Serendipity

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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.

I'm Brian Cox.

And I'm Robin Entz, and this is the last in the current series of The Infinite Monkey Cage.

So in series 11, what have we learned so far?

Well, amongst other things, we have learnt that the smaller a frog is, the less you should risk licking it.

Which is genuinely, we learned that about episode two: very small frogs, don't lick them.

That has changed your lifestyle a great deal.

Because you used to go to all those kind of she-she-so-ho restaurants, didn't you?

The little licky, and you go, I won't have a small frog, give me a larger frog.

Oh, Brown Cups, he's changed.

Anyway, all I'm saying is, small frogs can be toxic.

Warning.

We learned that subliminal advertising isn't as effective as liminal advertising.

That's true, yes.

We also learned that flowers may be nature's quantum computers, though we still have a very limited number of apps and games.

They've still only got Do You Like Butter 1.0 and

the Love Me Not app.

So for this final show, we're going to be looking at serendipity in science.

And by the way, if you're serendipity in science, which means just luck, really, or stumbling upon things by chance, but serendipity makes it sound a lot more scientific.

So whilst it may be presumed that science is a very exact and directed endeavour, some of the most enlightening scientific discoveries have occurred almost by accident.

From artificial sweetness to our understanding of this expanding universe, the knowledge we have attained is often not from what we set out to achieve.

We are joined by a panel of three brought to us by serendipity, but actually mainly by an empirical booking policy.

So, our panel are.

I'm Simon Singh, and I'm a science writer, and I've written books like Firmar's Last Theorem.

And my greatest accidental discovery was yesterday evening when we were trying to calculate how to split up the restaurant bill.

And in trying to calculate that, we actually discovered Firmar's Last Theorem's original proof.

I would tell you all about that right now, but unfortunately this introduction is too short to include it.

I'm Andreas Sailla, I'm professor of chemistry at University College London and my greatest accidental discovery really isn't suitable for a family show, I'm afraid.

But my second really came when I was actually paid by one of my mother's friends to pick dandelions out of her lawn for endless hours.

And that's when I discovered you could make a rainbow with a garden hose.

It was great.

My name is Dr.

Limac.

That actually, that is not a joke.

Thank you very much.

It's my official title.

And my greatest accidental discovery was finding out if you are a school child dreaming of one day becoming a great scientist, but actually leaving school with just two O levels and no actual prospects, if you then become a comedian and hang around on TV panel games enough, you eventually get offered an honorary degree anyway and you can call yourself a doctor.

So there you go.

And this is our panel.

Simon, isn't all science essentially serendipitous?

Sometimes people know what they're looking for and they spend years, they spend careers searching for it and ultimately find it.

I mean, with the Higgs boson, you know, people knew they built the LHC purposely to find the Higgs boson.

Incredible discovery, but not absolutely a shock, and much appreciated.

But at the other end of the spectrum, probably the best evidence we have for the Big Bang is the cosmic microwave background radiation, this echo of the Big Bang.

And the people who discovered that was two guys called Penzias and Wilson, who had a big radio telescope, and they built this radio telescope to pick up radio waves from outer space.

And they switched on the first day, and

they got this weird microwave radiation.

And so they pointed it in a different direction, they got this weird microwave radiation.

They waited a day, they still got this weird microwave radiation.

They checked everything, they found inside the telescope, this big radio telescope, there were two pigeons nesting.

And the pigeons had deposited what they called, diplomatically called, a white dielectric material.

So cleaned it all out, still, these microwaves kept on coming.

And eventually,

somebody kind of had to tell them, What you have discovered is the echo of creation.

These microwaves came from the Big Bang itself.

So utterly serendipitous discovery, one of the greatest of all time, and it won them a Nobel Prize.

I suppose you could say that the LHC, although it was built because there was strong evidence that something interesting was happening in the energy range of the machine, the actual discovery, we didn't know we were going to discover the Higgs, of course.

It reminds me of that famous Richard Feynman quote when it went and said to him, Look, we've built this machine and it costs seven billion dollars or something to test your theory.

And he said, why don't you trust me?

Yeah, yeah.

So it's the same way.

Peter Higgs could have said that.

So I thought the idea, but by asking the question, is science not all essentially serendipitous?

Is that it's the curiosity-led exploration of the unknown is really what science is.

You don't know what you're going to do.

Yeah, that's why we call it research.

If we didn't know the answer, we wouldn't bother doing it.

But I suppose at the other end of the spectrum, if there is a spectrum, if there's a range of serendipity, at the other end of the Higgs boson would be the muon, I think,

where they had a cloud chamber and this particle particle appeared that was a bit like an electron but heavier, and somebody said, Who ordered that?

It was absolutely not expected.

