The Cockcroft Rutherford Lecture 2012: Professor Brian Cox

so we welcome you to the University some of you will be regular visitors many of you may not have been back here for a long time but we hope that after today you will come back many more times we greatly value the relationship with our alumni we're in contact with over 250,000 alumni of the University and its predecessors many of them from across the world a lot of them are now in very senior positions many of them contribute to the university as I'm sure some of you do and if so thank you very much indeed either by providing funding or your time and quite a lot of alumni contribute to events such as or activities such as the Manchester Leadership Program some of our alumni do equally important things that may not be such high profile and just to highlight one example the winner of our volunteer of the year alumni this year was Estelle Goodwin who set up a charity in Cabiria which is a slum of Nairobi doing remarkable things for children there and I know many more of our alumni contribute in those sorts of ways if you haven't already picked up a booklet please do so and please feel very welcome as part of the University and the university's family when we select the lecturer for the Cockroft Rutherford lecture we look for several things an outstanding scientists because of course bears Cockcroft and Rutherford were scientists somebody who is eminent and a great presenter and we certainly have all of those today and someone who is not only a member of our staff but a member of our alumni Ron Cox of course will be known to many of you he was born in Chatterton not so far from here and he came here to study physics and gained a first-class degree he told me today it's exactly 20 years until he since he came to the University of Manchester he then made a brief excursion out of physics and into the music world some of you will be aware that he was in a band called dare and one of our friends today came along with a CD from dare ask to be signed by Brian what are very few copies I understand perhaps even more well-known he then Joe and John D ream particularly famous for their songs things can only get better which of course was hijacked by the Labour Party as they came into power so Brian can tell you he made tea with John Prescott of course Brian is now a professor of physics a Royal Society University research fellow noted for his research in particle physics both here and at fern which we'll be hearing a little bit more about then again he has another life of course as a popular television and radio star many of you will know his works on the wonders Sirius stargazing filmed at Jodrell infinite monkey cage on the radio and very much more he's even the son's professor so he does publish in the Sun I don't think that will count for the research excellence framework that we have to return to brands received many of honors including an OBE in 2011 and in the same year a Royal Television Society best printer presenter award but in spite of all this fame he's still working physicist he's still doing research in between television filming and writing books and this coming autumn he'll be giving a first-year lecture series which I think he'll mention to you he also is an inspiration to many in the way he persuades government about the importance of science he also values greatly communicating science and inspiring people potential future scientists non scientists and existing scientists and today he's going to talk about that about some of the barriers to communicating science and some of the great rewards we're really delighted that brands here to give the Cockroft weatherford lecture thank you bra [Applause] thank you and well the title of my lecture is a scientist in the media and I thought I'd begin by just playing a clip of the scientist that inspired me a long time ago 1980 actually Carl Sagan now those of you a similar age to me who are watching TV documentary at this time will they'll remember this very vividly this is the the opening of the first of a 13 hours of television series called cosmos and I think it's interesting to watch from today's perspective it may in some sense look a little dated but in another sense as I'm going to explain I think it was part of a long tradition of a particular way of explaining science of presenting science of explaining the value of science not just the economic value and I'm going to mention a little bit about that later in the talk but also the value to society the overwhelming power of science science as a foundation of our society I think it's one of the things that Sagan expressed so eloquently so I'll play these clips about three minutes long and then I'll say why what I think is valuable about it and try to set it into a context you you you you the cosmos this is all that is or ever was or ever will be our contemplations of the cosmos thirsts there's a tingling in the spine that catching the voice a faint sensation as if a distant memory of falling from a great height we know we are approaching the grandest of mysteries the size and age of the cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home mirror for the first time we have the power to decide the fate of our planet and ourselves this is a time of great danger but our species is young and curious and brave it shows much promise in the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the cosmos and our place within it I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky see for me I think one of the things that captured my imagination when I saw Sagan present science like that was that it's were the two reasons one is that it sparked polemical so you heard him say that it's a time of great danger Sagan was very famous for being a I suppose a voice in the Cold War this at the time of the Cold War when it looked more than any other time that we could destroy ourselves as civilizations they Sagan spoke very eloquently about the value of our civilization and why it would be obviously her disastrously stupid thing to do to destroy it and so he brought polemic back into documentary and I think that's interesting because there's a strand of thought that thinks that televisions documentary should be just the science it should be like an old-fashioned horizon program where there's a deep voice that just narrates about the scientific fact Sagan was very clear that science is much more important than that actually there's much more to the scientific endeavor than just the the I suppose the exploration of the scientific universe is activity and Sagan wasn't afraid to do that the other thing I think is important and the thing that really captured my imagination was that he was he had that you can see it there's a sense of wonder there there's a sense of that there's more to science the I suppose the idea that you should explore the universe is in itself the most valuable idea that we've had as a civilization the spin-offs which I would argue where the entire modern world in some sense just that they're spin-offs from the scientific endeavor exploration for the sake of exploration that captured my imagination and actually it's it's a very old way of looking at science although I think Sagan was one of the first to put that on television to be overt about the emotional power of science and when you look back in history you find that that was one of the motivating factors for many of the great scientists and I want to read you a little bit a couple of pages from this book the age of wonder which is by an author Richard Holmes who's most famous for his biographies of the Romantic poets but he turned his attend to a particular period in British science between about 1750 and 1850 and he termed the age of wonder and I'd like to read to you why