Episode 1

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Speaker 1 This is a download from the BBC.

Speaker 10 To find out more, visit bbc.co.uk slash radio4.

Speaker 12 Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox.

Speaker 15 And we spend most of our time on Radio 4 presenting the science panel show The Infinite Monkey Cage, but today we're doing something different.

Speaker 19 We're presenting a documentary about one of the most wonderful ideas to come out of a human mind.

Speaker 16 So, like all documentaries, we are going to take you on a journey.

Speaker 18 Though in this case, it's quite a short journey falling down a lift shaft.

Speaker 24 Or, more correctly, according to Einstein's theory of general relativity, a journey floating in an inertial frame of reference, waiting for the bottom of the lift shaft to hit us.

Speaker 24 Are you being served is and was always meant to be I think a tutorial on general relativity.

Speaker 13 Good. So 10 years ago we celebrated the centenary of special relativity which is E equals mc squared the most famous equation to exist in the history of human civilization.

Speaker 24 Which gives me some hope, actually, for popular culture, because the fact that there is a most famous equation means that we're not floating in an all-enveloping darkness of trivia.

Speaker 13 See, that's the problem, though. It's very easy.

Speaker 16 When you get one of those shows, the countdown of the top ten equations, we always know E equals M C squared is going to be number one, but no one knows the position of any of the other equations.

Speaker 12 F equals M A.

Speaker 16 Oh, that probably would be number two, wouldn't it?

Speaker 1 Anyway, so E equals M C squared.

Speaker 26 Brian, what does that mean?

Speaker 24 Well, it really means means that energy and mass are interchangeable, but it comes from special relativity, which is a theory of space and time.

Speaker 24 Space and time are no longer to be considered separate entities, they're merged together into a structure called space-time.

Speaker 14 So 10 years after E equals MC squared, now we celebrate general relativity.

Speaker 1 General relativity.

Speaker 20 I think the majority of people wouldn't necessarily know the equation for general relativity, so that is.

Speaker 24 Well, the equation is g mu nu equals t mu nu with a few pi's and Newton's gravitational content scattered all over the place but essentially what it means is that space-time can curve and in the immortal words of the great physicist John Wheeler matter and energy tells space-time how to curve and space-time tells matter how to move so g mu nu equals t mu nu but why why was that pi g over c to the four t mu mu mu mu mu nu mu this is uh it's lovely isn't isn't it?

Speaker 14 When it has one moment, it's Einstein, the next moment it's Edward Lear.

Speaker 30 But what is it?

Speaker 15 What is it about this particular idea that makes it so admired by physicists, cosmologists, and indeed failed physics students?

Speaker 24 Because it's ripe primarily.

Speaker 16 Yeah, no, but there's lots of other physics that's ripe. You don't get people going on about it as much as.
I mean,

Speaker 31 just the first time the universe appears in an equation.

Speaker 11 It's the first time that mankind attempts to write down some maths that describes the entire universe and everything in it.

Speaker 33 The general theory of relativity is the most beautiful physical theory ever invented. I think that that's a very, very defensible statement.

Speaker 33 And there's some pretty beautiful physical theories out there. But the way that it's self-contained and elegant and very, very compact and precise and how difficult it is to mess with it.

Speaker 33 You know, like every time we try to fix it or make it better, we end up making it worse.

Speaker 35 What he did with general relativity is of such a different scale, it's almost impossible to describe.

Speaker 35 He gave us a fundamentally new language and a totally, totally different way of thinking about the world. I can't really parallel it with anything else in the history of knowledge that I know of.

Speaker 36 The reason John Little is beautiful because it was one of the great genuine Eureka moments where somebody, through sheer brain power, realized that we were looking at the universe the wrong way and that actually the relationship between what's in there and what's space around them and all that is completely different to what we thought.

Speaker 36 That's all you please don't do the journey.

Speaker 32 The journey through the equations is really long, but the results, oh, the results are beautiful.

Speaker 29 So we've been warned by Dara not to go on the mathematical journey.

Speaker 14 So would you say that perhaps two half hours on Radio 4 won't manage to be quite enough to cover what is normally done in three years of undergraduate physics?

