The Infinite Monkey Cage USA Tour: Los Angeles

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Hello, I'm Robin Entz.

And I'm Brian Cox.

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.

For the first time live in Los Angeles, this is the Infinite Monkey Cage.

What a beautiful thing that across Hollywood at the moment, some people are going to see a new Will Ferrell film, some people are going to see live nude girls, and some people are here to see a lecture on the spherical matter distribution in the universe.

That's...

Yes!

So,

being in LA, we've been in LA for four days and you get to meet a lot of kind of people who go, oh, can I go on, can I go on, can I come on your show?

And sometimes you meet a kind of young band that you think, ah, well, they might be all right.

Yeah,

we apologise for this, but we felt sorry for them because they're you know trying to make their way in the music business.

They're called the cheeky monkeys.

Cheeky monkeys.

And please welcome to the stage Steve J, Jeff Davis, Jeff Lynn, and Eric Idle.

Good evening.

Hello?

Ready?

Yeah.

Two, three, four.

I find quantum mechanics confusing today.

Now science is all arrange.

The Hadron Collider is banging away,

trying to guess our age.

A particle here, a particle there.

In this weird quantum world, bits can be anywhere.

Which might just explain why I'm losing my hair in the infinite monkey cage.

The other day I heard Mrs.

Schrodinger say, I'm going to put out the cat.

Mrs.

Heisenberg said, oh he might be quite dead.

I'm uncertain if I should do that.

Unless you've got that Robin Insan Professor Cox, I'd leave that poor pussy alone in his box.

That cat may be both dead and alive, said the sage, in the infinite monkey cage.

Scientists say all the world's just a stage.

The physics is passing through.

There may be an infinite number of me's and an infinite number of you's.

God help us.

Over and certain, they are trying to learn

what can the dark matter be.

Nobody cries if a strawberry dies in the infinite monkey gate.

This linear superpositional thing is blowing my mind away.

The universe seems to be made out of string.

That's what some particle physicists say.

If infinite monkeys tide every day,

they may accidentally write Hamlet the play,

but they probably just shit on it and throw it away.

In the infinite monkey, the cheeky monkeys in the infinite monkey without your trousers in the infinite monkey.

Ladies and gentlemen, the cheeky monkeys.

You know what?

I think they might have a future.

It's just one of those weird things.

You go, oh, look, there's Jeff Lynn, considered to be the fourth greatest music producer in the world, playing the bangelale for an Eric Hyden's written song.

Just

another normal day in my life.

So,

as we're in LA today, we thought we would talk about Hollywood.

And indeed, in a town of fiction, is there any space for science fact?

So, when you're making films about marauding aliens or transformers or bizarre robots on the rampage, do you really need a science advisor?

Does entertainment need to face the scrutiny of scientific accuracy?

So, we're joined by a panel who are going to help us through these ideas.

And they are, first of all, Sean Carroll is a cosmologist at Caltech.

He's the author of Particle at the End of the Universe and a fantastic blog called The Preposterous Universe.

He is science advisor on angels and demons, the Tron Legacy, and Thor, which I think, why do you need when the basis of your film

is a mythical Norse god with a magic hammer?

But we better check the rest of the science and make sure it's a scientifically accurate magic hammer

he's also currently ensconced in an argument with Brian Cox about causality and quantum field theory I know that old chestnut

I think that may well come up tonight please welcome Sean Carroll

David X Cohn was a computer science graduate who was lured from programming to the cutting edge of award-winning animation.

First with The Simpsons, and then he went on to helm Futurama, the Lazarus TV animations.

He also created the game Zoid for the Apple II, which was hugely popular

with you.

And David and his dad.

Please welcome David X.

Cohn.

Zoid fan.

I've got a copy of Zoid in my trunk.

I'll sell you after the show.

Joe Rogan is a rigorous and prolific stand-up comedian whose comedy specials include talking monkeys in space.

His podcasts never skimp on detail.

In fact, some of them are longer than Hamlet and over three hours long, and deservedly so.

And he presented Joe Rogan questions everything which has so far included weaponized weather and robo-sapiens.

Please welcome Joe Rogan.

Now,

Eric Idle is best known as the lead singer of the cheeky monkeys

and author of the Infinite Monkey Cage theme tune.

Before moving to LA though, he was also involved with a kind of niche comedy group in the United Kingdom, but you've probably never heard of them.

Eric Idle.

Before we actually get started, I do have to ask you, Sean, the idea of a science advisor on Thorn is...

exactly is right where do you draw the line with the science?