he gave it that name and why you think is why he thinks it's important so he writes that the first scientific revolution of the 17th centuries familiarly familiarly associated with the names of Newton Hooke Locke and Descartes and the almost simultaneous foundations of the Royal Society in London and the Academy of Sciences in Paris its existence as long long been accepted and the biographies of his leading figures are well known but the second revolution was something different the first person who referred to a second scientific resolution was probably the poet Coleridge in his philosophical lectures of 1819 it was inspired primarily by a sudden series of breakthroughs in the fields of astronomy and chemistry it was a movement that grew out of 18th century enlightenment rationalism but largely transformed it by bringing a new imaginative intensity and excitement to scientific work it was driven by a common ideal of intense even reckless personal commitment to discovery he was also a movement of transition it flourished for a relatively brief time perhaps two generations but produce long lasting consequences raising hopes and questions that are still with us today romantic science can be dated roughly and certainly symbolically between two celebrated voyages of exploration they were Captain James Cook's first round-the-world expedition aboard the endeavour begun in 1768 and Charles Darwin's voyage to the Galapagos Islands aboard the Beagle began in 1831 this is the time I've called the age of wonder and with any look we have not quite yet outgrown Hinton and and then he goes on to just quote from Wordsworth a beautiful poem that Wordsworth wrote Wordsworth was at Cambridge he looked out and he used to look out over the quadrangle at a statue of Newton Newton and Holmes identifies this particular passage is really symbolizing this idea of science as a romantic pursuits exploration for the sake of exploration Wordsworth wrote a that statue of Newton and from my pillow looking forth by lights of moon or favouring stars I could behold the anti chapel where the statue stood of Newton with his prism and his silent face the marble index of the mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought alone beautiful words of course by Wordsworth but this sentiment I think that Holmes expressly so well in the age of wonder is that there always was much more to science than just utilitarian discovery there was a it was a romantic pastime I suppose as I said exploration for explorations sake and I think I just flew that picture off of a Faraday they're giving lectures at the Royal Institution and Faraday was one at the tail end of that age of one but still interestingly if you know the Royal Institution it's on Albemarle Street in London which was there at first one-way street in the world why because so many people brought their horses and carriages to come to the lectures the popular science lectures at the Royal Institution that the street was constantly blocked and so we are responsible for traffic regulations in some sense and but it just shows that this idea that that science communication as it's called today is some kind of modern phenomena is it's entirely wrong these these scientists back in 1750 1760 all the way through to Faraday and Beyond felt that it was an integral part of their profession to deliver the sense of excitement I suppose about science irrespective of how utilitarian it may be and Humphrey Davy actually discovered Faraday also expressed this beautifully in one of these lectures the wrong institution he said nothing is more faithful to the progress of the human mind than to presume that our views of science are Ultimates that our triumphs are complete that there are no mysteries in nature and there are no new worlds to conquer again poetic and idealistic words and I think that's been carried on to a large extent today if you look at CERN I want to talk a little bit about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN then it's very much in this tradition even if you look back at its founding document CERN was founded 19:54 outs of the dashes I suppose of the second world war it was one of the Europe's great projects and it was founded as it says in its Charter well here it is the organization shall provide for collaboration among European states in nuclear research of a pure scientific and fundamental character the organization shall have no concern with work for military requirements and the results of its experimental and theoretical work shall be published or otherwise made generally available that today CERN is still operates in accordance to those principles it's now a completely worldwide endeavor this is a list of the countries that are involved a member states which all European but observer States and non-member States and if you look at those lists you see countries collaborating together in the name of scientific research which you would never imagine would collaborate on anything else as countries such as Iran Pakistan Israel the United States countries that collaborate nowhere else in the world but collaborate at CERN to explore the universe and so what does CERN do well of course the Large Hadron Collider is there it's a machine it's the most complicated machine ever built by many measures it was the largest civil engineering projects in Europe when it's tunnel was dug between 1983 and 1988 and its job is to explore the universe according to CERN Charter because we're interested in how the universe works this machine accelerates protons so the nuclei of hydrogen to 99.999999% the speed of light it accelerates them around when they go in at full speed they traveled around that ring 11,000 times a second there are two beams of them one going one way one going the other way they're compressed into something which is the diet that I am the diameter of a human hair they're crossed and in those collisions in every proton proton collision that's generated they're up to 600 million every second by the way we recreate the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began why do we do that purely because we want to know how the universe works and this is the pitch of the inside of the machine this is the accelerator technology pioneered I should say by Sir John Cockcroft and others so it's a technology that was pioneered here in Manchester today it's industrial scale engineering this tunnel is as big as the tunnel liver of a London Underground train those are the two beam pipes in which those beams circulate so a tremendous engineer achievement I could say actually this whole thing runs at a temperature less than minus 271 degrees Celsius which is 1.9 degrees above absolute zero which is colder than the universe so a lot of people say that if it wasn't for a technological civilization like ours there would be nowhere as cold as that in the universe is hotter than the universe colder than the universe a remarkable engineering achievement and as I said its job is to create the conditions that were present a billionth of a second after the universe began why well we found over a century of experimentation arguably beginning here in Manchester with Rutherford that as you go back in time so you go hotter and hotter and hotter which means to smaller and smaller distances higher in higher energies the universe gets simpler and simpler and simpler so if you look at the universe as it was when it was a very hot and very dense it turns out it was very simple relatively easy to understand and then as the universe expanded and cooled complexity crystallized out so in a very real sense we human being stars and planets and galaxies are properties of an old and cold universe if you rewind time and go hotter and hotter the universe gets simpler I think a good analogy to