Christmas Special 2015

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Speaker 8 Suffs! The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

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Speaker 8 We demand to be seen. Winner, best book.
We demand to be quality.

Speaker 8 It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Speaker 10 Suffs.

Speaker 8 Playing the the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th. Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

Speaker 11 Hello, I'm Robin Inks.

Speaker 12 And I'm Brian Cox.

Speaker 11 And welcome to the podcast version of the Infinite Monkey Cage, which contains extra material that wasn't considered good enough for the radio. Enjoy it.

Speaker 14 Hello, I'm Robin Inks.

Speaker 15 And I'm Brian Cox, and it's Christmas Day.

Speaker 18 The day where everyone thinks about the thermodynamics of turkeys, the Newtonian dynamics of sleigh rides, and whether cranberries are alive or dead.

Speaker 7 Right, well, I'm not entirely sure everyone thinks like that.

Speaker 19 Anyway, so cranberries, alive or dead?

Speaker 18 Linear superposition.

Speaker 21 Of course.

Speaker 21 Same with every berry, aren't you? Every berry you put in a linear superposition.

Speaker 23 Absolutely.

Speaker 22 You don't see enough of that in Bake Off, do you?

Speaker 19 The linear superposition thing.

Speaker 25 Have you been thinking?

Speaker 20 Because this is Christmas Day, and I wonder whether, because the Schrödinger's perspective of opening presents, is it better not to open the present and it remains in a superposition going, it really is definitely what I wanted and also definitely what I not wanted, as opposed to opening it and finding out it's a dead cat.

Speaker 7 Which I have

Speaker 31 no idea why my uncle keeps giving me those, but I think he's very tight and he's also a vet.

Speaker 27 So, um,

Speaker 20 so we have taken a break from attempting to put together our Lego Large Hadron Collider, which is taking longer than we'd hoped.

Speaker 20 And we're going to bring you this monkey cage Christmas special because Christmas Day is a very special time.

Speaker 32 It is the only day of the year that I can watch Alastair Sims Scrooge without Brian going, Well, of course, ghosts break the first law of thermodynamics and say, say, ni, mi.

Speaker 18 Second law and the first law.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 18 Gibbs free energy. It's going to be negative.

Speaker 18 Delta H minus T delta S.

Speaker 18 You know what Delta S is?

Speaker 32 That's entropy.

Speaker 27 So that's a catchphrase from the second series which didn't catch on.

Speaker 29 The t-shirt sales not as high as we'd hoped.

Speaker 32 You'd imagine watching Ghost with him and a potter.

Speaker 23 So

Speaker 6 I don't want that.

Speaker 18 Today we're talking about the true meaning of Christmas, the Doctor Who Christmas special. There'll be no spoilers, there can't be because we haven't seen it yet.

Speaker 31 And why haven't we seen it?

Speaker 18 Because it would require time travel.

Speaker 16 And we still haven't perfected that machine, have we?

Speaker 20 For over 50 years, Doctor Who has twisted our universe into all manner of shapes, filling our minds with ideas and monsters. It's introduced us to real and imagined scientific ideas.

Speaker 29 It has been a portal creating thousands of sitting-room conversations about the nature of time and space.

Speaker 29 So to guide us through the real, the possible and the speculative ideas of Doctor Who, we have the usual panel of a physicist, a comedian, a special effects expert, an author and a member of the General Synod.

Speaker 23 Certainly not all the same person.

Speaker 24 And they are.

Speaker 37 Hello, my name is Paul Franklin and I design visual effects for Hollywood films including Inception and most recently Interstellar.

Speaker 37 And my favourite idea from Doctor Who is the Daleks, an enemy so terrifying, all our modern fears wrapped up into one, that we still find them terrifying terrifying even 50 years after we realise they'd be stopped by a couple of steps and a low wall.

Speaker 38 Apart from when they're not.

Speaker 38 My name is Simon Guerrier. I am a writer and I write Doctor Who books and comics and audio plays and the scientific secrets of Doctor Who.

Speaker 38 I think my favourite idea from Doctor Who is that you can make a living writing books and comics and audio plays from Doctor Who.

Speaker 40 My name's Victor Stock and I'm a priest and I was the Dean of Guildford where I first met Brian Cox and we started doing things together.

Speaker 6 Even

Speaker 7 one of those, he's a cheeky vicar this one.

Speaker 3 Even in Geneva.

Speaker 40 But since then I've retired and I live in London and my gig is working in Westminster Abbey. And my favourite Doctor Who thing is quite simple and straightforward at the moment.
And it's the TARDIS.

Speaker 40 And it's the TARDIS.

Speaker 40 Can I say why? Yes, you will. Thank you.

Speaker 40 The TARDIS is because it's like Christmas.

Speaker 40 Bethlehem is a small place, only religious people think this small stable's got something inside it which is bigger than the universe.

Speaker 40 And TARDIS, you get inside this little tiny whatever it is, and everything changes.

Speaker 13 The universe might be in.

Speaker 12 Oh, that was real proper vicar work.

Speaker 7 That was for anyone who didn't make it to a church, other proper.

Speaker 35 I was watching the Doctor Who special the other day, and as I looked at the TARDIS, I thought, isn't that a little bit like Easter?

Speaker 6 Anyway, so

Speaker 40 I don't think we were listening properly, I guess.

Speaker 35 But I did like it. It was very

Speaker 23 good with your allegories.

Speaker 19 Sorry, continue introducing yourself.

Speaker 36 So, over to.

Speaker 17 Hello, I'm Ross Noble. I have no scientific qualifications, and I was turned down for the job as the vicar of Guildford.

