Hello, and welcome to Emma Barnett Meets and this week I'm meeting the space expert and physicist, Professor Brian Cox and I'm really looking
forward to asking him about how he gets his head
around the vastness of space and to explain it to all
of us or try to, anyway. How he also goes about his daily life when he knows how
insignificant we really are and what he makes of NASA's new telescope and those amazing images. Welcome to the program. Thank you so much for coming to talk to me and to all of our viewers. And I actually wanted to start
with the new NASA telescope. We'll come to your particular
project in a moment, but it's named after the man
who ran the agency in the '60s and oversaw the first man
mission to the moon, James Webb. What do you make of what
we're seeing so far? 'Cause it's pretty incredible. Yeah, it's a remarkable instrument. I mean, you think of the predecessor which is Hubble Space telescope, I think it's almost impossible to imagine a world without that even if you don't know the images that we're familiar with of the universe, many of them, the spectacular galaxies and star-forming regions,
they're from Hubble. But the Webb is a
significant step forward. And technically, one of
the most important things is it can see what we call
longer wavelength light or infrared light. And that's important
because if you think about, we wanna see the first galaxies forming. So we want to understand
how the first stars and galaxies formed in the universe. And so what you do is you
look far out into the universe and because light travels quite slowly across cosmic distances, let's say you have a galaxy that's the most distant one
you can see with the naked eye is about 2 million light years away. So that means that the
light has been traveling for 2 million years to reach us. And it's a remarkable thing
actually to think when you look, it's called the Andromeda galaxy and if you know where you're looking, you can just catch it out
of the corner of your eye. If you think about it,
you're seeing that as it was 2 million years ago. Yes, although I don't-
Because it takes the light 2 million years to travel. I don't like being late to information, so that makes me feel very out of date. It's remarkable. I mean, it began its journey
before we had evolved on earth. So in the time it took, and that's the nearest neighboring galaxy. The Webb looks so far out
that it's capturing light that's been traveling for
over 13 billion years. But the universe has been expanding, and so the light has been stretching. And so for the most distant galaxies, we're looking back in time
almost to the Big Bang. The Hubble was not
sensitive to that light, so that the Webb can see the formation of the first galaxies. It's essentially looking all the way back to very close to the beginning of time. And that's very important because we're not entirely sure exactly how those first galaxies formed. The idea of what you just talked about in terms of how much time this has taken and what it's covering, do you think we will ever
be able to see the Big Bang? Well, we almost can. It's not the Webb telescope,
there's something called the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is light that was
emitted in the universe and it's a very precise number. It's 380,000 years after the Big Bang which is not very long at all, right. The universe is 13.8 billion years old. So we can see that, it's microwaves because
it's been stretched so much by the expansion of the universe. Going back, the problem with light is that in those earliest times, the universe was so hot and so dense that light couldn't travel through it. So it was opaque. So you can't use light to
go back earlier than that. But what we can potentially do, not yet, we're not good enough yet, but the technology we use now to detect colliding black holes, which is another remarkable thing, but I'll leave that one aside for now, but we have the technology to do that. And that technology possibly could allow us to probe
right back to this thing, the Big Bang and again, whether or not
that's the origin of time we can talk about as well. Brian, you've dedicated your life to explaining the scale
of the universe to people. You have a new world tour
and show called Horizons. What was the goal? Are you trying to teach people new things and understand the world
they're living in better? Or what are you aiming for? Well, actually all those things. So it works, I hope, on different levels. So I talk about cosmology,
we've spoken about what we call the large scale
structure of the universe. So the galaxies and how they formed, how the universe has
evolved since the Big Bang. But also I've got very interested in my academic work in black holes. And black holes, and they're
really evocative things. I think everyone's heard
of these strange things, these totally collapsed stars, from which nothing apparently can escape. But in the past few years,
past few decades, really, beginning work that Stephen
Hawking really began back in the 1970s and many others, we've begun to suspect
there's a lot more to them. And they've started forcing us to reassess our understanding
of what space and time are. And that's a really weird sentence. You might think, well, space
is the arena in which we live and time just ticks, but it really isn't. It looks like, from studying these things, there are building blocks of space and building blocks of time. And what I say in the show is
that's a mind blowing idea, and I talk about that. But the key point is there's
a great quote from Einstein, a beautiful story that Einstein told about when he was a little boy, he was six or seven years old and his dad gave him a compass. And so he looks at the compass and he saw, well, there's
