The Infinite Monkey Cage - Popular Science

Episode Date: June 14, 2010

Physicist Brian Cox and comedian Robin Ince return for a new series of Radio 4's witty, irreverent and unashamedly rational look at the world according to science. In a special programme recorded as part of this year's Cheltenham Science Festival, Brian and Robin are joined by special guests Ben Miller and Robert Winston to explore the choppy waters of science and fame. Are we are entering a golden age of science popularity? Is there a genuine interest in the wonder of science and is science the real star or is it simply being dumbed down as a result of our celebrity obsessed culture? They'll be asking whether science needs to be popular and whether this new wave of enthusiasm has any real impact on science policy, or the quality of science being done in this country. Has science finally found the S Factor? 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. Thank you for downloading this programme from BBC Radio 4. For more information, visit bbc.co.uk slash radio 4. Hello and welcome to a new series of the Infinite Monkey Cage. I'm Robin Ince.

And I'm Brian Cox. And for the first time, we've been released from our cage of infinite proportions and let loose on an unsuspecting audience. Well, it says unsuspecting audience. Obviously, you knew you were coming here. You had tickets. So that's lie number one. So we've been released from the cage, but what truly is infinity?

Professor Brian Cox, OBE. Infinity, Robin. least from the cage but what truly is infinity professor brian cox obe infinity robin is is a complex subject in quantum field theory then it generally means that we're ignorant of some part of the theory and the description of nature is not complete and so i would say that infinities parameterize our ignorance and so if we did shrink the infinite monkey cage into something that was non-infinite then i would say that infinities parameterise our ignorance. And so if we did shrink the infinite monkey cage into something that was non-infinite, then I would say we would probably be less ignorant. That still hasn't really answered the question, because people still don't know what the show title actually means.

But the case is, if it is an infinite cage, then can it be a cage? Because if it's infinite, does that mean it's a cage? If it's actually an infinite number of monkeys in a small cage, is that against BBC health and safety regulations? It would be just a really large monkey. Ben Miller. BAFTA. Why does it have to be an infinite number of monkeys?

It would be just like a really massive monkey with a quite small cage. But if the cage were infinite, then no matter how big the monkey was, as long as it were finite, there would still be an infinite amount of space in it. Who says the monkey's in the cage? It might just be the monkey's cage. Could it be outside anything? God, get out of the box, Brian. Wow.

I'm sorry, Ben. Before we get out of the box, could we at least parametise that box? Could it be outside? Comfy. Comfy. Comfy box. Nice little comfy box. So anyway, hello and welcome to Comfy Monkey Cage. Ben, we'll introduce you later on because you're going to remain an enigmatic figure, the Zorro of Pascal physics, if that's OK. This week we're at the Cheltenham Science Festival, once home to Edward Wilson, art explorer who perished with Scott on his final expedition,

and also Cheltenham was the first place that I dissected a frog. I did that at school here and I would like to apologise to Nicholas Joy for putting some of the entrails in his pocket without him knowing. That's entirely true. Oh, the cruelty of teenagers. As with many science festivals around the UK, 2010 has been Cheltenham's busiest year so we ask, why has science ignited

the public's imagination once again? We'll be discussing whether science has finally returned to its rightful place at the heart of popular culture and why the public perception of science matters. Joining us to discuss these issues, BAFTA-winning comedian and quantum physicist Ben Miller and to ensure that an OB really means nothing, current Professor of Science and Society at Imperial College and well-known populariser of science,

Lord Robert Winston. Lord Robert Winston. Robert, if you do ignite the science public imagination, what flame does it burn with? Wow. I think it's ignited for all sorts of reasons. I think that, first of all, there's a growing recognition that for too long we've not seen science as part of our culture, and that has changed.

