London Thinks – In Conversation: Prof Brian Cox and Dr Adam Rutherford

hello everybody I'm Adam that's Brian we like to talk about science so that's what we're going to do tonight we can talk about other things as well sit down because I feel asymmetric and uncomfortable I don't know whether to stand up I've got to make these announcements first though so I've got the sheet where I had to make these announcements and they are good things so listen carefully fire drill which is statutory in the unlikely event of a fire please exit in a slow and orderly fashion via one of the designated fire exits here and here thank you and the meeting point in this case will be by the bronze bust of Bertrand Russell which is lovely right there's free Wi-Fi here if you want to tweet the hashtag is the hashtag is London thinks Cox and I'm unhappy about that for two reasons we're open X yeah so and and also so this is an event organised by Conway Hall which is where you're sitting and the ethical Society and you can support the ethical society by becoming a member the I think it's the orange sheets which were on everyone's chairs if you're interested in living a good life without religion nu and books are in the in the in the atrium selling my book and I think there's another pamphlet there as well which is also available they're all signed so you can pick up a copy and the next bit is oh yeah the format of evening right so I can get rid of that now we like to do these things where we just talk to each other all right because we feel that this is mm and you got yeah channel shows yeah but the types of conversations that we normally have when we're in the pub or when we're eating dinner but that you're invited to and and can participate in and as I said at the beginning we like talking about science there are other issues that may emerge which are not necessarily about science that we will welcome about halfway through when we open out for questions should say though I mean you're welcome to serve you really got a burning question just shout it out because it's a you know the conversation so don't shout it out that that much I'm not I'm not I can say not sure I agree with that I should say I am did a similar event with them with Alex Roberts as well actually a challenge Science Festival a couple of weeks ago and you know is right the end of the evening and it was did there's one we have about two minutes over and Adam and I went that's it now and I don't we just have one more one more question from the gentleman in the front now you were anyway bowl see me and he was any any waited on no why don't we done here and his question was is bull semen alive when it's frozen and of course the entries yes unless is dead good the other elegiggle if it's viable it's alive if it's dead he won't come back to life and and but it was just you know don't want extra question you go which had not done that but seamer was my fault it was your boat yeah so so no one asked that question so a brief a brief note about questions not a as he says no questions about bull semen I'm actually caught as a as a biologist so if i interested in senior I'm very good at them quite I've written about semen quite a lot but but not specifically bull semen secondly if you do have a question stick your hand up someone will come to you the microphone is that correct yes and make it a question not a statement make it one question often people with their hands up and say I've got two questions and four statements doing or next and a theory and the third thing is and try not to be insane it's not a visit it was it an elk is that fighting sketches me my theory anyone do no theories you salute him that's fine anyway so the way we we both of us so from very different ends of the of the scientific spectrum on the biologist I don't know what he does but we both have ended up being interested in different ends of the scientific cow which end are you I didn't know there was a scientific grope in your ear right metaphorical but we're both interested in origins both of our books are about origins and I'm interested in the origin of life and Brian's become interested in the origin of life as a result of him thinking that life is merely an emergent property of physics do you think I also think that is not even public but why don't you start at the real origin and start at the very beginning we could okay my I become interested recently in cosmology in particularly early universe cosmology and that's not particularly divorced from what I've done for many years which is particle physics one way of thinking about particle physics is that high-energy particle physics anyway that let me do the Large Hadron Collider is you're looking at the physics of the early universe and that's basically because we we collide protons together at the LHC and the beams travel a 99.99999 99.999999% the speed of light and at which speed they circumnavigate the LHC which is 27 kilometres in circumference eleven thousand times second and at those energies when you collide them together you recreate the conditions that were present a billionth of a second after the Big Bang or so and so you'll in this you can think of the Large Hadron Collider as has been a time machine if you like to look at the physical processes that happened or were happening around a billionth of a second after the Big Bang now one of the interesting processes is of course the Higgs mechanism the emergence of the Higgs particle and a way of thinking about that by the way is that as the universe expanded and cooled then around that time somewhere around that time the universe so one way to think of it is something crystallized out or condensed out into empty space sometimes the Higgs is called the Higgs condensate so the picture is a little bit like thinking about a windowpane on a cold winter's day and you see ice crystals form on the windowpane where did they come from they seem to have emerged from nowhere but of course they haven't it's this water vapor in the air and as you cool it down the water vapor goes through what's called a phase change and changes in solid so you see the solid well in a similar way a Baliga sway that's what the Higgs mechanism essentially is about it's about the universe expanding and cooling empty space becoming not empty so in a more technical sense you could say that the lowest energy state of the vacuum is not to be empty is to be full of Higgs particles on the Higgs field and then we get our mass so you are the fundamental level so let's say the electrons in our bodies get their mass by interacting with the Higgs field and that's true now that was a remarkable prediction made in the in the 60s initially by Peter Higgs and others that turns out to be correct so strange it it seems in the other universe this phase transition happened and there's a Higgs field there so that that's always been my research area but partly is a result of writing books actually and partly as a result of filming human universe I was on earth your Wilding on bbc2 I got interested in early universe cosmology and what's interesting is that I always which all at the Big Bang which happen that's happened 13.8 to billion years ago according to the current measurement which is a beautiful measurement in itself and I if I'd talked about that in schools or anywhere really people say what happened before and it's a good question actually standing this in conwy hole in that achill Society and it's interesting to note that live names and had a proof for the existence of God based on such questions which is actually as far as I understand I'll get this wrong now because I know it's online as well so philosophers will go on Twitter and go you can also broadly speaking as I understand it live knits is someone will correct me there must be philosophy is a philosopher in the room good writer tell me this year as far as Einstein liveness said and things things can be if things are not eternal then they must have a cause and so he's tough he's shaking his head shaking his head fellas I understood it like this is quite live is his point was the most there must be a calls to things that are not eternal if things are Lodge if things are eternal they must be logically necessary and and the universe has some ages so it must've had a cause and the cause must be something eternal is that anywhere near right well Descartes as far as I can see it is all according to a call you tell us what Descartes Clinton he said one day cap proceeded like this I know that no so I also know that it is a great disavowed by Stephen Weinberg actually it's a demonically our topic now but he wrote him a history of science which I really liked is much criticized by historians of science and probably rightly so goody to physicists but it was it user physicists view are there any historians of science in the audience well yeah well I know I said probably rightly see no it's not a history book it's a physicists view of the history of this subject but one of the things he said was he said I think a real go at Descartes is really funny because I quite like I quite myself enjoy having to go at Li the ancient Greeks because what he basically said was yeah de kai he said it was a classicist an ass but he said what he said was M that basically so daycare is statements such as the atoms exist so that other fundamental building blocks of the universe at least which is correct but Weinberg put point was that there were many things that said that were incorrect so they the scientific met the idea of testing these ideas wasn't present and therefore you have a big list of things that you say then some of them might be right but it's not a terrific achievement in itself so that's what he said so I mean that's that's a bit like Aristotle as well not to knock the ain't I don't know who was complaining about sorry ancient Greeks oh yes Aristotle is the father of most sciences in fact but primarily biology something is really not credited for is you know so once every generation he was very much like that you know he did soundness lagoon in lesbos for eight years him this is in that's saying this what have I got something wrong already okay thanks similar to shaking his head at you I just refer getting I'm getting history right you're getting philosophy wrong I did I I just like do all right well anyway did let's get back to the place he forgets putting live knits aside for a moment and so the the question of what caused the big bang got was there anything before the Big Bang has always been a answered in in the strict way to answer it in the framework of Einstein's theory general relativity and what's got classical cosmology is that you don't ask that space and time began at that point and so even the notion of before is is probably wrong and actually even in so-called quantum theories of gravity that's probably still right right to say this that when you get to sufficiently small timescales and small distances in space then the notion of time itself becomes problematic so that there are problems with it but what's interesting and an textbook at the moment in in a certainly advanced cosmology textbooks for undergraduates is that there was something going on before the Big Bang if you define the Big Bang as the time when the universe was hot and dense so that time that we measure back to it was hot and dense 13.8 to billion years ago then the standard cosmology now says there's a time before that when the universe was doing something different to the expansion that it's happening now and that expansion is called inflationary expansion and so essentially space and time were expanding exponentially fast faster than the speed of light much faster driven by some speculatively some kind of feel which we've sometimes called the Implanon field but anyway