What a Gas! - Dave Gorman, Mark Miodownik and Lucy Carpenter

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I'm Brian Cox.

I'm Robin Ings.

And this is the Infinite Monoxide Cage.

Yep, that's right.

We are now the Infinite Monoxide Cage, formerly the Infinite Monkey Cage, which of course people will be very glad that we've changed it because everyone used to go, oh, the Infinite Monkey Cage is so cruel to the Infinite Monkeys.

Yeah, they say it's infinite.

You just have to understand that.

So it wasn't

cruel about an infinite.

We've got rid of the monkeys and

shut up.

And

instead we filled the cage with monoxide and apparently it's absolutely fine.

If you hurt monkeys, that's against BBC rules, killing their presenters is absolutely fine because they're just humans.

Even though Brian technically is not a human, because I made him.

Anyway, today we are joined by a compound of chemists.

A saturated solution of chemist.

What is the well, let's find let's find a happy medium for this.

Medium.

I didn't say some wouldn't be nice.

Thank you very much.

Let us call them an assembly of alchemists and they are here to discuss one of the deepest but also lightest philosophical questions we've ever approached here on the monkey slash monoxide cage.

What is a gas?

Yeah, what is a gas?

I've done a lot of research actually because before this I thought how do I best research gas?

So I watched a documentary all about Monsieur Pettermain, who some people here will know about Monsieur Petermain, who was a French music hall performer who found a way of using his internal gases to then create tunes with his bottom.

I know, and QI don't have me on.

Ridiculous.

To discuss this and other fascinating facts about gases, we're joined by a chemist, a materials scientist who aren't Dave Gorman, and one Dave Gorman who is Dave Gorman, but he's not a chemist or a materials complicated.

That was was one of the guns.

I would have just gone with, we're joined by two not Dave Gormans and one Dave Gorman.

I think that would have got us there a lot quicker.

We're joined by.

And they are.

Hey!

My name is Mark Miyadovnik.

I'm Professor of Materials and Society at UCL.

And the gas that I would least like to be stuck in a room with is methanthiol.

And this is a farty, foul-smelling gas that is partially responsible for bad breath.

But it's intentionally added to methane, the methane that goes into people's homes for their central heating and their hot water.

and it's added to that so that you can smell a leak.

And it is horrible.

And if you're in a room with it, you either think there's someone in here with terrible breath or there's a gas leak.

Both are bad.

And my name is Lucy Carpenter, or Lucifer, to my friends.

I'm a professor of atmospheric chemistry at the University of York, and I specialize in gases in the marine atmosphere, so far away from pollution.

And my gas has similarities to Mark.

It's a sulphur-containing gas as well.

So it's dimethyl sulfide, or DMS.

In low concentrations, it's attributed to the smell of the sea and it's also beneficial to the marine environment.

In the atmosphere, it has oxidation chemistry and helps make clouds more shiny, scatters sunlight back to space.

But at high concentrations, it smells of cabbages.

And I'm not a fan of cabbagey smells, so I don't like it.

My name's Dave Gorman.

I'm not a scientist, but I'm here because I won a competition.

And

the gas I would least like to be in a room with is Jumping Jack Flash.

And this is our panel.

Now, Mark, you've written a book about gas.

It's called It's a Gas.

Why?

I just think gas is a form of matter that is really underappreciated.

Like, it's mostly invisible.

It mostly doesn't smell of anything.

And you mostly just don't even notice it's there.

It's kind of all around us.

It's responsible for the birth of all the planets and all the universe, but it isn't appreciated enough.

And it's in all our lives.

in fact it's our life support system if you go to hospital it's it's part of medicine it's obviously part of the air we breathe it's it keeps the climate and our you know us alive in terms of all life on the planet and also and let's not forget this it is responsible for the bicycle being as brilliant as it is and bicycles are amazing and they are amazing because of gas I object to you saying that gas is irresponsible for the birth of the universe.

I knew it.

I was baiting you.

I was.

I'm glad that Mark mentioned bicycles though because one of my favorite gigs I did was him, it was at the Royal Institution, where he decided he would enter by riding in on a penny farthing, but failed to check the height of the door before doing so.

Dave, sometimes it's quite hard to get the guest in, and initially I thought getting in a kind of non-scientific guest on gas, you know, it's going to be difficult, but I don't think it is.

So, Dave, did you have a soda stream when you were a kid?

I did, actually, and I very much enjoyed a soda stream.

I also, I feel like this is a topic I've got input in.

Like many people, I've got a young child, which means like many households, gladiators, the reboot has been really big in our house.

And we had a conversation, which I imagine millions of homes up and down the land have had, which is, what would your gladiator name be if you were a gladiator?