I think that's really important and very encouraging. I think obviously the Royal Society's Year of Science has been important. I think the BBC has tried to put on quite a lot of good science this year. So I think there are lots of different reasons in the UK. But I think there's a growing international recognition, isn't there? I mean, I don't want to get too serious, but I think there's a difference now because suddenly public engagement is recognised as being a way of demonstrating

we all have a responsibility for the chaos we cause with our science and we are facing some pretty serious situations with it. So I think that this is starting to impinge on the consciousness. Robert, you started in, was it Your Life in Their Hands in the 70s, your first television? Yeah, I mean, I did make a programme in 74 called Medicine in the Year 2000, which was looking 25 years ahead. But looking back at that programme, it's deeply embarrassing because it was completely wrong.

Was it? But Your Life in the Hands was when I first really started broadcasting, so that was about 78. And what was it that brought you into television or into public promotion of science? Oh, well, I think it was a moment when this television crew had been with me in a minor Essex town for four nights over the Easter bank holiday, and they wanted me to film me doing a caesarean section.

And as I was delivering the baby from the abdomen, I had this moment that every surgeon dreads, which is the feeling of the pyjama cords around your waist loosening on your trousers coming down to your knees. After that, I was hooked on television. Ben, you were fascinated by science. You then spent most of your career as an actor and a writer. Do you remember when you were a child,

was there something in particular that made you excited by the world of science? We were talking about predictions of the future. Tomorrow's World, of course, is a fantastic show of nostalgia to now watch what the future was meant to be. Yeah, Tomorrow's World never felt to me quite like science, actually. It was sort of just, it was a woman with very long, polished fingernails saying, and this button here activates a rotor blade here, and sort of never describing exactly anything that was actually going on in the machine itself.

So I never really connected with Tomorrow's World. I loved Ascent of Man. It was the very first TV series that I connected with. But in terms of the wider picture of science, it was the moon landings were the first thing that kind of really captured my imagination. And we were talking just now about what is it that has popularised science or brought science to the public's attention over the last few years,

and I think the Hadron Collider's got to be a huge part of that. When we're doing fundamental science and we really are exploring the very frontiers of our civilisation, of the world that we live in, I think that does capture the public imagination and it fires everybody up with an enthusiasm. You've actually decided to write a book about science. Again, this is 20 years since you did your degree. Why have you now come back to science? Money. No, that's a facetious point, but also a fundamental one. I mean, I think partly

because, as we've been saying, there's a real appetite for popular science at the moment. And I think there's a huge sort of unexploited territory in, you know, a kind of wry, sideways look at the contemporary issues in science. So in the book, it's called The Joy of Science, the book that I'm doing. And it's kind of a, if you like, the talking points, the things that I hear people talking about in everyday conversation like um cookery global warming the large hadron collider particle physics and all those all those subjects that you do hear people kind of slightly sort of warily feeling their way around and sort of dealing with what the actual fundamental science is in an amusing way but i just want to spend from cookery to like you minute...from cookery to large... You know, the normal things, cookery, LHC, these are the two things.

What's wrong with these firing particles? I've burnt this. Cookery's a fantastic way of talking about thermodynamics. It's a fantastic way of talking about chemistry. It's a great way of talking about biochemistry. And, you know, everybody's also really interested in diet. So, I mean, you know what it's like. You can pick almost any topic in the world, and science has got something fascinating to say about it.

Amongst this, as you call it, unexploited, commercially unexploited territory, there must be somewhere deep in your soul where there's some altruistic reason for it. No, Brian, no. Surely. No, not really. If it gets a laugh, I'm happy. No, there is. I mean gets a laugh, I'm happy.

No, there is. I mean, I do... Well, the thing that frustrates me is the kind of cultural apartheid between scientists and non-scientists, and I've always sort of not really understood why science is held to be something separate to art and creativity. I mean, if Paul Dirac wasn't creating those equations when he sort of unified relativity with quantum mechanics. What was he doing? Did those mathematical objects really exist before he created them?