the thing was expanding exponentially fast and then it stopped doing that and there was a there was a transition if you like it stopped doing the exponential expansion the energy that was driving that expansion got dumped into space you can think of it like that and that heated it up and that's the origin of the particles out of which we are made ultimately so there's something going on before that hot dense bit which is interesting because we measure the time back to the hot dense bits we don't measure what was going on before that the reason we it's not an unmeasurable thing though we see the imprints of it we think in what's called the cosmic microwave background radiation which is the oldest light in the universe and so we have experimental not evidence is too strong a word but we have a handle on events that happen before the Big Bang theoretically speaking you can predict things and look at their imprint on things that we can see and the theories work at the moment that's the point so that I just think one thing to say though on the invention thing is if you ask the question how long was that other thing going on for which is a key question then the the answer is it's not known there's a minimum time that it had to be going on for to produce the properties that we see in the universe today but there's there's much debate about and whether that could have been going on how long is it going on could it be going on forever and and and there are technical reasons to think possibly not but then some physicists that you get around them so it's possible at least possible to conceive of a universe that's much older than the bit we can see and possibly possibly eternal or there's a lot of debate about that so I find that fascinating so that's not that's not the same saying the steady state universe that the universe has been the same forever which is what most of the classical's classical scientists thought but the other the other that mean a question and why I'm a mere biologist so I like rely on data and that really is that we my question to you is well how do we know these things and more specifically how do we know how much of what you're describing in a very physical form which the you know we then imagine how much of it is derived from fundamental math it's a good question that and it so that this inflationary idea was came 1980s ish and the reason was initially to answer a couple of very striking observations about our universe that are inexplicable so that I should just mention what this Cosmic Microwave Background is cuz it's key so the idea is as the universe expanded and cooled about 380,000 years after the Big Bang the universe became cold enough for atoms to form so before that it was too hot for electrons to go into orbit around nuclei so it was a plasma essentially and opaque to light light didn't couldn't travel very far through it but at that time 380,000 years after the Big Bang it became cold enough for atoms to form electrons went up around nuclei and the universe became transparent very quickly actually and so light could propagate through it and so we can photograph that light the most ancient light in the universe and we have done with satellites like the Planck satellite which is up in space now so we have a whole sky photograph of that light which is essentially a baby picture of the universe as it was 380,000 years after the Big Bang so the challenge of cosmology is to explain the structures that in the nature of that light the key problem the initial problem for cosmologists was this if you look at it now and you say where is that light now so I can see the light where did it come from well it's been journeying across the universe since 380,000 years after the Big Bang although in some sense that well we saw that that bits been receding away as well so the point is it's about 40 billion light years away now because the universe has been stretchered so he said where is that now it's 40 billion light years away so if you look over there that there's some stuff we can see you look over there there's some stuff we can see which is also 40 billion light years away now and it was 13.8 billion years away when it was emitted so you've got two points that had not had time in the age of the universe to talk to each other because they're more than 13.8 billion light-years apart a lot more actually one over there one over there and yet they're the same to one part in 10 to the 5 to one part in 100,000 they have the same temperature now just over two point seven degrees and statistically the distribution of small fluctuations at one part in 100,000 is the same over there is over there so you've got a massive problem which is how could it be that parts of the universe that have never been in causal contact have never been in contact with each other are the same it's a it was a huge problem in cosmology so inflation was introduced initially to one of the problems to deal with that which is to say well there was a faster than light expansion that happened before the Big Bang before the hot dense phase so they were once together and actually remarkably when you do Sizzix now when you say well what's the if you ask the question in this theory what's the patch of space-time that expanded out through inflation and the big bang to the thing that we see today which is ahead today is 90 billion light years across also concerning 350 billion galaxies the question is we can legitimately talk of it when it was 10 to the minus 26 meters in diameter which is and point naught naught naught naught 25 26 knots and a 1 so tiny smaller than atoms smaller even than little limits on the size of an electron and we can legitimately talk about that so that was why it was introduced and what's remarkable is if you do I'll just very quickly if you do and quantum mechanics so you just say you just say you look at the theories we're in a pub normally it's more to you know it's more Congress know we're gonna be know you I'm gonna stop in a minute interval value but I just want to point out there because you asked the question about the evidence so so inflation was introduced to sort of do that so that's not evidence that's just an explanation of what it could possibly be but actually it turns out now if you do just quantum theory and Einstein's theory general tivity as we know and follow that story through you get a prediction for the cosmic microwave background radiation which is exactly what we see and you've got to put in things like you've got to put the dark matter in and dark energy and matter and it's you've got to put in all the the ratios of protons and neutrons and two photons all these things near the universe you get it all you tune it all up and you get exactly the picture so there's a terrific amount of evidence now in that light that supports this theory is the as far as I know I think I'm saving saying it's the only theory we have that predicts every feature of the Cosmic Microwave Background as precisely that's not to say it's right but it's the only theory we have at the moment that does it all and nine million is nine billion years later the earth was formed so we just skip over those I'm going to do something different here because why don't we are open that up for questions right now because we will probably be level two yeah skip forwards is to talk about other things that are more earth-based but um if anyone's got any got any questions about there's one there if you could just wait for the mic to come whew there's one right right here in the third race loop um just give us a second yeah can you comment on the phenomenon of gravity waves and how that shaped time space in the universe yes so the question is about something called gravitational waves so it's a very quickly Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts them the waves in space and time if you like and we've kind of observed them observed what we we haven't observed them directly but we've observed for example that if you have and there's a pulsar system a double pulsar which is two neutron stars spinning around each other very famous system and so the neutrons now spin very fast and the old Brenda - the very fast and we've observed that the orbit is gradually decaying so they're gradually falling together and by gradually I can't remember the number but it's something like four centimeters a year or something I can't quite remember this is centimeters as a tiny movement but that's the prediction from Einstein's theory because they lose energy by emitting gravitational waves of space and time oscillate and carry energy way so we've observed them indirectly but there are specific predictions from this inflationary theory about what they would look like in the Cosmic Microwave Background and there was a story which some of you may heard that we thought it was thought they'd been seen by an experiment called bicep2 it turns out they hadn't they've made a mistake in the analysis and so that's still a big one of the frontiers of observational cosmology can we see those that this particularly the polarization of these things essentially the effects of gravitational waves in the early universe because it's a very direct prediction from inflation it was a really good example of science occurring in public as well the way bicep were a little bit robust and the way they announced that they thought they had detected gravitational waves bicep was a antarctic based telescope which is no longer there I don't think I think it's been deep decommissioned and at this I mean this was the big story in March 2014 and what I think one of the great things about it is is that the analysis occurred in public which is how some all science I believe should be done because when you make extraordinary claims so if you can end that sentence for me you need extraordinary evidence and what happened was if they will only turned out it with it wasn't calibrated right and they were actually looking at dust local dust and in nearby systems but what had happened was they made an extraordinary claim we scrutinized it over the like we physicist strana most scrutinized it over the course of the next year and it turns out to be wrong and everyone won as a result and the bicep team ended up collaborating with the with Planck team who are also looking for gravitational waves previously having been not in conflict but not buddies so it's um I don't understand many of the things that Brian says but but what I can what what I think is important about one of the things that I think is really important about that story is that it showed the nuts and bolts of how science should work make claims demonstrate that they're wrong make more claims yeah yeah that's what we're key point actually about public you hear it in the context of them sort of controversial areas or politically controversial areas as climate change or things like that way where you get you get papers published but being a peer-reviewed paper doesn't mean it's right in fact sees more than likely in fact probably virtually all of them are wrong in some specific sense that we've ever published because we don't have any fundamental theories of nature that we think of absolutely right so but the point is that a peer review gives you a minimum bar that at least it's not obviously wrong and it's not completely mad at some of your peers who said it so it's reasonable yes but the idea reason you publish it is so that people can check it that's the point of scientific publishing yes I sighs work it's worthy of entering the scientific literature yes is the bar that we're looking for and there was a devastatingly depress we've got some major problems in science and we may or may not talk about them but you know for all the beauty and the joy that we derive people like us