Brian Cox in conversation with Robyn Williams | The Quantum Universe | Physics

are in your world unfolding I am Brian Cox I'm a professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester and we got the full title of our society University Research now I've got the book that the new book is wonders of life wonders of life and the book that came out in penguin is that's out of the quantum universe the quantities er yeah everything okay and it can happen does happen which is actually a statement of fine man's approach to quantum mechanics ok let me ask you about that very title is it true that everything that can happen does happen yeah in a technical sense what you do you ask the question which is all that quantum mechanics tells you really is that I have a particle here at one point and I want to know the probability of it being over here at the next point what do you do well technically what you do is you add up a quantity it's called the action actually but there's no matter what it is you basically consider the particle move in every possible path from A to B and fineman's approach is to do that mathematically so add up a set of quantities for each possible way something get in one place to the other and you get the probability out in the end that it will actually be in the vicinity of that point at some future time so it's a statement of sort of technical fact in a way about how you do calculations in quantum theory yeah of course the public will immediately infer that everything that can happen in the world does happen well I remember I think of this shut up and calculate school of physics ok what quantum mechanics works it's the way we design design transistors etc it is our best explanation of everything in the universe other than gravity the problem with the theory in it in an interpretative sense is that you ask the question well so we accept the fact that atoms behave in a strange way and and also the theory does tell you how classical behavior so the behavior of cups and things and people how that emerges from the theory but you still have this problem that when you try to interpret it as a theory of big things then it's you get these threading as cat type problems where things are indeed everything that can happen is happening cat be alive and dead people can be in an infinite number of places at once and so it's how you interpret that yeah I think that the problem really is it's a probabilistic theory so it's telling you about that the probability that things will happen and if you think about it how do you interfere that was it mean to say well there's a 50% chance it's going to be here but you might say well nobody it is there or isn't it well no it isn't there's a 50% chance it's gonna be us that's how the theory works yeah I must say I've had in so angleman what you deal with in that book of something splitting and being here and there and here could be I don't know light-years away from there and yet there are in some ways they are still unified yeah well actually it's very interesting actually because in in the book we do what's called nonrelativistic quantum mechanics and then it's absolutely true if you say if I put a particle at a point so technically there I know exactly where it is where is it at the next instant the answer is anywhere in the universe with equal probability so there's no regard for relativity at all in this in this theory just it seems odd because relativity tells us that influences can't travel faster than the speed of light so this ribosome restriction now in quantum field theory which is the relativistic version of this that there is a modification a quite severe modification to that but still there's an apparent violation of the spirit of Einstein's theory of relativity things instantaneously seem to shift at one example of this is something called the EPR paradox which bothered Einstein a lot and I'm actually a physicist so we'd said this in the book can I also said this in some interviews and a physicist called sean carroll who's an excellent physicist in over am on the west coast of america I think he's at Stanford I think and he questioned this he said I don't believe that I think you're misrepresenting the theory because I think that it surely is the case that relativity is respected so he thought okay well we'll prove it we think that the books right in since is technically right but in spirit is it right and now we couldn't prove it so my friend Jeff for shows theoretical physics couldn't do the integral it's a technical problem and so so we thought okay so someone must have proved this you know maybe we were wrong but someone and we look back and then fine man had actually done some work on this in the early days and he couldn't do it either because you can't do the integrals it's a women can't do it so what now so it actually turns out to be a very interesting problem and so I don't know actually at the moment what I'm doing is that we've started a research project she's the interesting thing based on this popular book and I'm writing code at the moment because we I think you can do these intervals now with computers but back in the old foundational days in the sixties and seventies you know it was kind of with everyone's fairly sure that everything works out but no one's actually shown recite see how it works out so it's actually quite an interesting problem so it may be that that statement everything that can happen does happen it may be that in relativistic quantum field theory it needs it should be watered down somewhat and but actually I don't know at the moment so it's very interested but I think it's an example of how you teach you you simplify something for a book and you say something which is which is technically correct as far as you can tell but there's a lot of nuance in there actually which we're still investigating this you see the book there's lot in the odds but also