The Infinite Monkey Cage - Before the Big Bang

Episode Date: August 4, 2014

Brian Cox and Robin Ince transport the cage of infinite proportions, for the first of 2 programmes from the Edinburgh Festival. They are joined on stage by cosmologists Carlos Frenk and Faye Dowker and actor and comedian Ben Miller and comedian and fellow physics PhD alumnus Richard Vranch.

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Hello, I'm Robert Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And welcome to the podcast version of the Infinite Monkey Cage, which contains extra material that wasn't considered good enough for the radio. Enjoy it. I'm Robert Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And we are in Edinburgh, which is, of course, a very, very important place for science because it was here that Charles Darwin came to and discovered that he didn't like blood, but he did like taxidermy. So thanks to that, we then had a theory of evolution by natural selection, and creationists had something to argue about over and over again. Oh, if we come from chimpanzees, how come there's still chimpanzees? We don't come from chimpanzees. How many times do I have to explain that?

It's not fair. So well done, Edinburgh. How many times do I have to explain that? It's not fair. So well done, Edinburgh. Also, it is, of course, the rich home of body snatching in the early 19th century. Thanks to Edinburgh, this is where the tradition for medical students to place dismembered hands under people's pillows that they didn't like happens during Rag Week every year.

But this is no time for monkeys and limbs. Today, instead, we turn our attention from a finite number of primates to the question of the origin of the infinite cage itself. Today, we ask what's happened before the Big Bang? To take us through these ideas and possibilities, we have three physicists and one who almost made it. Which one could it be? This is one of the most complicated monkey cages we've attempted

since quantum cosmology at Glastonbury. Didn't go well, did it? That was fantastic. Trying to do quantum cosmology to people who've been drinking hot cider for three days and you could actually hear the splintering of the cranium. We've got to leave Glastonbury. I don't care. We're not going to see

the Rolling Stones. Life's become very uncertain. So we thought we'd establish the expertise of the panel by having them introduce themselves by presenting their credentials. I'll start. I'm Brian Cox. I'm Professor of Physics at the University of Manchester. I submitted my PhD in 1998 on double diffraction dissociation at large momentum transfer in photon-proton collisions. Correct reaction. Correct reaction. Hi, everyone. I'm Faye Dauker.

I'm a professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College London, and I submitted my PhD in 1990, and it was on space-time wormholes. I'm Carlos Frank. I'm the Ogden Professor of Fundamental Physics from the Institute for Computational Cosmology, Durham University, and my thesis was the global accluster system of the Milky Way

and the Large Magellanic Cloud, and I wrote my thesis when I was a lot younger than I am today. I'm Richard Vranch, and I improvise comedy for a living. But I used to be a physicist, and my PhD was about the way that radiation damages silicon chips. In space, chips are vulnerable because of the radiation, and on Earth, nuclear reactors, fission,

is very bad for the nuclear fission. So in a sense, my PhD could be described as fission chips. You've got all the possible reactions to that. An ooh, an uh, and a laugh, and applause. It was a supersition of all the different reactions simultaneously. That's the best many-worlds interpretation introduction we've had yet. My name's Ben Miller. I'm a comedy actor. Yeah,

all right. I didn't finish my PhD. Yeah, I get where this is going. It's basically bullying this, isn't it? The title of my PhD was Novel Quantum Effects in Quasi-Zero-Dimensional Mesoscopic electron systems. How come I don't get a woo? Because you didn't finish it! I did an English degree and wrote an essay about how Philip Larkin was similar to Morrissey. It was the 1980s, everything was different then. And this is our panel! Yes, our incredible panel.

