The Infinite Monkey Cage - The Infinite Monkey's Guide To… Tiny Things

Episode Date: May 22, 2024

Brian Cox and Robin Ince shuffle through the archive to find the smallest things in the world of science, from a particle so tiny nobody has ever actually seen it, to the millions of microbes we’re all made up of. They ask the short-of-stature comedian Andy Hamilton how he’d feel about being three times bigger, which he admits could come in handy if he ever met a mammoth, leading to an unexpected discussion about a potential new TV gameshow format. Entomologist Erica McAlister is back to tell the team about her favourite fly, which can burrow into a human head to lay its eggs, and we learn about a project to make ants glow in the dark using nano-gold which went a little bit wrong.New episodes will be released on Wednesdays. If you’re in the UK, listen to the full series on BBC Sounds: bbc.in/3K3JzyFProducer: Marijke Peters Executive Producer: Alexandra FeachemEpisodes featured: Series 16: What particles remain to be discovered? Series 19: Microbes: Secret rulers of the world? Series 6: Does size matter? Series 23: In praise of flies Series 24: Astronauts

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. BBC Sounds. Music. Radio. Podcasts. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Ince and this is another Infinite Monkeys Guide to... Now, scientific jargon can be tricky. Well, it can be tricky for me. It's not as tricky for Brian. That's his kind of job. You know, muons and gluons and strange quarks or quarks.

It's not jargon that, it's just a list of nouns. Yeah, I know, but it's jargon to a lot of us. Why? Because it's the name of it, it's a particle, a muon. I know, but it's hard and it's strange. Is it quarks or quarks? We've discussed this before. Well, that's a literary question.

Quark for Mr Mark is where it comes from, James Joyce, but a lot of people say quarks and a quark for Mr. Mork entirely changes that. I say quark. Well that's another thing as well. The charm quark and the strange quark, why is a strange quark strange? The story which I don't think is apocryphal is genuinely the particle was discovered that was very strange. It was a particle. It wasn't the quark that was discovered. We didn't know about quarks at the time, but there was a particle that was strange and required the addition of the strange quark to the up-and-down quark in order to explain that particular particle. Anyway, how do we go looking for these really, really tiny things? And it

is, it's very hard to imagine isn't it Brian, when we think about it that enormous things we kind of take for granted there is a point where things become so vast that again you get that sense of being infinitesimal when you think of the size of the universe. But sometimes when we talk about the tiny tiny things they're almost something that doesn't register. You know the the tininess of an atom let alone subatomic particles those are things that are very hard to picture especially when we know that they are us well they are to picture because they don't behave like grains of sand when we say electron I suppose most people picture it is just a grain of sand like a little thing you

bounce them together like little billy balls. But they don't behave like that at all. They're quantum mechanical particles. They, in a sense, expand to fill the space that they're in. So they're not visualizable. We're dealing with the easy stuff here, because we do know electrons exist. But now we're going to move into those other things

as we get to a size and also something which you certainly wouldn't say was a made-up story. We're going to talk a little bit about dark matter. It isn't a made-up story. No, but what, well, it's dark matter is still the strong evidence, but it's quite elusive, isn't it? So we're pretty sure it's there, but the nature of it remains a mystery. Here is the discussion about dark matter that we have with planetary scientist Monica Grady and physicist John Butterworth

who were explaining dark matter to frankly a skeptical Eric Idle. What we've got really are astronomers and cosmologists demanding, not demanding, but suggesting very strongly there is another particle. Which is a subatomic particle the size of an electron. Or they've got gravity wrong, you know, we shouldn't rule that out. That's an interesting point actually, isn't it? Because as you said, the only way we know or we suspect dark matter exists is because of the way that gravity behaves. So is it possible that our theory of gravity, which is Einstein's theory of general relativity, is wrong. So, when do you stop looking? I mean, I guess we were all kind of hoping that you guys would have found this particle by now.

Yeah, yeah. Sorry. I really feel like you've let us down. You can't find what's not there. Tell the wife. So all of our observations, and there are numerous observations that all support this idea of there being this dark matter particle, all of those observations are taken in a framework which is based on Einstein's theory of general relativity. And if we're missing something in that theory, then maybe we're misinterpreting our data. And something that would have got me thrown out of the university a decade ago is now

really gaining momentum and people are really seriously questioning our fundamental knowledge of physics. I mean, when you don't understand something as gigantic as 95% of the universe, that's got to point you towards you missing some key piece of the puzzle. Is dark matter outside our galaxy? No. It surrounds us.