there are several equations and that's probably the most technical of your books how did it go with the public well it's done very well it actually the response tends to be split if you look on Amazon for example you look at the comments and some book site then there are people that love it because it does explain the theory and it does derive things and it indeed at the end we derive something called the Chandrasekhar limit which is effectively where's their maximum mass of a white dwarf star what it really is is the maximum mass of a blob of matter that can be held up by quantum effects basically you find out it's 1.4 times the mass of the Sun which is indeed correct it's one of the great calculations in physics so we calculate that and so if people pay attention to the book and really want to understand the theory then then the the feedback is that they do and they feel wonderful and they give it five stars but there's another set of people that want a more popular book and they really would just like a descriptive book but I think there are a lot of descriptive books about quantum mechanics so that's not what we set out to do we set out to write a book that actually explained the theory as deeply as we could but with no mathematics that's harder than school maths sure so if you're comfortable doing things like Pythagoras and stuff then our view as authors is that you can follow the book if you want to and some bits might be hard and you might have to think but then you know it's so it's a different book yeah yeah that's a most impressive thing is that it's difficult enough and yet the public responds to that sort of thing but what I want to ask you now is something that I say actually saw at the time the Higgs boson seemed to be confirmed and this was a remarkable announcement chem coming from two teams and I saw you say in public that this was the most important significant discovery of your lifetime yeah why why sir well it's that for the first thing to say is the this theory is called the standard model of particle physics and is it is it's a quantum theory and it's a description of three of the four forces of nature so other than gravity it describes at a fundamental level everything we know about the way the universe works at the basic level such a lectricity magnetism the strong nuclear force the weak nuclear force and it contains this thing called the Higgs mechanism it's a unique mechanism in physics it essentially says that less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang that something condensed out if you like him into the vacuum so that the technical word for this Higgs field it's a condensate so you can all imagine almost it's similar physics to water condensing out onto a pane of glass so a cold pane of glass and you see liquid water appear on it - the water vapor changes state becomes liquid it's very similar to that actually in some ways it's a radical suggestion and then the suggestion is that things get mess by interacting with this condensate almost if you like bouncing off Higgs particles it's likely to lose the language but essentially zigzagging through this stuff and that's how things get mess so it's a very odd theory and actually more than that if you calculate naively the energy wrapped up in this Higgs field in every cubic meter of space you find out that it's greater than the solar energy output in thousand years so more energy in the Sun apples any per cubic meter very old Cleary it actually turns out that that's correct and what I think is very so that's odd in itself we found we found that that's a true description of nature what I think is even more interesting is it was it was in there that that proposal was made for mathematical reasons my Peter Higgs and others back in the 1960s so it was almost I think an observation that this is a cool almost a trick maybe that's devaluates like it's almost like a cool trick we can give masses to things preserve the beauty or the symmetry if you like of these equations if we are allowed to this rather strange mechanism so I think that it's one of the great demonstrations of the power of mathematics in physics in theoretical physics predicting something that's real so this is not ISA Taric this is absolutely the reason why the fundamental particles get their mass so white-wine electron has mass oh why the W and Z D particles that carry the weak force have mass we now know that's correct we don't know yet which Higgs particle it is I mean technically we've been absolute precise we don't actually know it we've discovered the Higgs particle well we've discovered is still goes on it's a boson definitely about a boson about 120 what six times the mass of the proton give or take so it's it's a boson with the right mass and some of the right properties to be a Higgs but actually the challenge now in CERN is to measure how this thing decays you does it we've seen it became to two photons for example now we know it's a boson what we want to say they came two electrons or tau they're all the different different things it can decay into and see if that matches the predictions of the basic Higgs Theory the so called standard model oh is it a different one their theories whether a five Higgs is for example so could it be one of a number of Higgs parties we don't know that yet and well they found that out in the near future because they're closing down CERN Large Hadron Collider for a refit yeah basically these maintance shot down ZAR very difficult to do on the la sea because it's cold so it runs at minus 271 degrees or so very close to absolute zero so it takes a month or so to warm the thing up and a month to down and obviously the things it you know you can have problems when you warm things up and cool things down so you try to not do maintenance on the machine so you have long maintenance things so it's a planned maintenance which has already been pushed back because