The Infinite Monkey Cage - Science v Art

Episode Date: July 23, 2012

Brian Cox and Robin Ince transport the cage of infinite proportions, to the slightly more confined space of the Latitude Comedy Arena. They will be joined on stage by a panel of guests, including Al Murray, for a witty, irreverent and unashamedly rational look at the world according to science. Given Latitude's artistic, musical and literary credentials, they'll be taking a huge risk by staging the ultimate show down, as they pitch Art against Science and ask which has more to offer and whether the two cultures might ever make a happy union. To help them battle it out, and alongside comedian Al Murray, they'll be joined by cosmologist Andrew Pontzen, comedian and actor Sara Pascoe and CERN scientist Jonathan Butterworth. Let battle commence!

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. Welcome to the last in the series of Infinite Monkey Cage. Last week, the man on my right learnt that observations of the cosmic microwave background may imply that there are an infinite number of worlds with an infinite number of versions of himself in them. Yet despite this, it turns out that there is a vanishingly small probability that he understands any of the things I just said

in any of those universes. It's Robin Ince. But I am happy to know that thanks to many world interpretations there is a world in which the man on my left actually walks past a volcano and goes, that's rubbish.

And do you know what? I don't think the stars are nice at all. Now that's an impression of John Ronson. It's not. It's me doing you as Orville from Keith Harris and Orville. That's what it is. I wish I could fly. But I can't.

It's against a lot of the laws. Poor silly physics. It is Professor Brian Cox. So, in the grand British tradition of summertime, a collection of people have gathered in a muddy field to listen to music and use loos that you would normally be terrified of. Today we're talking the two cultures, science versus art. So, which is better, space travel and vaccination

or Jack Vetrano and Hollyoaks? So, we are joined by four guests from Science and the Arts. Our first guest has spent the last few weeks doing a conga around the particle accelerators below Switzerland at increasing speeds, which means he's slightly younger than he would otherwise have been due to relativistic effects. He's a member of the Atlas Experiment at CERN, head of physics at UCL, and is getting a little tetchy when asked, so how does the God particle affect God? It's Professor John Buttleworth.

And like certain other men we know with an interest in the background radiation after the Big Bang, we have another physicist on who enjoys also playing the keyboard. He is also intrigued by how the sat-nav demonstrates that Einstein's general theory of relativity works, so much so that he's frequently so busy explaining how wonderful a sat-nav would be if it was actually approaching a black hole that his sat-nav is programmed to say, stop going on about physics, turn left, turn left, you're lost again. What is it about physicists? They know where everything in the universe is,

but they always get lost when looking for their own kitchen. It's Andrew Ponson. Now, it's not often that we have someone who can claim that they are the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of John Murray, the third Duke of Athol on the show. Yeah, apparently. So it's surprising. This is the third week in a row that we've had one of them on.

A man who by day is a polite Oxbridge modern history graduate but by night is a right-wing BSWL landlord. That's socks of university graduates for you. It is Al Murray. Al Murray. And our final guest is one of the country's most popular vegans. Put her near a table filled with nuts and berries and watch her

go. She's also appeared in the BBC comedy series 2012, which looks at an imaginary world of what would happen if the Olympics was organised by people who really did not have a clue what was going on. It is Sarah Pascoe. And this is our panel. Now, I want to get the interesting stuff out of the way before we talk about art. So, John, it has been a big month for science, undoubtedly. The Higgs discovery, I think, is one of the greatest discoveries in my lifetime, one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century.

So could you just outline, I suppose there are two bits of it. There's the experimental bit, but I think for the purposes of today, the theoretical bit of the Higgs, the fact that it was predicted back in the 1960s in part for aesthetic reasons. Yeah, I don't want to let the side down immediately, though, but there are people who think the Higgs is a bit of a bodge, and I'll explain why. The fundamental forces, the lights that we're seeing here and everything, you get them from symmetries.

