The Infinite Monkey Cage - An Unexpected History of Science - Rufus Hound, Matthew Cobb, Victoria Herridge and Keith Moore

Episode Date: August 14, 2024

Brian Cox and Robin Ince raid the archives of the Royal Society to reveal an unexpected history of science with guests Rufus Hound, Tori Herridge, Matthew Cobb and Keith Moore. Together they explore some of the surprising and wackiest scientific endeavours undertaken by early members of the Royal Society from the discovery of sperm to testing the insect repelling properties of unicorn horn. They hear how a beautiful book on fish almost scuppered Newton's Principia Mathematica and why a guide to the fauna of Switzerland ended up including depictions of dragons.Producer: Melanie Brown Exec Producer: Alexandra Feachem BBC Studios Audio production

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. BBC Sounds music radio podcasts. Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And this is Roald Dahl's The Infinite Monkey Cage. Not merely because today's show is recorded inside a giant peach, but because this is the unexpected history of science.

Of course, by giant peach, Robin means the Royal Society. It's a very common mistake. Many of you will know that Isaac Newton very often used to see himself as merely the pip with inside a large, fleshy fruit. Robin means the Royal Society. The world's oldest scientific society. Established in 1660 the society is

counted Isaac Newton Charles Darwin Michael Faraday Dorothy Hodgkin Stephen Hawking Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Brian Cox amongst his many fellows I didn't write this now that's not true not only yes he did write that my only change was I said why don't we add some other names as well as yours, Brian? I think my name will really make the point. Anyway, so... Well, today, we're not celebrating the work of the Society's most famous names. Rather, we're delving into its extensive archives to explore the unexpected history of the Royal Society.

To facilitate our exploration of this unexpected archival realm, we have a collection of artifacts and documents from the Royal Society's vaults, from Robert Boyle's notes on possible futures, to a survey of the flora and fauna of the Swiss Alps, with added dragons, and experiments detailing the therapeutic properties of powdered unicorn horn. It is weird, when you say dragons, it does actually become believable. If there's something about the way that you've managed to make us believe so many ridiculous

ideas about physics, then when you go, with added dragons, look, there's one just over there. Ooh, look at its shiny, fiery breath. Anyway, to further navigate these strange lands, we have a maggot wrangler, a trowel blazer, a science explainer turned maestro of musical theatre and the guardian of the archives. And they are... My name is Keith Moore I'm the librarian of the Royal Society. The most unexpected thing about science that I've discovered at the Royal Society is that Sir Isaac Newton had a talking dog. Perhaps more on that later. Hello I'm Dr. Torrie Herridge from the University of

Sheffield and the most surprising thing that I've discovered about science is that if you were to go back in time to the Middle East of the 1920s and you swung a cat, pretty much every single thing you would hit would be a woman doing science. My name is Professor Matthew Cobb from the University of Manchester and I think the most surprising thing I've found about science is that you spend your time being very, very confident of things and then you learn that it's all not true. No, they're just correction. Some things aren't true.

Some things are. For the listening public. Let's be absolutely clear. Oh, Brian's looking to lose his grant approval. You can't say it's all not true. No, there are things that we care about greatly that sometimes turn out not to be true because the data prove it that way, which is rather frustrating but also very exciting. My name's Rufus Hound. I do different types of showing off. And the most surprising thing I've found recently is that defibrillators are not as fun as telly makes them look. And this is our panel. I just wanted to say, Keith, that it sounds like almost a character from Tolkien, doesn't

it? The librarian of the Royal Society. The way you said it was impressive. Yeah. Well, I'm impressed by just working here because you get to meet some fantastic fellows of the Royal Society, some great scientists. And look what I get to play with every day, manuscripts and books from the history of science,

and they're wonderful things. See, it shows the great difference between Brian and me is because I hang around with a lot of librarians generally, I wasn't as impressed by the librarian bit as the talking dog story. And that shows that great divide between the two of us. Okay, can we start? So the Royal Society founded in 1660.

Could you give us a snapshot of what science was at that time? Science, as far as the Royal Society was at that time, was 12 guys who got together to form a club. So this is when Charles II is newly restored onto the throne. They think it's a good time to make a move and get royal approval, which they did.

