The Infinite Monkey Cage - What's the North Ever Done for Us?

Episode Date: November 21, 2011

The Infinite Monkeys, Robin Ince and Brian Cox, return for a new series of irreverent science chatter with a host of special guests. In the first of the new series, they're on Brian Cox's home territory for a recording at the University of Manchester. They're joined by impressionist Jon Culshaw, physicist Jeff Forshaw and biologist Matthew Cobb to look at just a few of the amazing scientific achievements that Manchester has given the world, from Rutherford splitting the atom through to last year's Nobel Prize for Physics. And if you listen closely, a few other well known voices may also appear to have snuck onto the panel...who knew that even Alan Carr has an opinion on the Higgs Boson.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 for the small coffee all day long.

Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. This is a download from the BBC. To find out more, visit bbc.co.uk slash Radio 4. If you've enjoyed this programme, you might like to try other Radio 4 podcasts, including

Start the Week, lively discussions chaired by Andrew Marr, and a weekly highlight from Radio 4's evening arts programme, Front Row. To find out more, visit bbc.co.uk slash Radio 4. Hello, I'm Robin Itts. And I'm Brian

Cox. And this is the Infinite Monkey Cage from Manchester Science Festival. Since we were last on air, many things have happened, but the worst thing that's happened is Brian Cox's level of science celebrity is now so high that we actually can't afford him for most of the show. BBC budgetary constraints mean we can only afford seven more words from you. Only seven words. Three more words from you. Oh, dear.

One more word, and we'll keep that word for a little bit later there. Perhaps you can use that word for looking at a shining thing and pointing. So for that reason, because we've basically got an emergency procedure, and we don't normally introduce our first guest this early, but we've got someone to replace Brian Cox, and it is the brilliant impressionist John Coulshaw. Now, John, we're very pleased to have you here. I know you can do his voice perfectly,

and I know also I spoke to you about a month ago and said, do the reading, learn the science, you'll be able to do him. That's all you need, he just busts it. I've done as much of that as possible. Good, right, so this is going to be... You don't say anything, Brian. This is going to be, from now on, John will be playing the part of Brian, so I'll give you the first...

Just a nice, easy starter. We'll start off on neutrinos. While we've been off air, there's been some kerfuffle over the idea that neutrinos might actually travel at faster than the speed of light, and thus the laws of physics will have to be rewritten again. So, Brian, can you explain neutrinos and what their superliminal travel may mean for causality? Well, neutrinos are really wonderful and...

LAUGHTER ..and they're really beautiful and amazing. LAUGHTER The amazing thing is that they're so small that they can't even be seen with the human eye or even by the eyes of things that are really small, like a vole, like a flea, or even an ant. And the neutrinos are faster than light

because when observed, they appear to be weaving teeny, tiny, wonderful little rollerblades that mean they can go through the universe like it was a disco. And in the year 2000, there was a band called Oxide and Neutrino who did Bound for the Relo, but it wasn't very good and it was quite hard to listen to. I'm going to have to stop you there. How exact was that real Brian Cox?

Nonsense. John, have you done any of the reading? Vaguely. I just scanned over it. But, John, I know that you're the reading? Vaguely. I just scanned over it. But, John, I mean, John, I know that you're a very keen amateur astronomer. I mean, we first met on the sky at night, 700th edition, wasn't it? Which is a real privilege to do. Yes, it was, and Sir Patrick Moore was there,

and he introduced you very magnificently. He said, welcome to the 700th sky at night, where we shall be talking about the fountains of Enceladus. They shouldn't exist, but they do. I'll tell you what, John, as well, the neutrino results, I mean, they may open up the possibility of time travel a bit like Doctor Who. Well, yes.

Yes, absolutely, absolutely. I have reversed the polarity of the neutron flow so the monkey cage should be free of the force field now. And then one of the great challenges of theoretical physics is understanding gravity, quantum theory of gravity, which is a force that does indeed surround us, penetrates us and binds the galaxy together, doesn't it, John?