think of a snowflake in the palm of your hand which is a very complex structure every snowflake is different but as the heat of your hand heats the snowflake up the snowflake melts into a pool of water and you see that underneath there was nothing more complex than h2o molecules of hydrogen and oxygen or in a very similar sense experimentally we found that true of the universe so the reason we are running CERN is to see if we can understand the fundamental laws that govern the universe because in those conditions it's easier to tease them out they're not obscured by this crystallized complexity now science has always had a double-edged reputation I suppose it in Richard Holmes his book he mentions this he points to paintings like this this was painted back in the seventeen forties I think by Joseph writes of Darby it's a very famous painting I'm one of a series of famous paintings it's called a bird in an air-pump you see there's a bird there and it's supposed to depict the Wonder but also the terror of discovery and science it was very current in the society then it led through you through the Romantic poets actually to Mary Shelley and then onwards to Frankenstein so is this idea that exploring the universe is potentially a dangerous pursuits lyrically and beautifully expressed by Joseph Wright today we have the same thing it may be that we've regressed slightly aesthetically but in the same sentiments are there this is an expression of one of the first one of the challenges we met at CERN to the story that we'd always assumed we'd be tell in at CERN was of this tremendous machine that was exploring the fundamental building blocks of the universe but there have always been two public issues with CERN one is this how we are going to die next Wednesday something that took us by surprise because I think we had no idea how anyone could think that bumping protons together would cause any problem my favourite response to this was by Gizmodo a website who printed this CERN two morons large hadron collider won't destroy earth morons and then what I quite like is because the morons might not be able to read there's a diagram No turn it on Bob it says they're not like that and in some sense we didn't help ourselves which is one of the lessons press officers can get James gillies he's a very good friend of mine an excellent press officer at CERN issued this statement which said the pointed out the planet hasn't been destroyed yet it's really slightly careful with your words another friend of mine Greg Landsberg is a really popular physicist in America said it's quite hard to destroy the earth there's almost a deep laughter ha ha ha I said that outs at the more direct approach it's actually genuinely true actually and it's interesting that the reason we know that by the way so you might say well yes but you've never collided protons together these energies how do you know well this is one of the two graphs I wanted to show tonight so we know that there's no problem with colliding protons together at those energies because Nature does it all the time what this is is a plot of cosmic ray collision so cosmic rays are very high-energy particles that hitting the earth all the time from space the highest energy ones actually and we don't understand in that we don't know the origin a galaxy is not a big enough particle accelerator to produce these energies there have been single particles measured with the energy of a tennis serve so imagine a tennis ball hitting you Pete Sampras or someone serve Z at your head there are single particles that hit the earth with that energy it's quite remarkable that they're up here and so this is a plot of the energy of observed cosmic rays hitting the earth and this is the number of them and this is the LHC energy this this red line here so going up there and this is what's called a logarithmic scale every division as you go up factor of 10 a factor of 100 factor of a thousand so for the time you get to here you're talking about energies you know around a million times in excess of the LHC collision energy and those sort of cosmic rays are common so we know that nothing interesting om toward happens in Pascal collisions because we've done the experiment nature's done the experiment for us and the reason by the way we don't use those to do a loss of the physics at the LHC is that they're hitting all over the earth and so if you build a little cosmic ray detector on the ground you don't get very many high energy ones whereas the LHC as I mentioned can generate 600 million of these collisions a second in a very small space so we can observe them but we're actually not very good at accelerating particles compared to nature so that's how you know I told the Daily Mail this and they didn't worry about it there's two arguments you have to face when you're arguing about the beauty and the power of fundamental research it's very common to point out the dangers it's very common to point out the cost I think neither of them particularly sensible arguments just to give you an example of how I learn to deal with some of this that I'm going to show you two videos now what one is of me on Newsnight arguing this case but first I just want to show you a little clip before I went on Newsnight I knew I was going on that on the day the LHC was turned on and I knew that a man calls to David King user was scientific advisors that the government was going to come on and I knew that he was a very firm advocate of closing down research such as CERN because in his view there's a limited pot of money and therefore it would be better directed into other more productive areas as I argued and I allow you again in this talk I think that science doesn't proceed like that I think science is the exploration of the universe and the benefits flow from that and noble goal however I knew David King was going to argue with me a friend of mine who's a comedian and satirist called Chris Morris who some of you may have heard of it it's very famous television programs called brass eye and sent me a clip of him being an interviewer this is a satire by the way so the interviewer you happens to be Peter Tatchell in fact the the gay rights campaigner well that's got nothing to do with the point the point is that he sent me this and said do this right when someone starts saying something you don't like or even if you want to will nerve them a little bit then face-work is very important said it's the look on your face because what happened is that the camera will go to you and you'll be on camera looking astonished disgusted or whatever it is the person who's talking to you'll get very disconcerted and then you can jump in and make your points here brilliant so I'm going to show you the clip that Chris sent me first you'll see his face work which is immaculate and then you'll see me do exactly the same thing on Newsnight about two days later so this is Chris the problem is everybody's too scared to do it by themselves get six seven eight nine ten MPs all coming out of once no other word picked on individually they'll all be able to have the mutual support and solidarity hopefully of their colleagues and get Jack Straw Robin cook Michael Howard I mean would there be arguing for them coming out they weren't gay at all well that might be an interesting proposition so you see Chris's face work so now watch for my perfect impression of Chris Morris I also say that I just run it on a bit the clip I do it twice in the clip but also III make the case for what I think is the reason that we we are doing this kind of research I think there's another argument brilliant people like this young man sitting next to me also need to be attracted into these other challenges that were faced with where the outcome can be directly you don't work