So on the 28th of November, 1660, the Royal Society was formed by those 12 fellows. And they wanted to make repeatable experiments and direct observations of nature. Rufus, you worked as a science communicator 30 years ago. So I'm going to go straight to you. Yeah. You used to be a science explainer at the science museum didn't you? It's still the only job that I

really feel can generate within me self-respect. What is your presumption so but if we go back one year if you say 1659 what do you think what was science then compared to what we might consider science to be now? I mean first of all it wasn't science was it? In the reading I've done about this, it was basically Isaac Newton, at the point he died, believed that he was gonna be best remembered for his writings on religion. Like, it was a world in which you were trying

to explain the will and the design of God. So I imagine that the science of that time was really carried out much more in the spirit of, oh, we're making these discoveries. When you look back at the history of science, there's just a lot of stuff that seems absolutely balmy, because now we know, but back then, of course, we had no idea, or some idea, failingly scratching around in the dark. That's actually a perfect summary of what this show is about. 30 years ago. 30 years ago. Could you give us a snapshot

of your field of science, if you could go back as far as 1660? And we should say studying dinosaurs, which then does make it even more. Exactly. So to give you the context, I am an evolutionary biologist. I mostly do that using fossils I look at fossils to understand how things evolved and how the world we have today works the way that it does So if you were to go back to say 1659, there was just a whole load of different almost folklorish explanations for the way that people try to interpret the things they were finding on a daily basis and You know you would see a giant bone and you might try and fit it into the folklore you knew So would it be a dragon?

Giants bones are often talked about you see writings from that time period in Sicily where I work a lot today and You know they find these fossils. They're like Giants Giants were here and there's even this suggestion that maybe actually that goes way back into antiquity and things like the Greek myth of the Cyclops may have originated in the fossils that were found on Mediterranean islands because there you have these fossils of elephants, dwarf elephants. And if you look at an elephant skull, it has a very steep forehead like a human. And in the middle of that forehead is a single hole. And even as an elephant paleontologist,

I find it impossible not to look at that hole and think, eye. It's not the eyes. The eyes are on the side. It's the nose hole. It's where the trunk goes in. But you look at that and you see something with tusks, giant teeth, a great big singular eye

in the middle of the forehead that's the size of a giant and what you get? You get a cyclops. But you've got this system of trying to make sense of the world. It's not just making stuff up for the sake of it, it's a system of making sense but it's a system that seems to be linked to storytelling maybe rather than experimentation. To go to Rufus's point though I suppose we're 200 years before Darwin, almost 300 years before the discovery of DNA, so there is no framework I suppose at the time to understand how complex organisms came to be the way that they are. Yeah and you're also really, I suppose you think about it for the average person, you're in a world that's not as connected as it was even

say a hundred years later and so you might not know what an elephant bone looks like if you are living in rural, the south of England you find a mammoth fossil. So what have you got to connect it with? But people were starting to do it and I think that's when you see this kind of, you know, the origins of this desire to put, you know, sort of fact alongside storytelling. But I guess it's important to think throughout this entire period, even with the origination of the Royal Society, folklore, religion, beliefs, all these things have stayed side by side

and continue to stay side by side. Matthew, your subject. So where was your subject? Whereas evolutionary biology, of course, didn't exist. But no, I mean, biology didn't exist. no I mean biology didn't exist so you had natural historians and exactly as already has been suggested one of the things they wanted to do was to find order in the world and they wanted to find order because it was divinely created and therefore it had to be logical and so they were looking to try and understand the complexities

and explain them but all that happened really quickly. So historians of science get very argumentative about this. There's a very famous book called The Scientific Revolution by a chap called Stephen Shapin which begins, there was no such thing as the scientific revolution and this is a book about it. But really very strange things happened around about the time of the foundation of the Royal Society in 1660. And very quickly discoveries are made that explain some things.

