Science v Art

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Speaker 11 Welcome to the last in the series of Infinite Monkey Cage.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 12 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?

Speaker 12 I don't think the stars are nice at all.

Speaker 11 No, that's an impression of John Ronson.

Speaker 4 It's not.

Speaker 12 It's me doing you as Orville from Keith Harris in Orville. That's what it is.
I wish I could fly,

Speaker 12 but I can't. It's against a lot of the laws.

Speaker 11 Poor silly physics.

Speaker 12 It is Professor Brian Cox.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 Today, we're talking the two cultures: science versus arts. So, which is better? Space travel and vaccination, or Jack Vetriano and Hollyoaks?

Speaker 4 So,

Speaker 11 we are joined by four guests from Science and the Arts.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 12 Yeah, apparently.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 That's Oxford University graduates for you. It is Al Murray.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 It is Sarah Pascoe,

Speaker 4 and this is our panel!

Speaker 11 Now, I want to get the interesting stuff out of the way before we talk about art. So,

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 The the fundamental forces, the lights that we're seeing here and everything, you get them from symmetries.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And the whole of physics, in a way, comes from symmetries, except that as soon as anything has mass, the symmetry breaks.

Speaker 1 And the beauty of that theory that connects symmetries with the way things work is broken.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 11 So, it was there in a sense as an aesthetic choice.

Speaker 11 We would like these symmetries to be able to do this.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But yeah, the Higgs is introduced in order to preserve that connection,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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?

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 It's only been around 150 years in its current form where it thinks it can solve stuff. Whereas arts,

Speaker 12 metaphysics, philosophy, those things have been around as long as humanity and are better.

Speaker 12 Can I just say, I'm amazed at the moment.

Speaker 12 Only yesterday, as I arrived on site, I was given a necklace that has been imprinted with happiness that was given to me.

Speaker 12 That's not a Higgs boson particle, that's a necklace that's giving me happiness right in front of me. So I win.

Speaker 4 Can I.

Speaker 12 See, I am amazed that Brian let you get away with saying science thinks it can solve stuff.

Speaker 4 Can I? But no, I'm genuinely.

Speaker 12 I'm not saying it thinks it.

Speaker 12 Obviously, it does solve stuff, but it's solving it in a new way and all that sort of thing. And

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 You know, cave painting and probably bashing rocks together, that's arts and science.

Speaker 12 There you have it, all happening at the same time. But I like cave painting more than rocks.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Like

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So that's science.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 1 do you just agree that science is art that works and go on?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I've got a question.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Science can be used for evil. Evil.
Bad things happen because of science.

Speaker 1 Evil science.

Speaker 3 Good scientists invent amazing things that are then used for evil. Science saves people's lives, but it also takes people's lives.

Speaker 4 Evil science. Doesn't it?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Haven't there been examples of that being used for evil propaganda?

Speaker 4 Like what? Well,

Speaker 4 art turns out to be evil as well.

Speaker 4 Hitler was an artist.

Speaker 4 I mean,

Speaker 4 that wasn't his main job.

Speaker 3 He was amateur. He was never paid.

Speaker 4 He was a very bad artist. He was a hobby.

Speaker 3 Okay, don't bring the vegetarianism into it.

Speaker 4 God.

Speaker 1 Do you know what?

Speaker 11 He was a vegetarian and a bad artist.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that isn't why people don't like him.

Speaker 3 By the way.

Speaker 11 Actually, it would be good if it just.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 He ate ham, so he was a bad vegetarian as well as a bad artist.

Speaker 4 He wasn't a vegetarian.

Speaker 12 No, he wasn't a vegetarian. It's nonsense.

Speaker 12 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,

Speaker 12 now you've thrown the ham at ham.

Speaker 4 That's definitely been.

Speaker 14 That's Hitler-the latitude crowd.

Speaker 11 Before we entirely lose focus, I just want to hold you.

Speaker 4 That happened a long time ago.

Speaker 11 Andrew,

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 So, could you just outline why that is often put up as being the ultimate example of aesthetics in science?

