The Infinite Monkey Cage - Trust me, I'm a Scientist

Episode Date: June 21, 2010

Physicist Brian Cox and comedian Robin Ince continue their witty, irreverent and unashamedly rational look at the world according to science. Brian and Robin are joined by special guests Ben Goldacre and comedian Dave Gorman to discuss the notion of trust in science. Why are people prepared to believe in magic and pseudoscience rather than empirical evidence, and does it matter? Science often appears open ended and evolving, a reason to mistrust it, especially when it can feel like we are bombarded with so much contradictory information. So is the scientific method the only way to truly test if something works, and why should we trust the scientists over alternative practitioners who many people would argue have helped them more than anything that comes out of a laboratory. 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 podcasts. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon Pull Apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Tax is extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. Thank you for downloading this programme from BBC Radio 4. For more

information, visit bbc.co.uk slash radio 4. Hello and welcome to the Infinite Monkey Cage. I'm Brian Cox. And I'm Robin Ince. And after last week, where we were allowed to venture out into the real world and go nose-to-nose with the audience at Cheltenham Science Festival, we've returned now to the dank basement of a BBC radio studio.

Cheltenham was actually fantastic. The level of questions from children was petrifying. It gives me hope that there's a resurgence, really. I don't think you'd have got it ten years ago. I don't think you would have had kids talking in those terms. This week, as I said, we don't have any children's questions, but we do have in the studio some people who do have very inquisitive minds. We'll be looking at the importance of evidence

and why people seem happy to avoid the evidence and believe in bamboozlers, loxenets, monsters, ghosts and all the other things I can't say because the libel laws haven't been changed yet. Can we cover spontaneous combustion? No. What happened to that? It used to be so popular. You don't see any spontaneous combustion anymore. It's a disappointment.

In a moment, we'll be joined by psychologist and presenter of Radio 4's All In The Mind, Claudia Hammond. Also with us to analyse the data, our genius hunter and comedian turned stand-up lecturer, turned comedian again. We don't know what he's going to do next, Dave Gorman. And a man whose life is one of almost constant fury. That is so unfair. There you go. Proving that point.

As he points out the bad science around us, Dr Ben Goldacre. Dave, we'll start with you while we wind up Ben Goldacre merely with a selection of different facial tics. Dave, last week we had Ben Miller on, who has an unfinished PhD. I believe you almost have a mathematics degree, but not quite. I did two years at university, one year in which I attended lectures, and then I dropped out at the end of my second year.

And I now have an honorary doctorate from Staffordshire University, which does say in the citation for your contribution to mathematics through your work. So I went to a degree ceremony and my mum wore a hat. Is that implying that your major contribution to mathematics was dropping out at the end of your second year and not carrying on? No, I think it's because I had some graphs in some telly shows. That was it.

Some of your stand-up lectures, like Are You Dave Gorman, Google Wack Adventure, were you using a kind of scientific method with those? I did a show called Reasons To Be Cheerful years ago, which was all about the lyrics to Ian Jury's Reasons To Be Cheerful. And throughout the show, I used to carry like a chalk bag that climbers use full of marbles, and at random moments in the show, or apparently to the audience,

I would just take a few marbles out and drop them in a glass jar at the front of the stage without explaining what was going on. And then at the end of the show, I would say, oh, you might be wondering what that was about. Well, when I first said I was going to do this show, everyone told me you couldn't talk for 90 minutes about a three-minute pop song, and everyone told me it wouldn't work. And so what I thought I'd do is measure how funny it was. And I've got a terrible memory. So what I'd do is every time I get a big laugh, I drop a sort of sizable number of marbles in the jar. And if I get a small laugh, I drop a few in. And what I'd do is, every time I'd get a big laugh, I'd drop a sort of sizable number of marbles in the jar, and if I'd get a small laugh, I'd drop a few in. And if I'd get heckled, I'd take a few out,

at which point someone in the audience would always heckle me playfully. So I'd take some marbles out, which would get a big laugh, so I'd put more in. And there was this kind of little end game to the show where I'd go through it all, and I'd say, well, I know you're thinking now I'm mad, I'm going to go away and count marbles or something. I'm not going to go and count marbles, that would be insane.