And it was universally voted by my family that mine would be wind.

Lucy, we should start with the definition.

So what is a gas?

A gas is basically a material that has a lot of energy.

So, it likes to be separated from its other molecules, unlike solids or liquids.

Although, having said that, if you take a cubic centimetre of air, you've got around 10 to the 19 molecules of gas in there.

Because they're invisible, we can't see them.

Most of them don't smell either.

But the essence of being a gas is you don't like your neighbours, really.

You want to be separate from them and exist because you've got your own energy going on, you've got your own kinetic energy.

So, unlike in a solid and a liquid, where the molecules are attracted to each other, so that's where they stay.

So, they're excitable creatures.

What's the difference between a vapor and a gas?

Because we say vapor, don't we?

We do say vapor.

I feel like a vapor is a cloud a gas.

I feel like a vapor is a sort of old-fashioned term for a gas, or maybe it's a gas that you can see, so a cloudy, so something that is maybe has particles in there as well.

So, if you have maybe small water droplets, you'll be able to see them because they're going to scatter light.

But there is that thing about vapours that they are condensable, aren't they?

So, the reason why you can smell perfume is because a vapor comes off the liquid, but the liquid is still also a liquid.

So, where a gas and a liquid both inhabit the same space,

that's what you're smelling is the vapor.

Whereas these little particles are actual liquid, they're an aerosol thing, aren't they?

They are a liquid phase in the gas, in the air, as is a cloud.

A cloud is these tiny droplets of water.

And so, when you look at the, you know, you look at the sky, the things you notice are these little droplets, the liquid phase.

Actually, you don't notice the gas phase.

And again, why do we not appreciate this enormous volume of gas 100 kilometers high, the atmosphere?

And we're at the bottom of this sea of gas, and this is called atmospheric pressure.

And it has shaped our history, it's shaped our evolution.

But because we were born at the bottom of this sea of gas, we're used to it.

And then we don't notice when it does strange things.

But it is responsible for lots of our gas technologies, like the steam engine.

I can answer your question as to why it's underappreciated, though.

It's because we can't see it, hear it, touch it, feel it, or smell it.

So we don't know it's there.

So of course it's underappreciated.

It's invisible.

But I sorry this.

So I was going to say, Mark's comment about it being so thin.

I mean when you see the images of the atmosphere from space and it looks just like this tiny thin layer, it's what 100 kilometers thick so you could drive out of it in an hour if it was horizontal.

And yet it has all these amazing functions for us.

So it keeps us warm, protects us from UV radiation, gives us oxygen to breathe, all of these functions that we don't even realize because they're just happening around us and not visible.

Yeah, it does raise the question: when did you say it's underappreciated, but historically, when do we start paying attention to this invisible atmosphere

and trying to describe it, trying to understand what it is?

So, the ancients thought that the world was, and I actually did go to a school where they taught me this as

the truth, which is another story, but

that there are four elements: earth, air, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, you can't get out of it.

I think we do need to know what the truth was from the ancients before we move on to gas.

My parents joined a religious sect for reasons that I can't really explain, but

they then.

It wasn't your fault.

But they then put us in the school of the sect.

And the first chemistry lesson I ever got was there are four elements, earth, air, wind, and fire.

And I was impressed about the air one because I was like, what is that?

It was the one I was least familiar with.

And despite the fact that actually there are not just four elements.

But I think that's where it kind of seems common sense that there are these different types of matter, and we'll call them the fundamentals.

And the gas, you can feel air when it comes into your lungs.

So that is where you understand.

And you understand that people die when they don't have air.

But it took a long, long, long, long time to understand that air is a mixture.

So air was thought to be a pure element.

And then there's the other element, the fifth element, which is sort of related to gas, which is quintessence or ether.

And this is the element that was meant to fill the rest of the universe.

So Lucy talked about this thin layer of gas around our planet.

They understood that there was an atmosphere and there was something else that the stars inhabited.

And that was a fifth element, the pure perfect element, and that's quintessence or ether.

And it took a long time to understand, and it was the astronomers who really nailed the fact that ether

couldn't really be a gas, actually, because they started studying the stars.

So this is the first beginnings of us understanding of gases and what goes on.

It's the beginnings of chemistry, I suppose.

So when do we start seeing an understanding of this air is not just a fundamental?

Well, I think absolutely right.

It was at Priestley, wasn't it?

So, he underturned basically 23 uninterrupted centuries of dogma, which was that air was one.

I mean, imagine that as a scientist, if you wrote a paper, I've discovered something that hasn't, nobody's discovered for 23 centuries because he discovered that, in fact, it was a composition, it wasn't some intangible, indestructible element of just air.

