The Infinite Monkey Cage - The Infinite Monkey Cage USA Tour: Los Angeles

Episode Date: July 13, 2015

Science Goes to Hollywood: Science Fact V Science FictionBrian Cox and Robin Ince continue their tour of the USA, as they take to the stage in LA. They are joined by cosmologist and science advisor on movies such as Thor and Tron Legacy, Sean Carroll, comedian Joe Rogan, The Simpsons' writer and Executive Producer of Futurama, David X Cohen, and Eric Idle. They ask why so many movies now seem to employ a science advisor, whether scientific accuracy is really important when you are watching a film about a mythical norse god and whether science fact can actually be far more interesting than science fiction.

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. As women, our life stages come with unique risk factors, like when our estrogen levels drop during menopause, causing the risk of heart disease to go up. Know your risks. Visit heartandstroke.ca. Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And

welcome to the podcast version of the Infinite Monkey Cage, which contains extra material that wasn't considered good enough for the radio. Enjoy it. For the first time live in Los Angeles, this is the Infinite Monkey Cage. What a beautiful thing that across Hollywood at the moment, some people are going to see a new Will Ferrell film, some people are going to see live nude girls, and some people are here to see a lecture on the spherical matter distribution in the universe. Yes. So, being in LA, we've been in LA for four days, and you get to meet a lot of people who go,

oh, can I go on, can I go on, can I come on your show? And sometimes you meet a kind of young band that you think, ah, well, they might be all right. We sort of apologise for this, but we felt sorry for them because they're trying to make their way in the music business. What do they call them? They're called the Cheeky Monkeys. Cheeky Monkeys. Cheeky Monkeys.

And please welcome to the stage Steve Jay, Jeff Davis, Jeff Lynn and Eric Idle. Thank you. Good evening. Hello. Ready? Yeah. Two, three, four. I find quantum mechanics confusing today

Now science is all the rage The Hadron Collider is banging away Using today, our science is all the rage. The Hadron Collider is banging away, trying to guess our age. A particle here, a particle there, in this weird quantum world, bits can be anywhere. Which might just explain why I'm losing my hair In the infinite monkey cage The other day I heard Mrs. Schrodinger say I'm going to put out the cat Mrs. Heisenberg said, ooh, he might be quite dead I'm uncertain if I should do that

Unless you've got that Robin Ince and Professor Cox I'd leave that poor pussy alone in its box That cat may be both dead and alive Said the sage in the infinite monkey cage Scientists say all the world's just a stage That physics is passing through. There may be an infinite number of me's and an infinite number of you's. God help us, over and soon they are trying to learn what can the dark matter be.

What can the dark matter be? Nobody cries if a strawberry dies In the infinite monkey cage This linear superpositional thing Is blowing my mind away The universe seems to be made out of string That's what some particle physicists say If infinite monkeys type every day They may accidentally write Hamlet the play

But they'd probably just shit on it and throw it away In the infinite monkey cave The cheeky monkeys In the infinite monkey cave Without your trousers In the infinite, Monkey King. Oi!

Oi! Ladies and gentlemen, the Cheeky Monkeys! You know what? I think they might have a future. It's just one of those weird things, you go, oh, look, there's Jeff Lynne, considered to be the fourth greatest music producer in the world, playing the banjolele for an Eric Idle's written song.

Just another normal day in my life. So, as we're in LA today, we thought we would talk about Hollywood and indeed in a town of fiction, is there any space for science fact? So, when you're making films about marauding aliens or transformers or bizarre

robots on the rampage, do you really need a science advisor? Does entertainment need to face the scrutiny of scientific accuracy so we're joined by a panel who are going to help us through these ideas and they are first of all sean carroll is a cosmologist at caltech he's the author of particle at the end of the universe and a fantastic blog called the preposterous universe he is science advisor on angels and demons, the Tron legacy, and Thor, which I think, why do you need, when

the basis of your film is a mythical Norse god with a magic hammer, but we'd better check the rest of the science and make sure it's a scientifically accurate magic hammer. He's also

currently ensconced in an argument with Brian Cox about causality and quantum field theory. I know, that old chestnut. I think that may well come up tonight. Please welcome Sean Carroll! David X. Cohn was a computer science graduate

who was lured from programming to the cutting edge of award-winning animation, first with The Simpsons, and then he went on to helm Futurama, the Lazarus TV animations. He also created the game Zoid for the Apple II, which was hugely popular... with you...

