The Infinite Monkey Cage - Is Cosmology Really a Science?

Episode Date: June 20, 2011

Robin Ince and Brian Cox are joined on stage by V for Vendetta author and legendary comic book writer Alan Moore, cosmologist Ed Copeland, and science broadcaster Dallas Campbell to ask whether Cosmology is really a science? Do scientific theories need to be testable to make them, well - scientific? And if so, where does that leave some of the more mind-bending theories that Cosmology has postulated over the last few years? From String Theory to the idea of multiple universes, the maths might work, but if there is no way of observing whether it is correct, is it science or science fiction? Does Cosmology have more in common with the fantastical stories dreamt up by fiction writers such as Alan Moore, and will science ever progress enough to really get to the bottom of some of the more weird and wonderful theories about the way our universe works? This programme was recorded as part of the Cheltenham Science Festival.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 a download from the BBC. To find out more, visit bbc.co.uk slash Radio 4. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. And I'm Robert Ince, and we are here at the Cheltenham Science Festival 2011.

For some people, Cheltenham is best known as being the birthplace of the electric light, the creation of the internal combustion engine, the discovery of the double helix, the birthplace of the electric light, the creation of the internal combustion engine, the discovery of the double helix, the birthplace of quantum electrodynamics and general relativity, and the home of both Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. When I say for some people, they are two people, the authors of How Everything Was Created in Cheltenham,

a book which has been largely discredited over the last few years. The good news today is that our discussion may have philosophical overtones, and as regular listeners will know, Brian Cox loves philosophy. Yes. Today I'm going to approach ideas about the nature of the universe with a logical positivist approach,

though I cannot rule out that I won't occasionally look at this from a deontological perspective using a Kantian approach. I did not write any of this, and I have no idea what I'm talking about at all. Stay classy, Cheltenham Spa. Told you they'd get that one. Today, today we ask, is cosmology really a science?

It's a ludicrous title that has nothing to do with me at all. Of course it's a science. So that's basically the end of the show. That is, is cosmology a science? Yes. If you would like to go further than merely the yes or no answer, then you can keep listening for 26 minutes. To help us come to a conclusion, we have three guests. Our first guest decided to avoid a midlife crisis,

choosing instead to go completely insane and declare he was a wizard. Author of Watchmen, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and publisher of Dodgem Logic, it is Alan Moore. Our next guest lived in the same street as Alan Moore, though we haven't merely booked him to give him a lift home after the show, though that would be helpful, Dallas. He is the only person we've ever had on the panel

to have worked with Jimmy Nail, but has since moved on to popularised science with the excellent BBC series, Bang Goes the Theory. It is Dallas Campbell. Our final guest works on constraining particle physics and smite models of inflation and dark energy in the universe using observational data.

Robin, data. Formerly chair of Sussex University Physics and Astronomy Department and now head of Nottingham University's particle theory group, Professor Ed Copeland. And this is our panel. Ed, we'll start with you, because for a lot of people, when they hear the word cosmology, I'm not entirely sure they know what it is. Some people may well be thinking of astronomy, astrophysics,

and many, many other studies of the universe. What defines cosmology? It's a well-defined topic. It's our universe. That's it. So that's all it is. It's only just the universe. In particular, I suppose it's the understanding of the large scale features of our universe So today the large scale features are on scales bigger than say a galaxy And going all the way up then to the edge of our observable universe

And then maybe as we'll go on perhaps into the world of many universes We may broaden it But the special thing about cosmology Which really means that it can interact with particle physics, which is the physics of the very small, is that our universe is evolving. It's getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So earlier on, it was smaller and smaller and smaller.

So each day, if I go a day before and a day before and a day before, I'm studying smaller regions. And if I go all the way back to about 13.7 billion years ago, I'm studying the world of particle physics. So cosmology, although it studies the large-scale features of the universe, because it's the whole evolution of our universe, it actually studies all length scales. So it sort of is studying all length scales, all time scales,

therefore it's everything alan it's uh everything cosmology the study of everything but it is one of those areas that seems to lend itself to i suppose a more a more mystical approach you say where's the universe come from what is the fate of the universe it's one of those crossover areas in a way i suppose isn't it i think you're prompting me to claim that my glove puppet, second-century Roman snake god, created the universe, but I'm not going to fall for that, Brian. But you do think that. Yes, I do think that, but I'm not going to say it on a radio show.