on one thing I put me myself I work the Cockroft accelerator Institute at the des reel and all the scientists that work at CERN are also working on particle beam therapies for cancer because it's part of the same endeavor it's part of the same expertise so you can't you can't say to people like me for example 20 years ago and went into physics well why don't you just do this because it's rather useful in fact learning how the universe works is useful is inspiring and on this day actually the day when for once physics is part of culture it's in the headlines at every newspaper every news broadcast in the world I don't think the president who has reach Association for the Advancement of science should be pouring cold water on that on this day of all night nor am i pouring cold water on it I think this is an exciting experiment I really am interested in the outcome as interested as most other people but I've got a real challenge here at which point are we going to say this particle physics machine this accelerator is as big as we want to build or do we know it's a very real maybe it depends what you when where you go next right at this point now and we've reached a problem we've got a door that's closed our understanding about the world works this machine has been built to answer that we're gonna have to leave it there sadly but thank you very much yeah I wanted to show you that there's actually a serious point there although it's quite funny see David then dinner actually afterwards I kind of made made friends with David since and I had dinner with him and the point is that in order to function in arenas like that ically on Newsnight you've got to know exactly what you want to say and you've got to know how to say it it's not enough and often scientists myself included wish this were the case that just by presenting the argument you would you would win that there are facts and there it is you can lay it out and that's fine but actually it turns out that's not the way that there are techniques that you need to learn in order to get your point across and that is one of them to use face work but actually David said to me later we had dinner and he said he said science needs people like you Brian because it needs fee feel comfortable on television and therefore can appear to win an argument even when they're wrong so this is near as a compliment you get so I mentioned there just at the end of that clip there that CERN what it's doing is is trying to open a door I think there's a phrase I used in other words the search for the Higgs particle is not the search but a particle because we like searching for particles it really is genuinely the key to a deeper understanding of nature it is a closed door in our understanding how so why is it that well as of now so as of on the eve of the new results that are going to be released from the LHC in July and the tantalizing interesting results that were released last summer but as of now this is what we know of the fundamental building blocks of the universe so we know that there are essentially four particles that make up everything in this room and everything in the solar system and everything we can see in the night sky which are these four here the up and down quarks which make up protons and neutrons which make up the atomic nuclei the electron which goes around the nucleus to make atoms and molecules and then this particle which is called the electron neutrino which is perhaps unfamiliar but is intimately involved in the way that the Sun shines I mean actually such is the intimacy of that relationship that there are 60 billion neutrinos per centimeter squared per second passing through the earth so passing through your head now as a result of the nuclear fusion reactions in the Sun so although they're unfamiliar there's a lot of them they don't interact very strongly with ordinary matter which is why you're not getting a headache from that process but that's it so that those are the four that you need to build a universe experimental II we found that nature chose to make two carbon copies of that set of four so these particles here in these particles here they're identical in every way to the first four except they're heavier and why that is we don't know we have no idea why that pattern exists we have very good evidence there isn't a fourth generation so that seems to be a complete set of the massive particles that you need to build a universe and that's it they're held together by four forces of nature gravity electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces and that's it so that's the complete picture of the universe that we know of at the moment and if we exclude gravity for a while because that we don't understand how that fits into this picture but everything else so all the massive particles that make up everything we can see all the forces that hold those massive particles together so every phenomena in the universe other than gravity is explained by a single theory called the standard model of particle physics that's it I don't need to say any more actually it is remarkable because it's a single equation that encodes encompasses everything we know about everything in the universe other than gravity it is one of the great achievements of 20th century science but it includes a particle that has not yet been discovered and that's the Higgs particle and for about two minutes I'd like to just explain how that prediction came to be how do you predict a new particle that you've yet to see well if you take that equation and take all the forces of nature out so let's say we want to write down the equation for how to electrons non-interacting electrons behave so we wipeout electric charge we sit them there and they don't do anything so this equation is just essentially describing the kinetic energy of those things how they move around and how they don't interact with each other now back in the 1920s at the birth of quantum theory it was known that when you write down the mathematical object that represents an electron there's some freedom in a mathematical sense in the description and it's very analogous to a little clock face a little clock hand so there's a mathematical objects called the phase if you're a scientist or a mathematician but it doesn't matter it behaves like a clock hand and you can rotate it around like that just like a clock hand and as long as you rotate all the clock hands together in parallel so together with each 1 2 3 all around like that then there is no difference in the predictions of the mathematics so that equation is immune to the position of the clock hands as long as you rotate them all which is just kind of an observation and it was made it was obvious it was made back in the 1920s the question was asked though for reasons of curiosity what happens if I want to turn the clock hands independently I don't want to move them all at once I want to just be able to adjust this degree of freedom it seems I should be able to do that because it makes no observational difference except that it turns out that it did but it broke the theory so you allowed to move them all any position you want as long as you do it in parallel but if you move them all around like that the theory breaks so the question was asked what do I need to do to that a theory of non interacting particles to fix that I want to it's called local gauging there into the technical term but basically just says I think I should be able to move all these little mathematical knobs at random and I don't think you should make any difference so you can do that you can fix it and you fix it like that and that is precisely what I had on the previous page in other words the forces of nature three of them strong nuclear force weak nuclear force electromagnetism and