I'm going to weigh them, and I'd get some scales out, and I'd weigh the marbles, and now I'm mad, I'm going to go away and count marbles or something. I'm not going to go and count marbles, that would be insane. I'm going to weigh them, and I'd get some scales out and I'd weigh the marbles, and then I'd get on an overhead projector a bar chart of how many grams of laughter every show had got so far. And I'd talk them through the early shows, which were terrible. When I didn't have a show, I hadn't really written it and I was workshopping it, and I'd be getting sort of 300 grams of laughter. And, you know, we got well over a kilo by the time the thing was running then I did a tv show like years later which had some graphs in and then I put that show back on tour again and the moment a graph arrived on that screen the first time it

happened when I was sort of reviving the show and I'd been on telly just the presence of a graph the noise from the audience literally sort of almost knocked me off my feet. Is that a weird demographic to have discovered, to discover that there were a lot of people who wanted to go and see live comedy events but felt there was a lack of graphs in them? Yeah, that's basically what happened. Anyway, Ben. Hi. As a man of constant fury, fuelled by the amount of bad science around us,

how do you choose every week from the vast amount of nonsense out there what to put in your column? You could write the same thing every week. You could write that a journalist had got something wrong once a day, but I think it's only interesting to write about journalists getting something wrong about science or health if it is then an opportunity to explain how they got it wrong and in the process of that how you got it right.

It's a gimmick to talk about basic evidence-based medicine and how you know if something is true or not. And why do you think there is a... There seems to be a scepticism now about the use of evidence. It's been pigeonholed as something that one section of society, these scientific people, do. It's not necessarily something that should be celebrated generally. It's bizarre, isn't it?

And I think that's partly because the level of scientific understanding more widely is sufficiently low that science can be misportrayed as being about sort of arbitrary assertions from authority figures rather than being about the very basic thing of how do we know if that's right? How do we know

if that treatment is better? How do we know if that social policy is a better intervention for the outcome that we want to achieve? Dave? I have a theory about why there is an increasing belief in the kind of mysterious and things like the Loch Ness Monster and so on, and homeopathy and all of that stuff, which is that in the sort of 50s and 60s,

most of the machines and gadgets that could be found in the home could be understood by the common man. So if your toaster broke, you could open it up and you could fix it, and if your car broke, you could lift up the bonnet, you could see all the moving parts and you could work out the mechanics of it, and kids used to make a crystal wireless at school, and so everything was kind of understandable to an intelligent human being. And now you use a computer, and if it breaks, you can't open it,

and if you can open it, you can't work out what the parts do, and if your toaster breaks, it's cheaper to buy a new one because they cost four quid and you're now using stuff which appears to be magic and so you're now using all this stuff that is beyond your own understanding so you feel oh well all that stuff beyond my understanding so that might as well work as that it doesn't make any difference anymore yeah it's a black box and that's not just sort of slightly sinister, but it's also intellectually threatening, I think. Also in the studio, fortunately, we have a professional psychologist, Claudia Hammond, also presenter of Radio 4's All In The Mind.

Now, Claudia, that's Dave's kind of anecdotal view of it. Is there evidence, this has presumably been studied, evidence as to why people don't like evidence? Well, what we do know is that once people have made up their mind about something, that there are all sorts of biases that go on in the brain where we keep to that view because we look for... For a start, you surround yourself by people who agree with you. We could argue we're doing that now in the studio.

