The Infinite Monkey Cage - The Science of Christmas

Episode Date: December 26, 2011

The Infinite Monkeys Robin Ince and Brian Cox are in a festive mood as they discuss the science of Christmas with special guests biologist Richard Dawkins, actor and writer Mark Gatiss and science journalist Roger Highfield. Producer: Alexandra Feachem.

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Hello, I'm Robin Ince and happy Christmas. Or, as we atheists say, happy Christmas. And I'm Brian Cox and I ate so much on Christmas Day that I had to be lifted out of my home by helicopter, so no change there. There are a few things actually more wonderful than on Christmas Day, seeing Brian just run downstairs in his Return of the Jedi pyjamas, go to the Christmas tree and go,

is it what I wanted? Is it what I wanted? Unwrap it. Ooh, it's a tantalising glimpse of a particle that may produce mass. Since you got those trainers as well, didn't you? So lucky. Today we're going to be looking at the science of Christmas, but before we start, as it's Christmas, we'd better pull a cracker. Right, there we go. Oh, what a fantastic...

That was much like the first CERN. We pulled the cracker, no bang. Six months later... Oh, no we go. Oh, what a fantastic... That was much like the first CERN. We pulled the cracker, no bang. Six months later... Oh, no, that's... There we are, there we are. Here we go. Joke. Where's the joke, Robin? Here we are. What's the similarity between an angry cow

and one of the most easily detected leptonic decay channels of the Zed boson? They've both got a muon. Now, that is an educated audience. I've got to say, yeah, I have found some of these CERN crackers have been pretty cryptic, but I do... If you get a chance to go and see the CERN panto, it is absolutely fantastic.

It's called Puss in Box and... LAUGHTER It's wonderful. He's behind you and simultaneously not behind you. LAUGHTER Today we're joined by three wise men, though rather annoyingly they haven't brought us any gifts, not even that frankincense tolk I've had my eye on on the body shop

and there are other retailers, of course, we should say, because we're on the BBC, who do stock frankincense, and myrrh bowls. Talk? I like the fact you call talk, talk. Did I say talk? You said talk. Nice bit of talk. I got a little bit of talk for you, mother. Our first guest came to prominence creating Dark and Forbidding World,

rather like the sort of thing some people imagined the world would be like after Large Hadron Collider was switched on. He has since acted in and written for Doctor Who, reinvented Sherlock Holmes, created wonderful novels and a very fine history of horror. Despite that, there is still a 49% chance that when introduced, his name will be mispronounced. So, please welcome Mark Gatiss, not Gattis. Thank you. Our next guest is an avid collector of the works of Charles Darwin and, as a result, also an avid collector of illiterate extremist hate mail from some of the world's leading fundamentalists.

It's Professor Richard Dawkins. And our final guest until recently was the editor of the UK's most popular science magazine, New Scientist, and has recently co-written Super Cooperators, a book about the nature of altruism, which I asked for a copy of and he didn't give to me, therefore I presume the book denies its existence. He's also written about the arrow of time. And Can Reindeer Fly? The Science of Christmas. It is Roger Highfield. the science of Christmas.

It is Roger Highfield. Now, Roger, as Robin said, you've written a book called Can Reindeer Fly? in which you outline the difficulties Santa faces on Christmas Eve, amongst other things. And I thought I'd summarise the difficulties and then you can tell me how he gets around it. So he has to visit approximately 2 billion children. Assuming that there are 2.5 children per household,

that's about 800 million stops on Christmas Eve. And if we assume that they're equally spread across the land masses of the planet, each house occupies about 0.069 square miles, which means the distance between each is on average about 0.26 miles. And given that he has 48 hours on Christmas Eve if he journeys across the international dateline in the direction of the Earth's rotation, one can calculate that he has 2 ten thousand Christmas Eve of his journeys across the international dateline in the direction of the Earth's rotation,

one can calculate that he has 2 ten-thousandths of a second per household. His sleigh must therefore travel at 1,279 miles per second, which is Mach 6,395. How does he do that? How does he do that? Well, of course, like anything in science, there are rival theories out there. Now, if you talk to Larry Silverberg

of North Carolina State University, he's very into the warp drive sleigh concept. And, you know, there's some beautiful work talking about how you can warp space-time and get up to extremely, maybe even near or beyond relative to some point light-speed velocities. Then you've got people like Ian Stewart, who talks about warping space and time with wormholes.