LAUGHTER ..and David and his dad. Please welcome David X. Cone. Zoid fan. I've got a copy of Zoid in my trunk. I'll sell you after the show. Joe Rogan is a rigorous and prolific stand-up comedian whose comedy specials include Talking Monkeys in Space. His podcasts never skimp on detail. In fact, some of them are

longer than Hamlet at over three hours long and deservedly so. And he presented Joe Rogan Questions Everything, which has so far included Weaponized Weather and Robo Sapiens. Please welcome Joe Rogan. sapiens please welcome Joe Rogan Eric Idle is best known as the lead singer of the cheeky monkeys and author of the infinite monkey cage theme tune before moving to LA though and he was also involved with a kind of niche comedy group in the United Kingdom but you've probably never heard of them. Eric Idle. Before we actually get started, I do have to ask you, Sean, the idea of a science advisor on Thor is... What exactly is...

Where do you draw the line with the science? This is why you're not a famous Hollywood producer, I think, because you don't see how this comes in. For one thing, they had a wormhole in Thor. They envisioned that the Bifrost Bridge that was bringing the gods from Asgard to Earth was this shortcut through space-time, just like Brian already explained.

Again, sorry. So we wanted to get the wormhole accurate for the gods of Asgard to make sure they came down. But they didn't want to get the wormhole. They said, so what is this thing? And I said, it is a wormhole. And the president of Marvel Studios said, we can't call it that.

It's 290s. 290s? Can we have our wormhole? We've got a wormhole. Let's just have a look at the wormhole. So if you watch the movie, Jane Foster, Natalie Portman, says they must have come over in an Einstein Rosen bridge. So that was my contribution to the movie, Jane Foster, Natalie Portman, says, they must have come over in an Einstein Rosen

Bridge. So that was my contribution to the movie. And Kat Denning says, what is that? And Stellan Skarsgård goes, it's a wormhole. Don't worry. So without the science advisor, they never would have gotten that. And more importantly, without the science advisor, Natalie Portman's character would not have been a particle physicist and therefore inspired who knows how many 12-year-old girls to go, like, what is that? I want to be what Jane Foster is. I just love that it's so nice. Oh, Newton's second law, that's so late 1970s.

We didn't mention that. It's quite deely-boppers and rollerblades. David, how important is it to get the science right? So The Simpsons are very famous, actually, for paying attention to science. Yeah, you know, to give my opinion, there's this writer, Simon Singh, from England, who has written a book about all the little math jokes that were hidden in the Simpsons and Futurama over the years. So there is a little genuine math in science, but it's not important. That's the question.

It's very, it couldn't be less important. It's usually, it comes in the form of, look at, you know, this shot of the classroom, there's a chalkboard in the background, and we're trying to rewrite some joke, and after about two hours of failing, someone says, there's also a blank chalkboard in the background. Dave, go out and write some kind of equation to stick on that chalkboard. So those usually come in that way, and we never thought they were going to be a big deal. Then suddenly people started writing books about them, and I show up here on your panel. But wait, let me tell you one more thing. When we started Futurama, which has a lot more science than science fiction,

really we had a big debate about how much science we could have put in. And one thing we agreed on early on is science shall not outweigh comedy. That was up on the whiteboard, and it was there the whole time. Science totally outweighs comedy. Come on. Look at whiteboard and it was there the whole time. Science totally outweighs comedy. Come on. Look at it. He's going, well, thank you very much. Nice.

That's the conclusion. So we like to refer to it and make jokes about it, let people know that we like it. But if the plot demands that they travel across space and get to another galaxy, which, as you said, is unlikely, we're still going to do it. Joe, do you find that, I mean, now there are incredible kind of films and books which are really playing around with proper scientific ideas.

When you were growing up and, you know, another science fiction boom then, was that in any way an inspiration to you in terms of the way of exploring ideas? I think any kid growing up is going to be fascinated by science fiction, the idea of the future, especially when you're a child, because you're thinking about the future in terms of, like, when I'm my parents' age, what is it going to be like? They had shows like Space 1999 when I was a kid,

where people presumed by 1999 we'd all be in space. We'd all be hanging around with robots, and we'd all have our own ships, and none of that panned out. But it was always fascinating for people to consider what would be like. Like, if you look at the cockpit in Alien, the original Alien, they were able to go to space, but their computers were so crude, they hadn't figured out, like, the idea of a touchscreen. They hadn't figured out so many concepts that we just accept today.

But Alien's a good example because when you at times you have a kind of utopian science fiction which says everything's going to be great and then alien says you know what we're going to be traveling through space and you are still going to be treated accordingly and your union's going to be crushed and you're going to be eating your own feces so just so you know we'll be traveling through space but it's still going to be awful i mean, wait, because I think aliens are very important. Alien and gravity establish the fact that all

women in space wear men's T-shirts. It's a very important rule of science fiction. In fact, it's actually science friction. If I wanted to write a book actually, we talked about the science of the Simpsons, if I wanted to write the science of Monty Python, would it be a very long book?

Yes. Because it'd take you a long time to find any. But there's a little bit of science in the Holy Grail. Sir Bedivy says, and that, my lord, is how we know the earth to be banana-shaped. Well, that's the bit where he proves that someone's a witch, doesn't he? Proves he's a witch, absolutely. Floats in water.

