The Infinite Monkey Cage - The Recipe to Build a Universe

Episode Date: July 4, 2016

The Recipe to Build A UniverseBrian Cox and Robin Ince ask what ingredients you need to build a universe? They are joined on stage by comedian and former Science Museum explainer, Rufus Hound, chemist Andrea Sella and solar scientist Lucie Green, as they discuss the basis of all school chemistry lessons, the periodic table. They discover how the elements we learnt about at school are the building blocks that make up everything from humans to planet earth to the universe itself. They were formed in stars and during the big bang. The history of the discovery of the periodic table and the elements is a wonderful tale of genuine scientific exploration that has changed our understanding of where we come from and how life and the universe that we know came to be. The panel also ponder which element they might choose if they were building a universe from scratch and the audience suggest which elements they would remove from the periodic table if given the chance? Producer: Alexandra Feachem.

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 podcast. Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And in a moment, you're going to be hearing me saying, hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. Because this is the longer version of the Infinite Monkey Cage. This is the podcast version, which is normally somewhere between

12 and 17 minutes longer than that that is broadcast on Radio 4. It's got all the bits that we couldn't fit in with Brian over-explaining ideas of physics. I do object to the use of the word longer, though, because that's obviously a frame specific statement. Yeah, we haven't got time to deal with that, because even in the longer version, we can't have a longer intro.

Just let them listen! I've got an idea! Can we just have a podcast version of this intro to the podcast, which can be longer than the intro to the podcast? Yeah, it will be available very soon. And then we just have a podcast version of this intro to the podcast, which can be longer than the intro to the podcast? Yeah, it will be available very soon. And then we can have a podcast version of the podcast intro to the podcast. Hopefully it's started by now, but if you're still hearing this, I don't know what's going on. And then we can have a podcast, podcast, podcast version of the podcast,

and then it would be a podcast. Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. Throughout our 14 series, we've always tried to be at the forefront of scientific revolutions and also contentious theories. And today is no different. For centuries, it's been commonly believed that the structure of little girls is primarily sugar, spice and all things nice,

while boys are predominantly genetically made of slug snails and puppy dog tails. But the latest research from Norway is suggesting something very different. So... It's not far wrong, actually. Because we're all made of the same ingredients to get recycled a lot, so there's a high probability that the protons or carbon atoms in a puppy dog's tail would have got recycled.

When you buried it in the garden before you were born and then it grew into some asparagus plant or something... Hang on, sorry, can I stop you there? When you buried it in the garden before you were born, yet again, a physicist who goes, of course, the nature of time is very malleable. So, tonight, we are going to be talking about, well, there's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,

and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium, and nickel, neodymium, nepotunium, germanium, and iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium. And there's others too, aren't there, Brian? Lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium and gold, potassium, indium and gallium. And iodine and thorium, thulium and thallium. So, we don't have time for that.

So, what are we going to do, Brian? Ah, well, we're going to look at what you need to build a universe. What are the ingredients and how are they put together? And so, to join us, we we have a panel and that panel is Professor Andreas Heidele from UCL. I'm a chemist and if I were building a universe I would make it out of mercury because that way it would be beautiful. I'm Lucy Green. I'm a professor of physics at UCL and if I was building a universe and I could use only one element, I would use helium,

because then you have everything you need to make stars and party balloons. I'm Rufus Hound, I'm the professor of nothing anywhere. And if I was making a universe out of only one element, I'd use iron, because then I would be Iron Man. Although, disappointingly, I'd be married to the Iron Lady, and I just don't like those politics. Can I just say, no-one has delivered their introduction more as if they were behind a screen on Blind Date.

Might be, I am. And this is our panel! APPLAUSE And this is our panel! Thank you all! Andreas Teller, we're going to start with you. We're going to start with a definition. So how would you define an element? What do we mean by the elements of the periodic table? I think the best way to define elements is really by analogy.

If you think about going into a library and thinking about all of the possible books and encyclopedias and so on, they're made up of fundamental units, and you can work your way down from paragraphs to sentences to letters. And eventually what you've got are, in English, 26 building blocks, right? The letters of the alphabet. And so the elements are really the fundamental, well now 118-ish units, sort of ideas elements that you make up the whole world for. Ish. Ish, because

yeah, I mean, actually naturally occurring, there's only about 90 or thereabouts. We've found more of those, but they're so short lived that they don't really count. And the found more of those, but they're so short-lived that they don't really count. And the building blocks of those elements are? The building blocks of those elements, of course,

you know, we can go down to protons, neutrons, electrons. You can go down beyond to things that you know how to spell, like quarks. So, yes, what you're trying to get me to say is that, of course, it's all down to physics. I think we should bring...

LAUGHTER Speaking of which, Professor Lucy. We should start, actually, because we're mainly talking about chemistry, so we're going to talk about the chemical elements, how they're built, how they work together. But we should just do justice to the fact that they're made out of smaller building blocks, the quarks.

