bluedot 2019 | Jim Al-Khalili: Sunfall

[Music] incredibly excited to introduce our next speaker for you today Jim al-khalili is a renowned physicist broadcaster and author he is currently working at the University of Surrey studying theoretical quantum physics he has written 12 physics books which have been translated into over 20 languages all around the world but this year he turned his hand to novel writing and he published his first novel Sun fall in April of 2019 and he is here today to tell us more about that and his experience of writing novels so please join me in giving a huge blue dot welcome to Professor Jim al-khalili thank you thank you thank you Tony good afternoon blue dot are you wet have you dried off someone's still with yo what's good I was hoping it was gonna rain really hard and then just everyone here will just have to cram into this tent so James Burke said that scientists should really try to predict in broadcasting try and entertain you'll will scare people if you say equals mc-squared here's an interesting fact you shouldn't say e equals MC squared you should say e equals M c-squared you stress the SI not the squared otherwise the M gets squared as well and algebraically it all just falls over okay I I take James Burke's point maybe we should not talk about far too much so um as Tony mentioned the introduction I have taken this foray into science fiction writing so normally if I'm giving a science talk I've got PowerPoint slides and stuff this was it's academic scientists liked it to be they feel safer with PowerPoint but I've done half a dozen events talking about the novel where basically I'm interview on stage I'm sitting down I'm comfortable and it's an in conversation sort of event where I'm asked questions this is sort of an a weird in-between thing where I've decided I don't have slide this is just that they said you're gonna have slides now just put the backdrop picture of the book so people recognize it and they'll know to see it in book shops and buy it and I do I do this thing all authors do this okay I go into a bookshop and I see it and it's sort of in somewhere and maybe sort of like there's several Brian Cox books on the side and I pull it out and I've sort of put it prominently and what I haven't done the junior Hartley thing yet where you go up to the with you mean books by Jim al-khalili just in case they recognized me in it embarrassing so why would I venture into into fiction writing well I should say it wasn't planned it's not something you know we all talk about how I've got a book in me one day I'll write two novel will write a story I guess when my kids were young I would make up store bedtime stories for them but hey yeah lots of parents do that it's not it's not unusual doesn't mean I've got some sort of special talent I certainly enjoyed reading science fiction growing up as a teenager a particular and in my twenties so I've read the books of arthur c clarke Isaac Asimov Larry Niven Robert Heinlein people like that a lot of them were what we'd call hard sci-fi or near future science fiction the sort of stuff you know that takes place a few decades from now not thousands of years into the future so sort of thing that Hollywood actually does very well if you think about sort of you know Tom Cruise move I'm not a big fan of Tom Cruise being creepy but but his movies are good you know sort of that the minority reports and the Mission Impossible type things so Hollywood does this you know Chuck near future science fiction very well but since those books those the classics by arthur c clarke and azimoff and others they haven't been that many in this particular genre of science fiction it seems now a lot of science fiction tends to be sort of fantasy sort of far future galaxies far far away very often if it's about Earth if it's about our future it tends to be sort of a dystopian world where a virus has wiped out nearly everyone apart from a band of teenagers who've developed superpowers who go around killing zombies and you know that Netflix are for Netflix series is pretty much about that I mean would they're fine they're good fun my daughter's really really keen on zombie films and series she she she reckons she and her boyfriend reckon they were they did reckon they were ready for the zombie apocalypse if it came they knew exactly what they were going to do but they were going to go out on them on on a boat in the water until they was that there was the prequel to The Walking Dead where zombies can swim apparently or float around the world so she realized that going out on a boat isn't isn't safe and she has to rethink her her plan but those sorts of it I enjoy those sorts of fantasy stories but it's not something that I would have a particular talent in writing about and so the natural topic for me to cover would be something based on the science that we know today the emerging science that that's you know artificial intelligence James Burke mentioned nanotechnology genetic engineering there are lots of areas where we sort of know it's coming and try then in imagine a future world in which a lot of those technologies are realized so that's something it tends to be more reliable and I knew and I'll say a bit about how actually the writing the book came about but I knew if I was to write a science fiction book I was gonna make damn sure every bit of science was correct nothing violates the laws of physics now I'm yeah hooray look I'm not one of those people who get very annoyed if a sci-fi movie get some of the physics wrong and it sort of depends I suppose it depends what sort of film it is you know you don't go and watch the latest Marvel film and and then you know you storm off in anger because spider-man's broken the laws of