I think that, I mean, cosmology is fantastic, mainly because of the extraordinary ideas that it allows us to at least believe for a little while until a better idea comes along. And given that cosmology is talking about things that are very far away in some instances or are kind of ambiguous, then there's a lot of room for coming up with some marvellously crackpot theories,

including my own, that a glove puppet created everything. I shall have the book out soon, and you'll hear about it then. Dallas, this idea that, well, it seems there's an innate human desire to explain things such as origins. Many, most cultures perhaps

share this, if not all. I think probably all cultures. I mean, the human brain is hardwired for curiosity. We're hardwired to observe things. We're hardwired to figure out how it all works. And yeah, we can go back in time and I think every point in history there has been an attempt to try and understand

cosmology. We have to make the difference between cosmology the science and cosmology as in ancient world views. The ancient Egyptians had all sorts of ideas sort of marble tables and the stars hanging up from threads. You can imagine the ancients looking up in the sky and seeing these pinpoints of light,

and it's quite a natural thing to join the dots and make little pretty pictures and sort of come up with some ideas. Do you remember that bit? There's a bit in Life, Universe and Everything. There was the planet Cricket. Do you remember that? So the planet Cricket, they had no cosmology because their whole planet was shrouded in dust, and it had never occurred to them to look up nobody had ever looked looked up before and they were the very peace

loving people and then one day one of them noticed a crashed spaceship and they went hang on a sec and suddenly someone tilted their head up and looked up and realized the universe was out there and they went oh no that'll have to go to go. And then declared war on the entire universe. So yeah, we like to know what's going on. I mean, the cool thing is now we've got this fantastic tool called science, which reigns in our imagination to a point. And even though there are things in modern cosmology that we don't know, lots of things are observable and we're sort of honing into something that is closer to truth than the earth on a stack of turtles.

Ed, keeping on the history just briefly, when did human beings get just some sense of the size of the universe? I mean, something like the Big Bang is very... I mean, really, it's in our lifetime, so that's become accepted. No, it was 13.7 billion years ago. Oh, I'm sorry, yeah. You misunderstood me. I, as an arts graduate, was using English, not numbers. But the idea of the size of the universe...

I was wondering where, for many people... In fact, there are still people now who don't really know the difference between the Milky Way, the universe and the solar system. And we lived in quite a parochial universe, didn't we? When was the point where people started to go, this whole thing is a lot bigger than we imagined? I think it's when they started introducing chocolate bars, so you have a Milky Way in the galaxy. No, I think it was probably around the time of Hubble, when Hubble was this

brilliant astronomer who used the telescope at Mount Palomar in California, and was able, the telescope was big enough that it could probe deep enough into the universe that it could make out individual galaxies. And by looking at the light from those galaxies, which, by the way, this is the stunning thing about astronomy, okay? What have you got to use? You've got light. That's it. You can't go out there and measure things with tape measures. You've got light, and you have to infer things from that.

So it's one of the most brilliant aspects, I think, of astronomy and then cosmology. That's the ingredient you're using. Anyway, he saw these galaxies receding, and from it he inferred something about the size of the universe because he was looking at where every soul, as far back as he could see, he was seeing these objects moving apart. And they've got this very particular way of moving apart. The distant galaxies,

they follow what's known as Hubble's law, named after him. So the speed with which they move apart, the speed of recession, is proportional to their separation. So the further away they are apart, the faster they're moving apart. It's a bizarre result. And from it, you can infer that the universe is expanding. But I would say that's the first time that people began to realise this universe is way bigger than our own Milky Way. Alan, do you think that, you know, not that many, you know,

a few centuries ago we believed we were the centre of the universe. Then we were shifted to being something that was going around the sun, and then really in the last century the idea of the size of the universe. People were, you know, for instance, there are meant to be five times as many stars as there are grains of sand on a beach. We live in a pretty big place. Do you think it becomes harder and harder for human beings to just comprehend where we live and where we are?

Well, I think that if they actually do comprehend the scale of the universe, then for an awful lot of them, that can get them into terrible trouble i mean one of my favorite writers the american uber paranoid hp lovecraft who filled his stories with these huge tentacled monsters and the thing is in the 20s he was starting to get a handle upon how big those black bits are between the stars and how we are in the western spiral arm of one galaxy out of potentially thousands hundreds millions of you know a vast amount of galaxies and so that was what he was reacting to. It was this sense of alienation, and it was suddenly a big, scary cosmos, and he turned it all into tentacled monsters.