So they were made in the first minute or so of the universe. So we thought we'd just give you one minute, which is the time it took the universe to build the primordial elements, to explain how those elements were built in the first minute of the universe. OK, that's nice. Starting now. So the idea around the Big Bang is that you have this phenomenal explosion where out of apparently nothing, space and time begins. OK, we could discuss sports beforehand, but we don't have time.

But in that process of formation of the universe... It was 10 to the minus 36 seconds for the universe. Yes, we had the formation of quarks and also electrons. But in the conditions early on, they were so hot, they don't immediately come together, but very soon the particles do start to come together. So you start to form protons and neutrons and electrons. And then eventually, after several minutes,

you can have your protons and neutrons starting to come together. So I've probably done that in less than a minute. I'm probably faster than, actually, the formation of the universe. So you're saying you're better than the universe? Yes, actually, I think I am. What impressed me was three people laughed when you said, I'd like to say what talked about before the Big Bang, what happened then,

but we haven't got time. And then they went, oh, because we didn't have time then. And the rest of them missed that particular joke. So well done three of you. You're our core demographic, which doesn't bode well for the future of the series. So we've got about, after a minute or so, we've got the two or three simplest elements, you're our core demographic, which doesn't bode well for the future of the series. So we've got, after a minute or so, we've got the

two or three simplest elements, basically. We've got hydrogen, single proton, helium, two protons, two neutrons, a bit of lithium. That's right, so a small amount of lithium. And what's really interesting is that, yeah, those processes that happened in the early universe set up everything we have today.

So that the universe by mass is mostly hydrogen, and then you have around 25% helium, a little bit of lithium, like you say, was formed, but nothing else. So very, very primitive building blocks of the universe. Before we get to the ingredients of the whole universe, then, for an average member of our... Before we get to the whole universe.

We've got time. I'm sure we can cover it. What are the ingredients of our audience members, for instance? What are the ingredients of Rufus? When we look at a periodic table, if we're ticking off, going, yeah, got, got, got, got, what are those bits? Well, it really depends on the asparagus that you've been eating

in your garden. But that's really at the kind of detailed level. I mean, certainly you've got a lot of hydrogen and oxygen in you. Of course, there's an awful lot of water. And your sort of framework is calcium and phosphorus thrown in with lots more oxygen. And then there's all the sort of flesh and blood stuff that we've got to throw in. And there you're going to find a lot of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. And then there's loads and loads of trace elements, and those are the ones which I think are really quite interesting, because those are often the business end that keeps things ticking over. So sodium and potassium, which runs your nervous system,

at the same time you're going to have lots lots of sulfur and then transition metals, sort of things like iron, molybdenum, zinc, copper. And those are often... I mean, along with the sodium and potassium, a lot of that is to do with being able to transfer electrons and protons, right, and being able to shuttle those around as you do chemistry. Could you just... Just so we can picture this. So we're talking about the periodic table of the elements. So you mentioned the transition elements there.

Could you give... It's your turn for the one-minute summary. So the one-minute radio picture of the periodic table. So the periodic table really consists, I would say, if you wanted to picture it in your head, of three main sort of rectangles. There's one on the left-hand side, which are the elements that I think most children of all ages want to get their hands on. Those are the things that you want to throw into water and blow up.

The alkali metals, that sort of stuff. I brought one. That's the cesium over here. Are you going to throw it into your water? I could throw it into the wine glass here. It'd be rather expensive, and the program would end. So maybe we'll do that after the microphones go off. So what happens then? So if you put that in the wine glass there, take us to what exactly is going on chemically. Oh, well, this gets really interesting. If you

drop it in there, then one of the things that happen is that immediately electrons start to leap off the cesium and they jump into the water. And as they do so, there's a positive charge that builds up on the cesium, the lump of cesium. And the positive charge all goes out onto the surface, and this makes this bead of cesium incredibly unstable. And within a few milliseconds, the whole thing detonates, and you get an exceptionally loud bomb.

No. Bomb. Yes. That's what it is. Bomb. I brought it. I should say, for the listeners at home, he's waving around all these ingredients perilously close to each other, shouting, bomb. And I'm looking at this probably... Trust me, I'm a chemist.

You used to demonstrate at the Science Museum. That was one of your jobs, wasn't it, Rufus? Yes. 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.