You can wriggle from one region in space-time to another. You've got to wriggle through all those chimneys as well, though. Yeah, well, that's right. But this is where the other... Now, in fact, it sounds like you're a member of the third camp, Richard, which is quantum teleportation. So if you talk to Anton Zierlinger and people of the University of Vienna

and Charles Bennett of IBM, they're quite into quantum teleportation. But, of course, you've got to define the quantum state of Santa. That means an awful lot of information. I mean, if I diced up Brian down to the last millimetre, that would be about 10 gigabytes of info. But I think if I define the quantum state of Brian, that would be something like 10 to the 32 bits.

There's a massive amount of information there. And, of course... LAUGHTER Don't look so surprised. I mean, I can believe it. Would you like another share? LAUGHTER I think Richard actually may be in the fourth camp, Of course, don't look so surprised. I mean, I can believe it. Richard actually may be in the fourth camp, not quantum teleportation,

but the camp which says it's complete nonsense. Now, I don't share that view at all, but Richard, you did actually write a book where you said that Santa was implausible. Shall I say, by the way, that wasn't the main point of the book. It wasn't the Santa delusion. That hasn't been... In Unweaving the Rainbow, you talked about some of the problems of the travelling at that speed for Father Crisp,

and I think you talk about telling a six-year-old about it. That is possibly so. I've probably got a lot of stick for that, actually, for disillusioning children in their charming... You were talking about sonic booms, I seem to remember. Oh, that's right. Well, that's got to... Matt, how much was it again? 6,395.

But if you talk to Nigel Wetherill of the University of Swansea, who did some of the calculations about airflow over thrust SSC, which is one of the world land speed record attempt cars. He'll tell you that you can actually come up with clever anti-sound apparatus. It's clear that Santa has got a very advanced R&D enterprise at the North Pole, Richard. I mean, at this moment, NORAD is tracking Santa. I've just got a press release from the US Department of Defence.

It has to be true. There is another count to which I belong, which is actually nothing to do with science at all, which is that Santa stays at home and has done a Santa franchise to the world's dads. And it works brilliantly. Roger, that list you made there almost ingests, but everything you said actually is legitimate physics so

quantum teleportation in particular so do you want to expand a little bit on quantum teleportation is my favorite actually of all of them i mean most people are familiar with teleportation in a kind of star trek setting which was actually gene broadenberry's way to save a lot of money because he didn't want to show spaceships landing and taking off the whole time, so he came up with a teleporter there. And I think at the end of the 90s, Anton Zilinger and his team at the University of Vienna did the first experiment where they entangled, I think, two photons

and teleported the properties of one photon to another. And that really opened up possibilities. But I have to say, as for teleporting Santa, I think it's theoretically possible. I think practically it's a bit of a tall order. But we haven't ruled it out yet, of course. I'd actually like to ask physicists present, is it in the distant future a possibility

that one could actually make a complete copy of an object? Yeah, I mean, the teleportation that Roger referred to with single photons, you genuinely do destroy the photon at one place and it appears instantaneously at a distant place. And there's nothing in quantum theory that tells you that there's any difference between the behaviour of a single particle and an ensemble of particles, like all the way up to a person. And in fact, very quantum behaviour has been demonstrated in very large objects well when i say very large

to me large as a particle i mean certainly bookie bowls so the carbon 60 so 60 carbon atoms behave in a quantum way so nobody knows whether there's any addition you need to make to quantum theory to provide a difference between the macroscopic world, the big world that we live in, and the small world. But in pure quantum mechanics there is no difference. And so we don't know of any difference. So in principle, if you ask the question, could it be possible, then I think the answer would have to be yes, unless

you modify the theory. And if you didn't destroy the original one when making the copy, you'd have two. And then which one would you be? Ah, but you have to, and that's what happens. So the interesting thing about quantum teleportation is genuinely the one that gets teleported is destroyed. Does that not mean, though, that if it

were even theoretically possible that the original you would be destroyed, and then does that mean that the copy is not quite right? It's not going to be human at the other end. I'm thinking pure Ray Bradbury terms. Well, it's identical. I mean, the notion of identical particles in quantum theory is basic to the theory, so particles are indistinguishable

and that affects their properties. It would be you. It would have all your memories and all your... But please reassure me, I would have turned evil. That is the entire basis of teleportation fiction. When he said, should we do a show about the science of Father Christmas, I thought, where's the hard science going to be? Well done, all of you.

