The Infinite Monkey’s Guide to... The Movies

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Hi, I'm Erica Cruz-Guevara, host of KQED's podcast, The Bay.

When something important is happening in the Bay Area, I want to know what it actually means for the people who live here.

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Hello, I'm Robin Ince.

And I'm Brian Cox.

Welcome to the Infinite Monkeys Guide 2, a new series in which we go through our extensive back catalogue of shows about event horizons, quantum superpositions, and dead strawberries.

We're not there yet, but there will be that dead strawberry show.

Anyway, this week, we're getting cinematic with the Infinite Monkeys Guide to the Movies.

It's rather self-aggrandising, isn't it?

Our extensive back catalogue.

Well, it's very much like a 1970s advert for an extensive range of Bryan nylon sofas.

I should do a lot more of this work, shouldn't I?

I think you should.

You've got creepy 1970s voiceover, man.

Perfect.

Yeah, it's that bit as you go.

Sorry, can we do that take again?

Your suit made out of man-made fibres keep sparking.

I'm sorry, but as you can see, it moves moves with me.

Now, for many of us, it was television and film that ignited our scientific fascination, whether it was Doctor Who or 2001.

But not the film The Black Hole from 1980, because it turns out apparently only you and I have heard of it, Brian.

That was actually genuinely one of the great science fiction films for me at that time.

And so, you know, if you haven't heard of it, then, well, that's not my problem, really, is it?

And it's got Anthony Perkins in it as well.

Wasn't he the guy from Psycho?

Yeah, Norman Bates and all that.

So, this week, we're looking at some of our favourite conversations about science in the movies.

In the last few years, the likes of Christopher Nolan and Danny Boyle have become more scientifically scrupulous.

And, of course, as many of you will know, Danny Boyle employed Professor Brian Cox to show that, from his perspective, without a shadow of a doubt, it really was possible to restart a star by shoving a bomb in it.

Now, I've spoken to a lot of other scientists, and they say that's nonsense.

So, Brian, why have you misled the public like this?

Well, that's not exactly what I said to Danny.

What I said was, you really can't restart a star by shoving a bomb in it.

Oh,

and he just misunderstood the way you said, you really can't, for you saying, oh, yes, Danny, yes, you can.

Let's go with that.

Anyway, enough of that.

We're talking here about the rigorous science.

When we went to Los Angeles, we spoke to Sean Carroll on his work on the scientific plausibility of Norse gods.

Yeah, well, anyway.

And scriptwriter David X.

Cohen on mathematics in The Simpsons.

I do have to ask you, Sean, the idea of a science advisor on Thor is.

What exactly is...

Where do you draw the line with the science?

This is why you're not a famous Hollywood producer, I think, because you don't see how this comes in.

For one thing, they had a wormhole in Thor.

They envisioned that the Bifrost Bridge that was bringing the gods from Asgard to Earth was, you know, this shortcut through space-time, just like Ryan already said.

Sorry.

So we wanted to get the wormhole accurate for the gods of Asgard to make sure they came down.

But they didn't want to get the wormhole.

They said, so what is this thing?

And I said, it is a wormhole.

And the president of Marvel Studios said, we can't call it that.

It's 290s.

290s?

Can we have a wormhole?

We've got a wormhole, isn't there?

So if you watch the movie, Jane Foster, Natalie Portman, says, they must have come over in an Einstein-Rosen bridge.

So that was my contribution to the movie.

And then, and Kat Denning says, What is that?

And Stellan Skarsgård goes, It's a wormhole.

Don't worry.

So, without the science advisor, they never would have gotten that.

And more importantly, without the science advisor, Natalie Portman's character would not have been a particle physicist and therefore inspired how many, who knows how many 12-year-old girls to go, like, what is that?

I want to be what Jane Foster is.

I just love that it's so nice of her.

Oh, Newton's second law, that's so late 1970s.

We didn't mention that.

Did you boppers and rollerblades?

David, how important is it to get the science right?

So The Simpsons are very famous, actually, for paying attention to the market.

You know, I know,

there's this writer, Simon Singh, from England, who has written a book about all the little math jokes that were hidden in The Simpsons and Futurama over the years.

So there is a little genuine math and science, but it's not important.

That's the question.

It's very, it couldn't be less important.

It's usually, it comes in the form of, look at, you know, in this shot of the classroom, there's a chalkboard in the background, and we're trying to rewrite some joke, and after about two hours of failing, someone says, there's also a blank chalkboard in the background.

Dave, go out and write some kind of equation to stick on that chalkboard.

So those usually come in that way, and we never thought they were going to be a big deal.