We blew up quite a lot of hydrogen, because it's cheap. We used a fair bit of liquid nitrogen which isn't explosive apart from if you put it in a container and then screw the lid on really tight because as it boils and the volume that it wants to take up is greater than the bottle it will blow up the bottle

but a lot of that's due with the temperature and the energy that's given to the liquid nitrogen. So the classic is that you put liquid nitrogen in, like, a plastic drinks bottle, do the lid up, it then immediately pressurises, like, to almost bursting point, but the plastic is just about strong enough to keep it in, at which point somebody goes, oh, shame, that hasn't worked, goes to pick it up, the heat from their

hand is the tipping point of that experiment and the plastic shards out and slashes their hand and face. I'm not going to say that there's somebody at the Science Museum who still works there that that happened to, but if you happen to go to

the Science Museum and see someone with a big scar on their face, it was them. Are we supposed to issue some kind of disclaimer at this point? Because this is broadcast on the school run. That's the problem. Yeah. Oh, no, but there is, I think, a

genuine argument that science isn't dangerous enough at school. 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 know, you get to a science lesson

and, you know, 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. Whereas I remember our chemistry teacher took us out and did a thermite reaction. And another reaction

where the point was that the energy in food comes from the hydrocarbon chains. So he couldn't, he wasn't by law allowed to tell us what the experiment was or what the secret ingredient he had used was but it smelt of candy floss

after the experiment was done. So we went, well it's sugar right? You must have used sugar because we can all, and it was those things were genuinely a group of students working something out because a big explosion, a big exciting explosion happened and then we were all really keen to know more. Whereas just saying, were you to do this theoretically,

an exciting thing might happen, were you to understand it, is like the fast-forward button to, don't care, mate, jog on. 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. Andrea, perhaps you just describe, you mentioned earlier that basis of chemistry, which is basically electrons jumping around.

Could you describe the structure of the elements, the structure of the atoms, and why, what it is that you look for as a chemist, how you describe such a reaction? Let's say you drop the cesium into the water. What's happening? Well, the key thing about chemistry is that chemistry is all about the electrons. In fact, all about the outermost electrons. And you can think of an atom, in a sense, as having this very,

very hard kernel in the center, the positively charged nucleus. You then have these diffuse layers, onion-like, of electrons around the outside. And it's the outermost ones which are the ones which really are involved in doing the chemistry. So sometimes, I mean, it worries me that people say, oh, you know, it's not possible that life could have sort of emerged spontaneously because we keep being told about this particle theory of matter, that there are

all these dancing particles doing random things. And chemistry is very far from random. I mean, the moment you bring a carbon up to an oxygen, for example, and you link them together, then suddenly the way the electrons are distributed is very unsymmetrical. So the oxygens are negative, the carbon is positive. And suddenly now, if you have two of those together, they will come together, you know, repelling and attracting each other in particular ways. And so the outcomes become, in some ways, predictable, but also much more interesting, and you can start building stuff.

And, you know, amongst the things that you might build, and this really demonstrates, I think, the superiority of chemistry over physics is this stuff, right? Is that you might build, and this really demonstrates, I think, the superiority of chemistry over physics, is this stuff, right? Is that you can take those building blocks and you can make fart goo. Come on! It's genius, isn't it?

That is actually the sound effect they use on the archers when they have that Incontinent Cows episode, isn't it? You are in charge of the fart goo. The very one, yes. I mean, I get big consultancy fees. So this is... Just because there is going to be a change, apparently, in terms of school education, where there's going to be the actual practical side, the blowing stuff up, the making fart goo.

How important was it for you when you were actually first learning about chemistry to be able to get, well, properly get your hands both dirty and blistered? Well, I was never really into the explosives nutter side of things. But one of the things that

really got me into chemistry was a teacher who, when I was supposed to do a practical where you had to identify what was in the tube, said to me, have a sniff and you'll know what it is and so and he opened up a whole kind of universe of things and then I sort of went beyond that and I thought well what do they taste like so first of all I decided that I would I would I would taste the acids in the lab. And that's when I realized that what chemists call dilute acid,

it's 0.1 molar in the mouth that's not dilute. My teeth were rubby for weeks after that. But they all tasted very distinctive. So then I moved on to the salt. How are you alone? very distinctive. So then I moved on to the salt. How are you alive? Because every time that I see you do any demonstrations, there's definitely a bit where

the people at the back go, he didn't put that on the health and safety form. But the idea of just tasting those things, that level of adventure, of really, and we should say, genuinely, that we've never had to say this on the show in 14 series don't do anything andrea says that we've never said about i mean literally anything

some of it may sound innocuous but i imagine there is still a chance that you will either kill yourself or your puppy or or you will develop a lifelong fascination with science so maybe you should but that's the, but a lot of them won't. Now, I know you're looking from a Darwinian perspective here. No. Some of them will be strong enough to survive as chemists, but most of the potential chemists will die! But isn't that...