Speaker 10 But

Speaker 17 my favourite Doctor Who idea is the fact that one day I might be killed by a robot, Bertie Bassett.

Speaker 17 A muted response there, but a nod from the expert.

Speaker 9 Hello, my name is Faye Dauke. I'm a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London.
My PhD thesis title was Space-Time Wormholes.

Speaker 9 I research black holes, the big bang, and I'm trying to discover the deep structure of space-time. And my favorite Doctor Who item is the TARDIS for a slightly different reason than Victor's.

Speaker 9 It's because there are solutions of Einstein's equations for general relativity, in which

Speaker 9 space-time has a

Speaker 9 portal through which you can go, and inside of which has a certain size. And inside the space-time can be as big as you like.
You can fill that

Speaker 9 region with a space-time with as large a space-time volume as you choose. There are many different solutions.
They're called

Speaker 9 Oppenheimer-Schneider solutions. And so we don't know whether such solutions are physically real, but the idea of a TARDIS is contained within general relativity.

Speaker 15 And this is our panel.

Speaker 18 So, Ross, do you think the TARDIS should be renamed the Oppenheimer-Schneider machine?

Speaker 17 Well, that would be, well, you know, the fact, you know, the fact that the initial TARDIS actually means something, that's going to be a long, you know, when somewhere, when he gets a new companion, they go, what does TARDIS stand for?

Speaker 17 And he goes, what was it again?

Speaker 18 The Oppenheimer Schneider solution.

Speaker 17 Oh, god, no, I'm dyslexic. Forget it, I'm not even gonna try it.

Speaker 18 Yeah,

Speaker 18 what does TARDI stand for?

Speaker 17 Time and relative dimension in space.

Speaker 18 And what does that mean?

Speaker 17 Well, I'm glad you asked me that.

Speaker 17 Well, if you're gonna start putting me on the spot, let me just bring up the whole wormhole thing.

Speaker 17 Can we change the name so they're called like space wormholes or like time worm or something space, something scientific?

Speaker 17 Because everyone's now talking about wormholes, forgetting about actual wormholes.

Speaker 17 Do you know how disappointed worms are now? Because they've read all your books and stuff and they go, oh, brilliant, I'm off down my wormhole, still underground.

Speaker 17 They're not popping out on the other side of space. And it's not fair.
Come on, scientists, think of the worms.

Speaker 15 That's interesting because you live in Kent now, don't you?

Speaker 11 And that is, of course, not far from where Charles Darwin wrote his book, The Formation of Vegetable Moles Through the Action of Worms, with observation on the habits.

Speaker 19 Have you read it?

Speaker 1 Theatrical worms?

Speaker 12 Yeah. Well, no, I mean, all worms are theatrical in their own way, aren't they?

Speaker 19 Let's not prejudge them. Let's allow them to do their show and then decide if it's theatrical enough.

Speaker 17 It's really hard getting them little top hats on them, though, isn't it? It just keeps sliding off. You don't know.

Speaker 12 You put it on the wrong end.

Speaker 17 Does that answer your question?

Speaker 34 Yeah, does it answer?

Speaker 18 Not in the way I was imagining, but it'll do.

Speaker 26 So, Faye, time and relative dimension in space.

Speaker 36 Let's deal with it.

Speaker 32 What do you think, as a physicist, here is this was the starting point of Doctor Who, this police box, this police box that can apparently travel through time and space.

Speaker 23 And when you hear this phrase, time and relative dimension in space, what do you interpret that as?

Speaker 9 I think about space-time, which,

Speaker 9 according to Einstein's theory of general relativity, is the arena for everything that happens. And it's something which unifies both space and time.
And

Speaker 9 in a very

Speaker 9 in a way that's very beautifully encapsulated in science fiction like Doctor Who, we travel in space-time.

Speaker 9 So we don't have now, according to modern physics, a picture of the world as space, and we exist in space with time passing in the same way for everyone and everything.

Speaker 9 But we move, we live out our lives in space-time, we trace out trajectories in this four-dimensional arena called space-time. And that's very much in accord with the idea of time travel.

Speaker 9 If we're moving, traveling through time in this space-time arena, why can't we go back? So it raises that possibility immediately once you think about space-time as a whole,

Speaker 9 as a four-dimensional substance.

Speaker 30 So, you wouldn't say, so that's starting point for Doctor Who, in terms of science fiction, where sometimes things are just absolutely wonky, totally made up, that's actually not a bad starting point then for a children's science fiction show to have this object called the TARDIS.

Speaker 9 Well, time is something which human beings have wondered about ever since. Well, since we have records of people thinking about the nature of the world, people have thought about the nature of time.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 certainly, our current view of space-time, our current best understanding of the nature of space and time, definitely lends itself to the notion of time travel.

Speaker 9 In fact, people do research on time machines, and in the scientific literature, they're called closed time-like curves.

Speaker 9 You have to give them a you know, a fancier, more science-y-sounding name than time machines.

Speaker 9 Yeah, you can't call them time machines because you wouldn't get funded. So, you have to call them

Speaker 9 closed-time-like curves, and people really do try to figure out whether the laws of physics

Speaker 9 allow such entities. And

Speaker 9 unfortunately, the consensus is that probably not, but we still don't know how to incorporate quantum effects into our understanding of space-time. So

Speaker 9 until we do that, we could still say there's a small possibility that they could be, that they could be possible.

Speaker 18 So so Einstein's theory of general relativity permits

Speaker 18 those structures. So so wormholes, space-time wormholes,

Speaker 18 permits those at the moment. And so we have to conjecture that they won't be there in nature.