There's this really deep connection in physics between symmetries, which means that things are the same in different places, reflections and things, and forces, the things that make the whole thing work. And the whole of physics, in a way, comes from symmetries, except that as soon as anything has mass, the symmetry breaks. And the beauty of that theory that connects symmetries with the way things work is broken. And the Higgs is the thing you have to introduce to keep the symmetry there

and keep the beauty and aesthetics there while making things have mass, which obviously we've got mass, you might have noticed. So in a way it's a kind of add-on to the theory, but in another way it's the underpinning of this whole beautiful structure of how physics and symmetries somehow make the universe tick. So it was there in a sense as an aesthetic choice. We would like these symmetries somehow make the universe tick. So it was there, in a sense, as an aesthetic choice. We would like these symmetries... It's kind of introduced to preserve our aesthetic choice.

I mean, it's more than an aesthetic choice. It's a mathematics as well, but mathematics, of course, is beautiful. And it preserves our kind of aesthetic prejudices, that there's some connection between what we think is a nice-looking theory and what actually happens in an experiment, which is what we saw last week, that actually there is this deep connection, which continues to astound me. But, yeah, the Higgs is introduced in order to preserve that connection,

and that desire to preserve the connection led people to postulate in the 60s this very peculiar object, unique in nature, and a whole field that fills the universe. And last week we saw the thing. Al, you were actually a history graduate. Do you find that there does seem to be an odd division? I mean, it happens at university. You consider it to be in the arts kind of area,

and then the scientists, and there doesn't seem to be that much mixing. Why do you think there is this division where, you know, this isn't something that always existed in society, but now? Well, I think it's because science is a sort of new kid on the block, isn't it, in terms of trying to get the grips with the universe it's brand new it's only been around you know 150 years in its current form where it thinks it can solve stuff whereas arts young you know metaphysics philosophy those things have been around as long as humanity and are better uh can i just say i'm amazed only

yesterday only yesterday as I arrived on site, I was given a necklace that has been imprinted with happiness that was given to me. That's not a Higgs boson particle, that's a necklace that's giving me happiness right in front of me. So I win. See, I'm amazed that Brian let you get away with saying science thinks it can solve stuff.

I'm not saying it thinks it can. Obviously it does solve stuff. Can I? I'm not saying it thinks it can. Obviously it does solve stuff, but it's solving it in a new way and all that sort of thing. The arts are sort of human beings like telling stories, they like symmetry, they like all these things that we've just talked about in physics. Those have existed in the arts

from the start. Cave painting and probably bashing rocks together. That's arts and science. There you have it, all happening at the same time. But I like cave painting more than rocks. But cave painting's a really interesting example, actually, because why you might say that is an art thing, an aesthetic thing, cave painting was them trying to understand the world and work out what it was.

Like some of the earliest ones, which they just thought were zigzags up and down on walls, turned out to be that they were filling the room with smoke and then when they were banging drums drawing the sound waves so that's science so can we just agree that science is art that works and go on I've got a question

so I'm not talking about who is good now who is the best, who's the good things they can do what about the opposite right so art, the worst it can be is bad. Bad art. Science can be used for evil. Evil. Bad things happen because of science.

Evil scientists. Good scientists invent amazing things that are then used for evil. Science saves people's lives, but it also takes people's lives. Evil science. Doesn't it? Yeah. Haven't there been examples of art being used for evil propaganda? Like what?

Well, art turns out been examples of art being used for evil propaganda? Like what? Well, yeah. Oh! Art turns out to be evil as well. Hitler was an artist! There we go. Hitler was an artist. That wasn't his main job. He was amateur.

He was never paid for that. He was a very bad artist. OK, don't bring the vegetarianism into it. God. Do you know what? He was a vegetarian and a bad artist. Yeah, that isn't why people don't bring the vegetarianism into it. God. Do you know what? He was a vegetarian and a bad artist. Yeah, that isn't why people don't like him. By the way.