to the theory they're prescribed to a very high degree by requiring that these little clock hands can just be moved around in different directions which is quite profound it's an interesting observation it's a mathematical observation so what we're saying is that there's a reason the forces of nature have the form that they do and it's to do with this thing it's called gauge invariance is a technical term but the principle is quite simple the point I want to get across is that there's an aesthetic judgment been made about the way the universe works this mathematics must behave in a certain way what happens if I fix everything up and with a essentially derive in the form of three of the four fundamental forces of nature so it's important and interesting except that it was known back in the 1960s that that doesn't quite work it works if all particles in the universe are massless but as soon as you introduce mass for particles it breaks again and that beautiful aesthetic structure breaks down and doesn't work so Peter Higgs and collaborators back in the 1960s tried to fix that problem can it be that we can restore this nicety so the forces of nature the mathematical nicety well you can and that's to add the other two lines of that equation which are all concerned with the Higgs mechanism so-called Higgs particles so what happens in words is that the universe is full of a field called the Higgs field so you can imagine if you want Higgs particles popping in and out of the vacuum it's like a condensate of particles sitting in the vacuum of space everywhere and all the particles that you're made of fundamentally the quarks and the electrons are getting their mass from interacting with that Higgs field from it you can think of it as them bumping into the Higgs particles in the vacuum and bouncing off them and the more they bounce the more mass they get it turns out that rather esoteric mechanism allows all our beautiful mathematical symmetries to be protected it's a very aesthetically appealing theory and so what you have to do is you have to find those Higgs particles we've been searching for now well nearly 50 years for those but the LHC is the first machine that has so much energy that it will either find them show that that is wrong and that's what we're on the verge of now so I wanted to show you that it's a bit technical but I hope you get the sense that this Higgs particle is not just another random thing it is intimately built into our best description of the way that nature works at a fundamental level that is our theory for everything other than gravity in the universe and it contains Higgs particles now just one last graph you may have heard last year that there were hints of the Higgs particle there were hints they weren't statistically significant and what I mean by that is this is a this is a plot and it's this point you should be looking at that says that there were three collisions in which it looked like they were Higgs particles made three out of millions and millions and millions over an expectation of about 1/2 so less than 1 so that is one example of a a signal a Hinks signal which is not significant enough yet to be said to be a discovery but that was made last year now the LHC is running beautifully with more than doubled the amount of dates are available so it may be and I don't know exactly I know what my experiments got I don't know what the other experiments at CERN I've got but there'll be announcements in July that will update this with twice or more the number of collisions so maybe they'll be interesting we're closing in on this a fundamental prophecy of the universe and just to finish that I think it's remarkable that you have a theory quantum theory that started in the 1920s are arguably actually back in Manchester with the discovery of the nucleus back in the early part of the 20th century by Ernest Rutherford and it makes predictions the mathematics gets complicated but elegant we believe those predictions we build the most complex machine in the world and we look to see if those predictions are right it will be one of the great achievements in the history of science if it turns out that that esoteric mechanism I just described actually turns out to be the way the universe works it's quite a remarkable moment I think so yeah in the last few minutes I'm in danger of going over a little bit but I wouldn't play it it and my science career started on television started by being interviewed and by the BBC when I was working at CERN and then I was asked to make a horizon which is the way of the routine for a lot of people actually I think it was the same for in Stuart the same for at least Robert same for Jim al-khalili all working academics who are interviewed and then given a series to try them out a program to try them out my first one attracted the attention of Harry hill so I thought rather than play a clip of my program I'll play the clip of Harry L Hill taking the piss out of me essentially because it's funny this question I'm going to try and answer one of the simplest questions you could ask what time is it about five to seven what time is it you're pretty much there there's more to it than that so the answer to the question what time is it is about time you got yourself or what see Brian reckons that you understand what time it is you have to go microscopic to know what time it is you have to stop looking into the sky and looking at the stars and the planets and you have to look down into the world of the small or at a watch see I'm wondering whether he's overthinking the whole thing he's making over complicated you can worry too much about the answer we might not be in a position at this moment in time with our current understanding of nature to even understand what it is that we're asking ok we break some work back we want to know what time is at the moment when you got the job of particle physics at Manchester University did you have to do any sort of test over simplifying it have a girl explaining it to me again every event is a grain this one event happens one grain of sand then another one can happen on top of it and you build up the future if you want you build up the universe as layers and layers of these grains yeah but that's the answer to the question how do you build a sandcastle yeah it's one of the occupational hazards I think of being on television that will happen to you happen to me sooner than I thought like the first thing that I did but oh yeah thank you Harry and I'm gonna just skip forward because I don't want to keep you too long through a couple of things what I want to show you is a couple of clips from my new series wonders of life and this is a still from that series so we finished filming this actually last Thursday in Madagascar and it's five hours for the BBC that's gonna be on in the autumn and I had to become I to learn biology essentially for this series the idea for the series is it's a physicist take on biology and I actually works a lot with them some people here at Manchester including professor Kyle Matthew Cole Bouzid superb give me a superb year-long intensive course essentially in biology to make this series it's an interesting challenge because I think more than any other series that I've done it touches on cultural issues which I genuinely chose to ignore him in making the series because I don't think it's relevant but we are talking about things like the origin of life there is a program specifically on evolution and as Richard Dawkins calls it and I call it in the in the in the film the the law of natural selection I think it's beyond the theory now it's a law of the universe in the way that gravitation is so we know a great deal about the way that life began we know a great deal about how life became complex and from