That, I think, is why chemistry is the funnest of the sciences, even if it's not the purest or whatever else, is that chemistry's history is of people who went, I wonder what that is. Give it a sniff. Bite a chunk off it. Like, the reason Marie Curie died of what she died of when she died was they were like,

I wonder what radioactivity is. Bring loads of that ash here and just stir it up in a big pot. No idea what it was at all. And the early descriptions of all the different elements do include smell and taste. That's how you knew what you were getting. You know, Marie Curie didn't lick

the radium. She had a rule. If it glows, make her husband lick it. But I would bet a pound to a penny at some point, Marie Curie went, I wonder what it tastes like. Because they just lived in a time before the knock-on effects of that were, you know, particularly considered. Mercury, which now, if a thermometer breaks,

you have to evacuate a whole school and, like, you know, warning sirens go off. I was at school and you used to be able to play with it in your hands and poke around with it. I think the early aspects of all kinds of science were about human experimentation. We always started on ourselves, whether it was physics, chemistry or biology. And I can think of experiments that were done even in the mid-1900s where following the Apollo astronauts' flights, where they had flashes of lights in their eyes, even when

they closed their eyes in the darkness, they saw these bright flashes. And they wanted to investigate what was causing them. So they surmised that it was high energy particles moving through the retina. And to test this on the ground, they set up beams of high energy particles and people stuck their heads in front of them. We were talking about this.

Larger, larger, shorter. I want to... We should just investigate... I want to deviate back onto the subject. The history, we want to talk about the history, but first I thought we've talked about the origin of the chemical elements, the first three or four lightest elements in the Big Bang. So, Lisa, you're a solar physicist, so you deal with the way that stars shine,

which is by producing heavier elements. So could you outline what's happening in the sun and how stars build those elements and construct them? So perhaps one thing to raise is that temperature's important. So actually, when we talked about the Big Bang, the fact that cooling happens means you start to be able to bring particles together and they stay together. So they don't have enough energy to separate away for themselves. Energy and temperature are the same thing. And when it comes to understanding stars, you're right, we want to

know how stars shine. And that was really the origin of starting to understand how elements are formed. And I think that the most important process is the one that takes the nuclei of hydrogen and turns it into the nuclei of helium. So this is the basic process that is powering most of the stars that we see in the night sky. So stars live out most of their lives on something called the main sequence, and during that time you're bringing together protons,

which are the nuclei of hydrogen, and turning them into the nuclei of helium. And actually it's a really interesting process that the particles go through because it's not just the case of just bringing them together and oof, they stick. You've got to have the right energies, and in fact more than that you have to bring in quantum mechanical effects because actually the energies inside of stars aren't quite enough for this process to happen.

So it is a fairly rare process. But overall, step by step, you can take protons, you can bring them together to make what's known as deuterium. You get some other particles and energies come out in forms of neutrinos or perhaps gamma rays later on. Then you bring together these deuteriums, you bring in another proton, and you start step by step to build up towards a nucleus, which is then two protons and two neutrons,

and that's your helium nucleus. And that's the fundamental process that's happening across the universe. So when do we start, I mean, historically, seeing the ingredients of the universe, but one probably goes water, earth, air, fire. At what point are you going with the building blocks, the democratist idea, the atomic idea, that there are a variety of different atoms when do we start getting the first inklings of that story so what in terms of the history of science yeah so the early the early

work around hydrogen to helium was played out by hans beta so that was in the 1930s and in his paper he didn't look at anything further on, but the inklings were there that actually this is a process that could build hydrogen to helium. Perhaps you could build other chemical elements as well. But at that time, it's perhaps worth remembering that we didn't have the same understanding of the universe as we have now. And it was still thought possible that the Big Bang could create all of the elements that we see in the universe. And really, we need to enter a scientist, an astronomer called Fred Hoyle, who was anti-Big Bang science.

He was a steady-state scientist, so he thought that the universe, even though it was expanding, was generating new material so that actually overall the density of the universe didn't change because he was looking for ways to discredit the Big Bang theory. And he was thinking, well, actually one of those ways is to say maybe stars make the elements. And he started to look then into the physics of how could you build onwards from helium

to get to the elements we see today. So you go on from helium to carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, then you go on again to magnesium, silicon, and so on and so on and so on. But you had to have the physical building blocks or the physics knowledge, which started with beta, to be able to put that together. It's a terrifically complicated process, isn't it, actually?

The building, the generation of carbon, the building of carbon and then the building of oxygen, it's almost... It looks fortunate that those elements exist in the universe, doesn't it? It's such a finely tuned process in stars. It is, you're right. So it just happens to be that the forces within nuclei and the electrostatic forces around these charged particles

just seem to be finely tuned so that you can get elements like carbon forming. And in fact, Fred Hoyle was key in our understanding of how carbon forms. And today that's the most important element for us. This is the element that life requires. But at the time when Hoyle was beginning in his work, it wasn't understood how you could form carbon in the stars. So they had a process where

you could bring together three helium nuclei, but it was a really slow fusion process and had a very low probability of happening. Whereas when you looked at how much carbon was in the stars, clearly there was something that was making lots of carbon. And so Fred Hoyle realised that actually perhaps you could bring together a beryllium nucleus with a helium nucleus and fuse these together and came up with a new fusion process to explain the formation of carbon. Isn't that wonderful, though, to be trying to disprove something that he fails to disprove and, in fact, to go on totally the wrong track, but while going on the wrong track to create something marvellous