There we go. So there we are, fantastic Dr Richard Branch, Professor Carlos Frank Professor Faye Dowker Professor Brian Cox and Ben Miller and the who we should not forget though, did get a judge's commendation for his performance as Hamlet in 1990 at the Student Drama Awards

Yeah Don't patronise me for his performance as Hamlet in 1990 at the Student Drama Awards. Yeah. Don't patronise me. Carlos, the title of this show is What Happened Before the Big Bang. So first we should establish what those words mean. The Big Bang. What is the definition of the Big Bang? My definition of the Big Bang is that it was the beginning,

where the universe as we know it, and I put emphasis on as we know it, began. So it was a state of very high density and temperature, possibly infinite density and temperature. The trouble is that when we talk about infinity, the laws of physics break down. So in reality, we don't really quite know what was the Big Bang but let's just for the purposes of the discussion

take the Big Bang to be the initial state from where everything else unfolded including our universes It's going to be difficult to address what happened before the beginning in that case though, isn't it? Well, it's Well, the difficult but the difficult things are the most fun things.

The easy ones are not that much fun. So if the question is what happened before the Big Bang, the answer is, I don't know. Thanks for listening. Good night. Faye, to you, the definition of the Big Bang, what do we mean by that term? I think Carlos expressed it very well.

It's where our current theories, the ones that we're certain of, the ones we're confident of, including Einstein's theory of general relativity, which describes space, time and gravity, and our theory of matter, which is quantum mechanical, so quantum field theory, where those break down,

where we know that we can't use those theories anymore. And as Carlos was saying, that's very early on in the universe, there was a state where the density and temperature of matter is so great that the effect of that matter on space-time is so extreme that we can't use Einstein's theory of space-time, Einstein's theory of gravity there anymore. And we have no agreed-upon theory of what people call quantum gravity to describe physics at that moment or before that moment. So for me, the Big Bang is where our current explanations end and we need new physics.

So, Ben, this show, then, is the show that begins where our knowledge stops. Is it problematic? Why are you addressing this question? Ben, I can rephrase it for you. What do you think it is about the part of Hamlet that has made it so alluring for so many actors? I think it's the way it can be interpreted

in a number of different social contexts. I think that's basically my theory. Richard, I was going to ask you, one of the things that some people, I suppose to an extent anti-science people, go, oh, they haven't even worked out how the universe began. as far as i know they've got i'm not up to date on this but the last i read we were up to the first 10 to the minus 37 of a second which isn't a bad start you know and so what what when you were studying 25 years ago yeah how many changes have we seen in the in

the last kind of two and a half three decades of our understanding of the big bang since you were looking at that area? Oh, so much has been discovered and so much has changed. Indeed, even this year, there have been advances in what we understand about the microwave, cosmic background microwave radiation, and that's how we know about the Big Bang because it's the remnant of that explosion. Even in the last few months, there have been advances.

So it's weird that something that happened 13 billion years ago is actually topical at the moment. Carlos, if we start, so Big Bang cosmology now, so the standard textbook description of what we do know about the universe, the evolution of the universe after it began. Could you give us a brief one or two minute summary of the textbook explanation of what we know? Yeah, because I think we started on the gloomy footing here

when we started stating our ignorance when in fact we have a lot of knowledge as well about what our universe has got itself up to in the last 13.7 Richard billion years. So what we do know, even though we don't know exactly what happened

at the Big Bang, and indeed, maybe Hamlet might have asked what actually went bang, we don't have an answer to that. But we do understand quite a lot of what the universe has been doing. So for example, we know that early on, the universe was very foggy. And when it was foggy, it decided to make some of the chemical elements that eventually found their way into our bodies. So we are mostly made of water. The hydrogen in the water actually was made, much of it, in the Big Bang. So we know, in fact, how these chemical elements were synthesized in the early universe.