And so, I suppose that's really what true serendipity in science is all about, or the extreme end of it, at least.

I love your description of the evidence for the Higgs boson being much appreciated.

There's nothing more.

Oh, we've got the evidence for the Higgs boson after 50 years.

Much appreciated.

Thanks very much.

Probably over there.

Andreas.

So, chemistry, it seems like the chance of serendipity there,

in the action of mixing these things together, in the act of deciding what should be combined with what there may well be in terms of the luck and the chance of what discovered on that way, what have we found out?

We've found out all kinds of things.

And one of the things is that we have this illusion that comes from the fact we write equations where we go A plus B, and then there's an arrow and C plus D.

And the thing that that equation doesn't express is the fact you're not talking about one molecule plus another one, if you're actually talking about 10 to the power 20, 10 to the power 23 of these things, all of which are independent.

And what's intriguing is that actually,

a lot of the time, you know, things do all behave in the same way.

But there's lots of situations, A, where you get, you know, sort of several products out and some of them turn out to be more interesting than others.

And so we have, you know, when you mix two things together, you have a pretty good expectation of what's going to come out.

And then if something else turns up, then, you know, that's kind of really interesting.

Can I ask you a question?

Because it breaks the rules.

You say it's really interesting.

What happens if you then discover something even better than you were looking for in the first place?

Well, do you take the credit for that?

Well, that's a really interesting.

I mean, I can give you a really good example of this.

And the really good example is going back to a research project that was initiated in the 1850s.

And it was a German chemist who was brought to Britain by Prince Albert to basically build up Britain's chemical industry.

His name was August Hoffmann, and he set up the Royal Institute of Chemistry in Oxford Street.

And one of his young graduate students was a man called called William Perkin.

And Perkin was given the task of taking coal tar

and using that to make something interesting.

And the interesting thing was a cure for malaria.

He needed to make quinine.

Now, there were good chemical reasons why that might seem possible.

Because if you analyze quinine, there were things in it that are also found in coal tar.

Anyway.

So are you saying cold tar?

Coal tars.

No, what you get.

Oh, you're not.

I'm talking about like tar on the road that's cold.

No, no.

You're not saying that, are you?

No.

Because that's hard to harvest.

Well, it's not, is it?

You get to go onto the road.

Yeah, that's what it's quite dangerous out, Brian.

You know a lot about science, but not much about road safety.

No, it's the 1850s, 1850s.

Oh, Darth 1850s.

That's true, yes.

Was there any tar on the road in 1850s?

There was no tar.

You know, you're asking the wrong man.

Andrea, was there any tar on the road?

MacAdam hadn't tarred the roads yet.

I can see why they made you a doctor.

I'm a doctor of humanities.

So I wasn't asking a proper scientific question.

I was trying to bring up the theatre of the piece.

That's my job as a doctor of humanities.

Can I tell you what scientifically it's flagging?

Knock, knock, who's there?

That's how it goes.

Perkin.

So Perkin was tasked.

Perkin was tasked with making quinine synthetically, essentially making it in the lab.

And he and the other students in that lab lab were making all of these weird colored materials.

They were making reds and oranges and browns.

And one day this guy, Perkin, made an incredibly unusual material.

It was a material that was purple.

No one had ever seen something that intensely purple.

Since the Romans had ground up small snails back 2,000 years ago.

And he was trying to make quinine at this time.

He was trying to make quinine, but back then they knew so little chemistry that they really were groping around completely in the dark.

Quinnine wouldn't be made until the 1950s, synthetically.

So this is 100 years before that.

Hoffman sort of looked at this stuff and went, it's not quinine.

And Perkins said, but it's beautiful.

And Hoffman said, just get back to bloody work, make quinine.

And Perkins said, I quit.

And he set up his own business.

Very cannily, what he did was he named it Mauve so that it had a French flavor.

And when

Queen Queen Victoria put a mauve ribbon in her hair, well, his fortune was made.

And I mean, it was a complete accident.

So can he take credit, going back to the original question?

Hoffman took no credit.

And Perkin made a fortune.

I think, as Churchill, if I'm not right, once said,

we often stumble across the truth, but few, most of us just pick ourselves up and carry on walking.

And what Perkin realised was this was something special, this was something extraordinary.

Well, this goes to the heart of the idea of the value of serendipity in science, doesn't it?

The idea that whilst we're obviously research science is about trying to venture into the unknown, often it just gets new colours.

But a good scientist will be aware of an anomalous results and will pick that up no matter where it leads.

Yeah, and the crucial thing was that this was a completely new colour.

It made everyone sit up and notice.

And what it did was it started the complete colour industry that revolutionized Europe because suddenly you could dye colours.

But above all, it started the pharmaceutical industry because suddenly you have the idea of being able to make compounds on demand.