derive from understanding trying to understand the universe in this process that has evolved over the last few thousand years we do have some major problems there was a paper published this week in which a Norwegian researcher had taken three top cancer journals you see this no three top cancer journals and compared all of the data the photographic data of cells expressing various genes that were published in in these three cancer journals and he discovered that 25% of them would you placated another in the same journals which is you know that it would be going too far to suggest that this was fraudulent but it's not good news that and what generally did he wrote to the editors of all the journals and with details of every single paper and he wrote to every single author of those papers and nine months later he hadn't had one response hmm so in terms of you know peer review being the marker of things being correct it is not whether in principle it is a marker of something being worthy event of entering the scientific discourse in practice whether you've cross-check is your yeah in practice we've got some issues though yeah that's why I'm just that's why things I was a meeting you today with them it's about government advice scientific advice to government and one of the points that came out was matter analyses are really important so because of this so single papers don't really tell you anything and the press of to blame for this because and universities impart the fact that the press releases that we just published this paper means that that that those results will be reported in the press and because they're in a peer-reviewed journal you people tend to think well they're they're true then so it might say you know chocolate in chocolate is good for you I don't know because one study had said it when in fact what you need to make statements and to make policy is an analysis of a lot of papers because that's where you get the overview of what the current status of our knowledge is and that's why the IPCC reports are important in in climate change because they're not individual then they're not work in themselves that they meta analyses so there's a snapshot of the best you can do at the time and that that's what you need and they don't exist in most fields yes small underpowered studies are the blight of my life as a geneticist and I think various other fields within the biological sciences are also blighted by this because they look like you know sexy results attractive results which are which are worthy of entering the mainstream press when actually our best you know conditional and worse probably under power to the point of being wrong but you know I teach on my students this that ah you know the country took like Jeanette I'm talk about genetics now but some the concept that there are genes for individual behaviors individual diseases individual traits complex traits like inheritance there just aren't all right and the whole history of genetics and the whole history of understanding families and how characteristics are passed down from generation to generation have sort of culturally conditioned us to think that they are but science is something that I say quite often science is the opposite of common sense it is there to to show us that our eyes can easily be deceived right that we're not very good at perceiving objective reality and the process of Sciences is to allow us to to get past our own prejudices and our own biases sinchon actually cuz I said in interview recently in The Guardian which was actually did report what I said for once then the science was a common-sense what I meant in though is that it's common to and then it was it's quite a humble and and and careful pursuit so it's and I likened it to plumbing that's kind of got plumber in my house at the moment is really meticulous and I thought I like the way that just the precision with which things are done so what I meant so I meant is science is common sense in the sense that if you want you look at something you want to carefully measure it and you're just careful and you check yourself and you make sure you don't make mistakes but you're right the conclusions you come to often a very far from common sense that quantum theory being an example yeah in most of the universe is not the way we see it yeah at most the universe we haven't even seen yes true iris in its influence I was actually questioned about genes because I wants to do some biology so you could say I read about this in a bit so you could say first what is a gene yeah and how does a gene get bit of DNA how does the DNA get read out of that process is fascinating so why don't you talk a bit about that the underlying yeah or you start with a different question I mean what is a gene is is one of those questions where you teach some of my main school pupils are here so once you haven't done their exams you have to ignore this bit so you've got the yeah you've got the a-level bit but now this is the real bit it's not gone into the syllabus yet is that we don't really have a good definition of what a gene is right right in the same way but we don't have a definition of what life is and we talked about it we will a soul can often about you know this seems to be like a fundamental problem actually I don't think it is and I think in general definitions offer constraints and not incite the there's a nice sum there's a nice anecdote about this which is that when just before the human genome was published which was 2001 there was a big meeting as happens every year at Cold Spring Harbor where all of the top geneticists in the world were there plugging away trying to get to the point where they were ready to publish the first draft of the human genome one of the great achievements in the history of science and I been young researcher guy called you and Bernie who's now very senior researcher in genetics he was a PhD student at time he looked in the bar everyone is a scientist knows that all the best and most important discussions at scientific conferences happen in the bar or in the cafe it's at CERN right and he looked around and saw all these amazing geneticists there and and one of the big questions about about the human genome before we knew the answer was how many genes do we have we are complex sophisticated biological organisms we think of ourselves as being more complex than most other organisms I think there's a possibly a little bit of anthropocentrism in there but nevertheless our concept of what a gene is should be reflected in the number of genes that we have right so you and Bernie took around a betting book and for for $1 a bet he asked all of these these geneticists the top geneticists in the world to predict how many genes we had and the top number was something like 500,000 and the bottom was one like 29,000 but that was an outlier by someone he was just betting loud to win and the average came out of something like 70,000 and the answer was 21,000 thousand right which is you know it's that's around about the same parts as a double-decker bus and it is fewer genes than a banana or rice or the fruit fly or the water flea Daphnia or most plants almost all trees because they do really weird things with their genes and so it just turned don't that you don't put that in your and your answers all right to a s - why would not do that because they won't pass why do you have to put in your answer you have to put what it says in the text and what is that 21000 anyway that's what you just said his name is all right yeah but what the textbook says right anyway the point was we didn't it's a another good scientific problem a press at the time I was doing my PhD at the time I remember the press at the time describing this well what happened was yeah Bill Clinton on stage with craig Venter and the head of Human Genome Project Bill Clinton saying things like today we have discovered the language in which God created life right and then he said he said something like within a few months we will have identified and and cured all inherited diseases at which put actually that wasn't Bill Clinton that was a BBC report that followed it on the news at which point you know every geneticist in the world won what I was working on a gene on chromosome 14 at that time and that's all we knew about it we didn't know what direction it pointed in you know we basically he said it's a time scale of two months to cure the disease that I was working on so does a gene code for a single protein well kind of mostly yes in a simplistic way a gene is a unit of information which is transmissible from cell to cell and from generation to generation and and that will usually build a single protein normally yes normally so the corresponding number of proteins that we have roughly corresponds with a number of genes that we think we have but there are many as you know biology is a science of exceptions and there are many many caveats and exceptions that on that betting book which I've got a slide of but not here the top page says how many genes do we have one dollar a bet and the rest of the page is caveats introduced by academics who went around saying well what do you mean by G so didn't have to write down another definition of the next person will tell you something but then do these interim things in the middle under that yes yes so you have so so a human genome many genomes of eukaryotes and large organisms are the genetic information is made up of small chunks of coding DNA hidden within large chunks of non-coding DNA and the gene can be split it could be split in many different ways and it's assembled this juncture in the middle so there's some yeah we go better and you're going to take well then in terms of the cosmic we don't really call it junk anymore used to be called junk it's not his best to refer to as non coding because junk implies it has no function and the art we don't know what function it has so there's a lot so another big revelation wasn't just a number of genes that we have in the human genome it was that almost none of the human genome contains genes yeah so less than 2 percent of the whole 3 billion base pairs spread over 23 chromosome chromosomes less than 2 percent of it is actually coding DNA now if you meet Mitch means that less than tickets enter bit codes for protein that right but the other stuff might do something well we know what lots of it does amazing how in 20 minutes we've gone from the origin of the universe to quite complex genetics and I just find it interesting well we've mined in certain do you find interesting yeah yeah okay so I'll keep going then we know what loads of it does right so chromosomes are complex three-dimensional structures and they're very active so when you see the beautiful double helix that iconic structure it's almost never like that okay it just it in cells is almost never like that when you see those pretty pictures of chromosomes arranged like you know little X's and little crosses arranged in in a nice order and 23 pairs it's almost never like that as well I mean during the cell cycle you know it's almost never like that don't you I'm looking at my students here and and it's really dynamic and it's it's being on unfold and unrolled and spun out so that the genes are exposed and can be translated into interpretations of what I like what am Matthew Cobb is a friend of ours afresh I managed to said in a talk of the run institution last week there's things to understand about DNA which I didn't know a while ago is that it it's not a code is it really it's actually it's a machine is well it's a case chemistry isn't it so it's actually these are chemical reactions that are happening it's not just it's not like something reads out a code and then and then translates it into some I know he does without a label