The Infinite Monkey Cage - Science Fiction, Science Fact

Episode Date: June 28, 2010

Special guests Jonathan Ross, graphic novelist Alan Moore and string theorist Brian Greene, join Brian Cox and Robin Ince on stage for a special edition of the science show that boldly goes where no other science show has been before. In a special science fiction themed programme, recorded in front of an audience at London's Southbank Centre, Brian, Robin and guests discuss multiple dimensions, alternate universes and look at whether science fact is far more outrageous than anything Hollywood or science fiction authors could ever come up with.Producer: Alexandra Feachem.

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. 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. And I'm Brian Cox. And this week we're at London's South Back Centre as part of the Royal Society's Summer Festival of Science and Art. And today we'll be looking at the most overt illustration of science meeting art, the science or possibly non-science of science fiction.

Brian, where does science meet art? What kind of equation would that be? I would say that if you represent them both as vectors, then their scale of products would be non-zero. Ah. And, of course, for listeners at home, that means that they are not orthogonal. So, 350 years ago, the first members of the Royal Society,

including Boyle, Wren and Newton, stood around a workbench tampering with the laws of nature and finding out things that were never meant to be known. He's learnt nothing. Originally described as an invisible college of natural philosophers, the Royal Society is now the oldest continuous scientific society in the world, funding more than 1,600 young scientists every year to research into everything from robotics, the AIDS crisis in Africa,

sources of renewable fuels, to particle physics, astronomy and space exploration. And despite supposed advance in genetics, Boyle, Newton and Wren still remain unreplicated lazy, lazy geneticists. So, in place of Newton, we have a physicist of immense gravitas, Brian Green. Our alternative Wren is the architect of the finest comic books of the last 50 years, Alan Moore. And in violation of Boyle's Law, proving that you can be absolutely full of hot air and still remain anchored to the earth, Jonathan Ross. Pretty impressive, an equation and a joke involving Boyle's Law

this early in the show. So I'll start off with you, Alan. Alan, you started working probably most famously with 2000 AD, which was an enormous success, and then within ten years you'd written V for Vendetta and Watchmen. And as you progressed in the kind of narratives you were dealing with, did you find that the science became more important with science fiction? The thing is, with science fiction, you have to remember the fiction bit.

I mean, like, I'd keep up to date with the latest scientific theories to see if there were any particularly mad ones that I could possibly sort of turn into a money-making series. But at the end of the day, the science in science fiction is mostly rubbish. I remember that, I think, in Halo Jones, I'd got a planet of such mass that time was actually being bent as a function of gravity. That sort of... I thought, well, maybe that could work.

It's absolutely correct. Is it? Yeah. Oh, right. It's absolutely correct. Is it? Yeah. Oh, right. And if you wrote that before 1915, you're a genius.

Brian, I mean, for me, science fiction was, when I was growing up, was one of those things that inspired me to be a scientist, because I couldn't really tell the difference. I grew up in the 70s, and for me, the Apollo moon landings merged with Star Wars and merged with Star Trek. Was that the same for you? Was it a part of why you became a scientist? Well, certainly Star Trek, you know, I would sit around with my dad and we'd watch it,

and there'd be all this crazy stuff happening, and how could you not get, you know, excited about this guy with pointy ears and flying out and exploring the universe? So I knew from an early age that I got seasick, so I wasn't going out in a rocket ship. That was pretty clear. But maybe, you know, you could fly out in your mind,

you know, and explore the universe that way. See, does it mislead, though, at all, just on Star Trek? Because when I was reading something the other day about obviously the fact that you can't actually go at the speed of light, but you can go near the speed of light, and I started to think, would that mean that Star Trek was merely a show in which lots of people just kind of sat there and just went, are we there yet?