We know also that when the fog lifted, it revealed the early phases of the universe, and that has been seen directly because when the fog lifted, this radiation that was present in the early moments of the Big Bang traveled towards us, and this radiation was discovered in the 1960s and told us that the universe had indeed

begun in this very hot then state. So we know about the chemical elements. We know about what we call the microwave background radiation, which is the heat left over from the Big Bang. And we know, of course, that the universe is expanding. So all these three lines of empirical evidence point to the fact that very early on, 13.7 billion years ago, something very exciting happened, which is when a universe was born. So even though we don't quite know how it was born or exactly what happened then, we know a lot about what a universe has been doing. And this is something

that astronomers routinely verify with astronomical observations. So how's that for a minute of two synthesis of 13.7 billion years of cosmic evolution, Brian? Well, I'll tell you what, we've had a call from Nicholas Parsons. You've passed the audition, and just a minute on. Faye, what I was wondering is, that 10 to the minus 37, which it might be less than that now, I'm not entirely sure, but how is that being investigated now? And how confident, I know it's a very difficult question for us scientists,

that we will, with biologists of course, with life, they said well we may well never be able to define exactly when life began and what we would constitute as life with the beginning of the universe that 10 to the minus 37 it's such an incredibly small amount of time, how

are we able to investigate the potential of why the universe exists as it does So this problem of quantum gravity how to reconcile einstein's theory of gravity with quantum theory it's a problem not a theory so when i say quantum gravity it's not it's not any theory that we have agreed upon and that we're investigating it's a problem And there are many different approaches to making progress with that problem, but they are all, each one of them, speculative. So we don't have any agreement in the physics community that one is the right one. And it's exactly in cosmology

where those ideas are going to be tested. The regimes at which quantum gravity effects are important are very, very extreme. They're on the tiniest scales, and the beginning of the universe is one of the regimes where quantum gravity effects could show themselves, and the effects that those quantum gravity effects could have on the subsequent evolution of the universe are things that we could go out and test and look

for now carlos we talk about this uh the the big banger that this hot dense initial state um now in some sense um some physicists will use a different form of language there and say well before that hot dense state there was something something which we know about and is generally accepted, which is the theory of inflation. So could you perhaps just sketch out the theory of inflation, which is the expansion period before this hot, dense state and the more usual expansion with which we're familiar? Yes. So may I disagree slightly with Brian Cox,

which is a dangerous thing to do? I'm not quite sure. These semantics, what was there before and what was after, it becomes unclear. Because in my picture of the universe, the big bang happened. And then soon after, this period of inflation happened. Now, of course, it can get much more interesting because I will tell you what inflation is in a minute. But one of the side effects of inflation is that it could be new banks. And, in fact, there could be a hell of a lot of new banks.

In fact, an infinite number of new banks. But there was like the father of all banks or the mother of all banks, which is what I'm going to call the big bang and then when that universe was born it turned out that it wasn't really in a kind of relaxed state it had like a teenager excess energy that the universe had to shake off somehow and it did it by expanding very very very very rapidly such that it grew from the size of a proton which is a tiny elementary particle to the size of a proton, which is a tiny elementary particle, to the size of a football in a wink of an eye in 10 to the minus 35 seconds. So we call this inflation. And the spirit of inflation, then eventually when the energy of the teenage energy, if you like,

the energy was exhausted, then the universe started expanding more gradually. Now that's the theory of inflation. And inflation is a wonderful theory that has pretty much been verified by experiment. Amazing as it may sound, because we're talking here about events that occurred when the universe was a mere 10 to the minus 35 seconds old. That's a decimal point, 34 zeros and a one, that fraction of a second. That's when inflation happened. And amazingly, we can actually test that that did indeed happen.

And one last thing I want to say about inflation, because one of the great successes of the field, I'm absolutely privileged to work in, and I regard myself as one of the luckiest human beings that I've been able to spend my working life in this subject, is that we're beginning to understand how galaxies, for example, came to be. Galaxies, which of course are very important for us, because without galaxies there would be no stars, without stars there would be no planets, and without planets there would be no Robin and no Brian, and none of the panel here.

So it turns out that the origin of galaxies goes back to inflation itself because inflation was produced by these things we call quantum phenomena. And the quantum world, everything is fluctuating all the time. And some of these little fluctuations became ingrained in the universe as it expanded at this very early age and eventually ended up producing galaxies and eventually producing us. And so that is what inflation did. And it is one of the greatest intellectual constructs of humanity,

the fact that we can begin to link up what we see in the telescopes today with phenomena that happened when the universe was just that tiny fraction of a second old. It's very... Because often, with some physicists, there's been a kind of damning of ideas of philosophy. And... Hello, Brian. And the... I just...