You know, which is one approach. I wouldn't recommend it, but it worked for him. It's interesting, isn't it, that when you begin to remove the mysticism, in a way, you replace it with a sort of sense of fear, almost, which is an odd contradiction in some ways, isn't it? Well, you also replace it with things that are potentially even stranger than mystical ideas. I mean, they may be real, they may be true,

but they are undeniably very, very strange. Like the Goldilocks problem with our cosmos, which, as I understand it, is that we are living in a very hospitable and habitable universe. The star conditions of the universe only needed to be helped by a fraction, and we would have had a universe where stars couldn't cohere or where the universe would have only lasted for a fraction of a second before winking out of existence again.

We're very, very lucky. Now, of course, the creationists and the intelligent design people will pounce upon this and say, ah, well, there you are. Is it luck? Or is it perhaps our Lord Jesus? ah, well, there you are. Is it luck?

Or is it perhaps our Lord Jesus? And so what we have had to do to actually explain this away, the gymnastics of our minds, I am in awe of some of the theories that we've come up with to explain away the unusual qualities of our universe. This is, Ed, one of the great, I suppose, criticisms of modern cosmology at the edge. So I'm thinking of perhaps string theory, for example, which is an attempt to explain the weakness of gravity.

It's an attempt to bring gravity into the fold. But many people criticise it for not making experimentally testable predictions. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's a bit harsh on the string theorists. You would say that, wouldn't you? Yeah, I would. String theory does one vital thing

which no other theory has yet been able to do. So before we talk about the cosmology, I'll just, for a few seconds, remind you of that. And that is one of the big goals of physics is to unify the forces of nature. We experience four major forces that we're aware of. We experience electromagnetism, the lights burning here. We experience the weak force, which is the sun radioactive decay that keeps us alive.

We experience the strong force, which is the force binding the nuclei together and prevents you from exploding. And then we experience gravity. Now, the first three of those have been effectively unified. In other words, there's been a common description of those forces. And so the natural goal is to try and include gravity. But we realize in order to do it, we have to include quantum mechanics, the physics associated with the very small. And gravity is the physics of the very big and you're trying

to reconcile these two together and no one's been able to do it. String theory as far as I'm aware is the one area which has so far managed to do it. It can actually, it's a theory which replaces a point particle with a small little string. You're made up of small little strings

vibrating away and the fact that you've gone from this point particle to a small little string. You're made up of small little strings vibrating away. And the fact that you've gone from this point particle to this little string means that quantum mechanics and relativity can be combined because the string actually has gravity in it. But then, indeed, it now needs to start making some predictions about things that can be observed. And that's where the problems begin to arise because one of the things that you need

in string theory is you need more than four space-time dimensions. Why four? You experience four. One is time, and then the other three are your x, y, and z coordinates. String theory needs ten. We'll just talk to Alan. He's got a few.

Alan could handle ten. He's got a few. Alan could handle ten. He's got a few extra dimensions. When I was talking to Brian Green, he said that it might need eleven. And it might need eleven. And I believe the eleventh one, that is kind of wrapped up around the other ten, isn't it? Like a little kind of bit of sellotape. It can be, but it can also sort of separate out. And that's where the world of brain worlds emerges,

which are parallel universes, if you like, which are quite exotic. But just back to this prediction issue, so one of the things that people are trying to do now is they're trying to look for consistent models in string theory which will both account for all the particles that we see and account for the cosmology that we see. And, well, it's early days. It's not worked yet. Use cats. They love string.

Also, with a string theory, if we've got Goldilocks enigma, can string theory become the Rapunzel effect? There we go, vibrating. Actually, I wonder how true this is of cosmology. I've asked this to you, Dallas, first of all where whether we've now returned to a kind of aristotlean method of science where of course aristotle said oh you don't observe you know you know just think hard think hard you don't need to do experiments you just need to think very hard and now we've got a certain amount of evidence that's gathered together and is cosmology perhaps returned to go

now i need to go back into a dark room and think very hard well you do have to think to think. And the trouble is, I guess, with our technology and the way we think, they don't move at the same speed. So often our technology is down here, but we're already predicting ideas using mathematical models and things up here. It doesn't mean we shouldn't think. We shouldn't wait to be able to observe it. I love the big questions in physics. I love the edge of science stuff because it fires the imagination. I enjoy the stuff that we don't understand. To me, my passion in science is really there. But I also sort of trust that the scientists