it's running so well it's running beyond anybody's expectations which is a tremendous achievement for this thing but you must remember is the most complicated machine by some measure that we've ever built in history and the fact that it works better than expected and as already made this discovery which is really one of the key reasons but the machine was built I think is remarkable certainly is now I want to ask you about an infinite monkey cage which is coming up on the radio very international at the end of December you've been there more or less since the beginning what what is the infinite monkey cage well it was an idea on BBC radio that we had to have it's basically a science chat show but um there's a sort of a history in Britain which is growing now if it's a mix science and comedy and I think it it sounds like an odd thing to do it's really I think personality driven it's the fact that there are a lot of comedians in Britain who have an interest in science and there are brain example you I cope resent programs with it has a degree in physics from Dublin and Robin in silico present' monkey cage with is is a avid reader of science he knows if you ask him what date did Richard Fineman say this then he'll know right so so it was the idea was to have a relatively light-hearted but often deep as well discussion about particular scientific issues so usually it's a panel show we usually have two scientists and one comedian guest and then there's myself and Robin and we just talk and actually we record it in front of a live audience and usually it goes on for about two hours then the poor editor has to sit there and I digit down to 30 minutes so what you hear is a snapshot of this rambling formless discussion around you know it we did one called for example provocatively call these cosmology a science for example where we're talking about cosmology in the data and so we so that that's basically the format and how do you respond because you're not a stand-up comedian owing you background music if anything in the public sense do you feel obliged to keep saying jokes no it's not my job I mean that's that and we always tell the scientists this that the scientist job so my job and the science job is to is to talk about the science and then Robins job and the the comedian's job is to is to respond but actually you find that often it isn't supposed to be funny it can be funny but often you find that the comedian guest will have some interest and will end up interviewing the scientist so it's we have no structure in the program it's just everybody sits there and talks about whatever they like to talk about an example just recently we had a Patrick Stewart the John Captain Picard of a Star Trek came on to talk about manned spaceflight so he wasn't been a comedian although he was quite funny actually because he started talking about his experiences when exploring planets and thank you so but certainiy was talking to the the Monica Grady's one of the the professor at the Open University has been very heavily involved in robotic space exploration and so that he ended up interviewing her and we myself and Robin didn't really do anything and that's the point as we both know that that's a way that real scientists actually talk because they're not being po-faced and stiff and formal all the time yeah talking in Martian what they do do is joke about their ideas so it's not in any way reducing the the ideas or the moral impact or the the dumbing down in other words you've hit an interesting question actually because when you popularize science out as you know that then there will be people who say well it's too important to be treated in that way actually I think's to the reverse science is too important not to be part of popular culture it is as Carl Sagan always emphasized it is absolutely the foundation of our society we live in scientific societies so to have a society where where science is some had divorced from the rest of culture it seems to me to be well I'm in Sagan again em say some ass anti-democratic it is anti-democratic because you have people who live in democracies whose lives are controlled by scientific decisions if they know nothing about the science then there's a democratic deficit and you have problems because society can make decisions that are not based on reason and the last American election I mean science was almost invisible yeah although Obama did make a very clear statement about climate change in his victory speech which I thought was very at the end yeah the angry does it showed and that that's an example that that's because you have a society where there are many people who are not don't understand that science is not a belief system and it's not a point of view that the scientists are not an interest group I mean they you know politically maybe they can be when they're lobbying for funding but essentially science is a process it's a the process by which we understand how nature works so if you want ask a question about is it true that putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere heats the climate there is only one way to find out it's to get data build models and try and understand the data there is no other way you can't sit there and say well I'd rather it wasn't because that would be unfortunate have tax implications that's the content list so I think that's the point about I really I feel quite strongly that the the signs it jostles for position right we live you know we work in the media as well as being scientists and you've so you've got reality TV shows and Dancing with the Stars or whatever and science has to compete in that arena for attention and and to particularly amongst children as well you've got to you've got to inspire them they're also inspired by pop music and they're inspired by sports they need to be inspired by science sure that's important we talk about public response I know that there