in terms of understanding of the universe? I think it's brilliant. And Fred Hoyle was ridiculed for his support of the steady state universe but in fact by going against Big Bang Theory he tested people and he critiqued the work and people

had to really develop their ideas and be robust in their science and so even though he wasn't correct in his ideas about the universe in that sense he led to huge developments in science he's also got very it's the whole history of chemistry is um largely a lot of the material science work that was done historically was done by alchemists you know they were trying to change base metal into gold. There was an understanding that there was a process

that could bring that about. Weirdly, if you say that it's just a case of creating neutrons and protons and then allowing the electrons to balance those forms, then actually it's not that far to say, well, if you could just add more protons and electrons and have those be the defining characteristics of those atoms, then you just need to add a few more to get lead into gold. Well, nuclear physics, that is alchemy.

I think there are parallels between Newton and Hoyle, actually, because Newton, we all remember him for his work on gravity, amazing discovery, but he was an alchemist and he had also some very strange ideas when it came to religion as well. And we've forgotten those ideas. We just credit him and respect him for the incredible contribution he made, and I think we should do the same for Fred Horne.

Aren't they deliberately forgotten? Sorry, I'm just interested. I'm looking at three scientists here. So to what degree would you say that is true of the three of you as well, that you're happy to put ideas out there in the hope that the wrong ideas will be forgotten and the ideas that you wrong ideas will be forgotten and the ideas that you blindly stumble upon being correct are the

things that you'll remember. If I had known the way you were seeing them as Professor Larry, Professor Curly and Professor Mug. If I could be polemical for a minute, I would answer that. The essence of science is being delighted to be wrong because every time you're wrong, you learn something.

And Richard Feynman very famously... It's not always great if you've licked the thing, though, and as you're dying, go, brilliant, I've been proved wrong, my innards are burning. Yeah, it's true, theoretical physics is less risky. You just get the sums wrong, it's not too bad. But Richard Feynman defined science as a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance.

So it's that philosophy that you start off knowing nothing, and then you play around, and when you get something wrong, you can rule that bit out and move on. So I think it's central to the scientific endeavour, and actually central to the human endeavour, but people don't like to be wrong. In science, you get used to it, don't you? I'm wrong most of the time in research science, as everybody is.

Well, everybody is. But I'll be less wrong tomorrow. Yeah, you're less wrong... But, like, that's where I think the cultural shift that... In no small part... I mean, look, forgive me for blowing smoke up anybody here, but I think that the mainstreamization of science and scientific ideas has been led in the last few years in no small

part with the two of you and that actually there's a really important philosophical idea which is try today and be less wrong tomorrow which feels absolutely fundamental to the business of being alive. And instead, actually, the cultural yardstick that we hold ourselves accountable to, or we are told to hold ourselves, and more importantly, one another to, is be right at all times, and if you are even momentarily wrong, death to you. Which is literally the death of all intellectual endeavour,

but also cultural endeavour, social endeavour, gender, fluidity, progress of any nature. If you will be pilloried for being wrong, that is the death of progress. So never put your results on Twitter first. APPLAUSE But just one thing I wanted to say. He said to the two of us, there were three...

Who's the one you left out? I did say three. But, you know, time was fluid. I think you're right. We need people who are willing to put their necks on the line and make bold and creative and completely left field statements otherwise science will only ever progress really incrementally if we all agree oh yeah very good your work andrea brilliant i've got a little add-on to that now and then we just go forward

step by step but little tiny steps the really big work that develops our ideas in a really big way comes from people who just take something that seems completely wacky first of all you know general relativity completely wacky first of all all. You know, general relativity. Completely wacky, first of all. Then it gets tested, and you find observation to support it, and gradually we come round to accepting that actually things weren't quite as we thought they were. Yeah, at the same time, though, 90% of those completely wacky ideas turn out to be completely half-assed, right? You know, we have to eliminate them. And yet, it's really important to think

outside the realms of the current possible. Andrew, we've mentioned the history of chemistry, the history of science quite a lot, but we go back to the periodic table. So, what's the first element that was identified? And how did we begin to say

these are things? There's hydrogen and helium and lithium and you can do your little song now well the idea the idea of elements had had always been around and that they had to be somehow or other building blocks out of which the world was was composed but it's really in the 18th century that you start to be able to classify things and that there are things which cannot be reduced chemically to anything simpler. There are lots of materials which, if you burn them, you suddenly find that they have a connection with something else. And so gradually you start to codify this idea that there is a carbon,

there is a sodium. this idea that there is a carbon, there is a sodium, then eventually more and more of these unique components are discovered. And through the 19th century, you get this incredible race, and that race is to find more and more elements. That's how you can become famous. And so what you're going to do is not only discover it, prove that it's that, and then what you want to do is to put discover it prove that it's that it's that and then what you

want to do is to put some name to it which will be memorable please can we talk about dmitri mendelif please can we talk about dmitri mendelif we are going to be talking about dmitri mendelif so now because uh rufus is very excited about the periodic table and it's kind of and that is dmitri mendelif is this so can we go through just that a bit of that story so the periodic table he's basically he starts to fill it in, and as he discovers this structure, he goes, hang on a minute, there's nothing there, but that means that thing does exist, we just haven't found it yet.