Then suddenly people started writing books about them, and I show up here on your panel.

But let me tell you one more thing.

When we started Futurama, which has a lot more science in science fiction, really we had a big debate debate about how much science we could put in.

And one thing we agreed on early on is science shall not outweigh comedy.

That was up on the whiteboard, and I was there the whole time.

Science totally outweighs comedy.

Look at it.

He's going, well, thank you very much.

Nice.

That's the conclusion.

So we like to refer to it and make jokes about it, let people know that we like it.

But if the plot demands that they travel across space and get to another galaxy, which as you said is unlikely, we're still going to do it.

Right, Brian, because you are a physicist, I want to know, you've obviously seen some of the Marvel movies, and so many of those movies now use ideas of a quantum universe.

And sometimes it just seems like, oh, this is an easy way to move the plot on.

I agree with you.

Oh, great.

That was much quicker than I thought.

What about everything everywhere all at once?

Love it.

However, I wouldn't use it as a quantum mechanics textbook.

But I think that's one of the things, isn't it, with films?

If anyone goes to watch a film and then goes, oh, I was going to also use that as my module for my degree, you're going to be in a bit of trouble, aren't you?

Well, unless it's film studies.

Oh, yeah, film studies.

I could probably do that.

I couldn't do physics, but I reckon I could do film studies.

I know how to sit.

It's a beautiful segue, actually.

Robin knows how to sit.

Back to wormholes.

One of the greatest science lectures that I've ever been to was cosmologist Faye Dauker's third-year introductory lecture on general relativity.

It was so good that even I understood some of it.

Obviously, until I went into the foyer, when I realized that all the stuff I understood had fallen out of my my head when I got up, which was annoying.

But she speaks with such passion and such joy.

And like before a lecture,

she's more like a theatrical performer, like she's kind of warming herself up because she's so excited about sharing that knowledge with her students.

Yeah, do you know that Faye's father taught me general relativity at the University of Manchester in the 1990s?

He was brilliant.

Stuart Dauker, absolutely superb lecturer.

I loved his lectures.

Here is, though, Faye telling comedian Ross Noble a little bit more about wormholes.

The black hole and the wormholes, you've mentioned before, are

allowable in general relativity.

They are.

And the wormholes.

Spirit wormholes, come on.

Ross, you're absolutely right.

There are two different sorts of wormholes.

I've never heard those words read before.

Go on, no, there's two sorts of worms.

The wormhole in interstellar is a spatial wormhole.

That's a shortcut in space so that you can travel from one place in space to another place in space almost instantaneously because you go down this little shortcut.

So those are spatial wormholes.

My PhD thesis was about space-time wormholes, and you're completely right to make the distinction because they are very different.

There are three types of wormholes.

Worms.

The worms.

The space-time wormholes are interesting.

They are they're not these shortcuts in space, but they are space-times where two disconnected portions of the universe can merge and become one.

And the space-time looks something like a pair of trousers.

So if you imagine a pair of trousers, then the two disconnected portions of the universe that are going to merge are the legs

and then they come together, of course, and then the the waist region, that's the new universe that has formed out of the two disconnected pieces.

And the two disconnected pieces, they come together at what is called scientifically the crotch singularity.

And

don't tempt me, madam.

And the the interesting thing is that the consensus, the scientific consensus on the crotch is that it produces an infinite burst of energy.

And

this probably makes this space-time unphysical.

But again, we will have to wait until we have a full theory of quantum gravity to be able to

give the final word on this.

Well, welcome to Call My Bluff.

So, Ross

is Space-Time Trouser Singularity.

Sorry, I was going to say if this hasn't been condemned by the church already, it soon will be.

2001, A Space Odyssey, is the science fiction movie that seemed to change it all.

It came out in the 1960s, where there was wild experimentation of many kinds, and there were many that saw it as a prophecy more than even a movie.

In fact, in one American cinema, there was a wild-eyed audience member who just suddenly stood up, shouted, now I see the truth, and threw himself through the cinema screen, finding out that actually what lay on the other side was not a starchild, but some old movie posters and an oil can or two.

Also, Brian, did you know that Ronnie Corbert was originally going to be one of the apes in the early scenes of 2001, a Space Odyssey?

Is that actually true?

Well, I was told this the other day that he didn't like having to have straws put up his nose, so he couldn't have the latex mask made.

Because you have to breathe when you'd be having the headpiece made.

So that's why Ronnie Corbett isn't one of the apes in 2001 Space Odyssey.

That would have been wonderful, wouldn't it?