Speaker 24 No, because

Speaker 24 the story of what the mathematics tells you is explicable and understandable, as we hope to show.

Speaker 13 Let us see if we can achieve that. We will return to the cosmologists.
But first, we set a just-a-minute task for three physics students who were wooed wooed away from physics by show business.

Speaker 27 Quite the opposite, of course, of your own journey, Brian.

Speaker 11 My name's Ben Miller. I am a comic actor and I started life as a physicist.
I did a degree in physics and I did about half a PhD in physics as well.

Speaker 36 My name is Dara O'Brien. I have a BSc in Mathematical Physics and Mathematics from University College Dublin, awarded sometime in the mid-90s by via a very circuitous route around the department.

Speaker 10 My name is Richard Vranch and although I now work as a comedian improvising at the comedy store I did study at physics and I did a PhD and I was briefly a fellow of St.

Speaker 10 John's Oxford and I'm a sort of a lapsed physicist I suppose.

Speaker 37 So Richard Vranch you have one minute on general relativity starting now.

Speaker 10 General relativity is a lot more complicated than it looks, but that's true of a lot of physics. Even Einstein's most famous equation, E equals M C squared, contains a lot of hidden treachery.

Speaker 10 So even in that, it's not quite as complicated. It's much more complicated than

Speaker 8 damn.

Speaker 15 There we go, a challenge, hesitation, or repetition of damn.

Speaker 13 Dara, you have 33 seconds on general relativity, starting now.

Speaker 36 The best way to explain general relativity is that it gives a view of the universe around us us that shows that matter

Speaker 36 mass of an object shapes the space that surrounds it that the very nature of the surrounding oh i know i said surround twice but how can you not say space twice there's no like euphemism for space Space is space.

Speaker 6 This is impossible.

Speaker 16 Dara, you correctly challenged yourself there with repetition.

Speaker 14 but as challenging yourself, we're actually going to pass it over to Ben Miller.

Speaker 16 Ben Miller, you have seven seconds on general relativity starting now.

Speaker 11 General relativity is a theory proposed by the physicist Albert Einstein. He finished in 1915.

Speaker 11 It essentially describes gravity as an acceleration within a higher dimensional space rather than a force which occurs between objects that have mass.

Speaker 11 Its implications are enormous because it teaches us not only that distant galaxies will have their light red-shifted because they are moving away from us, but also if that light passes through a gravitational field.

Speaker 11 If you like, the light has to struggle up through the four-dimensional well of space-time to reach our eyes and becomes stretched and crimson as a result. See, I avoided red.

Speaker 30 Well done Ben.

Speaker 13 But Richard Vranch has challenged the very nature of the time measurement we are using for this particular take on just a minute.

Speaker 15 So Richard Vranch, you have however long I suppose it's going to take to explain how the nature of time that we're using is in some ways forfeiting the entire conceit.

Speaker 10 If you did have a minute to describe general relativity and you were travelling quite quickly, the good news is you'd have just over over a minute because people looking at you would see your minute clock ticking down slightly more slowly than you saw it so you'd have longer to say this than you thought you had though it wouldn't make it any easier.

Speaker 20 Oh we have a challenge there from Professor Brian Cox.

Speaker 24 Yeah he's not at liberty to change the rate of passage of time in his own frame of reference.

Speaker 16 I think that is a correct challenge, though to be honest, I don't really have any idea, but you have done a lot of study on this thing, so I'm going to give it to you.

Speaker 23 So Brian Cox, you win that round.

Speaker 14 There is no choice, choice.

Speaker 20 You get very cross if you don't win things.

Speaker 24 Now it's time to regain control of this program. Rest the tiller back from the showbiz hordes.
We are talking about the most celebrated theory in all of physics.

Speaker 24 So what motivated Einstein to come up with this radical new theory of gravity which is after all a totally different way of thinking about our universe?

Speaker 24 Sean Carroll is a leading cosmologist at Caltech.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he was also scientific advisor on the Hollywood film Thor, so a little bit showbizzy.