Speaker 9 There are solutions of the Einstein equations that have these closed time-like curves or time machines in them,

Speaker 9 and we have to explain or understand whether they're physically allowed in the universe. So it seems like they're probably on physical, but

Speaker 9 we don't have the final answer because we don't know how quantum matter can change our understanding of space-time.

Speaker 18 Simon, it could be real.

Speaker 38 It's all real.

Speaker 19 Come on, remember, this is a geek for money.

Speaker 36 He's not going to start getting rid of that payday.

Speaker 18 Who's the most scientific doctor?

Speaker 38 The third doctor, John Pertwee, is the one who most frequently refers to himself as a scientist. But that really depends on your kind of tolerance of the plots.

Speaker 39 I think

Speaker 38 there's lots of big, mad ideas in Doctor Who, but not all of them

Speaker 38 make scientists happy. Sometimes when Doctor Who gets its science slightly more left field from conventional thinking, you get lots of very angry people on the internet.

Speaker 23 You've just written a book all about the science of Doctor Who, and in researching that, I presume you have come across what were the ideas that have most angered people within the scientific community?

Speaker 18 Well,

Speaker 38 there was an episode last year in which the moon turned out to be an egg in which lived a moondragon. And

Speaker 38 what's weird is that that made people cross in a way that an episode a few years ago, a Christmas special a few years ago, where the earth turned out to be full of giant spider babies, didn't bother them at all.

Speaker 38 And so, what I found, I think, is that when people have criticised the science, what they mean is that they've criticised a tone of story, or they've not liked a particular story because it didn't,

Speaker 38 the logic inside that story didn't work. So, I think whether the science is right or not is a different question.

Speaker 18 And I should just say, for balance, what's the greatest Doctor Who episode?

Speaker 38 My favourite is a 1973 story called Planet of the Daleks, in which John Pertley goes to a planet of Daleks. It's a bit of a surprise halfway through.

Speaker 18 And

Speaker 38 he defeats this army of Daleks by unleashing a volcano that buries them.

Speaker 38 But because the writer wanted to make it a bit more space and exciting, he came up with the most silly idea he could think of, which is that rather than lava, hot lava, it's a volcano of ice, an ice canoe, as he called it.

Speaker 38 Sixteen years after that episode was shown, and it was just a bit of sort of fantasy fun really, um Voyager two going past the moons of Neptune took a photo, and we now think that not only do four of the moons in the solar system have ice canoes, but also Pluto.

Speaker 38 So, Doctor Who fluked it science.

Speaker 38 Now, there are some people who think that if you base your Doctor Who stories or your science fiction stories on real scientific discoveries, then that's proper hard science and that makes the story good.

Speaker 38 And in and this is where I think the lie comes, because what that would would mean is that when they made Planet of the Daleks in 1973, it was a silly fantasy story, but now, without anything changing in that story, it's now a proper hard science story.

Speaker 38 So that's kind of where I stand on it. I think the science can be right in a Doctor Who story, and it can still be ridiculous, or vice versa.

Speaker 22 Victor, what's the General Synod position on Doctor Who?

Speaker 40 I've absolutely no idea.

Speaker 40 I mean, the General Synod worries about some things which matter, and it it doesn't give much time and attention to the really essential,

Speaker 40 fundamental meaning of the universe, which is obviously science fiction.

Speaker 40 And Doctor Who, but I don't quite know why they haven't, and so I'm not very helpful on this, especially on Christmas Day after a very good lunch.

Speaker 43 Have you, I mean, things like, for instance, you know, Harry Potter, not from, I don't think, as far as I know, for the General Synod, but

Speaker 30 there have been religious organisations that have been very angry about this playing around with kind of ideas of witchcraft and magic.

Speaker 30 And I wonder if there has been anything in the history of Doctor Who where, certainly Mary Whitehouse, for instance, you know, she was very angry about, I think, the Tom Baker years, and in particular, some of the Philip Hinchcliffe episodes made her particularly cross.

Speaker 40 But she would have exploded by now, of course,

Speaker 40 mercifully.

Speaker 40 Oh dear, lots of her fans are still alive in Worthing and they'll ring up.

Speaker 40 I think an important thing to say as an Anglican is that we don't really go in for this nastiness. You know, we make friends with atheists and we go on on programmes like this.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 40 in our quiet, understated sort of middle-class liberal way, we really get on with most people.

Speaker 40 And I think a rather serious thing about this is that in Europe, we have had what we call the Enlightenment.

Speaker 40 That was preceded by the Reformation.

Speaker 40 The Enlightenment was followed by the Industrial Revolution. And religious people have had to come to terms with all these things.
And so,

Speaker 40 sensible, open-minded religious people are not so frightened about things like science fiction.

Speaker 40 And as it's Christmas Day, and which I think is the best day in the entire year because you get people round a table like this who are unlikely to get round a table any other time of the year, you know, the difficult relatives you feel you should invite, and it's so nice when they go.

Speaker 40 But

Speaker 1 that's the spirit of Christmas.

Speaker 40 I think this whole business of being able to meet people who you normally don't meet and be open to ideas that you really haven't got the faintest idea or hope of understanding is a frightfully good thing.

Speaker 40 But then that's the Church of England line.

Speaker 32 What I love about you, Victor, you seem to be made out of bits of Ealing Films and Dick Emery.

Speaker 7 Well, it's a lovely, it's a beautiful monster, the Anglican monster.

Speaker 40 That is the Church of England.

Speaker 3 Paul, you

Speaker 33 mentioned already, did double Oscar winner for Inception in Interstellar.

Speaker 23 And when we were growing up, one of the great excitements was seeing on things like the multicolour swap shop, Matt Irving explaining the special effects, you know, very low budget and putting those things together.