Yeah, there's a real issue that Star Trek was merely a show in which lots of people just kind of sat there and just went, are we there yet? Yeah, there's a real issue that Star Trek never dealt with, which is if they were travelling at the speeds that they supposedly were by actually warping time, you could never communicate back with Starfleet command because, you know, so many years would have gone by that it would be like 10,000 years past. So there's a time warp element that they never dealt with. But yeah, you know, those elements, I think, just like you're saying, who cares?

If it's fun to watch and it's exciting and it gets you thinking about the universe, I think that's all that matters. I mean, this is the thing that originally science fiction, no one was really that interested in the science. When Mary Shelley created what is arguably the first science fiction narrative with Frankenstein, she was just using some misplaced speculations about electricity

to tell a story that was essentially a fantasy story, but it gave her a way of telling that story, just like with H.G. Wells and the time machine. He wasn't interested in tachyons or any sort of plausible explanation for time travel. He just wanted to tell a story about somebody who could travel in time. It wasn't really until a lot later that the science in science fiction became kind of fetishised,

so that that was the main point of the plot. I know, Jonathan, that you're a big science fiction collector. Huge. Do you have a first edition of Frankenstein? I've seen your HG Wells. No, I think I've got a second edition of Frankenstein. It's not mine, it's my wife's. I work for my wife, she's one of her favourite novels. But I've got the first run of War of the Worlds. It first appeared as a serialised

thing in a London magazine. But I love the fact that, you know, you say that the science wasn't important, but at the same time, some of those ideas and some of those much in the way that you just described your mass and time theory, they do turn out to be correct, which is bizarre. I mean, you look at Wells writing in Fruit of the Gods about genetic mutation in foodstuffs,

you think you can't really have known. No-one was actually doing that at the time, I don't think. But actually, I know we haven't got giant chickens yet, but surely it's only a matter of time. Please. Imagine the size of the... Imagine the barbecue weekends you'd have with that. What was interesting was that Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels, which was in the 1700s,

and he was the first person to actually say that Mars had got two satellites, which he'd got absolutely no reason for saying. It was just a wild-looking guess, but what with me and the time-gravity thing, it evidently worked out for him. What's that phrase, pareidolia, where you see something, but if you've been told it looks like something

you then always see it in that. And I wonder if it's something that because we know what we're looking for in these old theories, we look back and now we impose something we know to have happened on an idea which could have been interpreted in other ways after the event. When you look at stuff like, people say that the internet was foretold by, I think, Asimov. Not Asimov, sorry, it asimov so it was um arthur c clark of course about the um the phone system

becoming so it's kind of close enough for it to be an easy leap to make but at the same time it isn't the same and i think we impose the knowledge we have now on ideas that were thrown up then and say how brilliant they are how prescient they were they came up with that where in actual fact they didn't really come up with that they came up with a theory based on what was available at the time which we now impose the modern view on. Alan, you mentioned Frankenstein, arguably the first science fiction novel, which is a negative view of science in many ways, which I find surprising.

It was 1830, in that time when... Everything was kicking off. Yeah, but it was an optimistic time, in a way. It was that Victorians were beginning to explore the world and thinking about rockets to the moon. So why do you think that the first science fiction was essentially a negative view of science? Because at that time, yes, you'd got

probably your most obvious predecessor, Brian, who would have been like Humphrey Davy. Yeah. The chemical Prometheus. You'd got him. You'd got him... There was Zanus and Herschel and... You'd got the train, sort of, which was just transforming the landscape.