I'm yeah well I think I know what Matt's point was and I I think I'm not sure it's useful him saying that because I think in terms of basic the basics of understanding how how information is transmitted from generation to generation and that turns into working biology I think it is useful to think of it as a code because the DNA itself doesn't really do anything other than encode information the beauty of the structure of the molecule and why that was to people like me the most important discovery in the 20th century and possibly any century is that the this structure is inherent to its function so the reason it's a double helix is because you know it's a twisted ladder and the struts of the ladder can be split apart but the rungs are made of these individual chemicals called nuclear bases and there are four of them you all know this I know and there's a TC and G but they pair up in a specific way so a only ever pairs with T and C only ever pairs with G so if you take your ladder split it in two what you have is a s and t's and c's and g's on this side and which means you know exactly what the missing information is and that is the process of replication every time a cell divides every single piece of DNA in every single cell that is doing it does exactly that it splits it into and it's a means of making sure that you have the same genetic information in in a parent cell and a daughter cell but the other clever thing is that the second important thing which is inherent to the structure is that those letters in the middle ar-ar-ar-ar a code I'm happy saying it's a code and they encode proteins and proteins are what life is made of all by now my interest and I think yours as well is well this is an incredibly complex system it's beautiful its elegant we know loads about it but there's a unbreakable circle there because you need proteins in order for replication to occur and the proteins are encoded within the DNA so how did it start because the origin of life we didn't have proteins we might have had nucleic acids like DNA or something a bit similar maybe you RNA or something even more more basic than that but you need proteins to make DNA and you need DNA to encode proteins let's assume since I'm making I made a program on this I've almost made two now and I'm making another one now for BBC one because I find it so interesting and then I think we both think so the answer of how life began is nobody knows but there are a few plausible theories and I think the one we both think is most plausible is one that's very forcibly advanced by McLain UCL many others and which is that and we would talk about this earlier actually about all organisms it how do you understand an organism you can't understand an organism if you look at it now a frozen thing like a human being and say why is a human being like that the organisms in my language of four dimensional things in other words that you need to understand the history if you can understand it there are a lot of frozen accidents in biology and there are a lot of processes that occur in organisms that aren't accidents but you need to understand something about way back and in the case of the origin of life and you have to understand something about the aura that what the conditions were like on the earth four billion years ago what I find most fascinating though is that this theory is that those the things that happen four billion years ago the chemistry of the earth as it was four billion years ago are frozen in our present in ourselves today and so to understand why our cells do the things they do you need to know how life started and what it was doing four billion years ago that's a fair summary I suppose isn't it yeah it's so I give you the example that I find most persuasive is its use of protons so it's called chemiosmosis isn't it that's right it can be osmosis so if you look there's a wonderful number which is that every one of us now a human being is pumping about 10 to the power 21 protons per second across membranes so that's an 10 to the 21 what's that that's a a million million billion it'd be 10 to the 18 so it's a thousand million million million protons so it's within a few orders of magnitude of the number of stars in the observable universe every second being pumped across membranes and we work and all living things I think with almost no exception that would work by doing that and then the protons cascade down essentially like a falling down a waterfall and we stick some enzymes in the world to Foulke of ATP synthase and we make something called ATP and that's the battery of life so you say why on earth because because our basic the power source is respiration for us right which is just oxidation is a reaction to about electrons moving around so why do you why do you go from just burning food which is about electrons moving about in to pumping protons around which you then do something with and the theory is that that's because it's telling you about how life began the theory is that life began in vent in the deep ocean four billion years ago also almost as soon as it could on earth these vents were alkaline bent which means they're deficient in protons and they were emerging into an acid ocean which is got an excess of protons because the oceans were acid at that time and you get gradients of protons lots of them not very many in paws so you get these water flowing through little pores of rock and you get chemistry driven by the gradients in temperature and protons and that chemistry and was where life began where the where these things began to happen and the advanced chemistry begin to build up and because that's where it happened that's what it's like today because essentially life just put a bag round it and took it away events but it was a cell less chemistry the basic building blocks of life happening in the chemistry events without cells and without DNA just building until you get some replicating molecule and off he goes and my book describing that is available in the foyer always in your book did I do all right because that's what I thought was a pretty good-sized finding quite what the thing is though and I think this refers to something you said earlier and a friend of ours who says that all models are wrong you have to stick to that in science all models are wrong and that is what Nix is that's so I think we agree that that is probably the best model that we have and it's almost certainly wrong but that's what we're working on and one of the reasons what I'm again I'm interested in the process of discovery and how science works and this is a relatively new idea partly because those hydrothermal vents the white smoke the president waiting usually said the proton gradients aren't wrong I mean that that photo thank you sure yeah that it's not cells he's effectively universal biology is quite good at universal rule rules except all of them have exceptions but that's definitely right I mean what you've just described as the biochemistry is exactly right and it is what we think happens in these white smokers these hydrothermal vents but they were only discovered in 2000 yeah and we haven't really explored them very well because they're they're quite difficult to get to being at the bottom of the ocean they're not very stable they stayed for thousands of years but not tens of thousands of years but it's a it's a relatively heterodox view this it is I argue that it's right and it's the best model that we have and I'm happy to say that because all the other models that we've ever worked with are definitely wrong yeah as the same as inflation in that sense and very similar that this reproduces the day so that we see in there aren't any of the games in town really that's exactly it that's things that there aren't any other games in town but culturally it's been really interesting because for 150 years when we talk about the origin of life which I do quite a lot people immediately say primordial soup or primeval soup which is the concept that if you get the ingredients right invigorated by a bolt from the blue if the conditions are right then life will emerge now it's it's it can't be right right it can't be Darwin first described it he D and and Don was right about almost everything but that's not true by the way I just love that guy but he described a warm little pond and a letter to his friend Joseph Hooker in 1871 and sort of set the ball rolling for this to be the dominant theory in the origin of life for the next 150 years and it doesn't it doesn't adhere to what we know about physics about fundamental laws of the universe which are non-negotiable but more importantly for me than that which is say something about the culture of science and how he should do science it doesn't really doesn't do what life does right we're not powered by electricity in that sense we're not powered by heat we're not powered by UV then all all of the models of the origin of life which are primordial soup based which get published on a monthly basis to this day all depend on things that life doesn't do and the universality of the process that Brian was talking about just then chemiosmotic coupling is what life does and variables to translate yeah right so the base basically the idea that you've got more hydrogen nuclei protons on one side of a gradient than another and the flow from that high concentration a lower concentration powers kind of like a turbine powers and generates the energy that cells use and almost without exception all life does it so for a hundred years we've been researching the origin of life by looking at things that life doesn't do which is dim right that's a stupid way of that of going about I should say actually wouldn't mention one thing there yeah I mentioned earlier that there are no laws of physics that we would consider absolute the the reason there are also exceptions in physics there is actually one that we might we probably do consider absolute it's called the second law of thermodynamics and which essentially means that things tend to get more disordered over time and the reason we think it's absolute is it's a statistical statement essentially and so most physicists I think probably all would say there's one law that we expect to be a law really a law it's that a life at first sight appears to run counter to that we are obviously very ordered structures you know the human brain is a I said in the presence of Alex Roberts it's the most order structure in the universe and she said no it isn't an elephant brains more ordered as she's talking about that and I checked it out and she is wrong good the alien train descent herself mammalian brains I did but I wait so so we're all dead structures but what we do know in physics is that if you have out of equilibrium systems right so gradients be the protons or whatever then you can get you can generate local order right you have to you do work essentially so it is literally in a physical sense that you do work and you can generate local order at the expense of more disorder elsewhere it has to be said but you can generate it so you get systems that become spontaneously ordered in the presence of gradients and that that's the key point I think isn't it it must be what we are incredibly out of equilibrium systems everywhere in our bodies we're working most of the energy we get from our food is taken up mayn't keeping those out of equilibrium so that we can do think we were processed that's just living yeah I think I'm winning dogs it's a great question really the question is not what is life but what living what is living exactly right and when you die that process stops and we become eventually in equilibrium with the rest of the universe and we succumb to the non-negotiable law of the second law of thermodynamics with the beauty in the things I