Yes, you must do what you feel is right, of course. What if Alan Carr were a scientist, John? Do you know, I thought eggs bowsing was a brewery. Right, we'll get a grip now. In this series, we're going to be covering subjects as diverse as the origin of life, the science of sound, and a special Christmas edition, the physics of Christmas, with jolly old Richard Dawkins.

Here's a shiny farthing. Now go and get the most secular turkey you can. No threat to you, John. I can only do two different people. That's it. One of them is me. But today, we're going to be talking about Manchester. We're going to be asking the question, what's the North ever done for us?

Now, Manchester is a great city with a history of scientific discovery second to none and certainly not second to Cambridge, I would say. If you ignore Isaac Newton, who I think had some role in modern physics, didn't he? Did you do Newton?

My name is Isaac Newton. Alright, science time. Joining us to discuss the history and future of science in Manchester are two of my colleagues from the University of Manchester, Matthew Cobb, who's Professor of Zoology and expert on the sense of smell in maggots.

Which, of course, led to the classic joke, my maggot's got no nose, how does it smell? Through 21 smell cells which feed into a complex series of... LAUGHTER ..which feed into projection neurons and the mushroom body. Get on with it. So the... Were you the one who didn't get on with it? Look, let's not get involved in this now.

Why don't you do something to help me? Anyway, so... Oliver Hardy. He does impressions. Let's go. Go on. I'll challenge you. Go on. Gregor Mendel in the style of Oliver Hardy. How's that? Yeah, I can do that one. Why don't you do something to help me shell these peas? What do you mean, recessive? Help me shell these peas.

What do you mean, recessive? Our other guest from Manchester University is Geoff Foreshaw. He's a professor of theoretical physics and is the man you go to when Brian Cox is away looking at things in a hot place. So you've been very, very busy lately, of course. He's known in the bars around Manchester as Mr Pomeron because he interacts very strongly, but being a northerner he's colourless well done

those of you who understood that joke and if you didn't understand that joke can you tell me what it means later on I have no idea and this is our panel Jeff I want to start with you now Manchester the idea that it is this kind of, this hub of scientific knowledge, is there something different about the very, the Manchester way of approaching science compared to, say, what was seen as the traditional, old-fashioned way that Oxford and Cambridge had before the 19th century? Yes.

This idea of a Manchester attitude, it's in popular culture almost, and it's easy just to refute it and say it's nonsense. But there are two different ways of doing fundamental science. I'm speaking as a particle physicist. One is the kind of the string theory approach, the kind of platonic ideal, the idea that you kind of think about the way the world is

and through this very pure process arrive at these conclusions about how things work. The other way of doing things is to just get stuck in and just do it, right? See, I've got a little piece here, right, which I can read, written by Freeman Dyson, a famous theoretical physicist, who wrote an essay called Manchester and Athens. He said these are the two great cities in civilisation. He says that it was the anti-academic, anti-establishment brashness of Manchester

that made a fertile ground for the growth of science. Manchester brought science out of the academies and gave it to the people. And in the new environment that Manchester offered at that time, I think it's out of that, you know, it was fertile ground for this different way of doing science, this earthy way of doing science. And, Matthew, I mean, both of you are professors at Manchester.

Do you think we can still claim a... I shouldn't really say just Manchester. I mean, I suppose there's other bits of the north, isn't there? I have heard talk about the areas. A man once returned from a place called Preston. He was very bedraggled. But you think that atmosphere of non-conformity, which was clearly there in in the history of this

city and in the north is still there to an extent so is that pushing it a bit as a professional academic no it's very very different here i think in terms of the way we work in terms of integrating whole areas and the the size of the the what we have as a faculty which just means there's no departments there's no departments, there's no separate structures between people. So if you meet somebody in the coffee lounge or you hear them giving a talk and you think, oh, I could use that technique, then you're actually encouraged to collaborate.

And this extends outside of our part of the university and into things like the people working on the colours in dinosaurs. A lot of that work has been done here in Manchester, but also using machines around the world. And it's that integrative approach to science using both very simple techniques and very complicated techniques to address some of the most interesting problems. I can't let that go.