are several groups who've taken science on the road member of my family Ben Goldacre with Simon Singh and and yourself and you feel stadia like you know the old days of rock stars young rock stadia how do you account for the fact that science is so popular in the public area in Britain these days like that this is a widespread acceptance of what I just said that I think the scientific community now supports this idea that science has to be part of culture so a lot of scientists will engage and what we do with with ban and Simon and myself and Robbie is we provide it it's almost like a variety show so these live shows and that des stores their local scientists come on as well but you're right they're three and thousand seater 4000 sees her auditorium we actually did Glastonbury an 8000 people came actually recording of the monkey cage is a Radio 4 programme with 8,000 people but and been said to me actually van Gold okay he was actually talking about publication bias in drug trials right which is not the side of rock and roll thing to do but he got so the audience in him got so excited that it was almost like you know Aerosmith I was like a rock star going and you know what you see there's a bias here only positive trials are published and negative trials are suppressed and they're like yeah you know they so there's an atmosphere and I think what it is really I think is people respond to ideas and what we're really doing is is is is giving a a snapshot of ideas to the audience and because we make it move fast so it's not a hour-long lecture which people give in 10-minute slot snapshots of it can be publication bias it can be cosmology it can be whatever and then to some comedians there as well science-based comedy and so that's what I think people respond to because it's stimulating so I'm not surprised I know that people are interested in science if I go to a pub now because I'm on TV in Britain then I get asked a lot of questions about black holes and cosmology and particle physics because people are naturally interested so I think I think it's not surprising actually indeed now when it comes to your own filming you've had several series mainly as well would imagine the astrophysics looking at the sky the one solar system and of the universe but now you've turned to life hmm and the latest book and laser series packed full of all the ideas in biology and zoology and and evolution how did you come up how did you manage to digest all that stuff well I mean the idea initially came there's a very famous book called what is life by Owen Schroedinger father of quantum mechanics here is some based on some lectures he gave in Dublin in 1943 and the thesis of the book he asks it right on page one is how do the laws of physics and chemistry account for the events in space and time inside a living organism pieces she's essentially saying how can laws of physics chemistry explain life and he goes on to address two things really one is he essentially predicted the existence of DNA because it in a periodic crystal so a molecule that can carry information from generation to generation but also he looked at the thermodynamics of life and that this to me was even more interesting it's that it's the challenge to physics to say given the second law of thermodynamics which says that the universe tends to disorder so we know this that this is the the way things are you leave things they get more disordered how is it that these ordered structures form the human brain being the most ordered destroyed sure we know of in the universe how did that form spontaneously from a collapsing cloud of dust 4.8 billion years ago or so and so those questions I get asked a lot from my previous series wonders of the universe we dealt with entropy in terms of the heat death of the universe and everything fall into it and it's natural people say well what about life life runs counter to that so enshrouding your speaks to that and now we understand quite well it's called non equilibrium thermodynamics but I thought called in a series that was probably an introduction to non equilibrium thermodynamics with it so so it's basically the idea that a physicist can can attack these questions profound questions from the point of view of a physicist but then of course from a televisual perspective you've got natural history and you've got you can use animals to tell these stories and for example that the older the the entry point for order in the in the biosphere is essentially photosynthesis so essentially what's happening is that you get an ordered energy from the Sun and disordered energy as heat is being rerouted back into space and there's a almost and all the gap for life essentially borrows some order for a while and and so we we went we filmed in a lake in Palau which is full of jellyfish who have photosynthetic algae inside them and so that they actually essentially an animal that lives as close as you can to photosynthesis so that the symbiotic algae take the light from the Sun and they use that as food to eat for the jellyfish so you can tell the story of how photosynthesis essentially begins to build old at my co2 and water and make sugar that's an older molecule from two less ordered things because you've got this altered light from the Sun and so you can it's a new way in in a way of looking at not necessarily on physics if they're interesting because Schrodinger's lecture was re-enacted just last July in Dublin and is a festival which was quite marvelous and there's another section of the film which I found absolutely lovely which reminded me of JBS Haldane writing about being the right size and if you sort of drop a mouse it gets up and runs away and cat you know shrugs itself and a horse splashes yeah I think that yeah phrase is just so and of course that's physics that's what you do is it yes it's about I mean because naively you'd look and we would actually did the film that