I think he did experiments with mice, correct me if I'm wrong.

So, he maybe did some things that maybe not have met the scrutiny of today's.

They all did those in those days.

They did not fill in ethics forms at the same time.

No,

they didn't do their health and safety.

But I think he used to put upside-down beakers.

And then, I think, with the thing with oxygen, there was a mouse in a jar with also a piece of wood.

So

he discovered that whatever it is that made the flame happen, which was oxygen, also kept the mouse alive.

And he did the control experiment where the mouse did not stay alive as well.

But with that came the discovery of oxygen, and that air was not just some intangible thing but actually had composition and was made up of lots of different elements.

So he burnt the wood to take the oxygen out of the jar?

Yes, hence.

And then noticed that the air, the air was still there, but the mouse wasn't.

The mouse wasn't.

Not in its living state, anyway.

I mean, what an experiment.

I don't think that's proved that oxygen is a thing.

I think that's proved he's barbecued a mouse.

It only set the mouse on fire, didn't he?

It was separate from the

wasted the mouse, didn't he?

and like marshmallows on it priestly also didn't believe that he had discovered oxygen see he was investing phlogiston so the reason why things burnt wasn't that they reacted with oxygen which we now know to be true and actually his his discovery was the one that really turned it but he thought that and as did everyone else that only things that burnt they gave off phlogiston and that went into the air which was this element that could take phlogiston and then air and then plants absorbed phlogiston and they became wood and then you could burn the wood and it gave out the phlogiston again.

So the idea, what combustion was, what the magic of a flame was, if you think about the most magical gas, it's a flame in a way, isn't it?

Like, it captures you.

You can look at a fire for ages.

And they thought this was a substance, right?

And it was this phlogiston that was responsible for the flame of a candle, the flame of a fire.

And he came across evidence that it was not, it was an oxygen in the air, and it was the same oxygen that we breathe.

And he still disputed it till he died.

He said, No, it's phlogiston.

And it was other scientists who said, Hey, you just don't know how good you are.

You really should just take credit for oxygen.

You should do that in a French accent, what you just did.

Yes, that's right.

Yes, lovely.

It was a voice here, wasn't it?

Yes.

You named it oxygen and discovered it wasn't just the de phlogiston.

Yeah,

de-phlogistation of air.

What year was this?

It was the late 18th century that it was the composition of air was discovered.

It was quite remarkably close, isn't it?

If you think about it, I'm not comparing chemistry with physics here in any sense.

Oh no, you've really found out

you found out useful things.

Yeah, yeah, no, welcome.

Yeah, Newton.

1680s, we have the universal law of gravitation.

But it is interesting that the structure of air, atoms, molecules, is a relatively recent.

We didn't have the technology to measure that composition.

And now we keep discovering more molecules that are in air.

You know, every year goes past, we discover other things.

The technology gets better and more sensitive.

I was going to ask you that, actually, if you give us a breakdown, because it seems like the simplest of things, air, the stuff in this room.

Yeah, so we know that there's nitrogen.

Nitrogen, you know, oxygen around 21%, nitrogen, almost all of the rest of it, apart from about 1%.

So most of that 1% are the noble gases, and they are...

Sorry about some of those.

So they have very special roles.

And then the ones I'm interested in, an atmospheric chemist are, are really, really tiny in concentration.

So you might have one part in a trillion other molecules.

And they're so low in concentration because they are so reactive.

So, you know, until you can make amazing spectrometers or amazing ways to weigh those gases, you don't know that they're there.

We also know there's a lot of interaction with the aerosols that Mark was mentioning earlier, and how those aerosols form, sometimes they do form from gases as well, is a really big question in science and a big question in climate science as well, because those aerosols can form clouds.

It's very difficult to condense a vapor if you just have pure water.

I think pure water only freezes at something like minus 42 degrees centigrade.

It only freezes at zero because there are other little bits in there that you can't see.

So, yeah, we are becoming more and more aware, I suppose, of the millions of things that are out there.

I'm just so blown away by the fact that water doesn't freeze at zero.

Like, that feels like such a fundamental truth that everyone in this room believed.

And everyone's just casually going, Yeah, yeah, I knew that.

You bunch of liars.

That is mind-blowingly ridiculous.

You need

heterogeneous nucleation is the king, where you have another little thing, it goes for aerosols as well, and the droplets condense around something else.

They don't like to stick together unless there's something bigger there to stick around.

It was a beautiful thing to watch Dave's face suddenly become totally enlightened when you said heterogeneous nucleation.

He just immediately

went, oh, of course.

So I'm sorry the listeners couldn't see it.

