Science v Art

27m

Brian Cox and Robin Ince transport the cage of infinite proportions, to the slightly more confined space of the Latitude Comedy Arena. They will be joined on stage by a panel of guests, including Al Murray, for a witty, irreverent and unashamedly rational look at the world according to science. Given Latitude's artistic, musical and literary credentials, they'll be taking a huge risk by staging the ultimate show down, as they pitch Art against Science and ask which has more to offer and whether the two cultures might ever make a happy union. To help them battle it out, and alongside comedian Al Murray, they'll be joined by cosmologist Andrew Pontzen, comedian and actor Sara Pascoe and CERN scientist Jonathan Butterworth. Let battle commence!

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Transcript

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Welcome to the last in the series of Infinite Monkey Cage.

Last week, the man on my right learned that observations of the cosmic microwave background may imply that there are an infinite number of worlds with an infinite number of versions of himself in them.

Yet, despite this, it turns out that there is a vanishingly small probability that he understands any of the things I just said in any of those universes.

It's Robins.

But

I am happy to know that, thanks to many world interpretations, there is a world in which the man on my left actually walks past a volcano and goes, that's rubbish.

And do you know what?

I don't think the stars are nice at all.

No, that's an impression of John Ronson.

It's not.

It's me doing you as Orville from Keith Harris in Orville.

That's what it is.

I wish I could fly,

but I can't.

It's against a lot of the laws.

Poor silly physics.

It is Professor Brian Cox.

So, in the grand British tradition of summertime, a collection of people have gathered in a muddy field to listen to music and use loos that you would normally be terrified of.

Today, we're talking the two cultures: science versus arts.

So, which is better?

Space travel and vaccination, or Jack Vetriano and Hollyoaks?

So,

we are joined by four guests from Science and the Arts.

Our first guest has spent the last few weeks doing a conga around the particle accelerators below Switzerland at increasing speeds, which means he's slightly younger than he would otherwise have been due to relativistic effects.

He's a member of the Atlas Experiment at CERN, head of physics at UCL, and is getting a little tetchy when he asked: So, how does the God particle affect God?

It's Professor John Butterworth.

And like certain other men we know with an interest in the background radiation after the Big Bang, we have another physicist on who enjoys also playing the keyboard.

He is also intrigued by how the sat-nav demonstrates that Einstein's general theory of relativity works, so much so that he's frequently so busy explaining how wonderful a sat-nav would be if it was actually approaching a black hole that his sat-nav is programmed to say, stop going on about physics, turn left, turn left, you're lost again.

What is it about physicists?

They know where everything in the universe is, but they always get lost when looking for their own kitchen.

It's Andrew Ponson.

Now, it's not often that we have someone who can claim that they are the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of John Murray, the third Duke of Atholl on the show.

Yeah, apparently.

So it's surprising.

This is the third week in a row that we've had one of them on.

A man who by day is a polite Oxbridge modern history graduate, but by night is a right-wing BSW landlord.

That's Oxford University graduates for you.

It is Al Murray.

And our final guest is one of the country's most popular vegans.

Put her near a table filled with nuts and berries and watch her go.

She's also appeared in the BBC comedy series 2012, which looks at an imaginary world of what would happen if the Olympics was organised by people who really did not have a clue what was going on.

It is Sarah Pascoe,

and this is our panel!

Now, I want to get the interesting stuff out of the way before we talk about art.

So,

John, it has been a big month for science, undoubtedly.

The Higgs discovery, I think, is one of the greatest discoveries in my lifetime, one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century.

So, could you just outline the I suppose there are two bits of it there's the experimental bit, but I think for the purposes of today the the theoretical bit of the Higgs, the fact that it was predicted back in the nineteen sixties in part for aesthetic reasons?

Yeah, I will I don't want to let the side down immediately though, but there are people who think the Higgs is a bit of a bodge, and I'll explain why.

The the fundamental forces, the lights that we're seeing here and everything, you get them from symmetries.

There's this really deep connection in physics between symmetries, which means that things are the same in different places, reflections and things, and forces, the things that make the whole thing work.

And the whole of physics, in a way, comes from symmetries, except that as soon as anything has mass, the symmetry breaks.