Matthew, you just said working on colours in dinosaurs. Yeah. As the professional idiot on this show, anything about dinosaurs can you tell me more about that so we now know that certainly half of one branch of the dinosaurs they were covered in feathers

so all that business in Jurassic Park when you see the velociraptors doing all that and they're turning their key well they were about half the size they basically looked like big chickens and we've been able to work out from looking at the way that the light is reflecting in the fossils the colours they must have had.

So creamy with some orangey bands on it. A bit 70s, really. Had loon pants as well. John, as someone who hasn't grown up to be a scientist, when you were growing up in this area, did you get a sense of the kind of scientific achievement, of the fact that there was something different here about the mixture of the industry, the science,

and that kind of achievement? Yes, absolutely. I like what Geoff was saying about the no-nonsense approach to science that you would get in Manchester. I wish some of the Apollo launches had come, had been launched in Manchester. The countdown would have been wonderfully no-nonsense, right? Five, four, three, two, one, off you go,

off you pop to the moon. I always wish that, in many ways, Fred Dibner had become, you know, an astronomer, you know. Cos it's like, you know, you look at Saturn and Saturn's rings, you know, and, like, some of them, when you get up close, are about as big as bricks, you know. It's not far off me. That's what I was thinking.

I saw your face when you started doing that. I go, I wouldn't have a career. I wanted to ask Geoff, actually, could you just step through very briefly some of these great discoveries that have characterised Manchester from back in the 19th century and onwards? Yeah, I actually was guilty of this, thinking that, you know, BB, Manchester's great scientific discoveries,

were in the past. But actually, they've been a steady stream since 1800. So, 1800, John Dalton came up with the first serious idea that things emit of atoms. That was here. And his student, James Jewell, 50 years later, came up with the law of conservation of energy, the first law of thermodynamics, which is, I mean, these are profound discoveries. They equal mc squared of its time. 1911,

Rutherford is in Manchester and has discovered that solid matter is essentially empty, that all the mass in an atom is in a tiny, tiny part of it, right in the centre. So tiny, in fact, if I zoomed in on an atomic nucleus and made it about the size of a ball, then the electrons orbiting around it would be orbiting away at a distance of 10 kilometres away. And he discovered that essentially all the mass is in this tiny little football, and that everything else is empty. So it's a miracle that, you know, we don't fall through the floor. It

demanded an explanation. What is it that puffs out an atom? What is it that gives it its size? That's the beginning really of, in earnest, of quantum theory. 1950, just a few years later, so there's a kind of coming in 50-year steps, these great discoveries that really have changed the world. Radio astronomy is invented in Manchester. And Jodrell Bank. I'm going to say it's our audience. Any radio astronomers in the house? It's just, you don't get that very often.

Other audiences react like that to Westlife, but not here. Let me finish. The best is yet to come, right? So at the same time that Lovell was making Jodrell Bank, we were building the world's first computer, and six years after that, we've got the discovery of graphene, which is very likely to change the world. Manchester won the Nobel Prize last year. Kostya Novoselov and Andrei Geim discovered

it. Brilliant. Very Manchester names. You can always hear in Cheadle, Hume. Its properties are remarkable. I mean, it's something that's 200 times stronger than steel. I think I read on Wikipedia that a cling filled thick layer of graphene could support an elephant. So it's one of the strongest materials in the world and it's much lighter, much stronger, much harder, much more flexible than steel. So it's hard

to believe that that material, which recently discovered here in Manchester, is not going to have a world-changing effect. Matthew, it sounds quite physics-heavy at the moment. It does, doesn't it? Not good. So, address that if you'd like to.

I think even using physics, we can start with Turing, who missed off your list of great Manchester events. So Alan Turing, who most people will know in terms of his work during the Second World War, helping to crack the Enigma code, he came to Manchester just after the war and started working on the newly built computer.