we address that whether it's a film about size and we film the whole thing in Australia actually primarily because there were several interest in animals we could use the great white sharks after South Neptune Islands which that their shape is driven by the the hydrodynamics of water based that's why they're the shape that they are and also we filmed coconut crabs or rubber crabs on Christmas Island it's enormous cramps fabulous picture you standing next yeah with one up I mean it's just bigger than you are it is huge thing and they live for 70 years one of the great questions in biology is why in general do big things live longer than small things it's actually some debate about why that is it's not a settled question in biology that's actually the thing about biology you find it as a physicist you come to it and it's it's fascinating but quite frustrating because there are no rules in biology that there are there are some guidelines but there are exceptions to everything you say then life has found some way of creating an exception to that statement so it's rather more difficult actually to make a program about but I found it a fascinating of eighteen months or two years of learning about evolutionary biology I think it shocked me most I surprised me most was that the rapid progress in biology that's been made since I last did it academically which were back in the late eighties and yet particularly very some DNA sequencing and that technology the fact it's cheap now so the precision with which we know when you know if you trace back you look with common ancestors between different species and the 'i'm with which we're beginning to map that Tree of Life the evolutionary history of life took me by surprise actually it's relatively modern science biology is doing fantastic things at the moment and the final question really about your experience of making that film because a friend a mutual friend of ours suggested I ask you how much your attitude to filming has changed in the years since you first started to now I was probably more belligerent and when we started and because the the processes of television are very irritating I found I know that yeah and so so what I've learned as well as that this wonderful opportunity to learn about science beyond the physics that I do I've learned a little bit about how to construct films how films are constructed and so I think we've been making better films I work with the same team at the BBC all the time and I think we've been making better films because I am beginning to get an understanding of what it takes to make a film as well so in a sense it's become easier and and also of course more natural I mean what because that I think the skill of talking on camera is that it's a skill that's learned it's like playing the piano that's right those very few people I think and naturally able to just be the eloquent when looking at so only advice be to professor's who are continually asked to turn up to do something that takes three hours and which might result in 35 seconds you know they're really angry and they keep saying no what would your advice to them be I think it's a skill worth learning because it is so important that the science that we do is out there and understood I mean you know you can make the argument that you're not going to teach anyone about quantum theory in an hours program about quantum theory or an interview of course you're not but you're going to give people a flavor which may stimulate their interest and they'll go and find out some more but more than that it's making the science it's making it obviously and self-evidently relevant it obviously to us as academics it is obviously the basis of our civil is Asian it should go without saying but that's actually been the mistake it the the experience in Britain and with with convincing government to fund research has been that government don't necessarily know because they were also pressures from lots of industries they don't actually know it's not self-evident to them that the funding scientific research and education is the basis to a more prosperous future it is the foundation of our society that it's not actually self-evident to them so as academics I think we have a duty and an intense self in self interest actually in learning how to deal with the media and you have to learn it it's very annoying and very frustrating you get ask silly questions and you get asked them over and over again and and you know that there are things you have to notice I mean I get frustrated with television people because sometimes they want you to say something which is not right and you'll find and often this is a tip sort of professors away often if someone keeps saying something and you think it's ridiculous it's because they've got a very profound misconception about the science and so it's good to pick that out you should never say something that's wrong in order to get out of the room right but but it is worth sometimes saying to them why are you asking that what do you think and you'll often find that they've got something wrong and then you can and that's what I meant by learning and being less belligerent instead of just saying look you are an idiot I'm just going to keep saying this I've learned sometimes these people want to make good programs as well so sometimes it's worth teasing out where the the misconception is so you can make a better program together that's what I'd say about it thank you very much Brian pleasure are in your world unfolding you

Channel: ABC Science

Views: 191,419

Rating: 4.8722138 out of 5

Keywords: abc, radio national, australia, RN, brian cox, bbc, Professor of Particle Physics, University of Manchester, UK, The Quantum Universe, Penguin, science show, robyn williams, book, quantum physics, physics, science

Id: lNfWKARlhEM

Length: 28min 28sec (1708 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 16 2012