So for example, in 1666, a chap called Steno in a little book did three things. Firstly, he showed how muscles work, which was pretty cool, and he was right. Then he showed that what were thought to be vipers' tongues, which are in fact the teeth of a shark, he found them on mountains in Italy, and he said, oh, the older stuff is at the bottom, the newer stuff is at the top, which is Steno's principle of superposition, the basis of geology. And then he also said, just in passing, he did a dissection of a dogfish, oh, this is in the same book, it all made sense, and he said, oh, and in oviparous animals, so animals that lay eggs, the ovaries in the

female, they are exactly the same as the ovaries in a viviparous organism like humans. In other words, he said, women have eggs. So at the same time, you get all this one person in this hugely diverse field has made a series of really major developments and it starts to look like something like modern science. And in front of you actually we start with some artifacts there's a book from that time there Newton's Principia Mathematica and a very much bigger book which is not Newton's Principia Mathematica. Well there's a book of Willoughby's Book of Fish. And Willoughby, I mean, Keith knows much more about this than me,

but Willoughby was a fellow of the Royal Society and he convinced the Royal Society to publish his marvelous book on fish in 1685, it says here, and the illustrations are absolutely extraordinary. But it bankrupted the Royal Society. That's basic nearly nearly. Yeah, so Willoughby's history of Fischer's, the Royal Society paid for the the printing of the text in it and then it has these fantastic copper plate illustrations, which were paid for by fellows of the Royal Society. They sponsored those plates and you find a lot of them in there are by Samuel Peeps. He paid the money for it. But the printing of the text reduced the society's finances

so much that they couldn't afford to publish the next book on their list, which is Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica, one of the greatest books ever published. So how many, in terms of print run of the Book of Fish, how many of those, and where did they end up? Because I often feel sad you know you go to those stately homes and castles and you see these cages of books and some of them you think I don't think they were ever even open

they were just there to go of course I have a very big book about fish. So yeah where were they going and how many were there? Probably about 750 of that one but yeah you would have to be pretty wealthy to be able to afford to buy one. Some people got them through another route though Edmund Halley particularly because he is tasked with publishing print, give you a Mathematica, so he sees it through the press and the Royal Society can't pay any money for this so he pays his own money to get it printed and the Royal Society rewards him by recompensing him with copies of the History of Fish so I'm just fantastically grateful.

So just give us some sense of the History of Fish, if someone at the time were to want to buy that, in terms of I don't know, average yearly wage or... It would be a fair amount and it would be the aristocracy and the very wealthy merchants and other people around London who could afford to buy that kind. Well, you'd normally wait till January, wouldn't you, because they'd normally do the three-for-two thing. Yeah, yeah. But Principia Mathematica and Rufus is very boldly leafing through it and almost looking as if he is reading it and understanding it. Is that a naked miss? That kind of thing every time.

I'm very bit stressed. That particular edition that Rufus is manhandling over there. That's the first edition that belonged to John Flamsteed, the first astronomer of all. To everybody that's listening, you can get photographs of all these books and you can read them as we talk about them. You can go to the BBC website and there will be pictures of the archive that we're discussing today. On each step with Peloton, from their pop runs to walk and talks, you define what it means to be a runner. Whatever your level, embrace it. Journey starts when you say so.

If you've got five minutes or 50 Peloton tread has workouts you can work in or bring your classes with you for outdoor runs walks and hikes led by expert instructors on the Peloton app. Call yourself a runner. Peloton all access membership separate. Learn more at onepeloton.ca I'm just going to point out to everybody, right? They've put me on a table with a first edition of the Pring-a-View. Like, what is going on? It's like leaving a clown in charge of the nuclear button, which I understand America in the process of Could you could you just give us a sense of could you describe that well, I think it's been rebound I mean, I'm obviously looking at it as an object as opposed to a person capable of

Understanding any read us a couple of the first in the first page Well, I tell you what I was actually picking it up because we got given alcohol wipes before we came on and told if you do want to touch the objects You know what? Yeah, so I felt like I've got pre-clearance Good put the book down This fast HB as well because another book that again cost a fortune was Prinkipier Mathematica by I think was a M Whitehead and Bertrand Russell wasn't it and that actually spent about 250 pages maybe maybe more, proving that one plus one equaled two. Did anyone actually, because I remember Bertrand Russell

actually said that he thinks about four people ever read it, but they were all glad it existed. I mean in the same way, I know Rufus obviously has read Principia Mathematica. A translation, in fairness. The, uh, it is very good as well, the way they do the cartoons in it. That's the thing that I find beautiful about this book in the Royal Society is how many books here are books that are not necessarily read, but their existence is vital because the need of the proof,

the fact that if you have to, you can go, hang on a minute, we now need, and that seems to be an important part of it, not to be read, but to exist. Yeah, and with respect to the book juggling that was going on in the corner there, I've had mathematicians come and see the Principia Mathematica, and they're so moved they weep. You know, that's what it means to them.