We're all taking this rationalist approach to it and we'll all come out afterwards and think, oh, isn't that lovely, we're even more right than we thought before. People will read newspapers where they know that the newspapers will say what they say. And also when we see some evidence, we'll misinterpret it. So if we see new evidence that we disagree with, we'll look for the flaws in it. So people are going to carry on and on doing this, even when they're presented with good evidence, they're going to misinterpret it because they want to preserve their self-esteem and carry on thinking what they think. But if we accept the fact, I assume everyone at least around this table accepts the fact that basing decisions on evidence is the way to proceed. And we also

understand why biases may be introduced. Does that research give any insight into what you might do to persuade the public in general, let's say, or government or whoever the decision makers are, to base decisions on evidence? I mean, it's quite difficult. I mean, there are various studies that have been done on persuasion. There's various methods of persuasion that we know work. One is norms. So if you say that most people trust their GPs, if you find out the percentage and say that most people trust their GPs

rather than some sort of complementary practitioner, then people will look at that, and we know that people like doing what they think most people do. The famous study about this involves towels in a hotel room and trying to get people to keep their towels for more than one day in one room instead of having that normal sign which says you know up to you hang your towels up if you want to keep them for a day put them in the bath if you want them thrown away they put up a sign saying you know something like 74% of people who use this room kept their towels for more than one day and then we think oh that's good I'll do that most people

did that they have to be people like, which fits in with your hotel room, because you think, oh, yeah, the people in my room, they're a bit like me. They kept it, so I'll do it. So what you'd have to do is try and, if you were going to use norms for that, you'd have to try and find some way of saying most people do want to look at the evidence, and that might skew the ones who don't. I'm not persuaded by a hotel's environmental concerns

if when I walked in they didn't have the TV on waiting for me saying, hello, Mr Gorman, welcome to your hotel room. And the air conditioning switched on and the TV and the lights and everything. It's interesting how we've gone from the science of how people are irrational to how can we manipulate people into agreeing with us. You know, that's interesting, isn't it? Because, Ben, I suppose you're at the... Can I say that you're more at the aggressive end of science journalism?

I just don't think that's true. If you think it's not true, name someone who's more aggressive. That's because they're all wimps. There you go, you're at the aggressive end. Professor Mike Tyson. But I think everyone should insist that people are clear about their evidence. That thing where, as you were saying, Claudia, if you just tell people you believe in something stupid,

that's not going to woo them over. But if you highlight what they might be now... I was going to bring up homeopathy. Dave, you were involved earlier this year, I think it was in January, with something highlighting what homeopathy really was. Yeah, basically, a lot of people in London, Liverpool, and I think a couple of other cities took a homeopathic overdose. So lots and lots of people went and bought homeopathic pills and swallowed the whole packet in one go to see if anyone had an overdose. Shouldn't it have been a mass underdose anyway? Well yeah this is where I think some science has led some people to believe there's something in it. We all sort of know about how a little bit of a bad thing makes a good thing. You know that's

somehow lurking in the back of our high school science brains. Vaccine, isn't it? Exactly, but I think that high school lesson about vaccines has infiltrated homeopathy. And so people who've not actually looked into it actually do think that your homeopathic treatment contains a tiny dose of the bad thing. And actually, it doesn't even contain that. I used to always believe homeopaths thought they were a herbal remedy. It is made by diluting the ingredient to such a huge extent

that it's the same as one molecule of the active substance in a sphere of water whose distance is roughly the same as the distance from here in Bush House to the edge of the sun. Ben, you've written quite widely on an area of medicine where actually believing something makes it better, which is placebo. So it's the belief that something has happened to you that actually does cure you. So is it right to attack people's beliefs in this way? If you think homeopathy is okay, then should you not be allowed to do it without ridicule in the same way that

you should do? Certainly you should be allowed to do it. I mean, I wouldn't want to ban anything. So I don't want to ban homeopathy. I don't want to ban anything, really. But I do think that you should be free to ridicule people. And also, I think you go down a very dangerous line when you say, shouldn't we allow people to believe things that are untrue in their own interests? And then shouldn't we encourage people to believe things that are untrue in their own interests? And then shouldn't we encourage people to believe things

that are untrue in their own interests? I mean, it's fine by me if people want to believe that homeopathy works, but what I don't think is acceptable is for doctors to mislead their patients by saying, here is a placebo that will improve your condition. The problem with you, though, is because you've made me so cynical about everything now, that not even what is meant to be genuine pills with real stuff in them, they don't work for me anymore. I've got a kind of anti-placebo effect from whatever I take.