And then when he was here, he started to do two quite remarkable things. Firstly, he started wondering about what consciousness is and whether we could actually embody it in a machine and how would we know that. So he wasn't doing any experiments, he was just sitting down and thinking about it. And his idea of the Turing test, that if you could ask a machine,

you'd have a room, you'd got two responses, one from a machine and one from a person. And if an observer couldn't tell the difference between the machine's answers and the human's answers, then you'd end up saying, well, that machine is effectively conscious. So it's really important in terms of development of ideas of artificial intelligence. And what I'm particularly interested in is at the same time, he started trying to understand how cells and organisms develop, which when I first heard about

it, I thought this kind of typical maths arrogance that a mathematician thinks he can work out all this complicated stuff, just like physicists think he can work out all this complicated stuff, just like physicists think they can work it all out, and then the chemists think they can work it all out. And you know what? Life is really complicated and living things are really complicated in ways that you people just can't even begin to understand. There aren't any molecular biologists in the house.

You know, you have laws in physics. You can write down equations. We have a few equations, but there are generally exceptions to them, which are what makes biology so fun. But what Turing tried to understand was how do organisms grow? So you probably think that your genome is a blueprint with a set of instructions for making stuff, like a finger. Well, it's not. There is no gene for a finger.

So when you're developing, when you're an embryo, you had kind of lumpy little clubby limbs at your end of your arms. And then some of the cells started to die. And that was the gene telling them, die, die back. And then as those cells die, you start to get the development of your fingers. So there's no gene for finger. What there is is a series of genes that at various points in your body will tell cells to die to enable form to appear. And Turing, who didn't know any of that and didn't know anything about DNA because it hadn't been discovered, started just thinking, well, how does a cell know what it is? How does a cell know what to do? It must be told that by its neighbours.

And that could be quite straightforward, that a series of neighbours will send a chemical message, which Turing called a morphogen. They'll send that message to the cell and say, die, die, and it will then die back, and you end up with fingers. Or it could be something much more complicated. So he tried to work out, using a series of equations, using the baby computer,

to try and understand how this actually worked. And sadly, he committed suicide before this work could be fully developed. He published it in 1952, and nowadays biologists are trying to apply that. They're trying to apply that method to the latest data on how organisms develop the latest molecular genetic data about how cells decide what they are. And at least in some cases, he was absolutely right, and I think it's quite a remarkable genius that he had. John, do you ever think that, again, as the other non-scientists on this show,

we've just heard about the fact that most of what makes everything is empty. In fact, it's nearly all empty space. Everything that makes us is empty space. We've found out that fingers are basically there, messages from genes going, just die, die, die. Now, this to me is both wonderful, but also that sense of cosmological vertigo, that when you hear it says it's all empty space,

and you think, well, it can't be. That's ridiculous. Do you ever get that, almost a fear, that when you have that level of rationalism and possible truths? Oh, yes, I think so. Anything that makes the world more of a place of wonder is fantastic. I was just listening to your description there and thinking, my goodness me, this is how Keith Chegwin was formed. It makes him seem more impressive.

John McCruric was made this way. It sort of makes him seem more impressive. No, he was different, wasn't he, John McCruric? He was a different, entirely different biologist. Something went slightly wrong there, yes. He was cloned from Tweed on the first. They started with McCruric, then they did Dolly the Sheep. I just love the way that once you start discussing things like this,

you get to a certain point and your brain starts to get really confused and you can't go any further, like the tiny particles that Geoff was talking about. Is it believed now that we have discovered all particles or in 1,000 years may we be aware of even smaller ones? Is that journey into microscopics going to keep going on? Is that infinite as well as the universe in that direction? That is a brilliant question.

In the sense that the essay that I was talking about from Freeman Dyson is called Infinite in All Directions. The idea that things just, you know, that tiny particles might be made of something is, I mean, it's a natural thing to think about. It doesn't have to be that way, of course. It could be that there are elemental building blocks for which it makes no sense even to talk about their content. And the Large Hadron Collider is testing that idea. And it may well be that we'll discover that things I made have got substructure. And that could in fact remove the necessity for the Higgs particle.