There is a point where you do seem, with some of these ideas, that there is a moment where physics does return to being metaphysics, where things become thought experiments, where it is that level of philosophy. Richard, I wonder how you feel about that. Well, I have a controversial view, which is that the big picture of the order of events at the start of the universe have been revealed to us in a coded form in the lyrics of a popular song in the early 60s, just before the discovery of the background microwave radiation.

Of course, I'm referring to Tommy Steele Flash, Bang, Wallop, What a Picture. Which, if you put big in front of everyone, you've got the big flash, then the big bang. We're still waiting for the big wallop, but that could be dark energy. Do you know what? I'm not sure.

I think that might be Little White Bull that you just said that. Do you know what? I don't think Radio 4 think that might be Little White Bull that you just said that. Do you know what? I don't think Radio 4 has had two references to Tommy Steele so close together in the last 20 years. Well done. Carlos, you mentioned there, we shouldn't move on, almost in passing, we talked about inflation, which is, I suppose, the textbook model at the moment,

this inflationary expansion, 10 to minus 35 seconds after the Big Bang and so on. But then you just mentioned in passing that there might also be an infinite number of universes. So just to outline how it is that we might speculate that inflationary cosmology implies that there may

be more than one universe and in fact an infinite number. Infinity always kind of gives me the desire to scratch my head i don't know if i get a rash or what it is when infinity infinite infinite infinity is big so i worry about infinity it's much bigger than my brain i'm'm sure, of that. But yes, so it turns out, sadly for me, and I hope for most of you, that if these ideas of inflation are correct, then because inflation is associated with these quantum things,

and quantum things fluctuate all the time, then it may well be that once the mother of all big banks happened and inflation then followed, that as part of inflation, there were more quantum fluctuations that created a new universe

and distinct from ours, which inflated as well. And because there was still some leftover of this vacuum energy I was talking about before, it would fluctuate again and again and again and again and again, and we could be in a situation

where there isn't one universe or two or three or any number I can count, but an infinite number of universes, but that's bad enough. Trouble is, if these ideas are correct, there are an infinite number of universes, but that's bad enough. Trouble is, if these ideas are correct, there are an infinite number of universes being born all

the time. So this is something that is quite respectable. So respectable that the two people who thought about this just got a big million dollar prize called the Kavli Prize. I was on the committee that gave the prize. Maybe a mistake because I couldn't give it to myself,

but I gave it to Alan Guth and Bill Lindy and somebody else called Alexis Starobinsky precisely for these ideas. So they're respectable ideas. And it goes by the name of eternal inflation. Very nice name. Fundamental physicists like Fay over there like to use these words when they don't understand something.

Dark energy, dark matter, eternal inflation. But it is part of inflation. The dark side of inflation is that it does naturally fit in with this idea that we're not alone. But let me say, if you think you want to go on holiday to one of these other universes, forget it. You'll never be able to get there because there's no way we can communicate with these other universes. And so, Robin, this is really

now at the interface between the science, I love physics, and Richard here talking about metaphysics. So it is along in the boundary of the two. But I think it's quite likely that these ideas may well turn out to be right, but we will, unless fate tells us, never know for sure.

I just think that holidays and other universe, they lose your luggage when you go to Brussels. I mean, Ben, you've written a book which was explaining a lot of big scientific ideas. And I'm just amazed, in some ways, the nonchalance of what's going on here, which is, one, we've been talking for a moment where the fact that everything, everything that everyone is made of here,

everything was some type, it was the size of a football, it was smaller, it was smaller, it was smaller than that. And also the idea that the universe might be of an infinite size, which would then give us an infinite number of different versions. I mean, this means that we all exist somewhere else in the universe, if that was true.