A giant clump surrounds us all. In fact, it's in the room. Right, so you know I was talking about neutrinos flying through you. There is about between a million and a billion, depends on your model of the dark matter particle, between a million and a billion dark matter particles flying through, let's pick your thumbnail this time, per second. But just like the neutrinos you don't feel them. And very, very rarely, maybe once every four hours or so, there'll be a direct collision between one of those dark matter particles and the stuff that's in your body, but you don't feel it. They're

absolutely tiny, tiny particles. But how can you see that? No, that's just a theory of what we think, if our numbers are right and what we think the dark matter particle is like, that's how many would be in this room with us right now. And how do you calculate something you can't see? You just postulate, they bang into each other. So there are lots of things that you can say about the properties of this dark matter particle from our observations of the universe.

So the first and most important thing is it doesn't interact with the stuff that we're made up of. Because if it did, and most important thing is it doesn't interact with the stuff that we're made up of. Because if it did, then we would have detected it already. These particle physics chaps to my left and right are pretty good at particle physics. They would have found this particle if it really interacted with the stuff that we're made up of. It doesn't. So it's weakly interacting.

There are other properties. It has to have quite a small cross-section. So that means that it hardly ever collides with the particles that we're made up of, because otherwise again we would have detected it. And it has to be moving quite slowly, quite a slow particle. If it was moving too fast then the galaxy simply wouldn't form in our universe. This is the important thing, right? We've just been talking about dark matter and I know we've covered this in the past on the show, but it still seems to be such a simple problem Why then call it dark energy because dark energy and dark matter they have nothing in common

Do they apart from using the word dark? What was this, you know ridiculous idea in terms of the naming system and physicists? I mean dark matter the name makes sense in that the best Theory we have is that it's a kind of particle, subatomic particle, that doesn't interact with light, for example. So it's dark, so you can't see it. It's stuff that looks like it's there because we feel it's gravitational pull. But you're right, dark energy, we don't know what it is, it's the thing that appears to be causing the

universe to accelerate in its expansion. Brian Schmidt, who's been on the show several times, discovered that the universe is accelerating. That requires something to make that so, and so we don't know what it is and we call it dark energy. I mean it might be a property of space, we really genuinely, it's one of the greatest of mysteries and undoubtedly solving that mystery will point to a deeper understanding of the way our universe is. Someone might come up with a wonderful obvious answer tomorrow. That's the beauty of science. This is where the beauty of science sometimes gets ugly for you because we're going to move on to biology. So these tiny things are very big, tiny things by the standards

of the atomic model, but very tiny by the standards, I suppose, of the biological model, because one of the things that I find fascinating, again, I only found this out really by doing this show over the last 15 years, was the fact that we are also a bacterial multitude. So even someone as clean as Brian, and Brian is very clean, he's very, very shiny, but we were going through your weight of bacteria, we reckon about six pounds of bacteria is Brian Cox. Six pounds, 2.722 kilograms. When I first heard this I hadn't quite kind of put it in my head properly, which is the

idea that in terms of numbers we're more microorganism than human, because we've got 10 times as many microorganisms as human cells and then you find out that they're all very very small. Because I thought what if I had a really hot shower and accidentally got rid of all the bacteria and then it turns out they were making my knees and I'm just lying at the bottom of the thing. It'd be an absolute disaster. But yeah, so don't worry so much.

You eat a lot of bacteria but in terms of actual mass you are mainly human cells, not a problem. The idea that it would be your knees. Yeah. Just your knees are made of bacteria. Yeah they are. I'm so sorry bacteria, I hadn't realised. This hinge system's all over the shop now. We told you. Anyway, here is Monica Grady again with marine biologist John Copley and Ed Byrne

on the secret rulers of our world – microbes. What excites me about the microbes here on Earth is their ubiquity. So we find them everywhere from 20 miles, 32 kilometres up in the stratosphere. They can survive those conditions. We can find them in these things called lignite deposits, which is a sort of fossilized peat, and that occurs in some places two and a half kilometers below the ocean floor, and there are microbes living there as well. So that now they are everywhere and they're thriving in so many different ways. Well when you say... They're like the Brian Cox of life. You're everywhere man, you're ubiquitous. In certain circles.

When you said, I mean that seems, when we talk about microbial life, as we kind of alluded to in the introduction though as well, the idea of there's microbes and there's us, and then actually we were saying, so 50%, is that right? We are, how much of us is microbial life and how true is that of most or even all living things? So yes, we used to think that it was about we were outnumbered in terms of cells sort of 10 to 1 by microbes but more recent workers said no it's about it is about one to one. So yeah I mean plants live in partnership with microbes, animals live in partnership with microbes. So when we say we're half microbe but we we're not, I mean that's not, we're all human aren't we,

but it requires being, how does it divide up? I mean what if I accidentally flush out all my microbes? What's going to happen then? So yes. Why when Jeff Goldblum got into the teleporter, why did he only fuse with the fly? Why wasn't he genetically absorbed by the microbes and just a big half human half microbe? Fungus I mean, but he wouldn't have been as much fun. Would it I suppose he'd have been a mushroom It would have been a different show And you couldn't see What had happened to all the microbes when it went into the transporter because

they might also have become half of a fly microbe as well as half of a human microbe. There was a whole other story happening, a million other stories happening. I'm going to think that that film about a man and a fly being transported in a mass transporter may have had scientific flaws. I don't know if you've got a favourite nanotechnology joke. My favourite nanotechnology joke is I work for the biggest nanotechnology company in the world, but not very good. Which I think is a great nanotechnology joke.