This is why you're not a famous Hollywood producer, I think, is 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 explained.

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?

Come on about wormholes.

We've got a wormhole.

This is a word.

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 Skarsgaard 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 about it.

Oh, Newton's second law.

That's so late 1970s.

You didn't mention that.

Sprint dealie buffers 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 don't, people may have seen this, 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 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 wait, 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 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 you know refer to it and make jokes about it, let people know that we like it, but but if the plot demands that they travel across space and get to another galaxy, as which as you said is unlikely, we're still gonna do it.

Joe, do you find that I mean now there are incredible kind of films and books which are really playing around with with proper scientific ideas.

When you were growing up and and the you know another science fiction boom then was that in any way an inspiration to you you in terms of the way of exploring ideas?

I think any kid growing up is going to be fascinated by science fiction, the idea of the future, especially when you're a child, because you're thinking about the future in terms of like, when I'm my parents' age, what is it going to be like?

Like they had shows like Space 1999 when I was a kid, where people presumed by 1999, we'd all be in space.

We'd all be hanging around with robots and we'd all have our own ships.

None of that panned out, but it was always fascinating for people to consider what would be like.

Like, if you look at the cockpit in Alien, the original Alien, they were able to go to space, but their computers were so crude.

They hadn't figured out the idea of a touch screen, they hadn't figured out so many concepts that we just accept today.

Well, it's interesting.

So, Alien's a good example because when you, at times, you have a kind of utopian science fiction which says everything's going to be great, and then Alien says, you know what, we're going to be traveling through space, and you are still going to be treated accordingly, and your union's going to be crushed, and you're going to be eating your own feces.

So just so you know, we'll be travelling through space, but it's still going to be awful.

I mean, do you think that's the point?

Because I think aliens is very important.

Alien and gravity establish the fact that all women in space wear men's t-shirts.

It's a very important rule of science fiction.

In fact, it's actually science fiction.

Science fiction.

If I wanted to write a book, actually, we talked about the science of The Simpsons.

If I wanted to write The Science of Monty Python, would it be a very long book?

Yes, because you'd take you a long time to find any.

But

there's a little bit of science in The Holy Grail.

So Benevere says, and that, my lord, is how we know the earth to be banana-shaped.

Well, that's a bit weird.

It proves that someone's a witch, doesn't he?

Is that where he is?

Bruce is a witch, absolutely.

He floats in water.

But

you've gone on to, you know, you wrote a novel, Road to Mars, which is uh a science fiction and as you said I I think the that bit in Holy Grail and then Brian being picked up by a spaceship briefly is kind of there's not despite science fiction being a big boom and then Douglas Adams came along but you why did you then decide in the late nineties to do Road to Mars?

I was interested in

I just like the idea of the future of show business, which is what the book's about, because it intrigues me and it seemed to me that we were having so much everything was all computerized and everything that eventually we go back to real people being funny on stage.

And so I had just the idea of two comedians going around the galaxies just being, but they had a robot who could not understand what comedy was.

He didn't know why they made that strange noise.

The audience, when they laughed, he didn't know what they were doing.

Because there was no sense of irony in a computer.

Am I right?

It would be very hard to teach a computer comedy.

It would be hard.

Yeah.

Someday we'll do it.

You know, I think that this is where they surprise us.

But was the robot inspired by any particular audience member who just would not laugh?

The robot was actually based on David Bowie in 1983, so he looked pretty.

He was pretty cool, but he also made this warm fabulous discovery that out in space there was gravity, but the opposite of that was levity.

It's really Douglas Adams' idea, isn't it?

That you've got to...

So levity is an anti-gravity.

It's the opposite of gravity.

So if you have a spaceship and you're all sat there and it starts falling towards the ground, you've all got to start telling jokes frantically to make it stay up.

Is that it?

Laughter would keep it afloat.

By the way, we had a humorless robot comedian in Futurama named Humorbot 5.0, and his big joke was, Super Collider, I just met her.

Sean, we talked about, I talked a little bit about wormholes.

So the idea, central, central, the 90s thing, central to interstellar, you said central to to Thor, the science of Thor.

What's the current state of understanding of wormholes?

From physicists' point of view, do we think that they're a possibility and they would open the door to the stars?

Yeah, just asking these questions takes us right to the edge of the things we don't know very well.

I mean, wormholes were invented by Einstein back in 1935, and they're things that we can absolutely think about, write down the equations for, imagine them existing, and then you say, okay, do they actually exist in the real world and the answer is we just don't know probably the answer is no I mean probably if they do exist they're microscopic and quantum mechanical and not things that we can use to travel from here to there But even that, we just don't know.