I kind of think they didn't. And I think there's so much exciting, mind-blowing, kind of really fascinating stuff in science that I don't think reaches the general public, and which I think they would really, really enjoy. I say, Robert, you make a similar point in your book. It should be unacceptable culturally for a scientist to not know Picasso or Mozart, but also for an artist or a cultural commentator to not know Feynman or Dirac or Einstein.

Yes, well, I think Ben's made the point beautifully, and I agree totally with that. I think that it is astonishing how people can stand up in public at a party and say, well, of course, I didn't do science. I read Thucydides at Oxford. And that isn't, I think, acceptable now. I think that one has to understand at least some notion of the structure of an atom, should be aware that the key to a medical treatment will be a randomised controlled trial

and what a randomised controlled trial is, because actually that's really important for our health. To start using half-baked remedies which are not really proven because you don't understand what a trial is, I think is a terrible mistake. So I think we have to do that, but it's a hard push and it must start in schools i think to be fair primary schools have changed that's almost the most difficult area anyway because primary

school children are the most naive which is beautiful but they can ask questions which teachers will find very difficult but we're not really winning with children a bit older yet is one of the problems though possibly possibly the newspaper media as well, where you do have, for a long time it has been science, they will only really print if it's got some novelty to it or if it's a PR spin about red wine being good for you, chocolate being bad for you. So people will say, I can't believe what these scientists are working on.

It's all nonsense because they don't know the broad picture of science. I think one of the problems is, and I say it in Bad Ideas, in the book, that actually we have to learn how to do much more work with the media to make sure that actually we're not exaggerating what we do, that we're actually a bit more modest, that we actually recognise the humanity and the ethics, and that we try and answer the questions that the press needs to know. I do find it quite hard to be modest, I'm going to say.

But on behalf of science, you pointed out there, for example, in medical trials, there is a way to do it, to get to not the right answer by any sense, because you don't get to right answers in science, but the best we can do given the available evidence. Now, that's a quite absolutist position in itself that you have to explain to a politician or a journalist who feels that their opinion matters. I mean, we're drawing the line there, aren't we, as scientists, in saying this is how you do medicine. Well, of course, the differences between you and I is that my research tends to be useful. Your research is...

LAUGHTER Your research is completely useless. You're going to qualify that now, aren't you? However, the Lord Lord OBE. Reflected in the honest system. But you see, if your research is, and you know what I mean, of course, I mean, useless research is the best research. Basic research is really what we need to be doing.

But it's inevitable that to get that wonderment over, which you do so well, you have to actually kind of change the tempo. If I'm presenting a new medical treatment, I've got to be extremely careful that I don't exaggerate it because I raise expectations. That's actually what happened with the genome. The publication of the human genome was a nonsense, really. Here was a very distinguished scientist saying

it's more important than the invention of the wheel. Well, if so, ten years later, it's a wheel that's hardly turned. It hasn't benefited hardly anybody in this live audience. And I think that we have to understand that it may do in time, but if we raise expectations, we may find it very difficult to get governments to continue to support work which doesn't seem to be producing what we claim it's going to produce. So it's modesty in the claims we make for progress and the rate of progress rather than modesty in the sense that we do think that the scientific approach...

You can continue to be arrogant as you want, Ron, it's fine. We're going to continue this discussion in a minute and also throw it out to the audience as well to get questions. Ben, just one quick question for you. Who was the first scientist that you kind of... Who was your pin-up scientist, number one, when you were a kid? My primary school teacher, Mr Bailey. He was amazing.