this thing, this needle and it always points north,
points in this direction. So there's something
invisible that I can't see that underlies our reality, that's making this needle point north. And he said later in life, it was my first encounter with an idea, which is if you look at nature carefully and really pay attention and you're lucky, you can catch a glimpse of
something deeply hidden, which is a beautiful phrase. Something deeply hidden, which is the deep structure of reality. It's what our reality is. And so black holes, they're
kind of a metaphor in a way. I talk about them as
Rosetta stones in the sky. They're the things that by studying them, and you say, "Why, why would
we study these things?" Well in studying these things, we're beginning to get a deep picture of what our reality actually is. And that's a remarkable idea but it's a beautiful idea that
runs through all of science. How do you define a black hole? Well, it's in Einstein's theory, which is again it's a remarkable thing, it's probably in 1915,
over a hundred years old. But it's just a region of space from which even light can't escape. And by understanding what they are, and knowing more about
them, what do we then learn? Well, so Stephen Hawking back in the '70s published a paper, the initial one was called
"Black Hole Explosions", which is a great title for a paper. And he calculated, he
found out that black holes, in his language, he said
black holes ain't so black. They glow in the sky like coals in the sky and they radiate. And so over time, they lose energy and mass and ultimately
disappear over huge time scales. And that's so important and I
show this picture in the show that if you go into Westminster Abbey and look on the floor
of Westminster Abbey, on Stephen's memorial stone,
then you'd find his equation for the temperature of a black hole literally chiseled in stone
on the floor of an abbey. So you might say, "Why? Why is it so important?" This was the key, this was
his Rosetta stone idea. In trying to understand what happens, what happens to the stuff that fell in? When you thought these
things existed forever, which is pre-Hawking, right, then you think, well, it's okay. It gets locked up inside,
it can never get out. We don't care. But the thing evaporates
away, one day it will be gone. So then suddenly you have to
be faced with this question, what happened to everything then? If I threw a book into a black hole, is it somehow possible in the far future if you collect all this
so-called Hawking radiation that comes off, is it
possible to reconstruct the information in the book? And that's been a
question, simple question, that's driven this
tremendous amount of research for 50 years and it was pretty much sold
in 2019, actually, in 2020, pretty much. I mean, there's still a
huge number of questions. But roughly, well, the statement is everything comes out again,
all the information comes out. So everything that fell in, in principle, in the far future you could
reconstruct the information of everything that fell in. It just an astonishing idea because actually, the last
thing I'll say is that before that, before the Hawking papers and before this modern understanding, inside a black hole, just
according to Einstein, sits the end of time which is an astonishing thing to say, 'cause we can see them. We have a photograph
of one of these things in the center of galaxy too, actually. And when you look at that photograph, you're looking at the
end of time in space. So then you think, well, if
things go to the end of time, how does everything get out again? And that's the content
of this tremendous work in theoretical physics. This work, studying black holes, it's one of those things that a certain kind of person
says is useless, right. He said, "Why? Who cares?" It turns out that the techniques
that are being developed and the understanding that's being gained from looking at these things has got a very strong crossover with building quantum computers. Quantum computers are in laboratories now, they have a tremendous potential to revolutionize our civilization. Incredibly powerful computing devices. Well yes, and also that
sometimes the defense given, isn't it, about what's going into man going back to the moon or
woman going back to the moon. The other things are
discovered in the pursuit of those missions. Yeah, I mean, it's always
a cliche, but it's true. A friend of mine, an
astronomer, always says, "When people criticize these spacecraft and they say you know, the Webb, let's say the James Webb
space telescope was what, 6 billion or so." But it's appropriate to point out that nobody put 6 billion in a suitcase and launched it on the rockets. The 6 billion didn't go into space. It was spent on earth. And what is often the case, so putting aside the glory and wonder of the discoveries that are made, that basically, you are paying
people to do high tech jobs and do research and build
machines that operate at the edge of the possible and history tells us that that
tends to be extremely useful. You're inventing things
and trying to do things that are difficult and that expertise never
stays in one place. It then spreads out
across our civilization in ways that you can't really
predict or even quantify. Indeed and you did sound
very excited earlier. I mean, you sound excited the whole time about all of this, which is infectious even if we're, people trying
to keep up, including myself. But when you talked about
the golden possibility of there being life out there, and that question of are we alone? Where are you with that? What do you say to people right now with the latest information? Well, so again, I think
