that lets people feel problems rather than merely observe data.

Chapters

0:43
The silent Big Bang
Mark Whittle explains that the Big Bang was an expansion of space itself and produced no sound, since there were no pressure waves.
2:46
The acoustic era
Whittle describes how gravity compressed gas into spherical sound waves for roughly 400,000 years after the Big Bang.
4:14
Hearing the early universe
The show plays a rendering of the young universe's sound compressed into ten seconds and raised about 50 octaves.
5:40
Whittle's path into astronomy and the evidence for the Big Bang
Whittle recounts growing up near Cambridge during the discovery of pulsars, quasars and the microwave background, and explains the stretched light that arrives as microwaves.
15:07
From noise to music
Whittle describes narrowing the harmonics, mapping them to piano notes, and commissioning a choir-and-organ work based on the sequences.
19:47
Matter that understands itself
Whittle reflects on why humans can intuit cosmic physics and on the atoms in our brains tracing their own ancestry.
25:29
Smell as an early warning system
Paule Joseph explains smell's evolutionary survival role and her discovery of her mother-in-law's frontotemporal dementia through changes in taste and smell.
29:17
Why smell isn't screened
Joseph argues that primary care should screen smell, discusses aging versus neurodegeneration, and describes COVID-related loss and parosmia.
35:13
Living without smell
Joseph shares cases of a firefighter and a chef who permanently lost their sense of smell, and discusses olfactory training and treatment limits.
38:36
Alcohol, obesity and GLP-1s
Joseph outlines her lab's work on alcohol use disorder and new findings on detection thresholds and food noise in people taking GLP-1 medications.
42:14
Yiyun Kang and Passage of Water
Kang describes collaborating with Google and NASA to turn satellite data on freshwater loss into an immersive artwork shown at COP28.
46:55
Light Architecture and living with AI
Kang explains building a physical installation representing AI's inner workings and her entangled excitement and anxiety about the technology.

Key points

What was said, by whom, with the exact words. Timestamps jump to the moment.