I go, yeah, this ibuprofen won't really work. It's all a con by the man, isn't it? So I'm in a lot more pain because of people like you, and you disgust me. But nevertheless, we'll be carrying on with why you disgust me in a moment. First of all, we need to work out what the placebo effect really is. You've given us a certain idea of the placebo effect, but there's two men who I think will be able to really show us the way with the placebo effect, and we've sent them to the Bible Belt of the American South.

You say you are blind, brother? Yes, sir, since I was a baby. Let me lay my hands on you, brother. Oh, praise be. I place my hands on you and I say, leave this man's body infirmity. Leave its sickness. By the power invested in these hands,

I say, heal, heal. I can see, I can see! I can see! Tell them, brother! Testify! I can see! Oh, praise the Lord! Yes, praise the...

Who's that now? The Lord Jesus Christ! Praise him, I can see! Praise Jesus... What? Oh, I see the mistake, brother. You're in the control group. The control group? Yeah, this is the mistake, brother. You're in the control group. The control group?

Yeah, this is the placebo. A placebo? But my faith has healed my blindness. Yep, that's a placebo, all right. Hmm, this is going to skew our fountains. But if you're a faith healer and faith has cured my blindness, how can it be a placebo? Boy, I'm an atheist.

You mean I put my faith in a faith healer with no faith? My God! Yes, he is. Having my sight restored for all the wrong reasons is shaking my faith. Well, as it says in the good book... Hey, you can't quote the Bible at me. No, I mean The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. Oh, I hear that is a good book.

It is a good book. It is a good book. It's a good book. But you still believe. I'm not sure I do. Ah, now, that may have ramifications for the efficacy of the cure. My sight is fading.

The darkness is coming. Oh, I was worried that that might happen. Well, I think we'd better double the strength of the placebo. Oh, mighty Lord Jesus, come and heal the eyes of this placebo. Almighty Lord Jesus, come and heal the eyes of this begotten son. I command thee to heal him and

do some other stuff I can't think of right now. There we are, the placebo explained through sketch. Dave, I wonder, because obviously everyone here might appear to be, oh, we're all very smart, but... I'm not, I'm an idiot. No, I'm an idiot as well, and I have taken, I've believed rubbish,

certainly when I was a child, about the same age as you, you were a little bit younger, but we were brought up in that kind of environment of the unexplained magazine, of spontaneous combustion and all manner of weeping statues. Fortean times and all that. Does that ever fight against your desire to be a rationalist and inside going, oh, that ten-year-old boy who looked at those pictures

going, I think it is a monster? I think that is Bigfoot. I think conspiracy theories are really fun. I think it's really easy to find the appeal in all the kind of... I think one of the biggest things when I was a student was the kind of who shot Kennedy and all the various theories, I think one of the biggest things when I was a student was the kind of Who Shot Kennedy? and all the various theories, and that sort of spreads out. I bought a book as a teenager called Who Killed John

