The Infinite Monkey Cage - Improbable Science

Episode Date: November 26, 2012

Brian Cox and Robin Ince discuss some of the more unlikely and odd avenues of research travelled down in the name of science. For example, the British physicist who calculated the optimal way to dunk a biscuit into a cup of tea without it disintegrating too quickly. Or the brain researchers who demonstrated that they could detect meaningful brain activity... in a dead salmon. All these academics share something in common, not just a slightly quirky application of the scientific method. They have also been a recipient of the now infamous Ig Nobel prizes, awarded each year as a parody of the Nobel Prize, to research that seems at first glance, entirely improbable, and possibly pointless. Robin and Brian are joined on stage by the organiser of the Ig Nobels, Marc Abrahams, comedian Katy Brand and biologist Professor Matthew Cobb, from the University of Manchester, to ask whether all scientific exploration is valid, no matter how ridiculous it may seem at first glance, or whether there is genuinely something to be learned from observations that to many, may seem pointless. Producer: Alexandra Feachem Presenters: Robin Ince and Brian Cox.

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 with a small coffee all day long.

Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. This is a download from the BBC. To find out more, visit bbc.co.uk slash radio4. Hello, this is the Infinite Monkey Cage, but the Radio 4 announcer has probably already told you that, so four seconds into the show

and already we're wasting your time. So we will start off with Series 7's new catchphrase, Hey Brian, what is time? I'll give you Newton's definition. Newton said, absolute true and mathematical time of itself and from its own nature flows equably without regard to anything external. So there we go, that's time defined.

That's most of the series covered there. Although that's incorrect. It was subsequently replaced by Einstein's special theory of relativity. That's right, it doesn't have to be correct. We're an entertainment science show, not a proper one, so facts don't need to get in the way of conversation. And as you will discover over the ensuing 27 minutes...

Tonight, we're going to be looking at the cutting edge of improbable scientific research. We'll be asking if all scientific research, however ridiculous it seems, is worthwhile. We'll be examining papers published in peer review journals. Papers such as... Walking with coffee, why does it spill? From Physical Review E, volume 85.

Colonic gas explosion during therapeutic colonoscopy during electrocautery. Yeah, think about that one and what that does in terms of... We're joined by a panel of experimenters and researchers. Matthew Cobb is a professor of zoology. He's currently researching how maggots with a limited number of olfactory sensors

are able to detect the variety of aromas that they can, and hence the popular joke joke which we all remember, my maggot has only 21 olfactory receptors, how does it smell? We're not entirely certain at the moment, we're looking into it. Mark Abrahams is the editor and co-founder of the Annals of Improbable Research, which collects seemingly bizarre research and every year awards the Ig Nobel Prize for such insights

as Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller. That won the psychology prize this year. And the literature prize, this is my favourite, it went to a US government general accountability office for their report, Actions Needed to Evaluate the Impact of Efforts to Estimate Costs of Reports and Studies. Which I thought the citation was superb.

The citation said it was awarded for issuing a report about reports about reports, which recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports. May I point out what you were just doing now? You were giving everybody in the room here a report about the report about reports about reports and so on. Comedian and writer Katie Brand has pioneered research into just how socially awkward it is to come face-to-face with Lily Allen and Kate Winslet

after doing rude impersonations of Lily Allen and Kate Winslet on late-night television. Last time she was on Monkey Cage, she eloquently defended the notion that there are elements of the human condition which will be forever inaccessible to scientific research. Despite this hideous faux pas, we've invited her back. And this is our panel.

Thank you. our panel. Well, we sort of... Mark, first of all, we'd better find out what the Ig Nobel Prizes are. Obviously, we've suggested some of the kind of papers that get looked at by you in research, and those that may well win as well. But what is the philosophy behind the Ig Nobel Prizes?

These are prizes we've given every year since 1991. We give ten of them. And unlike every other prize I know of, every other prize I know of is either for the very best of things or some of them for the very worst of things. With us, best and worst are completely irrelevant. With us, there's one criterion.

It's you've done something that makes people laugh and then think, something that when people first encounter it, it's funny. It just is. And then a week later, it's still rattling around in your head. And all you want to do, no matter what you're supposed to be doing, all you want to do is find your best friend and tell them about it. I believe that someone won for... There was a specific piece of bra design, wasn't there, which...

Yeah, that was Dr Elena Bodnar, who invented a brassiere that in an emergency can be quickly separated into a pair of protective face masks. One for you and one for a lucky bystander.