And really, all of kind of modern chemistry emerges from that, modern industrial chemistry emerges from that moment.

So, basically, from a queen placing a ribbon in her hair and the popularity of that, we then get all the, I mean, if you can say, you know, beyond fashion, what kind of things are we talking about?

Well, I mean, certainly pharmaceuticals, right?

You know, the big colour companies, right, like BASF, which was the,

I mean, you know, the

wrong show for a second.

All of those dye manufacturers then went into pharmaceuticals, and things like aspirin and so on, all really emerged from that original moment with Perkin when he found that purple.

I mean, Lee, when, because we're talking about serendipity, and obviously, even though you are a doctor, not all of your work is scientific.

In all seriousness, if you could say Dr.

Mack.

Dr.

Mack, of course.

Dr.

Mac sounds like this is a very disappointing rap act that I've put from that shot.

Here's Dr.

Mac doing a collection of Covers of Goody's singles.

The Rochdale rap.

The first time I saw you, you used to be a conjurer, of course.

You were in the early 90s, you did a lot of conjuring.

I didn't conjure, Robin.

We've had this conversation before.

You've got a deluded view of me, where in the past I was some sort of variety act from the 1920s.

I never had a colour.

You were a red coat or a blue coat or something.

I was a red blue coat.

I forgot my own colour name.

I accidentally discovered if you put the red coats with the blue coats together and they make love, they produce mauve coats.

What's the characteristics of a mauve coat?

Mauve.

So no, I was a blue coat at Pontins, which isn't the same as being David Copperfield.

That's a completely different job.

But yeah, no, so I don't get the question.

I used to be a punt.

No, sorry, we haven't got to.

Which is about the serendipity of

in terms of your creativity, which is, you know, you've just been touring, when you're writing new shows, you've been together these shows.

When you are trying to create jokes, when you're trying to create, you know, kind of the art that you do, do you find yourself starting off and going, well, I'm going to write something about this, this is the routine I want to, and then during that journey, you end off finding that you've gone into a totally different tangent.

I think if you're not a scientist, I think everything is, I suppose, serendipity, because you're not looking.

I don't think specifically.

Everything I discover in my life is,

I don't ever wake up looking for much.

Maybe my car keys.

I might discover, you know, I might go and look for my car keys and then find a banana in there and go, actually, I've just realized I'm a bit hungry.

And more importantly, I'm not in a rush.

I don't need to go anywhere.

So that is a serendipitous moment of banana finding.

Because I'm not actually ever waking up much looking.

I mean, I'll give you an example of.

It's close to the achievement of Perkin, isn't it?

No need for sarcasm.

I'll give you an example, I suppose, of a serendipitous

joke.

I was writing my tour and I I would sit at my computer all day.

I suppose all my jokes are a form of serendipitous because I would, the way I write jokes, if I mean, we can rely on just noticing funny things, but that gets you through about the first 15 minutes of your show.

And then you have to actually come up with ideas from nothing.

So, what I do is I turn to a random page in a magazine for a couple of hours, different random magazines, and will try and make myself write a joke about whatever I see on that magazine in ten minutes.

And it's very rarely about the magazine.

So, if I if I look at a page of a and a car, an advert for a car, I'll end up with a joke about a squirrel.

And I've absolutely no idea how I got there, but that's the starting point.

An example with that with that would be: I asked my son recently, I was trying to write a routine about the fact that children's jokes are very simple, and I wish that comedians could get away with that.

Don't say anything, Robin, I know you've seen my act.

But

and the idea that kids kids are more simplistic and less anyway, that the the point is, I asked my eight-year-old son to tell me a joke.

I said, Come on, then, tell me a joke.

And he said, What's brown and sticky?

I said, You know, a stick.

And he said, No, poo.

And I found that so funny that I actually found that him telling me that was funnier than the idea of what I was going to write about about kids' jokes being simplistic.

I must point out, by the way, that's not quite what he said, but

it was even funnier.

But yeah, so that was an example of something which I then ended up using in my act, but not in its original original idea about kids' jokes being simplistic, which obviously that is a simplistic joke, but not what was expected.

I have a theory that in science that you get greater serendipity when you have a group of people.

So there was a guy at 3M, the company,

trying to invent a super glue.

And it was the most pathetic glue you could imagine.

And he was giving a lecture about all the polymers he was working on, etc.

And somebody said, well, hang on, maybe a pathetic glue would be useful because he wanted to put sticking notes in his hymn book.

And he invented the post-it note.

So you have somebody who doesn't realise what they've discovered, and somebody else working with them.

And then 3M have this really weird idea that everybody can spend 15% of their time doing whatever they like, so you could go away and invent the post-it note.