But you've gone on to, you know, you wrote a novel, Road to Mars, which is a science fiction. And as you said, I think that bit in Holy Grail and then Brian being picked up by a spaceship briefly... Yes. ..is kind of, it's not, despite science fiction being a big boom and then Douglas Adams came along, why did you then decide in the late 90s to Road to Mars?

I was interested in, I just like the idea of the future of show business, which is what the book's about, because it intrigues me. And it seemed to me that we were having so much, everything was all computerised and everything, that eventually we go back to real people being funny on stage. And so I had just the idea of two comedians going around the galaxy

but they had a robot who could not understand what comedy was. He didn't know why they made that strange noise. The audience, when they laughed, he didn't know what they were doing because there was no sense of irony in a computer. Am I right? It would be very hard to teach

a computer comedy. It would be hard. Yeah. Someday we'll do it. I think this is where they surprise us. Was the robot inspired by any particular audience member who just would not laugh? The robot was actually based on David Bowie in 1983. He was pretty cool. But he also made

this warm, fabulous discovery that out in space there was gravity, but the opposite of that was levity. It's really Douglas Adams' idea, isn't it? So levity's an anti-gravity. It's the opposite of gravity. So if you have a spaceship and you're all sat there

and it starts falling towards the ground, you've all got to start telling jokes frantically to make it stay up. Is that it? Laughter would keep it afloat. By the way, we had a humorless robot comedian in Futurama named HumorBot 5.0, and his big joke was, Super Collider, I just met her.

I'm sorry. Sean, we talked about, I thought, a little bit about wormholes. So the idea, central to interstellar, you said central to Thor, the science of Thor. What's the current state of understanding of wormholes? From a physicist's point of view, do we think that they're a possibility and they would open the Doors the stars yeah, just asking these questions takes us right to the edge of the things. We don't know very well I mean wormholes were invented by Einstein back in 1935 and

There are things that we can absolutely think about write down the equations for imagine them existing and then okay, do they actually exist in the real world? And the answer is we just don't know. Probably the answer is no. I mean, probably if they do exist, they're microscopic and quantum mechanical and not things that we can use to travel from here to there. But even that, we just don't know. So, I mean, that's a great thing. And the graduate students of the next generation might be answering this question. Because there are problems with them. If you can shortcut your way through space and time, you can, in principle, presumably, shortcut your way into the past.

You can build a time machine with a wormhole. Absolutely. This was an insight that came about from Kip Thorne, my colleague at Caltech, who was one of the people behind Interstellar. And he was actually helping his friend Carl Sagan write his novel Contact. And Carl Sagan was a great astronomer, but he was not an expert at physics. And he wanted, like Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel, he wanted to get his hero

from one place to another. So he said, I'm going to have her fall into a black hole and then come out somewhere else. And there was enough, like Carl Sagan, he knew enough to go like, that's probably not what would happen. You'd probably just die if you fell into a black hole. So he called up Kip Thorne, his friend, and he said, how do you get across from here to there? And so Kip Thorne said, well, it's a wormhole. And this was in the 80s, so it was okay to say that. But then Kip realized that what that meant was effectively from the outside point of view, you were traveling faster than light.

You were getting from here to there as fast as you want. And since he was an expert in relativity, he knew if you could go as fast as you want, you can go backward in time. So he wrote physics papers that says, yes, if you can make a wormhole, you can go backward in time. So then the question is, why can't you stop Hitler or something like that? You know, invent the internet early. And well, we don't know. Probably there's no wormholes is the answer. If there were, it would really? Put right in front of your face the fact that the laws of physics don't let you do certain things The the way they put it on lost the TV show is whatever happened happened

If you even if you could visit the past you can't change it So in other words, we're saying that if wormholes exist then free will is the thing that gets right? But what we're saying even before that is that free will doesn't exist because the laws of physics tell you what you're going to do. It's not 90s free will. Is there free willy? Wasn't there a fish called free willy or something?

Wasn't there a whale or something? It was a film, wasn't it? I don't think that dealt with that many philosophical questions. Really? It was a film, wasn't it? Yeah. I don't think that dealt with that many philosophical questions. Really? But it didn't deal with that one. It was more accurate, though. It was a kind of Hanna-Barbera version of now Hanna-Barbera's Leibniz program.

But I wanted to ask Sean, and I'll ask this, in fact, to all of you, which is when you talk about the likelihood of things, and then sometimes I meet physicists and they go, well, the maths works, so it does exist somewhere. Now, that I find, you know, it works on paper, therefore somewhere in the universe we're going to find this.

How comfortable are you with that idea? Not very comfortable with that idea. I don't know if any physicists would say that. We really should be quite humble about the things we haven't seen yet, about the parts of the universe, the phenomena we don't know yet. Physicists can sometimes seem

rather non-humble because something like dark energy and dark matter, they're quite confident exist, even though we haven't seen them, but we've seen their effects. So I think that physicists are actually pretty good these days at dividing the line between the stuff we have enough evidence to say that it's there, despite the fact that we haven't quite touched it directly, and the stuff that is still quite speculative.