Lennon? And the opening paragraph said, on such a day, on such a time, this man killed John Lennon. That was the opening paragraph. What's the title of this book on earth is going on? But all that kind of, like, this mystery, and it was about sort of Marilyn Monroe,

you could get sucked into any conspiracy theory, and did man walk on the moon? And all of that is part of the same thing that makes some people think that the Loch Ness Monster might exist or that ghosts might exist and all that kind of... It just appeals to the same part of your brain, I think. But do you find it a duller world? Because, I mean, that's the thing that a lot of people say,

go, oh, doesn't it make it all a little bit dull if there aren't monsters and magic things in trees? Who's going to answer, Robin? Because everybody's sat there with their heads in their hands. No, but that's why... That's exactly the reason I'm asking the question. It's just what people think. There are those who just go, but isn't it a more special world

if there are Bigfoot monsters, etc., and all these different magical things? So what is the fight against that? In fact, Claudia, how do you battle against that? Well, I think we shouldn't ignore pleasure. As you say, you were saying, you know, Dave was saying what fun it is, and that it was fun looking at those pictures and siding. Is that a bit of monster? Yes, I think it is.

And that you shouldn't ignore the fact that people have something to get from this, so it's not necessarily irrational. It can be functional if you're getting some pleasure from it. Just as you might watch Avatar isn't based on real science. Lots of that stuff can't happen, but it's still fun to watch. But the problem is they're rubbish mysteries. The mysteries of how the universe works, that's a really interesting mystery. The mystery of, you know, does tamoxifen really cure breast cancer?

That's an important mystery. But Bigfoot is such a crap mystery. We have to mention Carl Sagan every week. And I think one of my favourite bits of science writing is the start of The Demon Haunted World. Beautiful book, Science is a Candle in the Dark, where he tells the story of sitting in a taxi and the taxi driver turns to him and says,

you're that scientist, aren't you? And he says, yes, you can say yes, I am. Yes, I am. And he says, OK, well, I want to ask you about Atlantis. And Sagan has to say, well, no, it's not real. All right, UFO abduction, no, no. And he points out that the wonderful thing that scientists have to grab hold of is that people are fascinated by the workings of the universe

and actually the real workings of the universe. As Ben said, the Big Bang, what caused the universe to appear 13 what seven billion years ago black holes galaxy formation the origin of life in the universe all those things are much richer mysteries than this tittle tattle but actually you just have to communicate it but also people are fascinated by the real workings of medicine and in particular people are fascinated by epidemiology. If you look at the most read stories on the BBC News site, and if you look at the stories in the Daily Mail where they have this ridiculous ongoing programme

of dividing all the inanimate objects in the world into the ones that either cause or cure cancer, what you see is people care about risk factors for ill health, and they're really, really obsessed with it. And I think you can harness that and turn it into something more interesting than nonsense about coconuts so given that we sorry hang on what's the nonsense about coconuts i haven't heard about this one but i bet somewhere one way or another the laying on of kids

went to court yeah let me defend him but science is responsible for some of these things as well though it's because like in the same way that people's knowledge of vaccines leads them to have some belief in homeopathy, it's people's vague, faint knowledge of evolution and dinosaurs and things that make... Like Bigfoot, it's the idea that some kind of weird evolutionary step has survived, and that's exciting. And the idea that the Loch Ness Monster is there

is the idea that some dinosaur could have got trapped, couldn't it, in that thing and somehow have got through. And it's sort of weirdly propped up by high school and junior school science that sort of feeds at the back of your brain. Let's assume that we've made the case that the scientific method, basing actions and decisions and policy on evidence is a good idea. Maybe we've sounded too arrogant and not convinced half the audience. That's true.

Ben, how do we spread this evidence-based method beyond medicine, beyond science? Should it be applied to things like social policy? How do we make politics more scientific? Absolutely, we should do that. And what I find interesting is when you try and argue with a judge about whether we should do that and what I find interesting is when you try and argue with a judge about whether we should do randomised control trials of what sentence you give to a heroin addict who's just stolen a video recorder they will come back with the same kind of arguments against you that a

homeopath would or that a doctor would have in the 50s and actually you can do randomised trials of things like what sentence you give in criminal justice as easily as you can do a randomised trial of a pill. Because you look at the outcome after that person is released from prison or community service and see if they re-offend, for example. Absolutely. So first of all, you have to define what outcome you're interested in. And if you ask a judge to do that, as I have when they're sort of drunk at weddings at 10 o'clock at night, they just laugh in your face because actually people don't have a clear idea of what the objective is when they sentence at all. But if you pin people down and you get to say,