And in terms of comedy, I'm just wondering whether, if you're writing as a group, whether there's more chance of serendipity when you're bouncing off people as opposed to

I've been in rooms with people like Robin for long periods of time and serendipity is not the word

that springs to mind.

It's interesting what you said about 3M there.

There is many companies actually have these policies that 15% of the time the research scientists, or 20% of the time, can do things, curiosity-led research, essentially, which often leads to things.

When we're preparing for this programme, I look back to Andre Geim's Nobel Prize lecture in 2010.

So, Andre Geim very famously won the Nobel Prize for graphene in 2010.

Sorry, for whatever material.

Graphene, which is a form of carbon.

So, it's not graphite and not diamond, it's a different form of carbon.

I know that.

I mean, for the people at home, Brian.

Look, I know that.

This stuff is a virtually a wonder material.

It's one of the strongest materials known, one of the best conductors of heat, a very good conductor of electricity, many fascinating properties of this stuff.

Discovered it very recently.

But in his lecture, he said, While preparing for my lecture in Stockholm, I compiled a list of my Friday night experiments.

So he had this idea that when he came to the University of Manchester, the greatest educational institution in the world, then he did it.

He had these ideas where he would have a time for freedom to play.

And he said, only then did I realise a stunning fact.

There are two dozen or so experiments over a period of around 15 years.

Most of them failed miserably, but there were three bits, three hits.

Levitation, where he got the Ig Nobel Prize very famously for levitating live frogs.

Gecko tape, very famously made this invention, which is potentially very useful.

Working out how to si essentially build a synthetic gecko so you can climb up walls and graphene.

And he said this implies an extraordinary success rate, more than 10%.

And there are very many near-misses to's.

So the point was he discovered his Nobel Prize and his Ig Nobel Prize came from these curiosity-led pieces of exploration.

And I suppose the question that this one of the serious parts of this program,

there is one.

If there is one, it's this: that should scientists or must scientists be allowed that time?

In the same way as you said that engineers at 3M discovered something wonderful in that playtime.

Here's a Nobel laureate saying it was in my playtime that I made this groundbreaking discovery.

Yeah, and I think in academic institutions, there's increasing pressure to justify people's research.

And every you know, often there's an annual review or a five-yearly review, and people have to justify how this is going to pay dividends to the UK economy.

So I think in academic research, there's probably less

free time to go off and experiment randomly.

But in industry,

I was surprised at the amount of serendipity in industry.

So the Big Bang guys we talked at the very I talked about at the very beginning work for Bell Labs, big industrial research labs looking for ways from outer space.

Viagra was invented by Pfizer and they were working on a heart drug.

And so they got it to the clinical trial stage and so they kind of produced a whole box of these of these pills.

And the idea was to treat some kind of heart condition, so they gave them out to patients.

And the results were really poor.

So they asked for all the pills to come back.

People were very reluctant to return these pills.

And eventually they realized that they had another effect.

And

gosh, two billion-dollar industry when it was at its peak,

so to speak.

Can I ask you a question?

Was that a serendipitous gag or was that

have you been building towards that for the last 10 years?

What was it you actually

were telling me beforehand?

So, serendipity, the actual word itself comes from so Horace Walpole

coined it in a letter to a friend.

He made some wonderful accidental discovery.

He said, I call this discovery an example of serendipity, named after the three princes of serendip.

And serendip was the old, old word for Sri Lanka.

And so, that's where, and the three princes of serendip would go on their journeys making happy accidental discoveries.

So, that's where Horace Walpole got it from, and that's where we've got it from, Horace Walpole.

Ah, now that's their definition, Lee.

But I wonder what your definition of serendipity is.

Is it true or bluff?

My own mild aspect betrays the fact that I wasn't expecting that.

I accidentally now just came out with a scientific quotation without even knowing where the hell it came from.

But I mean, I think this idea of having your own kind of private time, private space, but also time to play is incredibly important.

And one thing that I think has happened in academia is often the loss of common rooms, for example.

Places where people kind of get together and just talk about stuff and out of those conversations emerge sort of new ideas that weren't there before.

Or somebody says, oh, well, that sounds just like such and such, which I've heard about or I've been working on.

And that creativity emerges.

from there.

And the more academics, I think, and people in industry are kind of boxed in their offices having to do loads of paperwork or whatever, the less you get that.

In your own career, have you seen that in terms of, say, trying to get grants, that it's always, you know, what is that, we need the practical application right at the start.

What are you trying to, is it getting harder to go, well, look, they've got an idea, this idea is interesting, we don't know where it's going to go, this is part of the beauty of the kind of, you know, the scientific journey?

Well,

I think more and more one has to sort of say, ah, well, this is where the application might lead.