And the beauty of that theory that connects symmetries with the way things work is broken.

And the Higgs is the thing you have to introduce to keep the symmetry there and keep the beauty and aesthetics there while making things have mass, which obviously we've got mass, you might have noticed.

So in a way, it's a kind of add-on to the theory, but in another way, it's the underpinning of this whole beautiful structure of how physics and symmetries somehow make the universe tick.

So, it was there in a sense as an aesthetic choice.

We would like these symmetries to be able to do this.

It's kind of introduced to preserve our aesthetic choice.

I mean, it's more than an aesthetics choice, it's a mathematics as well, but mathematics, of course, is beautiful.

And it preserves our kind of aesthetic prejudices that there's some connection between what we think is a nice-looking theory and what actually happens in an experiment, which is what we saw last week, that actually there is this deep connection, which continues to astound me.

But yeah, the Higgs is introduced in order to preserve that connection,

and that desire to preserve the connection led people to postulate in the 60s this very peculiar object unique in nature and a whole field that fills the universe.

And last week we saw the thing.

Al, you were actually a history graduate.

Do you find that there does seem to be an odd division?

I mean, it happens at university.

You considered to be in the art kind of area and then scientists.

And there doesn't seem to be that much mixing.

Why do you think there is this division where this isn't something that always existed in society, but now?

Well, I think it's because science is the sort of new kid on the block, isn't it, in terms of trying to get to grips with the universe?

It's brand new.

It's only been around 150 years in its current form where it thinks it can solve stuff.

Whereas arts,

metaphysics, philosophy, those things have been around as long as humanity and are better.

Can I just say, I'm amazed at the moment.

Only yesterday, as I arrived on site, I was given a necklace that has been imprinted with happiness that was given to me.

That's not a Higgs boson particle, that's a necklace that's giving me happiness right in front of me.

So I win.

Can I.

See, I am amazed that Brian let you get away with saying science thinks it can solve stuff.

Can I?

But no, I'm genuinely.

I'm not saying it thinks it.

Obviously, it does solve stuff, but it's solving it in a new way and all that sort of thing.

And

the arts are sort of a, you know, human beings like telling stories, they like symmetry, they like all these things that we've just talked about physics, and those have been existed in the arts from the start.

You know, cave painting and probably bashing rocks together, that's arts and science.

There you have it, all happening at the same time.

But I like cave painting more than rocks.

But cave paintings are really interesting example, actually, because while you might say that is an art thing, an aesthetic thing, cave painting was them trying to understand the world and work out what it was.

Like

some of the earliest ones, which they just thought were zigzagged up and down on walls, turned out to be that they were filling the room with smoke and then when they were banging drums, drawing the sound waves.

So that's science.

So

do you just agree that science is art that works and go on?

Yeah, I've got a question.

So I'm not talking about who is good now, who is the best, because the good things they can do.

What about the opposite, right?

So art, the worst it can be is bad.

Bad art.

Science can be used for evil.

Evil.

Bad things happen because of science.

Evil science.

Good scientists invent amazing things that are then used for evil.

Science saves people's lives, but it also takes people's lives.

Evil science.

Doesn't it?

Yeah.

Haven't there been examples of that being used for evil propaganda?

Like what?

Well,

art turns out to be evil as well.

Hitler was an artist.

I mean,

that wasn't his main job.

He was amateur.

He was never paid.

He was a very bad artist.

He was a hobby.

Okay, don't bring the vegetarianism into it.

God.

Do you know what?

He was a vegetarian and a bad artist.

Yeah, that isn't why people don't like him.

By the way.

Actually, it would be good if it just.

I didn't like his art, I didn't like his stance, and then there was just a turning point around the mid-30s where I thought, I think I was right in my earlier judgment of him.

He ate ham, so he was a bad vegetarian as well as a bad artist.

He wasn't a vegetarian.

No, he wasn't a vegetarian.

It's nonsense.

That's what you've got a historian on.

Yeah, it's not for him.

Finally, a lot of people who still quite liked Hitler, because of the vegetarian stance, have gone,

now you've thrown the ham at ham.

That's definitely been.