Can you give us a little bit of the mystery and that kind of adventure that he went on as he created the periodic table? Yeah, in the 19th century, one of the things that had started to strike people was the fact that there were similarities between certain elements. And in particular that they went in threes. That was the

original was a law of triads. That there were three elements that went together. And in fact the guy who came up with this was a Freemason and it's possible that the periodic table at its heart the original idea was a Masonic conspiracy. But leaving that aside. We can't leave that aside completely.

There are reasons we must. I recommend reading Alan Moore's From Hell. Anyway... By the time you get to Mendeleev, there are actually so many elements there, right, that the pattern is now getting sort of... You now have sort of five elements that you can put, that you can associate. And Mendeleev essentially assembled this without really knowing what the

rules were. The only thing that he knew was that things were going to get heavier as you sort of went down, but that then you could group things according to properties. And the astonishing thing is that actually, you know, he became so confident in his scheme that A, he was able to leave placeholders, as you've just said, you know, for things that he thought must be there but weren't. And then in one crucial place at the bottom of the periodic table, he spotted that iodine and tellurium, that their masses were the wrong way round, but he put iodine under the halogens, under chlorine and bromine, and he put tellurium under sulfur and selenium

because it was more chemically right. But he had no idea what the underpinning ideas were, and that didn't come until this young man, Mosley, in the 20th century and then quantum mechanics can i from a layman's point of view point out why that is so cool is that um a mendel was a scientist in the old-fashioned sense of wanting to know more and traveled around russia on the trains that were fresh and didn't spend his time in the first-class carriages but spent them hanging out with the farmers and pointing out why the chemical nature of the soil

would lead to better crops for them. So he was like a really early front-runner in science communication and the practical applications of the things, of the great wisdom and the knowledge that was spilling out at that time. So there was that that made him a kind of a renegade figure. But the other thing was that when he found these lists of elements or when he spotted that the properties put them in shared groups,

he left these two gaps. But what is just so amazing is that at the time, there was, as sort of exists now, a sense that, but we already know what all of the stuff is. And therefore, if you've left two gaps, your theory is wrong. And Mendeleev went, what if we don't? And they went, but we do! And he went, but what if we don't?

And within two years, two elements were discovered. One of them, gallium, named after gall, or the French word for cockerel, which was gallic, which was the thing of naming... But there's more to it, because the guy who discovered it, his surname was Le Coq, which means the cockerel, the rooster. So he managed, and he was hounded about this, to get his own name in the pun,

plus the country he was from, right, all into one element. So to present a theory with gaps that then allow other scientists to step up and go, oh, hang on, maybe they're... Like, if you don't present the whole thing as the finished piece and then have your competitors almost validate your theory, that's as good as science gets because it is outside of the...

There should be a better phrase for the afternoon on Radio 4 than dick-swinging, but I just can't think of it. But... Posturing. Posturing, thank you, posturing. So, yeah, that's... But to have confidence in your idea and then allow for the ego-wrought posturing of your contemporaries to then force them to actually chime with truth rather than ego. That's as good as humanity gets, quite outside of science and whatnot.

But I just like this idea that there's this hairy old bloke travelling around on trains talking to farmers who forces the building blocks of the universe to be understood in a superior fashion. It's beautiful. Jay, we talked about the... Lucy talked about the building of the lighter elements. So you talked about hydrogen to helium,

and then carbon and oxygen. But when you get to element 26, you get to iron, no longer are those built in the simple way in stars. So we've got a lot of elements beyond that. So could you just outline how those come into being? So we're talking about a common one, gold, silver, tin. That's right, elements that we see all around us.

There's tin. Tin is one of the most emotional elements. Listen, it cries. Did you hear that? No. Make it cry again. The cry of tin. So the formation of the elements, the heavy elements. You're right, when you go beyond iron, you're looking at processes then that build up the structure, but that require energy to be put in.

So everything up to iron, or thereabouts, you can release energy. And that's the wonderful thing about the processes, because that's how you power stars. You bring hydrogen nuclei together and you release energy, and that powers our sun and many other stars out there. But once you go beyond iron, the situation changes. So then you have to think, well, how can you start to build up larger structures, which essentially is revolving around bringing in more neutrons and capturing them into the nucleus of the particles.