Actually, it would be good if it just... I didn't like his art, I didn't like his stance, and then there was just a turning point around the mid-30s where I thought, I think I was right in my earlier judgment. He ate ham, so he was a bad vegetarian as well as a bad artist. Again, he ate ham. No, he he was a bad vegetarian as well as a bad artist. Again, he ate ham. No, he wasn't a vegetarian. It's nonsense. I think it's one of those things.

That's why we've got a historian on. Yeah, it's not true. Finally, a lot of people who still quite liked Hitler because of the vegetarian science have gone, now you've thrown the ham in there, that's definitely been, that's it. That's lost Hitler the latitude crowd. Before we entirely lose focus, I just want to... Oh, that happened a long time ago. Andrew, you're a cosmologist,

and one of the best examples, or the most often cited examples, of beauty in physics, in mathematical theories, is Einstein's general theory of relativity. So could you just outline why that is often put up as being the ultimate example of aesthetics in science? I think it's because it's incredibly efficient. So you start from some really basic things that you want to be true about gravity, or Einstein wanted to be true about gravity, something called the equivalence principle. It's actually quite a simple thing about gravity just being indistinguishable from being in a lift which is accelerating upwards.

So you can't tell the difference between sitting in a stationary lift that's in a gravitational field and being in a lift in outer space where there's no gravity but the thing is accelerating upwards. So it starts from that and very, very few extra ingredients, really, and comes out to a theory which predicts so many things that we now know to be right and along the way it also starts telling us that actually all gravity is is a sort of manifestation of the fact that space-time is curved and so it's it's not only really efficient

but actually it leads us to this really beautiful picture where instead of having the Newtonian slightly mysterious thing, things pulling on each other at a distance, you have what, in a sense, conceptually is almost simpler, that the stuff sitting in the space curves it up, and then the fact that it's curved causes other stuff to move differently. So an aesthetic sense about the universe is useful, is the point. Well, Andrew there said a beautiful picture,

and that's again why the art versus science thing, Sarah. It is a bit of a nonsense. It's about human imagination, and scientists, they have to use their human imagination to get something right, whereas artists only have to get as far as getting Brian Sewell going, that's very pretty. So we put ourselves under less stress. Yeah, but it's really difficult as getting Brian Sewell going that's very pretty so we put ourselves under less stress

Yeah but it's really difficult to get Brian Sewell to say that so that shows how tough art is you know he's not easy to please is he? The word truth in both schemes means such different things because truth in art is so blurry and vague so Hamlet is a play which people consider to be really truthful about the human condition, but it's completely fictional about a made-up person

saying made-up things in a made-up situation, yet we consider that made-up thing to be enlightening in our actual lives, and that's how art works. And so many paintings are, they're dots or they're blurry, and in a way, because of the way our brain processes them, they seem to say something to us in a truthful way where science is the exact opposite. Well, I'm not sure it is, though, actually. Really?

Because I mean, we were saying earlier on, is this the final theory? It's not. I mean, we know it's not the final theory because we know there are things wrong with it. And so science is about creating fictions which happen to give us one way of predicting what's going to happen. Wait a second. Wait a second. There we go again. Secondly, this is all a fiction.

What the hell is going on over there? So you create the thing if it was true. So you create the fiction and then you test it. Right. But then it's not fiction anymore. But you were just saying, I think it's fiction on the level that we don't really think, at least we certainly don't think at the moment, that this is really how the universe operates. But it's true. I'm old-fashioned enough to believe in objective reality, I'm sorry. And I think that

the good thing about science and where it differs, I agree that a lot of the methods and ways of thinking are the same. And in a way, art is a form of communication and can be used to communicate about science as well. But the thing with science is we're continually pushing those imaginative and intellectual bits of our brains against this really confusing and counterintuitive universe, which we can do experiments.