That's Hitler-the latitude crowd.

Before we entirely lose focus, I just want to hold you.

That happened a long time ago.

Andrew,

you're a cosmologist, and one of the best examples or the most often cited examples of beauty in physics, in mathematical theories, is Einstein's general theory of relativity.

So, could you just outline why that is often put up as being the ultimate example of aesthetics in science?

I think it's because it's incredibly efficient.

So you start from some really basic things that you want you want to be true about gravity, or Einstein wanted to be true about gravity, something called the equivalence principle.

It's actually quite a simple thing about gravity just being indistinguishable from being in a in a lift which is accelerating upwards.

So you can't tell the difference between sitting in a stationary lift that is that's in a gravitational field and being in a lift in outer space where there's no gravity but the thing is accelerating upwards.

So it starts from that and very, very few extra ingredients, really,

and comes out to a theory which predicts so many things that we now know to be right.

And along the way, it also starts telling us that actually all gravity is, is a sort of manifestation of the fact that space-time is curved.

And so

it's not only really efficient, but actually it leads us to this really beautiful picture where instead of having the the Newtonian slightly mysterious thing of things pulling on each other at a distance, you have what, in a sense, conceptually is almost simpler.

That the stuff sitting in the space curves it up, and then the fact that it's curved

causes other stuff to move differently.

So, an aesthetic sense about the universe is useful,

is the well, that was, I mean, Andrew there, you said a beautiful picture, and that's again why, you know, the art versus science thing, so perhaps it is a bit of a nonsense.

It's about human imagination, and scientists, they have to use their human imagination to get something right.

Yes.

Whereas artists only have to get as far as getting Brian Sewell going, that's very pretty.

So we put ourselves under less stress.

Yeah, but it's really difficult to get Brian Sewell to say that.

So that shows how tough art is.

You know, he's not easy to please, is he?

The word truth

in both schemes means such different things because truth in art is so blurry and vague.

So Hamlet is a play which people consider to be really truthful about the human condition, but it's completely fictional about a made-up person saying made-up things in a made-up situation.

Yet, we consider that made-up thing to be enlightening in our actual lives, and that's how art works.

And so many paintings are dots or they're blurry, and they, in a way, because the way our brain processes them, they seem to say something to us in a truthful way, whereas science is the exact opposite.

Well, I'm not sure it is though, actually.

Really?

Because I mean, we were saying earlier on, is this the final theory?

It's not.

I mean, we know it's not the final theory because we know there are things wrong with it.

And so, science is about creating fictions which happen to give us one way of predicting what's going to happen.

So

wait a second, there we go again.

Secondly, this is all a fiction.

What the hell is going on over there?

So you create the thing that if it was true.

Right.

So you create the fiction.

Yeah.

And then you test it.

Right.

But then it's not fiction anymore.

But you were just saying, I think it's fiction on the level that we don't really think, at least we certainly don't think at the moment, that this is really how the universe operates.

But it's true,

I'm old-fashioned enough to believe in objective reality.

I'm sorry, and I think that

the good thing about science and where it differs, I agree that a lot of the methods and ways of thinking are the same, and in a way, art is a form of communication and can be used to communicate about science as well.

But the thing with science is we're continually pushing those imaginative and intellectual bits of our brains against this really confusing and counter-intuitive universe, which we can do experiments.

We didn't discuss the experiment before, but that's the core of it, really.

It's not that the ideas can be the same, it's the fact that one set of ideas you can go out and build an enormous machine, test them, and see if they've got anything to do with objective reality.

And this is important, isn't it?

With the scientific theory, the judge in some sense of its beauty and its success is that you can test it against nature.

Whereas what you said about Hamlet, it's a test against, I suppose, opinion, in a sense.

Is there an objective measure of worth in art, do you think?

Or is it purely statistical in a sense?

As long as a lot of people agree that this is a great work, then it's a great work.

But you can't measure whether something's good art.

Well, actually, I think that's exactly right.

I think it's subjective.

I could think something was the best art that was ever made that everyone else on the planet thought was terrible.

And I could be the only person, but because it's subjective, and that's the art that speaks to me, I'm absolutely right.