So, I mean, that's a great thing.

The graduate students of the next generation might be answering this question.

Because there are problems with them.

If you can shortcut your way through space and time, you can, in principle, presumably, shortcut your way into the past.

You can build a time machine with a wormhole.

Absolutely.

This was an insight that came about from Kip Thorne, my colleague at Caltech, who was one of the people behind Interstellar.

And he was actually helping his friend Carl Sagan write his novel Contact.

And Carl Sagan was a great astronomer, but he was not an expert at physics.

And he wanted, like Kevin Veige, the president of Marvel, he wanted to get his hero from one place to another.

So he said, I'm going to have her fall into a black hole and then come out somewhere else.

And there's enough, like Carl Sagan, he knew enough to go, like, that's probably not what would happen.

You'd probably just die if you fell into a black hole.

So he called up Kip Thorne, his friend, and he said, how do you get across from here to there?

And so Kip Thorne said, well, it was a wormhole.

And this was in the 80s, so it was okay to say that.

And but then Kip realized that if what that meant was effectively, from the outside point of view, you were traveling faster than light.

You were getting from here to there as fast as you want.

And since he was an expert in relativity, he knew if you could go as fast as you want, you can go backward in time.

So he wrote physics papers that says, yes, if you can make a wormhole, you can go backward in time.

So then the question is, why can't you stop Hitler or something like that, you know, invent the internet early?

And well, we don't know.

Probably there's no wormholes is the answer.

If there were, it would really put right in front of your face the fact that the laws of physics don't let you do certain things.

The way they put it on Lost, the TV show, is whatever happened, happened.

Even if you could visit the past, you can't change it.

So in other words, we're saying that if wormholes exist, then free will is the thing that gets.

Right, but what we're saying even before that is that free will doesn't exist exist because the laws of physics tell you what you're going to do.

It's not 90s free will.

Is the free willy

wasn't there a fish called free willy or something?

Wasn't there a whale or something?

Wasn't it?

Yeah.

I don't think that dealt with that many philosophical questions.

Really?

But it didn't deal with that philosophy.

It was more accurate.

Hanna-Barbera version of now Hanna-Barbera's Leibniz program.

But

I wanted to ask Sean, and I'll ask this, in fact, to all of you, which is when you talk about the likelihood of things and then sometimes I meet physicists and they go well the maths works so it does exist somewhere now that I find probably you know it works on paper therefore somewhere in the universe we're gonna find this how comfortable are you with that with that idea?

Not very comfortable with that idea.

I don't know if any physicists would say that.

I mean we really should be quite humble about the things we haven't seen yet, right?

About the parts of the universe, the phenomena we don't know yet.

Physicists can sometimes seem rather non-humble because something like dark energy and dark matter, they're quite confident exist, even though we haven't seen them, but we've seen their effects.

So I think that, you know, physicists are actually pretty good these days at dividing the line between the stuff we have enough evidence to say that it's there, despite the fact that we haven't quite touched it directly, and the stuff that is still quite speculative.

And we've got to be, you know, we got to be comfortable about that.

So for example, I would say that we know well enough to say that, you know, we understand the underlying physics of the particles that you and I are made of.

You know, there's no room in the physics experiments that we've done so far for there to exist some new force of nature that can let you bend a spoon with your mind or the placement of Saturn on the day you were born affecting your life.

All these ideas are ruled out by what we know about physics.

We're going to get so many complaints again now.

There's a very

astrology lobby.

And then

Deepakle writes in green ink.

Joe,

you sat there looking puzzled.

I'm always puzzled.

But I had a question about the time travel, the idea being that if there are wormholes, somebody would have used them, right?

Is it possible that we are at the peak of if the universe has a beginning and the universe, you know, if we've gotten from 14 billion years to now, isn't it possible that we're the only ones that got this far?

And if we are, that no one has found these wormholes yet, and that one day we will, and that doesn't mean they don't exist out there.

It's just that one day w i it doesn't mean that someone would have already found them, correct?

I have a related question that you could could combine your answer, but you were saying, like, well, if these existed, somebody might have come back from the future and stopped Hitler.

How do you know some evil person from the future didn't go back and start Hitler?

Yeah, so I clearly have been unclear.

I'm not saying that the fact that Stephen Hawking sometimes says this as a joke.

We know there can't be time travel because otherwise we would be invaded by tourists from the future.

So that is not the evidence.

That is not the argument.

The nice thing about physics is there are rules.