And it's really quite touching. And wet, I should say. Sorry, you're sat in front of one of the foundational texts of your field. It's Mary Anning. We're jumping ahead now quite a few hundred years. Well, a couple of hundred years. And this is actually a book that is a compendium of the letters of William Buckland. And so William Buckland, just to give you some background, was

eventually the Dean of Westminster, but he was an academic researcher at Oxford University and a great keen geologist. He also liked to eat his way through the animal kingdom. That's a sort of side hobby. What he didn't manage to eat, his son took over and spent the rest of his life doing this. Sorry, can I just say that what he didn't manage to eat was his son? That was one of those awkward... This is worse than the Isaac story.

But apparently his least favourite meal was mole and blue bottle flies. But he regularly ate mice on toast. But within this book of letters is one of the few letters that remain written by Mary Anning. So Mary Anning is an extraordinary character in the history of science in that she was a woman, but more unusually was working class in that sense and her impact on the field of paleontology given those two things was immense and therefore very surprising but because she was working class her archive is

very minimal and it wasn't really retained there were letters she sent to other people it's been collected together in some places but we have to really tell her stories with the gaps that are left behind. So the letters in here are quite special and the one in particular that I think is really so telling, it isn't dated, I think it probably comes from the 1830s, is a letter she wrote to William Buckland about a discovery she had just made. She's like, William, I've got the most amazing ichthyosaur. It's even better than the last one. It's so perfect. Its skull is perfect It's got the tail. It's around the back. It's all there all the bits are missing are there and I've also got

Aplesiosaur and the telling line is I've shown it to um this other bloke from Scotland He says it's really perfect and basically what she's saying is I've got something amazing other people are interested How much you're to pay for it? Because it was her job. There were no professional paleontologists at that time. We think of a professional paleontologist as an academic, and we tell the history of science from the point of view of paleontology, we list the Bucklands of the world in that history of paleontology.

But in some ways, most of the people working at that time were gentlemen or gentlewomen hobbyists. She did it as a job. And she was savvy, she was clever, and she knew how to work these people. And they liked her. They appreciated her and they valued her. And I think that to me is one of the most surprising things about the history of science. You can tell a cliched story in some ways of this woman who was an outsider who was forgotten by history although we talk about all the time but it helps for the storytelling and you know and that she was not appreciated in her own time she was appreciated in her own time

they thought she was really skilled the most skilled there are contemporary accounts of calling her the princess of paleontology and yet she appreciated herself and her own value she thought William Buckland was a bit of an anatomical idiot. She told somebody else, for example. But it's not in that book. It's not in here. That is a great insult, though, isn't it? You are an anatomical idiot.

Is it the fact that in the actual time, people like Mary-Annie were respected, but because of their background, it also meant there wasn't the longevity of the story continuing to be told, that that gets lost somehow. Do you know what I think was really going on? I think it's as true today as it was then, is that people don't really like to really change things. And so they thought she was brilliant,

but they weren't gonna change the status quo. So in her own sphere she stayed but within that sphere as long as there was no boat rocking, she was respected and thought of as the best paleontologist who could find the best fossils. I mean we don't have our archive and so we really we have to fill in the gaps with our own imaginings and those imaginings means we get the Mary Anne we each want so I'm like yeah she was great she was this independent woman she was a business woman she was funny you know You know, she, yeah, but then somebody else will get a different character because you can create those stories in the gaps.

What you do have, which is maybe less interpretable in different ways, is her fossil legacy, the things she found, right? And that's, that remains. Now, Matthew, we have a book there. I'm going to ask this question. I worked with Matthew a long time ago on a series called Wonders of Life and pronounced this scientist's name completely wrong on the BBC program.

And the first person to correct me was Matthew. So I'm gonna pronounce it wrong again. I'm gonna say a book by Leeuwenhoek. Leeuwenhoek, I think. Leeuwenhoek. I'm nothoek. Leeuwenhoek. I'm not Dutch, right, so he was a Dutch scientist. It's very similar to what Torrie has just been saying. Leeuwenhoek was a draper.

