Dr Karl hits the factory floor in his tireless quest for understanding
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki has a plan to rescue people stuck down a rabbit hole of “disinformation”. The target of conspiracy theorists when he posts about climate change, COVID or even nutrition, to his combined 800,000 followers on TikTok and the social media platform X, he is working with a team to devise a chatbot that uses artificial intelligence to engage trolls in positive conversation.
Dr Karl’s How Things Work: Dr Karl goes behind the scenes at Allens.Credit: ABC
“There’s been a study that shows that having an AI chatbot talk to somebody reasonably for eight minutes, with three backwards and forwards conversations, reduces their disbelief by 20 per cent,” the lively science presenter and decoder explains. “So that’s my next job … But the logic isn’t going to work on everybody.”
In the meantime, following the publication of his memoir A Periodic Tale: My Sciencey Memoir, Kruszelnicki is launching his first solo television series, Dr Karl’s How Things Work. The six-parter comes after a 40-year television career that began when he hosted the inaugural season of ABC’s pre-Catalyst science series, Quantum, and still includes his talkback radio show on Triple J, airing since 1981.
Across the new ABC series, Kruszelnicki visits the factories of Encore toilet paper, Haigh’s chocolate, Bundaberg ginger beer, Kookaburra Sport cricket balls, Allen’s lollies and Bega cheese.
His suggestion to producers, to find out how Australian-owned audio equipment company, Røde, turns out 10,000 microphones a day, was shelved for a possible second season. The plan, he was told, was to “do things that are easy (Australian) icons. (They said), ‘We’ve got to suck people in’.”
Dr Karl shows it doesn’t take long to turn wood pulp into toilet paper.Credit: ABC
True to form, Kruszelnicki is insatiably inquisitive about the items that feature in the series, acting on a desire to understand how everyday things work that was sparked by a light bulb moment in his youth.
“I had this weird realisation that I kind of knew how the universe began but I couldn’t adjust the handbrake on my car. I felt really unbalanced as a person, so I became a car mechanic for a bit.”
He has also been a doctor, physicist, roadie for Slim Dusty, MTV music video producer, helped set up Australia’s first cable television network in Nimbin, and designed a machine to assist the work of Fred Hollows.
The series takes a cinematic approach to the production line, using music to inject drama into even the most mundane stages. With his signature lairy shirts concealed under safety jumpsuits, Kruszelnicki enthuses about each step of the conveyor belt, from the transformation of wood pulp into toilet paper in less than a second, to the exact science of hand-turning the perfect truffle. Adding to his delight, everything involves stainless steel.
“I’m a sucker for stainless steel. It maintains its integrity forever – or for about 1000 to 2000 years. The rust you get from stainless steel – chromium dioxide – is both adherent and non-permeable. So it stops and stays stopped. So, in the various factories that we went through, because in many cases we’re dealing with human contact-grade stuff, and everything has to be wiped down, it’s stainless steel all the way through. In every factory, I go, ’Ooh, I love this stainless steel!“.
As fascinating as are the facts in Dr Karl’s How Things Work, he believes that increased knowledge about everyday things we take for granted has implications beyond factual entertainment.
“At the moment, we’ve got this combination of 200,000-year-old thinking, because we are homo sapiens; medieval institutions like the fact that you have to work for money, when in fact there’s enough money to go around for everybody; and godlike technology in our hands. Those three things have put us in the weird place where we are right now … If we understand that the world is not a mystery, but understandable, we can then work out what things truly are mysteries. Trying to get people introduced to all these wonderful things that humans can do is part of the whole process of trying to bring light into the world.”
Dr Karl’s How Things Work screens on Tuesday, 8pm, ABC.
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