And no one could ever comedy is a perfect example whether you consider it an art form or not.

Because you can be in a room of 3,000 people watching a comedian.

If you're the one person not laughing, you will go out and say to someone, Yeah, he wasn't funny.

You won't go, he was funny to everyone but me.

No, they're all wrong.

He wasn't funny.

Al, there didn't used to be this divide.

There wasn't a divide between science and religion.

No, because religion was answering these questions, and art was tangled up in religion as well.

Why is there that?

When did this divide occur?

Because, like I said, I think human imagination, that's actually what it's about.

And when people get worried about should we like science or art, you go, no, you should just be interested in the world.

But there is, I meet more scientists who are also interested in art, whereas I quite often meet art people who go, I don't really like science, I find it a bit boring.

Well, that's because it is.

I completely disagree.

Which bit?

I completely disagree.

What do you want to say?

Hey!

I honestly don't think there is a clear divide, you know, because, hey, this is not a good example, this is not high art.

But let's take the Da Vinci Code, which was...

Guys, hear me out.

Leonardo da Vinci or the Da Vinci Code.

The Da Vinci Division Code.

Because that was a book, and I grew up in Essex.

I didn't go to a good school, etc., etc.

So, let's just say I'm a common normal person who read the Da Vinci Code, which was the first place that I read about the golden ratio.

Okay, so not having a sciencey background, I got a C, my double science.

It can act as a gateway, right?

I was um, when I was going to come on, so I reread Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy, which is when at universities they were deciding whether you should even be able to study any humanities subjects.

And he was arguing that people learn more, listen more when they're enjoying themselves.

And the importance of poetry and plays.

Well, that actually, while people are enjoying themselves, you could get huge political opinions out there.

It's really powerful, actually, people are having a good time.

And all of the best science writers now who become bestsellers is because they write about these really complicated things, but there's a story to it.

You can get really involved.

Firmer's Last Theorem is talking about something really complicated, but anyone could read that book and love it.

See, I read Fifty Shades of Grey, and that's got something about.

I think it was called The Golden Ratio.

I can't remember, but anyway, it was

want Al

to pick up on what Al said I want you to name some science that's boring no I was being I wasn't I was of course being facetious but the

well no I mean I my question to you as Nigel Tuffler would say it my question to you is this what difference does fine

I mean

science is obviously there have been many big breakthroughs.

Newton figures out gravity and mechanical laws and all that sort of thing.

And civilization follows.

Well, well, and we live in that, we live right now

in an invented Newtonian world, the car, the aeroplane, the PA.

This festival is an expression of Newtonian physics in many ways.

It's also an arts festival, on the other hand, but we won't get bogged down in that.

And then relativity, you've got 50 years later, they split the atom and we get all the stuff that comes out of that.

In 50 years' time,

where's the Higgs boson's iPod?

What's the consequence of this?

I mean, it's obviously it's a marvellous discovery, and your theory now holds up, and that's lovely for you all.

But what

and the

I think the most interesting thing has been the fantastic sigh of relief rippling through science.

You were wrong.

You're coming at science now as though it's justified by the technology it leads to, right?

Which is fine, but I didn't expect that from the Atifati under the table, I have to say.

You have to look back historically because it's always impossible to look at the frontier of science and try to work out what that's going to lead to in the next 50 years.

But historically, if you look back to the beginning of this quest to understand the building blocks of nature, so quantum theory arose throughout, I suppose, the turn of the 20th century onwards.

It took a long time, about, well, not too long actually, about to the 1940s to invent the transistor, which is an absolute cast-iron demonstration of how understanding something very esoteric, in this case quantum theory, the structure of atoms, leads to something that's profoundly useful.

So I think historically, what we found is that exploring nature, understanding the way the universe works, has been useful.

We don't know what we're going to find, right?

And we don't, and we've just.

You did in this instance because you were looking for a thing.

Yeah, actually, two years ago, I hope it wasn't there.

Really?

Yeah, yeah, it would have been, in a way, even more exciting if it wasn't, because we'd have to have a whole new theory.

When I used to be a proper scientist,

when I used to be a proper scientist years ago, before I started messing around on television and radio,

I wrote a paper with John.