It would be lovely, wouldn't it, to find out that actually every single one of those apes was played by a very, very well-known celebrity or scientist.

Tommy Cooper.

Jacob Bronowski, the Beverly Sisters.

Anyway, cosmologist Jan Eleven, who's the author of one of my favourite science books, actually, How the Universe Got Its Spots, told us a little bit about Stanley Kubrick's ideas of the depressurized pod for 2001 A Space Odyssey.

I was thinking about this very, very accurate movie, which is 2001 Space Odyssey.

And there's a scene where one of the characters gets into a depressurized pod, trying to get back into the spacecraft after Hal's kicked him out.

And he's there without his helmet on, I believe, for like 14 seconds.

And there is this big argument about whether or not his head would explode.

And apparently, Kubrick filmed it with him wearing the helmet originally and then discovered some research saying that he could survive for 14 seconds and then refilmed it without the helmet.

Now, that might not be a true story, but I just thought it was pretty fascinating because it wasn't actually a mistake.

Do you know what?

Actually, I think that Stanley Kubrick got the music wrong in 2001.

What, Blue Danube or?

Yes, because the opening music is Richard Strauss's Also Sprout Zarathustra.

And it's a wonderful piece of music, and that's sunrise when Zarathustra comes out of his cave and starts walking down the mountain.

And then later on in that same piece of music, there's a magnificent waltz where Zarathustra waltzes up to the cosmos and he becomes one with the cosmos and he really takes the next step in the evolution of the human race, which is clearly what the film is about.

And for some reason, Stanley Kubrick did not use that waltz.

And Richard Strauss waltz is a parody of the Blue Danube style waltzes.

So not only do you ruin movies by demanding scientific accuracy, you ruin them by also demanding philosophical stroke classical music accuracy as well.

Philosophical and musical accuracy.

Fair enough.

You know, when we did a musical with Eric Idol,

and Warwick Davis was in it as the Big Bang.

And I said to Warwick that as far as we understand now, the universe universe is going to carry on accelerating in its expansion forever so it will expand forever and ultimately there are models of the expansion of the universe where the expansion gets so rapid that space and time themselves get ripped apart and Warwick said well could I perhaps construct a little pod

would that protect me and I said no One of the greatest imaginative minds in fiction is Alan Moore, author of Watchmen, Viva Vendetta, From Hell, and also a recent short story which concerns the very first femtosecond of the universe and opens with the line, it was the best of times, it was the first of times.

I love that.

When I heard that,

I just thought, why didn't I think of that?

And the reason is because I'm not Alan Moore.

When Alan spoke to string theorist Brian Green, he found out that some of his wilder ideas actually fitted surprisingly well with modern thinking in theoretical physics.

The thing is, with science fiction, you have to remember the fiction bit.

I mean, like, I'd keep up to date with the latest scientific theories to see if there were any particularly mad ones that I could possibly sort of turn into a money-making series.

But

at the end of the day, the science in science fiction is mostly rubbish.

I remember that I think in Halo Jones, I'd got a planet of such mass that time was actually

being bent as a function of gravity.

That sort of thing.

I thought

maybe that could work.

It's absolutely correct.

Is it?

Yeah.

And

if you wrote that before 1915, you're a genius.

Brian, I mean, for me, science fiction was, when I was growing up, was one of those things that inspired me to be a scientist because I couldn't really tell the difference.

I grew up in the 70s, and for me, the Apollo moon landings merge with Star Wars and merge with Star Trek.

Was that the same for you?

Was it a part of what I was doing?

Well, certainly Star Trek, you know, I would sit around with my dad, and we'd watch it, and there'd be all this crazy stuff happening.

And how could you not get, you know, excited about this guy with pointy ears and flying out and exploring the universe?

So I knew from an early age that I got C-Sec.

So I wasn't going out in a rocket ship.

That was pretty clear.

But maybe, you know, you could fly out in your mind and explore the universe that way.

See, does it mislead though at all, just on Star Trek?

Because when I was reading something about the other day about obviously the fact that you can't actually go at the speed of light, you can go near the speed of light.

And I started to think, would that mean that Star Trek was merely a show in which lots of people just kind of sat there and just went, are we there yet?

Yeah, there's a real issue that Star Trek never dealt with, which is if they were traveling at the speeds that they supposedly were by actually warping time, you could never communicate back with Star Fleet Command because, you know, so many years would have gone by that it would be like 10,000 years past.

So there's a time warp element that they never dealt with.

But yeah,

those elements, I think, just like you're saying, who cares?

If it's fun to watch and it's exciting and it gets you thinking about the universe, I think that's all that matters.