Speaker 23 How important was Doctor Who in terms of forming the human being you are now?

Speaker 37 Absolutely essential. A long time ago, I was up for a job at the BBC early on in my career.
And

Speaker 37 they asked me what had inspired me to get into making visual effects for films. And I told them it was Doctor Who in a specific episode from the 70s.
And

Speaker 37 I think they were a little bit disappointed.

Speaker 36 I think they wanted me to wait a little bit higher.

Speaker 37 But it actually, yeah, it's been a huge influence on me. But I was thinking, you're talking about the science of Doctor Who.

Speaker 37 I think there's at least two or three different explanations for the death of the dinosaurs in Doctor Who.

Speaker 37 And it's a little bit like science, because each time they come up with a new explanation, it gets a little bit closer to scientific truth.

Speaker 37 I think the last time they did it was the Cybermen had crashed their spaceship into the Earth and like the big asteroid.

Speaker 22 Well, I mean, that's true in the 1970s, but in the early 1970s, dinosaur episodes, I don't think people knew why the dinosaurs died out. There was a lot of conjecture.

Speaker 23 So, you mentioned, though, that there was one particular episode that influenced you.

Speaker 37 So, which was it? It was a thing called Frontier in Space,

Speaker 37 which is a John Pertwee adventure. And the reason why I remember it is because they had a Blue Peter special about the effects, how they did the models.

Speaker 37 And I remember, I think it was probably Matt Irvine or someone like that

Speaker 37 showing this model spacecraft coming into land, and then they had a little puff of air to kick the dust up around it.

Speaker 25 I thought, that's so cool, that's what I want to do.

Speaker 18 Interstellar is a film that's famous for paying attention to the scientific detail and taking artistic license where necessary. But I was thinking about the black hole in particular.

Speaker 18 Wasn't that published, your simulation?

Speaker 37 Yeah, we well, we what we did to create the black hole for the film,

Speaker 37 we had to write a new piece of software which implemented Einstein's equations from general relativity.

Speaker 37 Kip Thorne, who's our scientific advisor on the film, who's a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech in Pasadena, he worked very, very closely with all the software designers in the visual effects department to create this new renderer, as it's called, which draws the images of the black hole.

Speaker 37 And it calculates the way that the light beams travel through the gravitationally warped space and go into orbit around the black hole, get distorted, and then come back out and hit the camera to produce that image of the black hole with this big sort of halo around it.

Speaker 37 It looks like a sort of hellish version of the London Underground logo.

Speaker 37 And the software that we put together for that calculated it so accurately we discovered, well, we observed a few interesting things happening in the space very close to the edge of the black hole shadow.

Speaker 37 We got a scientific paper out of that.

Speaker 38 So

Speaker 37 I am a co-author on that paper, which I do feel a tiny little bit of a fraud because I have a degree in sculpture.

Speaker 23 What did you contribute?

Speaker 21 Chicken wire and papier mache?

Speaker 38 I saw a payoff.

Speaker 18 I was going to say that that command of physics is impressive impressive from a sculptor.

Speaker 18 Can you speak on sculpture with such

Speaker 12 authority?

Speaker 18 Well, the black hole and the wormholes you've mentioned before are

Speaker 18 allowable in general relativity.

Speaker 22 They are.

Speaker 9 And the wormholes.

Speaker 12 Speak wormholes. Come on.

Speaker 9 You're absolutely right. There are two different sorts of wormholes.

Speaker 12 Oh, what?

Speaker 17 I've never heard those words read before.

Speaker 17 Go on, no, there's two sorts of worms.

Speaker 9 The wormhole in

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 So those are spatial wormholes.

Speaker 9 My PhD thesis was about space-time wormholes, and you're completely right to make the distinction because they are very different.

Speaker 23 Three types of worms.

Speaker 6 Worms.

Speaker 12 Worms.

Speaker 9 The space-time wormholes are interesting. They are

Speaker 9 not these shortcuts in space, but they are space-times where two disconnected portions of the universe can merge and become one.

Speaker 9 And the space-time looks something like a pair of trousers.

Speaker 9 So if you imagine a pair of trousers, then the two disconnected portions of the universe that are going to merge are the legs.

Speaker 9 And then they come together, of course, and then the waist region that's the new universe that has formed out of the two disconnected pieces.

Speaker 9 And the two disconnected pieces come together at what is called scientifically the crotch singularity.

Speaker 17 Don't tempt me, madam.

Speaker 41 And

Speaker 9 the the interesting thing is that the consensus, the scientific consensus on the crotch is that it produces an infinite burst of energy.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 this probably makes this space-time unphysical.

Speaker 9 But again, we will have to wait until we have a full theory of quantum gravity to be able to

Speaker 9 give the final word on this.

Speaker 21 Well, welcome to Call My Bluff.

Speaker 6 So, Ross

Speaker 19 is space-time trouser singularity.

Speaker 40 Sorry, I was going to say if this hasn't been condemned by the church already, it soon will be.

Speaker 15 Well, we'll move on from Crotch Singularity to, it's really weird because I wasn't expecting you would be the one that would create all of the complaints.

Speaker 39 I was going to,

Speaker 18 we were talking about the questions earlier. There's one here that says, Ross, has there been a lack of imagination in science fiction?

Speaker 39 But it sounds a redundant question, though.

Speaker 17 It's given me an idea for a new film.

Speaker 16 So, Simon, I want to say, we've been talking a little bit, but in fact, black holes, we should get back to black holes, which is

Speaker 24 they are meant to be, isn't that the TARDIS operates basically from a black hole? That the very power of the Time Lords comes from a black hole?