And if you made a wormhole right now, here in this room, after the show, we'll give it a shot, and

the best you could ever do would be to travel back to now.

You could not travel back to the 80s and coin the term wormhole.

The way that the time travel would work is in the future somebody could come back to you.

So you're absolutely right.

There could very well be the possibility of time travel just not to before you invented the time machine.

But that's not the reason.

The reason why we think it's impossible is because in the thought experiments where we try to build wormholes, they always collapse into singularities and kill you.

That's the reason why.

Oh, okay.

So there's a I think didn't Stephen Hawking publish a paper back in the was it the 80s called the chronology protection convention.

Early 90s yeah.

Early 90s.

So the idea I think was that the the laws of physics the the the new laws of physics that we surely require so a quantum theory of gravity let's say would prevent wormholes because protecting cause and effect and and and not having a universe where you could c go back and kill hitler or hitler's grandparents isn't is an axiom

The laws of nature will always respect cause and effect.

Yeah, and I think that

it's a conjecture, right?

It's a chronology protection conjecture, that whatever the laws of physics eventually turn out to be, we don't know what they are, they will have the property that you cannot travel backward in time.

But I don't think that the messing up the past is a good argument for that.

I mean in physics as we know it, if you give me the entire state of the universe right now, and the laws of physics, then you know with perfect fidelity what's going to happen in the future and what did happen in the past.

So in that sense, it's all settled with all the data right now.

So if if it's a little more complicated, the fact that the universe is settled and what happens happens is still just as true, even if some of those happenings involve going backward in time.

So the real rule is no paradoxes.

If Hitler was there, Hitler is there.

Sorry.

Try to do better next time.

Joe, do you feel as someone who watches movies, do you get caught up thinking?

As someone who watches movies.

Yeah.

That's the role we're playing, right?

I was going to deal with your particle physics.

It's about my level of expertise, by the way.

But the no, but I think as someone, sometimes I get a note like interstellar, I kind of do want the science to roughly work because I think it's really important to the film.

But some films I think, oh, do you know what?

Arnold Schwarzenegger's going back in time and there's going to be a chase and then he's going to be melted and I'm not going to go, oh, hang on a minute, they got the equations wrong.

It's kind of that sometimes, does it always matter for you that level of accuracy?

Or as David was saying, do you know what?

It's a romp.

And maybe it will inspire people to then investigate the science further, but every now and again, that, I'll let it go.

Well, in certain movies, you wonder why it was necessary, like in gravity.

Like in gravity, having all those satellites and the space stations all in the same orbit, it wasn't necessary.

But you know what I mean?

It's like they're not respecting you.

Because like if you know better.

If they had to do that movie in front of an audience entirely based of physicists, you would never pull that off, right?

You would have to tell the truth.

It's lazy writing.

It's a terrible, terrible world.

Yeah.

Well, Chris Hanfield, the astronaut, he said to us about, before you even get to that point, he came back down for the final time from the space station just before that film came out.

And one of the main things he was saying is, just so you know, the underwear we wear in space is very different to what you've seen in gravity.

It's a lot thicker, a lot more absorbent, it has a lot more practical uses.

David, do you get complaints?

I suppose the first thing is, I suppose it's different in animated films.

Let me clarify my remarks, because I feel guilty now.

I was saying our rule was that comedy would outweigh science in our show because it's a comedy and that was the tone we wanted to strike.

If I see a movie that purports to be telling me about science, I get as angry, as enraged as Joe was there if they're breaking the laws of physics.

So

it just depends on what the intent of the show is if I feel that they're delivering.

What most enraged you in a movie?

Most enraged me?

Well, I got pretty enraged.

I will talk about the movie Gravity for a second.

That enraged me.

I get enraged a lot, actually, in movies.

But I've been around a lot of scientists my whole life.

So what often gets me mad is not really so much that the science itself is wrong, but I feel like the portrayal of the scientists is often wrong.

So in gravity, for example, what bugged me was George Clooney and Sandra Bullock are floating around in space and they're supposed to be setting up this satellite.

And basically

they're two

highly trained astronauts, scientists, and their two opinions are Sandra Bullock is like, I really should have practiced doing this before I came out.

And

George Clooney's attitude is, is,

what is that gizmo that you're working on over there?

And it's like, they didn't practice, they don't know what they're talking about.

And look what happened.

So I just feel like, in real life,

they would really know what they're talking about, and they'd be quite good at bolting these gizmos together.

I don't know what that is.

I just love the ideas.

The Apollo 11 mission, and just they go, what does that thing do?