He wasn't trained as a scientist. He couldn't speak Latin, which was the lingua franca, a science at the time. But what he could do was use one of these, this tiny little bit of brass which is about five centimeters long, one and a half centimeters across, and in the middle of it is a pinhole, about a millimeter across, and in it is a tiny ball of glass, and that is a microscope. That is a single lens microscope, and with that microscope, Lerwijk and other Dutch scientists were able to see the most extraordinary things.

And what we've got here is a copy of the Philosophical Transactions, which is the world's oldest continuously running scientific journal, which is published by the Royal Society. And in 1679, Leeuwenhoek published a letter in which he described some things which he had seen in his semen. One of the things the Royal Society said, we should look at blood and stuff between your teeth and water, oh and look at semen while you're about it. And he didn't fancy that because he thought it was unseemly. But he then did do this and he writes this letter to the Royal Society saying, in 1677, saying, I've seen this stuff. And the first thing he does is to reassure them that he had not obtained this by any sinful contrivance, but by the excess which nature provided me

in my conjugal relations. So it then gets quite detailed. So he's in a room, one of those lovely rooms that you see painted by Vermeer with a light coming in, because of course you need a natural light, artificial light's no good. And he says that Vermeer's six heartbeats after ejaculation he had been able to see this. So he gets what's called a capillary tube, which is a piece of glass, very, very thin in the middle of it. He puts that onto onto his semen puts it onto the back of this

He goes over to the light with his shirt tails hanging down He calls into the window and instead of kind of thinking oh my god. I've got something terrifying He's really really interested in it He says this to the Royal Society and he writes to them and he says if you think this is either Disgusting or likely to seem offensive to the Royal Society, and he writes to them, and he says, if you think this is either disgusting or likely to seem offensive to the learned, I earnestly beg that it be regarded as private and either published or suppressed as your lordship's judgment dictates.

And what the Royal Society did is the classic thing, when you get a strange new discovery, they say, all right, well, you've got to go away and do it a few more times, we need some more experiments. And sadly, not always with him, hmm all right well you got to go away and do it a few more times we need some more experiments and sadly not always with him so he had to look at dogs and horses and all the rest of it and eventually two years later they published so what he describes you can see is these uh he got a series of eight different uh what we would now call spermatozoa. He called them animal cules and there's also on the other side of this picture kind of bizarre crisscrossy mess and he was

really interested in the crisscrossy mess. He didn't really care about these animal cules because he'd found stuff between his teeth and in water. He'd already discovered bacteria. What had he found between his teeth? Try it Brian, get a microscope and see what you've got between your teeth. I don't know. Try it Brian, get a microscope and see what you've got between your teeth. Brian doesn't have anything between his teeth because he's not real. But that is, I love the word animal cure and that fascination. Well he thought it was some, just some stuff that was living in his semen and the word that we use to describe that is spermatozoa and if you think what that means it means the animals

that live in semen so that word that we still use today is in fact got this completely different interpretation of what was going on so this was done over just over a decade after as I mentioned earlier on everybody had said oh women have got eggs it's all about eggs and now we've got this chap saying oh this is wiggly stuff in semen. And you all think, OK, we all know how it works. No, it took 180 years of argument between what we now call the ovists and the spermists, which wasn't quite as exciting as it sounded.

But it was those people who either thought it was all eggs or all thought it was all about semen. And of course, they were both wrong. And you'll never guess what happened when they organized their marches on the same day. You used to see the different way Easter was celebrated. Keith, the philosophical transactions, so this is a different kind of book, it's not like Newton's Principia, just a single publication. Could you describe the evolution of that publication in particular? Sure.

So the Philosophical Transactions was started in 1665 by Henry Oldenburg, who was the Royal Society's secretary at that time. He managed the correspondence. And he began to publish it as really a piece of private enterprise. It's really not until the end of the 18th century that the Royal Society takes it over a piece of private enterprise. It's really not until the end of the 18th century that

the Royal Society takes it over as a formal journal in which the Royal Society takes charge effectively. And then by the 1830s they are formally refereeing papers in the way that scientists still do today. So it's the oldest scientific journal. It's also the oldest periodical of any kind still in publication. But I just think it's amazing when you held the little microscope up there. You know, we're used to space telescopes and we're used to CERN and things like that. That handmade thing is the most powerful scientific instrument of its day. It's remarkable. I mean, I've used replicas here in the Royal Society. Last year there was

a big conference on Leeuwenhoek and people had brought along replicas and it was extraordinary what you could see using these microscopes. It was a huge thing in the Dutch Republic, which is where people made them. The philosopher Spinoza, he was an expert lens grinder. And then you could discover these amazing new worlds. I mean, when bacteria were discovered, Leeuwenhoek was trying to discover why pepper is hot, because that's one of the things they'd asked him to do. So he got a load of pepper seeds and he ground them up.