Speaker 38 Well, yes, but as the most recently, it's been established that the engine of the TARDIS is a black hole, frozen in the moment of its collapse and used as a power source.

Speaker 38 But that's a fairly recent idea in Doctor Who. You can see just how black holes have appeared in Doctor Who over the years.

Speaker 17 A kind of

Speaker 38 development of people getting used to the idea. The first black hole is mentioned in The Three Doctors in December 1972,

Speaker 38 which is about a year after Cygnus X1 was first being written about the first black hole that they think was discovered. So they seem to have taken this idea out of the news and run a story on it.

Speaker 38 And the Time Lords refer to it as the black hole, as if it's the only one, or it's the one that's near them.

Speaker 38 And

Speaker 38 the writers, one of whom would later go on to write the Wallace and Grommet films,

Speaker 38 that they come up with a story where there's a beam of antimatter that leads into a universe of antimatter on the other side of this black hole, and that seems to be confusing to scientific ideas that were going around at the time.

Speaker 38 When black holes are then used again in Doctor Who in a Tom Baker story, The Deadly Assassin, there's a thing called the Eye of Harmony, which the Doctor realizes as if this is something that Time Lords don't generally know is a black hole.

Speaker 38 He kind of translates this

Speaker 38 text from the old times which talks about it and goes, They're talking about a black hole. And that seems to be the power source of the Time Lords.

Speaker 38 A few years later, there's a story called The Horns of Naimon, where

Speaker 38 Graeme Crowden's Saldeed has got two black holes, artificial black holes, that have created a tunnel between them, so he can get from one place to another and surprise everybody. And again,

Speaker 19 you're one of the stranger villains.

Speaker 15 I'm all kind of show, busy Rogers and Hammerstein.

Speaker 38 That is exactly what that story is like.

Speaker 19 That was the last of the Douglas Adams stories, I believe.

Speaker 38 Yes, the last of the transmitted ones. And then,

Speaker 38 but the doctor is traveling at the time with his companion, who's a Time Lord, Romana,

Speaker 38 and she is completely surprised by this and doesn't think artificial black holes are possible and doubts the whole thing.

Speaker 38 So, there's this kind of idea that even the Timelords don't think that black holes are possible.

Speaker 38 Yet, more recently, when you get the Paul McGann TV movie, we learn that there's a the Eye of Harmony is inside his TARDIS.

Speaker 38 And now we've got this thing where Matt Smith goes into the engines of the TARDIS and there's a black hole.

Speaker 38 So it's never been really said: has that one black hole that was on Gallifray now been moved into the Doctor's TARDIS, or do all TARDIS's have a black hole inside them, or is it the Doctor's TARDIS special?

Speaker 38 I actually think that's kind of missing the point. What you're seeing is that the people making Doctor Who and the general public more

Speaker 38 readily have got more used to the idea of black holes, and it's become tamer to use it in stories.

Speaker 18 Do you think, Paul, that the

Speaker 18 so a film or indeed a television series that pays attention to the science is necessarily better as a piece of art, a piece of film? film?

Speaker 37 Well, you know, I was thinking a bit about Star Trek the other day and the opening

Speaker 37 voiceover where Captain Kirk is saying to explore the universe and seek out strange new worlds and new life and everything.

Speaker 37 But now we've learnt that most of the universe is invisible, that it's dark matter and dark energy.

Speaker 37 And so if you said to seek out and explore the 5% of the universe that we can actually see, it wouldn't be quite so interesting.

Speaker 37 So I think the program makers, the script writers often take a lot of license with it. But I often think the best science fiction is like an Einstein thought experiment.

Speaker 37 I mean, interstellar allows us to go and explore and visit places that we couldn't do otherwise.

Speaker 37 You know, and I thought some people complain: they say, oh, you know, if the spacecraft would get destroyed, they'd be killed by X-rays or gamma rays or whatever.

Speaker 37 But then we wouldn't be able to go inside a black hole and see what happens to Matthew McConnelly. So it's

Speaker 39 kind of what science fiction does.

Speaker 18 Kip Thorne got very defensive, didn't he, about some of those sort of charges.

Speaker 18 He claims that he calculated virtually everything.

Speaker 37 Yeah, he did. He really did.

Speaker 12 uh, he, I

Speaker 37 was basically appointed the bridge to Kip whilst we were shooting the film.

Speaker 37 So we were on the stage and we were doing things, and Chris would come and say, Chris Nolan, our director, would say, Oh, I want to do this with the spacecraft. I want to blow it up.

Speaker 37 And he wanted to break it, you know, it was a big ring-shaped spacecraft, he wanted to break it. And it's still supposed to be spinning.

Speaker 37 And I said, Well, I don't think it will hold together and fly to bits. Let's leave a little bit in.
But he was adamant, he wanted to break it.

Speaker 37 So I would immediately get on the phone and call Kip in Pasadena and say, He wants to do this.

Speaker 37 Is this possible? And Kip would say, Oh, it sounds very, very dubious to me. I'll make some calls.
And he'd call up his friends at NASA, at JPL, and run this hypothetical question past them.

Speaker 37 And then he'd come back and say to me, much to my surprise, if we assume the spacecraft has one-inch thick aluminium walls, it'll hold together. So, we ended up breaking the ring on the spacecraft.

Speaker 37 But

Speaker 37 Kip

Speaker 37 was involved throughout the whole process. And

Speaker 37 Chris, who, to be perfectly honest, you know, had I didn't think was that interested in science. I've worked on five films with Chris.

Speaker 37 He totally embraced that.