The thing I can't get past is also there's these tiny tiny particles of air that's really, really rare that's somewhere in the mix of other gases and and things in there that we can't see, perceive, taste, touch, know anything about.

But you can make a spectroscope and you can say to me, oh, there's there's a this tiny, tiny proportion of this gas you've never heard of in here.

And it's so similar to things on Channel Five where someone's going, Oh, there's evidence a ghost has been in here.

And literally there's nothing in my education to tell me the difference between these two things other than my faith in your certificates.

But if somebody sees a ghost, they just say I've seen a ghost, right?

Whereas I can show you some data, you'd believe it.

Oh yeah, can show.

Do you know what?

The number of times someone's come on this show and said, I can show you some data, and then we get back to the green room, oh, I've brought the wrong case.

Just a load of puzzler magazines again.

But the early investigations of gases are ghost stories.

So we all had them.

If you go back to ancient times, the mists that come out, the will-o-the-wisps in the marshes, these are all ghosts and they were given names, will-o-the-wisps, these kind of fairy lights.

In every culture in the world, there's a word for will-o-the-wisp, which is these little lights that appear in marshlands.

And we still don't quite understand.

We know that the fuel for them is methane coming out of these marshy worlds where there's no oxygen, so you get bacterial anaerobic digestion, as it calls.

So you get this kind of digestion of the vegetable matter into methane.

And it bubbles up.

And it's, of course, flammable.

That's what heats our water in our homes for many of us and gives us central heating.

But it sometimes lights, and these gas phenomena, people didn't understand.

It's like madness.

So, what do they call it?

They call them fairies, they call them ghosts, and doors suddenly shutting because we didn't understand about pressure in houses.

And so, this was further evidence of ghosts.

So, in fact, we were studying gas phenomena way back.

We had lots of names for them, and they're called spirits.

And if you want evidence, Dave, you can light your fart and it will go blue.

Oh, I must have eaten a ghost.

I can't believe that.

But that is, I mean, Dave, that is an interesting thing, isn't it?

Because that difference where we will often see kind of, you know, hucksters and grifters using what appears to be data.

Yes.

And as you said, you know, you can see ghost hunters and they'll kind of go, oh, look, the dial's just gone to very ghostly.

You know, but what you're doing, Lucy, you know, that bit of the difference in terms of to help everyone understand the difference when you go, this measurement, how do we know this measurement works?

How do we know this is evidence?

For instance, you were saying about we're still finding new things in the atmosphere.

Yeah.

Can you just run us through how we are doing that?

I mean, there's multiple different ways of measuring multiple different things.

And so it's horses for courses to a certain extent.

So mass spectrometry is a brilliant tool because each and every single element or molecule will have its own very specific mass, sometimes down to multiple decimal places.

And modern mass spectrometers have got really high resolution.

So you can measure something maybe to six decimal places in terms of its mass.

So it can only be that particular element or molecule.

If it's a very complex mixture, so in the atmosphere where it's all very complicated and sometimes you want to separate things out before you even inject them into your mass spectrometer, so you can do that with chromatography, a very, very old technique which essentially slows down the path of molecules as they pass down a column.

So you can inject things one thing at a time.

That makes it simpler.

But we're basically measuring the mass of something, and that's a fairly fundamental concept, I think, that most people would believe if they see it.

So you will see patterns in that data that make it very believable.

I do believe that.

I do.

I just know, also, I can tell now that the real scientists call it a spectrometer, and the ghost hunters call it a spectrometer.

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So if we go back historically, so the gases, like you said, the gases like argon, for example, presumably this is before mass spectrometers, modern instruments.

So, how were things like nitrogen, argon, the things that don't react, how were they discovered historically?

So, they were weighed.

You wouldn't believe this, but they were weighed.

It is still a mass.

So, it's a mass thing, but they were weighing flasks of gas.

And, of course, a flask of gas is mostly the mass of the flask.

So, these are really precise measurements.

And, of course, they were wildly off.

And, in fact, a discovery of argon in the air, which is 1%, so it's much more than carbon dioxide.

It's more than lots of gases, but it was completely invisible, unreactive, so no one knew it was there.

So this is a guy called Lord Raleigh, who starts to measure air, and

he starts to work out what's in there.

He knows there's nitrogen in there, he knows there's oxygen in there, but he finds a mass imbalance.

There's something else in there, but no one knows what the mass is.

So how do you do it?

What is that experiment?

So you have a known volume of air at some pressure.

Well, that's the thing.

So you have to control all the variables.

You have to control temperature because that changes the amount of the pressure.

There's buoyancy.