Does anybody know him? He was fantastic. He had this great aphorism. He said, mathematicians are lazy, he used to say to me. Mathematicians are very, very lazy. And his whole modus operandi was that mathematics was the thing that saved you effort you know if you learned these times tables then you didn't have to do all these other calculations if you kind of understood what number bases were then you know when you were

confronted with something in base two you were able to immediately translate the numbers you know and so it was a very very sort of empowering like you know robert was talking how important it is to teach science correctly to primary school children and i'm sure i'm absolutely sure that one of the reasons that i was able to study science with a degree of success was that amazing teacher well uh mr belly will be glad to know that he's now taking part in the segue to the next section of this show because what we are actually looking for indeed what Cheltenham Science Festival British Council are looking for via international fame lab is new great popularizers of science it's basically the equivalent fame lab of Britain's got talent but rather than looking for insane people it's actually looking for sane people instead an interesting twist on the idea it's a competition for scientists. The final will be taking place immediately after this recording.

And young scientists from 12 different countries, including Egypt, Morocco, Bulgaria and Hong Kong, are all taking part. We've got three of them with us today to give us a flavour of what the judges can expect later this evening. In the actual competition, the contestants have three minutes and we've decided to make it even harder for them this afternoon as we've given them just one minute to cover the whole of the subject. So, Brian, who is our first contestant with just one minute?

Our first contestant is... Oh, I see why you've asked me, because I've no idea how to pronounce that. I can help you with that. Hello, everyone. I'm Ivana. I come from Croatia. And I'm bringing you a story, how much does the size matter in animal world? For instance, if I ask you, who's bigger, men or women? Of course, you would say men, because it's obvious. But if we turn to spiders, what would you say then?

Maybe you would have some doubts. Let me enlighten you. There is a species of a spider called wolf spider that doesn't make nets. He attacks his prey directly. So he has a rather aggressive female. His female is sized as my thumbnail and he's something like a dirt under my thumbnail. So, when he wants to reproduce with her, he has to bring her some food, something like a wedding gift, in front of her. And while she's having a feast,

he just climbs up from the back and fertilizes her. So, in a way, they both remain satisfied. So, even dirt under the fingernail was said with real oomph there. Next, from Graz in Austria, we have Wolfram, who has a talk entitled Don't Miss the Ball, which indeed is very relevant to this evening's World Cup game.

Yeah, is David Beckham still playing for the team of England? No, he isn't. Oh, anyway, he knows how to do a free kick. But if I talk about that, there are two possibilities of doing a kick. You can do the kick straight, or you can bend it like Beckham. Now, what makes a difference? Well, if you kick it straight, then the velocity of any point on the surface of the ball is the same.

However, if you do it like backhand, then you kick, you hit the ball slightly off-center. So you not only give it a velocity in the forward direction, but you also give it a turn so that it rotates. Now, the rotational motion adds to the motion in the forward direction differently on the left hand and the right hand side of the ball, that's causing an imbalance. And this imbalance causes turbulence. And these turbulences in turn give rise to a force that goes from the side where the

velocity is higher to the side where the velocity is lower. And that bends the ball so that it just reaches the goal and makes the goal. So good luck for England tonight. And finally, Britain's great hope after the debacle that was Eurovision. Matt Parker, stand-up mathematics. Afternoon. I'm going to talk about the probability that you're alive. Well, not now. In the future, what's the chance you're alive? So, Miss, do you know what the chances are you'll be alive in a year? I'm trying to interact. I've only got a minute here. Actually, a year from now, your

insurance company will have already worked out the odds that you're going to be dead. But you can do this too. I checked. If you look up the government data, there are approximately, if you're 15 to 29, about 10,285,900 of you. Sorry to make you feel less special. And of those, in the same year, 4,445 died. So just your raw statistics of not surviving a year is 0.043%, a disturbingly big number. And if you divide that by 365.25, your odds of not surviving the next 24 hours are 0.0001183%. Now, some of you have your pessimistic faces on. To leave you with a positive note,

I want you all to think of something you've got to do tomorrow, something you're not looking forward to. And now relax. There's a 0.0001183% chance you're not even going to have to deal with it. Thank you very much. Thank you to Ivana Wolfram and Matt, who is still on the stage. Matt, how do you choose one minute to do?