there's in cosmology, I say this in the show as well, it's one of the most challenging subjects because at one level, it
makes us feel very, very small and insignificant and
it's true, physically. I mean the earth is one planet around one star amongst 400
billion stars in one galaxy amongst 2 trillion galaxies in the part of the universe we can see. So we're definitely small, right? So you can't argue that. Yes, you've clarified that. But, you're right. If you ask the question about life, the answer is we don't know. We found nothing, nothing
alive beyond the earth. But admittedly, we haven't been very far or looked tremendously hard. Although we are looking hard now on Mars because we suspect there might
have been microbes on Mars because there was once water on Mars and it was geologically active and all the things that we think led to the origin of life on
earth were present on Mars around the same time, about three and a half
to 4 billion years ago. So we wouldn't be surprised if we find that microbes existed, probably, subsurface on Mars or maybe on some of the
moons of Jupiter or Saturn where there's water today. However, nobody expects anything more
complicated than a microbe. And it's interesting. So, if you look at the
history of life on earth, you have microbes around
3.8 billion years ago, pretty much, not long
after the earth formed in geological time. But if you look for evidence
of complex life on earth, then really there isn't
any in the fossil record until about 600 million years ago or so. So on this planet, for most
of the history of the planet, there was slime, basically. Single-celled things
doing interesting stuff, photosynthesis and things, but nothing more complicated
than a single cell. And it's only in the last
half a billion years or so that you get this
explosion of life on earth. And only as I said, it's only in the last less than a million years that we've had Homo sapiens on earth. And in the last few tens
of thousands of years, we've had a civilization. So here, it took pretty
much 4 billion years to go from cell to civilization. And that's a third of
the age of the universe. And so that leads many
biologists that I speak to to suggest that whilst
microbes might be common, civilizations might be rare. Actually I asked a friend of mine, a great physicist, Sean Carroll, how many civilizations do you think there will be in a Milky Way
galaxy, a typical galaxy? How many in a typical galaxy? And he said, "None." Right, none. And I tend to say one. So somewhere between
zero and one, probably. But, that's a guess. But do you want there to be?
I think it's a good guess. Brian, is that what it is? You sound like perhaps you
have an optimism for it, and I wonder what's underpinning that? I would love there to be. And actually, because it worries me and this is the way that
I end my show, actually. It worries me that let's
take that position. Let's imagine that in our
galaxy, 400 billion suns, there's just us that thinks, right. I mean microbes all over the place, but in terms of things
that think and can feel, and in a very real sense, bring meaning to the universe, all these things we've talked about, the beauty of these galaxies. They're not beautiful if there's nothing there
to perceive them, right? They're just galaxies. So if that's it in this galaxy, then the decisions that we make now, as a civilization, have
a, galactic implications. If we destroy ourselves, for example, deliberately or through inaction, then it's possible that we
eliminate meaning perhaps forever in a galaxy of 400 billion stars. So I think that leads you to, it's a good working assumption, that we have a tremendous
responsibility, in a sense, not to do that. So I would be much more comfortable with our current predicament if the galaxy was filled
with civilizations. Then I'd say, "Well, okay. It would be rather stupid of us to eliminate all this
beautiful culture and science and arts and music that we built up. But at least there's someone
else that's doing that." But I'm not actually sure there is. How comfortable are you with space tourism and the pursuit of that
knowledge and meaning being left largely to a very
small group of rich men? You're right. The idea that the technology is used, if all it was used for was to send a few very, very rich people
into space on a joy ride, then there will be a real criticism there. But that's not all the
technology is used for. So I think it's important
to understand that the space industry is
about operating initially, near earth orbits and we've
already industrialized that. We all use it everyday. I mean, we all switch on
our sat navs in the car, satellite navigation, it
requires infrastructure in orbit. A lot of the stuff we
know about climate change, resource use and so on,
that's coming from satellites. So I think you have to look at
the space industry as a whole really and say, well, it's not just about, the same argument was made for intercontinental travel by aircraft, it's true, when the first
aircraft were built. It was extremely expensive
in the preserve of the rich. But of course, within a few decades it had democratized travel and we all take advantage
of that every day. So I think that's the
right way to look at space. It's not to focus on particular bits of it that we might not like for
moral reasons or whatever it is. So it's actually, I really do advocate for the fact of looking
at the whole industry, which is tremendously important now. It is, I mean I am interested
though that you did say, and correct me if I'm wrong, that all political leaders
should go to space, perhaps for some perspective. Do you still think that?