Patrick Stewart has managed to maintain a wonderful career on the Shakespearean stage while dominating two major science fiction franchises, X-Men and Star Trek.

And I have to say, I've rarely seen Brian happier than when he was allowed to touch Picard's communicator badge.

It was wonderful because there were real meteorites at the recording.

So these things are four and a half billion years old, the primordial building blocks of the solar system, you get to touch the ingredients of Earth.

And yet, me and the rest of the audience were more impressed with Patrick Stewart's communicator badge.

Here is Patrick Stewart on Star Trek fiction versus cosmological reality.

And of course, Star Trek the Next Generation, and indeed the other shows, kind of there's this wonderful thing where a ship just goes, oh, look, here's another planet full of life.

Here's another planet full of life.

And of course, it actually turns out that the universe is of incredible size.

And to get anywhere, it's certainly with the technology that we're currently talking about, that actually the likelihood of being, you know, we'll get to another planet and go, no, that's just a kind of gas giant.

That's got nothing in it.

Yeah, but of course we didn't film those episodes.

I mean,

there were lots and lots and lots of weeks that we didn't find any aliens at all.

Oh well,

that's

warp nine.

There we go.

But you know, I'm not sure if this is the place and time to for a revelation, but you mentioned a date just now, Brian, 1987.

Now there is a connection between the arrival of Star Trek the Next Generation

and

the underfunding of the space race, and particularly of NASA.

Very few people know this, but Star Trek the Next Generation was actually financed by the American government and the CIA.

Why?

To distract the United States' attention away from the fact that we were no longer spending any money on space.

Now, that is a conspiracy theory, isn't it?

If you say so, Brian.

And can I just, I know this is kind of show and tell with what Monica has brought along.

I brought a little something too, which is also from outer space.

I'd just like you to pass it around you.

This was from the last year of the series.

Oh.

Security!

Isn't it?

Actually, there is something sad about the fact that I'm trying to get it.

We have to.

I tried to run it.

I had a piece of Mars in my hand and didn't say

this

it is a Star Trek it's a communicator it is so I can tap it and say an original not a not a that's I wore all the way through the last season so it's been around a bit

I have never that's the biggest reaction we have talked about some of the in

seven series some of the most incredible mind-blowing ideas of evolution of particle physics we have had people talking about CERN about the Large Hadron Collider and the incredible real things.

Something made by a prop manufacturer in a suburb of LA.

Can you believe such a thing exists?

Get the Turin shroud out of the way.

Put that in a bin.

Well, that's a bad example, isn't it?

What I'm comparing this to is the Turin shroud.

Let us now pass this relic, this nail of the cross that has been brought here.

Oh, I have stigmata too.

The Infinite Monkey Cage episodes we took all of these clips from are available on BBC Sands and the Infinite Monkey Cage back catalogue.

Next week we'll be hearing from Katie Brand about fruit generating chickens and Rufus Hound tells us how he would commit the perfect murder as we mull on what death is in the Infinite Monkey's Guide to Strawberries.

But before we go, there was a very special treat for us when we recorded our LA episode of Monkey Cage.

I remember when we walked into theatre, and you in particular, because you have this encyclopedic knowledge of 1970s television, got very excited.

Oh, the photos on the wall, the posts on the wall.

And then the most beautiful thing is, it's the Ricardo Montelbaum Theatre, and of course, Ricardo Montelbaum from Fantasy Island.

He was Khan in the Star Trek TV series, and then obviously Wrath of Khan, and then in the Spy Kids movies.

But before we went on, there's a pre-recorded announcement which just goes, ladies and gentlemen, please turn off your cellphones, otherwise you will experience the wrath of Khan.

Yeah, and then to make it even more surreal, Eric Idle and Jeff Lynn turned up unannounced and performed the first, and I think it's the only live rendition of our theme tune.

If you've enjoyed this discussion about science in the movies, here's another film-related podcast you might enjoy.

And if you've not enjoyed this podcast, you probably didn't get to this bit anyway.

Mirror, mirror on the wall.

Who's the greatest storyteller of all?

To countless fans worldwide, the answer is Walt Disney.

I'm Mel Gedreich and in my Radio 4 podcast, Walt Disney: A Life in Films, I'm leaping through the looking glass and entering the world of the man behind the mouse.

Who was the real Walt Disney, and how did somebody who molded Western pop culture in his image end up on his deathbed afraid that he'd be forgotten?

Through the stories of 10 of his greatest works, I'll be separating what's fact and what's fiction when it comes to this much-mythologized genius.

Listen now on BBC Sounds.

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