So although we don't think of ourselves as buoyant in a sea of air in the way that you're buoyant in the sea of liquid, we are.

We do have buoyancy and you have to adjust for the buoyancy of the flask which is sealed because that resists the gravitational force of the gas in the air.

And the idea, of course, that gas itself has a weight and it's bearing down on all of us is another sort of thing you have to get your head around.

It isn't just that individual, each atom has a mass.

You can think of the whole volume of the atmosphere bearing down on us.

And it has significant forces on us, which drive all sorts of phenomena which we rely on, in fact, in our modern-day lives.

So, it's a lot, isn't it?

Do you have that number in your head?

It's a huge pressure, isn't it?

What's the weight of air on our head?

One atmosphere.

It's several tons.

But some of the early air pollution measurements were done by acid titration.

So, real classic sort of stuff that you anyone's done a chemistry degree or even in chemistry A-level where you've done titrations.

So, when you could start to measure things like SO two and ozone and those gases that were responsible for you know the 1952 London smogs, for example, you can measure the gases, then you can see the thousands of people that are going into hospital because of the smogs that were happening.

Then you can put those two things together and it becomes causation, not just what's going on.

We can see this vapor, but now we know what it's made up of as well.

So, the measurement science was really crucial to showing the impacts of the atmosphere.

Because I find it quite amazing.

I mean, there might be some people in the audience who are old enough to have been in London when there was smog, because we're into the 1950s, aren't they?

There are.

Radio 4.

Yeah,

don't alienate them.

There's some people in here who came in for a quote-unquote in 1977 and never left it.

But no, I'm fascinated.

So I remember the first time of seeing about that.

and the density of it and the fact that this was you know a regular occurrence in a city so what was smog and how did they end up dealing with that?

Yeah, it was SO two, so sulphur di sulphur being burnt from coal, so the sulphur gets burnt oxidised to sulphur dioxide and that produces sulphuric acid, and then this magic where aerosols get made from uh in this homogeneous nucleation this time, um forming cloud droplets, so it becomes basically an acid, acrid, horrible smog to breathe, and over a couple of days, I think the estimates are something like ten thousand people died over two days.

It's remarkable that you say, it's not long ago.

It's in living memory that we were discovering that this is a bad idea to fill the atmosphere with silver dioxide.

What are the big questions now?

Because it might naively say, well, surely we know how the atmosphere works now.

What a naive question.

Well, I mean, in terms of the big questions, we do know an awful lot.

I think it's a lot now about feedbacks.

So if you have more greenhouse gases, for sure the climate is going to warm.

But what exactly, what feedbacks is that going to trigger?

So, exactly, when will permafrost release methane?

Why is the Arctic melting more quickly than even our worst projections?

Sorry to be not very optimistic, but you know, there are those sorts of feedbacks between the ocean and ice and the atmosphere that we're trying to understand to understand where we go in the next hundred years.

And will we meet these targets of one and a half degrees centigrade?

Probably not, but that's what we're trying to find out.

I think it must be harder for developed nations to try and improve the air.

When you were talking about the smog in London, and people talk about real pea super, it was visible and you could see the grime and the dirt on the buildings.

And you still see old buildings around this town where you can see that kind of visible evidence of the scarring that it caused.

But now we've sort of cleaned that stuff up, we're left with just the poisonous, invisible stuff, and that's got to be harder to motivate the public to care about because they can't see it and they can't see their children breathing it and it sort of doesn't have that immediate impact.

Well, it's tr I mean the problems keep evolving.

So the problems used to be coal-powered power stations in cities.

Luckily we got rid of that.

Then it became diesel and petrol powered vehicles industry as a whole.

And actually, you know, now we predict that we're all hopefully moving to electric cars in name a year

at some point.

And now a big source of organic compounds in air are personal care products.

So they've really overtaken the the VOC emissions from CARDS.

So it's using deodorants, you know, chemicals as a whole.

We're just much more reliant on chemicals.

Maybe our standards of hygiene have improved as well, but it's an issue.

Some people are nose-blind to it.

That's my theory.

Well, because they just absolutely stink, don't they?

Or something.

And you're like, whoa, and they walk past you, and then you walk where they've just come from, and you can smell it for like a long time.

You think, but do you not feel like this is just overwhelming?

And obviously, they don't.

They've got a concern for the environment.

We should celebrate that.

But there is this thing about our sense of smell is the thing we rely on for gases, right?

If we can't smell it, it's not just seeing, is it?

It's smelling.

And if we can't see it and we can't smell it, then it doesn't exist until someone

puts more deodorant on near you and you just can't cope.

And we have got this part of our brain which co-locates senses of smell with locations.