physics you know it's fantasy it's you're not meant to believe it but you can't believe the number of scientists who got so annoyed in the film gravity with Sandra Bullock because her hair didn't float properly in zero gravity I tend to think if it's science fiction the clue is in the second word right it's fiction it's made up it's an imagined universe it doesn't have to be true but sometimes if it's hard sci-fi you want to believe it you want that imagined world to be a possible future for us and so not only would you not want it to break the laws of physics but you want it to somehow demonstrate the science that we think is going to be happening in the future and that's what I decided I had to do with with some forth ok so how did it come about I'd measure the introduction I've written lots of popular science books nonfiction I'd never written any fiction and I was at the the launch party of one of my books actually on the topic that I gave a talk here at blue dot last year on quantum biology and we were at the launch party and the the publishers were very keen to so what's your next book Jim Wright we're you know now we've got this one out of the way were gonna write next and I hadn't thought about writing I thought come on guys you know give us a break this is a it's hard work writing a book I've got I've got a day job to do and I said well I've got everything off my chest I I've written about quantum mechanics have written about space and relativity and the Big Bang I've written about the history of science I don't know what I said write about maybe I'll write a novel oh really that's very what would it would be about so I don't know I guess science fiction right well we've put you in touch with our science fiction commissioning editor and before I knew it they'd arranged for this lunchtime meeting with a guy from transferor publishing Simon Taylor who wanted to know what I was going to write my novel about and I had no idea and I said well it'll have to be something talking about something that I know so I'm gonna have to fill it with lots of physics I suspect the lead characters will all be physicists is that all right yeah and and it would probably be some time in the future where a lot of the the ideas that we're sort of thinking about now I come to fruition now of course what what helps me in this is that because of the nature of my work I I'm not the the typical academic who spends all their life in in the lab or in front of a computer screen or writing equations I do as you know many of us and the sorts of scientists that would come to to blue dot give talks we tend to communicate science the wider audience and I've had over the last eight years now the privilege of presenting a program radio for the life scientific where I've talked to coming close to 200 scientists including actually well the organisers of blue dot Tim Tim O'Brien and so I have spoken to and and try to sort of digest the science from you know Helen shamans been on a guest monica Grady's been on so basically there anyone here in on stage well I actually having to do James Burke or Dennis Campbell yet so I sort of have got to know what is the cutting edge science in all areas from neuroscience to robotics to Space Research to geology to chemistry to math I felt I mean if I could remember it all I'd be a polymath but it sort of you know you remember one or two nuggets and then the rest is just it just dissipates but it has meant that I could fill my book with all these ideas that are exciting some of them are speculative some of them we're not quite sure if they're going to I say right or not but they could be and when it comes to science fiction the fact that it could be right is enough right it doesn't it was tremendously liberating actually for me to write a novel because when you're writing nonfiction when you're writing even more so when the writing a scientific research paper a peer-reviewed paper to be published about your research you have to be so sure you have to back up what you're saying you have to provide evidence you have to provide references you know you prove your theorems you carefully do your measurements when it comes to fictions at well that's possible right go with it and and and that way found tremendously liberating but it meant that I had to have sort of a very different head on so once I had accept it and I think it was a just I mean it was vanity when when they said well would write science fiction novel there's no way I was gonna say no uh I'll think of something you know if when you think about you know first-time authors novelists how hard it is to get published how hard it is to persuade a publisher or literary agent to take your manuscripts your your your baby that you've maybe spent years and years and years crafting and modifying I hadn't even done a creative writing course in my life I've got a level English you know but the publishers knew I could write this and I've written a lot of nonfiction that did not mean I could write fiction and so they did take a chance on me and Simon Taylor they that my editor said that and he was true to his word that he would roll his sleeves up and help me out and you know this this thing would would evolve slowly and sure enough I mean I I'd send him an early draft and I'd probably wait two or three months because you know he's got other books that he's dealing with and then finally I'd get the feedback from him and I swear that the first and second lots of feedback were each twenty plus thousand words into the point I think you write the book then farming you are so much better at this than me why oh no no Jim you know that you know the science I just know how to write again well that's sort of important and so Sun fall was born as an