simple origins or certainly how complex life evolved into the complexity that we see they so I wanted to play your two clips one is a clip that I think best explains the the approach we made which is why would a physicist be making a series which is essentially about the natural world and then I'll show you a clip with this my friend here the three I think he was a weak old lion cub but anyway first of all the clip that shows the approach to the series in February 1943 the physicist Erwin Schroedinger gave a series of lectures in Dublin now Schrodinger is almost certainly most famous for being one of the founders of quantum theory but in these lectures which he wrote up in this little book he asked a very different question what is life and right up front on page one you say is precisely what it isn't it isn't something mystical so Schrodinger there isn't some magical spark that animates life life is a process it's the interaction between matter and energy described by the laws of physics and chemistry the same laws that describe the falling of the rain or the shining of the stars so yes that's it's a fascinating book actually you've never seen it what his life is written as the same 1943 it predicted the existence of DNA has Schrodinger called it an a periodic crystal in the sense there must be a molecule that replicates and passes information on from generation to generation Watson and Crick site that has been one of the inspirations that led them 10 years later to discover DNA it also deals with the interest in in complex question of how life it's in with thermodynamics in the sense that one of the fundamental laws of physics is that the universe tends from order to disorder so how is it that in the universe that's tending towards more and more disorder things like human brains emerge so it's a fascinating book but let me just show you one other clip which is the lion because I did this actually there's two reasons one is it's a cute clip but secondly it shows the in wonders of self system ones of the universe our challenge was to describe things that happen out there in space and we chose to do that by using Lansky on earth as an example so you can you can stand there you can say here's a as my friend says actually Robin in so he says you can stand and point at the sky and wistfully at it and say there's a volcano but you can use the backdrop to explain physical processes in wonders of life is different you can use the animals to explain the physics and the chemistry and the biology and so this is an example of of that Oh before I do that let me just tell you about this that last week was filmed in Madagascar and we film these things these are lemurs called I is quite remarkable examples of evolution by natural selection if you trace them back and this is very recent work done on DNA and DNA sequencing that tells you very precisely when this species split from the other lemurs so you follow the tree of life where's the node on that tree that leaves this thing called the aye-aye turns out it's 40 million years ago a very in a sense a very ancient animal in a sense its species has been around for that amount of time it occupies Denisha woodpecker occupies here or in certain areas of the world so it's got a very long finger the central finger which actually has 360 degree rotation is on a ball-and-socket joint and uses it to tap three times on that on the bar and on tree trunks he is tentative listens with his ears then when it hears there's a grub inside it when it's hollow it NORs into the wood with his teeth which uniquely among the primates regrow so they're more like the teeth of a rodent it em puts its long finger in grabs the grub and eats it so it's the most remarkable example of a creature that specialized highly specialized into one evolutionary niche and I just want to show you that because it's the weirdest-looking thing you remember believe that so that's a lemur as a primate and but back to this so I'll show you that clip now of an example of how we use animals to talk about science [Music] for this believe it or not is the top predator in Africa why she will be when she's older she's only about eight weeks old now now she in some ways has an easier time of it than the herbivores because she easy in ready-made meat ready-made protein and proteins are the the biologically active molecules in everything that's alive their long chains of molecules called amino acids which at their heart have a carbon molecule [Music] there are thousands and thousands of different proteins that make up her body in a clause which I can feel now there's a protein called keratin see that and in our eyes there's a protein called opposite which is bound to a pigment so the whole world is called rhodopsin and that protein Tunes their vision to different colors there are also proteins their muscles myosin and actin which do the things that allow us to run away I've got a few scratches now because of you because of your proteins so here this line cup so to finish and I want to go back to the I suppose what's been the theme of my talk which is to speak about how I think the the best way to not only to promote science but actually to describe what science really is I started with kal Sagan and his wonderful introduction to cosmos and I want to end with Carl Sagan as well and because this spacecraft which kal Sagan worked on it's called the Voyager spacecraft is really took one of the most iconic pictures in the history of science in the history of humanity it's a very famous spacecraft in the sense we're still in contact with it now it was launched in 1977 its mission was to go to Jupiter and Saturn it was designed only to last two or three years to do that it was known that there was a possibility of one of the spacecraft going on to Neptune and Uranus if it worked long enough it did that and then it carried on and on and on and now 40 years later over 40 later we're still in contact with that spacecraft so 30 years later I should say so it's a remarkable engineering achievement you may have seen it was in the news recently Voyager 1 because it's reached the edge of the solar system as defined by the position where the sun's magnetic field meets the intergalactic magnetic field is transmitting by the way on it with a transmitter with a power of 18 watts and yet we can speak to it it is over I think it's 18 light hours away now so it takes light 18 hours together and a team what transmitter a tremendous thing but it took an iconic picture it took two actually it took many great pictures of Jupiter Saturn Uranus and Neptune but on its way out from the earth-moon system if you could dim the lights of it in 1977 it took this picture which was the first picture of the Earth Moon system together so fragile crescents again against the blackness of space but then Carl Sagan had the wonderful idea to turn the spacecraft round after it was on its way out of the solar system into interstellar space when it was for Bill miles away actually from his home planet and took this picture and if you could dim the lights a lot so I can talk about this picture could you need to be able to see it can you dim the lights no well can you see that little blob there that's the earth it's called the pale blue dot picture it's the earth as seen from four billion miles away it has no scientific value at all it took Kyle Sagan a long time to convince NASA to do it but arguably because of what's a Sagan saw in that picture there it is the earth from four billion miles away because of what he saw in that picture and what he wrote about it's become a tremendously valuable piece of cultural it's a cultural object now it's no longer a scientific object and I wanted to finish by reading what Sagan powerfully and movingly wrote about this picture