We didn't discuss the experiment before, but that's the core of it, really. It's not that the ideas can be the same. It's the fact that one set of ideas, you can go out and build an enormous machine, test them and see if they've got anything to do with objective reality. And this is important, isn't it? With the scientific theory,

the judge, in some sense, of its beauty and its success is that you can test it against nature. Whereas what you said about Hamlet, it's a test against, I suppose, opinion, in a sense. Is there an objective measure of worth in art, do you think? Or is it purely statistical in a sense? As long as a lot of people agree that this is a great work, then it's a great work.

But you can't measure whether something's good art or not. Actually, I think that's exactly right. I think it's subjective. I could think something was the best art that was ever made that everyone else on the planet thought was terrible. And I could be the only person, but because it's subjective and that's the art that speaks to me,'m absolutely right and no one could ever comedy is a perfect example whether you consider it an art form or not because you can be in a room of 3 000 people

watching a comedian if you're the one person not laughing you will go out and say to someone yeah he wasn't funny he won't go he was funny to everyone but me no they're all wrong he wasn't funny al there didn't used to be this divide. There wasn't a divide between science and art. No, because religion was answering these questions and art was tangled up in religion as well. When did this divide occur? Because like I said, I think human imagination, that's

actually what it's about. And when people get worried about should I like science or art, you go, no, you should just be interested in the world. I meet more scientists who are also interested in art, whereas I quite often meet art people who go, I don't really like science, I find it a bit boring. Well, that's because it is.

I completely disagree. Which bit? I completely disagree. What do you want me to say? I honestly don't think there is a clear divide, you know, because, hey, this is not a good example, this is not high art, but let's take The Da Vinci Code, which was... Guys, hear me out on this.

Leonardo da Vinci or The Da Vinci Code? The Da Vinci Code. Because that was a book, and I grew up in Essex, I didn't go to a good school, etc, etc. So let's just say I'm a common, normal person who read The Da Vinci Code, which was the first place that I read about the golden ratio. OK, so not having a science-y background,

I've got a C, I'm a double science. It can act as a gateway, right? I was... When I was going to come on, so I reread Philip Sidney's The Defence of Poesy, which is when at universities they were deciding whether you should even be able to study any humanities subjects. And he was arguing that people learn more, listen more, when they're enjoying themselves, and the importance of poetry and plays were that actually while people were

enjoying themselves you could get huge political opinions out there you could it's really powerful actually people having a good time and all of the best science writers now who like become bestsellers because they write about these really complicated things but there's a story to it you can get really involved firmer's lastorem is talking about something really complicated, but anyone could read that book and love it. See, I read Fifty Shades of Grey, and that's got something about it. I think it was called The Golden Ratio. I can't remember, but anyway,

it was... But I want Al... To pick up on what Al said, I want you to name some science that's boring. No, I was being... I was, of course, being facetious. Well, no, I mean, my question to you, as Nigel Tuffner would say,

my question to you is this. What difference does... I mean, science is... Obviously, there have been many big breakthroughs. Newton figures out gravity and mechanical laws and all that sort of thing. And civilisation follows. Well, we live in that.

We live right now in an invented Newtonian world, the car, the airplane, the PA. This festival is an expression of Newtonian physics in many ways. It's also an arts festival, on the other hand, but we won't get bogged down in that. And then relativity, you've got 50 years later, they split the atom and we get all the stuff that comes out of that. In 50 years' time, where's the Higgs boson's iPod? What's the consequence of this? I mean, obviously, it's a marvellous discovery, and your theory now holds up, and that's lovely for you all.

But... LAUGHTER And I think the most interesting thing has been the fantastic sigh of relief rippling through science. You're coming at science now as though it's justified by the technology it leads to, which is fine, but I didn't expect that from the arty-farty end of the table, I have to say.

You have to look back historically, because it's always impossible to look at the frontier of science and try to work out what that's going to lead to in the next 50 years. But historically, if you look back to the beginning of this quest to understand the building blocks of nature, so quantum theory arose throughout, I suppose, the turn of the 20th century onwards. It took a long time, well, not too long actually, about to the 1940s to invent the transistor,

which is an absolute cast-iron demonstration of how understanding something very esoteric, in this case quantum theory, the structure of atoms, leads to something that's profoundly useful. So I think historically what we've found is that exploring nature, understanding the way the universe works, has been useful. We don't know what we're going to find, right?