And then he did the same business with the capillary tube and putting water on it. And then he looked and he couldn't see why pepper was hot but he could see all these things which we now have been able to be able to identify as bacteria and protists whizzing around in the water. But for some years people thought that you had to use pepper and it was called the pepper water experiment and they're still called infusoria, this class of bacteria, because it was an infusion from the ground up peppercorns. And then one day somebody said, what if we don't put the pepper in? What happens? And then they discovered that

actually the water was pretty disgusting, was full of all this stuff. I just want to say for the record, I'm going to change my most surprising thing I discovered about science to the most surprising thing I've discovered about science is it took ten years for a blokes club to look at their semen under a microscope. To be fair they are very tired at that point. So the one up what I've got in front of me is a Royal Society journal book Keith which is from the 24th of July 1661. This is the record of what happened at Royal Society meetings. Now in meetings they would show objects, they would read letters, but sometimes they would do experiments as well.

And you have a record of one of their experiments there with unicorn horn powder. So do we know where they got the unicorn horn powder? From a unicorn? Presumably it could have been an Arwall's horn, so I imagine that's what it would have been because of course it has that wonderful, as we draw a unicorn's horn today, you know, it's this wonderful spiral, long, thin, elegant tusk. But what were they using the unicorn's horn for? They wanted to know if it was a repellent for spiders

Was that just completely random thoughts Very useful repelling spiders, I guess So they made a circle of this powder put a spider in the middle of it as a means of imprisoning the spider did it work? No I'd run away. I've never seen loads of spiders and seen a unicorn Yeah, and I've never seen a unicorn and seen loads of spiders. So maybe it does work I just wondered it because the image that I saw that horn I just wondered because the image that I saw, that horn looked very much like that was the reason it went extinct. It really looked, I would say, unwieldy and not necessarily useful.

Well, yeah, I guess, I mean, it was one of those things about the amazingness of nature is how many unwieldy examples of antlers and horns. You see the great diversity of nature and it always throws out questions, always. Why on earth does that animal look the way that it does? It's ridiculous. You often can't get at it unless you look at all of the predecessor animals that come before and see the longer term patterns, because one individual data point on its own is not enough.

And that's what you see, I think, through this entire period of the early days of formalized natural history, is the building up of that data across multiple different types of creature. And bit by bit, patterns emerge that people realize are the interesting patterns. And that guides investigation and eventually leads you to people like Darwin. Now, following on, on he from the unicorns You your book in front of you is the book I referred to in the introduction with dragons That's right. Yeah, so this is your hand. Yeah, I've showed you who writes a very beautiful Alpine itinerary and we have the manuscript version of this year

Which was sent force Isaac Newton's approval and the Royal Society published these particular volumes of it. Yeah and it's beautiful so I mean Ike, so Keith I went through this and it is a completely standard field guide to the Swiss Alps which if you hadn't had the chance to go there you'd be amazed and fascinated to read about and look yeah in the incredible waterfalls the amazing mountains the flora the fauna you can see there, it's all completely sensible, 1783. And then... Later edition, not published by the Royal Society, I hasten to one. And here we have... Dragons! So this is a subsequent edition. Yeah, same book, supposedly the same author, but... And so the Scheuters were natural historians in Switzerland they collected

tales of natural history as well as travelers tales and some of this probably derived from bones that were being found in the alps as well why was the later edition why was it modified was it kind of a marketing I mean so this is yeah it's an extra one

this is a kind of a third volume a flying dragon breathing fire it's like it's basically extra one. This is a kind of a third volume. A flying dragon breathing fire. It's like, basically as far as I can gather, it was first edition was just the straight science. And it didn't really make me feel well. What does this book need? Exactly. So what do we need to do? More dragons. But actually it was still presented and this is, you know, the early 18th century. It's still presented as a factual account of travels and what you might see in the Swiss Alps