This raises a very interesting question, though, because if Santa is teleporting himself, then he's destroying himself at one location and reappearing instantly, perhaps, at another location. So, Richard, the issue with that, many people would have, is the issue of free will and consciousness

and is a person really just an emergent property due to the ensemble of their atoms and if you put all their atoms in exactly the same place... That's the question. Where's the soul? So, Richard, where is the soul? Where's the free will? Well, in memory of Christopher Hitchens, I want to quote what he says when anybody says,

do you believe in free will? I have no choice. He says, when anybody says, do you believe in free will? I have no choice. Just before I forget, there was a fantastic story, which I can remember what it was called, by Ramsey Campbell, a Christmas story about this bloke who's wandering drunk, I think, on the way back from a party in a snowy landscape, and he sees something in the distance,

and he hears someone swearing and grumbling, and he comes round the corner of the wood, and it's Father Christmas, with his stalled sleigh and his reindeer munching away. And Santa's there sitting freezing and he explains how he's been doing this job for thousands of years and it's incredibly difficult to get across the world and across the time zones and everything. He says, I'm just thinking of packing it all in

but I just can't find a replacement. And this bloke is sort of unemployed and thinks, well, maybe, you know, it's not a bad job, is it? Once a year, you get to be Santa Claus, and eventually, after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, he agrees to take on the mantle, and Santa opens his cloak and hands it over. And as he does so, he's revealed to be

this sort of twisted, raggedy, Rupert the Bear little thing, and he goes, Vree! Vree! And the coat closes around this newcomer and that's him for the rest of his life. That's the truth about Santa. Is this the new Doctor Who? It should be, actually.

Mark, you are someone who has written ghost stories and has a love of ghost stories. What is it about Christmas that it seems, in particular, that is a wonderful time, that at one point here there is all the rejoicing going on, but it's a wonderful time to muster up these strange stories. What is it you think about ghosts and Christmas, the supernatural? I suppose if you could quantify it, it's a magical thing, isn't it?

It's something special in the air. It's probably a lot to do with sitting around a fire for hundreds of years telling those sort of stories. It's something special in the air. It's probably a lot to do with sitting around a fire for hundreds of years telling those sort of stories. It's something that just fits together, even more so than Halloween time. And then obviously Dickens massively popularised the idea of it. But I think there's just something

special that seems to demand that, although apparently not on BBC Four every year, even though that's what I've been pushing for. Richard, because your new book, The Magic of Reality, in which you argue correctly that reality is more magical than fiction, but why does science enhance the magic? Why is reality all you need and ghost stories, et cetera, not necessary?

Because reality is true, that's the main one, but when you think about what it's telling you, reality, the science of reality, the science of physics, the science of biology, is telling you why you exist, how the laws of physics has taken the simplicity of molecules and atoms and built them up over billions of years to make something so fantastically complicated that it can make up ghost stories

and read and write and listen to music and be loving and hating and things? I mean, isn't that just a stunning fact? And that's what you get from reality. And any amount of magic, any amount of supernaturalism is just playing around, a rather cowardly kind of playing around, compared with the wonder of understanding

things through reality. Mark, a lot of your work walks on the boundary between the two, doesn't it? You work, obviously, Doctor Who, that's science fiction. So how important is the balance? Well, I mean, I could be wrong, but I don't think Richard's saying that it therefore precludes

the notion of fantasy or fiction, because that's what we're enjoying. I couldn't agree more, though. From my childhood onwards, I found such incredible majesty in discovering the most basic scientific facts at school or through my learning stuff at home, fossils, which I was obsessed with as a child,

and I spent most of my childhood on nights like this, freezing my brass monkeys off, trying to see the moons of Jupiter and failing with my rubbish telescope. But I remember just finding all these things so amazing that, for me, it doesn't get in the way of my love also, of stage magicians or all those sort of stuff. It's just because that's also, in its way, breathtaking. Is there a point, Roger, do you think, where there is,

say, Father Christmas, there is a point of perhaps cutting out the belief when a child gets to a certain age where some of the fantasy stories are placed on the back burner? Is there, in terms of seeing the nature of the mind, a point where these things are left behind? I've still got an eight-year-old so i couldn't possibly comment on that uh at all but i have to say though i think there's a pre-scientific primitive mind trying to make sense of the world around them you can actually see where a lot of the christmas