I happen to be wearing one right now. But which member of the panel should I save? Great. Please, nobody say I could save more than one. Thank you. But that, like all the other winners, there's more to the story, a lot more.

And in her case, she was and is a doctor. She grew up in Ukraine. She treated victims of the Chernobyl power plant meltdown. And over the years, she'd been wondering what might have been done differently to save lives. Most of the medical problems at Chernobyl, they later realized, came from the particles in the air that people breathed in. So she kept thinking if there was some simple thing that was everywhere so that in an emergency, something you don't expect, it's right there and you can put it over your face.

And at least for a few minutes, it'll do. I really like this invention because it will force employers to make sure that at least 50% of the workforce is female in order to save everybody in the building. Katie, I suppose that there's some members of the public, I suspect, think that all scientific research is perhaps like this, in some sense.

It sounds that all of it can tend to sound ridiculous, in a way. I mean, you know, even mine. Do you do some manner of scientific research, Brian? Even that I used to. Yeah. Yeah, no, I think there's an element of truth to that.

I suppose that when you just peruse the science coverage in whatever paper you read, it sometimes can seem so specific and narrow that I guess all scientific research can seem sort of vaguely amusing to people. Because that's what I feel like, that, you know, if I read one particular type of research, I might find it fascinating, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to plug it into the kind of matrix of the sort of macro perspective of what's really going on.

So I just end up with lots of very strange and specific pockets of knowledge that I cannot relate to each other at all. Yeah, I mean, that reflects very badly on me, but I certainly enjoy myself. I was going to say, actually, Matthew, I'm looking at the Ig Nobels this year. Most of them do seem to be biological. The coffee one wasn't, was it? That was a physicist.

Yeah, it was actually the Fluid Dynamics Prize, I think, wasn't it? Yes, yes. And the Ponytails one also was about physics. The Ig Nobel Physics Prize this year went to two groups, one of them British, the other American. One group had looked at the physics of ponytails. Why are they shaped the way they are? And there's a lot of physics behind that.

You may remember reading in the papers when that came out, there was some talk about some specific name that they had come up with for the Rapunzel number, which is characteristic. The other group had looked at a different aspect of ponytails. If you walk behind somebody who's walking or jogging, someone who has a ponytail, why does it have the kind of motion it does? Why is it... The thing that got this guy started was... He was wondering, why is it that the person's head is going up and down but the ponytail is going from side to side? What is the physics of that? Which turned out to be rather curious.

And then that guy was done for stalking, wasn't he? It's very unfortunate. I'm a researcher. I'm just looking at your hair oh this is even worse the paper's called shape of a ponytail and the statistical physics of hair fiber bundles see but is that matthew is there a certain battle to actually get to the point of research where we find out that there is an application to this you know the ponytail researchers said all of these things have beneath them proper science, and there is a real reason to understand them.

And perhaps the public can sometimes say, oh, I'll give scientists all this money, and they're just too loud about rubbish. Well, they don't, because they're also thinking we're curing cancer and we're doing all that stuff, which, so, you know, there's that contradiction. People assume, on the one hand, we're doing this terribly important research,

which is going to make us all live longer, and the rest of it. And on the other hand, we're studying ponytails or maggots or levitating frogs or doing stuff like that. I'll stop you there. Levitating frogs. Well, there's a very interesting point here, actually, Mark, because levitating frogs, it's a reference to a colleague of mine at Manchester, Andre Geim, who I think is the only person

to have won both an Ig Nobel Prize and a Nobel. Andre Geim in the year 2000 was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in physics. He and Michael Berry jointly, because they used magnets to levitate a frog. Ten years later, Andre Geim was awarded a Nobel Prize in physics, not for the frog work. That is disappointing. You really want it to be.

To put it most graphically, he won that prize because he took a pencil and scribbled on some paper, took a piece of sticky tape, put it on the scribbling, and then he flexed the tape over and over, and then threw it away, and then realized there might be something

valuable there, got it out of the trash, and discovered that he had come up with the first reliable method to make a substance or get samples of a substance called graphenes, the two-dimensional form of carbon, you know, one atom thick. It's a sheet, and people had known for a long time this exists in nature, but they could never tease apart these sheets. In a pencil, that's what you have, that grey stuff, the so-called lead, is graphite. It's just layers and layers of this stuff, but it's so tight together that nobody could tease apart two things until Andre Geim played with his sticky tape