So one way you can generate mass in the universe is not this fundamental thing called the Higgs particle, but have substructure. And the history of particle physics actually goes down that route, doesn't it? It's basically finding substructure, which explains these more complex phenomena. Yeah, every time we've looked, we've found something inside of the little things.

Talking there, obviously, from the approach of life sciences and then physics, where, to me, with a lot of advances in biology, there then are a lot of criticisms. A lot of people become furious and they make placards. You know, that moment there, when Darwin finally published there, there was fury. And yet, coming up with Ernest Rutherford saying,

basically it turns out nearly everything's empty space, people just go, oh, that's fine, we'll move on. And that, to me, seems to have some real ramifications for what you believe in. Why is it that physics seems to manage to pass by a lot of those kind of arguments from the placard waivers, whereas biology gets it in the neck. I mean, physicists believe that things are empty, but they're not.

You know, it's not. Tap your head. It's solid. I mean, this is just stupid. So if you're interested in higher things and not subatomic physics... Higher things than atomic physics! things, not subatomic physics. Higher things than atomic physics? If you're interested in organisms and how they interact in the planet... It's just mess, that.

Overlying the fundamental beauty of the universe. They're emergent phenomena that cause all sorts of problems. Well, exactly. They're causing problems and that's why it's interesting. There is actually... I mean, this has got nothing to do with Manchester at all, but there is a debate we've had many times on Monkey Cage about whether complex structures such as human beings

can in principle be derived from these basic laws. And we get a lot of opinions either way actually on the show. So Matthew, what's your opinion there? I mean essentially, do you think that if you had a sufficiently good understanding of the basic laws of physics, you could derive a person? No. Okay, so I'll give you an example. Go back to the genome.

Read the genome of the chicken. We sequence the chicken genome. Where in there does it say that a male chicken will go cock-doodle-doo? There's no immediate diet. It's in there, but it's not in there. So it's an emergent property, exactly as you said. And those emergent properties, precisely because they're not linear, you can't simply derive them. I mean, exactly as you said. And those emergent properties, precisely because they're not linear, you can't simply derive them. Or if you had a sufficiently powerful universal Turing machine, let's bring it back to Manchester, a sufficiently powerful computer, you could, in principle, derive the map of life forms you could have.

I don't know. How would you know? Wouldn't you be rerunning the whole universe? Aren't you asking, in fact, for this Wouldn't you be rerunning the whole universe? Aren't you asking, in fact, for this big machine to be rerunning the whole universe and all the potential alternative developments that were there? I don't know what the answer to this is. I don't know how to know. It's at times like these we need Alan Moore back on this show because he's always got an answer for that.

Or Alan Carr. I don't know what's going on. What do you think, Alan? Well, I want to know, why do all organisms have to be carbon-based? Maybe silicon or some other form of basis? Right. I think you're dead right, Alan.

That's exactly possible. I want to go back to that Manchester thing. We were talking there about what Alan Turing did when he came up here. We were talking about the incredible discovery of Ernest Rutherford. Are we saying that it needed to happen here with the methodology that was going on, that it would have taken longer if we had remained in the, as you were saying, the more ideal version of science

and scientific ideas that were going on in the traditional Oxford and Cambridge environments? I think it would be stretching a point to suppose that the things that started and characterised science in Manchester in its early days, driving what's happening now. I think that's not right. I mean, what that certainly did, though, was develop a momentum which has continued to this day, and a heritage which people working here are inspired by. But I don't think it's the case that this kind of manc attitude, the scientists in the physics department

aren't all walking around baggy trousers or whatever a manc attitude is so it's not I see the biology department as Morrissey-esque and kind of the physics department as more Happy Monday-esque that's the way that I've

it's an international arena now Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov, probably little influenced by the... Happy Mondays. The Happy Mondays. One of them does the experiments, the other one just dances in the background. It's a beautiful mix.