And we've got to be comfortable about that. So, for example, I would say that we know well enough to say that we understand the underlying physics of the particles that you and I are made of. There's no room in the physics experiments that we've done so far for there to exist some new force of nature that can let you bend a spoon with your mind, or the placement of Saturn on the let you bend a spoon with your mind or the placement of Saturn on the day you were born affecting your life all these ideas are ruled out by what we know about physics. We're gonna get so many

complaints again now there's a very astrology lobby and then Deepak will write in green ink. Joe you're sat there looking puzzled. I'm always puzzled. But I had a question about the time travel, the idea being that if there are wormholes, somebody would have used them, right? Is it possible that we are at the peak of, if the universe has a beginning

and the universe, you know, if we've gotten from 14 billion years to now, isn't it possible that we're the only ones that got this far? And if we are, that no one has found these wormholes yet, and that one day we will. And that doesn't mean they don't exist out there, it's just that one day... It doesn't mean that someone would have already found them, correct? I have a related question that you could combine your answer, but you were saying, like, well, if these existed, somebody might have come back from the future and stopped

Hitler. How do you know some evil person from the future didn't go back and start Hitler? Yeah, so no, I clearly have been unclear. I'm not saying that the fact, Stephen Hawking sometimes says this as a joke, we know there can't be time travel because otherwise we would be invaded by tourists from the future. So that is not the evidence, that is not the argument. The nice thing about physics is there are rules, and if you made a wormhole right now, here in this room, after the evidence, that it's not the argument. The nice thing about physics is there are rules. And if you made a wormhole right now, here in this room, after the show, we'll give it a shot.

And the best you could ever do would be to travel back to now. You could not travel back to the 80s and coined the term wormhole. The way that the time travel would work is, in the future, somebody could come back to you. So you're absolutely right. There could very well be the possibility of time travel just not to before you invented the time machine. But that's not the reason. The reason why we think it's impossible is

because in the thought experiments where we try to build wormholes, they always collapse into singularities and kill you. That's the reason why. Oh, okay. So I think, didn't Stephen Hawking publish a paper back in the was it the 80s called the Chronology Protection Conjecture? Early 90s. So the idea, I think, was that the laws of physics, the new laws of physics that we surely require so a quantum theory of gravity, let's say,

would prevent wormholes because protecting cause and effect and not having the universe where you could go back and kill Hitler or Hitler's grandparents is an axiom. The laws of nature will in cause and effect and not having a universe where you could go back and kill Hitler or Hitler's grandparents is an axiom. The laws of nature will always respect cause and effect. Yeah, and I think that it's a conjecture, right?

It's a chronology protection conjecture that whatever the laws of physics eventually turn out to be, we don't know what they are, they will have the property that you cannot travel backward in time. But I don't think that the messing up the past is a good argument for that. I mean, in physics as we know it, if you give me the entire state of the universe right now and the laws of physics, then you know with perfect fidelity what's going to happen in the future and what did happen in the past. So in that sense, it's all settled with all the data right now. So if it's a little more complicated, the fact that the universe is settled and what happens happens

It's still just as true even if some of those happenings involve going backward in time So the real rule is no paradoxes if Hitler was there Hitler is there. Sorry try to do better next time Joe do you feel as someone who watches movies? Do you get caught up thinking that's somebody watches movies? Yeah as someone who watches movies, do you get caught up thinking... As someone who watches movies. That's the role we're playing, right? I was going to deal with your particle physics work... That's about my level of expertise, by the way. But I think as someone...

Sometimes I get... Like Interstellar, I kind of do want the science to roughly work because I think it's really important to the film, but some films I think, oh, do you know what? Arnold Schwarzenegger's going back in time and there's going to be a chase and then he's going to be melted and I'm not going to go, oh, hang on a minute, they got the equations wrong. It's kind of that sometimes, does it always matter for you that level of accuracy?

Or as David was saying, do you know what? It's a romp. And maybe it will inspire people to then investigate the science further, but every now and again, bah, I'll let it go. Well, in certain movies, you wonder why it was necessary, like in Gravity. Like in Gravity, having all those satellites and the space stations all in the same orbit, it wasn't necessary. But you know what I mean? It's like they're not respecting you, because you know better. If they had to do that movie in front of an audience entirely based of physicists, you would never pull

that off, right? You would have to tell the truth. It's lazy writing. Terrible, terrible world. Yeah. Well, Chris Hadfield, the astronaut, he said to us about, not before you can get to that off, right? You would have to tell the truth. It's lazy writing. Terrible, terrible world. Yeah. Well, Chris Hadfield, the astronaut, he said to us about, not before you can get to that point, he came back down for the final time from the space station just before that film came out, and one of the main things he was saying is, just so you know, the underwear we wear in space is very different to