and threw it away and picked it up. Yeah, and he emphasised, I think in his Nobel speech, that science is about curiosity, about a playful exploration of the universe in many ways and i suppose that's the well i should ask you the question but is that the point of the the nobels are one of the points that you're you're you're encouraging a an exploration of the universe for its own sake it doesn't matter whether you're levitating frogs or discovering in this case graphene which is probably one of the most important materials of the 21st century yeah um improbable to me means it's not what you expect

and again that to me doesn't mean it's good or it's bad it's just you don't expect it you probably don't know what to make of it and the basic question of scientific research why do people do it what are they doing? If you throw away the fancy words, anybody who's doing research is just trying to understand something nobody else has managed to understand. This could include how you interact with your kids or your spouse or anything, but that's all they're trying to do, is understand something that nobody else has managed to.

So, Matthew, going back to levitating frogs, this is, I mean, that is, Matthew, going back to levitating frogs, the... This is... I mean, that is, again, that's a piece of research that when you first see it, if you see the headline about that, you just think, oh, there we go, there's some scientists just mucking about and we're giving them money. Can you tell us a little bit about that research?

I think he just got a frog because it was alive. He wasn't actually about frogs. It's about the levitation. It's a quantum mechanical effect. There you go. So it's the quantum mechanical effect using living things. But they don't have to be living things. They also levitated drops of water and dead strawberries. No, I want to ask Matthew. I'm interested in this.

Because what qualifies as strawberries being dead? It's dying, I guess. As soon as you pick a strawberry, it's dying. But one of the reasons why what we like is like with meat, when it hangs and it's gradually decaying, it's going to taste nicer. Similarly with fruit, as it decays, it's going to increase its

sugar content and then eventually it's going to become disgusting. But it's dying. I should ask Katie, actually. You're a theologian, aren't you? You did a theology degree, right? I did do a theology degree, yes. When does the soul of a strawberry leave? If I can put it in those terms.

Well, there wasn't much call on the theology course I was on for investigating the soul of a strawberry. I know in your mind, Brian, that is what all theology is. It's the same thing. It's trying to attribute souls to any old thing but um no I mean I'm happy just to eat strawberries and not give them a second thought. I don't uh it seems to me to be a much more religious thing to try and levitate a strawberry. So why did you call it a dead strawberry? Is that important?

Why did you call it a living frog? Because it was alive. Yeah. I've not had a satisfactory definition of when a strawberry's alive when it stops growing isn't it when it's not able to grow or give any sign of doing things

it's changing colour so you pick them and they can still you buy those things in the supermarket that are going to ripen in the bowl, which never do and they're always really hard. But those ripen in the bowl things, they're changing, but that's, I guess, part of a decay. So no longer respiring.

I mean, from your point of view, there is localised negative entropy is breaking down. And that's life. Now, that I understand. Are you seriously saying... You should see what he's like when he looks at the sell by date of something, but what does this mean in terms of the entropy of this cheese

Schrodinger in his famous 1943 book What is life defined life, one of the ways he defined it is something that resists the second law of thermodynamics essentially so it's something that resists the tendency of the universe to disorder.

But it's not quite as simple as that, because your fridge does that as well. And you don't think your fridge is that. Now that you've raised the topic of food, do you mind if I mention the paper that, to me, is the most unfathomable that I've run across? Its study, it was done by an academic, it was published in 1972, 75, something like that, by an American in the state of Connecticut.

And the title of this study is something very close to Racial Preferences for Cheese Color. That's an accurate title. It's a short report. It's a page long. The person who wrote it, and I tried to find more about this person. I could not find another thing this person did or even find this person's name anywhere other than this one sparkling report.

She went to a supermarket, set up a table with samples of two kinds of cheese, American cheese. One of these samples of cheese was white American cheese. The other is yellow, and they taste the same. Everybody knows they taste the same. And she had people with blindfolds test that. And then she simply put up a sign saying, come get some cheese. And everybody who came up, she noted down what race they were. And she noted down, are they white? Are they black? Or the other category she chose was Hispanic. And her report is simply a count of how many white people choose white cheese, how many white people choose yellow cheese, how many black people choose white cheese, how many black people choose yellow cheese, how many black people choose white cheese, how many black people choose yellow cheese, and the same

with Hispanics. And that's the whole report. There's no explanation of why she did it. There's no explanation of what she thinks it might mean, let alone what it does mean. It's just the numbers. What was the, did she tot up all the... She had none. Well, her conclusion was the she tot up all the... Her conclusion was the numbers. What were the numbers? More white people choose white cheese than black people who choose white cheese.