love absolutely love this concept is that that process has been continuous for four billion years in a perfect unbroken chain and it happens in every single one of your cells right now on every single one of those cells was born from an existing cell which ultimately goes back to the your fertilized egg that you grew from which ultimately goes back to the fertilized egg of your parents and you can trace that pathway where every single one of those cells was doing exactly this process and DNA replication all the way back four billion years to the origin of life and it is unbroken there are no cells according to how we understand how life works that don't adhere to that to that model which is an incredible thing hand up straight away there's well needs a biologist there is one the air other words are one but why don't we have no relations anyway what time are we at yes quickly tell me what what's what's the timing those questions referring back to the universe m and wanted to know what your m what you're thinking about parallel universes parallel universes there are different kinds of parallel universes so one of the regarded inflation and what there's a thing called the inflationary multiverse which is so I briefly said there's this thing that's expanding exponentially fast and then it stops an E and you get a hot and dense thing and it was like the Big Bang and many of those theories so that's textbook although as I said with appropriate caveats many of those theories what's called eternal inflation theories that suggests that the inflation doesn't stop all at once it essentially stops in patches you can think of it so you can think of a bit of it stops and you get a universe a Big Bang and the rest of it carries on and another bit of it stops because it just randomly drops down and stops and you get a big bang get another move and Big Bang so these things you get this fractal tree of universes it's called the inflationary multi so in those pictures you have an infinite number of universes essentially and they'll be happening all the time so that would be going on now somewhere you'd have new universes and the inflation czar going on and the patch is where it stops to the places where you get this reheating you Center this big bang thing and it all slows down and gets more sedate and you can have stars and planets and galaxies and things like that so that's one of them probably did the other one you might be talking about in quantum mechanics there's an interpretation of quantum mechanics which suggests that everything that can happen happens essentially so you get essentially what's called a a multiverse a quantum multiverse or many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics where essentially you have this Tower of universes in which all possibilities play themselves out so there are different kinds I do kind of believe in I I think I believe him let's let go you don't have questions so the next question is a meter yeah okay is there a microphone up on the others up in the in the cheap says because it's a very powerful case secular building this is this gentleman doing one where you and this does it again - I know all right I got it so go ahead yeah it's just um interested in if you're look interested in learning about the pineal gland and die mole trick to me and in hell people you know experience looking into different dimensions that way the the pineal your pineal gland yeah right how people they there's a planet in the Amazon where people have tried this plant medicine called ayahuasca and they say they can look into other dimensions and so it's a bit more so what we have is it's interesting that you mentioned the pineal gland I'm choosing to ignore parts of that question and in order to be polite but they're gentle up there first mentioned Descartes right and Descartes is a big problem for consciousnesses is an area that both of us are also very interested particularly in as it relates to artificial intelligence and you know Descartes we didn't introduce it but he formalized the idea that the mind and body was split Cartesian dualism now he thought he proposed that the pineal gland was the source was the external internal source into which the soul flowed about right he's gonna say no no idea about that and there's a wonderful painting by Rembrandt called the anatomy lesson of dr. Damon which was huge but was burnt in a fire in 1629 there any art historians here okay 1629 and all that is left of that is this Anatomy portraits were very important at that time but it's this amazing amazing anatomy lesson and what it is is showing the executed corpse of a criminal his name was black John and in it dr. Damon the anatomist is trying to find we think he's trying to find the pineal gland on the grounds that Descartes who was not a contemporary of Rembrandt's but was what was part of that culture at that time came before Rembrandt was effectively looking for the dualist soul next question please yes no hold on a sec no this gentleman really was first up you are next him first okay wait is there a mic up there overview okay next but wait wait for the mic so the gut whoever's got the mic has the next question it's like Lord of the Rings high flies lot of flies sorry right so this has gone weird I was wondering where would you put viruses in the evolution of life I mean you were talking about life and how it evolved where would you put viruses that's a great question and the answer is we don't know so the which is what the answer to all the best scientific questions so the consensus is the general view by biologists is that luck that viruses are not considered living they are parasitic on living things and are not capable of self-sustaining their own life right that's the general view it's not it's it's not a view that is that people fight desperately about it's just that that's a useful way to think and think about it in ghent now I think the number is that for every living organism that we know of there are at least two viruses and it's likely to be much greater than that so what that does is poses a number of problems for us because we see the origin of viruses as being very very early on in the origin of life they contain DNA and RNA but they're not not cellular and so we don't really know how to position them on what is broadly refered to the tree of life but as we are learning from our colleagues from people at MacLean at the moment the tree of life is probably a not very helpful thing bit of a misnomer anyway anyway the point is it depends on what you think living is and if you define life or if you look at life as being something in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics which is capable of extracting and parasitizing its own environment and virus has fallen to that so the answer is we don't know but if you if you want if you want to get a really big research grant you could spend the rest of your life trying to answer that question please do hello I know man with a mic um Adam thank you for calling attention to chemiosmotic coupling and the flow of protons across membranes because that was the theory of my very dear friend Peter Mitchell Oh Peter Mitchell the greatest Nobel price went that no one's heard of well I I knew him intimately and I wrote his obituaries and the independent and he spent 20 years crying in the wilderness being called crazy struggling to persuade his very thick-headed colleagues about that theory and they they had to admit that he'd proved it in the end so it really thrills me to hear you both praising that theory and spreading those ideas and it is wonderful I have a question for having made my statement I have a question hey that was a good statement that was that was a good one honestly honestly just briefly isn't it as an interlude Peter Mitchell who I I didn't know what office Leigh but um he was often described as quite irascible no he was very gentle and modest and self-effacing it wasn't irascible at all oh really oh that's interesting see III I didn't not like you Nick Lane describes the remedies wrong he sees affairs every instance he might have been arrests of all two other people another question honestly that honestly though case chemiosmotic coupling and his work is as important as quick and Watson's and the human genome projects and probably Darwin's and it is just not known you know it's not known in the same way that we are bewitched by the double helix but it's important for the origin of life because it has to have come before DNA RNA genetics cells if it didn't none of this works right so if you want to talk about the origin of life you have to start with proton gradients and the work of Peter Mitchell well it's wonderful that you say that keep saying it too in fact I've been going through a lot of Peters papers that he gave me and I'm working on a kind of popular account of his things at the moment oh good but back to my question - yes sorry Brian but I mean we could talk about Peter forever Brian I want to ask you you you you said you mentioned plasma and thing not too long after the universe was created according to the Big Bang Theory you mentioned that there was plasma which then became physical matter now the problem is that 99.99 percent of the universe still is plasma so what do you say sixth era right have we not got solid yet I know 99.9% of universe is still plasma you said yes hey that's not right actually you might mean it matter so well I should just say why I say that's not right I mean but maybe you're asking a different question that it's not right because if you look at the breakdown of energy in the universe then we know that evolved a 70% a bit less is dark energy and 25% is dark matter and five cents I'll rephrase it by seeing 99.99 percent of what could be detected yes so you talked about the math theory is known to be plasma the whole question of dark energy and dark matter is a separate issue yes well well well said but but speaking of what's been detected and what yes rather than what we postulate would you like to revise the statement about plasma having become matter because yeah what we can detect physical matter as we exist in this room and on this planet is so rare that it's less than 0.01% of the universe and is very abnormal well yes so I think what you're saying is that if you look at you talk about math so that's gravitationally collapsed into stars and planets and you're saying that the interstellar medium iwase that by a large factor I think is what you're saying is taking the microwave the microphone away now second and I'd uh I'm not sure I fully understand there's a contradiction there I I think what you're saying is that most of the mass in the universe is ionized gas and and so that very little bit is in stars and planets and things I know but I don't see white yeah but the stars themselves yeah plasma yeah you're right all I'm saying is that the this this what we're talking about here is the the universe before this point where is cold enough for atoms to form and afterwards and so the only statement is that before that time then the universe was opaque because there were lots of free electrons around and after that time there weren't that many free electrons around and and so it's I know what you're asking so then there's then then there's a time when the stars switch on so this is way before there any stars so this is this is just the universe 380,000 years after the Big Bang when there are no stars and no galaxies nothing is clumped together yet at all so you get this point where you get the the atoms forming and the free electrons aren't around then you get the stars turning on and then you get the what you say that you get the plasma in the stars interstellar medium but as far as I understand it then what we talk about here is the because