what you've seen in gravity. It's a lot thicker, a lot more absorbent, it has a lot more practical uses. But David, do you get complaints? I suppose the first thing is, I suppose it's different in animated film. Let me clarify my remarks, because I feel guilty now. I was saying our rule was

that comedy would outweigh science in our show, because it's a comedy, and that was the tone we wanted to strike. If I see a movie that purports to be telling me about science, I get as angry, as enraged as Joe was there if they're breaking the laws of physics. So it depends on what the intent of the show is

if I feel that they're delivering. What's most enraged you in a movie? Most enraged me? Well, I got pretty enraged. I will talk about the movie Gravity for a second. That enraged me. I get enraged a lot, actually, in movies. But I've been around a lot of scientists my whole life,

so what often gets me mad is not really so much that the science itself is wrong, but I feel like the portrayal of the scientists is often wrong. So in Gravity, for example, what bugged me was George Clooney and Sandra Bullock are floating around in space, and they're supposed to be setting up this satellite, and basically they're two highly trained astronaut scientists, and their two opinions are, Sandra Bullock is like, I really should have practiced doing this before I came out.

And George Clooney's attitude is, what is that gizmo that you're working on over there? And it's like, they didn't practice, they don't know what they're talking about. And look what happened so I just feel like in real life they would really know what they're talking about and they'd be quite good

at bolting these gizmos together I just love the ideas, the Apollo 11 mission, they go what does that thing do, I reckon that was never said in a NASA mission before we land on the moon that's the one they said don't press why, no no no, give it a go What does that thing do? I reckon that was never said in a NASA mission. Before we land on the moon,

that's the one they said don't press. Why? No, no, no, give it a go, Gil, Mike Collins. I think you see these things in movies about scientists because most people don't know what scientists are like and what they're like in their daily life. But if you see a movie about doctors or something people are familiar with, if there's a movie about expert surgeons,

they don't show them doing surgery. What's that red stuff squirting out of his hand? But with scientists, people don't know. Do you feel that, Eric? Does it annoy you? If you go to see a science fiction film, do you want accuracy or do you want it at least not to throw you out, make

elementary mistakes? Does it matter? Well, I think it's the same with any film. It's the same. It's a story, story, story. So you want the, you know, elementary mistakes like that? Does it matter? Well, I think it's the same with any film. It's the same. It's a story, story, story. So you want the... You know, the story's what leads it. You don't go, gosh, this couldn't possibly happen unless you happen to have a particular information. But I like H.G. Wells.

I'm very fond of H.G. Wells. I think that some of those... You know, the invasion of the Earth and all those wonderful things. He was the first to really popularize cultural books, reading science fiction, wasn't he? I mean, that was the best. So I'm very fond of reading it.

I'm happy with that. Philip K. Dick I like, because he's always playing lovely games with the ideas of things. So it's not really important. It's more philosophical that he's playing with the ideas, not real facts, you know. Whereas I think Apollo 13 was a fabulous film

because it actually happened. I think we're all saying the same thing, which is that the reason to get science right in movies is not because it's supposed to be educational about science. It's because you're trying to tell a good story, and guess what? When you make a little bit more effort to make the science realistic, you get a better story. It's not opposed to getting a better story

because it's more realistic, the audience goes along with it, they can engage with it, it feels right, even if it's all subconscious. They're not thrown out of the story by people doing weird things that violate the laws of physics. It doesn't alienate people who actually know the science. Years ago, I worked as a science advisor on a film called Sunshine, which was filmed by Danny Boyle.

It's a great film. If you've not seen it, it's brilliant. It's very scientific. It's about the sun's beginning to break, so they're going to send a bomb into it to restart it. So it's very much based on contemporary science, as it was at that time. This is a good example, because I was sent the script. That's the first line of the script,

and I did ring them and say, well, there's a problem here. But one of the interesting things is that Danny Boyle, as a director, is very, very precise, and he wanted to know everything. So he said to me, the job of the science advisor is to tell me everything that may be wrong. I want to know everything. But then I

will reject things because of the plot. One example was that they tried to have the spacecraft silent in space which is an old you know i obviously if you have a spacecraft going past you in space you can't hear it but it just didn't look right on the screen spacecraft go they always do and it just looks like you've not had you didn't have any money to spend on special effects and another one was interesting. They tried to film the astronauts moving at normal speed.

Because obviously, when you're weightless, you just do things at a normal rate. You don't go like... This is golden radio, this. Brian, this is now moving in a slow-motion fashion. You commentate, yes. But they found that when they filmed some tests, it looked wrong, because the audience's expectation of being in zero-g is that the astronauts move in slow motion.

