The Infinite Monkey Cage - Christmas Special 2015

Episode Date: December 25, 2015

The Science of Doctor Who Brian Cox and Robin Ince celebrate the festive season with a look at the science of Doctor Who. Swapping the infinite cage for the Tardis, they are joined on stage by comedian Ross Noble, Professor Fay Dowker, Oscar winning special FX director Paul Franklin, author and Doctor Who writer Simon Guerrier and the Very Reverend Victor Stock. They discuss the real science of time travel, the tardis and why wormholes are inaccurately named (according to Ross!).

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 podcast. As women, our life stages come with unique risk factors, like high blood pressure developed during pregnancy, which can put us two times more at risk of heart disease or stroke. Know your risks. Visit heartandstroke.ca.

Hello, I'm Robin 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. Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And it's Christmas Day, the day where everyone thinks about the thermodynamics of turkeys, the Newtonian dynamics of sleigh rides, and whether cranberries are alive or dead. Right, well, I'm not entirely sure everyone thinks like that. Anyway, so cranberries, alive or dead?

Linear superposition. Of course. You're the same with every berry, aren't you? Every berry you put in a linear superposition. Absolutely. Don't see enough of that in Bake Off, do you, the linear superposition thing? How many pizzas are in the order? Because this is Christmas Day Day and I wonder whether... Because Schrodinger's perspective of opening presents,

is it better not to open the present and it remains in a superposition going, it really is definitely what I wanted and also definitely what I not wanted, as opposed to opening it and finding out it's a dead cat? Which I have no idea why my uncle keeps giving me those, but I think he's very tight and he's also a vet. So, we have taken a break from attempting to put together

our Lego Large Hadron Collider, which is taking longer than we'd hoped, and we're going to bring you this Monkey Cage Christmas special because Christmas Day is a very special time. It is the only day of the year that I can watch Alistair Sims' Scrooge without Brian going, well, of course, ghosts break the first law of thermodynamics.

And the same... Second law and the first law. OK. Yeah. It gives free energy. It's going to be negative. Delta H minus T, delta S. You know what delta S is? That's entropy. So that's a catchphrase from the second series which didn't

catch on. The T-shirt sales not as high as we'd hoped. You'd imagine watching Ghost with him and a potter. So... LAUGHTER I don't want that. Today we're talking about the true meaning of Christmas. The Doctor

Who Christmas special. There'll be no spoilers. There can't be, because we haven't seen it yet. And why haven't we seen it? Because it would require time travel. And we still haven't perfected that machine, have we? For over 50 years, Doctor Who has twisted our universe into all manner of shapes,

filling our minds with ideas and monsters. It's introduced us to real and imagined scientific ideas. It has been a portal, creating thousands of sitting-room conversations about the nature of time and space. So, to guide us through the real, the possible, and the speculative ideas of Doctor Who, we have the usual panel of a physicist, a comedian,

a special effects expert, an author, and a member of the General Synod. Sadly, not all the same person. And they are... Hello, my name is Paul Franklin, and I design visual effects for Hollywood films, including Inception and most recently Interstellar. And my

favourite idea from Doctor Who is the Daleks, an enemy so terrifying all our modern fears wrapped up into one that we still find them terrifying even 50 years after we realised they'd be stopped by a couple of steps and a low wall. Apart from when they're not. My name is Simon Gerrier.

I am a writer and I write Doctor Who books and comics and audio plays and the scientific secrets of Doctor Who. I think my favourite idea from Doctor Who is that you can make a living writing books and comics and audio plays from Doctor Who. My name's Victor Stock and I'm a priest and I was the Dean of Guildford, where I first met Brian Cox and we started doing things together.

Even... Even... Yes, he's one of those. He's a cheeky vicar, this one. Even in Geneva. But since then I've retired and I live in London and my gig is working at Westminster Abbey. And my favourite Doctor Who thing is quite simple and straightforward at the moment and it's the TARDIS.

And it's the TARDIS... Can I say why? Yes, you may. Thank you. The TARDIS is because it's like Christmas. Bethlehem is a small place. Only religious people think this small stable's got something inside it which is bigger than the universe. And TARDIS, you get inside this little tiny whatever it is and everything changes.

The universe might be infinite. Oh, that was real proper vicar work. That was for anyone who didn't make it to a church. I was watching the Doctor Who special the other day, and as I looked at the TARDIS, I thought, isn't that a little bit like Easter? Anyway, so... I don't think we were listening properly.

But I did like it. You're very good with your allegories. Sorry, continue introducing yourself. So, over to... Hello, I'm Ross Noble. I've no scientific qualifications and I was turned down for the job as the vicar at Guildford. But... My favourite Doctor Who idea is the fact that one day I might be killed by a robot Bertie Bassett. A muted response there, but a nod from the expert.

Hello, my name is Faye Dauker. I'm a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London. My PhD thesis title was Space-Time Wormholes. I research black holes, the Big Bang, and I'm trying to discover the deep structure of space-time. And my favourite Doctor Who item is the TARDIS, for a slightly different reason than Victor's. It's because there are solutions of Einstein's equations

for general relativity in which space-time has a portal through which you can go and inside of which has a certain size and inside the space-time can be as big as you like you can fill that region with a space time with as large a space time volume

as you choose. There are many different solutions. They're called Oppenheimer Schneider solutions. And so we don't know whether such solutions are physically real, but the idea of a TARDIS is contained within general relativity.

And this is our panel! Thank you. Ross, do you think the TARDIS should be renamed the Oppenheimer-Schneider machine? Well, that would be... Well, you know, the fact that the initial TARDIS should be renamed the Oppenheimer-Schneider machine. Well, that would be... Well, you know, the fact, you know, the fact that the initial TARDIS actually means something, that's going to be a long...

You know, when he gets a new companion, they go, what does TARDIS stand for? And he goes, what was it again? The Oppenheimer-Schneider solution. Oh, God, no, I'm dyslexic. Forget it, I'm not even going to try it. PrepJet, what does TARDIS stand for? Time and relative dimension in space. And what does that mean? Well, I'm not even going to try it. Prep to you, what does TARDIS stand for? Time and Relative Dimension in Space.

And what does that mean? Well, I'm glad you asked me that. Well, if you're going to start putting me on the spot, let me just bring up the whole wormhole thing. Can we change the name so that they're called, like, Space Wormholes? Or, like, Time Worm... Or something space, something scientific,

because everyone's now talking about wormholes, forgetting about actual wormholes. Do you know how disappointed worms are now? Because they've read all your books and stuff, and they go, oh, brilliant, I'm off down my wormhole, and they're still underground. They're not popping out on the other side of space. And it's not fair. Come on, scientists, think of the worms.

That's interesting because you live in kent now don't you and that is of course not far from where charles darwin wrote his book the formation of veteran role through the action of worms with observation on their habits have you read it theatrical worms yeah well no i mean all worms are theatrical in their own way aren't they let's not prejudge them let's allow them to do their show and then decide if it's theatrical enough really hard getting them little top hats on them though isn't it just keep sliding off you You don't know. You've put it on the wrong end.

Does that answer your question? Not in the way I was imagining, but it'll do. So, Faye, time and relative dimension in space. Let's deal with it. What do you think, as a physicist, this was the starting point of of doctor who this police box this police box that can apparently travel through time and space and when you hear this phrase time and relative dimension in space what do you interpret that as

i think about space time which according to einstein's theory of general relativity is the arena for everything that happens. And it's something which unifies both space and time. And in a way that's very beautifully encapsulated in science fiction like Doctor Who, we travel in space-time. So we don't have now, according to modern physics, a picture of the world as space, and we exist in space with time passing in the same way for everyone and everything. But we move, we live out our lives in space-time. We trace out trajectories in this four-dimensional arena called space-time.

And that's very much in accord with the idea of time travel. If we're moving, travelling through time in this space-time arena, why can't we go back? So it raises that possibility immediately once you think about space-time as a whole, as a four-dimensional substance. So you wouldn't say... So that starting point for Doctor Who, in terms of in science fiction, where sometimes things are just,

you know, absolutely wonky, totally made up, that's actually not a bad starting point, then, for a children's science fiction show, to have this object called, you know, the TARDIS. Well, time is something which human beings have wondered about ever since... Well, since we have records of people thinking about the nature of the world people have thought about the nature of time and certainly our current view of space time our current best understanding of the nature of space

and time definitely lends itself to the notion of time travel in fact people do research on time machines and in the scientific literature, they're called closed time-like curves. You have to give them a, you know, a fancier, more science-y sounding name than time machines. Yeah, you can't call them time machines because you wouldn't get funded. So you have to call them... You have to call them closed time-like curves, and people really do try to figure out whether the laws of physics allow such entities, and unfortunately, the consensus is that probably not,

but we still don't know how to incorporate quantum effects into our understanding of space-time. So until we do that, we can still say there's a small possibility that they could be possible. So Einstein's theory of general relativity permits those structures, so wormholes, space-time wormholes... Thank you.

Permits those at the moment, and so we have to conjecture that they won't be there in nature there are solutions of the Einstein equations that have these closed time like curves or time machines in them and we have to explain or understand whether they're physically allowed in the universe so it seems like they're probably on physical but we we don't we don't have the final answer because we don't know how quantum matter can change our understanding of space-time. Simon, it could be real.

It's all real. Come on, remember, this is a geek for money. He's not going to start getting rid of that payday. Who's the most scientific doctor? The third doctor, John Pertwee, is the one who most frequently refers to himself as a scientist.

But that really depends on your kind of tolerance of the plots. I think... Because there's lots of big, mad ideas in Doctor Who, but not all of them make scientists happy. Sometimes when Doctor Who gets its science slightly more left- field from conventional thinking, you get lots of very angry people on the internet. You've just written a book all about the science of Doctor Who, and in researching that, I presume you have come across...

What were the ideas that have most angered, you know, people within the scientific community? Well, there was an episode last year in which the moon turned out to be an egg in which lived a moon dragon. Well, everybody knows that's true. But what's weird is that that made people cross in a way that an episode a few years ago, a Christmas special a few years ago,

where the Earth turned out to be full of giant spider babies, didn't bother them at all. And so what I found, I think, is that when people have criticised the science, what they mean is that they've criticised the tone of story or they've not liked a particular story because the logic inside that story didn't work. So I think whether the science is right or not is a different question.

And I should just say, for balance, what's the greatest Doctor Who episode? My favourite is a 1973 story called Planet of the Daleks, in which John Pertwee goes to a planet of Daleks. It's a bit of a surprise halfway through. And he defeats this army of Daleks by unleashing a volcano that buries them. But because the writer wanted to make it a bit more space and exciting,

he came up with the most silly idea he could think of, which is that rather than lava, hot lava, it's a volcano of ice, an icecano, as he called it. 16 years after that episode was shown, and it was just a bit of sort of fantasy fun, really, Voyager 2, going past the moons of Neptune, took a photo, and we now think that not only do four of the moons in the solar system have ice canos, but also Pluto.

So Doctor Who fluked its science. Now, there are some people who think that if you base your Doctor Who stories or your science fiction stories on real scientific discoveries, then that's proper hard science and that makes the story good. And this is where I think the lie comes, because what that would mean is that when they made Planet of the Daleks in 1973, it was a silly fantasy story,

but now without anything changing in that story, it's now a proper hard science story. So that's kind of where I stand on that. I think the science can be right in a Doctor Who story and it can still be ridiculous or vice versa. Victor, what's the General Synod position on Doctor Who? I've absolutely

no idea. I mean, the General Synod worries about some things which matter and it doesn't give much time and attention to the really essential fundamental meaning of the universe, which is obviously science fiction and Doctor Who. But I don't quite know why they haven't,

and so I'm not very helpful on this, especially on Christmas Day after a very good lunch. Have you... I mean, things like, for instance, you know, Harry Potter, not from... I don't think, as far as I know, from the General Synod, but there have been religious organisations that have been very angry about this playing around with kind of ideas of witchcraft and magic. I wonder if there has been anything in the history of Doctor Who

where certainly Mary Whitehouse, for instance, she was very angry about, I think, the Tom Baker years, and in particular some of the Philip Hinchcliffe episodes made her particularly cross. She would have exploded by now, of course. Mercifully. Oh, dear, lots of her fans are still alive in Worthing and they'll ring up. I think an important thing to say as an Anglican is that we don't really go in for

this nastiness. You know, we make friends with atheists and we go on programmes like this. And in our quiet, understated sort sort of middle-class, liberal way, we really get on with most people. And I think a rather serious thing about this is that in Europe, we have had what we call the Enlightenment. That was preceded by the Reformation. The Enlightenment was followed by the Industrial Revolution. And religious people have had to come to terms

with all these things. And so sensible, open-minded religious people are not so frightened about things like science fiction. And as it's Christmas Day, which I think is the best day in the entire year because you get people round a table like this who are unlikely to get round a table any other time of the year. You know the difficult relatives you feel you should invite

and it's so nice when they go. But that's the spirit of Christmas. I think this whole business of being able to meet people who you normally don't meet and be open to ideas that you really haven't got the faintest idea or hope of understanding is a frightfully good thing. But then that's the Church of England line.

I love about you, Victor, you seem to be made out of bits of Ealing films and Dick Emery. It's a lovely, it's a beautiful monster, Anglican monster. That is the Church of England. Paul, you mentioned already, you did a double Oscar winner for Inception and Interstellar, and when we were growing up, one of the great excitements

was seeing on things like the multicoloured swatch show, Matt Irvine explaining the special effects, very low budget and putting those things together. How important was Doctor Who in terms of forming the human being you are now? Absolutely essential. A long time ago, I was up for a job at the BBC early on in my career, and they asked me what had inspired me

to get into making visual effects for films. And I told them it was Doctor Who, in a specific episode from the 70s. And I think they were a little bit disappointed. I think they wanted me to make it a little bit higher. But it actually, yeah, it's been a huge influence on me. But I was thinking, you're talking about the science of Doctor Who. I think there's at least two or three different explanations

for the death of the dinosaurs in Doctor Who. And it's a little bit like science, because each time they come up with a new explanation, it gets a little bit closer to scientific truth. I think the last time they did it was the Cybermen had crashed their spaceship into the Earth, like the big asteroid. Well, that's true in the 1970s, but in the early 1970s dinosaur episodes,

I don't think people knew why the dinosaurs died out. There was a lot of conjecture. You mentioned, though, that there was one particular episode that influenced you. So which was it? It was a thing called Frontier in Space, which is a John Pertwee adventure. And the reason why I remember it is because they had a Blue Peter special about the effects, how they did the models.

And I remember, I think it was probably Matt Irvine or someone like that, showing this model spacecraft coming into land, and then they had a little puff of air to kick the dust up around it. I thought, that's so cool. That's what I want to do. Interstellar is a film that's famous for paying attention to the scientific detail and taking artistic licence where necessary. But I was thinking about the black hole in particular.

Wasn't that published, your simulation of that? Yeah, what we did to create the black hole for the film, we had to write a new piece of software which implemented Einstein's equations from general relativity. Kip Thorne, who's our scientific advisor on the film, who's a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech in Pasadena, he worked very, very closely with all the software designers in the visual effects department to create this new renderer, as it's called, which draws the images of the black hole. And it

calculates the way that the light beams travel through the gravitationally warped space and go into orbit around the black hole, get distorted, and then come back out and hit the camera to produce that image of the black hole with this big sort of halo around it. It looks like a sort of hellish version of the London Underground logo. And the software that we put together for that calculated it so accurately, we observed a few interesting things happening in the space very close to the edge of the black hole's shadow,

and we got a scientific paper out of that. So I'm a co-author on that paper, which I do feel a tiny little bit of a fraud because I have a degree in sculpture. What did you contribute? Chicken wire and papier-mâché? I think I saw a... It's good to say that that command of physics is impressive from a sculptor.

Can you speak on sculpture with such authority? Well, the black hole and the wormholes you've mentioned before are allowable in general relativity. They are. And the wormholes... Space wormholes, come on. Ross, you're absolutely right. There are two different sorts of wormholes.

Oh, what? I've never heard those words before. Go on, there's two sorts of wormholes. The wormhole in interstellar is a spatial wormhole. That's a shortcut in space so that you can travel from one place in space to another place in space almost instantaneously because you go down this little shortcut.

Yeah. So those are spatial wormholes. Right. My PhD thesis was about space-time wormholes, and you're completely right to make the distinction because they are very different. So there's three typestime wormholes, and you're completely right to make the distinction because they are very different. So there's three types of worms. LAUGHTER

The worms. The space-time wormholes are interesting. They are... They're not these shortcuts in space, but they are space-times where two disconnected portions of the universe can merge and become one. And the space time looks something like a pair of trousers.

So if you imagine a pair of trousers, then the two disconnected portions of the universe that are going to merge are the legs. And then they come together, of course, and then the waist region, that's the new universe that has formed out of the two disconnected pieces. And the two disconnected pieces, they come together at what is called scientifically the crotch singularity. And...

Don't tempt me, madam. Don't tempt me, madam. And the interesting thing is that the scientific consensus on the crotch is that it produces an infinite burst of energy. And this probably makes this space-time unphysical. But again, we will have to wait until we have a full theory of quantum gravity to be able to give the final word on this. Well, welcome to call my bluff.

So, Ross, is space-time trouser singularity? Sorry. I was going to say, if this hasn't been condemned by the church already, it soon will be. Well, we'll move on from crotch singularity to... It's really weird, because I wasn't expecting you would be the one

that would create all of the complaints. I was going to... We were talking about the questions earlier. There's one here that says, Ross, has there been a lack of imagination in science fiction? But it sounds like a redundant question. Oh, it's given me an idea for a new film. LAUGHTER

Simon, I want to say, we've talked a little bit, but in fact, Black holes, we should get back to black holes, which is, they are meant to be... Isn't that the TARDIS operates basically from a black hole? The very power of the Time Lords comes from a black hole. Well, yes, but as the... Most recently, it's been established that the engine of the TARDIS is a black hole

frozen in the moment of its collapse and used as a power source. But that's a fairly recent idea in Doctor Who. You can see just how black holes have appeared in Doctor Who over the years, a kind of development of people getting used to the idea. The first black hole is mentioned in The Three Doctors in December 1972, The first black hole is mentioned in The Three Doctors in December 1972, which is about a year after Cygnus X-1 was first being written about the first black hole that they think was discovered. So they seem to have taken this idea out of the news

and run a story on it. And the Time Lords refer to it as the black hole, as if it's the only one, or it's the one that's near them. And the writers, one of whom would later go on to write the wallace and gromit films uh he that they come up with a story where there's a beam of antimatter that leads into a universe of antimatter on the other side of this black hole and that seems to be confusing to scientific ideas that were going around at the time when black holes holes are then used again in Doctor Who in a Tom Baker story, The Deadly Assassin,

there's a thing called the Eye of Harmony, which the Doctor realises as if this is something that Time Lords don't generally know is a black hole. He kind of translates this text from the old times, which talks about it, and goes, they're talking about a black hole. And that seems to be the power source of the Time Lords. A few years later, there's a story called The Horns of Naimon

where Graham Crowden's Saldid has got two black holes, artificial black holes that have created a tunnel between them so he can get from one place to another and surprise everybody. And again... Sorry, the way you... You're one of the stranger villains. I'm more kind of show-busy Rodgers and Hammerstein villain. That is exactly what that story is like.

That was the last of the Douglas Adams stories, I believe. Yes, the last of the transmissive ones. But the Doctor is travelling at the time with his companion, who's a Time Lord, Romana, and she is completely surprised by this and doesn't think artificial black holes are possible and doubts the whole thing. So there's this kind of idea that even the Time Lords don't think artificial black holes are possible and doubts the whole thing so there's this kind of idea that even the time lords don't think that black holes are possible yet more recently when when you get the paul mcgann tv movie we learned that there's a

the eye of harmony is inside his tardis and now we've got this thing where matt smith goes into the engines of the tardis and there's a black hole so it's never been really said has that one black hole that was on gallifrey now be moved into the Doctor's TARDIS, or do all TARDISes have a black hole inside them, or is the Doctor's TARDIS special? I actually think that's kind of missing the point. What you're seeing is that the people making Doctor Who and the general public more readily

have got more used to the idea of black holes, and it's become tamer to use it in stories. Do you think, Paul, that a film or indeed a television series that pays attention to the science is necessarily better as a piece of art, a piece of film? I was thinking a bit about Star Trek the other day and the opening voiceover where Captain Kirk is saying to explore the universe and seek out strange new worlds and new life and everything.

And now we've learned that most of the universe is invisible, that it's dark matter and dark energy. And so if you said to seek out and explore the 5% of the universe that we can actually see, it wouldn't be quite so interesting. So I think the program makers, the script writers, often take a lot of license with it, but I often think the best science fiction is like an Einstein thought experiment.

Interstellar allows us to go and explore and visit places that we couldn't do otherwise. Some people complain, if the spacecraft were to get destroyed, they'd be killed by X-rays or gamma rays or whatever, but then we wouldn't be able to go inside a black hole and see what happens to Matthew McConaughey. So that's kind of what science fiction does.

Kip Thorne got very defensive didn't he about some of those charges he claims that he calculated virtually everything. Yeah he did he really did I was basically appointed the bridge to Kip whilst we were shooting the film

so we're on the stage and we were doing things, and Chris would come and say, Chris Nolan, our director, would say, oh, I want to do this with the spacecraft. I want to blow it up. He wanted to break, you know, it was a big ring-shaped spacecraft. He wanted to break it. And it's still supposed to be spinning, and I said, well, I don't think it will hold together and fly to bits.

Let's leave a little bit in. But he was adamant he wanted to break it. So I would immediately get on the phone and call Kip in Pasadena and say, he wants to do this, is this possible? And Kip would say, well, it sounds very dubious to me, I'll make some calls. And he'd call up his friends at NASA, at JPL, and run this hypothetical question past them,

and then he'd come back and say to me, much to my surprise, if we assume the spacecraft has one-inch-thick aluminium walls, it'll hold together. So we ended up breaking the ring assume the spacecraft has one inch thick aluminium walls it'll hold together. So we ended up breaking the ring on the spacecraft. But Kip was involved throughout the whole process. And Chris who

to be perfectly honest I didn't think was that interested in science. I've worked on five films with Chris. He totally embraced that. But he would do things like he would say to Kip, for instance, as a planet, where the time dilation factor is one hour on the planet

surface is seven years back on Earth. And Kip said, well, I don't think that's possible. There's no orbit that would be stable that the planet could be orbiting the black hole that close for that time dilation factor. And he'd say, well, it's non-negotiable. Go away and think about it. And so Kip

went away. This is how Chris works. He said, I want it like this. All the great directors do this. They don't listen to anybody else. They just do their thing. And Kip went away and ran all of Einstein's equations and came back and again said, well, much to my surprise, if we imagine a black hole that's a hundred

million times the mass of the sun spinning at very close to the speed of light, then there will be a stable orbit where you can have one hour equals seven years. It might not be a very nice place to visit. That's fantastic to see out of Hollywood. I don't care. Change the law of physics. I don't care they've been running it for billions of years.

I need it for scene seven. That would be a simple request most of the time. Was there a scientific advisor on Inception? I think Chris consulted with various psychologists and people who dealt with the field of psychology and the imagery of dreams and things like that. And he knows a lot about that himself. But no, there wasn't one

working with us on a day-to-day basis. And I think during Dark Knight Rises I think I was possibly the nuclear physics consultant on that. At no point did he go, well basically I want Bain to have this thing where no one's going to be able to hear him

and I'll be fine. Could we put a switch on it that just goes, oh, that's better? You make that, but monkey cage regulars will know that one of our guests, the cosmologist Sean Carroll, was science advisor on Thor. Yeah, because he said that... I asked him and I said, science advisor on Thor. Yeah, because he said that... I asked him and I said,

science advisor on Thor, why? He said, obviously, you know that bit where they look at you and go, don't you know anything? Because obviously they wanted the wormholes, space wormholes, but what he said was merely wormholes, so I'm now realising how inexact he was, Ross, thanks to you.

Because we wanted the wormholes that the gods of Asgard travelled through to be as authentic as possible. It's a clash of ideologies there. I've just realised, actually, that coincidentally, the T-shirt I've got on is from the film Sunshine, on which I was science advisor, in which the sun stopped working and we went to fix it. LAUGHTER The sun stopped working and we went to fix it.

Good point. But it obviously worked, because Benedict Wong is now working at NASA, if you've seen The Martian. That's a very specific reference there, but... That's geeky. I was going to say, Doctor Who, in 52 years it's been on air, it's only ever had one official scientific advisor, which was back in the early 60s.

And the production team, a new production team, came in in late 1966, and they wanted to make the show kind of connect with the audience more. So they set more stories in the present day, and they tried to base stories on real science. And so the script editor at the time interviewed four, or had lunch with four scientists who might be scientific advisors. He met with Patrick Moore.

He met with the engineer Eric Laithwaite from Imperial. He met with Alex Comfort, who would later write The Joy of Sex, but at the time was a leading proponent of science of senescence and ageing, though I'd quite like to see what The Joy of Sex, Doctor Who stories would have been like. And finally, he met with Kit Pedler, who was an ophthalmologist, an eye doctor,

and they got talking about lots of different things, one of which was, how can we use the post office tower, the BT Tower, as it now is, which had just been built in a Doctor Who story, and Kit Pedler gave him a story about, well, what about, there's this mad idea of getting a computer to talk to another computer down a phone line. So there's a story from 1966 called The War Machines,

in which the internet creates machines that knock over boxes in London. They talked about the various scientific ideas about how populations were controlled with Muzak and drugs and, you know, this kind of idea that you could do... There were lots of theories that that was being done in some of the communist countries. So you get a story called the Macra Terror, where the doctor and his friends free everyone

from giant invisible crabs that nobody believes in. And then there's a story where they were talking about this idea of what would happen if you had a planet that was just like Earth, sharing its orbit, which had been around since before Pluto had been discovered. It was one of the ideas about what could affect things, gravity, and explain some of the anomalies in Newton's ideas of how the planets went round the sun. And they were talking about this, and Kit Padler says,

well, there's this new idea, which is about, for space travel, rather than fitting spaceships so that they create an Earth-like environment in which astronauts can live, that's a very costly way to do it. Maybe the way to have people working permanently in space is to kind of equip them with their own inbuilt air-conditioning systems in a thing called cybernetics,

and that's where the Cybermen came from. And the Cybermen were invented by the scientific advisor on Doctor Who, and then they went off and made their own programmes and Doctor Who's never had a scientific advisor. So the eye doctor, because what happens... Sorry, I just... With the weeping angels, what happens to blind people?

No, if you look at them, they freeze. They can't move. That's a good thing, isn't it? Yeah, that's what I mean. Like, if you look at them, they're frozen, and as soon as you blink, they... Oh, no, I see what you mean. So a blind person would just literally straight in dead. Or if the dog is looking at the edge.

Not that I've spent a lot of time not sleeping because of this, right? So blind fella's there, he's got his guide dog, right? He's approaching it, so he can't... So he's knackered, right? But the dog's looking at the edge, so he's knackered right but the dogs looking at the edge was not coming closer right so what I don't understand is why doesn't the doctor just carry a dog see what I'm saying I'm glad I'm here several dogs in case one bling exactly two dogs time in it so that every time that don blinked, four dogs.

So you're going to really annoy now. Get the statistics right. You say, I should be the dog. Why did they bring back canine? It was that bloody idiot Ross Noble. Exactly. Canine, that's what he's there for. He is one of the weeping angels. Faye, I wanted to get to the...

We talk about interstellar, we talk about wormholes, and you mentioned that space wormholes, space-time wormholes, and you mentioned that they're potentially possible, or at least not ruled out, given what we know, which would mean that time travel would be possible. What's interesting about interstellar is that, as I understand it, one of the interpretations of that film is that time travel's possible, but you still need a consistent universe,

so we don't have free will in Interstellar. You see that Matthew McConaughey's character can't stop himself leaving his daughter's bedroom. He can't change history. So I'm going to ask a really simple question. Do you think we have free will? Could you imagine a sensible universe, this universe, with wormholes and time machines?

I probably exaggerated the likelihood that these things are possible. You said it was unlikely. Yeah, the consensus is that unless there are some surprises in store in the physics that we don't yet know, it's most likely that they're not possible. in the physics that we don't yet know, it's most likely that they're not possible.

And it's true that when the story, the full story, the full space-time story is consistent, as it is in Interstellar and as it is in Terminator and as it is in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, then you can't have free will. Whatever happens has to happen, and you can't have free will. Whatever happens has to happen and you can't change that. You can't make a new decision. You can't decide not to go in the time machine and go back in time. But it doesn't allow for any deviation. It's very, very finely tuned. The universe has got to be very, very finely tuned. And that is counter to the second law of thermodynamics.

Although it's possible, and you can set things up so that they're just perfectly right so that it's all consistent, any little deviation will ruin everything. So that's a feature of these consistent universes where there is time travel that most physicists would say is unnatural. It's something that is not...

It doesn't accord with the physics that we understand. It doesn't accord with the second law of thermodynamics, for example. I suppose, though, Victor, in your world, there is a... I suppose God sits outside time. Well, no, I'm not saying that as an... Possibly, if there is a God, then it's in my world as well. But in Christian theology, let me put it that way, in Christian theology, God sits outside of time.

I think this is something which... This is Anglican hesitation here. I'm trying to think what the answer might be. I'd like to say a bit more about free will, if I may, which is one of the great big arguments in theology in the last 2,000 years has been about free will. And people come down on, you know, we've got it or we haven't got it. And I, again, laughing at myself,

but of course that disguises a deep seriousness, think that we do have free will, but not much. That, by the way, is a true Anglican answer. I think we probably do, but maybe only a little bit. We can't be sure. Mince pie? Faye, though, if you take Einstein's theories of relativity, if you take space-time, especially in general relativity,

at face value, then you end up with this picture, don't you, of a so-called block universe, which means that the whole thing is there. So there's no definition, the unique definition between past, present and future. The whole thing's laid out, so the past is there, the future is there. And in such a universe, we don't have free will, do we, if you take the theory at face value?

If you think of free will as being something non-material and spiritual, then there's no place for that in physics at all, no matter what your picture is. So the question is, how do we understand how we make a decision? Well, if you make a decision for some reason, then that's the explanation of why you make the decision. And I completely fail to understand what's problematic about that. I mean, you have a decision to make, you think about it, for some you weigh what you're going to do, what's going

to happen if you make the decision one way or the other way, and then you think about it, you think, well, I prefer this, and then you do that. And the decision is made because of everything that's happened to you up to that point. And that determines which way you'll decide. Or it's just totally random, in which case there's nothing to understand about it. So, yeah, I'm completely uninterested in the question of whether there's free will. It seems to me...

Now, you see, that's a very typical physicist's answer. You're all doing exactly as we'd hoped to cast you. Well done. Ross, what's your favourite monster? Oh, monster? I thought you said monster. I was going to say Herman. My favourite... Doctor Who monster?

As I said earlier, I like the... I forget what he's called, but that Bertie Bassett robot thing. The Candyman. The Candyman, of course it was, yeah. Which, you know, as you can tell, I was very much in the Sylvester McCoy era when nobody was watching. And they just went out.

That's when, of course, when the Daleks first flew of course uh yeah technically they flew oh sorry but yeah no go on technically what at last you as the doctor who write have been able to go well technically come on no no go on technically what so so uh in revelation of the Daleks the Colin Baker Daleks story that the Daleks do Davros floats above William Gaunt as he's electrocuting him so remembrance the Daleks, the Colin Baker Dalek story, the Daleks do... Davros floats above William Gaunt as he's electrocuting him. So Remembrance of the Daleks is the second one where we see a Dalek flying, if you count Davros as a Dalek.

I was just going to say... It all gets a bit into... As scientists are prone to say, I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that. Well, we have now, unfortunately, run out of time. So we asked our audience a question as well, and we asked them, who would you like to see play Doctor Who and why? And what was lovely, by the way,

was a lot of you just gave very, very serious answers and went, Ben Whishaw would be very good. That was excellent. Is this a trick question? Professor Brian Cox, of course, or James McAvoy? Chair, so she can turn back time. Jeremy Clarkson, for his exceptional skills in hand-to-hand combat, make him the most dangerous doctor in the world.

Me, Matt Smith. Oh, Jeremy Corbyn. It will be his only chance to save humanity. Brian Cox, because look how shiny he is. I always think of you more like an autom. I think you are a little kind of autom baby. That's Jimmy Carr. Nobody, because then I were again one hour of my boyfriend's time a week.

Felicity Bainbridge. So, thank you very much to our guests, Faye Dowker, Simon Gurrier, Paul Franklin, the very Reverend Victor Stock, and Ross Noble. APPLAUSE We are back in January with our new series. Victor, as it is Christmas,

and you are our resident former Dean of Guildford Cathedral. I'd like to make sure we don't see any of the others. You are the only former Dean of Guildford Cathedral we ever have on this show and I'd like to make that clear. So, have you got a Christmas message for the Doctor Who fans and the Monkey Cage listeners? Well, I think what I want

to say is this, that the Monkey Cage makes extremely complicated scientific ideas attractive. That's why it works. And for religious people, when the whole business of the universe, the way we behave, the dreadful things we do to each other, is inexplicable. Christmas is about God making himself attractive and that's why we all have these Christmas lunches and too much to drink and that's great and sit about wishing the relatives would go home. But the serious business is that we all feel a bit better on Christmas Day because this particular bit of Christianity is very attractive.

And in that way, I think there's a kind of bow to the monkey cage. And I want to say, as a priest who knows absolutely obviously diddly-squit about science, I want to say that you make something really important attractive to all sorts of people. And thank you. Thank you. Victor, stop. Please.

Thank you very much, Victor. And so that brings us to the end of the show, and I... Ross! Behind you! A space-time wormhole! I think this is a space-time anomaly! No, it isn't. Is it not? No. We've really over-egged that one then, haven't we? Never mind. Tell you what.

Let's hope we get to the middle eight, though. They like that. That was the Infinite Monkey Cage podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. Did you spot the 15 minutes that was cut out for radio? Hmm. Anyway, there's a competition in itself. What, you think it should be more than 15 minutes? Shut up, it's your fault.

You downloaded it. Anyway, there's other scientific in itself. What, you think it should 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 Adam Rutherford, his 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 programs 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 for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply.

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