it's the time before the stars then you have a universe through which light can travel and impeded because those free electrons and surround all over the place and then the Stars switch on what you need to give that that's them I'm not sure when the first what the best number are when the first stars appeared but it was a long time after that so I think if I understand that that's what you're asking okay so I think the mic was there next and then I think it's down here so sorry for shouting earlier back to the vents and the cascade of protons is it something that could be replicated to test yes about about 450 yards from here the in UCL on Darwin in dart in the doll and building on Gower Street that experiment is happening right now by Nick Lane who I've written about in my book but he's also written his own much better books given that he does the actual research they have a bioreactor it's called a bioreactor which it's quite fancy but what it actually is is a jar with it really is I mean it's quite unsophisticated bucket chemistry but that's important because that is what you know the origin of life did not occur in a sterile lab but inside that you had so that so it's got various pipes and tubes which are trying to emulate exactly what we think occurred in the origin of life in those white smokers those are quite hydrothermal vents and in it they are not just doing the bucket chemistry of what might have occurred there testing Nick is testing individual chemicals and adding various bits and small variables to see if you get molecules out which are look like the precursors of biochemistry so the origin of life really is the study of the transition from chemistry to biology and if you can begin to detect molecules in these systems whenever the systems are that look like biology more than they look like chemistry then you're on to something so yeah we await those results with bated breath thank you though thank you I think the next week whoever's got the mic go ahead and this is a question for brain and completely changing the topic a bit and I just wonder what your thoughts were on the Rosetta mission and the possibilities of it on the Rosetta a Rosetta yeah yes for the comet Lander and fillet yeah but it's a it's a potentially so I think it will change our view of the of the early the origin of the planets and the solar system the point is the simple point is that these things these comments are pristine material from the early solar system so they've not been you know changed they've not done what planets have done and they've been out in the the icy reaches of the solar system so the idea that their pristine misty reial means that you're you're looking at the solar system as it was and when it formed and so I think that some of the big questions what are the organic molecules like on that it and is the water I think this is only the reason I was stuttering that I think I think there's a published paper that showed already I think it's from that comment that the water is not the same as the water on earth inter do you remember that in terms of the the isotope weathering the water on earth so that already it doesn't suggest that there's a theory that the Earth's oceans came from a bombardment my comics essentially brought the water back in so that the early Earth was very hot the water would have been driven away from the hot young Sun and then the water came back through cometary impacts that I think that result doesn't rule that out it just says that that kind of comet was not involved particularly heavily in bringing water back maybe there are the kinds of comments I did so it's all this is new science and I'll heavily carry acid at the moment so I think weirdos question what's the wealth of the composition of the water what are the organics on the comments etc that it's a very important for that and to demonstrate where the water on earth came from is a great question which many people argue about a lot and there that there's plenty of well aplenty there's good evidence that water trapped in the rocks that don't coalesce that's formed the earth is enough water to actually populate the oceans of of the early Earth and some people argue that the earth was watery from very soon after its formation but then what you have is a period called the late heavy bombardment which runs from about 4.2 billion years ago to 3.9 billion years so 300 million years where the delivery of comets and meteorites from space onto earth was enough to to melt all of the rock on earth and vaporize the oceans on a sort of monthly basis if life had emerged on earth before that then the impact on the energy delivered by the later bombardment is enough to sterilize the oceans you know every few months right but the question of whether there is delivery of interesting potentially biochemical biochemicals from space is an important one and it seems unlikely that given the amount of stuff coming from space and landing on earth in during the period of the late heavy bombardment it seems unlikely that those ingredients were not part part of that including water but you know the question was about about fillet and you know that answer looks like the dirty ice that is on that comment piece 67p is not it's not the same as the water that we see on earth but the negative result is as good as a positive result so you know we keep looking science is cool whoever so my second one down there and then there's one there's one up here so oh okay yeah so I guess that's a good segue to bounce us back from the cosmic to the cellular what I've always been sort of curious about is we sort of understand now to some extent the mechanism of aging and how sort of the cellular clocks cause cells to expire but I've always wondered about where the imperative for that comes from since the reactions are sustainable the DNA is replicated obviously with some degree of mistakes happening along the way but where's the beginning that are ageing Oh a Aging yes where do we see the sort of that imperative to expire show up in that family tree I'm not sure we do understand why aging occurs I mean I think we've got a good idea of why of what what the mechanisms are so there are various cellular processes the most iconic of which is the loss of telomeres and in chromosomes so these are the these little caps on the ends of chromosomes which basically stop the chromosomes from fraying and through every cell division they get lost and eventually you get to a point where you've got none the chromosomes start fraying and you get mutations in the cell becomes what's known as senescent which is incapable of dividing once again so you know with if you the best thing the best analogy for these is to is that the sort of plastic cap on the end of shoelaces right if you lose that the shoelace praise and the shoelace stops being the way that you just tying your shoelace none sure it's really really stiff later I just had some thank you for that planted question so the I think we've got a good idea of the mechanisms or some of the mechanisms why of what happens when we age but it's a very good question as to why it happens I mean there's not an evolutionary Selective process going on we don't really know what death is in the same way that we don't really know what life is and you know the best way to look at it is as a transition from chemistry from biochemistry to chemistry at the will of the second law of thermodynamics right that's a bit hand-wavy what sway says in the Bible right I think it's I think that's what is around prefer yeah so you know there's that in in non-cellular terms there's lots of interest in why we continue to exist after we've reproduced and from from from a social Darwinian point of view we've got lots of theories they all they are all theories and none of them is is demonstrably correct I mean there's things like the grandmother hypothesis which is that in terms of you know grandmother's stick around after they've been after their post-reproductive in order to maintain the the flow of their genes which they share in high proportion with their grandchildren on to the next generation which is the will of biology so I mean the grandchildren are more likely to survive if they're a grandparent to reproductive age yes although it's specifically grandmother's for reasons that I'm not sure about I don't know the answer to that in fact it's not really my area and then there's white why sex in the first place yeah we don't know why sex exists right I mean it's sex is a perplexing thing from an evolution from a straightforward evolutionary point of view on the grounds that it's just slightly absurd to have two individual not stopping you like that slightly absurd to have two individuals making one right that's not an efficient process fun though it is so but again you know it looks like I think the best models which as we said earlier are probably wrong with the best models that we have are likely to be to do with the efficient transfer of energy right so the the the introduction of the mitochondria into so the origin of complex life so we have another question on yeah yeah don't do that basically we do I forgot yeah your question as with yours is we don't know um I'm afraid I'm going to be a bit greedy and ask you both something to separate very small questions though um any ideas Brian about what if we have any clues about what determines whether an electron or a photon would behave as a particle as a wave and Adam a question for you sorry why on earth do they teach at schools still about the primordial soup in every single example GCC or a level and can do we know enough to start teaching children and students about the electrons and there's no question is there gee I mean the first question it is a very brief I'll give you the two minute introduction to quantum mechanics which is your other questions about so a quantum theory is in my view and my my colleague Jeff for show with whom I do research and write books and we wrote a book called the quantum universe and our central view is particles are particles right they're particles literally things and quantum mechanics when viewed like that is a theory about how they move around so that the central thing in quantum mechanics is and this is the way we teach it actually and in the first year because I lecture it's managed it is we say so the central question is given a particle here what's the probability it's going to be somewhere else at some later time and there's a rule for that which user was first written down by Richard fine in that language and which sir it's just a computational rule there's something interesting I said there which is the part that the cause is Gibbs quantum mechanics it's strangeness I said what's the probability it's going to be somewhere so that's the difference really between quantum mechanics and Newtonian physics Newtonian physics you know if you've got a bowl and you throw it or you put a ball down on the table let's say then it will stay on the table and if you throw a till pile some path through the through the air whereas in quantum mechanics it's it's about probabilities and that was introduced into the theory because nature demanded it so I can't tell you why that is but the theory gives us a rule which is given a particle here what's the probability it's going to be over in this region over here the weird thing is that in what's called putting relativity aside so the basic quantum mechanically under the 1920s if you ask the question what if I put a particle precisely there what's the probability is going to be somewhere else at a later time the probability is anywhere else in the universe with equal probability which is very strange and that gets modified when you put relativity in but not completely actually it can still be rather