traditions come from that you know 10 20 30 40 000 years ago in the northern hemisphere as the sun ebbed away you know when you had less and less fewer and fewer hours of sunlight each day got colder and colder you knew that your whole life depended really on the living sunlight driven economy of the planet and that sunlight was ebbing away you could easily imagine how you know when the winter solstice approached 21st of december that people thought well i've got to do something to get the sun back what can i do and of course they were looking around for things like you know they were using fire they were keeping logs and things going not just to keep warm but perhaps thinking as well maybe I can entice the sun to come back

you can see how people became intrigued by evergreens thinking you know a primitive mind in a deciduous world would have thought what is it about those fir trees that means that they're hanging on to their leaves they must have some magical properties and things like mistletoe and holly that hung on to their berries during the depths of the winter again so you can see how the elements of the christmas story they probably had rituals to do with flames with candles with evergreens and so on and lo and behold the sun came back the next year and they had summer and spring and agriculture again so i think it's quite easy to see how that sort of pre-scientific attempt to rationalize the world gave us things like christmas celebrations i think it's not that surprising actually that people have a psychological bias towards trying to influence the world and it's

not enough just to wait and hope that the sun comes back you sort of feel we we've got to do something and it ties in with the the whole origin of all sorts of superstitions i think i think it was skinner the famous psychologist who did experiments in skinner boxes with pigeons and you know a skinner box is a box where you put a pigeon and if it pecks a key it gets a reward or maybe gets a reward every 10th time it pecks or something of that sort well skinner found that if you put the pigeon in a skinner box but the reward was delivered randomly after the bird knew that you know there was a reward around you would come back and look at all the birds in their skinner boxes and each bird would be doing something superstitious one bird might be chucking its head over its left shoulder another might be scratching at the ground another might be

preening its left wing in a manic way in a frantic way and what these birds had done was try out looking over the left shoulder and as it happened the reward happened to come immediately afterwards and so as it were the bird drew the conclusion oh that must have been that do it again and then coincidentally it happened again this strongly suggests that superstition is innate in humans certainly arises automatically out of certain psychological predispositions you've got to be a fairly sophisticated statistician to actually do the test and work out whether it's true that's right and actually being superstitious probably has a survival value because if you were wandering through a wood and you saw a shadow

and you thought, my gosh, that's a monster, OK, 999 times out of 1,000, it was just a shadow or a tree moving or rustling. But once in a while, it will be Ugg from the local tribe, you know, with his flint axe ready to bash your brains out. So, actually, it was quite good to be a bit superstitious and to see something animate in the inanimate brilliant now we're going to get the show can being complained about because it's anti-august you should also say that skinner's house was the worst place to

have christmas oh do you want to open your present is it a dead pigeon in a box somebody was on the show last time when we were down at the Cheltenham Science Festival and managed to combine a wonderful mix of beautiful songs, wonderful rhyme scheme and actually scientific content and she's joining us especially for our Christmas show. Please welcome Helen Arney. So I used to live with a biochemist. He was a quiet sort of person, didn't really tell me much about his life. But I wanted to know about his work.

I wanted to know a lot more. So I gave myself an early Christmas present last year, and I read his diary. This is what I found inside. This time last year At the laboratory Christmas party Down the Wetherspoons I gave you my heart

But it's not like that song by Wham! No, ma'am, I promise You could have given it away the very next day and I wouldn't mind. You could have sneaked into my chest, made a cardiac arrest and that would be fine. Well, it's been a year And I'm still working here Even though I said I wouldn't be And my crush on you is crushing me Like the coke machine in the canteen

I'm empty inside Last week I asked to borrow a test tube Just to feel your hand in mine. Tonight I'll stop this charade and ask you to dance with me to Slade. And hope you'll say, fine. Last year I tried to tell you how I feel but it just came out as, I really admire your skills with a pipette I tried to impress you so I gave you all my drink tokens and you used them to purchase fermented beverage that apparently contain large quantities of ethanol and fun

and at 1am we tried to leave and you threw up in the corner of the car park and you said it was cool corner of the car park. And you said it was cool to share a taxi home, but when I tried to get in, your friend Sue said there wasn't enough room, but there was definitely one seat next to you. But Sue works in protein folding, so I suppose she knows about that sort of thing. And now the party's here and we're standing with our beers by the pool table

and you're holding hands with our supervisor even though your facebook status says you're single why does the internet always lie you've been given a promotion you don't want my c2h50h token I think my heart is broken, I wish I had never spoken to you at last year's laboratory Christmas party

Thank you very much, Helen Arney. APPLAUSE logical detective and believed very illogical things, including things like the fairies at the bottom of the garden. And have you found in rewriting it that you have been more perhaps scientifically methodical than Conan Doyle? No, I mean, Doyle's a great gift. A genius, right, that he was. He never imposed his own beliefs onto Sherlock Holmes, who never wavers.