And then there's an infinite number of other universes as well with every other possibility. How on earth can you manage to fit that in a brain? How can we manage to explain that to people and in any way kind of take that on? Well, I like it because it means that somewhere I finished my PhD. Not just in one place, there's loads of places you did finish it. You're just the lazy Ben Miller in this universe.

Yeah, but on the downside, you didn't get that award for a student Hamlet. But he finished an infinite number of PhD theses as well. An infinite number of times. Well, I think this is where Hamlet comes in, isn't it? Hamlet is essentially about the unknowability. You know, Hamlet wants to know who killed his father and finds that essentially unknowable

and feels unable to act because he doesn't have the information to be able to take a decision. And luckily, in science, we have experiments, so we can actually go and look and we can measure things and we can try and convince ourselves of one opinion or another. So unlike Hamlet, we have evidence. I find it a fascinating idea that, as Carlos said, as you said, the inflationary cosmology is probably the standard model of cosmology at the moment,

although there are people, I think, Faye, you perhaps disagree with that, don't you, in a sense? Yes, I'm an inflation sceptic, Carlos. I don't think that the inflationary model is something which we can say is we have strong enough evidence for that we know it happens. You take the price away from Alan and Andre, the million dollars. No, no, it's a good idea. It's very clever. It's a good idea. I'm just saying in terms of its status as understood and agreed upon science, it doesn't, yeah, to me it's not as well founded as other things

that we that we say we're sure of like general relativity for example is it true that anyway and also you dissed me i like it that you yeah this is what we needed you you dissed me as a theoretical physicist having abstract ideas and you're the one talking about infinitely many universes and infinitely many Big Bangs. I mean, come on. Yeah. Brian asked me the question.

I have to answer it. I have to respond to Brian. But I mean, I think I have a day job. I look for dark matter, and I figure out how galaxies form, and I simulate the universe. That's a day job. I look for dark matter, and I figure out a galaxy's form, and I simulate the universe. That's my day job. My day job is figuring out a galaxy's form.

I occasionally make the odd one. But surely during the day you can't see the stars. Well, no, that's right. But, you know, on weekends I'm allowed to think about the infinite monkey, the infinite universe. So, Richard, what do you want to say? Well, is it true that if inflation gets above 2.5%, the Astronomer Royal has to write a letter of apology

to the Charter of the Exchequer? To God. To God, yeah. But I'll tell you one thing. When I came back to the UK, as you can tell by my Geordie accent, I'm not from Durham, I was a postdoc at the University of Sussex, and I get a phone call one day, and I pick up the phone.

I say, it's 10 Downing Street. And they said, Mrs. Thatcher, the prime minister, is very interested in science. She was a chemist. And we're looking around for a scientist who will be able to talk about something exciting. And they've told us that you do kind of exciting things. Can we come and talk to you?

And I must admit, I wasn't a great fan of Thatcher then, and I'm not now either, but 10 Downing Street, all right. So I said to these fellows, okay, come along. I'll tell you about my research. So these men, I've never seen people dressed like on the television, you know, pinstripe suits and umbrellas and briefcase the whole lot they came and into my office and us physicists tend to wear slightly informal clothes to say the least so anyway these two gentlemen sit down and say very good dr frank as i was there

what do you work on i said well i work on trying to understand the universe and i work on how galaxies formed and you know something very exciting that's just happening now is that we now think we understand the origin of galaxies oh yes what is that so well that is the theory of inflation the faces dropped there was no more questions as soon as they were able to politely say goodbye they got up they left and I never heard back from them so I always wonder what it was that I said that was wrong, that offended 10 Downing Street there. But I think it must have been something to do with inflation. It disappoints me that all these people with PhDs

aren't taking this subject seriously. Because what I want to know... I mean, one of the things that interests me about the multiverse... One of the only things that interests you about the infinite number of universes. One of the many things, Brian. One of the many things that interests me about the multiverse... One of the only things that interests you about the infinite number of universes. One of the many things, Brian. One of the many things that interests me about the multiverse... About reality. ...preoccupies my mind at this moment, shall we say that,