And you see it on the moon, actually. You see it in old Apollo footage. It looks like people are moving quickly, actually. It looks like it's almost comedic. So did you find that... You've worked on many films now, Sean. Did you have those conversations where they say tell us everything, with Thor who's probably an exception.

You normally, when you're moving with a magic hammer, go in a kind of upy-downy, wavy manner, but I think they changed the stuff for a more direct look. You have a bad attitude. Many people have bad attitudes, including the director of Thor, who was Kenneth Branagh.

And he was, you know, if someone brings in science advisors to a movie, there's 500 people working on the movie. They might not all be equally enthusiastic about the whole science advisor idea. So Kenneth Branagh was like, okay, well, I have this one scene. Here's what's going to happen. Tell me what words I should attach to that. And, you know, you can do that, but that's not really using the science advice to its best efficacy, I would say. Well, there's a great life... I think his name is Hugo Gernsback,

who was a guy who, in the 1930s, all those magazines which were just called things like Amazing! And there's a beautiful... He said, extravagant fiction today, cold fact tomorrow. And his inspiration, apparently, was he wanted, exactly as you were saying, to lure people to go, look, I'm going, he wanted exactly as you were saying, to lure people to go, look, I'm going to show you,

as you were saying, Joe, show you an image of what the future could be. And with luck, you know, these kids who would be reading about Martian invasions or kind of, you know, rocket launches and kind of Flash Gordon style things, they would go, well, I think I want to go into science. I mean, Joe, do you think that is,

that's a good way of using science fiction is going, we might not get it all right, but we're going to excite you enough that you're going to go, i might actually learn how to do these equations that's been the argument for a bunch of things where they get things wrong you know like that's been the argument for martial arts movies you know that they inspire children to get into martial arts but most of the stuff doesn't really work but it does get you to go but it's not necessary i always feel like it's lazy writing the same thing with the science same thing with

any movie that depicts a real person. They change the actual events in order to make it more dramatic or make it flow better or whatever they're trying to do to it. Like, it's just lazy. There's great ways to do it and tell the truth. That should be paramount, especially if you're dealing with something that is supposed to be based on reality.

Like, the truth should be paramount. Then figure out how to make a story work around that. Because otherwise you alienate people who actually know what's going on. I suppose that you have a problem with space movies in particular. The distances involved. We had Patrick Stewart on once on Monkey Cage.

And he said, we were talking about film, and he said, well, of course, most weeks, the planets we visited were very dull, and we didn't broadcast those episodes. Because, you know, it is a fact that most planets are dull and lifeless, and the distances are very large. So it is problematic if you want to write Star Wars or Star Trek or anything. We had this problem on Futurama, of course, that they had to get to planets.

And although I was willing to fake the science, I like to at least tell my fellow scientists in the audience that we know we're getting things wrong. We get them wrong. So our excuse there was, we said like, okay, you know, how can we get across the universe? That's 5 million light years. You can't go faster than the speed of light. That's right. That's why we increase the speed of light. It's wrong, but we're kind of copping too. That would make it more difficult to travel great distances. Well, you really want to decrease it. If you could decrease it to 30 miles an hour,

then you could get anywhere. Because time dilation would kick in in a Prius. Are you saying that... Are you saying that... Oh, OK. Revoice that episode. Oh, OK. Revoice that episode. If you can uncancel us for the eighth time.

But that is great, though. That's so typical of you. I'm going to spoil your entire anecdote with facts. Always with the evidence. I wondered if there was ever a line where you do actually, you know, you were saying the most important thing is entertainment, but have you ever gone, no, this bit of science, this has to remain intact, and we're going to work, in fact, sometimes

it's ridiculous, it sounds like the limitations, but by having to go into that universe and go, how can we find a way around to make this entertainment and stick within the laws? Is there any line you go, we're not going to cross that, that has to remain scientific fact. There's a couple. My proudest science moment in the episodes of these shows that I've worked in

was a Futurama episode written by this amazing writer, Ken Keeler, who has a PhD in applied math and two master's degrees in science. And he wrote this episode where everybody in the crew had changed brains. So I had your brain, but you had his brain, and he had Joe's. So we didn't just switch, but they're all messed up. And we were talking about doing this episode, which is kind of a standard Scooby-Doo-style plot, and we started thinking, but what is the math?

What can we do to make this more mathematically interesting? So we thought, well, what if the machine that switches the brains of any two people cannot switch those two people back? So once we're messed up, you up, if I switch with you, I have to get my brain back through some other thing. And then we said, wait, is it even possible for everyone to get their brains back at that point, or will you get into a dead end?

So the day of writing ended, Ken Keillor came back the next morning, and he said, I've proved a theorem. And so they got their brains back using this heroic theorem, and this is my proudest moment. At the climactic moment of the show, we flashed the entire proof on the screen.