But I think most academics who are reading, you know, these grant proposals, they kind of look at some of those impact statements and they say, well, it's got to be there because our masters require that.

But in a sense, what they're really looking for is the kind of clever, original idea, which might lead somewhere.

Imagine it's quite difficult, the idea that you try and get a grant and say, you know, we need a million pounds.

And they go, what for?

They go, just open to stumble across something, really.

Luckily.

But it's not that different to comedy, is it?

If you go to the BBC and say, can I have a huge investment in in my new show?

And they go and sit about and go, I'm just going to sit in the room in Robin Ins for a couple of months and see what happens.

They'll go, not falling for this again.

That was a good late 90s for us, though.

Very good late 90s for this.

There are two kinds.

I mean, there are two parts, in a sense, to science.

Because on the one hand, there's the slightly humdrum stuff where you know exactly, well, you have a pretty good idea, pretty good hunch of what it is that you're going to find, what you're trying to test, and so on.

And then there are those moments along the way.

You know, you have a plan that you're going to take this useless coal tar stuff and you're going to convert it into quinine and you think there's a rational way to get there.

And then along the way, you suddenly stumble on something new.

And that really kind of fires off things in a completely new direction.

I suppose to defend

the funding agencies for a moment, I suppose if you have questions that society needs answering, so for example, we might need a better way of

a better fertiliser for plants or a better energy source or something like that, then the way to do it is investment in scientific research.

There is no way to find a a better for a way to generate electricity than doing it with engineering science.

So I suppose that's an entirely legitimate thing to do for society to direct money to scientists and engineers in order to solve specific problems.

Can I just say, by the way, if you're looking for a better fertiliser for plants, ask my son what's brown and sticky.

Stick.

Yes.

And so I suppose that tension between directing money to solve particular problems, but then also allowing the playtime, which can lead ultimately to far more valuable discoveries in the long term.

Well, I think you need that playfulness.

You need to find that kind of playful space.

And what's, I mean, you know, you talk about this 10, 15 percent of free time.

That used to be the norm in companies in the 1940s, the 1950s.

And it's really interesting that there were these huge research labs,

the Bell Labs, there were the famous Phillips labs in Eindhoven, and places like that, which were premier research institutions on a sort of world-class level.

And through the 70s, 80s, those places were basically kind of closed down and narrowed and so on.

And what's happened has been the re-emergence of that, in a sense, through companies like Google, which have completely redefined how work is done and which allow their employees much more space to kind of talk to each other and to play around.

I remember that Casimir, actually, a very famous theoretical physicist who was the director of Philips Labs,

he gave an evidence to the US Congress, I think, back in the 1960s.

And he said that he can think of no example of a discovery that's profoundly changed civilization that wasn't serendipitous.

Is that

true?

I suppose in as much as if you know what you're looking for, you're going to kind of find it.

So there are things that we know that we need to know, and then there are things that we don't know that we should use.

That's what we're talking about.

Our hero.

And it's the things that we don't know.

Things just pop up as well.

Things that we don't know we need to know are the things that just change the world.

From the level of Twitter, we didn't know that we needed to have a Twitter, and yet it just transforms the world.

So

yeah,

those are the

nobody was looking for quantum theory, and then it just suddenly pops up.

Nobody was looking for relativity, and then suddenly it just transforms the way we see the world.

But is that even using that terminology, it just pops up?

Is that in some ways making it sound like for a lot of these people who are working in incredible pieces of research that it's not just, oh, hang on a minute, I've just found quantum theory.

Even that action, even discovering, you know, it's not just luck, it is luck that certain results occur, but then it requires the ingenuity to interpret that.

Because so far, we've had some odd examples.

We're going, serendipity is great, and we've come up with pathetic glue, mauve, and sex pills.

So it's some people might not, you know, and cosmic microwave background radiation if that makes the edit.

Yeah, it's

it's you know, it's also penicillin, you know, it's all of these great discoveries.

And there are people, there was somebody who spotted penicillin before Fleming, and they documented it, but they didn't figure out why it would be very valuable.

This Big Bang radiation had been detected by Russian scientists, and they just saw it as an annoyance.

Actually, I think they put it down to some kind of atmospheric effect.

So, you spot this stuff, but you've then got to realize what it genuinely means and what it can then be used for in the future.

I wanted to up the ante a little bit, because as I said, obviously, you know, being foolish about pathetic glue and mauve, but also, Andrea, in terms of chemistry, artificial sweeteners.

Yeah, this is, we were reading about the fact that all artificial sweeteners occur.

I mean, one of the stories that seems remarkable is that basically one of them was discovered because someone misread test for taste.

Yeah, absolutely.

Now, that could really have gone awry, couldn't it?

This is

now, I think the supervisor's supervisor sent off the student or the coworker and said, you know, send the samples off for tasting.