And that's why it's such a powerful trip for memory, because the olfactory nerves go straight into the brain.

And so what happens is you smell something, and you're immediately it triggers a cascade of memories.

And so, we have this kind of industry selling us smells that are going to make us feel good, right?

And they are now causing pollution, it's incredible.

But it's a whole industry to make us feel better because it taps straight into nostalgia or our sense of feeling about ourselves.

And it's an extraordinary industry, really, that it is a billion-dollar industry selling us lovely smells.

And if you go back in time back to the ancients, a perfume was something only a king or queen would have.

Like it was so unusual to smell good.

Everyone else in history just stank terribly.

So we forget this: that you know, not only do we do not see smogs anymore, but our biggest problem is people over-perfuming themselves, not under-perfuming themselves.

That's very interesting because I'm sure quite a few people in this audience will have read the novel Perfume, which has that fascinating thing, which is the lead character actually emits no smell whatsoever.

So he has to create,

because even though people can't detect, what they detect is something's not quite right.

So is that part of as well when we're approaching people, this idea that you do need to have some kind of the smell of humanness will be detected, even if it is in the subconscious.

And there's the pheromone issue.

So there's these invisible smells, which we can't actually consciously smell.

You can't sniff and go, that's rose.

But a lot of the animal kingdom operates off these invisible smells that give them cues, like mate with that person or that ant actually sorry not person that bee

this is a separate show

11 p.m

and there's a lot of debate there's all these t-shirt experiments that go on where they get men to wear t-shirts and then they'll they'll give them to people of the opposite sex or different sexes and they will and they'll get them to sniff them and see whether they're attractive or not and they they use this as evidence that there are some invisible smells you give off that impermeate you that make you attractive to other people and this is what of course what the whole perfume industry thrives off the idea that if you wear a perfume that you can you will become instantly more attractive, like the person on the telly, which is then imprinted in your brain.

So, the attractiveness to each other is also part of this mixture, which is why it's so alluring, it's an elixir.

We all know that there are problems with putting gases into the atmosphere, as you said, greenhouse gases, and so on.

But historically, there was a problem of taking gases out of the atmosphere.

I'm thinking of ozone.

We were disorienting, weren't we?

With our CFCs emissions, oh, CFCs, and then we had to remove it.

We're talking stratospheric ozone, one of my favourite subjects.

Yeah, exactly.

So,

it's an interesting episode to reflect on, isn't it?

Because that was a successful international collaboration.

Definitely.

Very quickly.

Yes.

And our hairspray and our love of hairspray, apparently, in the 60s and 70s, that was one of the main.

So, yeah, we released chemicals into the atmosphere that destroyed ozone in large, hugely large quantities.

So the amazing thing was, is when the evidence finally came, I think it was 1985, that there was an ozone hole, and only two years later the Montreal Protocol was signed, which was absolutely incredible, which started the phase down of all of those compounds, CFCs and their replacement gases.

And now every single nation, even North Korea, has signed up to the Montreal Protocol, which is phenomenal.

It's astonishing, isn't it, if you think about the problems we have with greenhouse gases?

I mean, two years from the discovery of a problem and the s scientists saying there is a problem here to a treaty.

I mean, there was pressure before then, so the public, I think because they the public were very concerned about that issue.

I mean, you might remember, even Margaret Thatcher raised this as an issue with Reagan.

So, you know, there was awareness of it, and the public, I think,

were willing to give up their use of hairspray for the sake of maybe not having skin cancer.

And, of course, these were specific industries that created these products.

And so,

they were kept on board because, as long as they could have a replacement compound, so they were allowed to replace the CFCs with a bunch of compounds called HCFCs, which aren't quite as harmful to stratospheric ozone but still are harmful to stratospheric ozone and on it went and more and more stringent phase downs happened.

But you're right, it was incredible and it gives us hope I think that for the future that we are capable of making these huge leaps and gains when we come together and look at the science and talk to the policy makers.

And I think that we're only just starting to understand just how much complexity they are at the different levels in the atmosphere.

So different levels of the atmosphere have very different effects.

Even for something people might think that the kind of global warming is kind of an easy thing to understand because it's just like you put something like CO2 into the atmosphere and it warms because it's a greenhouse effect.

But actually, it does actually depend where it is.

And I think that those kind of more sophisticated understanding of kind of what happens at the first hundred metres, what happens at a kilometre, what happens at the, these are all starting to be the science questions of our age, aren't they?

Can we talk briefly?

Because as usual on Monkey Cage, we've got through the first three questions

of about 20.

Nitrous oxide.

Sorry, I'm going to get in there because.

No, no, no.

Right, Mark, nitrous oxide.