So we're still here. We're in the 18th century now. So but the dragons are still there I'm sure to is skeptical about some of these stories, but he records them anyway Yeah well I think there's a really important point here and it goes back to the the business with the unicorn horn the spiders and in the Royal Society's motto is roughly translated, don't take anybody else's word for it. And so they've got these stories, these stories that are in the Bible, in Greek myths or travelers tales, maybe it's true. How do

you know? Well there's only one way to find out and you either go and try and find a dragon or if you're interested in trying to keep spiders away then you get some unicorn horn and see whether it works and this was... But you have taken someone's word for it. That bloke around the market went oh yes unicorn horn this. So one of the things they were obsessed with in the early years of the Royal Society was trying to understand as I was talking about earlier on where things come from where life comes from and one of the things that they had learned, because I think it's inovid or somewhere like that,

that you could, if you get a load of vipers and you grind them up and you put them in a bottle, then that gunk will generate new vipers. And they had this bottle which they would bring out every kind of four months. And then in the record book, they said, no, still no vipers. And eventually they had every kind of four months and then in the record book they said, no, still no vipers. And eventually they had some kind of tiny crawling things which are presumably mites

and it didn't work. And other people around the world were doing the same thing, taking these old stories and trying to see, well, do you generate toads from a dead duck that you leave on a compost heap? Well, no, you don't if you do the experiment properly. It's interesting, Ruth. Oh, it's a great guardless question leave on a compost heap. Well, no, you don't if you do the experiment properly. It's interesting. It's a great Godless question time, by the way. It's interesting, Rufus, isn't it? You're seeing, I suppose, as Matthew said,

the beginnings of what we call modern science, this idea that you try things, you test things. So although some of the ideas in these books seem ridiculous to us now, they're part of that, as Matthew said, the early process. Not only ridiculous, because they did the work. Yes, of course. Otherwise, maybe it did work. Yeah. They're part of that, as Matthew said, the early process. Not only ridiculous, because they did the work. Otherwise, maybe it did work. They did the experiment. Why is it ridiculous that there could be dragons in the Swiss Alps? If you're finding fossils of dinosaurs

or things that look like dinosaurs, you don't know what they are yet. What is inherently ridiculous about a dragon until you've worked out basic things about biology and whether something should have wings and four legs and the patterns you see in nature and what you'd expect to be usual and unusual. If you haven't written those things down, it's very easy to laugh now, but why is it ridiculous to believe these things? And what strikes me is it is quite recent.

But I think also culturally, we think of science as a thing. You know, like the way our society is built up is you've got like these are matters spiritual, these are matters physical and these are matters science. But science is literally just a method for working out you're not being mugged off. So all people referring to themselves as scientists, it gives you a validity. It's like, you know, people put on high-vis jackets and just walk into football games, there's press on it and everyone goes, oh, you must be one then. It's like, you know, what's the, like, all these

whack jobs that have got a vested interest in perverting what you think. They want to justify that you should believe them based on the fact that I'm a scientist. But that doesn't mean anything. What have you studied? What do you know? The thing about, you know, let's mash up some vipers and see if we get more vipers is that is science. So I think in the disparity of all of these things, we want to hold up the books that show that the great genius, great learning, that these people stood on the shoulders...

These are the giants on whose shoulders other Giants would then stand on know that's how much standing on the turtle and then that's right yeah the waterfall going off the edge the fine the final book which is in front of me is a book by the great and prolific Robert Boyle who's you look at his publication list and it's quite remarkable but he published a letter a list of Predictions essentially or projects or things that he thought may happen It's a to-do list. Yes, so this is probably from the 1680s. We don't exactly know what the date is, but it's a list which starts to think about the sorts of things that natural

Philosophers ought to be looking at and doing the the questions that they wanted to answer, the things they wanted to do. So they wanted to fly, for instance, they wanted to live underwater. And you can read some of these things out. I have some here, the prolongation of life, the art of flying, as you said, the cure of wounds at a distance. So then he says, I don't understand what this is, he says, the emulating of fish without engines by custom and education only. What an ambition. Free divers. That's what free divers do. Oh I see. They train themselves to do that. Vanishing perfumable by rubbing. There's another one I don't know. But it's a remarkable list. It is and you can think if you like if you know a bunch of scientists had to come up with a similar list today what kind of things would they be asked? It's a good question actually. We'll start with Matthew. What's your Robert Boyle-esque...