Of course small things have become incredibly useful to us in lots of ways. But we asked Andy Hamilton, who is himself quite small, and biomaterials expert Eleanor Stride whether size really matters. As guest idiot I would say it depends what the context is. I mean if it's out in the sort of tooth and claw environment and nature, size probably does matter. For instance if I'm up against a mammoth, I know that's unlikely. Not with Channel 5's new man versus mammoth, Joe.

Joe, what's really sad is that if that gets broadcast, there'll be someone sitting in a room at Channel 5 going, do you know that might just work? Can they bring back mammoths? Yeah, I think it depends entirely on the context. I mean, it's all relative. I mean, how big you are to start with dictates how big something looks to you. So when you're a child, everything looks big, doesn't it? And then you go back to places when you're an adult that you visited as a child and you think, well, it's shrunk. What's happened to it? If you could be three times the size and a giant... Yes.

...to terrorise all of those... I'm still worrying about the nanotechnology because when you're working with stuff that tiny you must lose a lot of it. I don't want to go back to the ants but we actually had a crazy project last year that someone proposed trying to make ants glow so forget mice this was trying to make ants glow and we were doing that by introducing nano gold into the system and actually if you go were doing that by introducing nano gold into the system. And actually, if you go beyond a certain size, the nano gold does literally go everywhere.

And that causes you enormous problems. So that was worth a fortune. Or is it not? No, no, no, because it's a billionth of a meters worth of of gold. Yeah. For anyone trying to stick to a diet, anyone to just not love food as much. Erica McAllister is one of the best guests because she's a brilliant ability to put anyone off their tea. Especially when we've had shows that have gone out at 4 30 and someone's got their fish paste sandwich there and the fly is then just buzzing around the kitchen and I can tell you that more often than not the fish paste sandwich ends

up in the pedal bin. She loves flies but she loves the expressions people pull on their faces when she talks about them. Here's some of the horrid stories about flies that Erica shared with comedian David Baddiel. I think I have been bitten by a fly once. You've never been bitten by a fly. You may have been pissed, shredded, sucked, maimed, but you can't be bitten because they don't have jaws. What fly was it, do you know? You know I didn't ask. Foolish of me. It was a gerbil.

It was on my back and it was a fly because I saw it buzz. By the way, I want to ask later why they buzz because I would have thought that evolutionaryism is a bad thing because it alerts you to the fact they're there and you swap them more easily. because it alerts you to the fact they're there and you swap them more easily. So I don't know. I don't think that, well, in fact, botflies, because they're so fat and heavy, because they're such loud buzzers,

they will catch a mosquito and lay their eggs on a mosquito. So when the mosquito feeds off you, the botfly laid an egg, then drops off, and the larvae then crawls through the hole. So not only can you have a botfly maggot, you get dengue at the same time, which is quite fun. Somebody's going, ugh. Must be said that amongst entomologists,

rearing a botfly is a great thing. People want to, you know, they're very happy if they go to the tropics and they get one of these maggots living underneath them, they then want to rear it and to get the fly coming out. No, I say this, I've popped one out my friend's head. So, no, no, he's a primatologist, so he was very like... so we're in Costa Rica, we're in the jungle. No, I'm sorry, but that, that... so people are disgusted by a thing that you... then you're meant to...

people are not going to be like, oh no, don't worry, he was a primatologist. That doesn't seem to stop the disgust of you popping a thing out of someone's head, merely due to their job. Well, he should have been like, you know, it's a jungle, get used to it. But he looks like primates and, you know. But he was in his head. And what's quite fascinating, because they can't burrow down at that point, obviously, because of the skull. So it grows across. So I was able to watch it developing which was fab. But at night when it's all quiet you can hear it eating and erm... Well done Erica by the way 137 shows and already we've had more errrr's than we've had in

every single one of all of the hundredth because it's this image though of the crawling across, like some kind of under skin comb over happening. Seriously, that's not the bad thing. It's because it's maggots feed one end, defecate the other end. Obviously, obviously they do. I don't think you should go, er, about that, humans do that too.