idea back in 2015 and it's it it took three years to write and then of course the time it takes to get it published I don't just I mean look I know there's gonna be very few but hands up who's read sample it's the front row great bless you they got here first the idea the premise is very similar to the premise of a really awful Hollywood film called the core where the Earth's magnetic field is dying and so scientists have to kick-start it so they build this rocket ship that burrows down deep into the core of the earth to be like Jules Verne but it blasts with a laser beam or something it vaporizes the rock in front of it and they travel all the way to the core where they chuck a few nuclear bombs and and kick started again stupid idea completely impossible whereas in some fall is absolutely feasible because and this is one of the things I'm really proud of with it with the book I figured out how how you would do it realistically you see what so so this is the scenario and some fall and what I'll tell you I'm I'm gonna try very hard not to give you any spoilers because you're all going to want to go off and buy obviously that's funny before I went on holiday a couple of weeks ago with my family so my wife and I and our two children David and Kate both in their mid 20s and their other halves and we're heads like pull holiday in Croatia very lovely very warm weather but nice my wife and my daughter had both red Sun fall and my daughter liked it and she table which is really nice because I you know she doesn't have to say that she that's the only book of mine that she's even looked out I think no that's not true she hasn't looked if she wants but she was really keen for for her brother and her boyfriend her brother's girlfriend to to read the book as well so she said right we're gonna have to have a some full quiz on holiday and basically whoever loses has to buy dinner and it's like it's gonna be a thing everyone has to read it and so there was a point when we're sitting around the pool where there were three people reading my novel and I can just imagine you know they were doing it because I was there as soon as I turn my back and wandered off oh goodness for that little rubbish and you know bring out something they really wanted to read anyway where was I so yeah I'm really proud of of the premise of the book the idea is so we know that the earth our planet is a giant magnet we have a magnetic field that's why a compass works okay we have a magnetic north or the magnetic south and the Earth's magnetic field is is vital for the survival of life on this planet we think we're not sure but we believe that Mars also used to have a magnetic field but for reasons we don't know billions of years ago that magnetic field died out whatever it was that was sustaining that magnet field died out on Mars Mars could have had an atmosphere it could have had life but without a magnetic field which provides the bubble wrap around a planet protecting it from the radiation from space bombarding it without that magnetic field that radiation those cosmic rays would strip away the atmosphere and would destroy all life and and that's why you know there's no life on Mars now because the dirt has a bit of an atmosphere but not much and of course it's exposed to the radiation from space Earth's magnetic field keeps us safe so we're aware of for example the aurora borealis the Northern Lights or the Aurora Australis that the Southern Lights that is light being given off from air molecules in the upper atmosphere when they're bombarded from space by these cosmic particles the particles collide with these molecules of oxygen and nitrogen in the upper atmosphere and excite them and then there when they pump them with energy basically and then when they release their energy again it comes out in different wavelengths of light as a light display that's the Northern Lights so this is proof of the magnetic field exist but also if there was an if it didn't exist the compass wouldn't work the compass needle would just float around and the one thing we do know about the history of our planet is the Earth's magnetic field every few hundred thousand years flips over so the magnetic north becomes the magnetic south and vice versa and that process takes a bit of time it doesn't happen overnight and we know it's happened it doesn't particularly you know affect life as far as we know but there would be some disruption during the flipping process because that's when the Earth's magnetic field gets much weaker and we're more exposed to the radiation from space we are overdue a magnetic flip okay we're sort of way longer hundreds of thousands of years late overdue magnetic clip so it is quite feasible that it could happen we also know the Earth's magnetic you know this of North and southern poles are moving the magnetic north has been drifting across of these and it doesn't coincide with the geographic North Pole it's drifting is it across Siberia now I can't remember which way too many way it's moving you can't you can imagine that this is the early stages maybe of the Earth's magnetic field weakening and and I'm flipping so the premise of the story is that the Earth's magnetic field people know it's getting weaker this is the story is set in 2041 and yeah I mean climate change and basically I didn't write you know there are only so many disasters you couldn't sort of throw into a book and that before it gets very very depressing so I've sort of made some like climate change has happened we've mitigated against the worst-case scenario but sea levels have risen and there's been mass migration of people from coastal areas around the world so millions of people are moving around so there's a societies around the world are some