And my only concession to popular taste was I kept it on the screen for one quarter of a second. But it's there if you freeze frame it. Eric, I know you've become interested in science. Have you always been interested in science? Because now I know. I mean, you're a regular on Monkey Cage. You write songs which are full of very accurate science, actually. We heard the Galaxy song there, which we met, actually.

Yes, I read that in 1982. I became very interested because I realised that I didn't believe in anything, and I was quite ignorant. And so I decided to study cosmology, and I started to study about biology a little, and how the Earth got to be there. Because I think it's very fascinating when you find yourself...

I was about mid-30s, and I didn't know anything. And I think the nice thing about science is you actually can know something, and they are provable and testable. And, you know, you, of all people, have pulled my galaxy song to pieces because of the facts, but they were accurate when I wrote them in 1982.

And what's interesting is that our knowledge has grown so extraordinarily that a lot of the facts are dated. There are 200 billion stars in the galaxy, and only just last week, they think it's 50% more now. So there may be 400 billion stars in the galaxy. And I find that fascinating.

With this period of time, because of television and the computer, we've learned more in the last 20 years than we've ever learned in the entire billions of life on Earth. So I find that fascinating. Essentially, if science fiction delivers, is part of the delivery of that message, that there are no,

knowledge is always advancing, that we don't have absolute truths in science. Do you think science fiction can play a role there? Because it's easily accessible. Essentially what I'm saying is, can it begin to teach people about the rational thoughts? I don't know, because that's why we have science fact. I prefer the Higgs-Boson documentary than almost any film last year,

because it was fascinating. It actually explained to me what on earth was going on, because none of us have any idea what the Higgs-Boson thing is. It sounds like a very bad nautical dance. But in fact, it's really fascinating because I read it now and I go, I'll go to him because he's very useful over dinner. And I say, what is this? How can the universe

begin and all these particles have no mass? I mean, that to me is just, what is something that has no mass? And when I answer it, I get some food. And the idea that there is this particle that gives everything mass is fascinating to me,

that the whole web of things that go through and actually gain mass is extraordinary. We should have it. Why don't we have the one-minute, without hesitation, repetition or deviation Higgs boson? Do you want to know why mass? I mean, the funny thing is the Higgs boson was not invented to give particles mass.

That was a spin-off. Back in the early 60s, they were trying to understand why the nuclear forces that work inside the nucleus of an atom only stretch over a short range. And these young kids came up with the idea, like several of them independently, oh, I know, maybe the universe is filled with an invisible energy field that absorbs the lines of force. And five years later, Steven Weinberg says, oh, I know, if that's true, then we can also use that to give inertia, to give mass to the electrons and the quarks that we're made of. And 40 years

later, and $9 billion later, there's a little bump on a graph that indicates, oh yes, we found the particle that you get when you poke that field and started vibrating. They were right back in the 60s. To me, it is absolutely mind-bending. I was fortunate enough to be there. I was there. Were you there in Geneva when they were announcing it? It was an amazing historic event.

It still makes me cry when I watch the film. Everybody's in tears. Particle of the universe. It is an extraordinary moment in human discovery. And I find that more interesting than actually science fiction. Because, you know, anybody can make stuff up. Yeah, you're waving your hand and it's moving through the Higgs field. And if it weren't,

then all the electrons in your hand would be moving at the speed of light and they would go out and you wouldn't exist. And it works. I've never heard the Higgs motion as a spin-off. The idea of it being the kind of Laverne and Shirley of particle physics. And then there's other ones that were kind of the Joni loves Charchi of physics, and we don't talk about them anymore.

It's a wonderful example, isn't it, of the central modesty of science. You don't set out often to answer big questions. It's a very small technical question. It's very dangerous, actually, if you set off to answer the big questions. Sometimes, you know, you're just trying to get this one little, you got to work at where you understand at the boundary between what you do and do not understand. And then if you're lucky, if you're in the right place at the right time and you're a genius, if it all works out. Look, Stephen Hawking became famous because he showed that black holes give off radiation. Why did he discover that? Because there was this graduate student at Princeton

who claimed that black holes had entropy, and Stephen Hawking was annoyed at him, Jacob Bekenstein, and he set out to show that he was wrong, and he showed that he was right and showed that black holes give off radiation. So with science fiction, it was a niche area or a kind of a cult area for many years.

We've seen the Oscars this year. We had two Oscars for Theory of Everything. We've got The Imitation Game with Alan Turing. We've got Interstellar winning an Oscar, albeit for the look of the film. So is that changing? Are we in a golden age or entering a golden age where science fiction and films about scientists,

in the case of the Hawking movie and the Alan Turing movie, can win Oscars and that they can do well? Yeah, I think so. I like to look back at Star Trek and Star Wars, the two obvious ones for people of our generation, roughly, as sort of the straight line for science fiction and then later science fiction comedy, where you couldn't have done that earlier because people had no baseline for what is the science fiction

world on TV or in movies. And once you had those, you could do your comedy version, which we did, or you can do the more serious version or whatever. But I think you had to grow up with that in the air, I think, to get to the point we are now where people are so accepting of it. Do we have different standards? Do you have different standards for like a fantasy movie like Star Wars or Masters of the Universe, Galaxy?