I want to know the two big questions that science can't answer and philosophers have been worrying about for millennia, that is why is there anything and how does consciousness work? Those are the two big, the biggies I think. Tell me for you, if your your Boyle-esque list. Well I think it's really interesting that list actually, maybe perfume aside, is really economical. It's like how can we get longitudes so we can basically travel further and get more stuff and I think what's really interesting is that you know obviously science has always been in service to society. It's not always really you know been a kind of blue skies let's just find out what's in our semen kind of action and And it is, to a certain extent, today.

And I guess on this list, what's missing, like I don't see any, how can we use science to maybe allow women to be elected as fellows to the Royal Society? It's the kind of social mission within that. And so I guess what I would want on this list is how can we use all of this incredible technology to basically make the world better.

And Rufus, for you the to-do list for 2024. So if you were going to do your, you know, obviously we've got Molitude there, you're going to be dealing with that again, you're still probably dealing with the perfume issue, I know, because the smell of links off you today has been terrible. But yeah, so what would you have on your list? I think there's only one question that at the current moment feels most pertinent in trying to ascertain and that is simply is there intelligent life on earth? It does seem to me Keith, to summarise these all the scientists we've talked about, at these times that there aren't specialists that they're not compartmentalized you get the sense

of these roving brains that will just investigate anything that they'll turn the mind to anything and I think we shouldn't forget so I started out with a story of Newton's talking dog basically a German guy had a dog that he trained to talk he he said, brought into the Royal Society and they presented it at a meeting to Isaac Newton and the guy manipulated its mouth to say say words presumably in German, who knows. But you know science was was also an entertainment at that time. You've got a load of gentlemen in a room so it isn't just about finding out about

things, it's finding out about them in a way that is, there's a display element to it. It's fun and that's part of the reason why they're doing it. Faraday made dead frogs' legs jump about to show that electrocurrent worked in it. And when you watch any modern science communication, it starts with explosions. You know, like we blew a thing up and here's how the science of that works. Mythbusters, which I love, still watch endless clips of Mythbusters on YouTube. It's basically, what do you want to know about? Flowers? Great, let's blow up some flowers. Koala bears. Bring them in boys! And then he remains. Brian is normally walking on the beach with a parasol like Ryan's daughter going,

this is sand. Here's my bucket and this is entropy. If you listen to him talk for long enough he eventually goes, of course at one point this all exploded. So we asked the audience a question today and that question was, the most unexpected thing that they've discovered about science. What is it? What have you got Brian? Well Mitch says that the most unexpected thing I've discovered about science is that strawberries die when picked. The most unexpected thing Chris Yeldham has discovered is that despite its nebulosity,

a single black hole can account for all the lost socks. How much it relies on mathematics. I like that. No, I'd just like to be specific about that. As a mathematician with very poor book sales on Principia Mathematica 1 and 2. I love this. It's almost like the final statement. But it's very profound actually. We haven't finished it yet. Pretty good. Excellent. Very Royal Society answers there. It was taken very seriously. Well done everyone. Well, thank you to all our guests, Keith Moore, Rufus Hound, Tory Harridge and Matthew Cobb. And next week is the final episode of the series. We're going to continue our theme of unexpected scientific discoveries because we're going to Glastonbury in search of the Holy Grail

We're not we will be at Glastonbury festival discussing the search for alien life really comment It's attacked by a Klingon once I'll tell them all about that next week, but it's true. Oh fine Goodbye. In the infinite monkey cage, out you trow, in the infinite monkey cage. Turned out nice again. This is a story about one of Britain's most revered institutions and the theft of ancient treasures that were sold around the world. It felt like a real punch to the stomach. My God, things are being stolen from our museum.

I'm Katie Razzle, and from BBC Radio 4, this is Thief at the British Museum. At the heart of our tale is an antiquities dealer turned amateur detective thrown into the centre of a global scandal. I was shocked. I remember that, just thinking my hair stood on end. Search for Shadow World. Thief at the British Museum on BBC Sounds.