somewhat in turmoil and they know that the Earth's magnetic fields getting weaker but they think a flip is happening and the idea is that there's a one of the characters in fact she turned out to be everyone's favorite character but why everyone I mean everyone is ready obviously me and my editor publisher and so it says she's an and and a young Iranian computer scientist and a cyber hacker and so this is in Iran post Islamic Revolution right so so she's a bit of a anarchist you know pink hair piercings lesbian really self-confident very self-assured about her ability and she manages using obviously a quantum computer to dis uncover this conspiracy this truth that's being hidden that the Earth's magnetic field isn't getting ready for a flip but it's actually dying and the authorities don't know what to do about it so they it was they don't want to tell the world that it's really happening you know chaos will ensue as of course it does and so the premise of the book is how would you kickstart the Earth's magnetic field now the Earth's magnetic field is generated by it's liquid metal core and in the core of the earth where temperatures and pressures are so high metal iron nickel is in liquid form it's melted and it's processing moving around inside the Earth's core and because it's liquid because it's moving it's conducting and it generates electric field which generally induces a magnetic field and there's some feedback loops and it's quite complicated geophysics that we're only now just starting to understand so the basic idea is why would the magnetic field of the Earth ever die because that liquid core somehow has slowed down or it's it's not travelling in what's called laminar flow it's also a rather turbulent and and of all over the place so how would you give it the boost of energy that it needs to get it going again without sending a rocket blasting a laser beam through the rock to get to the middle how would you deliver energy to the center of the earth without destroying all the stuff in between you need something that will travel through the earth as though the earth were transparent now we know of such particles they're called neutrinos and so every one of us now has millions of neutrinos streaming through our bodies from all directions because they they interact very weakly with normal matter but that's not interesting neutrinos aren't quite not quite sexy enough I needed something that was that will also saw the earth as transparent but somehow I don't want it to go through and then come out the other end there's no good for anyone I want it to be in the core of the earth and so this is set in 2041 and two of the main heroes I warn you there are physicists there are particle physicists and by this point we have discovered what the ingredients of dark matter is now dark matter we know it there's there's much more five times as much dark matter stuff in the universe as there is normal matter that makes up atoms and everything in the world and dark matter we only know it exists because it has a gravitational effect or normal matter so we know you know so the reason that when I jump up and fall down again it's the earth gravity the Earth's mass that's pulling me back down again but that's not the only force that holds stuff together in our world the electromagnetic force is what holds electrons within atoms and what holds atoms together to make molecules and molecules to make all stuff dark matter doesn't feel the electromagnetic force that's why it's dark because the electromagnetic force also involves absorbing and emitting light light just go straight through dark matter as if it weren't there because dark matter can't capture the particles the photon the particles of light but it does have gravity and that's how we know it's out there it's holding galaxies together dark matter you need it to explain why our universe looks the way it does you need dark matter to explain how galaxies formed in the first place how galaxies move around and move relative to each other how stars within galaxies move around without flying off so we know it's there but it doesn't interact with normal matter so the premise of the book is they have discovered that dark matter is made of a certain type of elementary particle called not a neutrino but a neutralino you've heard it here we don't know what dark matter is made of but when they discover it's neutral I remember Jim al-khalili telling us about that in his novel Wow he's like arthur c clarke he knows the future he's brilliant the nice thing is a lot of this stuff that I write about in my book because it's based on research that's being carried out now I can check with people who know what they're talking about and there's a guy in the office next door to me Justin Reed who's head of the physics department at sorry who is one of the world experts on Dark Matter so I would just knock on his door and check and he'd read through the manuscripts on neutrinos possible candidates for dark matter and so yeah possibly these are what are called supersymmetric particles they we may discover them at the Large Hadron Collider we don't know they're one of a number of Canada we know Dark Matter has to be made of something and we know it's made of something that isn't like anything that normal matter is made of so it's not made of atoms it's not made of the particles that make up atoms not made of quarks or electrons because all those particles feel the electromagnetic force it kind of even be made of just electrically neutral particles because other stuff reasons su is the other nuclear forces that I don't go into so it could be made of nutrients so the idea is they have discovered by 2041 they've discovered that dark matters made only truly knows but not