Myself and John wrote a paper together.

It's called W Scattering in the Absence of a Light Higgs particle.

And we worked on what you would do at the LHC, what signatures you would look for.

If you didn't find a Higgs, what would you look for?

So the the reason that experiment was built was that this was a theory and it's profoundly esoteric and it's rather odd actually.

So that that's why people have been excited about the discovery because it it is a it's a profoundly different way of looking at the universe.

I think that's a very interesting way that art plays a big role in science or at least aesthetics because you there's a lot of questions you can ask in research and you can't go and spend 15 years building a collider to answer every single one of them.

And it's very clear that the question, is there a Higgs boson or not, which has all other ramifications for our understanding, was decided to be an interesting and worthwhile question to address by the scientific community on the basis of aesthetics and maths.

And there are loads of questions you can ask, and we might be missing some tricks, but using aesthetics and maths as a guide to what's an interesting thing to put your time and effort into answering is actually very fruitful, it has been very fruitful.

And this latest discovery is just another example of my goodness, it actually works.

The universe seems to have something to do with our aesthetic understanding of what's going on.

I think that's quite wonderful, and it's definitely a way that art and aesthetics play a role in science, for sure.

I mean, I mean, Andrew, do you want to say

I mean, this idea of being able to predict how useful scientific discoveries are going to be in the future?

I've I've been being quiet on purpose because uh when it comes to cosmology it's even harder to uh to make any kind of predictions as to how useful it's going to be.

I mean, one of the big things in cosmology at the moment is about inflation, which is a process that supposedly happens at something like a million, million times higher energy than the stuff you're studying at the Large Hadron Collider.

And it's very hard to imagine, and we've got telescopes looking for particular signatures of this, it'd be very exciting if we find them.

It's very hard to imagine that leading directly to new technology.

But what you can do, of course, is point to spin-offs.

It's not just that

you get a new theory of physics and

that

lets you build something new.

Also, actually, building the stuff that lets you look into the physics is very helpful in itself.

So, I think one example is radio astronomers, people looking at the sky in radio waves, developed the technology that's required to make mobile phones work because they have this kind of technology that cancels out echoes off buildings and other things.

And that is now in every mobile phone.

Otherwise, it would just simply be involved.

It's the moon landing frying pan, so to speak.

Yeah.

It's always mobile phones, isn't it?

But Sarah, there's a, as Andrew said, cosmology, this expanding view of our universe, the removal of the Earth from the centre of the universe, Copernicus onwards,

whilst that hasn't had a direct technological use, it's been inspirational in a great deal of art and literature.

Yeah.

I think this is the thing, this is what's so interesting about hearing you all speak.

I just don't think you can have one without the other.

I don't think you can just know, or just be exploring how we're here on its own.

And I don't think you can just be talking about, like, so from the outside, like, why are we here and what does it mean and how does it feel?

I think you do need both things.

There's such an

we're trying to understand both things, right?

Like, what is life and what we're supposed to do with it?

We're trying to work, and you couldn't just have one without the other.

Science keeps people alive.

The fact that we're so overpopulated is because we've managed to do this, so life is available to so many more people, we're able to feed so many more people, but at the same time, you wouldn't want it just to be medicine and all of us kept alive until we were 120 if there was nothing for us to do.

But you need art.

We know why that's not.

But that's an interesting thing, though, which is there is, I think there's a South American tribe, which I think is called the Piraha, and they have no history, no sense of history at all, and they also have no art.

They have no, basically,

they survive, they live, and they have no art.

So

what use is art?

What is it about the human being that means art is a required thing?

Al, what do you think?

Well, because otherwise it's a barren walk through an endless veil of tears.

I mean, come on, Robbie.

You know, I mean, otherwise you'd be so lonely, you'd go into a supermarket and use the self-service checkout and put an unexpected item in the baggage area just for the conversation.

So

the only way you can make existence palatable is to paint stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Really?

Paint stuff, sing lovely songs.

What about exploring nature as it really is?

Well,

they're the same thing.

Let's go for a walk.

Isn't that the

biggest brilliant artist?

And the Turner Prize go to the Ramblers Association.

Or Chorleywood to Richmond's World along the canal route.