Speaker 33 It's always very interesting interesting to see how genius physicists do their work because they're all different. You know, the styles are always different.

Speaker 33 One thing that actually strikes me about the personalities of many successful genius physicists over the course of history is how stubborn they are.

Speaker 33 He just got this thing in his mind that he was going to fit gravity into special relativity. And the thing that was weird about it was that there is very little experimental demand for such a theory.

Speaker 33 You know, we had Isaac Newton's theory of gravity. It did perfectly well as far as anyone knew.
There was like a couple of things here and there, like the orbit of Mercury maybe didn't quite fit.

Speaker 33 But mostly, Einstein was driven by the demand that all of our different pieces fit together when it comes to our theories of physics.

Speaker 33 He was a pioneer of special relativity, and he knew that Newton's theory of gravity, as good as it was, didn't fit. with special relativity.

Speaker 33 We didn't need to make them fit in terms of fitting the data at the time, but this just bugged him, this inconsistency.

Speaker 33 And so he just, you know, without much experimental input at all, he made conceptual leap after conceptual leap.

Speaker 33 And to his enormous credit, he didn't get stuck in a rut, you know, like he was willing to change his mind and do different things.

Speaker 33 And, you know, later in life, famously, people make fun of Einstein for getting stuck in a rut. But, you know, if you have Einstein's track record, I think that you get some

Speaker 33 credit later on in life, no matter what you do, because you were so right so many times. I'm going to give you the slack.

Speaker 14 So this is where I have the first kind of impasse. So Newton is his idea of gravity, one of the, again, one of the most famous ideas in the whole history of science.

Speaker 37 It's wrong.

Speaker 19 There's something that doesn't work out when Einstein looks at it.

Speaker 24 That's right. We now have a more accurate theory.
So Newton's theory was that there is a force between massive objects like the Earth and the Sun which pulls them together.

Speaker 24 Einstein's radical suggestion which leads to a more accurate theory is no. There is no magical force between objects that pulls them together.

Speaker 24 What we're feeling when we experience the force of gravity is the geometry of the universe itself.

Speaker 1 So why is my apple falling?

Speaker 24 Well Einstein would say the apple isn't falling.

Speaker 24 The apple is minding its own business with no forces acting on it, traveling a perfectly straight line through space-time and the Earth gets in the way.

Speaker 24 So the picture really is that the ground is accelerating up to meet the apple.

Speaker 20 And this is where the happiest thought comes in, which is, it's not often a happiest thought is plummeting to the ground in a lift though.

Speaker 22 Here's former physics student Ben Miller explaining that happy thought of Einstein's.

Speaker 11 What if I was in a lift? in space stick with it because it's brilliant so okay now imagine i'm in a lift and i'm so far away from any gravity that there's no gravitational effect on me at all.

Speaker 11 He said, If I was in this lift

Speaker 11 and the lift were accelerated,

Speaker 11 let's say up, you know, he said, I would feel like the bottom of the lift was pushing on my feet, so I would feel like I had weight.

Speaker 8 And

Speaker 11 this you have to be Albert Einstein to think of this. He said, Okay, so if I'm in a lift in space and the lift accelerates, I feel like I've got weight.
What if weight

Speaker 11 is an effect of acceleration?

Speaker 30 Can we just ask you, Mr.

Speaker 28 Inman, when you say I'm free, you mean that very much from the perspective of the forces of the universe?

Speaker 24 He means I'm free falling. That's what he means.
I'm in free fall. Which means we're no forces acting.
That's what he meant.

Speaker 37 Mr. Humphreys, are you free-falling?

Speaker 28 I'm free-falling.

Speaker 1 So this is just about gravity, then.

Speaker 21 So that's what we're talking about.

Speaker 18 Then it illuminates us in terms of what gravity means to the universe.

Speaker 24 Well, it's much more than that, which is why general relativity is one of the pillars of 21st century physics, and of mine 20th century.

Speaker 24 It's about space and time, and it is also a theory that applies not just to a solar system or the Earth going around the Sun. It applies to the whole universe.