Speaker 37 But he would do things like he would say to Kip, for instance, there's a planet where the time dilation factor is one hour on the planet's surface is seven years back on Earth.

Speaker 37 And Kip said, well, I don't think that's possible. There's no orbit that would be stable, that the planet could be orbiting the black hole that close for that

Speaker 37 time dilation factor. And he'd say, well, it's non-negotiable.
Go away and think about it. And so, Kip went away.
This is how Chris works: he said, I want it like this.

Speaker 37 All the great directors do this,

Speaker 37 they don't listen to anybody else, they just do their thing.

Speaker 37 And Kip went away and ran all of Einstein's equations and came back and again said, Well, much to my surprise, if we imagine a black hole that's a hundred million times the mass of the Sun spinning at very close to the speed of light,

Speaker 37 then there will be a stable orbit where you can have one hour equals seven years. It might not be a very nice place to visit.

Speaker 36 That's fantastic, just the idea of Hollywood.

Speaker 40 I don't care.

Speaker 35 Change the law of physics.

Speaker 6 Well, I don't care.

Speaker 23 They've been running it for billions of years.

Speaker 32 They need it for scene seven.

Speaker 37 That'd be a simple request most of the time.

Speaker 15 Was there a scientific advisor on inception?

Speaker 37 I think Chris consulted with various

Speaker 37 psychologists and people who dealt with the field of psychology and the imagery of dreams and things like that.

Speaker 39 And he knows a lot about that himself.

Speaker 37 But no, and there wasn't one working with us on a day-to-day basis. And I think during Dark Knight Rises, I think I was possibly the nuclear physics consultant on that.

Speaker 17 At no point did he go, well, basically, I want Bane to have this thing where no one's going to be able to hear him. Ah, that'll be fine.

Speaker 17 Could we put a switch on it that just goes, oh, that's better.

Speaker 18 You may laugh, but monkey cage regulars will know that one of our guests, the cosmologist Sean Carroll, was science advisor on Thor.

Speaker 44 Yeah, because he said that

Speaker 44 I asked him, and I said, science advisor on Thor, why?

Speaker 36 He said, obviously, you know that bit where they look at you go,

Speaker 24 don't you know anything?

Speaker 32 Because obviously they wanted the wormholes, space wormholes.

Speaker 23 But what he said was merely wormholes. So I'm now realizing how inexact he was, Ross, thanks to you.

Speaker 19 Because we wanted the wormholes that the gods of Asgard travelled through to be as authentic as possible. It's a clash of ideologies there.

Speaker 18 I've just realised, actually, coincidentally,

Speaker 18 the t-shirt I've got on is from the film Sunshine, on which I was science advisor,

Speaker 18 in which the sun stopped working and we went to fix it.

Speaker 17 But it was, it obviously worked because Benedict Wong is now working at NASA.

Speaker 38 If you've seen The Martian.

Speaker 17 That's a very specific reference there, but that's geeky.

Speaker 12 Now, out geek that

Speaker 38 in 52 years, it's been on air, it's only ever had one official scientific advisor, which was back in the early 60s.

Speaker 38 And the production team, a new production team, came in in late 1966 and they wanted to make the show kind of connect with the audience more. So they set more stories in the present day

Speaker 38 and they made to base stories on real science. And so the script editor at the time interviewed four or had lunch with four scientists who might be scientific advisors.
He met with

Speaker 38 Patrick Moore, he met with the engineer Eric Lathwaite from Imperial, he met with Alex Comfort, who would later write The Joy of Sex, but at the time was a leading proponent of

Speaker 38 science of senescence and aging, though I'd quite like to see what the Joy of Sex Doctor Who stories would have been like.

Speaker 38 And finally, he met with Kit Pedler, who was an ophthalmologist ophthalmologist, an eye doctor,

Speaker 38 and they got talking about lots of different things. One of which was, how can we use the post office tower, the BT tower as it now is, which had just been built in a Doctor Who story.

Speaker 38 And Kit Pedler gave him a story about, well, what about there's this mad idea of getting a computer to talk to another computer down a phone line.

Speaker 38 So there's a story from 1966 called The War Machines, in which the internet creates machines that knock over boxes in London.

Speaker 38 They talked about the various scientific ideas about how populations were controlled with music and drugs and you know this kind of idea that you could do that.

Speaker 38 There were lots of theories that that was being done in some of the communist countries.

Speaker 38 So you get a a story called The Macroterror, where the doctor and his friends free everyone from giant invisible crabs that nobody believes in.

Speaker 38 And then there's a a story where they they were talking about this idea of what would happen if you had a a a planet that was just like Earth sharing its orbit, which it had been around since before

Speaker 38 Pluto had been discovered. It was one of the ideas about what could affect things gravity and explain some of the anomalies in Newton's ideas of how the planets went around the Sun.

Speaker 38 And they were talking about this, and Kit Padler says, Well, there's this new idea, which is about rather than for space travel, rather than fitting spaceships so that they create an Earth-like environment in which astronauts can live, that's a very costly way to do it.

Speaker 38 Maybe the way to have people working permanently in space is to kind of equip them with their own inbuilt air conditioning systems in a thing called cybernetics.

Speaker 38 And that's where the cybermen came from. And the cybermen were invented by the scientific advisor on Doctor Who.

Speaker 38 And then they went off and made their own programmes. And Doctor Who's never had a scientific advisor in that.

Speaker 17 So the eye doctor, because

Speaker 17 what happens? Sorry, to I just with the weeping angels, what happens to blind people?

Speaker 38 No,

Speaker 38 if you look at them, they freeze if they can't move.