only that they've discovered that dark matter interacts with dark matter so in accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider they can make beams of dark matter and if you fire two beams of Dark Matter each other just like you now the Large Hadron Collider what they do is they they accelerate beams of protons the particles that make up atomic nuclei and when beams of protons collide mat equals MC squared see that mass turns into pure energy and that energy generates lots of new particles like the Higgs boson for example so that's how they make new particles by colliding normal particles together well in the story they collide beams of dark matter together and that creates energy so the idea is that they have to deposit this energy at the center of the core of the earth so that it can be used it can turn into some seismic wave that sort of kick-start the Earth's magnetic core and they've worked out they need to fire beams of dark matter from different locations in fact eight different points around the globe they're all meet at a single point the size of a peppercorn somewhere in the center of the earth where the energies are completely balanced annihilate each other and generate this boom of energy that kick-starts estimates they've done the calculations and it works the problem is that if any one of those eight beams fails then it's all off kilter so rather than the energy just being deposit in the core it gets thrown out back radially to the surface and will destroy the earth so this is the premise scientists know that the earth is dying and humanity only has a few years left they have to try and save it they've got an idea but if any one of those beams fails then humanity dies out even more quickly than if we waited around for the magnetic field to die and of course there are goodies and baddies and so there are end of world as judgement day fanatics who are so like extreme environmental assume that humanity has destroyed the planet and this is the earth taking its revenge on us and therefore they're quite happy for humanity to be wiped out so they're trying to sabotage the project so that's the premise of the book there's a lot of science in there that I was I'm very pleased with some of it not even would appreciate just how pleased I am with it but obviously I tell people if they ask but essentially it's a page-turner essentially it's meant to be a thriller and I think part of that is not the fact that I was so influenced growing up reading the books of arthur c clarke or Isaac Asimov but reading Stephen King and Stephen King was a master storyteller when you get to the end of the chapter and you know and then it came for him you wanted you know you jur it just keeps you gripped and that was what i found i was quite good at keeping keeping the reader engaged well I what I didn't realize that I wasn't so good at was some of the very basic lessons that you learn as a novelist that had I done a Creative Writing course I'd have learnt about somethings called show don't tell so anyone who's who's written any fiction is any creative writing will know what that means you bet you don't spell things out you know in detail let let that be told through the characters through the the seem so so it might my editor was always taking a show don't tell and four eight I just didn't know what what do you mean show don't so why can't I say that gradually you learn the other thing I learned was he keeps saying mind your POV your points of view apparently if you are telling the story through the eyes of one of the characters one of the protagonists and so and then someone else suddenly felt really angry he said no you can't say that how do you know they felt angry they may have looked angry because you're seeing them through the eyes of someone else you can't suddenly jump into their eyes and see the world through their eyes which seemed to me like what a bit of a pedantic subtle point they said believe me a reader even if they don't know about point of view that will jar that will sound awkward so it was tricks like that that I had to learn gradually over the course of the two and a half three years of writing the book I'm pleased with it it's sort of done alright is still in hardback so you might be wanting I could appreciate it on to wait for the paperback to come out sometime next year but anyway you should still buy the hardback the publishers haven't I mean it's I'm not sure if I should be worried about this that they haven't come back to me and said what's your next novel going to be Jim so whether or not I'll write another one I'm I'm not I probably will I sort of got the bug now and I sort of feel that steep learning curve of writing fiction I don't want to waste it so I might come back to this at later point but I am pleased that it has been well received by the people who have read it and I'm the really the reason I got this slide up of the cover of the book is only to show off that other nice little quote there were Stephen Baxter's one of my heroes another fantastic hard sci-fi writer and so he equates it as somewhere between the day after tomorrow and Neuromancer brilliant as soon as he read that the publisher sent the book to him he liked it and he said that they said that's going on the front cover so I don't know if it's helped sales but you know I'm very proud of it so I think I've got what about just about 12 minutes or so I've run out of stuff to say that's part of part of the problem of not preparing PowerPoint slides which will remind you or actually maybe you have some notes you know tell me what's a so I finish what I say so with roving mics and I'm happy to take questions and I will point to people so yes someone in the front row and then I couldn't get