John, I'm fascinated by this idea of a Manc physicist. Exactly. If Einstein had been from Manchester, it would have been, right, you've got E, right? And what that equals is M and C and squared, and that's it, that's my theory, I'm having it. Sorted. I've not been a top bat for years. I know, Matthew, actually,

you tell me a fascinating story about Manchester's... We've said that the north, in particular, had this particular attitude different from Oxford and Cambridge, but you tell me the story about some discoveries about moths that required Manchester's less beautiful side. Well, yeah, so one of the most important proofs of the principle of evolution by natural selection was first observed in Manchester,

where during the Industrial Revolution, the streets got terribly dark, all the trees got dark, and amateur entomologists who were collecting moths noticed that they started to find very few of the light-coloured moths and lots and lots of the dark-coloured moths. This is called industrial melanism. And so the dark form, which in the middle of the 19th century

was about 2% of the population, by the end of the 19th century had gone up to about 90%. So there's this massive change in only 50 years in the colour of these two kinds of moths. You want to say, well, they're just dirty, don't you? I know that. Give them a wash. Give them a wash. That's very, very fast for an evolution.

It's incredibly fast. It normally takes millions of years. And what's really interesting, of course, is now we've got clean air. They introduced the Clean Air Act in the 1950s, and it's now switched back the other way in another 50 years. So we can see this change driven by industrial pollution leading to change in the two colours.

We now know, people have been able to identify the genes, or probably the single gene involved in coding for this darkness and exactly why it happened. It wasn't only in the moth. There was about 70 other species of insects showed this industrial melanism. So that's a really important example of how natural selection can actually shape evolution,

shape animals and change their shapes very, very in colours very, very quickly. How many generations is that? What's the...? I'm a maggot man, I'm not a moth man. What a great superhero that would be. Maggot man. Stan Lee needs to invent that superhero, maggot man. Could I ask a maggot question? I have a maggot question.

OK. In the 1973 Doctor Who story, The Green Death... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, there was some industrial toxic waste... That's right. ..and it affected some maggots and they became giant maggots and John Pertwee had to stop them. Could that actually happen?

Yes. Could that happen? Could maggots come to my lab? One day I will rule the world. Now, we actually asked the audience as well a question to find out if we could get to the bottom of if the North had something very special that made it better for scientific discovery.

What's the North got that makes it so good for scientific discovery? The North has always embraced pies and gravy tea I've got one here which from Twitter it says the desire to discover something that will stop it raining this one from Blue Lozange Bear. The North has got my girlfriend.

She's very experimental. This is rather succinct. What's the North got that makes it so good for scientific discovery? Deirdre Barlow's glasses. What about this one? Do her, John. Do you do Deirdre Barlow? No, but I can do Ken. Here's one, a happy one.

A grimness that inspires the need to find the point of it all. So there we are. Next week we're going to be looking at balance and asking, is it only fair to give everyone a platform, however wrong they are? So we'll be joined by the President of the Royal Society, Paul Nurse, and the week after that we'll be dealing is it only fair to give everyone a platform however wrong they are?

We'll be joined by the President of the Royal Society, Paul Nurse and the week after that we'll be dealing with all the complaints from people who say that we were very one-sided in our handling of the idea that the moon is a hollow spaceship. There really is a book about that by the way. They've gathered all the scientific evidence and then on the second page they start to make things up. So, to all of our guests goodnight Geoff Fawcett, goodnight Matthew Cobb scientific evidence, and then on the second page they start to make things up. And so,

to all of our guests, goodnight, Geoff Fawcett, goodnight, Matthew Cobb, goodnight from Brucey. Nice to see you, to see you, Entropy. Goodnight from... It's goodnight from Patrick. Yes, and we shall be here next week. Until then,

have a good night. It's goodnight from Tom Baker. Yes, well, it might be hello, although that hasn't happened yet. It's a good night from Russell Crowe. Look, this is going to take a while, so thank you very much for listening. Goodbye. Goodbye. Thank you. 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.