Speaker 39 That's a good thing, isn't it?

Speaker 17 Yeah, that's what I mean. Like, if you look at them, they've frozen, and as soon as you blink, they're not.
And then a blind person would just literally straight in dead.

Speaker 15 Or if the dog is looking at the angels,

Speaker 17 not that I've spent a lot of time not sleeping because of this, right? So, blind fellows there, he's got his guy dog, right?

Speaker 17 He's approaching that, so he can't sit, so he's knackered, right? But the dog's looking at the angels, so it's not coming closer, right?

Speaker 17 So, what I don't understand is why doesn't the doctor just carry a dog?

Speaker 25 See what I'm saying?

Speaker 12 I'm glad I'm here.

Speaker 18 Several dogs in case one blinks.

Speaker 17 Exactly. Two dogs.

Speaker 12 Timing it so that every time that dog blinks, four dogs.

Speaker 6 So you're going to really annoy now.

Speaker 1 Get the statistics.

Speaker 39 You say I should be.

Speaker 26 Why did they bring back canine?

Speaker 11 It was that bloody idiot Ross Noble.

Speaker 10 So exactly.

Speaker 17 K-9, that's what he's there for.

Speaker 39 He is one of the weeping angels.

Speaker 38 Faye,

Speaker 18 I wanted to get to the w we talk about interstellar, we talked about wormholes, and and you mentioned that space wormholes, space-time wormholes, is all of them.

Speaker 18 And and you you mentioned that that they're potentially possible, or at least not ruled out given what we know, which would mean that that time travel would be possible.

Speaker 18 Uh the what's interesting about interstellar is that as I understand it, one of the interpretations for that film is that time travel's possible, but you're still in a consistent universe, so we don't have free will in Interstellar.

Speaker 18 You see that Matthew McConnell's character can't stop himself

Speaker 18 leaving his daughter's bedroom, he can't change history. So, I'm going to ask a really simple question: Do you think we have free will?

Speaker 18 Could you imagine a sensible universe, a universe, this universe, with wormholes and time machines?

Speaker 9 I probably exaggerated the likelihood that

Speaker 9 these things are possible. I mean,

Speaker 9 yeah, the consensus is that if, unless there are some surprises in store in the physics that we don't yet know,

Speaker 9 it's most likely that they're not possible. And

Speaker 9 it's true that

Speaker 9 when the story, the full story, the full space-time story

Speaker 9 is consistent, as it is in Interstellar and as it is in Terminator and as it is in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure,

Speaker 9 then you can't have free will. Whatever happens has to happen, and

Speaker 9 you can't change that. You can't make a new decision.
You can't decide not to go in the time machine and go back in time. But it doesn't allow for any

Speaker 9 deviation, any it's very, very

Speaker 9 finely tuned. The universe has got to be very, very finely tuned.
And that is counter to the second law of thermodynamics.

Speaker 9 It's although it's possible, and you can set things up so that they're just perfectly right, so that it's consistent all consistent. Any little deviation will ruin everything.

Speaker 9 So that's a feature of these

Speaker 9 consistent

Speaker 9 universes where there is time travel that most physicists would say is unnatural.

Speaker 9 It's something that is not

Speaker 9 accord with the physics that we understand. It doesn't accord with the second law of thermodynamics, for example.

Speaker 18 I suppose, though, Victor,

Speaker 18 in

Speaker 39 uh your world

Speaker 18 there is uh that there there is a I suppose God sits outside time well no in your I'm not saying that as an insider possibly if there is a God then it's in my world as well but um but good s so in Christian theology let me put it that way in Christian theology God sits outside of time I think this is something which this is Anglican hesitation here

Speaker 40 I'm trying to think what the answer might be

Speaker 40 I'd like to say a bit more about free will if I may which is one of the great big arguments in theology in the last 2,000 years has been about free will.

Speaker 40 And people come down on, you know, we've got it or we haven't got it. And I, again,

Speaker 40 laughing at myself, but of course that disguises a deep seriousness, think that we do have free will, but not much.

Speaker 22 That, by the way, is a true Anglican answer.

Speaker 36 I think we probably do, but maybe only a little bit.

Speaker 23 We can't be sure.

Speaker 40 Mince pie?

Speaker 18 Fay, though, that the if you take Einstein's theories of relativity, if you take space-time, especially in general relativity, at face value, then you end up with this picture, don't you, of so-called block universe, which means that the whole thing is there.

Speaker 18 So there's no definition between the unique definition between past, present, and future. The whole thing's laid out, so the past is there, the future is there.

Speaker 18 And in such a universe, we don't have free will, do we? If you take the theory at face value.

Speaker 9 If you think of free will as being something non-material and spiritual, then there's no place for that in physics at all, no matter what your picture is.

Speaker 9 So we make decis the question is, how do we understand how we make a decision?

Speaker 41 Well,

Speaker 9 if you make a decision for some reason, then

Speaker 9 that's the explanation of why you make the decision.

Speaker 9 And I completely fail to understand what's problematic about that. I mean, you you have a decision you to make, you think about it, for some

Speaker 9 you weigh what you're going to do, what's going to happen if you make the decision one way or the other way, and then you think about it and you think, Well, I prefer this, and then you do that.

Speaker 9 And a decision is made because of everything that's happened to you up to that point,

Speaker 9 and

Speaker 9 that determines which way you'll decide, or it's just totally random, in which case there's nothing to understand about it.

Speaker 9 So, uh yeah, I I'm completely uninterested in the question of whether there's free will. It seems to me.

Speaker 19 See, that's a very typical physicist's answer. You're all doing absolutely exactly as we'd hoped to cast you.