And an hour later, the guy came back and said, hey, this one's sweet.

And his boss went, what?

And now it's called Splenda.

You know, there are loads

of other examples.

I mean, another one was a chemist who went home in the evening to have dinner, but he hadn't washed his hands.

And he suddenly found that his bread roll tasted sweet.

As a chemist, the first thing I would do at the end of my day is go, I've got to wash my hands.

I'm a chemist.

Well, I mean, if I could.

I've got my tongue fizzing and exploding.

I forgot to wash my hands.

Well, that's how you can tell that somebody's a chemist because they wash their hands before they go to the toilet.

So serendipity, this chance, the the chance discoveries are not necessarily chance discoveries.

They are completely scientific because I I have never discovered any scientific discoveries by chance.

And you two seem to have a bit of a better chance than me.

It's actually a good concern.

Only a bit of a point, isn't it?

You know, you can't be complete.

You are lucky in the first place.

Is there, in terms of those motives, say, Simon was talking about the discovery of pathetic glue.

Now, when it turned out that pathetic glue was

an innovation, it was going to be very useful.

Does that person think, brilliant, I've created something wonderful, or is there, after that serendipity discovery, is there still the...

That wasn't really what I wanted.

Do you sometimes find that some of these stories of scientists who, by chance, have discovered things and applications that they weren't expecting, that underneath it, they still go, that wasn't what I was after, though.

And I still want to find that other thing.

I mean, I've never spoken to Andre Gein, but if you were to ask him,

he tried out one of his Friday afternoon experiments, which was the frog and the magnet thing.

Can we sort of, I don't think we should leave this, I was going to say hanging, but there is the frog and the magnet.

It's not really enough for the audience at home or here to just go, this is just a frog and a magnet.

I think they might like to have some sense of the possible purpose.

Because this wasn't...

He wasn't just going, I've got a magnet and a frog.

That's all.

There's nothing in there.

Frictionless bearings is a possible application of that.

So you could imagine building.

I don't think you do it now, but at the time, hard drives were discussed.

The fact that you could build frictionless bearings.

Anything you can levitate is interesting.

You imagine things like maglev trains.

And this was actually levitation.

I mean, this was really an exploration of a phenomenon, a magnetic phenomenon that applies to every material on the planet.

And we normally think of magnetic materials as the ones that you pick up with a magnet.

But in fact most materials are repelled by a magnet.

And so if you

there's a beautiful experiment, I mean sort of demonstration you can do where you stick two straws on the end, sorry, two grapes on the end of a straw and you suspend the straw from a string.

So it looks like a dumbbell sort of hanging from a thread.

You now bring a strong magnet up to the grape, and you'll find that the grape runs away, sort of moves away from the magnet.

This is called diamagnetism.

And what they wanted to do was to show, right, the diamagnetism could be strong enough that you could actually make things fly.

And it was the diamagnetism of water that mattered.

And so they thought, what are we going to use?

Grape?

Eh, boring.

Let's try frog, right?

And it worked.

And there are videos online for those of you who are into magnetic porn.

This is very, very interesting.

It's not as far away from writing jokes as you imagined, is it?

Levin eight and grapes and frogs in a magnet.

It's a very similar process, isn't it?

It's very interesting because there's a a debate at the moment to to bring some current affairs into this show at the towards the end.

So the the debate about science in schools.

So what you spoke about there, about this an experiment you can do with grapes and some straws, and you can see a fundamental piece of science there for yourself.

Um that there's a lot of controversy at the moment about downgrading the value of scientific experiments in schools, or in particular, not having them contribute to the marks at A-level.

But for various reasons, it's very difficult to mark them, etc.

But there's been a lot written, a lot of controversy about this idea that you're taking the play out of science, you're taking that skill out of practical science and making it theoretical.

Well, I think one of the reasons that some people think that actually that practical component isn't as valuable as some people make it out to be, is because, really, very often these things turn out to be simply an exercise in, oh, here's the recipe, right?

I'm just going to follow the recipe, like in Delia Smith's book or something, right, and I'm going to do it, and then I'm going to get the marks at the end, and you go out.

And it never really goes through your mind.

And this is something that, you know, at university we wrestle with, where we know that some of our undergraduates, you know, they'll say to you,

I don't quite know, is this blue or something?

Right?

And you go, well, look at it.

What do I have to say it is to get the marks, essentially?

Well, kind of.

But it speaks to the fact that a lot of people.

A lot of people listening at home, so don't know that that's not blue.

It's not blue, no, actually.

But really, it's a question of is the practical simply an exercise in kind of jumping through formulaic hoops, or could you come up with a way of bringing that sort of slightly sort of more playful thing

into the teaching that is currently absent?