because I think it really genuinely does some what the real value of science which is a something that we do because we want to explore and something that gives us a perspective of our place in the universe which is uniquely valuable which only science could give us so Sagan wrote this about that picture look again at that dot that's here that's home that's us on it everyone you love everyone you know everyone you ever heard of every human being who ever was lived out their lives the aggregates of our joy and suffering thousands of confident religions ideologies and economic doctrines every hunter and forager every hero and coward every creator and destroyer of civilization every King and peasant every young couple in love every mother and father hopeful child inventor and Explorer every teacher of morals every corrupt politician every superstar every Supreme Leader every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam the earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants since of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner how frequent their misunderstandings how eager they are to kill one another how fervent their hatreds our posturings our imagined self-importance the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this point of pale light our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark in our obscurity in all this vastness there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves the earth is the only world known so far to harbor life there is nowhere else at least in the near future to which our species could migrate visit yes settle not yet like it or not for the moment the earth is where we make our stand it has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world to me it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot the only home we've ever known thank you very much [Music] Thank You Brown that was inspiring influential rewarding entertaining and I say a big thank you to the BBC for turning brown into a biologist now so he's going to answer a few questions we've got some roving microphones and we have time for all of them can you wait for the microphone can I just say also well the microphones going we have an overspill theater upstairs if you stick with us for a few minutes we will come up and Brian will answer some of your questions this is Raphael and I've been dying to ask him this question sorry have you ever been bothered by the sheer size of the universe in relation to our own size I mean it's likely infinite actually so you'd be very bothered maybe you were bothered no and I think and I think this is what Sagan's writing men read out at the end I think that the fact that we are undoubtedly rare certainly intelligent civilizations as far as we can tell a rare may be life isn't rare in the universe maybe there's life on Mars now maybe it's life on Jupiter's moon Europa now but it'll be simple life so we don't know how likely it is that complex things will develop but it seems rare but I think that confers value because it to me what rarity means is tremendous value so it's the opposite for me I think our insignificance comes which is true we are insignificant on the universal scale but are we because we're extremely rare which means that we're extremely valuable and Sagan actually another great Sagan quote he said that he said he said the these these that voyage sure he was talking about these things these are the things that hydrogen atoms do when given 13.7 billion years which i think is a beautiful way of looking at us I'm a physics teacher a comprehensive high school in John Cockcroft hometown given the local relevance what advice would you give on how to excite the young people in particle physics and physics in general I think as I tried to say I think it's to do its putting science in its context because when you put it in its context as I as I argued the way that it was absolutely commonplace if we go back to the 1780s 1800 1850 it's it's a it's an optimistic pursuit it's a pursuit it's about exploration it's a to me that there are obviously the details matter and obviously as a teacher teaching students how to do mathematics and teaching them the processes of science extremely important but I think that can go hand in hand with an appreciation that it's a romantic endeavor at heart and I think every scientists will tell you that I think if you think back there's a famous passage as great book by EO Wilson called Concilium stir biologist in which he says that for him that he called it the ionian enchantment actually this moment when you just look at the university look at nature and something captures your imagination and I think for him it was M if I remember rightly it was just it was just watching the way that these little insects wandered around and so it can be anything from astronomy to and anything but the point is that everything you see everything you notice to me anyway is it then you can use that as the hook and then and then science is the way that you investigated I was very fair I said babbling on just answering your question everything there's a very famous and clip of physicist Col Richard Fineman who makes a passionate defense against one of his friends who's an artist who says that you know you can't surely understand a rose and he said that I don't understand how not understanding that this thing is colored because insects selected it to be colored it's colored because of not selection but it sense artificial selection from insects which raises questions I do insects seven aesthetic sense now how did that thing get that what about the smell what's the evolutionary fresh effort to smell bees yet all those things he doesn't understand how knowing more about that rose makes it less beautiful of course it makes him more beautiful and and I think so that's what I would say show them Fineman show this great clip of Feynman I think it was on the horizon back in the 1980s you find it's possible it's a brilliant question that and what happens if we find the exit the answer is that then you have to start making precision measurements of it because whilst we have a theory which predicts the existence of such things there are actually lots of different ways that that can happen lots of different theories there are some theories for example there are five of them rather than one so you've gotta then start to understand it to understand how it behaves investigate it in the same way that we investigated the electron over the last 100 years and learnt a lot in doing so so it's the start of a of a process so if you're worried about having a job in particle physics then you don't need to worry because you would easily be able to be a PhD student here I managed to hopefully study in the Higgs particle as certain without a doubt kristan down here at the front and then we'll take one over there we'll probably just a couple more and then we'll go and see them hi by the way I love you I understand that I think it was sometimes in the 1900s we were looking for two other boson particles and we found them fortunately but what happens if we don't find or we find evidence that concludes that there is no Higgs boson yeah it's it's a again a good question actually my most cited research paper is on physics without a Higgs the LHC so the the point is that the standard model as I wrote it down so this is this piece of immaculately tested theory that breaks down energies technically it's called 1.40 V which is a measure of energy the LHC collides is designed collision energies 14 TV at the moment is operating at 10 it operates it at 8 last year at 7 actually last year so and so the point is that we we have we're well in excess of the energy which the theory breaks without a Higgs so when you remove the Higgs you know