Speaker 39 Well done.

Speaker 21 Ross, what's your favourite monster?

Speaker 25 Oh, monster.

Speaker 17 I thought you said monster. I was going to say ermine.

Speaker 38 My favourite, what, Doctor Who monster?

Speaker 17 Well, as I said earlier, I like the, I forget what he's called, but that Bertie Bassett robot thing.

Speaker 38 The Candyman.

Speaker 39 Candyman, of course it was, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 17 Which, you know, as you can tell, I was very much in the Sylvester McCoy era when nobody was watching.

Speaker 17 And they just went.

Speaker 17 That's when, of course, when the Daleks first flew, of course.

Speaker 38 Technically, they flew. Oh, sorry.

Speaker 39 But yeah, I'm not going to be able to do it.

Speaker 31 Technically, what?

Speaker 15 At last, you as the Doctor Writer have been able to go, well, technically, come on, Lee, that's the one.

Speaker 39 Sorry, No, go on. Technically, what?

Speaker 38 So, so in Revelation of the Daleks, the Colin Baker Dalek story, the Daleks do, Davros floats above William Gaunt as he's electrocuting him.

Speaker 38 So, Remembrance of the Daleks is the second one where we see a Dalek flying, if you count Davros as a Dalek.

Speaker 38 It all gets a bit into, as scientists are prone to say, I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.

Speaker 36 Well, we have now, unfortunately, run out of time.

Speaker 29 So, we asked our audience a question as well, and we asked them, Who would you like like to see play Doctor Who and why?

Speaker 19 And what was lovely by the way was a lot of you just gave very very serious answers and went Ben Wisha.

Speaker 22 He'd be very good.

Speaker 27 That was excellent.

Speaker 31 Is this a trick question? Professor Brian Cox of course.

Speaker 11 Or James McAvoy.

Speaker 18 Chair, so she can turn back time.

Speaker 14 Jeremy Clarkson, for his exceptional skills in hand-to-hand combat make him the most dangerous doctor in the world.

Speaker 18 Me, Matt Smith.

Speaker 18 J.O., Jeremy Corbyn. It will be his only chance to save humanity.

Speaker 16 Brian Cox, because look how shiny he is.

Speaker 28 I always think you'd view more like an auton. I think you are a little kind of auton, baby.

Speaker 12 That's Jimmy Carr.

Speaker 33 Nobody, because then I were again one hour of my boyfriend's time a week.

Speaker 32 Felicity Bainbridge.

Speaker 14 So, thank you very much to our guests: Faye Dowker, Simon Gurrier, Paul Franklin, the very Reverend Victor Stock, and Ross Noble.

Speaker 7 We are back in January with our new series.

Speaker 23 Victor, as it is Christmas, and you are our resident former Dean of Guildford Cathedral.

Speaker 33 I'd like to make we don't see any of the others. You are the only former Dean of Guildford Cathedral we ever have on this show, and I'd like to make that clear.

Speaker 29 So, have you got a Christmas message for the Doctor Who fans and the Monkey cage listeners?

Speaker 40 Well, I think what I want to say is this: that the monkey cage makes extremely complicated scientific ideas attractive.

Speaker 40 That's why it works.

Speaker 40 And for religious people, when the whole business of the universe, the way we behave,

Speaker 40 the dreadful things we do to each other, is inexplicable, Christmas is about God

Speaker 40 making himself attractive, and that's why we all have these Christmas lunches and too much to drink, and that's great, and sit about wishing the relatives would go home.

Speaker 40 But the serious business is that we all feel a bit better on Christmas Day because this particular bit of Christianity is very attractive, and in that way, I think there's a kind of bow to the monkey cage.

Speaker 40 And

Speaker 40 I want to say, as a priest who knows absolutely, obviously,

Speaker 40 diddly squid about science,

Speaker 40 I want to say that

Speaker 40 you make something really important

Speaker 40 attractive to all sorts of people. And thank you.

Speaker 39 Thank you.

Speaker 21 Picture stop.

Speaker 11 Thank you very much, Pikta.

Speaker 30 And so that brings us to the end of the show. And I...

Speaker 12 Ross!

Speaker 36 Behind you!

Speaker 31 A space-time wormhole!

Speaker 26 I think this is a space-time anomaly!

Speaker 39 No, no, it isn't.

Speaker 23 Is it not? No. Oh, we've really overeated that one then, haven't we?

Speaker 43 Never mind.

Speaker 27 Tell you what, let's hope we get to the middle eight, though.

Speaker 6 They like that.

Speaker 16 That was the Infinite Monkey Cage podcast. Hope you enjoyed it.

Speaker 32 Did you spot the 15 minutes that was cut out for radio?

Speaker 22 Hmm.

Speaker 30 Anyway, there's a competition in itself.

Speaker 11 What do you think? It should be more than 15 minutes. Shut up.
It's your fault. You downloaded it.
Anyway, there's other scientific programmes also that you can listen to.

Speaker 13 Yeah, there's that one with Jimmy Alkaseltzer.

Speaker 11 Life Scientific.

Speaker 13 There's Abby Brother Fiddy's dad discovered the atomic nucleus. That's Inside Science.

Speaker 11 All in the Mind with Claudia Hammond.

Speaker 13 Richard Hammond's sister.

Speaker 19 Richard Hammond's sister.

Speaker 11 Thank you very much, Brian. And also Frontiers, a selection of science documentaries on many, many different subjects.
These are some of the science programmes that you can listen to.

Speaker 45 Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

Speaker 45 Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past. In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed.

Speaker 45 From getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg brothers, listen to You're Dead to Me Now, wherever you get your podcasts.