Except you did in this instance, because you were looking for a thing. Actually, two years ago, I hoped it wasn't there. Really? Yeah, yeah. It would have been, in a way, even more exciting if it wasn't, because we'd have to have a whole new theory. When I used to be a proper... Come on. When I used to be a proper scientist years ago before I started messing around on television and radio,

I wrote a paper with John. Myself and John wrote a paper together. It's called W-W Scattering in the Absence of a Light Higgs Particle. And we worked on what you would do at the LHC, what signatures you would look for. If you didn't find a Higgs, what would you look for? So the reason that experiment was built was that this was a theory.

And it's profoundly esoteric, and it's rather odd, actually. So that's why people have been excited about the discovery because it is a profoundly different way of looking at the universe. I think that's a very interesting way that art plays a big role in science or at least aesthetics because there's a lot of questions you can ask in research and you can't go and spend

15 years building a collider to answer every single one of them. And it's very clear that the question is there a Higgs boson or not, which has all other ramifications for our understanding, was decided to be an interesting and worthwhile question to address by the scientific community on the basis of

aesthetics and maths. And, you know, there are loads of questions you can ask. And we might be missing some tricks, but using aesthetics and maths as a guide to what's an interesting thing to put your time and effort into answering is actually very fruitful. It has been very fruitful. And this latest discovery is just another example of, my goodness, it actually works.

The universe seems to have something to do with our aesthetic understanding of what's going on. I think that's quite wonderful. And it's definitely a way that arts and aesthetics play a role in science, for sure. a role in science for sure. I mean, Andrew, do you want to say... I mean, this idea of being able to predict how useful scientific discoveries are going to be in the future. I've been quiet on

purpose because when it comes to cosmology it's even harder to make any kind of predictions as to how useful it's going to be. I mean, one of the big things in cosmology at the moment is about inflation, which is a process that supposedly happens at something like a million, million times higher energy than the stuff you're studying at the Large Hadron

Collider. And it's very hard to imagine, and we've got telescopes looking for particular signatures of this. It'd be very exciting if we find them. It's very hard to imagine that leading directly to new technology. But what you can do, of course, is point to spin-offs. It's not just that you get a new theory of physics and that lets you build something new. Also, actually building the stuff that lets you look into the physics is very helpful in itself. So I think one example is radio astronomers, people looking at the sky in radio waves, develop the technology that's required to make mobile phones work

because they have this kind of technology that cancels out echoes off buildings and other things. And that is now in every mobile phone. Otherwise it would just simply be impossible. So that's the moon landing frying pan, so to speak. Yeah. It's always mobile phones, isn't it? But Sarah, there's a,

as Andrew said, cosmology, this expanding view of our universe, the removal of the Earth from the centre of the universe, Copernicus onwards, whilst that hasn't had a direct technological use, it's been inspirational in a great deal of art and literature. I think this is the thing, this is what's so interesting about

hearing you all speak, I just don't think you can have one without the other. I don't think you can just be exploring how we're here on its own. And I don't think you can just be talking about, so from the art side, why are we here and what does it mean and how does it feel? I think you do need both things. We're trying to understand both things, right? What is life and what are we supposed to do with it?

You couldn't just have one without the other. Science keeps people alive. The fact that we're so overpopulated is because we've managed to do this so life is available to so many more people, we're able to feed so many more people but at the same time you wouldn't want it just to be medicine and all of us kept

alive until we were 120 if there was nothing for us to do. But you need that. We know why we need it. That's an interesting thing though, which is, there is, I think there's a South American tribe which I think is called the Piraha and they have no history, no sense of history at all, and they also have no art. They have no, basically

they survive, they live, and they have no art. So what use is art? What is it about the human being that means art is a required thing? Al, what do you think? Well, because otherwise it's a barren walk through an endless veil of tears. I mean, come on, Robin. You know, I mean, otherwise you'd be so lonely,