Really? And I forget where Hispanics came up. And I should say that I've done a lot of digging, and as far as I can tell, no-one has disputed this. LAUGHTER Actually, this sort of thing could bring science into disrepute. Interesting, we don't usually play clips, but I think this is illustrative of how people can get the wrong end of the stick.

Now, we chose a completely unbiased example, so we chose Sarah Palin speaking about science in the way that only she can. Some of these pet projects, they really don't make a whole lot of sense, and sometimes these dollars, they go to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not. Can I just say, I think Sarah Palin would probably consider

the cheese experiment to be very much in the public good. That's the irony here, isn't it? Well, Matthew, I think that's an interesting clip because fruit fly research sounds like something that should be considered for an Ig Nobel Prize. But, of course, it isn't. Absolutely. I mean, it sounds completely daft. And some of the research that is done does sound rather surreal.

So, for example, finding clocks in flies. I mean, it sounds like something very strange. But this is really important work that now enables us to understand why when we go abroad and travel to America, we get jet lag is all to do with our biological clocks. And that work was all started on fruit flies by an American called Seymour Benzer,

who decided he was going to actually try and understand the differences in behaviour that you get between individuals. So Mark was saying earlier on about the motivations, why people do research. His was he'd had a first child and he knew what that child was like and then he had a second child. And before the child was born, he could only imagine it was going to be just like the first one.

Of course, it wasn't. It was completely different. And so he thought, well, why are these two individuals so different? And he decided to study the genetic basis of behaviour. And so he chose to use the fruit fly, which first started to be used at the beginning of the 20th century and so he then tried to look at quite complicated things like biological clocks like learning things that you'd think were you couldn't actually study in something so small so what did he take a load of fruit flies on a weekend to new york or something see what time they woke up in the morning and not like you know how tired they were by about five o'clock nearly nearly he gave them some nasty mutagens some nasty chemicals to drink they worked out the flies show an active time

their weight just before the lights come on they start to move around and you can track this using infrared beams and so they knew the rhythm of the fly's clock and a bit like ours the flies will get entrained to a 24-hour cycle turn the lights off and they gradually drift to about a 25-hour cycle so that same thing if you these people do experiments where they live in caves for weeks on ends with no lights they end up on a slightly different time this is the thing i don't quite understand because because you could quite clearly see that in people going for a weekend to New York. So why do you need the fruit flies? Or are you sending people for weekends to New York

in order to understand the fruit flies better? You need to know how it works. What's the clock made of? Because you haven't got bits of clockwork. So they fed their flies this horrible chemical, and then they did this experiment in 1971, and they showed that they were able to change a single gene, one single gene in these flies, and they made flies that either had a clock that ran very fast,

a clock that ran very slow, or a clock that was broken completely. And this was, so this is, what, 40 years ago now, and it's the basis of all our understanding now of biological clocks. It's got the same genes working in us, in all of us. And they've even found a familial genetic disease where people wake up very, very early. Used to be my children, but they seem to have changed as they got older. They don't do that anymore.

So when you wake families that wake up incredibly early, they have exactly the same mutation as the fruit flies that run on a very, very quick clock. So it's an example of incredibly conserved biology telling us something fundamental about how a biological process affects all of us, and it's all found by a rather madman working on fruit flies. There's a reason why he used fruit flies, though, too.

As you said, they have much the same machinery inside them, but they reproduce so fast that you can watch this happen again and again through many, many generations, which you couldn't do if you were doing this with people. So you can see it happen so many times that if there's a pattern, you're going to spot it reliably. See, Matthew, how do you...

I mean, that Sarah Palin clip, we can kind of go, ha-ha, she doesn't know about the experiments that are done on flies and how regularly this is done now when we're looking at different kind of mutations and genes. But the gut reaction for many people would be, you know, the narcissistic way of human beings. Why are they experimenting on flies? Why aren't they doing things about human beings?

Yes. How do we cut... They're not only doing it on flies, they're doing it in Paris, France. Paris, France, yeah. A lot of those flies and those people are my friends because I used to work in Paris, France, and I knew a lot of the fly people who worked there. And I think the way you explain... I thought you called them the fly people.

They are, that's what they're called, the fly people. No, they're just flies. No, they're fly people. I'm joking, I'm joking. You speak to them, it's all right, as long as they don't speak back to you. It's when they speak back to you, you've got to start worrying. I know, I get that from a lot of scientists.