And you can do that in stars if you have a source of neutrons along with a process that allows you to transform a neutron into a proton so if you remember the nucleus contains protons and neutrons together you can't just keep building in more and more neutrons you'd build a very unstable particle but you can transform some of those neutrons into protons and build bigger nuclei so stars could do this if they have some neutrons available but when it really happens in a dramatic way, you see these elements being formed during a supernova explosion. Then you have a flood of neutrons and you have neutrinos rushing through as well. And in those processes, you can build the larger elements, which are

absolutely important for us. So we're talking about the ingredients of the universe. So how much can we be... this the planet earth is a good example then are we able to monitor things that are many light years beyond us and go well actually the basics are all here we are able to or is there a possibility that within certain other star systems within certain other conditions there are a myriad of elements which we know nothing about well i think using the Earth as a way to probe what the rest of the universe is made of actually was misleading, first of all, because when you looked out into the universe

and you used the fact that there are signatures in light, carried in light, that allow you to probe what the universe is made of. So this is spectroscopy, and you use the particular colours in the light to be able to say that light is characteristic of this element and this light is characteristic of this element. And first of all, when studies began on the sun, of course, it's our nearest star, it was the elements that are most abundant on the earth were found. So it was very easy to think, oh, well, the sun is made of exactly the same stuff as we have around us and in the same proportions. But actually, that was completely wrong.

Well, in some sense, it was wrong, because what we know now is that the sun is made mostly of hydrogen. And that wasn't discovered until the 1920s by an astronomer called Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who normally people haven't heard of. But she single-handedly found out what pretty much the whole of the visible universe is made of, because she, at the time, was the person who took the light coming from the sun applied the latest mathematical

theories about how temperature affects the light that different elements gives off and realized that actually the sun isn't made of iron like eddington thought or isn't mostly made of carbon or nitrogen or things we see around us but but is mostly made of hydrogen and helium. And so I think, you know, when you read school textbooks, you read that Newton discovered gravity and you read that Darwin discovered evolution, and I think that Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin should be listed as discovering what the universe is. It was a huge debate, wasn't it?

Because people would think, what's the energy source of the sun? And Kelvin, Lord Kelvin, calculated if it was made of coal, they knew the mass of the sun. Really, because you're thinking what what is it made of they didn't know about nuclear fusion they only just knew about the atomic nucleus just around that time and you draw for something familiar and it contradicted darwin because it seemed i can't remember the number that was a few at most tens of millions of years i think that if the sun knowing the mass of it, was made of coal, then it could only emit that energy for a few tens of millions of years,

not billions of years, which the biologists were pointing to billion-year timescales. So if it was made of coal, the sun would burn for about 6,000 years. If it was powered by its own gravitational collapse, then you would get tens of millions of years. But you're right, it's nothing on the billions of years that people were starting to think about evolutionary process. And it's quite remarkable that you're talking about the early 1900s here.

It's almost living memory. That's right, 1920s we work out what the sun is made of, and in the 1930s we finally figure out what the energy source of the sun is. Incredible. The sun, you said, is made of hydrogen and helium. And maybe this is a slight sidetrack, but noble gases, WTF, right? They basically don't react.

They don't do... Oh, yes, they do. So, hang on then. OK, right. Yeah. Helium... Helium doesn't, I agree. OK, right. Yeah. Helium... Helium doesn't, I agree. OK, but... I'll give you that.

What I don't understand is... Does argon react? Argon does, yeah. Really? I was taught it doesn't. Transiently. You can see spectroscopic complexes of argon with things like HCl in the gas phase in the lab um it's an undergraduate practical really but how does that how does that can you just very briefly just probably my own amusement

can you describe what's happening there because argon's got a full outer shell of electrons well the thing is that the the full outer shell of electrons turns out to be a sort of rather simple way of thinking about things. And it was back in the 1960s that somebody spotted that the energy that it would take to ionize a molecule of xenon, for example, was very, very similar to the energy it would take to ionize a molecule of oxygen.

And so suddenly they thought, if we can react something that reacts with O2 to give O2+, maybe we can do that with xenon. And what they did was they started reacting with the Tyrannosaurus Rex of the periodic table with fluorine. And so suddenly you can make xenon fluorides, you can make xenon oxides, then they were able to move on to krypton. And so you can make all of these compounds. The thing is that the idea of the filled shell is in a sense a construct that we've put on there. In the end, the electrons don't really care how many electrons.

All they're trying to do is to minimize their own energy. And if that takes place by forming a bond to fluorine, then that's great. And so we can make these things and we can do chemistry. But that presupposes you know what they are and that you've got some in this mug. So before that point, somebody had to say, there's a thing here and we're going to call it neon.

There's a thing here and we're going to call it xenon. What I don't get is how in human endeavour did it get to the point where people said, in this flask, there is a thing? Yeah, it's a great story. It goes back to Henry Cavendish. And Henry Cavendish did an incredible experiment at the end of the 18th century

in which he passed sparks into a flask full of air. And what he found was that the nitrogen and the oxygen would react together, and he could remove those by adding water. And so gradually, gradually, gradually, the volume of stuff that he had was that the nitrogen and the oxygen would react together and he could remove those by adding water. And so gradually, gradually, gradually, the volume of stuff that he had went down and down and down and down until he was left with a tiny volume of something. But he had no idea what it was.