didn't sit around and get drunk and make it up. I'm sort of assuming there is a little bit of work gone into sort of string theory and coming up with these models. My problem is ever since you've used the term luck or Jesus, I'm trying to work out how I can turn that into a game show. Actually, this is something that fascinates me, because when you talk about vibrating strings,

because this is one of the things that I haven't read, is it's very hard to actually get a sense of the size of them. Now, Alan, do you have a... Because I was told that there was... The vibrating strings, you were talking about, if you take the size of the universe and the size of the Earth and the differential between those two, if you then imagine an atom is the size of the universe,

the string is the size of Earth. Because when you get to that, this is the hard thing about it, is we really are talking about sizes, again, beyond really our imagination. I think one of the things that I actually heard was that to actually find one of these things, wouldn't we need a collider that actually went all the way around the Milky Way? That would be a very large collider, wouldn't it? What the extra dimensions can do for you, though, is they can lower the energy at which you could reveal these properties to

actually in some cases within the reach of the Large Hadron Collider. So one of the more speculative things that might happen at the Large Hadron Collider is you may see a hint of these extra dimensions. I think then string theorists would begin to legitimately claim that there is validity. That's right. I mean, people are actively looking at the Large Hadron Collider. It's up and running and colliding things and getting loads and loads of data. And in it, they're looking for evidence of, for example, these extra dimensions that might be there.

And you'll see them by the fact you typically will lose energy. You'll have missing energy from, we all learnt at school, conservation of energy, energy in is energy out. Sometimes if you do the balance of the books, there'll be a bit of energy missing, and that may be a sign of a string type of event like something emerging from the extra dimensions. One of the major questions, I think,

one of the major questions in cosmology is can cosmology be used for song? Yeah, there we go, that's a link. We have actually got someone, a wonderful singer, someone who's come directly from a benefit. They're trying to raise money to buy exhausts for cars in Cheltenham. Very exciting idea.

For many, the problem with attempting to approach concepts of cosmology has been exacerbated by the lack of ukuleles, in much the same way that theories of infinity were slowed down by lack of a bassoon. Fortunately, this has been solved by one woman who combines keen scientific knowledge with the ukulele. Please welcome Helen Arney. scientific knowledge with the ukulele, please welcome Helen Arney. So yes,

this week I've been completely captivated by these videos of the solar explosion. Have any of you seen these? On YouTube, actually, that bastion of scientific knowledge. The same one that brought us the news that cats

can play the piano. So I've been completely enraptured by this video of an exploding sunspot. And I've spoken to a couple of people about it and solo physicists aren't sure whether it's something significant or whether it's just something quite ordinary. But I've got my own theory, which is that the sun has got his huff on. but I've got my own theory, which is that the sun has got his huff on. I used to be someone Now I'm just another sun One of a hundred thousand billion billion

You treat me insignificantly Name a tabloid after me Synonymous with paparazzi Just a backdrop for Brian Cox on TV Since Edwin Hubble it's never been the same Those pictures of other stars pushed me out the frame. You never even gave me a proper name like Alpha Centauri, Epsilon Tauri, Delta Libre, HR2948 or Kevin Kevin You've achieved nuclear fusion, well done

fused some helium from hydrogen, well every second I do that to 620 million tons, if I was Marilyn Monroe you'd be Stacey Solomon You should have stopped at Copernicus. Then I'd be the center of your universe. You say I'm just an average ball of gas. I say you're talking out of Uranus.

talking out of Uranus. I have said that right, haven't I? 1.4 million kilometers. That's my diameter. Tell me seriously, with those parameters, have you ever tried to put a hat on there? Hip, hip, hip, hooray I'll be a red giant someday And your world will explode in flames

But until then Can you join my Facebook fan page? fan page. We are genuinely trying to become the kind of two Ronnies of science programming and now we've found Elkie Brooks as well so we've kind of, it's all back to, Alan one of the ideas I suppose is that point of philosophy

versus science where some ideas and anthropic principles say that life is required for the universe to exist that if there isn't something to observe it then it itself doesn't exist that you have to actually collapse it into existence and i just wondered how how you feel about that as an idea of philosophy versus science well i mean that's the i believe the what the strong anthropic principle which if i understand it correctly yeah the universe is quite big, I think we've agreed, but it started out really, really tiny. And by observing from however remote a distance or time the origins of the universe, then according to Heisenberg, we're kind of affecting them.