I mean, it must be coming up with the right subject. No, absolutely. I mean, there's a lot of maths which is fascinating if you've got time to read a textbook, and very few people seem to do this. So I thought, if I can remind people of the fact they're going to die, I may have their attention for a minute. I hope no-one did die during that.

Ben, as you know, studying science takes many years. Three years for a degree, three years for a PhD or so. Condensing it into one minute seems a big ask. Could I ask you to condense your PhD thesis into one minute? I don't know how I could condense it into one hour. Not because it's complicated, because I didn't really understand it at the time. The title was

Novel Quantum Effects in Quasi-Zero-Dimensional Mesoscopic Electron Systems. So basically... Bing! One minute. The title. Oh, dear. Oh, dear. So, shall I continue, or...?

No. It was his. Come on. No. So, basically, that mesoscopic means the boundary between the microscopic, the world of the very small, and macroscopic, the everyday. So, that's a very interesting region to look at. And, of course, the microscopic is... That's something terribly badly, aren't I?

A wolf spider, basically... sneaks up on the female and has it away with it. Which I think is possibly the strategy I'm going to adopt in the future. Basically, the... The electrons, they went into a dot... Help me out, someone, if anybody knows what my PhD was about. The electrons went into a dot. The dot was very small,

and you could actually see quantum mechanical effects in objects that were on the boundary size between the very, very small and the everyday. So sort of hundreds of atoms. What happens when you have objects of the size, say, typically 100 atoms, 200, 300 atoms, something like that? APPLAUSE You're clapping.

You're clapping. Let's not pretend that was a good explanation. I think we're going to take some questions from the audience now. And I think we're going to start with someone who is almost about one third in over on that side there. Hi, you were talking earlier about infinity and I was wondering could the problems we have with defining infinity be due to our difficulty in understanding other dimensions? Ben.

No. Next question. On the contrary, yes. No, the answer is... There you go, that's science for you. The answer is yes, I would say. I mean, it is true that infinities occur in physical theories really when you approach the boundary of that theory.

So they occur, for example, in Einstein's theory of gravity when you go back to the Big Bang or you go to a black hole and everything gets very, very small, and the length scales you're talking about are such that quantum mechanics may be interesting. And then you just get nonsense. You get things called singularities or infinities. And they're a signal that you need a new theory.

And it may indeed be the case that the quantum theory of gravity, whatever that may be, involves extra dimensions. So I side with Robert, yes. Isn't the problem, though, that... Deluded, sad, it's just drifting on in your own little world. You'll never come to anything, Professor Brian Cox. Only interested in the money, Ben Miller. There's one there's one oh right over there just on in the speaking as someone who's um just finished primary school science education do you feel that there's too much emphasis um

because i felt like i was spending most of the school year learning on photosynthesis, and it wasn't particularly interesting. Do you feel that we should spend more time doing stuff like how the brain works and the nervous system and possibly other more interesting things? Robert, do you do much... Are you involved in the curriculum at all, setting the curriculum? Well, I've been involved with the sort of Nuffield curriculum for A-level. I do think that the curriculum is what, I've been involved with the Salton Nuffield curriculum for A-level. I do think that the

curriculum is what's letting us down, and I think that the question's absolutely appropriate. We need to find ways of really tackling the real issues in the curriculum, which we don't do very well. And I think, spot on, it would be very interesting for the curriculum to consider what the ten great

puzzles facing science are at the moment and then fit those into the curriculum in some intelligible way for example you know the nature of dark energy for example the nature of human consciousness those sorts of issues and then find out how you learn the rest of physics or the rest of biology from those but i think that's not enough unless we also for most people most people i think need to have some practical stuff that they can do as kids not all kids some kids are quite happy with the puzzle element of science. Ben, what was it that captured your imagination initially