You'd got all of this stuff that was going on. And it would have been a very exciting time to be a scientist. But, I mean, Mary Shelley wasn't a scientist. She was a young, unmarried woman who just lost a baby and was hanging out with lord byron which is always a sign that your life's not really the girls love a bad boy don't they and i think that it was just that the world was changing and whenever the world changes what's coming in is going to be, by definition, kind of alien. It's only in 1910 where, in America, we get Tom Swift, boy inventor. And this was a completely American view of science fiction

in that there were no restraints. There was no pessimism. It was all talking about the kind of wonderful world that science would make available to us without any ethical restraints i mean in one of the stories i think tom swift and his giant earth blaster he's going to harvest all of the iron ore at the center of the world despite international protests this was like 1920, something like that. And this seemed to establish a kind of a much more optimistic

pro-science view of science fiction that carried over into the early American science fiction pulps and pretty much established the tone for much science fiction in the 20th century. Brian, why do you think that there is... We were talking about Frankenstein. There is this kind of negative image. At the moment, in fact, we've seen a resurgence in articles

being written in newspapers where they talk about the religion of scientists. And obviously a while back we had CERN where there was all this, oh, these scientists are dabbling, they're going to create a black hole that's going to suck the earth into itself. I mean, does science fiction partly, do you think, actually stimulate the imagination of people to fear the possibilities of progress? Well, I think science fiction can play that role, but I think, you know, the example you bring up about CERN and a little mini black hole destroying the world, I think is a really good example. I don't know, and Brian, you can tell us whether this was really strategically thought through by the PR people at CERN, but it was a wonderful move.

Nobody cared about the Large Hadron Collider, as far as I can tell, until this idea of a black hole destroying the world sort of came up. I'm serious. I got like 25 phone calls when that story broke to be on CNN, to be on the NewsH Hour in the United States. Everybody wanted to talk about the LHC, but what they really wanted to talk about was this black hole destroying the world. And there was a

real issue there. This was not completely nuts. We are going to potentially create little microscopic black holes at the Large Hadron Collider. So there's a real issue. No. I think we all knew that was going to happen. So there's a real issue. I think we all knew that was going to happen.

So it's great that the issue came up. Scientists sat down and did the calculations and found that if you're going to be afraid of that black hole that we may create destroying the world, you should actually be afraid that there's like, you know, some dragon's going to materialize out of thin air and just going to gobble us all

down that way. Those are about roughly the same probability. Yeah, so you can write about that one. But I want a cut. I want a cut of that story. Alan is absolutely shocked at that. I'm still trying to get over the time-gravity thing.

Another of Alan's predictions, the dragon thing. But Jonathan, it's almost a conspiracy theory in a way, isn't it? It's the popularity of conspiracy. These scientists know something. They know they might destroy the world, but they're mad and they're going to carry on doing that. We know that even you, with your boyish good looks,

deep down you're essentially Lex Luthor. You know, we... No-one's as good as you pretend to be, Cox. No, but I said everything's probably going to be all right when we turn the LHC on. It wasn't reassuring enough. Look at you, you look like a 12-year-old who's trying to sell sort of biscuits or something. You know, we want a man with a beard like Alan Moore

who looks like a scientist who wants to destroy the world to say, I'm not going to do it after all. I've changed my mind. I'm going to wait for the dragon to eat us all up, I've just heard about. Is your view, Alan, of science essentially positive or is it essentially negative or neutral? I think it's essentially positive. I think that science as a tool is the greatest tool

that consciousness has come up with to help us in fathoming the cosmos about us. It's the most perfect tool. But I believe that it only can and should go so far. I feel that science is perfect for describing the material universe. But I believe that the realm of consciousness is actually outside the boundaries of science. I mean, you can't repeat consciousness in a laboratory.

You can't measure it empirically. I know that you can sort of... Not yet. Not yet, but... You may be able to produce a conscious computer, for example. But Adam's saying that he doesn't think we should. Well, I don't think we can actually create a conscious computer. Oh, we

might be able to. Have you ever seen Jimmy Carr work like that? He's a joke machine. I really liked the thing that you were saying about the Arthur C. Clarke idea of the phone network becoming conscious. I saw a wonderful comic strip the other C. Clarke idea of the phone network becoming conscious. I saw a wonderful comic strip the other day.