you'd go into a supermarket and use the self-service checkout and put an unexpected item in the baggage area just for the conversation. So the only way you can make existence palatable is to paint stuff. Yeah. Paint stuff, sing lovely songs. What about exploring nature as it

really is? They're the same thing. Let's go for a walk. It's not. It's like Harry's art. And the Turner Prize goes to the Ramblers Association for Chorleywood to Rickmansworth and on the canal route. I can't let him get away with that. He just said that science,

the whole glorious emergence of a technological civilisation is the same as going for a war. Yes. Well, think about it. I'm not even going to defend that point of view. I'm just going to stick to it. You must have done Question Time. You must have.

And I won't do it. The last thing they need is comedians on that. But that's the... I like that someone at the back just shouted, why can't you all get along? And the nice thing is, after the show, we will. The whole thing is merely a construct. But for now, security security have them thrown out

as a final question to get back to the subject of this discussion does science need art I'm going to go around the panel and a quick answer Andrew does science need art yeah I think it does

I mean if you look at the way these things develop they do develop hand in hand John people need art, scientists are people, so yes. And Al, if you could just sing the theme tune to different strokes. No!

That's what you want, isn't it? Yeah. Of course science and art should happily co-exist and walk into the future holding hands. Science and art should happily coexist and walk into the future holding hands. Sarah, do you think science and art should kiss more? Yes.

What's been so interesting for me, listening to you guys, is hearing about creativity in science. Because it's imagination. It is, but imagination, I suppose, guided by reality yeah yeah but sometimes unreality is more fun like unreality is fun yeah because don't you need you need like you were saying you need an escape if you just spent your whole time you know when you start doing your whatever you do classical gas or whatever on your guitar somewhere in the middle of cern that is you need this it this, it does not become the sorbet between the kind of, the rigour of the scientific ideas.

Because classical gas is something where the gas molecules bounce together and the collisions are completely elastic. So they obey the ideal gas equation. And that is why I play on my guitar. Do you know what? To me, I'd love to be. That is the question, whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

or to take arms against sincere troubles, and by opposing end them. We can do that as well on this table. To sleep, for chance to dream, aye, there's the rub. For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil? Aye, I've forgotten the rest. Thank you, God, you've eased the listeners down into PM at 5pm,

which comes at 8, so back to Radio 4. Can we do Twas Brillig and the Slidy Toe, Tidgar and Gimble in the Wable, Mimsy with the Borough Groves and Moan Wraiths Out Gae, Beware the Jabberwock, My Son, The Jaws, The Bide... So this is a story all about how my life got to stand upside down. I'd like to take a minute, just sit right there. John, your song.

Now we've turned this into stars in your eyes. And who are you going to be tonight? Tonight I'm going to be Albert Einstein doing a George Formby song. Well, thank you very much to our guests, to Sarah Pascoe, Andrew Ponce and John Butterworth, Al Murray and to the Laptude Festival. We will be leaving you

for the summer and I imagine we probably won't be back in the autumn, will we? Because science is finished pretty much, isn't it, John? We've finished science, haven't we? We're trying to think of some new stuff to do, but I'll get back to you. A couple of loose ends, yeah. We'll be back for a new series in November,

but that's a long time for our producer to be on holiday, so we've decided that since she might get bored, she should spend her time by answering irrational complaints from listeners. So Robin is now going to generate an irrational complaint to the BBC for the summer. So this is what our producer thinks of some of you who are listening. Stars may aid us in foretelling the birth and death of galaxies, but have no ability to tell you if it's a lucky week for love or economics.

Climate change denies merely fear umbrellas, irrationally. She only allows us to read The Guardian whilst on BBC premises, and insists that we dress as Stalin whenever we're doing our meetings. Homeopaths do not have a physical brain, but merely skull water with the memory of brains. Thank you very much. Goodbye.

Goodbye. 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.