And I think that's where the

debate lies.

Do you think it's important to do that, to bring play back into teaching?

I think if there are ways to bring play, yes, because that's the only way you learn.

I think in the end we only learn by play.

This is what we're talking about, Simon, isn't it, ultimately?

It's about doing science and whether that element of play, the chance discovery really lies at the heart of science, or what balance there is between chance and directed research.

I'm just wondering whether you could ever engineer a a practical

probably you couldn't do do it now because it would just be online and and everybody would know what what the ultimate goal was but when we did practicals at school they would say here's a trolley going down a slope here's a ticker tape measure it graph it and prove the the equation we wanted to prove to the start to the start but if you could engineer an experiment which had a certain path that students could follow

but if they really really put the effort in they might just go off on a side road or they might discover something that they weren't supposed to be looking for and to get that genuine sense of wonder there's you know there's a quote in science that you and I have used many times, which is that

science is not about the eureka moment, it's about the oh, that's funny.

You know, it's that weird moment where it's not what you expect, and that's where the real discoveries are made.

Lee, I was going to ask you, so go back to your school days.

So, so you said you didn't do science?

No, I didn't.

No, we did.

Well, we did plastic work, which was a subject, genuinely.

Plastic work.

It was a subject that didn't last very long.

Did anybody else do plastic work, or was I at a very unusual school?

Not one person in the audience did plastic work.

Did you do plastic work?

It was a lesson that they obviously saw the future and saw the future was plastic.

And so instead of woodwork and metalwork, we did plastic work and we fashioned things out of plastic.

Did you have

to school Borstell?

Did you?

Borstel.

That's it, yeah.

And we weren't allowed the tools required for metalwork and woodwork.

Would you have been more likely to be interested if science had been more about play, more about this pure science?

Listen, I went to a school where science was very much about play.

And it was about when the teacher's teacher's not looking, you set fire to the frog or the madden.

But we weren't playing perhaps in the right way.

Well, as long as you drew a graph of how long it took the frog to burn and try it with different sizes of frog and different frogs,

it wasn't like that.

You just got a clout around the head and said, Don't set fire to the frog.

It was a different, and I said, You're quashing me as a future scientist.

Why would you do that?

You're quashing

my potential skills.

You need to play for the serendipitous moment, I said.

What was your view of the sky?

You're four years old, I'm talking about that.

What was your view of science, though, at the time?

I mean, is there any reason you didn't was it dull?

Was it not interesting?

Why did you become a conjugate?

Genuinely, if I'd have been at school,

if I had been at school, at school, we used to do experiments

to prove things they already knew.

Which is what Simon said.

They wanted to do that.

And I think that was why it was a bit not dull, but if they already, I wanted to do something perhaps that he said, right, it's all very interesting.

If you like this chemical and like this chemical, put them together, whatever, this will happen, right?

But if a teacher would have said to me, if I mix these two chemicals, you know what's going to happen, and I went, no, and he went, neither do I.

I would have been extremely interested very quickly.

You don't lick your fingers and find out as an artificial sweet though.

Lee's not well.

That's the heart of science, though, isn't it?

That is the joy.

So, I did an experiment the weekend with my son.

We've got a corn flake on a bowl of milk and a very powerful magnet, and you can drag the corn flake across the milk with the magnet because there's iron, fortified iron in cornflakes.

Corn flakes are fortified with iron, so you can drag it across.

And then you can grind up the cornflakes and get the granules that have actually got the iron in.

And this is kind of just a real journey of exploration.

And we did another one where you get pots and you put a seed in each pot, and one you don't put any soil in, the other one you don't put any water in, the other one you don't put any sunlight in.

And you see which ones grow.

The odd thing is that the one that doesn't have sunlight still grows because there's energy in the seed.

So So I had to put a bit of vinegar in that one just to kill that one off.

But

otherwise, it's a really educational experience.

I don't think we should end this episode on sometimes you have to lie to make sure they know the truth.

So that's possibly not the.

What do you think?

I mean, that's a good, not the vinegar bit, but the rest of it is a good.

I'm just thinking how hungry your child is.

We dragged a corn flake and then he ate it.

Poor thin boy.

Andrew, what do you think are the best examples that we give to those people who do think there might be a linear route to knowledge?

Again, we were talking about this before, the idea that if every experiment, if everything that's given a grant to, we need there to be this big result to say, well, there isn't a linear route.

You know, there are many ways of getting to some of the great understandings that we have about the universe and glue.

Glue is very underrated.

It's very interesting.

But I mean, I think that the thing you need is to be able to get the best and most kind of curious people to provide them with really good facilities.

Of course they should be aiming for certain targets.

But when you've actually got really smart, observant, curious people, then they will pick up on the, oh, that's weird kind of, oh, it's not quite what I expect.