Mark Whittle
Whittle argues the Big Bang was an expansion of space itself rather than an explosion into pre-existing space, and was therefore effectively silent.
“it was the expansion of space itself, carrying material with it. And so paradoxically, the Big Bang was probably in a way silent. Because everything's moving away from everything else. There are no pressure waves”
Listen from 1:47 · Big Bang cosmology
Mark Whittle
Whittle says the universe's acoustic era began almost immediately after the Big Bang and lasted about 400,000 years.
“started almost immediately, basically, and extended for about 400,000 years”
Listen from 2:56 · Big Bang cosmology
Mark Whittle
Whittle notes the primordial sound waves had frequencies of roughly one wave every 50,000 years, far below human perception.
“The frequencies of the waves that I'm talking about are one wave every 50,000 years. So, I mean, you wouldn't even live to see one wave pass you”
Listen from 4:05 · Big Bang cosmology
Mark Whittle
Whittle explains that light leaving the young universe at micron wavelengths was stretched by expansion into millimeter-scale microwaves.
“they started out as light, leaving the young universe with wavelengths of about a millionth of a metre. That's a micron. And they arrived a thousand times longer”
Listen from 8:23 · Cosmic microwave background
Mark Whittle
Whittle says Fred Hoyle coined 'Big Bang' derisively on BBC radio in the 1950s and the name stuck.
“he coined the term big bang to be slightly derisive just saying well it's nothing more than a big bang really and that name that name has stuck”
Listen from 9:34 · Big Bang cosmology
Mark Whittle
Whittle says wave analysis of the microwave background revealed a fundamental and harmonics, the signature of a musical instrument or human voice.
“not only were these waves basically acoustic waves, but also there was a fundamental of harmonics. And that is exactly the signature of something like a musical instrument or a human voice”
Listen from 10:54 · Cosmic microwave background
Mark Whittle
Whittle chose sound rather than imagery to communicate cosmology because astronomy's public presentation is overwhelmingly visual.
“I just thought it was a wonderful way of communicating to the public what these new discoveries were, was to actually use sound as the bridge”
Listen from 11:20 · Sonification of scientific data
Mark Whittle
Whittle proposes that subatomic quantum vibrations during inflation were amplified into sound waves that became the pattern of galaxies.
“quantum oscillations smaller than atoms get amplified by cosmic expansion to make huge sound waves that then transform into an ever-expanding tapestry of galaxies”
Listen from 12:45 · Big Bang cosmology
Mark Whittle
Whittle says the raw cosmic sound resembles noise because the young universe's harmonics are very wide, so he narrowed them to make them musical.
“if you're standing at a piano, you don't put your finger on one note. You put your full forearm onto a lot of notes. It all comes out together. And so it's not very musical and it's more like noise”
Listen from 16:58 · Sonification of scientific data
Mark Whittle
Whittle argues that atoms from the first acoustic era now compose human brains, so the universe can witness its own origins.
“right now, some of those atoms are inside your brain, somehow witnessing and understanding their own ancestry”
Listen from 18:10 · Big Bang cosmology
Mark Whittle
Whittle says the piano rendering uses the first eight harmonics, which are the ones telescopes have detected.
“those are the first eight harmonics, which are basically the eight that have been seen by telescopes”
Listen from 18:34 · Sonification of scientific data
Mark Whittle
Whittle contends science is intuitable because humans evolved amid the same physical laws and developed sensors for light and sound.
“all the laws of physics are right here on the surface of the earth and we've sort of been coached in them through our evolution”
Listen from 19:47 · Big Bang cosmology
Paule Joseph
Joseph describes smell as an evolutionarily preserved survival system that detects airborne threats before they are seen or heard.
“it detects airborne threats like smoke, fire, toxic chemicals that are in the environment, including predators, before they can be seen or heard”
Listen from 26:24 · Olfaction and sniff training
Paule Joseph
Joseph recounts that changes in her mother-in-law's cooking led her to test her smell with scratch-and-sniff stickers, ultimately yielding a frontotemporal dementia diagnosis.
“that kind of sort of led to a cascade of doctors' employment and a number of tests. And then we realized that she had frontal temporal lobe dementia”
Listen from 28:10 · Frontotemporal dementia
Paule Joseph
Joseph says smell decline appears years before other symptoms in Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and frontotemporal dementia.
“we see that in individuals with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease and even frontal temporal lobe dementia, the sense of smell is decreased early, like years before any other symptoms appear”
Listen from 28:41 · Olfaction and sniff training
Paule Joseph
Joseph argues that primary care physicians should at minimum screen for smell loss and refer patients, noting no specialty currently owns the test.
“if you ask me who should be doing this test, I would say at a minimum, primary care should be screening and then doing the proper referrals”
Listen from 30:02 · Olfaction and sniff training
Paule Joseph
Joseph says what matters clinically is not whether smell is perfect but whether it changed suddenly and failed to return.
“what matters is not whether your smell is perfect, it's whether it changed, especially if this change is suddenly and it has not come back”
Listen from 31:06 · Olfaction and sniff training
Paule Joseph
Joseph says a small group of COVID patients developed parosmia, in which familiar smells become distorted, which she considers harder to live with than total loss.
“some of them have developed parasmia, which is an absence of distortion. For example, your coffee smells like burning garbage”
Listen from 31:49 · Parosmia
Paule Joseph
Joseph says her team is scanning parosmia patients with fMRI to understand what brain signals change during smell distortion.
“we're getting individuals with parosmia and putting them inside a scanner to understand through, you know, fMRI, just scanning their brain, what signals are changing?”
Listen from 32:59 · Parosmia
Paule Joseph
Joseph argues that persistent smell loss should be treated as an invisible disability, citing a firefighter who needed workplace accommodations.
“we really needed to start thinking about this as a disability. This is one of those things that we consider an invisible disability”
Listen from 36:18 · Long COVID
Paule Joseph
Joseph says treatment options are limited to olfactory training, which works for some people but not others, and virus-caused loss can regenerate if caught early.
“We don't have a lot of treatment when it comes to smell and taste. We primarily have, you know, olfactory training is one of the things that we tend to recommend to individuals”
Listen from 37:18 · Olfaction and sniff training
Paule Joseph
Joseph reports a recent study finding smell unchanged in people taking GLP-1 medications, with differences appearing in detection thresholds and reduced food noise.
“everybody assumes that these medications make food taste bad or taste like nothing. And that's not what this group of investigators found. Smell was unchanged”
Listen from 39:37 · GLP-1 receptor agonists
Paule Joseph
Joseph recommends practicing everyday olfactory training, such as deliberately smelling spices while cooking.
“you can do this even when you're cooking at home, right? Just get something out of your cabinet when you're putting the spices in”
Listen from 41:46 · Olfaction and sniff training
Yiyun Kang Prediction · due Dec 2050
Kang says half of humanity will lack clean water by 2050 and that she used NASA satellite data with Google to dramatize freshwater loss.
“Half of humanity will like clean water by 2050, and many already do”
Listen from 44:21 · Freshwater scarcity
Yiyun Kang
Kang argues that artistic creativity is essential rather than a luxury because it lets people feel data instead of merely seeing it.
“This is where artistic creativity becomes an essential, not a luxury. You don't just see the data, you feel it”
Listen from 46:10 · Passage of Water
Linked moment · 47:40Skip to 47:40 using a listen link in the info box.
Yiyun Kang
Kang says she began tackling AI in her work because chat interfaces removed the technical barriers and hid the complexity behind them.
“now, everything is just at our fingertips. We just need to type it. So it removes all the barrier”
Listen from 47:40 · Artificial intelligence and art
Yiyun Kang
Kang describes Light Architecture as an installation of 'neural pods' where visitors stand inside the mind of a machine rather than watching a model.
“These modules are no longer flat pixels, they are living neurons, and I call them neural pods. Here, you don't just watch a model, you stand inside the mind of a machine”
Listen from 49:26 · Light Architecture
Yiyun Kang
Kang says her feelings about AI combine excitement and anxiety, which is reflected in the fluctuating light and darkness of her work.
“exactly like a huge excitement, great anxiety, all kind of entangled inside of me. That's the reason why my artwork is also fluctuate”
Listen from 50:57 · Artificial intelligence and art

People

In the conversation

Manoush ZomorodiHost of NPR's TED Radio Hour
Mark WhittleProfessor of astronomy at the University of Virginia who sonifies the early universe
Paule JosephChemosensory researcher and senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health, co-director of the National Smell and Taste Center
Yiyun KangSeoul-based multimedia installation artist working at the intersection of art and technology

Discussed

Fred HoyleBritish cosmologist who coined the term 'Big Bang' in BBC radio broadcasts
Caroline ShawPulitzer Prize-winning composer who wrote a choir-and-organ work from Whittle's cosmic note sequences
Ander MikkelsenSound artist who worked with Whittle on turning cosmic harmonics into music

Topics

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From the publisher

Our senses help us navigate everyday life. But can they also reveal what lies beyond our perception? This hour, TED speakers explore the hidden world through the senses. Guests include astronomer Mark Whittle, chemosensory researcher Paule Joseph and artist Yiyun Kang. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org . See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy

Summary, chapters and key points were generated from the episode transcript on September 27, 2026. Quotes are checked word for word against the transcript.

Categories: Science·Astronomy·Medicine