Speaker 20 Well, that means we need obviously to journey further, not only down the lift shaft, but also to Durham.

Speaker 14 Which, yeah, you see, it's a segue, isn't it?

Speaker 28 And we went to see Carlos Frank, who wonderfully in the reception area outside his office actually has a bust of Albert Einstein, which watches you as you walk around.

Speaker 26 So when he's thinking of ideas, he makes sure that Einstein's looking at him all the time.

Speaker 1 So here's Professor Carlos Frank.

Speaker 6 Everything we know about the universe ultimately boils down to the ability to solve Einstein's equation.

Speaker 6 The Big Bang, the expansion of the universe, the origin of the chemical elements, the existence of dark matter, the formation of galaxies, all can be traced back to this man

Speaker 6 thinking deeply around 1916.

Speaker 24 So special relativity, she said, 1905 equals mc squared, which is the thing that is probably most famous for in the public mind, the most famous equation in physics.

Speaker 24 But then so space-time enters that equation, or that theory, or something you can kind of take it or leave it. It's quite nice in special relativity, isn't it? Space-time.

Speaker 24 Yeah, do you think he had any inkling that that concept could be turned into a theory of gravity and a theory of cosmology, the theory of the universe, back in 1905?

Speaker 6 Well, I think that

Speaker 6 I'm now second-guessing one of the greatest minds that humanity has produced, but I can see a link between Einstein's thinking in 1905 and then his thinking 10 years later when, or a bit more than that, when he developed general relativity.

Speaker 6 Because when he was thinking about special relativity he had objects that were only in constant motion moving always with the same speed and then the minute he said what happens if the speed changes then that change of speed is called an acceleration accelerations are produced by forces and at then at that point he had to think about forces gravitational forces for example and he had a certain reluctance to think in terms of forces so when he started thinking about objects changing speed he thought well how do do you accelerate them?

Speaker 6 And here was the genius. He then said, you don't need a force, you just need to change the geometry of space-time, and that will cause acceleration.

Speaker 6 So that was, I think, if you have to put your finger on where

Speaker 6 the genius is in Einstein, is in realizing that you can do away with forces and explain everything in terms of geometry. of space-time.

Speaker 6 Now the first time you hear this, you'll be traumatized like I did the first time.

Speaker 8 I go, what on earth?

Speaker 6 Geometry of space-time? What do you mean space? What geometry? Well, it takes a little while to get used to the idea. So, we physicists like to have analogies.

Speaker 6 So, you imagine, for example, a cannonball on a rubber sheet. So, the rubber sheet is space.

Speaker 6 And first, it's flat, then you put a cannonball and it bends.

Speaker 6 So, that gives you a kind of feeling for the distortions that gravitational heavy objects can produce on, in this case, the fabric of space.

Speaker 6 And then it takes a further leap of imagination and probably a few years of thinking about this to add time into the equation and to recognize, well, time is the same as space.

Speaker 6 And gravity distorts not just space like a rubber sheet, but the whole of space-time.

Speaker 27 There is something when we were sitting opposite Carlos there, the excitement, the gleam in his eyes, the talk of the fact that, you know, he is just, there he is, having his Cocoa Pops in the morning and thinking, I'm just thinking about general relativity.

Speaker 16 And the beauty, that's what he kept stressing when we were sitting in his office: the beauty of the theory.

Speaker 24 Yeah, I think it's something that everybody who studies general relativity in any depth experiences.

Speaker 24 Because although mathematically, so technically, it's a complicated theory, in terms of the basic ideas, it's elegant and simple.

Speaker 24 See, we already had the idea of space-time that dates back to special relativity, 1905-1906.

Speaker 24 And we had Newton's laws, which tell us there's a force between objects, that's what gravity is, a force between massive objects.

Speaker 24 What Einstein does is simplify that and say, no, there isn't a force, a fundamental force between massive objects. There's just space-time.

Speaker 24 And there's the way that massive objects curve and warp and bend space-time.

Speaker 19 See, that's what I find exciting as well, which is he's made things less complex, which means that I will have to spend even more years studying it to find out that things are much simpler than we first thought which is why I went to Imperial College to see professor of theoretical physics Faye Dauker where she's doing her introductory lecture on general relativity.