And near the matter rescued, because no one could really work out what he'd done or tried to reproduce it. And it wasn't until Lord Rayleigh demonstrated, and here, you know, it's a bit like Al Capone, right? A tiny accounting error was that there was a very, very small difference in the density of nitrogen if you made it by a chemical reaction. So you mix two things together and you make pure nitrogen.

And on the other hand, nitrogen, if you remove all of the other components of air, so you take a slug of air, you remove the oxygen, you remove the carbon dioxide and so on, then you measure the density of that. And there was a tiny difference in the density of the order of a couple of percent. And Rayleigh said, this is really strange. And a man at UCL, in fact, our university, William Ramsey, said, you know what? I think there's got to be something else in there.

And so at that point, he did the same experiment with much, much more air, and this time he removed the nitrogen as well, and what he found was a gas which had a different spectroscopic signature which didn't have any chemistry. And so he called it argon, the stranger. Okay, hang on, follow-up question. So then, ta-da, argon, the stranger. Then somebody goes, oh, I've got another one. No, no, it's the same guy.

Because William Ramsey then goes, hang on a second, this thing has a mass of 40. That means that it sits, right, sort of around potassium somewhere. Right. Wait a second, there's something else here. Maybe there are others. And so at that point, there was a kind of 10-year chase where he went hunting around,

desperately trying to find other elements that might fit. Somebody reported to him that there was this, that if you took certain radioactive rocks and you heated them up, they would boil, right? And they would release a gas. He isolated the gas. And then the spectroscopic signature was the same thing that had been seen in the spectrum of the sun right that was helium in fact that was

confirmed by William Crookes who was the person who discovered thallium right that gave the green line in the spectrum and then they found neon and they found krypton and xenon. Radon came a little bit after that. And so really, the thing is that Mendeleev had no idea of how his scheme worked. And so he didn't know that there was a whole column missing. And Ramsey actually filled in that entire column. And so this is where I was again disappointed with one of the names of the new elements. And I'm really sorry to Professor Oganessian, who has had his name put on the last one of the noble gases. But maybe it should have been called Ramzon after Ramsey, who discovered all the rest.

So we have a final question for all three of you, which is, if you could create an element that would be a real boon for the universe but doesn't exist as yet, what are we missing? I don't want one element. I want a whole periodic table of dark matter. Oh. Just think, a whole new universe of chemistry.

Dark chemistry. Surely, obviously, the one we all want. Boom! It's the element of surprise. What do you reckon, Lucy? What's missing, what's missing? Well, I like the dark universe, the dark periodic table, but maybe one of the big questions is why we don't have enough antimatter in the universe,

and maybe I would like to see the antimatter periodic table. Why is it that we have so much matter and not enough antimatter? Where's it gone? So, we asked our audience, if you could remove one element from the periodic table, what would it be and why? And these were the answers. Aluminium, to save Americans from

pronouncing it wrong. The fifth element, because Bruce Willis never improved on his role in Die Hard. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Whoa, whoa. Objection, hound. The fifth element is Willis' final hour.

Huh? Leeloo? Leeloo? Mirjavovic wearing nothing but Versace. Get over yourself. Who wrote that? It was Dan Benton. Car park, Dan, car park.

This one, it says EU, Europium, 63, because it costs us £350 million a week. And it's signed Nigel Farage. Renium, because things can only get better by de-renium. I think we should stop there. Oh, you can't have more than that. You can, dear. Thank you very much to our panel,

Andrea Seller, Lucy Green and Rufus Hound. While we've been off air, we've had lots of questions, and the one we've picked out of the hat today is from Mark Saunders, and he emailed us with this. Due to relativity and time dilation, is it possible that somewhere in the universe a star is born and dies in our lifetime? Brian.

It's a good question. You've got to try and get into a position where time speeds up for you relative to the star, because stars last... What are the star? Because stars last... What are the shortest-lived stars, Lucy? I think a few millions of years. Yeah, so something quite quick. Do you want to speed time up?

So I think you'd have to go close to a large... a massive object. In fact, we did this, didn't we, Rufus, in The Science of Doctor Who? You put a rucksack on for some reason and then pretended, acted, falling into a black hole. Teetered on the brink of a black hole.

Yeah, yeah. So actually, if you could teeter around close to a black hole or fall into one, then you would see the whole history of the universe actually play out as you fell across the event horizon. So I would say go stand close to a black hole. Do we need to end on a warning? Please do not go and stand close to a black hole. Do we need to end on a warning?

Please do not go and stand close to a black hole. It may well affect your length. So, um... Thank you very much for listening. Goodbye. APPLAUSE Monkey cage In the infinite Monkey cage In the infinite Monkey cage In the infinite

Monkey cage Till now nice again And then we've got the podcast Podcast podcast podcast version of the podcast Brian doesn't even know that you have actually Now listened to the whole of the show And this is all he's been doing For the last 47 minutes.

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