far away although it's unlikely to be so and that's the uncertainty principle and what's interesting is that so the wave-like behavior of particles when you're talking like this emerges as a result of the mathematics so the wave-like bit is is emergent you can you can derive statement you can certainly derive the uncertainty principle which is often presented as a wave-like idea you can derive that and you can derive the essentially the Schrodinger equation which is also with some you've got to make some assumptions but broadly speaking you can derive it so I would say that particles or particles we have a rule which is nature is given us which tells us the probability it's going to go from one place to the next and what Fineman tells us to do is if you want to know what that probability is it's going to be over here you have to calculate every possible route it can take from there to there and add them all up and you get the from and that that works basically so em so I would say that the I don't see there's a an idea of sometimes it's a wave and sometimes it's a particle if you do essentially the the way quantum mechanics the way which had Fineman showed us to do in the forties and fifties and onwards from there then it's a particle but the wave-like Theory emerges I would say I think it is I mean it's some sense semantics and it historically it was done so you look at Schroedinger and you notice that these particle to be able to wave like way so it's certainly equations of diffusion equation actually but they have these wave-like properties and you can certainly teach it that way but if you go to what's called the principle of least action this way of doing quantum mechanics that Fineman did and turned into quantum electrodynamics then you really do have particles hopping around and what we shall not star an advert for my book which is available in the 48s books the quantum universe which is apparently quite I think it's quite a difficult book actually in 9 site but it but it does do this so it goes particles of particles let's find the rule that tells the probability they're going to be somewhere else and you get the wave-like properties emergent from that underlying single rule which is to do with it so they call it an action principle which are fundamental you can see their fundamental actually the planks constant used to be called the quantum of action he's got the units of this quantity action which is an interesting thing ok there is a there's a very quick question about why don't we teach the primordial soup why do we why do we see so will that point minute we don't think we do do we are you well so the question is directed to you why do you teach you know I'm well you'd like I mean there's a couple of things to say about ow one is that science progresses slowly right and what makes it into textbooks happens at a other other at a very slow rate you know slower than research is done I'm kind of okay with that the second thing I think is more interesting which is that that the name primordial soup was was invented by a guy called JBS Haldane in 1924 and he and a Russian guy called Alexander operon independently began to develop Darwin's idea of a warm little pond and they did it in a scientific way rather than just merely speculating which is what Dan was doing in that letter and what Haldane was doing was looking at what we then thought was the early composition of the earth and speculating that these were the right ingredients and the right proportions now it's wrong for the reasons that we've discussed it can't be right for the reasons that we've discussed the second law of thermodynamics and proton gradients it doesn't do what life does but he did something he gave it a name right he gave it a name which is quite sticky it's quite a nice name everyone knows it it's got the words soup in it and everyone loves soup and they say that you know trivially but actually it's really important because often in science and Beyond science when you give things names especially interesting names that people can remember the ideas that underlie them sort of travel with that cultural meme and it happens all the time primordial soup is one the number of times I get asked questions about epigenetics which i think is a vastly overstated field and used to be called gene regulation but gene regulation isn't very sexy epigenetics is incredibly important pre-empting a question somewhere it's incredibly important but it's not mysterious right and it only became mysterious and part of the public consciousness when everyone started talking about epigenetics because epigenetics sounds cool that's not to downplay all of the important research that goes on into epigenetics it's just that just like with primordial soup these names become sticky and and we hang on to them because they're memorable and often it's deeply deeply problematic for the actual progressive of what of trying to find out what is correct rather than what is attractive because in science we're not really interested in whether ideas are attractive or not we're interested in whether they're right right not wrong yeah that's better yeah yeah not wrong is the best that we can do yeah gone him I reckon we got time for a couple more survivors got the mic mind you got the mic we should ignore that side either we can go we could go from alright we're going to go there there and there and then down here but obviously once we've gone from there to there in the time it takes the oven there today we can go to a physicist show me all right that's all it's all relative but quick let's make those try and cram as mate as much as we can so quick questions okay my question just seems it doesn't quite seem like a good question but hold on my question I kept hearing something called a singularity alright that before the the universe began there was a singularity now did the singularity come before or after the expansion it's a brilliant question that so the first thing say is that what singularity as a mathematical meaning given Einstein's theory in any theory where where infinities happens so essentially you say that as everything gets infinitely dense an infinitely small and space-time curvature becomes infinite and then that's what singularity is so um that's a breakdown of signal in a breakdown of your theory and but if you referring to that as the the beat the point of origin as it were the Big Bang then we know that the Big Bang the hot one accepts an inflation we know that there was something before that there's no singularity in there there's a transition through whether there's one back which starts off inflation on my college calls in the mother of all big bangs or the one of those that sets everything off in motion I really it's just not known and singularities of yeah the what they signal though is not really something about nature they signal that your language is broken and you need a better theory it's a catchy word again I mean it makes reference to the earlier the earlier on mathematical it just so does epigenetics again so does primordial soup as a technical definition as well that's safer cooks corner just another two more only whoever's got the mic and then we're going dude this someone's really dying to ask a question over there because they've been asking for about yes all the time and we can't see because it's over check the beard and then the gentleman with the sort of t-shirts but anyway yeah yes hello yeah right hey um I was really loved when we get together like this there's there's so many influences and people like were to admit decart and everything think about Pina Mitchell not necessary science a question whether it's someone when you're working looking over your shoulder from passes like whether you want to call it a muse or whatever is there someone basically I can google the out of tomorrow who will distract me when I'm really bored at work someone an unknown gem unknown well that's why is Hugo there's an Peter Mitchell and well that's a good question I am being good we'll come back to that let me think about it sorry you could I mean they're interesting but I mean I at the moment as I said I think that an atom's book obviously is very interesting Nick lanes recent book I'm reading at the moment most recently she's called the vital question I think is it called goodness it's really that quite deep and very a detailed exploration of these ideas of pizza Mitchell's ideas and others this is really quite a difficult but I love the book because it says at the start there's there's some evasion says I'm gonna I will use some jargon in this book because it's the way I just have to write I don't want to explaining myself all the time if you don't understand it look it up she's great and then the other bit he said there's a great Xander's ray says in my book editor and he says this is my book so the kids it by the head it just wonderful it takes no prisoners in the book which I actually actually though that that in terms of that sort of circular reference thing that has happened to me with the guy always going to suggest so great unsung hero massively unsung hero of science because no one's ever heard of him but we learn about cell theory at school and in the textbook that we teach it it refers to Sean and schleiden as being the birthers of cell theory in the 19th century around about 18 eight uh but they got one key part of it wrong and that bit was filled in by a guy called Robert Rimac and Robert remac was a Polish Orthodox Jew who came to Berlin which is where all this stuff was going on in the mid 19th century and he threw very careful observation in his attic because he was Jewish he wasn't allowed lab space and he wasn't allowed a professorship but in his attic he windowed developing eggs which is a technique still used today you can cut a sort of square out of the egg and you cover it with cellotape and it means you can do experiments or observe the growing embryo but he observed red blood cells in the chick dividing and that was the formation of new cells and from that he came up with a missing part of cell theory that the second or third grand unifying theory of biology which is that cells only ever come from existing cells right now he was ignored and his colleague whose name was Rudolph a vehicle who was a very well-to-do German and younger than him with a professorship ignored him for a couple of years and then decided that it was correct and published it and became a superstar in his book was a best-seller now Booker wasn't entirely a bad guy but in this case he was a total shithead now that's Robert remac so I'm on a desperate quest to reestablish Robert remac as being one of the fathers of the most important areas of biology that no one's ever heard of along with Pete Mitchell I mean no ether that's a good one I mean no ether she was showed that the conservation laws like the conservation of energy conservation momentum all these things cause very angular momentum have a relationship deep relationship to symmetry and it's fundamental to model theoretical physics and so if you got some when you might not have heard of a me know if there is it is a good good place to start I was going to say about circular referencing I was looking something up about Rimac and he said dude quick question I know I saw but I was thought I was looking something up about remap the other day when I was writing and um there was a reference on Wikipedia and there was a reference to it at the bottom so I followed the reference and that was to a slightly obscure article in a sort of academic journal and there was a reference there the bottom of it and and they would I think two more steps in the reference chamber because it was pissing me off by this point and the final reference was that I had said it on TV ha