That's one of the first, as far as I know, gases that got used in medical procedures.

Yes, it's laughing gas.

When it was first discovered, it was thought to be poisonous because it does sort of make you go a bit mad.

And Humphry Davy, a young scientist, comes along and he's tasked with seeing if different gases will solve different types of disease, like tuberculosis.

And he just starts, he starts just administering laughing gas to his patients, and it doesn't really help the tuberculosis then he starts administering to himself and he starts to giggle and he starts thinking wow why does it make me laugh why is it so funny and he can't resist really being a scientist about it and kind of self-administering and it's to quite dangerous levels he invites all his friends he invites all these poets they all start taking these drugs and everyone's having a giggle and they write some bad poetry, some very good poetry.

Like Coleridge, in fact, is there at these parties.

And then Davey realizes realizes something really important it not just makes you laugh it doesn't just it actually has an anesthetic effect on you and anesthesia as as used in medicine was almost unheard of people in fact

the doctors of the day would often give people sort of um quite strong drugs like opium or alcohol they're not they're not anesthetic so basically they're just and they're quite dangerous because you you put give them the patient too much they're sick or they start babbling and moving about and thrashing about but this is a gas that you can actually calms people down and can actually numb pain.

And this brilliant discovery, and all the doctors said, no, no, you don't want to be using that because pain's really important in healing.

You need to feel the pain.

And it's a long story short, there's lots of other ones that are then vapours of ether are then explored.

And of course, the dentists are going,

We need an anesthetic because people are constantly in so much pain with tooth decay.

And if we could just anesthesize them, we could pull out their teeth.

And so the first dentist who uses laughing gas on a a patient in front of all the medical establishment goes, look, this works, administers the laughing gas and says, open wide to the patient.

And the patient goes, oh, and they all go, oh, that means it's not really anesthetic.

So it doesn't really work.

And so they then ridicule him again.

So it takes many, many sort of goes at this before the medical establishment finally admit that laughing gas is a great thing to use.

And so there's an enormous kind of interest in these vapours and gases that cause this anesthetic effect.

And it's actually the Queen Victoria who it's not and it's not laughing gas in that case, it's chloroform.

But

yeah, and we're all beneficiaries today.

If you go to hospital today and you get an anesthetic, it all started with laughing gas.

There are hospital trusts who are now withdrawing nitrous oxide because of its effect on greenhouse gases.

It is a bad green.

I mean it's it's laughing gas, but it's no joke, yeah.

It does have um some bad uh side effects as well.

But what they don't tell you about laughing gas, so I mean I very much enjoyed laughing gas during the birth of my second child.

Maybe other women did out here as well.

It makes you sick as well, a little bit, or it can do, which is

talk about that.

It's toxic, and yeah, you've got to be careful with you.

Like all of these things, they have an effect on the body.

It's a very powerful, you know, I love the fact that Queen Victoria, it wasn't laughing gas, it was chloroform, because she was so committed to not being amused.

And can we talk about the technology of removing gases?

Because that played a huge role.

I mean, in physics in particular.

Yeah, so

one way to study gases was to kind of just grab them and kind of put them in these bags and then bubble them through liquids and study them and burn them and react them and so on.

And then at some point, in fact in the UK, a guy called Dewar starts to realize that if you can cool gases down, they will start to turn into liquid.

So if you cool the air down, you start to get all its constituents coming out.

And so then you realize that you can get liquid oxygen.

And liquid oxygen is very useful because then you can store liquid oxygen, You can start giving it to people in hospitals.

But also, you have a way in which you can have experiments that happen at particular temperatures, very cool temperatures.

And you can get even down to liquid helium.

And if you get down to liquid helium, then you're down to very close to zero Kelvin.

And that allows you to explore the whole quantum world.

And in fact, loads and loads of physics would never have been discovered without those cryogenic processes.

They're also being used by people.

You have liquid nitrogen.

So nitrogen is one of the first gases to come out.

And that is a very useful sort of workhorse of the scientific establishment.

And it's so cheap, it's cheaper than milk because there's so much nitrogen in the air.

So when you cool air down, you get nitrogen as a byproduct when you're trying to get liquid oxygen.

And we really benefited in this country, as did lots of countries, from having an oxygen kind of producing industrial complex because every day of the year there are big tankers of oxygen being shipped around this country to all the hospitals.

And if it wasn't for those, when they start running out, people die.

So it's incredible, actually, the hospitals and this technique for making these different gases.

But it's also, of course, important to the discovery of the nobile gases, helium, xenon, krypton.

They would have never been isolated without these techniques.

So, it's just an incredible set of things, and cooling gases down and making liquids and cryogenics is just a huge area.