I don't see many of them these days, but this one was really appealing. It had got a fortress in the middle of a wasteland, and a guy turns up at the gate, and they say, Who goes there? And he says, I would like to come into your fortress. And they say, Well, we can only take people who are going to be useful to us. And he said, well, I think that you'll find that I am useful for... I am the internet. And they say, no, you're not.

And he says, yes, I am. I can prove it. And they say, well, go on then. And he takes out these bits of paper and he says, I bring you pornographic pictures and the rantings of angry children. They think about it for a while and they say, well, there's one question. If you can answer it, we will accept that you are the internet. We are interested in purchasing hot water bottles shaped like cats.

What else might we be interested in? Brian, I think that hot water bottles shaped like cats is a very easy segue into talking about string theory. This is one of the things that has almost become to some people it's quite a mystical idea. There is much debate in science. And when we are talking about ideas where science fiction and science fact do blur,

string theory has been used in all manner of different ways within fiction. Can you, first of all, explain for the many people who probably don't really understand just a little bit about what string theory is, what it entails? Sure. You know, there are two major developments in physics that were discovered in the 20th century, and we've already spoken about one, Einstein's general relativity, which talks about gravity being able to warp time and things of that sort. And there's another development called quantum mechanics, which is focused on not big things like stars and galaxies in the universe, but small things, molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles. Quantum mechanics works fantastically well in that domain, small stuff. General relativity works fantastically well for the big things.

But for a long time, we've known that you try to put the two theories together, and the math completely combusts. They just do not work together, period. Now, we know the universe works, and therefore, if we found the deepest understanding, we expect all the pieces to fit together into one unified whole. And string theory is our latest attempt to meld quantum mechanics and general relativity

into one consistent framework. So it would be a theory that could describe small things, big things, perhaps everything in between, in principle. The problem is it's such a difficult theory that we've been at it for a while now, but there's a huge road that we still need to walk before we understand it well enough to make predictions that we can test. Recently, Martin Rees, the president of the Royal Society,

gave a series of lectures where he speculated that it's possible that there may be some things that are actually in principle beyond us to understand. So maybe humans will never be clever enough to produce even a quantum theory of gravity. I mean, could that be the case? Could string theory or something like it just be beyond us? Definitely. In fact, I had a program that did air here a while ago

called The Elegant Universe. And in one of the opening episodes, I was at the board writing the equations of general relativity, lecturing to somebody, you thought. And then I'm saying, aren't you getting this this and the camera pans back and it's a dog you know and the dog kind of barks and you know um and the point was exactly when you're making although many people wrote to me angry because they thought we were trying to say the audience was like the dog which sort of you know that sort of wasn't really what the point was the point was we humans have a limited capacity to understand things.

The amazing fact is so far, whenever there's been a mystery, if we've worked hard enough, we've been able to figure it out. But we may hit the wall at some point. The old 11-dimensional problem. Yeah, that part is a little hard. If the camera was to pan down to here, I could

be replaced by that dog. How can there be 11 dimensions? Oh, I mean, just in a nutshell. You know, when you study this theory, you study, of course, it's a purely mathematical undertaking. We don't have any real experiments that we can do because these strings are so fantastically tiny that they're beyond our technological capacity.

You're talking about technological limitations. But when you study the mathematics, the mathematics says, unless this theory has 11 dimensions, the math falls apart. There's an equation literally that says that. So that's your answer. That's no answer that's any use to me.

Jonathan, what's your favorite Superman film? Oh, that's easy. Number two with Zod. Excellent. He's back on track. You know the thing you mentioned earlier, which i could grasp because it was an idea which i think we could all do with the idea that maybe we'll hit a wall that we don't understand anymore i don't see what do you really genuinely believe that i can't see that happening i can't see because you think about the stuff that we know now the way we interact the way that we use our rational mind to