well, when we sentence a heroin addict who's stolen a whole load of video recorders, our objective is we want to stop them stealing video recorders, we want to stop them taking heroin, and we want them to be alive five years down the line. So you go, OK, you've got two sentencing options. You can either give compulsory drug testing and treatment orders or you can give a custodial sentence and these are the two options open to judges so why not take a whole bunch of people where you don't know which sentence would be the

best randomize them a hundred of them get the dtto a hundred of them get the custodial sentence and then five years later we'll follow them up and then we'll know which is best and you could do this for so many things in criminal justice. We don't know, for example, about whether early release is risky. We don't know what the offending rate is afterwards, particularly because we only know the offending rate from the people in prisons and judges and so on have decided to let go. What they should actually be doing is identify 200 people

who they're willing to think about letting out on licence towards the end of their sentence because of overcrowded prisons and then only let 100 of them go keep the other 100 in and compare the recidivism rate between the two groups and by doing that kind of thing, which you can do on education policy, which you can do all kinds

of things, you would actually find out what works best That is a much better version of the Wedding Crashers film. In which Vince Vaughn crashes weddings to argue with judges about evidence-based sentencing.

I'm prepared to go with that one. Claudia, how do you think we can... That inquisitive part of the human mind, humans are so inquisitive, how do you tap into making sure that we use our inquisitive nature for good and not for nonsense? Well, I think it's a good idea to subject social policy like that

to evidence because, and I think you're right, that people do like it. They do like knowing does this lead to this and does this lead to this. But the problem is that you're always going to have to compete with politicians who will talk in terms of certainty. And science, in a way, can never beat them because it's always going to be in terms of this is the best evidence we've got so far so we won't say this will stop people ever taking heroin

again but we will can say well this is the best evidence we've got whereas politicians will stand there saying this is what must be done and it's really hard for science to compete with that it's got to somehow and worse than that you know you've got to find this fantasy politician who's willing to stand up and say i don't know which is the best educational intervention to reduce teenage pregnancies. I'll try this in half the schools, I'll try something else in half the other schools, and we'll know the answer in about 15 years' time,

by which time I will be long gone. People don't want to be experimented on, though, do they? In a weird way, I think people want the world to be fair, and so we'd rather all our children got a bad education than some of them got a good education and some of them got a bad education in pursuit of furthering our knowledge of education i think i think that's a failure of education or rather a failure of people like me to communicate because you only do trials if you don't know which the best educational intervention is to reduce teenage pregnancies so it's not as if you're giving somebody the one that works and somebody one that doesn't because you don't know

which one works so nobody's getting the one that works you know i'm a twin and if my mum had been told one of your boys is going to have this system one of them's going to have that one because we know everything else is the same because they're twins and we'll see which one comes out better she would have thought oh no i don't care which one's better i don't want one of them to have a different education to the other. I want it to be fair. It's very interesting that. But the other problem at the other end of the scale is the people who are sensibly in charge, whether they're politicians, judges or doctors, are actually very resistant to the idea that what they think they're doing is right.

And they don't want that to be tested on. And Archie Cochrane, who is the great grandfather of evidence-based medicine, described in his fantastically titled autobiography Non-Random Reflections on Healthcare, described these huge arguments that he would have with very senior surgeons, and he'd say, you know, what's the best treatment for breast cancer? And they'd go, you've definitely got to remove the breast,

clear the lymph nodes and do this huge operation. And he'd go, well, how do you know? Because this guy down the road says you only have to cut the lump out. And they'd go, well, I'm the biggest expert in the world. And he'd go to the other guy, and the other guy would say, you've just got to cut the lump out, and the other guy's an idiot and he got them all in the same room and so you know what do we do you all think that you're right we've got to do a trial and it was so hard that he spent decades having to get himself involved in some genuinely

quite serious mischief right so in 1971 he ran a trial on whether coronary care units, specialist cardiac care units in hospitals, had better outcomes than people being treated at home. And the results of this aren't applicable to today's CCUs, they're much better now. But he did this big trial, and everybody came together for the results, and he said to all of these senior cardiologists, well, we've just got the results in, and I'm afraid it looks like you were right. The people who went home and were treated at home, they did much worse.