So although Doyle was, you know, obsessed with spiritualism towards the end of his life and was a great proponent of the Cottingley Fairies, Sherlock Holmes never wavers. So although Doyle was obsessed with spiritualism towards the end of his life and was a great proponent of the Cottingley Fairies, Sherlock Holmes never wavers. So it's easy in that respect. Now, it's been suggested that us nasty rationalists who believe that a universe composed of 350 billion galaxies each with 200 billion suns

and built out of elements cooked in the furnaces of long-dead stars, should, and that's enough, should not be allowed to celebrate Christmas. So we thought it would be a nice question to ask, if that were the case and some legislation were brought in, then what scientific celebration could we have instead on December 25th? Well, I think it would be fun to celebrate what might have been the real origins of the whole Santa mythology. And I'm talking about a toadstool here,

Flyagoric amanita muscaria. Before vodka became the preferred mind-altering drug of choice, people used these hallucinogenic toadstools for all sorts of rituals and I think in ancient lap and sammy society the shaman the sort of religious fellow would dry out these toadstools would take it would commune with the gods usually to solve a problem or whatever say there was sickness in a village he'd come back with the gift of knowledge of course they all lived in yurts so he would go through a combined door and chimney so you've got the idea of a chap who's eaten a toadstool which is of course red and white you've got the christmas colors he's got the gift of knowledge he's coming through a chimney he's imparting this gift to

people so you see little elements here in these ancient Scandinavian societies of our Christmas rituals. You can actually bind in flying reindeer as well because, of course, you've got to be very, very careful with these toadstools, very, very poisonous, but the hoi polloi found out that if you saw the shaman taking a pee in the snow and then ate the yellow snow, you could actually get quite a good high much more safely.

So you've got the idea of getting pissed and... Before we go any further, can I just say, as a BBC regulation, that please do not now go out and eat toadstools or eat yellow snow. Because that's a great thing that ends up in the Radio Times. So, Richard, so Roger's suggestion is some kind of horrendous cross between Trainspotting and Frank Zappa. What about yourself?

Well, December 25th is Isaac Newton's birthday, isn't it, depending on which calendar you use. So I don't know. I mean, I actually don't have a problem with Christmas. I think, culturally speaking, this is a Christian country, and so I have no problem at all with saying Merry Christmas to people, and I don't have any truck with this Merry Yuletide. No, Merry what is it? Holiday season.

Presents around the holiday tree and presents in the holiday stocking and things like that. So Merry Christmas. Yeah. I was just thinking of Newton there as a failed alchemist, going, what have you got me? Terry, it's all gold. It's not all gold, it's revels, isn't it?

Well, I tried. I tried. This is, we asked the audience, what is the worst event you could receive as a Christmas present? I think this is probably exactly the kind of answer we're expecting. Death Star. I am an Ewok and I can't reach the controls. This is a box set of the Infinite Monkey Cage on ice.

But then in brackets it says, please don't do it. This is a D-REAM machine. Yes. This is a... I remind you, the question was, what is the worst invention you could receive as a Christmas present? And this is from God, and it says, atheism. How did God get in?

There, well, there we are. That's the... Thank you very much for your answers to that. Thank you very much to all our guests, Richard Dawkins, Roger Highfield, Mark Gatiss and Helen Arney. APPLAUSE It's the end of the series, but we'll be back in the summer. Hopefully by then the neutrinos will have been brought to order and start obeying the laws of physics again,

and the Large Hadron Collider will have offered more of its flirtatious glimpses of the Higgs. Why is that particle so shy? Do you think it's worried about its weight? And so until 2012, the year of London, Apocalypse, when we find out that the Mayans really did have access to ancient wisdom and that the world will end because it's written in the stars. So some people believe that the Mayans put it to the end of the world.

I think Wham's last Christmas was a prophecy. Have a very happy Christmas, what's left it. Goodbye. Goodbye. APPLAUSE Thank you. To find out more, visit bbc.co.uk slash radio4. of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts. you