The Infinite Monkey Cage - The Infinite Monkey’s Guide to... Building a Universe

Episode Date: October 11, 2023

While most of us believe the universe began with a big bang, Brian and Robin hear some of the alternative theories, including an Egyptian myth that it actually started with a giant ejaculation, as they question the origins of life as we know it. With so much still to be discovered about the cosmos, Rufus Hound says we need more bangs and flashes in chemistry classes, arguing lessons aren’t dangerous enough anymore. So could comedians play a role in advancing the science? Matt Lucas says he’s happy to jump into a black hole when he learns there’s high speed internet and Eric Idle gets poetic about the tiniest of particles in a special song about the Higgs Boson.Episodes featured: Series 10: Before the Big Bang Series 23: The Fundamentals of Reality Series 14: The Recipe to Build a Universe Series 22: Black Holes The Infinite Monkey Cage 100 Series 8: Glastonbury SpecialNew episodes will be released on Wednesdays, but if you’re in the UK, listen to new episodes, a week early, first on BBC Sounds: bbc.in/3K3JzyFProducer: Marijke Peters Executive 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. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Ince and this is the Infinite Monkeys Guide to... Now today we're going to tell you how to build a universe. We're not, actually. That's what it says in the script.

No, no, no. Look, I've told you before, right? This is how the media works. We kind of huckster them at the beginning, pretend we're going to tell them how to build a universe. About halfway through, by which time we've got listening figures, then it turns out that we're really only going to give them the slightest hints of how to build a universe. So as long as we don't give away that bit in the introduction,

then people are misled into listening to the whole thing. Do you think anyone would actually begin to listen to this based on the premise that when they've listened, that they would be able to be... Well, essentially, they would become a god and be able to create a universe. Yeah, we are looking for an audience of and be able to create a universe. Yeah. We are looking for an audience of people who want to become gods.

Credulous. Yeah. Today, we are going to tell you how to build a universe. We'll have these letters from Margaret from South Anglia. No one sends letters anymore. I tried to build a universe and I ended up... No, they'll be happy. They'll go, I built a universe.

Now I'm a god. Now I create minions and I crush them when I wish. There is an ancient philosophical question of why is there something rather than nothing? But that actually might be looking at things the wrong way around. It makes you think nothing is easier or more natural than something. But it might actually be that something is the more natural state of existence and nothing is you know yeah the nothing yeah for nothing to exist requires far more effort from the laws that you know so you don't really have to philosophically explain the existence of

the universe that the the question that arises before that is why you think it is more natural that nothing should exist rather than something, and therefore something requires an explanation. Should we let the guests do that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll let them do the explaining. But the question is not why is there something rather than nothing, but why do you think nothing should be so easy?

Yeah. So to start us off on the story of how this all started, here is a man who has a bust of Albert Einstein in his office. He does. I've seen it, it's fantastic and it really is, it's on quite a high shelf. So it's properly Albert Einstein looking down on you at all times. Here is cosmologist Carlos Frank talking about the Big Bang. Even though we don't know exactly what happened at the Big Bang, and indeed maybe Hamlet might

have asked what actually went bang, we don't have an answer to that, but we do understand quite a lot of what the universe has been doing. So, for example, we know that early on, the universe was very foggy, and when it was foggy, it decided to make some of the chemical elements that eventually

found their way into our bodies. So, we are mostly made of water. The hydrogen in the water actually was made much of it in the our bodies. So we are mostly made of water. The hydrogen in the water actually was made, much of it, in the Big Bang. So we know, in fact, how these chemical elements were synthesized in the early universe.

We know also that when the fog lifted, it revealed the early phases of the universe, and that has been seen directly because when the fog lifted, this radiation that was present in the early moments of the Big Bang traveled towards us, and this radiation was discovered in the 1960s and told us that the universe had indeed begun in this very hot, dense state. So we know about the chemical elements.

We know about what we call the microwave background radiation, which is the heat left over from the Big Bang. And we know, of course, that the universe is expanding. So all these three lines of empirical evidence point to the fact that very early on, 13.7 billion years ago, something very exciting happened, which is when a universe was born. So even though we don't quite know how it was born or exactly what happened then, we know a lot about what our universe has been doing. And this is something that astronomers routinely verify with astronomical observations. So how's that for a minute of two synthesis of 13.7 billion years of cosmic evolution, Brian? Right, Brian, the Big Bang, what would you prefer as terminology? Because obviously that started off as a kind of joke from Fred Hoyle because he didn't like the idea of the Big Bang. Would you think in the same way that, you know, sometimes people might consider there were other phrases rather than black hole or things like that? Is Big Bang one that you think, you know what, we could kind of reboot Big Bang?