I reckon that was never said in a NASA mission.

Before we land on the moon,

that's the one they said, don't press.

Why?

Yeah, I don't know, give it a go, girl, Mike Collins.

I think you see these things in movies about scientists because most people don't know what scientists are like and what they're like in their daily life.

But if you see a movie about doctors or something people are familiar with, you know, if there's a movie about expert surgeons,

they don't show them doing surgery, and one's like, what's that red stuff squirting out?

But with scientists, people don't know.

Do you feel that, Eric?

Does it annoy you?

If you go to see a science fiction film, do you want accuracy?

Or do you want it at least not to throw you out, make

you know, elementary mistakes like that?

Does it matter?

Well, I think it's the same with any film, it's the same.

It's a story, story, story.

So you want the, you know, the story is what leads it.

You don't go, gosh, this couldn't possibly happen unless you happen to have a particular information.

But I like H.G.

Wells.

I'm very fond of H.G.

Wells.

I think that some of those, those, you know, with Invasion of the Earth and all those wonderful things, he was the first to really popularize cultural books, reading science fiction, wasn't he?

I mean, that was the best.

So I'm very fond of it reading it.

I'm happy with that.

Philip K.

Dick I like because he's always playing lovely games with the ideas of things.

But so it's not really important.

It's more philosophical that he's playing with the ideas, not real facts, you know.

Whereas I think Apollo 13 was a fabulous film because it actually happened.

It was very, and it's also, I think we're all saying the same thing, which is that the reason to get science right in movies is not because it's supposed to be educational about science.

It's because you're trying to tell a a good story, and guess what?

When you make a little bit more effort to make the science realistic, you get a better story.

It's not opposed to getting a better story because it's more realistic, the audience goes along with it, they can engage with it, it feels right, even if it's all subconscious.

They're not thrown out of the story by people doing weird things that violate the laws of physics.

It doesn't alienate people who actually know the science.

I mean, I, years ago, I worked on it as a science advisor on a film called Sunshine, which filmed Danny Boyle.

It's a good,

it's a very not seen it.

It's a brilliant, it's very scientific, it's about the sun's beginning to break, so they're gonna send a a bomb into it to restart it.

So it's very much based on this is a contemporary science as it was at that time.

This is a good example, because I I was sent the script, that's the first line in the script, and I did ring them and say, Well, uh there's a problem here.

But but the thing one of the interesting things that Danny Boyle, as a director, is very, very precise and he wanted to know everything.

So he he said to me, The job of the science advisor is to tell me everything that that may be wrong.

I want to know everything.

But then I will reject things because of

the plot.

One example was that they tried to have the spacecraft silent in space, which is an old, you know, obviously if you have a spacecraft going past you in space, you can't hear it.

But it just didn't look right on the screen.

Spacecraft go

they always do.

And it just looks like you've not had, you didn't have any money to spend on special effects.

And another one was interesting was it was he they tried to film the astronauts moving at a normal speed.

So literally, because obviously when you're weightless, you just do things at a normal rate.

You don't go like that.

This is golden radio, this.

Right?

The launch is now moving in a slow-motion fashion.

You commentate, yes.

But they found that when they filmed some tests, it looked wrong.

Because the audience's expectation of being in zero-g is that the astronauts move in slow motion.

And you see it on the moon, actually.

You see in old Apollo footage.

It looks looks like people are moving quickly.

Actually, it looks like it's almost comedic.

So, did you find that?

You've worked on many films now, Sean.

Did you have those conversations where they say, tell us everything?

With Thor is probably an exception.

You normally, when you're moving with a magic hammer, go in a kind of uppy, downy, wavy manner.

But I think they changed the stuff to a more direct

bad attitude.

But many people have bad attitudes, including the director of Thor, who was Kenneth Branda.

And he was, you know, if someone brings in science advisors to a movie, there's 500 people working on the movie.

They might not all be equally enthusiastic about the whole science advisor idea.

So Kenneth Branagh was like, okay, well, I have this one scene, here's what's going to happen.

Tell me what words I should attach to that.

And you can do that, but that's not really using the science advice to its best efficacy, I would say.

Well, there's a great line for, I think his name is Hugo Gernsback, who was a guy who, in the 1930s, all those magazines, which were just called things like amazing.

And there's a beautiful thing where he said extravagant fiction today cold fact tomorrow and his inspiration apparently was he wanted exactly as you were saying to lure people to go look I'm going to show you as you were saying Joe show you an image of what the future could be and with luck you know these kids who would be reading about Martian invasions or kind of you know rocket launches and kind of Flash Gordon style things they would go well I think I want to go into science I mean Joe do you think that is that's a good way of using science fiction is going we might not get it all right but we're going to excite you enough that you're going to go I might actually learn how to do these equations.