I can't let him get away with that.

He just said that science, the whole glorious emergence of a technological civilization, is the same as going for a walk.

Yes.

Well, think about that.

I'm not even going to defend that point of view.

I'm just going to stick to it.

You must have done question time.

You must have done it.

No, I haven't done that.

Well, I won't do it.

The last thing they need is comedians on that.

But that's the.

I like the someone at the back just shouted, why can't you all get along?

And the nice thing is, after the show, we will.

The whole thing is merely a construct.

But for now,

security, have them thrown out.

As a final question to get back to the subject of this discussion, does science need art?

I'm going to go around the panel and a quick answer.

Andrew, does science need art?

Yeah, I think it does.

I mean, if you look at the way these things develop, they do develop hand in hand.

John?

People need art, scientists are people, so yes.

Wow.

And Al, if you could just sing the theme tune to different strokes.

No!

That's what you want, isn't it?

Of course, of course,

science and art should happily coexist and walk into the future holding hands.

Sarah, do you think science and art should kiss more?

Yes.

What's been so interesting for me, listening to you guys, is hearing about creativity in science.

Because it's imagination.

It is, but imagination, I suppose, guided by reality.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But sometimes unreality is more fun.

Like, unreality is fun.

Yeah, because don't you need, you need, like you were saying, you need an escape.

If you just spent your whole time, you know, when you start doing your, whatever you do, classical gas or whatever, on your guitar, somewhere in the middle of CERN, that is, you need this, is this, does art become the sorbet between the kind of the rigor of the scientific ideas?

I guess a classical gas is something where the gas molecules bands together and the collisions are completely elastic.

You obey the ideal gas equation.

And that is why I play on my guitar.

Yeah.

Do you know what to mean?

That's the question whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take

To sleep, perchance to dream, aye, there's the rub, for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come when we've shuffled off this mortal coil.

Aye, I've forgotten the rest.

Thank you, God, you've eased the listeners down into PM at 5 p.m., which comes today.

It's like, oh, back to Radio 4.

Can we do Twas Brillig and the Slidey Toe, Tidgar and Gimble in the Wable, Mimsy with a Borough Grove, and Moam Raids Out Gay?

Beware the jabberwock, my son, that draws the bite that's going to be.

So, this is a story all about how.

My life doesn't just stand upside down.

I'd like to take a minute, just sit right there.

John, your song.

Now we've turned this into stars in your eyes.

And who are you going to be tonight?

Tonight, I'm going to be Albert Einstein doing a George Formby song.

Well, thank you very much to our guests: Sarah Pascoe, Andrew Ponce, and John Butterworth, Al Murray, and to the Latin Festival.

We will be leaving you for the summer and I imagine we we probably won't be back in the autumn, will we?

Because science is finished pretty much, isn't it, John?

We've finished science, aren't you?

We're trying to think of some new stuff to do, but

a couple of loose ends, yeah.

We'll be back for a new series in November, but that's a long time for our producer to be on holiday, so we've decided that since she might get bored, she should spend her time by answering irrational complaints from listeners.

So Robin is now going to generate irrational complaints to the BBC for the summer.

So, this is what our producer thinks of some of you who are listening.

Stars may aid us in foretelling the birth and death of galaxies, but have no ability to tell you if it's a lucky week for love or economics.

Climate change denies merely fear umbrellas, irrationally.

She only allows us to read The Guardian whilst on BBC premises and insists that we dress as Stalin whenever we're doing our meetings.

Homeopaths do not have a physical brain, but merely skull water with the memory of brains.

Thank you very much.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

If you've enjoyed this programme, you might like to try other Radio 4 podcasts, including Start the Week, Lively Discussions chaired by Andrew Marr, and a weekly highlight from Radio 4's evening arts programme Front Row.

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

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We'll pair you with a dedicated expert for a personalized one-on-one experience.

You'll explore our curated selection of diamonds and gemstones while learning key characteristics to help you make a confident, informed decision.

Choose from our signature styles or opt for a fully custom design crafted around you.

Visit yadavjewelry.com and book your appointment today at our new Union Square showroom and mention podcast for an exclusive discount.