Fred Hoyle felt that the universe had existed and will exist forever, a so-called steady state universe. So he invented the term Big Bang as kind of a pejorative term. It's ridiculous. Any theory that predicts that there is an origin to the universe must be nonsense, so let's call it something stupid. But actually, it's a great bit of marketing, isn't it, for an interesting bit of physics? An interesting bit of physics.

I'm understating it somehow. The origin of all that exists but we don't really know whether the universe had an origin in time or what it even means to make that statement because we don't know what time is for example but is that what i was wondering is is it because like when you say black hole that immediately you know as we know from various things that have been made people then go oh it's a hole to somewhere else and a big bang immediately makes us think of an explosion so we see something a kind of you know blasting outwards so i'm just wondering about those images whether they are ultimately unhelpful in our attempt to comprehend them or whether they are so hard to comprehend beyond equations you're right

they're unhelpful and i i myself of um we we made we made a series a long time ago on the BBC called Wonders of the Universe. And I saw too late in the day that there was going to be an explosion in order to illustrate the idea of the origin of the universe, the Big Bang. And as you rightly said, it's a complete misnomer. It's a terrible bit of a... It's not an educationally sound concept. It's wrong, right? And so I think eventually, because we'd gone so far down the line of the production, there was the big explosion. And I said, and that's exactly not what happened. To me, that's one of the fascinating things as well about the kind of the way that education works very often

is that most of us will probably leave school with some knowledge of various different creation myths from faiths religions legends etc but very few people leave school with even the very first kind of germ of the idea of the possibilities from the laws of physics and probably of the early days of the universe it was extremely difficult concept we don't know what happened at the origin of the early days of the universe. It was an extremely difficult concept. We don't know what happened at the origin of the universe, if indeed there was an origin. We don't know the nature of that. We don't have the theoretical framework to explore it in any detail. So it's one of the great mysteries.

Did the universe have an origin in time? And if so, what does it mean to have an origin in time? And that's why we spoke to cosmologist Jan Eleven and comedian Sarah Pascoe about the importance of those stories about how it all began. We tell a very compelling story about the origin of the universe and the evolution of the universe and the fate of the universe. And I could do something different with my time.

I could count atoms in my room, but we don't think that's a good story. So as scientists, we don't fund those kinds of projects and i'm sure it is a really good story but i don't know if you ever heard the ancient egyptian one but it was about like a massive ejaculation and and it made the world is it as good as that frank for those who always check the ingredients of what you're buying in the supermarket, you might also want to check the ingredients of the universe to ensure that they're right for your current fitness regime.

So that's where the periodic table comes in. They're not the most basic ingredients. We talk about the chemical elements. That's a periodic table of chemical elements. With a chemical element such as carbon, for example, carbon appears in a periodic table. It's made of protons and neutrons six protons and six neutrons in the nucleus unless it's an isotope of carbon like

carbon 14 for example in which there are six protons and eight neutrons and we could go on but the point is that there are protons and neutrons only electrons and the protons and neutrons themselves are made of quarks so two up quarks and a down quark in the proton two down quarks and up quark in the neutron and actually if you probe the proton at very high energies then you find out that there's a very complicated structure as well as i think other proton structure function you would have rather than modified starch and glucose you would just have how many quarks were in each thing of your delicious chocolate pops yes a lot though right they're really big numbers so you're going to say we we're going to need a bigger packet. If you put up quarks, down quarks and electrons and other sort of ingredients at smaller levels.

And riboflavin and niacin. Well, at higher energy, you probe them at very high energy. As you can see, the sea of gluons at low X in the proton, for example, at room temperature, then you would be perfectly within your rights to say the ingredients of this breakfast cereal are up quarks, down quarks and electrons and leave it at that. Andrea Seller is a proper chemist, by which I mean, if you look at his hands, they're covered in blisters and calluses. And he's also the kind of person that will persuade me to put my finger in liquid nitrogen. So far, I've always remembered to take the finger back out. How many fingers have you?