ha it was BBC four so probably correct the round is it last finally we've got there sorry I would just bellowed just shout I'll repeat it in the origin of viruses how they came to recall they came to what you mean the mechanism of how it works now or how they got that process in the first place well yeah we know exactly how they work now I mean they're incredibly clever it's an incredibly clever system and they work in various different ways but broadly a virus which can very simple it contains some genetic information but the only genetic information it contains is to reproduce itself by adopting like by annexing the existing cell machinery of the cell so what it does is you get these little viroids which cling onto the surface of a cell inject their DNA or RNA cuz many viruses are RNA and that DNA in that RNA integrates into the host cell and which then reproduces itself which includes the instruction to destroy the cell right so it reproduces itself by the absolute bucketload using the own cells machinery and then destroys the host cell when we get biros --is the immunological reaction the sniffle that i currently have is our cells being destroyed by viruses our immune system trying to clean up the clean up the mess so that's how that's broadly how viruses work how they came to develop that I don't know I don't think we know but I certainly don't that's the good right where is it what time is it do we have time for one more than one or one more one more does anybody one there are lots of questions does any does anybody have any appetite we carried on for the couple minute side you want to go away I do it okay carry on for another couple of minutes then because there's a lot of questions it feel free if you need to go to the pub no one will be offended ago but if you gotta take another couple then and then we'll call it a day but it really honestly end yeah with you my friends do motorcycles so the question for those who didn't hear it was there a lot of words that are sexy quantum being one of them and how do we stop charlatans or people abusing these words and taking them away and and I mean might I have to sort of sort of opinions on this because it in one sense it's sort of it doesn't matter if you're talking about I don't know sort of oh I don't know what the age of the earth and someone says it's six thousand years or something in it it doesn't matter what they think it doesn't matter so any obviously in that case when it spreads into education then it matters a lot but there is a serious side I think when pseudoscience affects public understanding of and respect for actual science because then what you do really is you you you open the floodgates and it's not clear then it's not if you don't know what a scientific statement is you don't know what's the scientific what it means to say scientific consensus which is even a dirty word with some political circles then there's a big problem especially if you talk about public health policy or climate policy etc so I think that's where the the problem is actually maybe pseudoscience can be seen as a gateway to relativism and a gateway which is I think then we have a huge problem because we can't function properly as a scientific society and there was a second part of that question which is how do you stove your friends giving money to psychics get some different friends names yeah or become a psychic that's a much better idea economically set that out we just develop a business yeah Rutherford and Cox thank you assured me she just a conduit what good two more and then we'll stop we'll stop did this their own was good and and I've you've been quite keen for a while so gentlemen lady hi hello just a quick question you both are scientist and men of reason right men of reason what men of reason whatever reason men of reason am i right in saying that hey defend row you're gonna say yeah if you derive something strange in that statement I will deny then okay Wow are we sorry a we as humans would be ever lucky enough what's your opinion on this to ever have gotten rid of religion from the world is that do you think we'll ever be possible at all I suspect not and I'm not sure that I would want that because in many ways religion has provided us with a cultural framework in which we live we are deeply although I'm an obviously an atheist and I suspect most of you are as well given where we are i I i profoundly and deeply value the cultural contribution contributions of Christianity to the life of this country and I would love to see people be not shackled by holding on to medieval superstitions feel free to chip in joy I agree with you and actually I agree with that what we said and why I disagree with my wife disagrees with me on this so but I shouldn't say that should I live on oh yeah because I know you did it stylee I agree I think that clearly V yeah yeah well no I agree with Adam I think I think it's wrong to that what we're really talking about I think for me anyway the issue is how do we get rid of fundamentalism of any type actually I think that there's an idea that I strongly believe in actually which is that such that societies like ours operate according to a consensus so there's a cultural consensus with it and that's what we strive for as a democracy and that means that you're going to be on the tails of these distributions on some issues everybody is and actually one should celebrate that because that tells you that you're operating in a in a democracy where where where as many belief systems and opinions as you can are embraced and not violently opposed or suppressed so it's a so we have free speech for example which is absolutely central that means that you're on the tail of a distribution sometimes you will be offended by things sometimes you will offend others sometimes and I that's to be celebrated I would say um yes I can't know what's going to say them so another question and this lady here and there later yes go ahead shout yes I got it wrong well no you didn't I put anything you got it wrong okay let me tell you why it's interesting so we let's just explain that the quake it was fine so questions about I would be gone the little background is the on The Today program last week John Humphries said something really ridiculous to Matt Cobb and Nick Lane actually and a lot of people made fun of a TA the very strange moment where he thought that the whole genetic code of life on earth had been transmitted from an alien planet I don't know why he felt that so it's a lot of people I had a liver going so radio force it's me why don't you go on and educate John and so one of the ideas was what are the the scientific ideas that you everyone should know about so what I said was that there's a very famous is in page one I think of the Fineman lectures on physics which are wonderful things and Fineman says if all human knowledge were destroyed and I could choose one thing to preserve that would give them the clue this that as they rose again what would give them a clue what would the clue be and if I said everything is made of atoms then that would be the key that unlocked the door so then that civilization could then rebuild a lot of the knowledge that we have so that's what I said on Radio 4 so I didn't say everything's made of atoms I said exactly what I've just said that that's in defining lectures I think it's a good idea that that's the piece of knowledge you've actually given everything else the doors open from them so it's wrong question everything isn't made of atoms of course we know now that atoms are made of other things we'd have the dark matter and dark energy and all these things so it's not right but it was copied down by the Manchester Evening News and that happens a lot actually I think it's one of the great dangers of speaking on the radio and saying things I've seen it often with things I paraphrasing in the newspaper and write down half of it undone of it I'll get it wrong and not give the context and there so it's an example of that so it's wrong so so yes so me and my friend were then debating as physicists we were like well why and cops got that wrong so then what if if you were talking to a room or physicists or various scientists what what would you say is fundamentally everything in the universe is made up of because what where do you go with that like do you go for light made of bosons or do you go turns of quarks and how were we amazing so you could say what we know at the moment is the small that the fundamental building blocks as we found them at quarks the standard model of particle physics so the six quarks and six leptons so called the electron the me on the tail on the neutrinos and so that's that's that those are the smallest things we found in inverted commas we we haven't found any substructure in those so you could say that but we might expect their sub structure I got a metaphysical question at that point though doesn't it because until you find sub structure to say that this is fundamental is is unjustifiable oh yeah so so so we call them the they're your rights are saying the fundamental building blocks it's kind of a phrase phraseology it means that those are things that we found and we've not been able to see any sub structure in them so that that's what's a semantics and naming problem session everything yours I should say everything the universe isn't even made of those that because we know this dark matter and that it isn't made of those but it's definitely there the word atom means uncuttable right which is young so the naming convention which didn't work out that well so this one I mean this goes right back to starting when I said about Democritus was nearly said there everything's made of atoms or uncuttable things and we she had no evidence for and then good guess laughs well given the contactor now to be right yeah right we were professing matter so one more and then we gotta go right who really wants to ask Creager that one that's Loreen hi thank you and so this talk was sold to the public with a sideline that there might be a discussion on how we can make the UK a sort of hub of scientific excellence within the world and now with so much of the UK scientific funding coming from the EU what's your view on the possibility of the UK leaving the EU after 2017 oh I see z14 finish off it's a really easy I think it's a really easy answer it'll be disastrous and I mean just if we just stick to science so we don't broaden it it you're right that we are we we attract because we're excellent and we're efficient and we're good at science we attract a lot of money in competitive EU grounds and it would be a big hole in our science budget if we were to leave the EU yeah science is a truly international endeavor and extracting ourself from any international community for whatever reasons is only going to have the effect of restricting the flow of talent into this country and and in other directions but the basis of your question was making the UK an international hub doesn't make any sense from a scientific point of view for the benefit of this country economically or in terms of simply as an intellectual powerhouse so no from me thank you so it sounds a question time okay so it suddenly turned into questions home now we need a clean it's a rough Russell Brand on the NSA way we should say thank you to the thank you before we get something about know how you keep science policy so thank you I don't have any notes so that's it thank you very much optimize thank you you

Channel: Conway Hall

Views: 164,309

Rating: 4.7578545 out of 5

Keywords: Brian Cox (Academic), Adam Rutherford, Physics (Field Of Study), conway hall, londonthinkscox, London (City/Town/Village)

Id: NuK_HWhPluA

Length: 101min 50sec (6110 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 19 2015