is the fact that we're here talking about it. And, you know, it's very hard to imagine, isn't it, how something that started in a very hot, dense, presumably random state ended up in this great sense of, in this dignified sense of order we find amongst us today. And in particular, you know, Robin, you were talking about the ability of our brains to understand some of these ideas and the great organization that that must take within you know within our within our bodies and within our chemistry our biochemistry

and what interests me about the multiverse is that's a possible explanation for that isn't it because then there would exist other universes where there weren't people alive to host popular programs about science, and, heaven forbid, Ryan,

people who could talk loquaciously without having to point at things. It's a good question, actually. As Ben says, is that a sufficient... We're asking the question, what happened before the Big Bang? We're asking questions about, I suppose, the cause of existence, in a sense. That's what that question means. So is it conceivable that that will always be beyond science? Or is it truly a scientific question?

If it's scientific, is there any way we're making progress towards an answer? I have complete confidence in science and i the from our experience so if you look back throughout history the things that we understand now couldn't have been conceived a few hundred years ago what the things that we understand the things that we have discovered that they're really immense and i have to say that we haven't been trying very hard, and we haven't been trying for very long to understand the universe. If you get out of the 13.7 billion years, if you think about the tiny proportion of that

that we've actually been having a go at science, it's very tiny. And if you think about the proportion of the population of the world that has ever existed, I mean, just take human beings, the proportion of the population of the world that has ever existed, I mean just take human beings, the proportion of the population of the world who have had the opportunity to explore these ideas and have had the leisure time and the organisational ability to explore these ideas, that's also very tiny.

So we've done enormously well, I mean staggeringly well, given that we haven't been trying very hard and we haven't been trying for very long and i i have no doubt that we will understand much much more i mean i think we can't now conceive of even conceive of the the things that we will understand in the future just the history of science teaches us that so it's almost i don't yeah and every every discovery in science so far so again using history as our guide every discovery in science has not closed the door we've never come to the end of any line of inquiry it's always opened the door to new questions that haven't even been thought before questions that you didn't even know were there

are now there when you make a big discovery. And I think that there's no reason at all ever to doubt that that process will come to an end. I just wonder when Carlos was saying about the teenage phase of the universe, about whether now the idea of the universe having a kind of sentient, self-aware creature investigating, that's kind of the midlife crisis of the universe, and then that'll over and be done with.

Because this is, again, the intriguing thing where we're talking about as you said you can't you know go on holiday to other universes so how far do we ever get beyond it just being a thought experiment the fact richard that there are an infinite number of views according to this you know this this we know this is proper science it's one money so the you know that's how that does that go beyond the thought experiment do we ever see you know it's one money. So that's how... Does that go beyond the thought experiment? Do we ever see, you know, is there something beyond that where you go, this now, the way we can view our views, has an incredible ramification for us as human beings? Well, I think the fascinating thing,

people mention quantum fluctuations before. I'm not quite sure what they are, but basically in quantum physics, things kind of appear out of nowhere, and they exist for a bit, and they do do things like they exchange forces or something then they disappear again so in a sense the universe could have just come from nothing it's like a payday loan and we're sort of living on borrowed time and eventually it may collapse back or it may go out again but the fact is that we're all a kind of a transient of something which came from nothing and might well go back to it is quite a nice thought, really.

Yes, Carlos, the idea that... Faye is rather optimistic, the sense that... And I would share that optimism, that if there is going to be an answer to this, it will come from science. But the multiverse, this infinite number of universes idea, is really... It's not a particularly satisfying answer is it? Almost we're saying well every possible universe occurs

there's no particular explanation for the laws of physics in this one other than there's one possible set of laws of physics and they're all made manifest somewhere and that's the reason that we exist in a sense because we have to because everything exists that can how does that make you feel?