It's used for you. We all do that. Now, one of the first moments of existential despair that usually occurs before, well, before we even know what the word existential means, or indeed even know the word existential, is a strange dizzying horror of realising just how vast the universe is. I don't know when you first came across it. I think for me it was, there's a great short film called The Powers of Ten. It starts off with the couple on a picnic blanket and then it keeps going out by a factor of ten across the universe and then it does reverse.

And I think the next day I felt so dizzy thinking about the size of the universe that I very nearly fell into the toilet. For me it was when I first crossed the Pennines to Halifax. Well they told you there was nothing beyond. They did yeah. They told me it was only Oldham but it turned out there was Halifax. They they told you there was nothing beyond. They told me it was only Oldham but it turned out there was Halifax. They said no they said there be Yorkshiremen. We end with a clip about how tiny we are in the vastness of the universe and who better to ask

than an astronaut who's experienced this in a very visceral way. Here's NASA astronaut Chris Hadfield with comedian Katie Brand. I suddenly could see with nobody filtering anything that the earth has been here uninterrupted for four and a half billion years and there has been life on earth uninterrupted for four of those four and a half billion years. So the earth is tough as nails and life is so tenacious and we can get all wrapped up in the you know The current events be they good or horrible and and think that this is the only moment that's ever existed But life we could not eliminate all the life on earth if we tried our damnedest life is tough And I found that reassuring, you know this little elephants length life that we're going it's important to us

But in the big scheme of things, it's important to us. But in the big scheme of things, it's just a momentary blip. Katie, I think you alluded to it right at the start. It's a complex set of emotions that contemplate in our place in the universe raises, because at one level, as you said, the sheer time scales, the physical, the physical insignificance of our world might make us feel just that insignificant and irrelevant. And yet at the same time, there's a profound sense of value. What's your feeling of what that complex mix of emotions signifies?

Yeah, I mean, as I've said before on this show, and you know, my mathematical ability is very low for various reasons, teaching and sort of slightly odd maths arrangements early in Catholic school where we just did art and Jesus. And I was good at art and Jesus. I'm still good at drawing. It should have just come to you. Yeah. Yeah, we were often told how insignificant we were, but for other reasons. But I think the difference in emotions I've had, especially over the last year or two over lockdown, I got into some of this stuff.

And what I felt was excited by the idea that there were ultimate truths out there that people in the world who study these things are really trying to get at. And they're not afraid of the truths, the underlying truths of existence and how space works and on a quantum level, on a classic level, all of that. But so I sort of broached it with this incredible fascination for like, wow, this could be really about what is the true stuff of life. This is incredible. And then I think I glimpsed out of the corner of my eye for a very brief second an understanding of what this all meant.

And I instantly became really terrified at the seriousness and the hugeness of it, of how quantum physics might actually work and how that affects how I perceive my life on earth and how I perceive everything, how we all perceive each other. Is anything real? Does anything matter?

I went through all these emotions, sort of in about 20 minutes. And then I carried on reading, carried on being excited by it, came in and out of understanding. And I did feel thrilled and uplifted, but also deeply unsettled and worried. And I got quite upset for a bit because I thought nothing I know is real. Nothing I know makes sense anymore. Nothing, you know, nothing matters, as you say.

But then a new thought came to me. I didn't say that. Well, no, I mean, I wasn't saying you were directly saying nothing in my life has any value. But I think I settled on a new idea, which is all of this tells me that we should value every single second of our own life on earth and that finding pleasure in life is the most important thing, pleasure and beauty and truth. Obviously I had to go off and have a quick bounty bar to calm down and then I thought, you know what, just have another one. That's what the message is.

Next week it's over to you, the listeners, as we bring you the Infinite Monkeys guide to audience favourites. Just to warn you, we will have the one where you get all scared with those spiders. People really enjoyed hearing you being scared. I wasn't really scared. He was scared. Anyway, thanks for listening. Bye bye. Now all the episodes we took clips from are available on BBC Sounds and you can find all the details of those in the program description for this show.

In the infinite monkey cage Turned out nice again. Hi, I want to tell you about my podcast from BBC Radio 4. It's called Fed and it's with me, Chris Van Teleken. It's about one of the most important things that we all do every single day. It's about what we eat. And I'm taking a close look at one food in particular, the most commonly consumed meat in the world. And it comes from a humble look at one food in particular, the most commonly consumed meat in the world. And it comes from a humble, unremarkable little animal that, as I've been finding out, is actually pretty extraordinary.

It's chicken. We eat around 74 billion of them per year. And yet, it turns out, I know almost nothing about where it comes from, how it's raised, or the impact it has on our bodies, our culture and the planet. But I'm going to find out in Fed with me Chris Van Teleken. Listen now on BBC Sounds.