Yeah, and I did say oh, most of them should come back. Most of them. Very good, very good, that's the last part of that quote. Yeah. Yeah, it was based on an idea, which is a very famous idea
called the overview effect, which is well known that
astronauts change their view of the always, as far as I'm aware anyway, that when they come back, they have a more positive view of the value of this planet and are very much more
focused on preserving it as a beautiful place, perhaps a unique place in
a galaxy, as I've said. So I felt that, and I do feel that having the good fortune speaking to many astronauts, that their experience, if the people who make the decisions, the big decisions about our future, could have that experience, I think would be good investments. It's extremely hard argument to make that we should actually spend
money allowing, you know, in our case, at the moment,
our Prime Minister, right. So in the UK, we'd say, "Well, we should spend
money sending Boris Johnson into space and bringing him
back safely to earth again because it would change his view." Now I don't think I'd win that argument. No, but-
But, I think there's a serious point there, which is that it does seem to
change people for the better when they see our earth as it really is, which is a fragile thing
against the blackness of space. So I think it is an argument
that I would try to make. I would lose it because it's very expensive. Do you want to go, are you willing to go? I would love to, because as I said, I'd love to share that experience of seeing our world from space. I think it's really, unarguably, it appears to be a life
changing experience and it seems to change
individuals for the better. You won't be scared? Well, I don't know. I mean, I remember one of
my great heroes, John Young, who flew on the Apollo
missions, walked on the moon, test flew the first space shuttle and he said that anyone who sits on top of however many thousands of tons
of liquid hydrogen and oxygen and isn't a bit worried,
doesn't understand the problem. So he's probably right. Do you have people come and
talk to you about faith? Do they talk to you about how religion and that side of life fits
into your level of knowledge? Because I know you've
traveled around the world talking to people. Yeah, a lot. It comes up as a question because cosmology it's
a science of origins. And actually, with the
study of black holes, as I've mentioned,
we're even beginning now to think about what space and time are. So naturally the, I say
it in the show, actually, I say, when we're talking about this, it's the moment of creation if there was. So we're asking, was there
a moment of creation? And that's the correct
language to use, I think. It's evocative language, but it's really what we're talking about. Did everything come into being,
or has it always been here? We actually don't even know the answer to that question, really. So yeah, I get asked it a lot because I think cosmology is a challenging science that challenges us to
think about these things that we often, you know, we associate that with
theology or philosophy. And I think that's a good thing because something I
very strongly believe in is that segmenting or
making little canisters and putting different
bits of human experience or different music and art and theology and philosophy and science
and segmenting them all is just the wrong way to look at it. What we are doing is a deep
level trying to understand what it means to be
human in this tremendous, potentially, infinite universe. And so those questions get asked. And ultimately I say, I'm
quite straightforward, I say, "I'm not a
religious person myself." But the correct thing to say, even about the question did the universe have a beginning in
time, is we don't know. We don't know and that's it Professor Brian Cox, thank you so much for your time and your insight. Thank you very much. And thank you to you for being with us. Until next time, goodbye.