Is that a good thing? I don't get a warm feeling inside me when we talk about this. However, there is a very attractive proposition associated with the multiverse. One I already mentioned, that if inflation did happen, it's almost inevitable that the multiverse would be with us. But the other aspect that many people find very attractive, I must say I personally remain agnostic about this, and that is this.

So Robin here, amongst the many words that he uttered at the beginning, he just kind of namedropped dark energy. Now, so dark energy is something that was discovered by physicists in 1998. They got the Nobel Prize for that a couple of years ago. And dark energy is a newcomer to the cosmic scene. It's something

that we know our universe has. And it's causing the universe to accelerate at a faster, to expand at a faster and faster rate. So we know it's there but we have no idea of what it might be now theoretical physicists like fey sit down when they hear about this and do a calculation and the simple calculation you would do about the size of this dark energy you come out with a number and the number turns out to be 10 to the 120 times wrong.

Now, she talked about the most accurate prediction of physics ever. This is the most inaccurate prediction in physics ever. So it tells us there's something we don't understand. So we have no idea where the dark energy comes from. One possible explanation is that in order for us to be here, in order for life to prosper, we know the universe has to have certain attributes. It has to live long enough the universe has to have certain attributes it has to live long enough it has to make stars it has to make all chemical elements and all these things that we

know and love now it may well be that dark energy is required for these conditions to pertain and it might be that of all the possible multiverses where everything goes only maybe hours or maybe a handful or maybe a large number have the conditions required for dark energy and therefore for life to exist. So some people this goes by the anthropic principle namely that the laws of physics as what they are because if they were

any different we wouldn't be here to be asking about the laws of physics. Now I am agnostic about the anthropic principle because I think it's a valuable, it's a valid way of reasoning, but it should be the last resort of physicists. When you've run out of explanations, this would be

the last resort. And so that's another attractive side of the multiverse, and maybe it explains, as you say, why we're here. This is really warming up now to being the kind of Foreman versus Alley rumble in the jungle between Faye and Carlos. So Faye, now over to you for the punch. So in fact, that discovery of the accelerated expansion of the universe that was made in 1998 had been predicted, so a prediction had been made that such an expansion would be discovered of that order of magnitude

using a theory of quantum gravity, and that was made by a physicist called Raphael Sorkin, a theoretical physicist. And he used an argument based on a hypothesis about quantum gravity that space-time is fundamentally grainy or atomic. And using that idea and the idea that dark energy, because it should be a quantum phenomenon and therefore itself subject to quantum fluctuations and therefore can't be zero, he made an estimation of how big this dark energy component of the universe should be. And the estimation turned out to be right on the money.

And he made that. It was a real prediction. He made the prediction in the late 80s, early 90s. And it turned out to be correct. And that idea of granular atomic space-time, I think, received a great deal of support from this verified prediction. And it's even more exciting than that, and I have to tell you this, because you won't have heard this in the popular press, and you'll be the first people to hear about this. There are now indications coming from a fantastically clever experiment whose acronym is BOSS.

I think people could do some kind of analysis of some of these acronyms, BOSS, BICEP. There's an acronym, MACHO. Anyway. So this experiment is called BOSS, which stands for Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. And they've just put out a couple of papers, and more papers are in the pipeline.

And what they have done is they've used... It's very difficult to do cosmology because you don't know how far away things are. When you see things, they might be dim because they're just dim. They don't give out much light, or because they're far away. And when you see things which are small, you don't know whether they're small because they are small, or whether they're just far away and look small.

So you need what are called standard candles and standard rulers, things that you know how intrinsically bright they are or how intrinsically big they are. BOSS, this survey, uses a standard ruler, and that standard ruler is the size of the of the sound horizon of the hot plasma at during at the big bang so during the hot dense stage of the universe so sound waves travel in this plasma and they travel a certain distance until the moment when the cosmic microwave background radiation is formed that we see. So that's a standard distance, it's a standard ruler.

And the BOSS experiment uses that, and that sound horizon imprints itself upon not just the microwave background radiation, but also on the distribution of galaxies that we see. And they have measured this distribution of galaxies using this standard ruler at very, very early times. Not as early as the microwave background radiation, but later that, but much earlier than the data that tells us that there is dark energy today.