Speaker 26 Unfortunately it's an introductory lecture for fourth-year physics students so let's see how long it takes for me to get a little bit lost.

Speaker 21 I'm currently sitting in the front of a lecture hall to listen to Faye Dauke's introductory physics lecture and this is the first time I've been in a university lecture hall, I think, since a lecture on Andrew Marvel, the poet, in probably 1989.

Speaker 21 And on the blackboard, Faye has just put that gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter.

Speaker 18 She hasn't finished writing the quote yet.

Speaker 21 I'm now going to see how far I can get before I become bamboozled and confused.

Speaker 38 Welcome to this course on general relativity.

Speaker 38 GR is one of the great treasures of scientific knowledge. GR

Speaker 38 introduces to science a new physical, dynamical substance, which is a four-dimensional,

Speaker 38 dynamical, curved fabric, which bends and warps and ripples and carries energy.

Speaker 38 And the reason that general relativity is so fundamental and the reason that it constituted such a great revolution in physics is that this fabric, this four-dimensional fabric, is space-time itself.

Speaker 24 So, nothing so you're all right at this point, Robin?

Speaker 30 I think for the first 20 minutes, I'm fine.

Speaker 20 Even the fourth-dimensional stuff, I think we've had enough car journeys with you explaining that to me, that some of it, some of it has been absorbed.

Speaker 13 But, well, we're just coming up to the point now.

Speaker 38 A Lorentz transform set of coordinates. And if we take the Lorentz transformation to be going in the positive x direction,

Speaker 38 then the Lorentz.

Speaker 15 So, it's there now, and I think if there is a graph which can be made out of my attempts to understand contemporary physics, then there is always a downturn when we get to Lorentz.

Speaker 12 It is the Lorentz rule of my incomprehension.

Speaker 24 Well the Lorentz transformations are not too difficult actually. You do those in the first year.
But but general relativity is a difficult theory.

Speaker 24 I was taught it actually by Faye's dad in in my final year at the University of Manchester. And I sort of understood it a bit then.

Speaker 24 But you have to hear it more than once and you have to think about it many more times than once.

Speaker 24 And actually, it was only relatively recently, talking to Faye, in fact, and having it explained for the fifteenth time that I began to really get a a clear picture of what general relativity is all about.

Speaker 24 Is this the beginning of a new career for you? Are you going to leave comedy behind and move into the the real world?

Speaker 14 Some people say I left it behind a long time ago and became a performance artist, obviously. The uh but it was I just found it very i exciting to pick up on other people's excitement.

Speaker 14 Again, this is this idea anytime where physics is described as some kind of cold pursuit.

Speaker 28 And then talking with Fame, with other people as well, about the fact that this was front page news as well, not 100 years ago, 96 years ago, 1919.

Speaker 27 Einstein's theory, there are observations made that go, yep, this is a good theory.

Speaker 14 Arthur Eddington.

Speaker 16 But how do you make those observations?

Speaker 24 Well, Eddington observed the bending of starlight around the Sun. And to be able to see stars close to the Sun, you need to obscure the Sun.
So he ran an expedition to observe a total solar eclipse.

Speaker 24 And the reason for that is that the sun's light is blocked out by the moon, so you can see the stars behind it. And he measured the bending of starlight.

Speaker 24 And that's why I think this was front-page news, because it's a very simple concept and an evocative concept.

Speaker 24 The words are that you're seeing starlight bent by the sun. And the reason that the starlight curves around the sun is because space and time themselves are curved by the mass of the Sun.

Speaker 24 And that's an easy thing to write headlines about, even if the mathematics is extremely complicated.

Speaker 16 I love that image there as well of just the fact of front page news, a man picking up his Times newspaper as he's dunking his toasty soldier into a runny egg and going, I told you, Molly, I told you it is curved.

Speaker 37 I was right all along.

Speaker 18 Anyway, we asked cosmologists John Eleven and Brian Green, why was this headline news?