That's been the argument for a bunch of things where they get things wrong.

You know, like that's been the argument for martial arts movies, you know, that they inspire children to get into martial arts, but

most of this stuff doesn't really work, but it does get you to go, but it's not necessary.

I always feel like it's lazy writing.

The same thing with the science, same thing with any movie that depicts a real person, they change the actual events in order to make it more dramatic or make it flow better or whatever they're trying to do to it.

Like, it's just lazy.

There's great ways to do it and tell the truth.

That should be paramount, especially if you're dealing with something that is supposed to be based on reality.

Like the truth should be paramount.

Then figure out how to make a story work around that.

Because otherwise you alienate people who actually know what's going on.

I suppose that you have a problem with space movies in particular.

The distances involved.

We had Patrick Stewart on once on Monkey Cage and he said we were talking to him about filming.

He said, well, of course most weeks the planets we visited were very dull and we didn't broadcast those episodes.

Because

you know, it is a fact that most planets are dull and lifeless and the distances are very large.

So it is problematic if you want to write Star Wars or Star Trek or anything.

We had this problem on Futurama, of course, that they had to get to planets.

And although I was willing to fake the science, I like to at least tell my fellow scientists in the audience that we know we're getting things wrong.

We get them wrong.

So our excuse there was, we said, like, okay, you know, how can we get across the universe?

That's five million light years.

You can't go faster than the speed of light.

And that's right, that's why we increase the speed of light.

So,

you know, it's wrong, but we are kind of copping too.

But that would make it more difficult to travel great distances.

Well, you really want to decrease it.

If you could decrease it to 30 miles an hour, then you could get anywhere.

Because

time dilation would kick in in a Prius.

Are you saying that?

Oh, I got it.

Revoice that episode.

Can you, if you can un-cancel us for the eighth time.

But that is, I was going to, that is great, though.

I love the fact that's so typical of you.

I'm going to spoil your entire anecdote with facts.

Always with the evidence.

I wondered if there was ever a line where you do actually, you know, you were saying the most important thing is entertainment, but have you ever gone, no, this bit of science, this has to remain intact, and we are going to work.

In fact, sometimes, if it's ridiculous, it sounds like the limitations, but by having to go into that universe and go, how can we find a way around to make this entertainment and stick within the laws?

Is there any line you go, we're not going to cross that?

That has to remain scientific fact.

There's a couple.

My proudest science moment in the episodes of these shows that I've worked in was a Future On episode written by this amazing writer, Ken Keiller, who has a PhD in applied math.

and two master's degrees in science.

And he wrote this episode where everybody in the sh crew had changed brains.

So, you know, I had your brain, but you had his brain.

He had Joe's.

So we we didn't just switch, but they're all messed up.

And we were talking about doing this episode, which is kind of a standard Scooby-Doo style plot.

And we started thinking, but what is the math,

what can we do to make this more mathematically interesting?

So we thought, well, what if the machine that switches the brains of any two people cannot switch those two people back?

So once we're messed up, you know, if I switch with you, I have to get my brain back through some other thing.

And then we said, wait, is it even possible for everyone to get their brains back at that point, or will you get into a dead end?

So the day of writing ended, Ken Killer came back the next morning.

He said, I've proved a theorem.

And

so

they got their brains back using this heroic theorem.

And

this is my proudest moment.

At the climactic moment of the show, we flashed the entire proof on the screen.

And my only concession to popular taste was I kept it on the screen for one quarter of a second.

But it's there, if you phrase frame.

Eric, I know you've become interested in science.

Have you always been interested in science?

Because now I know, I mean, you're regular on Monkey Cage.

You write songs which are full of very accurate science, actually.

We've heard the galaxy song there, which is very science, actually.

I read that in 1982.

I became very interested because I realized that I didn't believe in anything and I was quite ignorant.

And so I decided to study cosmology and I started to study about biology a little and how the Earth got to be there.

Because I think it's very fascinating once you find yourself.

I was about mid-30s and I didn't know anything.

And I think the nice thing about science is you actually can know something, and they are provable and testable.

And, you know, you, of all people, have pulled my galaxy song to pieces

because of the facts, but they were accurate when I wrote them in 1982.

And what's interesting

is that our knowledge has grown so extraordinarily that a lot of the facts are dated.

We're much more, there are 200 billion stars in the galaxy.