probably gonna be the front row my gym fans hi you said that you were very proud of some of the science and you tell people if they asked so I'm asking right well one of the things I'm very pleased about is that in 2041 that you know obviously there's drones there are flying cars right because I know that your first Blade Runner I got that wrong because it was five cars in 2019 but augmented reality is a thing so now you know we we you'll have heard of Google glasses maybe where you know you super imposed on your field of vision is something on the lens which so what you look at it it tells you what you're looking at because it can take a picture of it and recognize it and send it through the internet and back to you well augmented reality by 2041 I predict will be directly on your retina so superimposed on on your on your retina and the way that happens is using a certain type of light-sensitive protein called cryptochrome now it just so happens that part of my research is in this new field of quantum biology and where there are quantum effects taking place inside living cells and in fact I use quantum biology several times in the book because the other book is the other bit is where these monarch butterflies of North America that sense the Earth's magnetic field and a lot of animals can sense the Earth's magnetic field because it's getting weaker they they get lost and so they they drift out of out of the normal sort of migration pattern but in augmented reality even we have this protein in our retina called cryptochrome and it's light-sensitive so it's utilized by scientists to receive signals from whatever your your wrist pad or whatever it is that replaces your smartphone and you just blink to turn it on so if you look at someone you can blink and you can see who they are because it will identify them the sort of thing that I no black mirror for example does really well I'm I'm constantly amazed by this some of the ingenuity and ideas of black mirrors really really clever so I borrowed from my own research Eric on symbology to predict that cryptochrome will be used in augmented reality that it may happen and then they gave me say oh yeah Jim I clearly talked about that years before his time amazing man yes keep keep talking if I probably come on oh hello there we go I've really really enjoyed the book thank you oh thank you okay and I'm currently studying with the Open University and doing a science degree I'm also in a process of rut story as well and I was interested in what the your process was he writing your characters whether they were based on people you knew or an amalgamation of people you knew the characterization is very interesting and it's not something that again I had any training in so you write about your characters are based on people you know and they're not based on one person there might be a collection of different their personalities are bits and piece is one of the character Sarah Sarah Maitland is based on and a solar physicist that I know very well you may have heard of a Lucie green professor Lucie green from UCL she's presented stuff on TV Sarah main is basically Lucie green but not her and I had to explain very carefully to Lucy that you know Sarah does something that you wouldn't do that's not you I I have a I years ago had a Chinese postdoc Changzhou very brilliant particle physicist went back to Beijing he heads a big research theoretical particle physics research group in Beijing I've got a character in the book not Cheung Chau but Chun Li who was a very brilliant particle physicist who works with the main character so they I start off by thinking I need a character that's probably a bit like so-and-so and as you write gradually those they become more three-dimensional what I what I didn't expect was that at some point once those characters take on a personality a life of their own they start arguing with me I saw almost disagreeing you know I want this character to do something and it's almost as they can't say no I'm not gonna do that you might do that Jim but that's not me who's writing this book anyway come on yeah I mean but you know that they they really do become people in my head what I then had to do was make sure that they become people in the readers heads that even even the unpleasant characters you need to empathize with them somehow and so again my editor would be constantly telling me just because I have this imagined universe in my head I have to the reader has to share it so you have to have all the sights and sounds and smells and as you know if I'm there embedded there I can imagine it but if unless I put that down on the page the reader won't so it's a gradual process and and you know in writing it's not the sort of thing that you know I can be you know giving lectures at university or sitting in some boring meeting and they oh I've got an hour and a half I'll go and write a bit more of the book no it had to be I had to look weeks in advance and say okay Thursday Friday nothing on write block that off book writing and get okay and then I can really myself in that universe it's not listen it wasn't an easy easy thing to do right yes hi Jim I just wondered what you felt more nervous about submitting your very first nonfiction book or this book oh I'm much more nervous about this one I I with nonfiction you write about what you know and you are simplifying it because I'm writing popular science not a textbook so I'm simplifying it so that people who are not experts in my area can understand it so I'm very confident that I know more about that subject and the reader but when you're writing fiction yes it's an imagined world but the craft of fiction writing it was something that I was very aware I was really naive about and very green