Masters of the Galaxy? Whatever the science is. Guardians of the Galaxy. Guardians of the Galaxy. Comic book movie. Like a comic book movie, a ridiculous movie versus something like Gravity, which is based on real people, real ideas, a space station that actually exists. Don't you have different standards

for movies when it comes to those things? Like Star Wars is preposterous on a number of different levels, right? But it's still awesome. It doesn't need to be a science. We were talking about this before. Star Wars doesn't need to be science fiction. It could be a western. It could be a kind of

cop movie. It could be many different things. It's Lord of the Rings in space. Yeah, Lord of the Rings can kind of still... You can do that movie without it being in Middle Earth and with less hairy feet and all that kind of stuff. And it's kind of... But there are... Interstellar or Gravity kind of seems that you can't just go,

and there's some science. You couldn't do it without the Hobbits. You could. What, so people go looking for a ring? You could do that without them being sure. for a ring? Would you do that without them being short? I'm just saying that you couldn't do Lord of the Rings without the ring. No, you can't do that without the ring, but that's

not a mystical thing, is it? You could go to Saturn. It's a sceney mission, you know, there's plenty of rings there, aren't there? What about Avatar? Avatar seems to be a combination of those things. It's a combination of a fantasy movie, but it also involves science. There's some scientific...

How bad did they get it wrong? Avatar. Hyper Sleep. Yeah. They suspended animation, and then they go to this planet, and there's floating islands. Yeah.

Wait, that was... How bad? How bad did they get the Hyper Sleep? You're saying that was a fiction movie? Well, Hyper Sleep's a good... Well, maybe this is a biological question. I mean, what are the things, Sean? If you look at Interstellar,

it's a different kind of movie because it's based first on the science. The history of the movie is interesting, isn't it? Because it was essentially started by scientists. That's right. So Kip Thorne, my colleague at Caltech, and his friend Linda Obst, who was a producer on Contact, the movie that was made from Carl Sagan's novel,

they had this idea that let's do it right. They were a little bit upset with how Contact ended, it turned out, as Carl Sagan also was. They said, let's just make a science fiction movie where it's 100% we get the science exactly right. And they got a call from Steven Spielberg's office saying, we hear you have a movie treatment, send it to us. They had nothing, of course, so they pulled an all-nighter, as you do, and they typed

up a treatment. And Spielberg got excited, and Jonathan Nolan was attached as a writer, and then eventually Spielberg had to leave, and Jonathan Nolan goes, well, I know a guy who's a director, my brother, Christopher Nolan and Christopher Nolan was less excited about getting the science exactly a hundred percent right so it's you know 99% right the science it's there's very few times in the movie where they just are wrong they stretch credulity right and left but it's not wrong and and more importantly they get good dramatic ideas

by being inspired by the science, by time dilation, by wormholes, by time travel. These are all science ideas that get you good story ideas. What was wrong with the end of contact, scientifically? Well, you know, she enters a quote unquote wormhole, and it's more like an LSD trip and it's like it's Deepak Chopra's movie, it's not Carl Sagan's movie

it's like she's one with the universe and things like that and then the Matthew McConaughey weird preacher man he was right all along if only I'd listened to the surfer preacher guy something that a real physicist never says to answer Joe's question earlier,

I think that every movie needs to have its own world and its own standards. If there was suddenly a talking tree in gravity, you'd be like, that seems unusual. But in Guardians of the Galaxy, it just fits in perfectly well. I think Avatar is pretty good on the science. It's not

perfect, so there's some floating rocks in the sky. The question is, are you thrown out of the world? Does the drama work? And I think that when the collaboration between scientists and movie people or novelists or whatever works the best, it's when the scientists can give new ideas that can then be made dramatically successful in the context of that world. And that's why it's important to have science advisors on Thor or the Avengers

or Tron Legacy because maybe we can give some people ideas. The advisor they needed on Avatar was someone to make up a believable name for that element. What was it? Unobtainium. Unobtainium. I could have, for oneium I could have for one dollar

I could have made up a better name than that one dollar that is we could continue for another four hours and we have in the past but for legal reasons we have to end now thank you very much to our fantastic panel

who have been Joe Rogan Sean Carroll, David X. Cohen, Eric Eidel. Thank you very much to our fabulous additional music guests as well. Cheeky Monkeys. Thank you very much for listening, and goodbye. Thank you. Cheeky Monkeys, Cheeky Monkeys In the infinite monkey cave

Without your trousers In the infinite monkey cave Oi! Infinite Monkey Kid. Without your trousers in the Infinite Monkey Kid. Oi! Oi! 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.

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. Thanks.