Putting out the dead strawberries to attract them. Yeah, exactly. That's how you capture a theologian. A trail of dead strawberries. We've not defined whether they're alive or dead yet. I object to this. Look, I'll tell you what, we'll put the strawberry in a box and we won't observe it and it can be both.

This might be... This might be my route. But we're not going back to strawberries. We're trying to deal with flies. I love the idea of having a Schrodinger's strawberry. The whole of Wimbledon changes. Robin, I bet you if you leave it in the box for quite a long time,

the odds of it being alive or dead are going to change. No, according to the accident. Sorry, Brian, do you want to go back to the strawberries or can we move on to the flies? I'm thinking about how you'd write down the wave function of a strawberry. When are you not thinking about the wave function? I've never looked at you without thinking.

I know he's thinking of some wave function. They're diffracting. They've got a wavelength. It's a de Broglie wavelength. It's proportional to the mass. Go on, carry on. French nobleman, de Broglie. Jimmy de Broglie.

Paris, France again. Paris, France. Great place. Matthew, so we've had a lot of, I suppose, examples of science that sounds ridiculous but actually can be tremendously useful for our research and also you said the discovery of graphene, which might revolutionise the 21st century. Is there a place where the line is drawn, should be drawn?

Is there anything that's too ridiculous to be scientific? I suppose I'm asking questions like, what is the definition of science? What makes it not science, but just silliness? Well, I think that there are some apparently unscientific things that are really interesting. One of the prizes this year was one for the people who put the dead salmon in the MRI scan and they showed brain activity in a dead salmon. I think that's absolutely fantastic.

So on the one hand, it seems really wacky. Why on earth would you put a dead fish in an MRI scan? It sounds like a lunchtime thing, doesn't it? Well, yeah. Or late at night. Maybe they stuck it for the microwave. They wanted to heat it up. It's got lunchtime thing, doesn't it? Or late at night. Maybe they stuck it for the microwave. They wanted to heat it up. It's got a big thing. Whereas, in fact, that was really important

because it was kind of a negative control because I suspect that they imagined that the dead fish wouldn't have any activity in its brain, and yet they actually got a recording out of it. So this showed that their methods, their statistics they were using for identifying, you know, lighting up in the brain were in fact erroneous. And that's a really important kind of silly but very sensible discovery as well. Have they done strawberries?

I don't know. I've been thinking, as you've all been talking, about the crossover between science and art. And the more you describe science as just being done not necessarily for trying to find anything out or to advance anything but just merely for its own sake and for the joy of doing something sounds to me like a lot like art that's what artists do and I and I it reminded me what you're just saying of a story that I read recently that was about an artist who had recorded the songs of crickets in a particular

area I think in near Norfolk or Cambridge or something and had slowed them down so that you could hear the individual songs that all the crickets were singing and then had broadcast it in this tube that he had created which meant that you could walk through and not be disturbed in any of your other senses and just listen to this very, very slowed down sounds of the cricket singing. And people who have done it have reported that they are singing in tune, that they're singing in harmony, that they are creating melodies that you can actually hear when you slow it right down. And I just wondered, do you think that's art, or do you think that's science, or do you just think that's silly? I can suggest there's a difference between those two worlds.

That if it's science or it is science, if when you start out, you have something in mind that you might learn from doing this. Why am I doing this research? Because it might tell me something. There's some question I have in mind that I might learn. You know, this works, this doesn't. It's big, it's small, whatever it is. And art, you don't need a specific question. You just do it. Obviously, we want our panel to leave with further work to get on with,

so we've asked our audience, what would you like to be researched that some may think of as pointless? And we have your entries here. This one's a good one. it just says, Art History. That's really true. Brian Cox's hair. How on earth is it so perennially dazzling? There we are, that's Mac.

The correlation between episodes watched of Downton Abbey and membership of the Socialist Workers' Party, that one. Here's one. Why is bacon so brilliant? And I think that refers to Francis Bacon. That's what we were going to have a show called The Great British Bacon Off, in which it was which Francis, the painter or the scientist?

You decide. And Richard Bacon would decide, and it didn't get... And then an actual bacon sandwich, which would probably win every time, wouldn't it? Well, let's see how that works. Daniel, in the audience, were you referring to the philosopher Bacon, the artist Bacon or Bacon? All of them.

Why are Bacon so brilliant, then? LAUGHTER An English lesson from the physicist. Thanks to our guests, Katie Brand, Matthew Cobb and Mark Abrahams. Thank you very much for listening. Goodbye. Bye. Thank you. To find out more, visit bbc.co.uk slash radio4. 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 podcast you