Speaker 39 Well, I think there's probably two reasons. One reason is scientifically it was, it was just opened up an entire world, completely changed the way we viewed everything.

Speaker 39 There were consequences of general relativity that even Einstein didn't foresee. And so it is incredibly exciting to follow a theory to conclusions you didn't foresee, and that's quite thrilling.

Speaker 39 But I think there's also was kind of a political reason that the world was in trouble and there was a lot of strife and a lot of nationalism and coming out of World War.

Speaker 39 And I think Einstein represented something, something else to people that transcended that kind of nationalism. That was a gift from humanity.
It was a humanity's accomplishment in some sense.

Speaker 40 Yeah, the other part of it, too, is that Einstein was described as having toppled Isaac Newton, right?

Speaker 40 So you had this giant of science who had given the world an understanding they thought of the theory of gravity.

Speaker 40 And here comes Einstein to give a radically distinct picture that went head to head with Newton's approach in these eclipse observations of 1919.

Speaker 40 And when the eclipse observations showed that Einstein was right and Newton was wrong, that's when the New York Times, that's when the Herald Tribune, that's when the London Times, that's when the papers around the world blared out these headlines that Einstein had toppled Newton, and that's when the world took notice.

Speaker 24 The wonderful thing about general relativity is we've heard throughout this program about this complex theory you only begin to learn about in the fourth year of a physics degree describes the whole universe and it's an an act of genius.

Speaker 24 Undoubtedly, all those things are true. But at its heart, there are very simple concepts.

Speaker 24 And essentially, what general relativity says is that we can dispense with this force of gravity and we can replace it with just the way that objects move around in curved space.

Speaker 24 And it's something that's easier in that sense than the Newtonian theory.

Speaker 19 Well, I asked Faye if there was a way of kind of comprehending it without having to wait for an eclipse.

Speaker 38 You can have the experience which tells you that there's no force of gravity pulling you down.

Speaker 38 So the idea that there is a force of gravity pulling you down is at odds with your experience, your actual experience, which is that your chair pushes up on you. It's pushing up on you right now.

Speaker 38 You can feel it. You do not feel any force

Speaker 38 acting on you, pulling you down. What you feel is your chair push, the pressure of your chair upwards on your bottom right now, as you're sitting there in your chair.

Speaker 38 And that's totally in accord with general relativity, but at odds with the Newtonian theory.

Speaker 38 The Newtonian theory says that there's a force pushing up on you from your chair, but also a force pulling you down, the force of gravity pulling you down towards the center of the earth.

Speaker 19 Geological. Sorry, stop for a moment.

Speaker 22 I want everyone just to think.

Speaker 22 Because the people are sitting there now.

Speaker 38 Yes. Yes.

Speaker 18 And they need to feel that.

Speaker 38 They do need to feel it.

Speaker 24 This is for me a perfect example, probably the best example, of the power of physics and the power of thought.

Speaker 24 I mean, we have a theory that came essentially from Einstein's head, a remarkable theory, which makes extraordinary predictions about the universe. It predicts the existence of black holes.

Speaker 24 It predicted the Big Bang. It describes the orbits of planets around stars.

Speaker 24 It describes the orbits of neutron stars, of pulsars around other pulsars, of pulsars around black holes, the behaviour of the most exotic objects we've yet discovered in the universe.

Speaker 24 And indeed, the behaviour of the universe itself is predicted with accuracy, as far as we can tell, by this single simple theory.

Speaker 13 So hopefully, even if you haven't fully grasped what g mu nu equals t mu nu necessarily entails, you have got perhaps a little bit of a change of the sense sense of the feeling of gravity around you.

Speaker 18 And next week, we look to the future of general relativity.

Speaker 26 I think they're going to keep it going for a while, aren't they?

Speaker 30 As a system of running a universe, it works.

Speaker 14 What is the future of general relativity?

Speaker 29 They got rid of it. It just

Speaker 29 got new universal rules.

Speaker 24 And do remember, there's no unique definition of past, present, and future in relatives.

Speaker 12 Right, I think we'll just sit here and just feel our chairs.

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