OK, I'll hold them up. How many fingers can you see? Seven and a half. Yep and that's just on the one hand because I've also been involved in some genetic experiments recently. Andrea Sellers is dangerous isn't he? He's dangerous. I mean for those who haven't been to a recording of Infinite Mudcage when Andrea Sellers on we have him in a fume cupboard.

Yeah. An armoured fume cupboard on stage. He made some special candles for our 100th episode and uh they were placed on the cake and then we all decided it was best not to eat the cake because even though the cake itself was edible we weren't entirely sure what form of effluence had then come off the candles anyway here he is talking with actor rufus hound about science education and what helps us understand what makes our universe did you used to do these kind of experiments because it's what all kids want to when they get into chemistry you want to

see the bangs and flashes yeah although not as much as you might well i say as much as you might like as much as i might have liked um we blew up quite a lot of hydrogen because it's cheap um are we supposed to issue some kind of disclaimer at this point so because this is broadcast on the school run that's the problem yeah oh no but um there is i think a genuine argument that science isn't dangerous enough at school um it's true you can laugh but the thing that makes chemists want to be chemists is that at school they saw a grown-up blow something up. And they went, oh, I need in on this.

And now everything's so health and safety that you get to a science lesson and you're not allowed to even look at a thermometer without wearing goggles and a welder's mask. And it just feels like, oh, yeah, it's just more of this. It's all theory. It's the same with biology, isn't it? It's all very well looking at the insides of a frog in a line drawing,

but finding them in your pocket, placed there by some other awful boy, really is a far greater education, isn't it? Yes, I would imagine so. But that would fall under the auspices of the Natural History Museum, not the Science Museum, and therefore I don't care. Oh, OK. As we've said many times on this show, science is not necessarily about getting the right answer, so much as getting the least wrong answer with the knowledge and technology that we have at any given time.

Yeah, I mean, it's about, OK, I'll let it go. OK, well, let's just say the best answer for the time being. Yeah, because if you say science is not so much about getting the right answer, that implies that it might be about getting the wrong answer. Yeah. It's about ruling possibilities out in a quest to understand nature. I don't think we've got enough time to do the entire module on the philosophy of science, but we will get there eventually because it is basically always about progressing.

It's about generating new questions. Scientific answers are usually the seeds to about generating new questions scientific answers are usually the seeds to grow those new questions from and black holes are quite a seed here's jan 11 explaining to comedian and actor matt lucas what would happen to him if he found himself in a black hole it's who wants to dive into the black hole who wants to sit outside and watch fine i'll go into the black hole i'm going in it's So why don't we send Jana in with you? And Jana, what would you, with Matt, experience as you cross the event horizon and fall into the black hole? So the beautiful part is that we would really not experience anything extraordinary as

long as the black hole was big enough. That might sound counterintuitive, but the bigger the black hole, the less in some sense you notice the curvature. So similarly with the Earth, the bigger it is, you don't notice a curvature as much as if you're standing on a basketball and you're really aware of it. So you could pass right through the event horizon of a black hole. There's no material there. There's no substance there. Your experience should be of weightlessness, like you were floating on the International Space Station. And we could be joking and having a perfectly good time. And it would happen in a matter of seconds for us. And then we would have the unhappy realization that we were inside the black hole. Would we never be

able to get out of it? Is that we would never be able to get out of it, at least not in our current form. So well, hang on a minute. Do they have Wi-Fi there? Because as long as I can Instagram from there, I'm quite happy. Well, actually, you could get Wi-Fi. So here's one of the misunderstandings about black holes is that they are absolutely utterly dark from the outside, but they can be bright on the inside. So Matt, you and I could watch what was going on in the galaxy, we could see the light could rain in behind us. And if we arranged it properly, we could get this kind of view, this saturated view of the galaxy sped up, and we'd get really fast Wi Fi actually.

Well, I'm up for it if you are. When we were on tour in 2022, you were talking about black holes a lot and schwarzschild and schwarzschild's radius and his ideas of black hole it's just incredible the background story of how he started to contemplate these ideas isn't it yeah so it turns out that in einstein's theory of gravity if a star can collapse and keep collapsing and keep collapsing, so it shrinks down inside a certain radius called the Schwarzschild radius. For the sun, as an example, it's three kilometres. So you can imagine taking our sun 700,000 kilometres in radius and squashing it down below three kilometres.