kind of appraise and sum up and explore the world in a way that we couldn't have comprehended and it wasn't just because technologically we didn't have those ideas you know years ago people said everything that will be discovered has been discovered yeah but i'm not saying that i'm not saying that kind of limit that kind of limit is basically saying there's an end to science that there's a point after which there's no new mystery that needs resolution i i don't think that will happen. But the dog analogy, I think, is actually a pretty good one. Because dogs are pretty smart by a certain standard. You know, they can catch Frisbees. You know, they can come to the door. You know, there are smart things that they do. However, I don't think any of them understand the general theory of relativity. I could be wrong. And I

always worry that the dog community is like, we've got the unified theory. We're not going to give it to you. You know, but, you know, dogs seem to have a limit, we've got the unified theory, we're not going to give it to you. But you know, dogs seem to have a limit, yet they are smart. Why would we be different? Every other species seems to have the limit, why wouldn't we? It's a darn good lassie film though, isn't it? You were saying earlier about science fiction

and science and how they relate. I mean, with regard to string theory, as an example of me kind of reading half a book on string theory and focusing upon one sentence, which is my basic method of approaching almost everything. that essentially reality and the universe is created by the vibrations of the strings, which I thought was lovely because there's poetry there. I mean, that makes everything music. So I immediately banged out an eight-page comic story about a guy with a super string violin who can alter reality.

Now, I don't believe that you can actually do that, but it was a poetic conceit based upon the actual science. Well, you would presumably alter the laws of physics. If you played around and vibrated the strings in a different way... Someone write again. We need you, Alan, in our laboratory. Everything you need to know about science is in Tharg's future shocks. You were saying that before, Jonathan.

You were saying, when we were back there, the only science I know is actually from Alan Moore's books. And now do you feel a lot more wise? Now I know I'm smarter than both the Bynes put together because I've been reading him for years. But I love that. I do love that. And joking aside, there is a lot of science in your work, and there's a lot of, and obviously

there's a lot of thought and a lot of knowledge goes into it. And I love the fact that here's something which is a medium that was initially designed for children, and not particularly demanding ones initially, and that you do, you broaden the palette, and you actually bring ideas in which maybe do encourage people to look elsewhere. You know, I'm sure that kind of popularises the way that science, the fact that we've got so many people here, the fact that

it's becoming so much more of a kind of topic is because it's become, it's used across the board and it's used in popular entertainment more than it ever was before. Yeah, I mean, there are worrying sides to that though in that, I mean, there was a Danny Boyle film where

the son... He was the science advisor. You were. Well... This is one of those great funny-mouth moments. No, no, it's actually interesting. I was going to ask Brian about this as well, because Brian's worked on three films now,

which I think all involve... So it's Frequency, Déjà Vu, what's the third one? Lost Mimsy? Yes. That one. Which Mimsy? Yes. That one. Which are all about time travel. I think time travel into the past features in all of them, which as far as we know is not possible.

As you said, Sunshine, the actual initial idea, I remember getting the script, actually, because they'd asked me if I'd look at it, and the first line had two mistakes on it, which is, our son is dying now, and we're going to fix it. Wrong, wrong. So, Brian, how right does it have to be right? Does it offend you the moment that science is...

No, not at all. I mean, like you're saying, fiction is science fiction, so I don't think it has to be right at all. But what really bothers me is when you have a lazy screenwriter who bends their own rules halfway through the film. That's what I hate. If you set up a consistent set of rules, your own little universe, even if it conflicts with the laws of physics, if it's an interesting story and you're consistent, I'll go along for the ride. So I don't think it has to be accurate at all. There is a certain amount of slippage with the actual science.

I mean, taking that Danny Boyle film, Sunshine, when I first heard about it, I thought, this Danny Boyle film sounds ridiculous. The sun's going out. We need to reignite it with a nuclear bomb the size of Manhattan. I mean, the sun is about 80 million times bigger than this planet and probably wouldn't notice a bomb the size of this planet. No, entirely correct.

But then, just when I thought I'd got it all figured out, I picked up New Scientist a couple of weeks ago and I think the cover story was, the sun is going out. So does somebody just have to write some science fiction and then the entire universe reorders itself? Brian, we've been talking about the meeting of art and science and you've actually, recently, been working with Philip Glass.