and turned you into a scientist at school? What I really liked about science was the fact you didn't need to know anything. You know, I really liked the fact that in the arts, there was all this stuff to remember. There was all these dates. There was all these quotations. There was all this incredibly time-consuming stuff. But that in science, there was a kind of purity,

you know, which was, if you were listening and you could understand the idea, then you had something that you would then have forever. You didn't ever then need to do any more work. Laziness, basically. You didn ever then need to do any more uh work laziness basically you didn't ever need to do any more work because you kind of understood the fundamental of the theory and then the fun was then you could apply that in any different situation you know once you understood

the general principle then you just simply applied the boundary conditions in whatever different example it was and you would get an outward pop the answers. And I thought that was an amazing... It just completely fascinated me that our brains worked like that, that once you understood a principle, it was kind of job done, you know, move on, you could then apply it. And you could also question the teacher, and there was no authority in the room,

because once you understood the theory, you could argue with the teacher as well. And you could say, well know if it pays of an inverse square law then surely x you know so how can that be right and you were there was an equal authority in the room as well and i quite always quite enjoyed that as well as i say i do think we make a mistake as scientists in trying to pretend that science is difficult and i don't think most science really is difficult which is really what you're saying isn't it and i and i think that's right and i don't think most science really is difficult, which is really what you're saying, isn't it? And I think that's right, and I think if we understood that really it's a question of trying to work out how you simplify the basic ideas, which we can do, that's part of the trick of science communication, of course.

And I think we should apply it more. It's interesting because I generally say to PhD students, you should be able to, in nearly every case, really simplify your PhD in three sentences to explain to a lay member of the public. And if you can't do that, it may be that your PhD may not be worth even doing. See, I find it interesting that I don't...

What was it again, Ben? It was quantum meso dot... Right, another question. Oh, we've got another one over there. Could someone create a star on Earth? We do. That's a good question. We do.

Yeah, that's what a nuclear fusion reactor is. So it's exactly the physical process. In the sun, what happens is hydrogen turns into helium by a process called nuclear fusion. And we can do that. We've done it in Oxford, actually, at the world's leading fusion reactor, which is in Britain and is very rarely celebrated. Now there are big experiments in America and in Korea trying to do that. It is the ultimate energy source.

I think it's the energy source that we must have at some point in the future. The difficulty is containing the thing. It really is holding something actually much hotter than a star because we have to do it much more efficiently than the sun. The sun's very inefficient, actually. Brian Cox, OBE goes ahead, mocks sun for being bad power system. This is very, very slow. Fortunately, actually, it's been there for five billion years

because it's slow. It's a good thing. I've got to say, the questions that come... Because we did a Q&A in Edinburgh at Science Festival as well where some of the questions are fantastic from people where you were expecting the question to be, hello, I am 11 years old, what is your favourite planet? And you pointed at one little boy and thought,

this will be easy, it's getting a little bit late. And he went, what is dark energy? And you went, oh. Very good question. Thank you very much for your questions. We are going to have to wrap it up now. So, thank you very much to our guests here at Chelms Science Festival, Ben Miller, Robert Winston and the kids from FameLab.

Next week, we'll be joined by comedian Dave Gorman and bad science columnist Ben Goldacre to talk about whether and why you should trust a scientist. And you can contact us for our BBC web page at bbc.co.uk slash radio4. You can also tweet us at atthemonkeycage. And now I think we're going to end on an experiment, which is, is it possible to do the credits

without going up a note on the last name? Right, well, we're going to end on an experiment, which is, is it possible to do the credits without going up a note on the last name? Right, well, we're going to find out. So thank you to the Cheltenham audience for joining us, as well as Robert Winston. And Ben Miller. If you've enjoyed this programme, you might like to try other Radio 4 podcasts, from Friday night comedy and daily drama from the archers

to a range of news, discussions and documentaries. For a full list of available podcasts, visit bbc.co.uk slash Radio 4. In our new podcast, Nature Answers, Rural Stories from a Changing Planet, we are travelling 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.