And what they've discovered is that at this earlier time, it looks like the dark energy was actually negative. And that is something that was, again, predicted by this same model, theoretical model, same theoretical model of atomic and granular space-time by Raphael Sorkin. We're going to have to have a new monkey cage on this because we're going to get thrown out in four minutes.

Carlos, by the way, just so you know, you couldn't hear it, even though it was very vociferous. There was a shaking of the head. I'm going to wrap up really quick. I just wanted to ask Ben about this. We've got three minutes now. When you hear these beautiful, some type of very enigmatic

kind of ideas, is there ever a point where you think, do you know what, it was so much easier when the universe just began as a cosmic egg or we were just balanced on the back of an elephant and some turtles. Yeah, we should bring back some of those old myths, shouldn't we? Great, yeah, I mean, yes, yes, you know, turtles. I think that makes a lot more sense. All the way down.

I'm going to go round. I want one word, well, two words, one word answer to each of these two questions. That's two words. Faye, I'll start with you. Are there an infinite number of universes and is our existence That's two words. Faye, I'll start with you. Are there an infinite number of universes and is our existence inevitable? Two words.

I don't like the idea of infinity. I can't get my head around it. So, okay, so I'm going to say no to that one. What was the other question? Is our existence inevitable? No. I can't believe you as a scientist are now doing a yes-no game.

Ben. That's so... It's always maybe or perhaps. All the equations tell us perhaps, maybe so. Exactly. What do you think? Infinite number of universes? I don't know, but I think we are all in the imagination of some huge turtle sunning itself

in a neutrino blast from a... Yes. Fill in the blank who never got a PhD. Carlos is furious. That's definitely not true. Carlos just said he believes it's the dreams of an elephant. We never got a PhD. Carlos is furious. That's definitely not true. He believes it's the dreams of an elephant. We've got no time to go to him.

Well, I read this week that the whole Big Bang theory is in trouble anyway because all the stars have asked for too much money. So the answer is I don't know. But let me just say one more thing. In the times of Shakespeare, thunder, lightning and rain were a matter of witches. Today, it's part of science. We don't know whether the universe is infinite or not. That's metaphysics today.

But one day, it will become part of science. I loved your Columbo style. Just one more thing on dark energy. So we asked our audience as well. So maybe one of them has got the ultimate answer. Here's hoping. This is, what would you like to imagine existed before the Big Bang? Oh, here we are. What would you like to answer? A universe made

entirely of Brian Cox's hair. So that returns to string theory. The Archers. An empty plain white room with Nicholas Parsons simply waiting for the next universe to begin. So, with that... Thank you to our panel, Professor

Fredowka, Professor Carlos Frank, Dr Richard Wrench and Mr Ben Miller. Next week... Next week is the final show in the series and we'll be asking is being an idiot genetic? Well, actually,

what we're actually going to be asking is whether irrationality is an integral part of being a human or could there be a future where we all become cold, cold, clinical versions of ourselves, where everyone is no more than a cyborg keyboardist who has clearly bought hair. So, thank you, goodbye. Thank you. Goodbye. be Who gives a fig if a pig can do trig in the

Infinite Monkey Cage That was the Infinite Monkey Cage podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. Did you spot the 15 minutes that was cut out for radio? Anyway, there's a competition in itself. What you think is to be more than 15 minutes? Shut up, it's your fault. You downloaded it. Anyway, there's other scientific programmes also that you can listen to.

Yeah, there's that one with Jimmy Alka-Seltzer. Life Scientific. There's that one where the 30s dad discovered the atomic nucleus. Inside Science, All in the Mind with Claudia Hammond. Richard Hammond's sister. Richard Hammond's sister. Thank you very much, Brian. And also Frontiers, a selection of science documentaries on many, many different subjects.

These are some of the science programmes that you can listen to. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet. We are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories

of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts.