The Infinite Monkey Cage - Christmas Special 2016

Episode Date: December 27, 2016

Brian Cox and Robin Ince return for a very special Christmas edition of the show. They are joined on stage by Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, actor and writer Mark Gatiss, cultural anthropologist Deborah Hyde and the Bishop of Leeds. They'll be discussing the joys of the Christmas ghost story, and looking at the Victorian obsession with the supernatural. They'll be asking when studying paranormal phenomenon went from a genuine scientific endeavour, to the realms of pseudoscience. Producer: Alexandra Feachem.

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. 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. This is the BBC.

Hello, and happy slightly after Christmas. I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Professor Brian Cox. By the way, he always has to actually say Professor before his name, because otherwise people don't believe he is. This is true, especially the bottom half of the internet is very much in doubt. How can you look like that and still be a professor? Whereas I do look like a professor. I'm all bald and skin conditioned with shabby knitwear.

It's good radio. It is good radio, yeah. We've been doing 14 series. They can smell shabby off me now through the radio. That's what those digital radios are for. Anyway, so this is Welcome to the Monkey Cage Christmas Special. Now, one of the many traditions of Christmas is the Christmas ghost story. Stories of M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft, and, of course, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. But are ghosts woo? Or are they woo?

Yes, you see. So today we just get... In fact, we have previously discussed ghosts on this show. And we used to get letters of complaint. And it's one of my favourite letters of complaint. We used to be allowed to reply to the letters of complaint until they found out that Brian and me replying to letters of complaint led to more ramifications. But we had someone write and go,

you did a show about ghosts. I was very disappointed. Why didn't you have any ghosts or spirits on the show? And we wrote back and we said, we did. Didn't you hear them? So, we are going to discuss that great question, will we be able to haunt our enemies when we die? And after 2016, I'm sure many of you have a lot longer enemy list

than you did have at the beginning of the year. What happens after we die? That is, if we do die, Brian, of course, won't die because he's already refusing to age. So, will my energy leave my body and become a ghost, Brian? In what way will energy leave your body, then? In a quantum way. It's discrete packets of energy.

I've done the reading. Define energy. Electric ectoplasm. Great band, that. That would be good, actually, I think, for a peel band. That was electro-ectoplasm there, and rather a sticky record as well, a peculiar release. I'll be playing that more on Friday.

So, tonight's guests are a clergyman, a professor, an occasional colonel and a cultural anthropologist, which is a very good start for a game of Cluedo. So, today's post-festive panel are... I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist from New York City. I work at the American Museum of Natural History, where I also serve as director of its Hayden Planetarium.

I also do some TV and some radio and write books every now and then. That was a full CV. Do you have a favourite ghost story as well? I'm kind of... Well, I'm a sentimentalist, and though maybe they're not specifically ghosts, I think in the film, It's a sentimentalist, and though maybe they're not specifically ghosts, I think in the film, it's a wonderful life. It's an angel that no one can see.

I count that as a ghost. Not all ghosts are haunting you. Some are helping you. And so it's a wonderful life. Just last night, in fact, I saw the last few minutes of... You once called me a warp-frustrated old man. Well, what are you but a warp-frustrated young man? Look at you. You used to be so cocky.

But if I may broaden the concept of ghost, and as an astrophysicist, it's not hard for me to think of stars that have long ago died whose light only just reaches us on Christmas Day telling us that they once did die. And that stream of light is a ghost, a kind of spirit energy of the last gasp of a star's life. So when I look out at the night sky,

I know that some fraction of all the stars I see are ghosts of a star that was once alive. It's not, it's just photons. I have loosened the definition. Can I say, last time... Ghost photons, how about that? Last time we had Neil on the show, the other guest said, please don't make me answer anything after Neil.

He'll say something poetic and beautiful that has also been empirically tested. And I won't have anything up to that standard. So our next guest is... Good evening. I'm Deborah Hyde. I'm editor of the Skeptic magazine. And I

read and write about why people believe in weird things. Do you want my favourite ghost story too? Well, given that I'm far more into folklore than I am into fiction, I think my favourite one that still creeps me out to think of it is an account by Montague Summers of a village on Cornish Shore. And another of the villages nearby had been washed out to sea and they said at Christmas Eve

you could still hear the bells tolling under the water. Ooh. I thought that was creepy. Well, my name's Nick Baines. I'm the Bishop of Leeds for the Church of England. My favourite ghost story isn't a story, actually. It's the old Milton Jones line about... He said, I was walking down the road and I saw a baby ghost on the pavement.

On the other hand, it might have been a handkerchief. LAUGHTER Hello, I'm Dr Mark Gazis. I am a... I am a doctor. I never use it. But I'm going to use it tonight because it's the right circumstances. I'm a writer and actor, and my favourite ghost story, because I do actually have one, is Count Magnus by M.R. James.

And this is our panel. APPLAUSE The first thing to say is that this is The Infinite Monkey Cage and this is a show about reality. I wish it was a reality show, because then I would get paid a lot more, wouldn't we? The housewives of CERN. Can we make that?

Before we ask the first... The next US standard model. I couldn't think of any other puns, I've run out already It's infuriating what happens on Radio 4 Before we ask the first question, therefore, I want to make a statement We're not here to debate the existence of ghosts because they don't exist If we want some sort of pattern that carries information about our living selves to persist Then we must specify precisely what medium carries that pattern

And how it interacts with the matter particles out of which our bodies are made. We must, in other words, invent an extension to the standard model of particle physics that is escape detection at the Large Hadron Collider. That's almost inconceivable at the energy scales typical of the particle interactions in our bodies, and so we need not discuss this further. Is any body object in that at all?

No? Excellent. Carry on. Well, for the purposes of balance, Brian, I'm sensing that maybe someone over there is perhaps... They've got to have a spiritual sense or they had a father who liked cheese. So... Brian, if I understand what you just declared, you just asserted that CERN,

the European Centre for Nuclear Research, disproved the existence of ghosts? Yes. OK. That was the main reason I think it was built. That's what I'm trying to understand. Later on, we'll be dealing with the Higgs boson, but first, let's send these ghosts round this accelerator. It's just a side benefit to declaring that there are no ghosts,

because otherwise you would have found them in that energy regime. Well, I would say that if there's some kind of substance or thing that's driving our bodies, making my arms move and legs move, then it must interact with the particles out of which our bodies are made. And seeing as we've made high-precision measurements of the way that particles interact, then my assertion is that there can be no such thing as an energy source that's driving our bodies.

We should ask that. Has anyone had a haunting experience? Even when you were a child, Neil, something that you felt for a moment, you thought, I can't explain this. Oh, there's plenty of things that I encountered and couldn't explain, then I investigated them. So,

just because you are a scientist or a budding scientist doesn't mean you understand everything you encounter. Many things you don't understand, and what separates the gullible from the inquisitive is the inquisitive person explores

precisely what it is they don't understand to try to come to understand it and so i've yet to really find a phenomenon that has defied my complete knowledge of physics and math and astrophysics so yeah but in that moment there's a mystery yeah it's kind of fun and i can i that allows me to understand and even embrace the urge that people have to want there to be this deep mystery, such as ghosts of ancestors and this sort of thing. I have a soft spot for what that psychological state is, because I felt that intermittently,

except, as I said, I just kept exploring and getting the answer. And I did. Deborah, do you think... I mean, you're editor of The Skeptic magazine, and even as a sceptic, there can be those moments where perhaps you've had a couple of drinks, you've realised there's a shortcut going across the graveyard, and exactly when you're halfway from either wall,

then you see one of those graves that's shaped a little bit like a nun, and very briefly you believe there's a kind of a ghost of a nun there, and then you run away from the ghost nun. Oh, it's been all singing and dancing. It's been far worse than that. and very briefly you believe there's a ghost of a nun there and then you run away from the ghost nun. Oh, it's been all singing and dancing. It's been far worse than that. First of all, when I grew up, I believed in all this stuff because my aunties were mad and... Yeah, I grew up under the influence of a load of mad old bats

and also I... I presume they don't listen to Radio 4, they're not around anymore. I mean that in the kindest way. And I also suffer from a condition called sleep paralysis, which is a harmless little sleep blip. If you get it, it really doesn't hurt you, but it happens when you tend to sleep on your back, you're waking in your sleeping states, become confused,

and so you correctly identify your surroundings, but you can't move because you're paralysed because you would act out your dreams. And you get some intrusion of dream phenomena, so you can hallucinate. And it can be absolutely terrifying. Just a quick survey, actually. If you put your hands up in this room,

if you have ever experienced that. That's... Normally, it's between 15% and 40%. There's an awful lot of people have it, but because we have no language for it... I should say, there was about seven out of 200 on this occasion. Radio 4 audiences are notoriously shy. That's why they like to come... They would never come to a TV recording.

Too open. Radio recording, secret place. Who wants to be identified after the fact? Funny enough, one of the guys who wrote the classic book on the subject, a guy called David Hufford, went to Newfoundland because the community there had a vocabulary, they had a way of discussing it. And normally, for us, people don't say anything because they think that they'll be mistaken for being mad

or for being, you know, on their way to psychosis or something like that. But you can have the most peculiar experiences, and as well as all of the regulation, goblins and demons. I've also had Cadbury's Smash Robots. And on Saturday, I had a Cylon from Battlestar Galactica. So that is how I know... Can we all get this condition? That's how I know it's not a real supernatural condition.

I'm glad they were regulation goblins. Mark, have you... Someone who, of course, has used his imagination to scare the jeebers. Something very strange happened to me once, and I'd like to tell you about it. Well, I want desperately to believe, not in the continuation of the spirit, because I don't believe in it, but I want

I think I've said this before, Robin, the problem with it to me is that every bit of the language you try and describe feels like it's coming from science fiction. So I want to believe in the notion of something being impressed in time, or some kind of replay, and it's kind of what Nigel Neill was always writing about.

And it's a very attractive idea that somehow bits of the past might replay themselves, and it might be just something we don't understand yet, and I really want to believe that. But I did actually once have a very strange experience, which I cannot explain, and I'd like to tell you about now. Many years ago, I was living in a squat in Leeds. I was in Leeds the other week, and I was in Leeds 6.

I haven't been back to the Hyde Park Picture House for 25 years, and I thought, I lived in that street, I lived in that street, I lived in that street. And anyway, one of the places I was living, I had a friend who was renting a room in Archery Road, the top floor of this Victorian house. And he was going away for the summer holidays for three months. And he said, do you want to stay in my room? And it was obviously a step up from the squat, because I have a history. a step up from the squat, because I have a history.

And I was thrilled, obviously. So I moved into this house, and it was like June, July, and it was the top of the house, and nobody else there. And I remember distinctly going out for the day and coming back, and I opened the door to this room, and it felt like a hundred people had been in the room. And then as I came in, they just all disappeared. It was sort of charged.

I remember, and it might, maybe it was just because it was stuffy, but it really made an impression on me. And then a couple of nights later, it was so hot, I just slept on top of the bed. And I woke up in the middle of the night, and all the lights were on, the radio was on, and it was so cold, I could see my breath in the air. And this is absolutely true. I cannot explain it.

And I was really quite shaken by it. And I rang my friend Roger the next day, and he must have picked up something in my voice. He said, are you all right? I said, I didn't sleep very well. And he said, have you seen it yet? I said, what do you mean? He said, I think it might be haunted. I said, I think it might be as well. And then the next few months when he came back, there were lots of strange little things. We found someone who'd lived in the room before, who'd had a feeling they were being watched. Someone who lived downstairs and the room was empty

and they used to try and revise in it, but they couldn't stay for the same reason. They felt like someone was looking at them. And then I moved to Bristol and I remember ringing Roger at one night and he said, you won't believe what's happened. And he'd had a dinner party just because he was about to leave Leeds.

And there was this guy at the dinner party and he said, can I have a look around the house? leave Leeds. And there was this guy at the dinner party. And he said, can I have a look around the house? He said, yeah. And they were just between courses or something. And he went straight upstairs, this was without any prompting, to the top floor. And he came back downstairs and he said,

has anything strange happened? And Roger said, what do you mean? And he said, there was someone waiting on the threshold of that room. And they're still there. That's obviously, I've now modified that. That's the story, but that's what happened to me. And I don't know what it was. I love that line, waiting on the threshold of the room.

And they're still there, that's the good bit. Nick, what about you? Have you had an experience where just for a while you thought, hang on a minute, I'm not meant to have these... Well, I think reality is actually much more multilayered than we often realise. And, you know, what we're talking about here is how you interpret some of those things. But, you know, real human experience is real,

whether you put it down to, you know, chemistry or other dynamics. And, yeah, you know, I've... I remember being locked in a room in Lancaster at a conference centre with a guy who was, you know, you might want to say was mentally ill. But when stuff starts moving around the room and there's only two of you in there and there's stuff going on

and it's... I mean, I didn't feel scared or anything. I just thought, well, this is odd. I didn't think too much about it afterwards. You know, I was just glad to be alive. Why didn't you think about it afterwards? If stuff is moving around on its own accord, you just didn't think about it afterwards?

That would preoccupy me for years. Well, it might do, but, you see, I think this is part of the issue. I mean, you know, I was saying to someone recently, perception is as real as reality. It becomes a reality. And so how people experience things is one thing. How they then articulate or try to interpret it is another. And that's where it becomes open to interest.

It's like we have a perception of democracy as opposed to living in one. See, because Neil's right, because I think I would love to see something like that, because then it does require a significant modification to the laws of nature as we understand them. If people can move things around, if that's possible, by thought or something like that...

The most likely explanation, as you said, is it's something to do with perception. But if it really is the case that a glass of water flies up into the air without any action, then that requires us to rewrite the laws of nature. So that would be... This is Nobel Prize winning stuff. I think both myself and you... I'll be all up in that situation.

Can I give an example, Brian, back to your point? I have a niece. No, a second cousin-niece or whatever. A couple times removed. Whose father died. Okay? And she was alone with her father in the viewing at the funeral parlor. And so the casket's open.

She was alone sitting next to him, and she tells me, flat-footed, she tells me she had a conversation with him, with her dead father. And rather than just be all sceptic, right, I just, let me just ride this. And I said, well, what was it about? And he said to me, she's quoting,

he said to me, don't worry, I'm fine, I'm in a better place. And it was this kind of innocuous conversation. So I said to her, I said, all right, next time this happens, here are the questions you ask, okay? Where are you? Are you cold? Are you wearing clothes? Is anyone else there?

I mean, just start getting physical information about it. Because if you actually have access to the other side, that's an important moment. You don't just say, oh, we're all happy. No, make that a science experiment. I think this is the basic problem, is all of this data collection isn't done under controlled circumstances.

Therefore, it does represent genuine human experience, an out-of-body experience as an experience, but it doesn't necessarily mean the consciousness has left the body. So I would be more inclined to believe these things if we could replicate them under controlled circumstances. How important is it? What Darren Brown says about an extraordinary thing requires extraordinary evidence.

Not just any old evidence, but there's nothing. There's hardly anything. No, and I was going to ask, in terms of Mark's story, how important is environment? Because it sounds perfect, doesn't it? The upper floor of an old Victorian house in Leeds. Oh, there it is! Leeds, creepiest place on earth of course and um i think environment plays an enormous part there has certainly been several studies which have been done to suggest that it does there was one

experiment done by professor richard wiseman for example in hampton court and uh they um they sent a load of people off to collect different stories about the ambient atmosphere and what they picked up. And basically the people who believed in ghosts to begin with came back with ghosty stories, and people who were interested in tapestries came back with observations about the tapestries. And so it seems very much as though we... Well, we know this from so much work in cognitive science

that we kind of see what we expect to see. Why do you think it is, though? I mean, especially in the last 20 years, psychic mediums in the UK and the US seem to have become... It's a profitable enterprise. Because you can monetise it over the internet. But why do people still...

Sometimes a lot of evidence builds up and it turns out that maybe there is a psychic medium who's a little bit scurrilous and might not be talking to the dead. And when the evidence has built up enough, the reaction generally seems to be, oh, I'd better find another psychic medium. So have you, in terms of your sceptic study, found to be the reasons that

people will go i really want to keep believing that this communication can happen i really think that believing in the supernatural is a default set for human beings i mean it takes a great deal of education out of that you've really got to know some very precise stuff i tend to deal more in history than in the present environment. And what I would say about the historical scenarios that I study is it was utterly forgivable. People didn't have access to the concepts that we do. But, you know, it provides comfort, but it also plays into the way we work. We don't see the world as it really is. We see the world as it's useful to see it. There are all sorts of things I can't see.

I can't see infrared, I can't see ultraviolet, I can't perceive certain sounds, I can't see electrons. It doesn't mean they're not there. We work within a certain kind of closely registered bit of the universe, and it's the bit that keeps us alive. And sometimes we'll be oversensitive to some parts. I mean, you only get to ignore a tiger once, after all. So we are enormously attuned to movement and to faces,

and it's why Jesus turns up in so many bits of toast. And tortillas. And tortillas. And so I think the mistake is to think that we really see the world as it is. We don't. Does the church have a position on ghosts, a sort of official position? On toast.

On Jesus on toast? No. On ghosts. Because, obviously, you hear of exorcism, for example, which some churches practise. Yeah. Does the church have a position on it? I mean, I think Christian theology says that reality goes beyond

what you can simply measure and what you can see and what is. This is why I think we've talked before about how science, if you like, can address the questions of how and what, but I don't think it can address the questions of why, you know, the meaning questions. So reality and experience have to go beyond simply what you can measure and what you can see. You know, your question was a long way from that. It was, does the church have a view on ghosts? I think the church takes seriously that there is,

or Christian theology takes seriously, that there is a huge dimension beyond what is simply physical. Can I address something you said? Our five biological senses are, by modern standards of scientific measurement, some of the most feeble data-taking devices there ever was. And so, when a person says, I have a sixth sense,

and they're the life of the party, I can walk in as a scientist, I say, I have a dozen senses. As she just said, I have methods of detecting infrared, ultraviolet, x-rays, gamma rays, polarization, gravity vectors, ionizing radiation.

There's all manner of things going on around you that your senses are oblivious to. And science has access to them. So in the end, in science, it's never about the human sensory system, because it only really becomes science after you've replaced the human sensory system with an apparatus that can make an objective measurement. But except that human beings are involved in the measurement. No, no. So that changes the event. You can get sort of purely philosophical on it and go off the rails doing so. Allow me just to say that, yes,

I can have a device that measures infrared and reports that to me in a way that my senses have access. Yes, I get that. But I can set it up so that it reduces the likelihood that my senses will misinterpret what's happening. And all of science is about minimizing, if you can't get it to zero, at least reduce the chance that your senses are the only data-taking device around. And to

the extent that we have succeeded at that, that has produced the entire industrial revolution and all the modern things we enjoy and love and experience in modern life. So when someone says, oh, we admit some existence beyond your senses, I got that. And we don't find ghosts. So you now have to say, beyond our senses and beyond all the scientific apparatus that measures things that the human physiology cannot. So that makes it even less tenable to me that what you want or expect there to exist beyond someone's sensory experience

is some spirituality that is somehow beyond the access of our machines and tools yeah and i take that but i think at the end of that once you've said all that you're still left with the question of so why do we matter that's the distinction between the how and the what and the the why would you say neil then that if the technology with with levels of innovation we don't necessarily have the technology where we don't have it yet now, but everything in the universe That is available to our senses that we can detect would become measurable with advances in technology

With or without our senses we measure things so so I can I cannot assert and I will not assert I don't think Brian would even assert this that Everything that could possibly happen in the universe is accessible to our apparatus today or even tomorrow. I can't assert that. All I can say is the history of this exercise is one where any time someone thinks something spiritual is going on, however long that lasts, it succumbs, historically, it succumbs to the application of the methods and tools of science that decodes the thing that was previously spiritually presumed.

That's all I'm saying. So going forward, if I'm a betting person, what horse am I going to bet on? I'm going to bet on the methods and tools of science. What we can say, though, is that particle physics in particular is a high, high precision science. So we understand how the building blocks of matter that we see, the energies that are typical of how we live, we understand the interactions of those particles extremely well,

remarkable precision. I'll give you one example. The accelerator before the Large Hadron Collider, it's called LEP, the Large Electron Positron Collider. And that machine measured the mass of a particle called the Z boson, or Z boson. So precisely that we saw not only the effect of the moon in the sense that it was changing the tide level in late Geneva,

which was causing a slight bias on the measurement, but we also ended up seeing the TGV train leaving Geneva on its way to Paris in the mass measurement, the variations in the measurement of mass of this particle. And the joke at CERN was always that if that had been anywhere else in the world other than Switzerland, there would have been no correlation between the train timetable...

LAUGHTER But that level of precision that you see was essentially electrical current from the train leaking around, going through a river or something, getting into a bit of the apparatus and sort of changing the measurement slightly. But when you're talking about that level of precision in measurement, then you need a very, very strange and subtle interaction with matter

for us to have missed it. And that's the key point about particle physics. Mark, I wanted to ask you because I believe you have some interest in Sherlock Holmes. And looking at that, the objective versus the subjective, and Conan Doyle, of course, famously creates a detective who, with his use of empiricism, manages to make remarkable deductions. And yet Conan Doyle, as a human being, is interested in the Cottenley Fairies and later with spiritualism.

That kind of clash of creating a character who would seem to dismiss most of, or many of, Conan Doyle's later beliefs. Why do you think that is, that those two things could exist so vibrantly in his mind? He was an amazing man and a great mind and a great heart, a brilliant, brilliant writer, but also just an incredible sort of enthusiast with so many things. He did everything in his life.

He was a sort of war correspondent, a spy, an adventurer. He was a whaler, all kinds of things. And the really interesting thing is his spiritualism, which came quite late after the death of his son, which is usually the way these things happen, he allowed Professor Challenger to become a spiritualist, but never Sherlock Holmes. And despite the fact he disparaged Sherlock Holmes for his entire career,

he could never really understand why people liked him more than anything else. He never let Sherlock become a believer, which I'm rather proud of for him. But I don't know. I don't know how you can... I suppose you can distance your fictional creations and also whatever you believe in yourself, you don't actually have to inflict on everything you create.

But, yeah, it's an odd thing to think that someone... He was so taken in by the Cottingley Fairies, which from this distance, look, you can't believe anyone ever fell for it. But I think he just wanted to believe, which is what we're all talking about, isn't it? Really, that so much of what you perceive is because you want it to happen. What are the fairies? Oh, this is another episode, really.

In the 20s, these two schoolgirls in Yorkshire. It's always Yorkshire. I'm sorry. I'm a Scouser so can I just say that? Their father was an amateur photographer and they took these photographs of what they said were fairies

at the bottom of their garden. They had very sort of 20s haircuts and some people said, haven't they just been cut out of a magazine? But people believed it. And Conan Doyle was one of them. He was a great champion of it. It's an extraordinary case. It must say a lot about the human condition.

Nick was talking about this thing that emerges from us or whatever it is that we are. There is an enduring fascination with ghost stories. I mean, you spend a lot of your time writing about that. I love them. You don't have to believe to love them, and I think especially this time of year, we all know it's just correct, they go together.

Long winter evenings, firesides, spooky stories, it's a strange thing at Christmas, and yet it feels absolutely right. And it's because we have a need to tell them, I think. It's the more glee in them, I just wondered, because most of the people I know who love ghost stories don't really have many beliefs that might verge more towards the kind of mystical. So this is their one chance to go,

for 30 pages of an M.R. James story, I am now blowing a whistle that I shouldn't blow and bringing things forth. And that is... We still have a desire, however rational we may believe us, to just, for a while, go into the kind of the warm pool of strange ghosts. I mean, it's a sort of rollercoaster thrill, isn't it?

It's a comforting sort of scare, like all good scares. I think you feel like you do it for the right reason. But also it's something very deep in us, I think, to want to believe in these things for a little moment. But isn't it partly to do with, or tied up with

our understanding of mortality? There's something about the fact that from the moment we're born, we shall die. What? I'm sorry. We're blunt in Yorkshire, so I'm sorry to break it to you in that way. But it is something that some people have a vocabulary for and other people don't, but it goes deep into all of us. I mean why was there such um a big upsurge in the interest in the paranormal in the 1920s well we just had the first world war you know shed loads

of slaughter and therefore people um really wanting to dig a bit deeper about you know what well what's happened to these people why has our whole life been so ripped apart, and what does it say existentially for me about my existence and my life and my meaning? It can be snuffed out like that. So I think there's something about ghosts and ghost stories and hauntings and all of this that is tied up with something that we can't always articulate.

This is a very interesting thing. M.R. James is very hot on this, that ghosts need to be malevolent. Great ghost stories, for it to work, they need to be malevolent. Actually, of course, there are hundreds of stories about rather sad stories about ghosts or revenants of one kind or another, but the really effective ones, they are horrible. And that is a very important key to a ghost story working as opposed

to the idea of a ghost. Can I give my best argument against ghosts? If I may? Okay. So if you run the numbers you get, there's about anywhere between 70 and 100 billion human beings who have ever lived on Earth. So you subtract away everyone alive

today. So you're up 70, 80 billion. So that's actually ten ghosts for every living person today. So this would be a really crowded world. They don't all become ghosts, Neil. What? Yeah. Ghosts?

There are rules about this, Neil. Yeah, Neil. They've got unfinished business, they've lost their heads. I missed the ghost rule book. There are big rules, Neil. Why is the head... I've always wondered about that. Why is it when you lose your head, you become a ghost? That's just tradition.

I think workers, you have to come back for it, don't you? It's something to do with being separated. There's usually mythology about people who... Revenants, people who come back, are people who've died before their times. We don't seem to be very particularly accommodated to the idea that we have to die, but if we die when we're 70 or 80, all right then.

The categories of revenants that come back and have unfinished business and cause trouble for the living are people who've been cut off too early. Women who've died in childbirth, people who've died when they're very young. So the restless ghosts. Yeah, the restless ghosts. Suicides, people who've been executed.

So they turn up in the form that they were when they died. Brian, can I get geeky on you real quick? When you said people have lost their heads, I want to change that to say people have lost their bodies. That's actually a good point. Yeah, isn't it? I'm just getting geeky on it. Because if the mind is the contains who you are,

then it's off with your body, not off with your head. So final question for all of you is, if it does turn out that we are ghosts due to it's turned out there isn't an overpopulation problem, who would you come back and haunt? If you have one person to return to haunt, who would it be?

Oh, am I first? Whoever's got their first... Yeah, I don't know. I think I would haunt people in a positive way. I would go to famous people who had the power to do damage from their ignorance of science, go to famous people who had the power to do damage from their ignorance of science, and I would haunt them in ways

that will completely convert them to understanding the methods and tools. So you would be the ghost of Trump Tower. It's such a beautiful thing, though, going, I've come to tell you, believe in science, believe in empiricism. I realise there's a bit of a kind of paradox here. Bit of an issue. Deborah, do you have anyone that you're ready to haunt benevolently?

I can't really... Not benevolently, no. No, definitely not. I would have a bit of difficulty because I think if I was going to take the trouble to be a ghost, I'd want one of those nice frocks. You know, the medieval ghosts are a lot more pretty than the regular normal ghosts with jeans or leggings. You shouldn't have a ghost with jeans or leggings. So I think I would probably have to...

I think I'd have to make a mission for myself based on the aesthetics. Nick, I know this is not something that normally comes up at the General Synod, but... I think haunting would probably take too much effort and energy, so I'd probably say no, let them be. Ooh. Mark? I think, well, Christmas Carol, probably my favourite story, I think I'd do a similar thing.

I'd like to change someone's mind, like Scrooge, because I think that's a very positive thing for a ghost to do. Because it must be a bit dull. And you get a change of clothes. I've not checked the rule book recently. But, you know, sometimes you have to wear what you died in. It must get very boring. So that's why probably maybe ghosts become mischievous,

because they're a bit bored. But it would be nice to sort of redeem someone, wouldn't it, in that way? Otherwise everything else is too political, that's the problem. Because I think we're all thinking the same thing here. So we also asked the audience a question. We always ask the audience a question. And this time we've asked them, in fact, roughly the same thing. Who would you like to be haunted by, though, and why?

And we've removed Brian Cox, because that is normally the answer. So, what have you got, Brian? Who would you like to be haunted by who? The patch says a strawberry. It's an old monkey cage joke. To finally answer the question of whether it was alive and find out how it died. I have a young Harrison Ford, Blade Runner incarnation,

because you said I can't have Brian. They're very sciencey, these. Neil Armstrong, Miss Sophie. Is there a reason for Neil Armstrong? I mean, obviously, it would be great to be Neil Armstrong. Why, does he have some great stories to share? I like the idea that it's just an anecdotalist ghost. I've come to haunt you with stories of Apollo.

Richard Dawkins, to see his face when he realises... LAUGHTER That's us. Jesus, because if he turns up, I should have listened more to my RE teacher. And have you got any others there? Do you haven't followed the... No, I've not got very many, but...

John Lennon, why? Imagine. Can you tell me what these things are? Do you not have any? In the UK, we call them crackers. Oh, OK. Before you end it, I don't... What are these? They're called crackers, so you don't have any of these equivalent in the US?

In the United States, if you call something a cracker, you're not referring to anything like this. Well, Deborah, if you'd like to pull... No, with Neil, first of all, and they... And I believe we also have to put... Because this is the end of the... Crackers. Yes! Right. Crackers are basically...

You get a gist? There we go. I smell gunpowder. I think the reason that you don't have crackers in the US is because, of course, much of British culture is to constantly remind children that things can be disappointing. Crackers are part of that disappointment, so you in your optimistic way, what have you got?

What happened there? Well, there's something in here. Yes, there's a gift. There's a disappointing gift, a disappointing joke and a disappointing hat. Let's see. This is a travel sewing kit. Yeah, well, we knew you were away. Just what I always wanted for Christmas. Well, there's an even better one for you.

There's a false moustache, which you can wear. You can wear the false moustache over your own. Can I have anything? You haven't got anything, so let's make sure... I hate you. No, you still have a brush. There we go. Oh, you have a lucky crystal. You've been after one of those. I do.

So, thank you very much to our wonderful guests today. It'll be Mark Gatiss, Deborah Hyde, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bishop of Leeds, Nick Baines. APPLAUSE I, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Bishop of Leeds, Nick Baines. Now, we will be back for a new series in the new year when we'll be discussing science's biggest mistakes, the mathematics and psychology of puzzles, and real domestic science, the physics of everyday life. And until then, Brian will be returned to his moisturising oxygen tent

that they keep in CERN to keep him so young-looking, and I go back into a cupboard in some charity shop. So, happy New Year and goodbye. APPLAUSE In the infinite monkey cage In the infinite monkey cage In the infinite monkey cage Now nice again. 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.