How did you get the balance between the science, which you want to put into it, and at the same time creating an artistic endeavour? This was actually a pretty simple one because it's a work that's based on a short story that I wrote. So there weren't even that many words to play with in order to actually make a live presentation of the book. So Philip basically just read the story.

I stood at a blackboard again, another whiteboard, you know, with Philip there. And I went through the physics of black holes, the physics of warping of time. And then Philip sat down over the next few months to write a score for a 40 minute piece that would bring a story of a boy traveling to a black hole to a general audience. It's called Icarus at the Edge of Time and it's a rewriting of the myth of Icarus where rather than wax wings and journeying to the sun

the boy goes to a black hole and then real physics kicks in, general relativity kicks in and he actually comes back from this one-hour journey, he comes back and it's 10,000 years later. So Philip really just sat down and tried to understand the science. Sometimes he'd call me late at night, can you come down to my studio, I've got some idea for the slowing of time, and I'd head down to lower Manhattan, go to his studio, and listen to him play various attempts at it, and little by little he grasped the ideas and turned it into a piece of art. Do you think you can actually, would you be able to take away from that film,

just on one kind of showing, do you think you'd be able to take away the science? No. Or do you think maybe you get captured by the beauty of it and then you go, I'm kind of hooked into this and I want to see it again? Definitely more like the latter. There's no pedagogy in this piece,

and I think a lot of places where art and science, when they tend to mix, I think where they fall down is when they try to be pedagogical, to actually teach something. I don't know that it's the right medium to teach. What you can do is spark fantastic excitement. You know, even, you know, my five-year-old

son may or may not be here, I'm not sure, but, you know, I dedicated the book to him. That's a true statement, I know that. It had to be one or the other. So don't call me on that. I thought maybe that was a quantum puzzle you were making. He's like waiting in a certain way. He isn't here. But just to simply say, I wrote it for him, but I didn't want to bring it to him and read it to him because he'd be like, oh, no, not daddy's book again.

I didn't want to get into that sort of thing. But he found it on his own, and my wife read it to him, and he was like crying at because you know the boy comes back and his father's been dead for 10,000 years you know so he would periodically ask me so so time slows down near a black hole couldn't you have made the black hole smaller so the boy comes back 20 years later so his dad is still alive you know the bottom line is he cares about time dilation and general relativity not that he understands it but he's seen it at work in a narrative that grabbed him emotionally. And that's what I think we can do with this kind of melding of science and art and science fiction.

It's interesting because I think we both publicise science and we've become known for that because we think it's a good thing to do. We want to encourage more kids into it, we want to make society more scientific. But we've also been talking about science fiction, as we mentioned at the start, novels like Frankenstein and films that paint this rather more negative view of science. Do you think that the films that are popular now

and the books that are popular have painted a negative picture of science more than a positive picture of science, and is that a problem? Yeah, personally, I don't. The ones that only really make me kind of sick to my stomach are the ones that paint the scientist as sort of the crazy wild guy who just is like a nutty figure.

My wife would probably say that to me, but you know. Or my son who may or may not be here. Yeah. My wife who may or may not exist. Should we do the experiment? Is my wife here? There she is. Oh, there's my son. He's here.

I was right, sort of. Jonathan, what have you learnt today? Speaking on behalf of dogs, this weather is doing me no favour. Well, we've got to the end of the show, and today we didn't manage to get a Carl Sagan quote in, so for the last minute we always have one Carl Sagan quote, and today it's going to be,

if a human disagrees with you, let them live, in a hundred billion galaxies you will not find another. So, thank you to our guests, Alan Moore, Jonathan Ross, Brian Green. Next week, the final show of the series, and we'll be asking, can things only get better? Goodbye. Goodbye. Well, we'll see what he did there. 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 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

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