Then the prediction is that very strange things happen. So you see time stop at a place in space, which we now call the event horizon of the black hole, as viewed from outside, time stops. And then you have this tremendous problem at the, I'll call it the centre of whatever this thing is. But this thing's called a singularity. And it's where the theory itself breaks down.

We still don't know what happened, what the meaning of that thing is over 100 years later. So these ideas baffled people. And actually, through the Second World War and out the other side in the 1960s, people were still debating whether such a thing would happen in nature, because the apparent consequences were so strange that people didn't want to contemplate the consequences. because the apparent consequences were so strange that people didn't want to contemplate the consequences. The great physicist Arthur Eddington said, when he thought about these ideas of stars collapsing to nothingness,

he said nature will prevent such absurdities from existing. Well, here's hoping, nature. You keep putting your effort in. Anyway, we now return to Brian's former place of work, the Large Hadron Collider in CERN. It's been one of the most magnificent stories of understanding our universe. And it is, of course, where we began to truly understand the idea of the Higgs field and the Higgs boson. So here is astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Higgs boson with a little help from a song by Eric Idle. Thinking about how to get people to understand the Higgs boson, I think of a Hollywood party, okay? If you are unknown,

an unknown actor at a Hollywood party, and you enter, and the bar is across the way, you could just walk there with no impedance to your progress. You have a low party mass, okay? If you are famous and you walk in, if you're Beyonce and you walk into a party, people crowd around you and you cannot move very quickly. You have a created party mass. So the Hollywood party field granted the popular person more mass than the unpopular person. And this is a, when you want to think about why one particle has a higher mass than another, you can think of this sort of interaction with the Higgs field. And there are other science comedians in the world, by the way. One of them is Brian Maller.

He is the origin of this next joke. Higgs boson walks into a church, and the priest, this is a Catholic church, the priest says, I'm sorry, we don't allow Higgs bosons in church. And the Higgs boson said, excuse me, but without me, you can't have mass. Ooh. Good one. Brian Mallow on that one.

To me, that's top. That's one of the top few of the decade. I think in your list of descriptions of the Higgs boson, you omitted to mention that Eric has written extensively on this subject. I did not know that, Eric. It's a little-known fact. Would you like me to do it? I think I would. There's a little song I write about the Higgs boson.

Not many people know this, but there's the Higgs boson, and there's leptons, and there's gluons. There's the Higgs boson, and there's positons and muons.'s gluons. There's the Higgs boson, and there's positons and muons. There are photons, there are protons, there's neutrinos, positinos. There are quarks, and there's electrons in the Higgs boson. There's neutrinos, angelinos in the Higgs boson. There are sauvignons and pinos in the Higgs boson. There are bonos, yocoanos, brianinos, capuchinos,

both latinos and latinos in the Higgs boson. There are gluons, there are latinos in the Higgs boson. There are glue-ons, there are mu-ons in the Higgs boson. There are many, there are few-ons in the Higgs boson. There are gold-ons, there are blue-ons, there are old-ons, there are new-ons, and some we haven't got a clue-ons in the Higgs boson. The Infinite Monkey Cage episodes we took all of these clips from are available on BBC Sounds and the Infinite Monkey Cage back catalogue. Next week, we hear about weird-looking fish.

I love weird-looking fish. And discover why deep-sea diving is better than space travel. I can't say that. Yeah, you can. Which one have you done? Deep-sea diving. And would you go into space? Yeah.

Oh, OK. All right, then. We discover why deep sea diving is as good as space travel. On the Infinite Monkey's Guide to the Ocean. In the Infinite Monkey Cage. Without your trousers. In the Infinite Monkey Cage. Turned out nice again.

Before you go, here's another podcast from the BBC that you might enjoy. You know the problem with technology, right? We've made it too complicated. I mean, it's filled with jargon and buzzwords, and really it doesn't need to be. So I am going to fix it. Understand Tech and AI is a new series from BBC Radio 4 with me, Spencer Kelly.

I've got together some great guests to help me explain everything from getting online to avoiding the artificial intelligence apocalypse. So, I'll see you there. Subscribe to Understand on BBC Sounds. 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.

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