Why isn't it?

And often, you know, the differences that lead to those clues

are really incredibly small and you've just got to have the right sort of mind to be able to pick up on that.

Because, you know, sometimes it's purple.

I mean, that's kind of almost obvious.

But it's interesting that, of course, the supervisor was blind to that, right?

He really didn't see that.

He thought, no, it's not queen.

And so it didn't matter what color it was.

And so actually, there's an interplay between the great experience and at the same time, the sort of naivete of the person who's starting out, who suddenly finds the solution.

I used to work on Tomorrow's World, and so we'd meet inventors all the time with ideas,

all sorts of ideas.

I remember going to meet a guy who worked for the forensics lab, and he told me the story that he was, that the fish tank broke, and so he got the super glue out, talking about glue and serendipity, and started gluing the fish tank back together with super glue.

And I think the way super glue works is it comes out, and it's obviously liquid, and then it reacts with the moisture in the air to solidify.

And the vapours from the super glue had kind of gone all over the fish tank and reacted with the moisture of the fingerprints that he'd left on the glass.

And he could see all his own fingerprints on the fish tank.

And because he worked for the forensics lab, he thought, wow, this is the best way to find fingerprints that you would never ever see normally.

And now it's a well-used forensic technique.

You know, you take the objects, you put them into a tank, you pass in super glue fumes, and you see all the fingerprints.

And so it's, as you say, it's about I'm a forensic scientist and I look for forensic things and this is my research, but oh, hang on, there's an interesting thing over here that can just transform an area.

Can you use super glue to mend kryptonite?

Anyway, so

what have you learnt, Lee?

To stay in.

Good.

That's, of course, your popular signal, isn't it?

Staying in.

No, I've learnt a lot of things.

I've learnt some of it has washed over me.

But I was interested about the thing about the whatever you just said about the glue and the fingers and the tank.

Something about how fish fingers were invented or something.

I didn't quite fully listen, but

yeah, no, I've learnt a lot.

Thank you very much.

That was very enlightening.

Thank you.

This has probably been, I think, the most erratic show we've ever done.

And I really think that you had that, Lee.

I enjoyed your company.

It was erotic at one point.

I don't think it was erotic.

I think...

Which bit was erotic?

A little bit about Viagra.

Well, I don't know if it's actually eroticism.

Oh, I'm thinking of pills, blue ones.

I think there should be some other content before it actually becomes erotica.

Otherwise, imagine you walking around super drug.

Anyway, so

don't worry about orange pills, they don't do it for me.

Anyway, so

you'll hear a different voice.

Yes, yes, yes,

sometimes you like this LOWAN brain.

I'm okay enough.

Someone clean it up.

Anyway, so

Bernard Manning, John Rumson.

John Rumson, sometimes it's John Rumson.

So, we asked the audience a question.

We are off air for six months, and we wanted to find out while we're off air, what do you hope that scientists might discover in that time before our return?

So, these are the answers we received.

Can Narnia actually exist in a wardrobe?

Brian.

Yeah, it depends what you mean by Narnia.

Right, okay, well, we'll have to come back to that with some more specific definitions.

A decent non-recurring storyline for Downton Abbey.

A pill to cure stupidity.

Says, forgive me, I'm only 11.

And it would sort out some of the idiots in my class.

This is from Isabella.

Well done, man.

Something that can be put into sock material that means part of socks can always find each other without human intervention.

So homing socks.

Thank you very much for those answers.

And thank you very much to our panel who were Simon Singh, Andrea Sella, and Lee Mac.

So,

if the moral of this episode is that the exploration of nature can be enabled but not directed, and that modern civilization rests on the serendipitous discoveries of a thousand curious minds, what's the moral of the series, Robin?

I would say that the moral of series 11 is that we should be curious about nature, we should question why we believe what we believe, and also that there are no stupid questions.

You haven't been following our Twitter feed, then have you, Robin?

Okay, there are sometimes stupid stupidish questions.

Oh, hugely stupid questions, slightly stupid questions.

My favourite one is i if science is so good, then why do they have to keep changing it?

Yeah, fair enough.

It does seem like you lot can't make your mind up, doesn't it?

One moment it's atoms, then it's all manner of cheeky particles, ridiculous.

So I would say, yeah, it would be better if you could be a little bit more definite with your science.

You need to let doubt get in your way.

You haven't listened, have you?

The eleventh series.

You haven't listened to anything.

I want to listen to you, but there's something so alluring about the hair you bought after Series 6 that I just keep getting distracted.

Series 5 hair, it was more Frankie Howard, but since Series 6, it's just so shiny.

Anyway,

can I try it on?

Goodbye.

cage.

Till now, nice again.

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