And only just last week, they think it's 50% more now.

So there may be 400 billion stars in the galaxy and I find that fascinating and with this period of time because of television and the computer you've we've learned more in the last 20 years than we've ever learned in the entire billions of life on earth and I find that fascinating essentially if if if science fiction delivers the is part of the delivery of that message that there are no that the knowledge is always advancing,

we don't have absolute truths in science.

Do you think science fiction can play a role there?

Because it's easily accessible.

So it can begin.

Essentially, what I'm saying is, can it begin to teach people about the rational?

Because that's why we have science fact.

You know, I preferred the Higgs-Boson documentary than almost any film last year, because it was fascinating.

It actually explained to me what on earth was going on, because none of us have any idea what the Higgs-Boson thing is.

It sounds like a very bad nautical dance.

But in fact, it's really fascinating because I read it now and I'll go to him because he's very useful over dinner.

And I say, what is this?

How can the universe begin and all these particles have no mass?

I mean, that to me is just ex what is something that has no mass?

And when I answer it, I get some food.

And the idea that there is this particle that gives everything mass is fascinating to me, that the whole web of things that go through and actually gain mass is extraordinary.

We should have it.

Why don't we have the one-minute without hesitation, the additional deviation Higgs boson?

Do you want to know why mass?

I mean, the funny thing is the Higgs boson was not invented to give particles mass.

That was a spin-off.

Back in the early 60s, they were trying to understand why the nuclear forces that work inside the nucleus of an atom only stretch over a short range.

And these young kids came up with an idea, like several of them independently.

Oh, I know.

Maybe the universe is filled with an invisible energy field that absorbs the lines of force.

And five years later, Steven Weinberg says, oh, I know, if that's true, then we can also use that to give inertia, to give mass to the electrons and the quarks that we're made of.

And 40 years later, and $9 billion later, there's a little bump on a graph that indicates, oh, yes, we found the particle that you get when you poke that field and started vibrating.

They were right back in the 60s.

I mean, to me, it is absolutely mind-bending.

And I was fortunate enough to be there.

I was there, were you there in Geneva when they were announcing it?

It was an amazing historic event.

But it still makes me cry when I watch the film.

I mean, everybody's in tears.

Yeah, particle physics.

It is an extraordinary moment in human discovery.

And I find that more interesting than actually science fiction.

Because, you know, anybody can make stuff up.

Yeah, you're waving your hand and it's moving through the Higgs field.

And if it weren't, then all the electrons in your hand would be moving at the speed of light and they would go out and you wouldn't exist.

And it works.

I think this is one of the interesting.

I've never heard the Higgs motion as a spin-off.

The idea of it being the kind of La Vernon Shirley of particle physics.

And then there's other ones that were kind of the Joni Loves Charchy of physics, so we don't talk about them anymore.

Well, it's a wonderful example, isn't it, of

the modest, the central modesty of science.

You don't set out to answer often, to answer big questions.

It's a very small technical question.

It's very dangerous, actually, if you set off to answer the big question.

Sometimes, you know, you're just trying to get this one little...

You got to work at...

where you understand at the boundary between what you do and do not understand.

And then if you're lucky, if you're in the right place at the right time, and you're a genius, if it all works out.

look, Stephen Hawking became famous because he showed that black holes give off radiation.

Why did he discover that?

Because there was this graduate student at Princeton who claimed that black holes have entropy, and Stephen Hawking was annoyed at him, Jacob Bekenstein.

And he set out to show that he was wrong.

And he showed that he was right and showed that black holes give off radiation.

So with some of science fiction,

it was a niche area or a kind of a cult area for many years.

We've seen the Oscars this year.

We've had two Oscars for Theory of Everything.

We've got the Imitation Game with Alan Turing.

We've got Interstellar winning an Oscar, albeit for the look of the film.

But so

is that changing?

Are we in a golden age or entering a golden age where science fiction and films about scientists, in the case of the Hawking movie and the Alan Turing movie, can win Oscars and that they can

do well?

I think so.

I think

the

I like to look back at Star Trek and Star Wars, the two obvious ones for people of our generation roughly, as the sort of the straight line for

for science fiction and and and then later science fiction comedy, where you couldn't have done that earlier because people had no baseline for what is the what is the science fiction world on T V or in movies.

And once you had those, you could do your comedy version, which we did, or you can do the more serious version or whatever.

But I think you had to grow up with that in the air, I think, to get to the point we are now where people are so accepting of it.

Do you have di do we have different standards?

Do you have different standards for like a fantasy movie like Star Wars or Masters of the Universe, Galaxy?