that there's new physics there right you know that the physics you see in that energy domain is physics that you don't understand without a Higgs so that's why the LHC was built at the energy that it is so it's in the root of the unknown region so you have to see something and that's the first time we've had an accelerator which has been beyond their energy where our theory breaks down thanks very much Brian is there any evidence back to the first question that were other planets with life but they have actually destroyed them in the way that potentially we could it's for any evidence that there that there was life on these other planets but in fact that life form is destroyed the planners no way that we could know and actually it's it's a good question there's a thing called the Fermi power dogs which is usually it and the physicist Enrico Fermi expressed this fact in the nineteen thirties I think and the the point is that our let's just take the Milky Way galaxy there is something like four hundred billion stars in the Milky Way and very recently we've been discovering planets around every star that we can survey there we know of a thousand planets are more now around distant stars so it looks like planetary systems are common so 400 billion let's add 100 billion solar systems our galaxy has been around for over 11 billion years 12 billion years so the question is if there were civilizations out there and they've survived they should have spread across the galaxy by now or at least they're artifacts they're safe self-replicating machines they're the robots that can go and mine and rebuild themselves and exponentially reproduce to populate a galaxy we're not far off doing that and by far off I mean you could give us 10,000 years but we'll bet we know we can do that in principle and then we will colonize the galaxy if we're still around 10,000 years the blink of an eye there's been 11 billion years for those things to happen so the question is why don't we find artifacts of other civilizations and the answer is we don't know it could be that they're rare it could be that civilizations destroy themselves before they get to that point it could be that civilizations don't explore although that's hard to understand because exploration seems to be it's the heart of science and the driving force behind civilization in the first place so it's a very good question actually and the answer is we don't know so last question here first and I read your books you know Y is equal to MC scared this is not a question you know and I still don't understand why he is equal to MC square I actually sent an email which I haven't got a response from you yeah actually my question is you know why gravity is not fitting into the equation with other forces you a brilliant question is why is gravity not in the framework again and I mean the reason we don't know with the answers to that question is because gravity is so weak it is something like a million million million million million million times weaker than the other three forces of nature which on that scale are evolved at the same strength so you have three forces that are very strong and in one force that is incredibly weak is so weak that it's is affects even at the scale of you know grains of sugar impossible to measure and so we don't know the answer to the question why is gravity so weak and it is tremendously difficult to do experiments with gravity so gravity at the moment it's eluded a description a combined description of gravity of the forces as eluded us from a mathematical sense so string Theory's an attempt to do that so Matt the mathematics is hard but one of the reasons the mathematics seems to be hard I think is because there's no experimental signpost in we don't know our best theory of gravity is Einstein's theory of general relativity from 1915 which is a geometric theory it's a theory that says that gravity is not really a force is it's a result of space and time being curved by objects energy or mass and so and that's the best framework we have and actually interesting the Jodrell Bank because that's part of at this university it's worth mentioning them the highest precision tests of gravity are done by Jodrell Bank and its partner telescope in Australia and looking at a double pulsar system so you've got a system there where there are two stars which stars collapsed to the well what about 10 kilometers across a star collapsed into the size of a city spinning around thousands of times a second orbit in another one doing the same thing so space and time are curved all over the place in that violent place and actually remarkably the predictions of Einstein's theory a hundred-year-old theory fits perfectly with the observation of that extreme physics so no one's been able to find a problem with Einstein's theory let alone find an experimental signpost to a new theory which is a quantum theory of gravity ok so just before we finally thank Brown for our fantastic experience just two comments to make firstly there are drinks downstairs after the lecture we'll be running up stairs to meet those there and I believe tomorrow's going to brands going to be very busy in the media launching all right I'll do it for you Brian Cox and Jeff for sure he was very good he hasn't mentioned it the quantum universe everything that can happen does happen so the next one 2 by K feedback edition paperback edition you've probably all got the heart of course sir and I'd now like to invite Andy Spinoza to come and give us a vote of thanks on behalf of the alumni Andy is the Past Chair of the Alumni Association and has just been elected your representative the Alumni representative on our Board of Governors Thank You Nancy for that introduction of her hosting the Q&A I'll be very brief it's hardly news is it to most students can tell us that being an eminent scientist doesn't make for a great presenter automatically but I'm sure he'd agree with me that in Professor Brian Cox the university is blessed really with a world-renowned scientist who has a real gift for communicating and I know if you know he's done this lecture already today so I think we can add those attributes sort of an impressive stamina as well and it's got more Q&A after this but in this world of 24-hour news and Twitter and sound bites I think it's a huge asset to the reputation of the university that you can engage with the media Brian with such intelligence and passion and you're the reason everybody's here today for what I understand is the most popular alumni event there's been at the university today's event shows how the Alumni Association is going from strength to strength really under the new chairman Jeannine Watson who was who was here earlier and we don't you all to engage as much as you can with the Association there are there through the website and future events there are refreshments afterwards so the alumni team is around if you wish to to speak to them of course events like this don't happen without a lot of hard work so thank thanks go out to all the staff from the division of development Alumni Relations who have worked on this and the division of course is led by director Chris Cox and the new head of alumni Clare Kilner who introduced herself earlier but finally of course I'd like to bring to a close a truly memorable Cockcroft Rutherford lecture this year by asking you to show your appreciation one more time [Applause]

Channel: The University of Manchester Alumni Association

Views: 36,192

Rating: 4.6335878 out of 5

Keywords: The University of Manchester, University of Manchester, UoM, Manchester, Alumni events, Alumni lectures, Cockcroft Rutherford, Brian Cox, Physics, Astronomy

Id: yGkykyvnuDg

Length: 71min 10sec (4270 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 26 2017