They died at a much faster rate than the people in CCUs. And all of the cardiologists said, well, this is ridiculous. Well, I'm glad we did this trial, but this is ridiculously unethical. We should stop the trial immediately. We've got the answer. We should stop it right now. At which point Archie Cochrane said, only kidding. The ones in the CCU are dying faster. And they all got really angry.

And it was, you know know it took that level of of mischief and advocacy to get it happening in medicine only sort of 20 30 40 years ago i i think this goes to the house of the matter actually because scientists myself included are often accused of being arrogant because it can seem as if i'm sure on this show it seems as if we're saying this is the way to proceed but and i think it is that feeling that you have no authority when you're faced with nature, right? There's a very famous quote from Richard Feynman, the great physicist who says this.

He says the key to science is it doesn't matter what your name is, it doesn't matter how important you are, what titles you've got. If your opinion is disputed, experimental, nature, you are wrong. And is that one of the difficult things for people to accept, that authority counts for nothing in science? I think rather than a bit sounding didactic and that thing you're saying, oh, you're scared of this show,

making it sound like we all know this is how you're meant to proceed, it's trying to convey the idea that the way you should proceed is inquisitively and with suspicion that you might be wrong. Absolutely. And that sounds less arrogant and is more healthy. I think Ben's main point, surely, with Archie Cochran, was going to be the fact that there should be more prank-based evidence. So it starts with Ben leaping out of a wedding cake,

surprising the judge. Holding a judge hostage. Yeah, that works for me. I think that gets science into the public domain. Sorry, Brian, you've got something probably far more serious to say than that. All I have to say is that that's all we've got time for. So thanks to our guests, Dave Gorman, Ben Goldacre and Claudia Hammond. And we've had some lovely feedback from last week's show,

apart from one that we'll ignore. I think Brian's quite self-effacing. But Mark Tuckett would like to take you to task over your explanation of infinity last week. He writes, Quite disappointed to hear Professor Cox's rather dismissive attitude to infinity in the first episode. An infinite cage need not

be impossible because there is no room for space outside of it. I draw your attention to infinite set theory. He's actually exactly right. We were talking about there being nothing outside of an infinite cage, but there are different kinds of infinity, as Cantor's diagonal slash argument was famously used

to show that there are more decimals than there are real numbers. So whole numbers. So you can go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, all the integers down a table, and you can show that there's at least one more decimal than that. Does that now make this the infinity plus one monkey cage? No, that one's actually like the equivalent of Hollyoaks later. at least one more decimal than that. Does that now make this the infinity plus one monkey cage? No, that one's actually like the equivalent of Hollyoaks later. That's the very saucy version.

Next week, we've been let out of the cage once again, and we'll be going where no other science-based radio show has been before, all the way to London's South Bank, with special edition of the programme recorded as part of the Royal Society's 350th anniversary celebrations. We'll be joined on stage by Jonathan Ross, comic book genius and shaman Alan Moore, and string theorist Brian Green to discuss where science fiction meets science fact. If you've enjoyed this programme, you might like to try other Radio 4 podcasts, from Friday night comedy and daily drama from the archers,

to a range of news, discussions and documentaries. drama from the archers to a range of news discussions and documentaries for a full list of available podcasts visit bbc.co.uk slash radio 4 this is the first radio ad you can smell the new cinnabon pull apart only at wendy's it's ooey gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long taxes extra at participating participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature.

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