Masters of the Galaxy, whatever the science fiction is.

Guardians of the Galaxy.

The comic book movie.

Like a comic book movie, a ridiculous movie, versus something like gravity, which is based on real people, real ideas, a space station that actually exists.

Don't you have different standards for movies when it comes to those things?

Like Star Wars is preposterous on a number of different levels, right?

Yeah, but it's still awesome.

It doesn't need to be a science that we were talking about this this before star wars doesn't need to be science fiction it could just be it could be a western it could be a kind of cop movie it could be many different

interstellar case yeah it's even yeah lord of the rings can kind of still you can do that movie without it being in middle-earth and with less hairy feet and all that kind of stuff and it's kind of but the there are interstellar or gravity kind of seems that you can't just go and there's some science you couldn't do it without the hobbies

you could what some people go looking for a ring

wouldn't do that without them being short i'm just saying that you couldn't do Lord of the Rings without the ring.

No, you can't do it without the ring, but that's not a mystical thing, is it?

You could go to Saturn.

If you're shining mission, you know, there's plenty of rings there, aren't there?

What about Avatar?

Like, Avatar seems to be like a combination of those things.

It's a combination of a fantasy movie, but it also involves science.

Like, there's some scientific.

How bad did they get it wrong?

Like, the

hyper-sleep.

Yeah, they suspended animation, and then they go to this planet, and there's floating islands.

Yeah?

Wait, that was...

How bad?

How bad did they get like the hypersleep?

Are you saying that was a fiction movie?

But hypersleep's a good,

well, maybe that's a, this is a biological question.

I mean,

what are the things, Sean?

If you look at Interstellar is a different kind of movie because it's based first on the science.

The history of the movie is interesting, isn't it?

Because it was...

essentially started by scientists.

That's right.

So Kip Thorne, my colleague at Caltech, and his friend Linda Oates, who is a producer on Contact, the movie that was made from Carl Sagan's novel, they had this idea that let's do it right.

They were a little bit upset with how Contact ended, it turned out, as Carl Sagan also was.

So they said, let's just make a science fiction movie where it's 100% we get the science exactly right.

And they got a call from Steven Spielberg's office saying, we hear you have a movie treatment.

Send it to us.

They had nothing, of course.

So they pulled Nalnider, as you do.

They typed up a treatment.

And Spielberg got excited, and Jonathan Nolan was attached as a writer, and then eventually Spielberg had to leave, and Jonathan Nolan goes, well, I know a guy who's a director, my brother, Christopher Nolan.

And Christopher Nolan was less excited about getting the science exactly 100% right.

So it's, you know, 99% right, the science.

There's very few times in the movie where they just are wrong.

They stretch credulity right and left.

But it's not wrong.

And more importantly, they get good dramatic ideas by being inspired by the science, by time dilation, by wormholes, by time travel.

These are all science ideas that get you good story ideas.

What was wrong with the end of contact, scientifically?

Well, you know, she enters a quote-unquote wormhole, and it's more like an LSD trip, and it's like she's, it's Deepak Chopra's movie.

It's not Carl Sagan's movie.

It's like she's one with the universe, and things like that.

And then the Matthew McConaughey weird preacher man is like, he was right all along.

If only I had listened to the surfer preacher guy.

Something that a real physicist never says.

I mean, to answer Joe's question earlier, I think that every movie needs to have its own world and its own standards, right?

You know, if there was suddenly a talking tree in gravity, you would be like, that seems unusual.

But in Guardians of the Galaxy, it just fits in perfectly well.

And I think Avatar is, you know, pretty good on the science.

It's not perfect, so there's some floating rocks in the sky, you know.

But it's not y th the question is, are you thrown out of the world?

Does the drama work?

And I think that when the collaboration between scientists and movie people or novelists or whatever works the best, it's when the scientists can give new ideas that can then be made dramatically successful in the context of that world.

And that's why it's important to have science advisors on Thor or the Avengers or...

Tron Legacy.

Because maybe we can give some people ideas.

The advisor they needed on

Avatar was someone to make up a believable name for that element.

What was that?

Unobtainium.

Unobtainium.

I could have, for $1, I could have made up a better name than that.

$1.

That is, we could continue for another four hours than we have in the past, but for legal reasons, we have to end now.

Thank you very much to our fantastic panel who have been Joe Rogan, Sean Carroll, David X.

Cohen, Eric Idle.

Thank you very much to fabulous additional music guests as well.

Thank you very much for listening and goodbye.

Thank you.

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