Chit Chat: Dr Karl on the weirdest question he's ever been asked, cool shirts and his live show

Australia Broadcast Center

a day ago

Dr Karl Kruszelnicki has dedicated the majority of his life to answering our weirdest scientific questions with infectious enthusiasm and wildly accessible explanations of exceedingly complex concepts.
But how much do we really know about the man himself?
As part of Science Week, triple j is taking Dr Karl's Science Hour out of the studio for the first time in its 48-year run, with a live show at the Enmore Theatre in Eora/Sydney on August 11.
Of course, ABC Entertainment took this opportunity to sit down with the veteran science broadcaster and ask him a bunch of personal questions.
Read on to find out how Karl Kruszelnicki became Dr Karl, the strangest question he's ever been asked and what audiences should expect from Science with Dr Karl Live. But also so much more — prepare yourself.
I was coming home from primary school and it was a really hot day and the bitumen was wet and sticky on the road and we'd been taught at school about how black absorbs heat and how plants do this photosynthesis and absorb sunlight.
I thought, "Well, if black absorbs the Sun's energy really well, how come plants are green and not black?"
That was my first science question ever.
In 1981, I was very interested in NASA's Space Shuttle program. I'd been following it for many years and I knew a lot about it, so I thought, "Bugger it, I'll apply," and I wrote a letter to NASA saying, "Dear NASA, my name is Karl. I'm a fit young bloke, I can run a City to Surf, I do martial arts. I've got a degree in maths and physics, a master's in biomedical engineering, and soon I'll have a degree in medicine and a degree in surgery, can I be an astronaut? Yours truly, Karl."
And they sent me a letter back saying, "No, we're full up, and anyway, we only employ Americans." I've still got that letter.
But then I heard triple j was doing a show on the launch of the Space Shuttle … So I rang up and said I'd applied to be an astronaut on the Space Shuttle program and I knew a lot about it, and did they want me to come in and talk about it?
And they said, "Sure, come in."
I was out the back afterwards having a cup of hippie tea with [journalist and former triple j broadcaster] Tony Barrow, and he said, "Gee, I really need this tea to clean my kidneys."
And I said, "Look, I'm sorry to disagree with you, but in fact it's the other way around. Your kidneys clean the tea out of your blood.
"You see, your kidneys filter around 200 kilograms of blood every day, they pull out about half a kilogram of salt at vast metabolic cost, then they put all of this salt back into the blood stream, except for a tiny amount that goes in the urine, and the reason this happens is because God made a mistake and we're fish gone wrong."
And he said, "We need you for a new segment. We'll call it 'Great Moments in Science'."
Because they've got a sense of curiosity.
People want to know why the sky is blue, or why, when you use really fine sandpaper on a hot day and you breathe out, you can see water vapour coming out of your mouth like you would on a cold day.
Or — one classic one from the past which is possibly too rude to talk about — a lady rang in and said, "Hi Dr Karl, whenever I have oral sex with my husband and his penis is at the back of my throat, I go temporarily deaf, and I wondered about this, so I asked all my girlfriends to try it with their boyfriends and husbands and it happened to them too. Why?"
I think so.
Well, firstly, almost certainly this has not been discussed in the medical professional literature, so I had to wing it.
But, luckily, I have 28 years of education including 16 years at university for free, because once upon a time the Australian government thought education was a worthwhile investment.
So, I started working from first principles. When you're listening to the quietest noise you can possibly hear, your eardrum is vibrating backwards and forwards an incredibly small distance, roughly equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom. Our eardrums respond to the merest change in pressure.
Now, imagine you've got a sheet drying on the clothesline and you peg it at the top and the bottom is just floating free; the merest breath of wind will make it move. Suppose you bolt it to the ground, the wind won't make it move so far.
With your eardrum, you've got a pipe leading to the outside world that sometimes you stick a cottonbud down. And then there's also another pipe on the other side of the eardrum going down the back of the throat. That's called the Eustachian canal and it's related to why, when you're flying in an airplane and you're coming down for landing and you've got a blocked ear, you have to swallow to make it go away.
Getting back to the penis hitting the back of the throat, it hits the Eustachian tube, shoves some air up there and holds it there.
And so you've got a preload on the eardrum, it's bulging out slightly and it's not free to flop and respond to the merest change in pressure like normal because it's being pushed by a fair bit of pressure from the inside.
And that's what's happening with going momentarily deaf from oral sex.
I made a very romantic marriage proposal.
My wife [Mary Dobbie] was in Sydney and I rang her up saying, "Hi, honey, I'm in this cheap hotel in South East Asia about to inject opiates into the buttocks of a young yoga teacher and I know I'm not supposed to inject into the buttocks, but I haven't had any sleep for a couple of days, so can you remind me why and where should I inject instead? And by the way, will you marry me?"
And then the line went dead.
Well, it was a cheap hotel room in South East Asia. But, anyway, I rang back again and she eventually said yes.
Then we had a scientific wedding where we got married inside the Arctic Circle on the longest day of the year, so on that day the sun did not set, and it was a metaphor for how the love would not set on our marriage.
Questions from the audience.
Plus we'll have lots of people who know stuff. When I'm live on air I'll often say, "I can give you a bit of an answer but really, what we need is a canine endocrinologist." With a bit of luck, we'll have lots of those in the audience.
And we'll have a few surprise little videos as well.
So, it'll be a mixture of [questions] driven by the audience, plus listening to the audience give their answers, plus a few funny things I can't share because we want to keep the element of surprise.
There's a few things going on here. Number one, if you look at a bunch of people going out at night for a bit of fun, in general the female humans have gone to a lot of trouble to dress up and look good and the males have gone to lesser trouble, sometimes even wearing bloody shorts and a T-shirt, God help me.
Number two, in general it's kind of accepted in our society that a female person can get away with wearing [as much colour or pattern as they want]. Whereas, the males are kind of stuck with variations of white and blue and brown or black.
And third, when I was a kid growing up in Wollongong, I was about 15 and it was a rainy day in winter and I was walking down Crown Street and everyone was dressed in grey and all the faces were sort of uniformly 'blah'. Suddenly, I came around a corner and there was this woman dressed in really bright colours and everyone sort of smiled a little bit when they saw her and I thought, "Wow. If you've got a choice between happy and sad, I prefer happy. And is it that easy to get happy?"
And so now I follow the rainbow theory of colour dressing, where I try to wear every single colour of the rainbow at once, every day.
Science with Dr Karl Live is on at Enmore Theatre in Eora/Sydney on August 11.
Quotes lightly edited for clarity and brevity.