Can I go back to N2O though?

Because it's also in squirty cream, and I know you love squirty cream.

Yes,

let's not overlook that role.

It's an important one.

But the main source

of nitrous oxide to the atmosphere is from fertilizer use, so it comes from soils.

And so, you know, that's a big problem because how we need fertilizer, we need to create food.

And actually, N2O has been going up massively in the atmosphere.

It's the single, the one molecule that's the single most damaging molecule for the ozone layer.

So it's actually doing more damage than CFCs right now, as well as being a greenhouse gas.

So the question is: do we all want to give up squirty cream, which is gone, which is squirted out via N2O because it's one of the few gases that doesn't make it go rancid?

It's a fantastic way to have a brilliant quick dessert if you're a parent, get any fruit, and just squirt a bit of cream on, and everyone thinks you're a woman.

Why can't you just put argon in it or something?

It's expensive.

Well, yeah, I mean, I guess that's the question, isn't it?

It's soluble in fat, N2O.

But argon might be as well.

But I assume it's, you know, we don't have much argon.

Maybe let's not use it in our squirted cream.

Maybe that's like high-preference.

Good question.

Good physics experiments to do with our current creation.

We need a new gas for squirty cream, everyone.

Go.

I think it was

Margaret Thatcher's, she was a chemist at university.

I think her PhD was in about the density that could take gas in those kind of solids.

So she effectively invented the Mr.

Whippy ice cream.

Yeah.

I love the image, though, the fact that squirty cream is also very often used for custard pie fights.

And the idea that that is ultimately, you know,

it won't end with a bang or a whimper.

It will end for human beings with a custard pie fight.

Somehow fits into the absurdity of what we are.

Well, we've managed to run out of time after five years.

You told me time was a fiction.

Dave, I just want to ask you, actually, because before we started this show, you were very in the dressing room.

You said, there's no way my favorite state of matter is liquid, then solid.

I can't stand gas.

It's my least favorite state of matter.

And I just wondered, have you changed your opinion on that at all?

No.

We failed.

I'm enjoying a rum and coke with some ice in it.

I guess I'm smelling something, but it's definitely the liquid and the solid in the

mouth.

Without gases, no fizzy drinks at all.

None.

No shameless.

Yeah, no, fair enough.

There you go, I'm told.

Gas.

Well, it would also evaporate, wouldn't it, without the gases?

Because

we couldn't survive.

Life wouldn't survive.

I mean, the drink would boil away.

Yeah.

Oh, there you go.

Rum and coke with ice in it.

I've got gas, liquid, solid.

It's the perfect metaphor for everything you've ever talked about on this show.

And the metaphor gets better with every glass, doesn't it?

Absolutely.

What do we ask the audience?

We ask the audience: if you could transform anything in the world into a gas, what would it be and why?

What have you got, Brian?

Newsreaders.

So that they replace the gloom with a breath of fresh air.

Jackie.

I've gone here, but I'm just going to say I've learnt a lot tonight.

I've learnt that water doesn't freeze at zero degrees, that krypton is not made up and part of science fiction,

and that squirty cream can go on fruit.

I'm learning.

I'm always learning.

But on your thing, from Penny Simpson, she would make smarties into gas so that she can fit more in her mouth.

So long as the gas still tasted of smarties.

It's not scientifically accurate that you'd fit less in your mouth, wouldn't you, if you filled your mouth with gas?

You've come a cropper there, Penny.

You've had an absolute man.

Thanks for joining in.

Because we're talking about the number of molecules of Smarty.

I do know someone who's developed this technology already, which is basically breathable, as they call it, breathable flavours that you can have.

So you can have a breathable coffee or a breathable chocolate bar without the calories.

And so there are products on the market that are doing that, yeah.

I'll just say that that was also the perfect physicist moment.

Penny came up with an idea filled with joy, and you destroyed it.

Macbeth, because he proclaimed methane.

That's only in the folio edition, of course, the methane line.

What have you got there, Brian?

From Andy, this is good.

Rationality, because there's a world shortage of that.

From Graham Bodkin, I would put all politicians into group 18 of the periodic table.

It would be the noble thing to do.

Yeah, Kirsty says my holiday luggage to avoid random and ridiculous charges from budget airlines.

Martin says it would transform Donald Trump into Argonne so as to make him inert.

Thanks to our panel, Lucy Carpenter, Mark Mayadovnick, and Dave Gorman.

Next week, next week, we're going to be heading to the Royal Society for a very unexpected take on the history of science.

Why is it unexpected?

Because they don't know we're coming.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Till now, nice again.

She needs to see this.

She needs to see Paddington too, apparently, so keep it brief.

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