And I think that the idea was, was that we had retroactively made this a fit universe to live in so that we could evolve across the millennia to make those observations in the first place, which is kind of spectacularly mad. I really like that one. There was a writer, I can't remember who it was, but he described that as the completely ridiculous anthropic principle, and you can look at the acronym in your head later.

It's not very BBC. Not quite Sandy Toksvig level, but it's getting there. I think that we've ranged across some rather bizarre concepts in this show, and I think that's one of the criticisms, if that's the right word, of cosmology.

Martin Rees, the astronomer royalist, said that it's possible that these questions will remain forever beyond us. And the fact that we're being led into these rather more strange and esoteric regimes, string theory, 11-dimensional universes, actually say is that we're not capable in principle

of understanding and answering these big questions. What's your view as to whether we may actually get to something like a string theory, a theory of the origin of the universe? God, that's simple, isn't it? In about a minute. I'm a little more concerned now than I was, say, ten years ago when I thought string theory might come up with a unique solution.

But then it gradually became clear that, in fact, a lot of very senior physicists who have worked in this area have decided that, basically, we won't be able to say there's a unique solution. We won't be able to find one. And that there'll be many that will be compatible with the kind of universe that we exhibit. I don't like that myself. I'd rather think that we can get there, but it's going to be hard. Alan, do you feel that, you know, now we're near the end of this discussion,

do you feel any more confident that Glycon may well have been the overpowering sock puppet in the creation of the universe and has a much more important part in cosmology to play than someone like Ed would cynically think. Well, I'd have to say, Robin, that I certainly haven't heard anything to dissuade me from that opinion. Dallas, in balance, having sat there, listened to Ed's point of view and Alan's point of view, where would your sympathies lie?

Well, you know, my heart's obviously with Alan, because Alan's socks seem... I'm interested now. I'm interested in Alan's socks, definitely. It's not his socks on his feet. No, no, no, I know. It's a sock god. He doesn't... You don't wear glycon. But I provide the string-free shoes. There you go. I'm always fascinated about where we are with this question.

I look at all different areas of science doing Bangor's Ethereum. I always come back to this question of cosmology and the very edge of cosmology, and what are we able to know and what will we never know? Well, it's interesting. It is one of the areas that is most perhaps requested, or perhaps is the question to you on Bango's theory. However, it's very difficult

to cover. Well, it is difficult to cover. We've done quite a bit of cosmology in Bango. We've done general relativity in five minutes. We've sort of demonstrated time dilation by flying an atomic clock around the world. We've looked at the scale of the universe. We've done all those kind of things because, well, certainly for me, and I think for everyone,

it does something to the mind. It just, the wonders of science, if you like, are encapsulated within those ideas, within those thoughts, I think, more than, perhaps more than anything else. So hopefully there we have a mix of hope, melancholy and socks. And we should actually make it very clear, by the way, that there was some confusion there over Alan's socks and actually glycon. Never wear your deity. It's a very important thing.

A deity is always annoyed if it's given a verruca. So we're going to attempt to finish this show before we get to the point where we realise how small and insignificant we are. And hopefully we haven't gone too far as yet. You might be small, remember, but that is all relative. Small by the standards of the galaxy, tiny by the standards of the universe, but a positive colossus compared to a super string. And even more than that, unlike a super string, you definitely exist.

You know, I've got a whole host of things to read out here, but I'm just going to say that I find it much easier standing on a mountain smiling at the sky. LAUGHTER much easier standing on a mountain, smiling at the sky. And if any of you would like to go to Leckhampton Hill this evening in Cheltenham, you'll see Brian at the top going, when that cumulo nimbus. It's not all stars, sometimes clouds get in the way.

Thanks to our guests, Ed Copeland, Dallas Campbell and Alan Moore. Next week, Brian is going to try and find himself on a ley line. You're looking forward to that, aren't you? I'm going to build the Rational Tent at Glastonbury, and I'm sure it'll be stormed at the end by irate hippies, but I'm going to do it anyway and make a stand. They've already sent the plans for the Rational Tent.

It's shaped a little bit like a kind of wooden man for some reason. Made of wicker. And we are going to be joined by Billy Bragg, Shappi Korsandi, Graham Coxon and Tony Ryan. Thank you very much for listening. Goodbye. Thank you. If you've enjoyed this programme, you might like to try other Radio 4 podcasts, including Start the Week, lively discussions chaired by Andrew Marr,

and a weekly highlight from Radio 4's evening arts programme, Front Row. To find out more, visit bbc.co.uk slash radio4. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet. We are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change.

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