and so writing something that a proper novelist a proper writer would read and say that's not bad wasn't a given and that's why I was very pleased when it has been well-received so far so absolutely much more nervous about how this this book would would would fare compared with nonfiction hi Jim I'm 11 years old and so I have a question what what age would you class your books aimed at sorry what age would you say your book is ain't what oh well there's the rude bits in it are rude words so it depends if parents think their their kids should be exposed to rude words is about yeah I mean if you strip out the rude words any age but yeah that maybe there should be some but you know that's not the this weird isn't it you know you when a scientist gives a lecture you know and you know I'm not swearing today because I know they're young members in the audience scientists don't swear but and and you'd be very shocked if you heard a scientist swear but then you'd watch a some Hollywood movie and it's just you just take it for granted it's strange that you know where swear words are allowed on so the no swear was obviously a my non-fiction books but in this yet there are a few so check with your parents is what I would say is there any more here oh this this this there's two down the middle oh right okay there's another one there how we're doing for time we've got about three minutes a minute each hi Jim looking forward to reading it very much just when are you talking about dark matter and your neighbor who know more about it what's the concurrent state of thinking on what it might be well there are there are a number of candidate particles we think dark matter is made of some kind of matter particle that interacts gravitationally there are all sorts of weird and wonderful names of hypothetical particles axioms wimps supersymmetric particles we simply don't know it's it's quite frustrating because on the one hand we become more and more certain that Dark Matter exists we do computer simulations suggest the universe wouldn't exist in this data is now without dark matter so we are very very confident that dark matter is real there isn't any other explanation like modifying the laws of there's a force of gravity that just wouldn't work and yet at the same time it's quite frustrating that we have yet to discover these Dark Matter buzz it was for example hoped that the Large Hadron Collider may have by now discovered what are called supersymmetric particles of which at the Dark Matter particle like a new truly know is just one of a family of new particles we've not discovered any supersymmetric particles here now it doesn't mean they don't exist it just means that we haven't found how to make them with the right energy it so you talk to different experts in dark matter and they will tell you what their favorite candidate particle is but it's it's sort of a guess at the moment as long as it satisfies certain criteria we just have to keep on trying we we try and capture dark matter particles from space we try and see them behaving out in space and what they do and we try and make them afresh in particle accelerators here on earth there are three ways of studying that matter none of them yet has yielded the secrets of what it's made of but it'll happen it'll come right so there were all right okay you've the microphones there okay yes and then and then we'll have to have the last one in the middle hi Jim it's really nice to meet you I just want to ask you um what is your thought on Donald Trump not accepting that climate change is real when every single person in the universe knows that it is actually a real thing yeah if Donald Trump wasn't the President of the United States we could all just safely ignore him as a clown but yeah I mean it's very dangerous it's it's wick it's difficult it's difficult sometimes I mean Dallas in the last event talking to James Burke saying there's there's a rise of conspiracy theories people think the earth is flat there seems to be a group of women maybe sort of encouraged by social media who-who believe in very strange ideas and and it's very a stain obviously as dangerous as anti science you know climate not believing that the climate that we have a crisis that we have to do something about is is terrible it's very very dangerous but as are other things it's dangerous you know if you're an anti-vaxxer it may be not so dangerous if you think the earth is flat or that what we're celebrating this weekend actually man didn't go to the moon at all that sort of quaint it's very silly but quaint and harmless what do I think about climate change sir I'm terrified I'm absolutely terrified that of what is happening and something has to happen and and it would I mean things like the extinction rebellion movement raised awareness in a way that adults haven't been able to do for you know for longer so I think something has to happen and but it has to come from from governments and when you have the leader of the most powerful country in the world it doesn't believe in it it's it's I mean you can be given get very depressed very quickly so I do one just helps that you know he he will be the footnote in history could be forgotten about as an aberration and in in in humankind's history right sorry at that time I'm sorry you had your hands up for so long but we've run out of time sorry thank you hello thank you so much for us down with these we give them a huge round of applause thank you [Applause]

Channel: bluedot festival

Views: 1,824

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: bluedot, festival, Sunfall, Jim Al-Khalili, bluedot 2019, Science, Jodrell Bank

Id: YNjEVlWcVEU

Length: 47min 8sec (2828 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 26 2019