Speaker 14 I think it's because it's incredibly efficient.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 It's actually quite a simple thing about gravity just being indistinguishable from being in a in a lift which is accelerating upwards.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 So it starts from that and very, very few extra ingredients, really,

Speaker 14 and comes out to a theory which predicts so many things that we now know to be right.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 11 And so

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 That the stuff sitting in the space curves it up, and then the fact that it's curved

Speaker 14 causes other stuff to move differently.

Speaker 11 So, an aesthetic sense about the universe is useful,

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 It's about human imagination, and scientists, they have to use their human imagination to get something right. Yes.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 So that shows how tough art is. You know, he's not easy to please, is he?

Speaker 3 The word truth

Speaker 3 in both schemes means such different things because truth in art is so blurry and vague.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Yet, we consider that made-up thing to be enlightening in our actual lives, and that's how art works.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 14 Well, I'm not sure it is though, actually.

Speaker 4 Really?

Speaker 14 Because I mean, we were saying earlier on, is this the final theory? It's not.

Speaker 14 I mean, we know it's not the final theory because we know there are things wrong with it.

Speaker 14 And so, science is about creating fictions which happen to give us one way of predicting what's going to happen.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 wait a second, there we go again.

Speaker 12 Secondly, this is all a fiction. What the hell is going on over there?

Speaker 4 So you create the thing that if it was true.

Speaker 3 Right. So you create the fiction.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And then you test it. Right.

Speaker 3 But then it's not fiction anymore.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 4 But it's true,

Speaker 1 I'm old-fashioned enough to believe in objective reality. I'm sorry, and I think that

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 We didn't discuss the experiment before, but that's the core of it, really.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 11 And this is important, isn't it?

Speaker 11 With the scientific theory, the judge in some sense of its beauty and its success is that you can test it against nature.

Speaker 11 Whereas what you said about Hamlet, it's a test against, I suppose, opinion, in a sense.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 But you can't measure whether something's good art.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 Why is there that? When did this divide occur? Because, like I said, I think human imagination, that's actually what it's about.

Speaker 12 And when people get worried about should we like science or art, you go, no, you should just be interested in the world.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 1 Well, that's because it is.

Speaker 4 I completely disagree.

Speaker 4 Which bit?

Speaker 4 I completely disagree. What do you want to say?

Speaker 12 Hey!

Speaker 3 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...

Speaker 3 Guys, hear me out.

Speaker 11 Leonardo da Vinci or the Da Vinci Code.

Speaker 4 The Da Vinci Division Code.

Speaker 3 Because that was a book, and I grew up in Essex. I didn't go to a good school, etc., etc.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Okay, so not having a sciencey background, I got a C, my double science.

Speaker 3 It can act as a gateway, right?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And he was arguing that people learn more, listen more when they're enjoying themselves. And the importance of poetry and plays.

Speaker 3 Well, that actually, while people are enjoying themselves, you could get huge political opinions out there.

Speaker 3 It's really powerful, actually, people are having a good time.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Firmer's Last Theorem is talking about something really complicated, but anyone could read that book and love it.

Speaker 12 See, I read Fifty Shades of Grey, and that's got something about.

Speaker 12 I think it was called The Golden Ratio. I can't remember, but anyway, it was

Speaker 4 want Al

Speaker 11 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

Speaker 12 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

Speaker 12 I mean

Speaker 12 science is obviously there have been many big breakthroughs.

Speaker 12 Newton figures out gravity and mechanical laws and all that sort of thing.

Speaker 11 And civilization follows.

Speaker 12 Well, well, and we live in that, we live right now

Speaker 12 in an invented Newtonian world, the car, the aeroplane, the PA.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 And then relativity, you've got 50 years later, they split the atom and we get all the stuff that comes out of that.

Speaker 12 In 50 years' time,

Speaker 12 where's the Higgs boson's iPod?

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 4 But what

Speaker 12 and the

Speaker 12 I think the most interesting thing has been the fantastic sigh of relief rippling through science.

Speaker 4 You were wrong.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 So I think historically, what we found is that exploring nature, understanding the way the universe works, has been useful.

Speaker 1 We don't know what we're going to find, right? And we don't, and we've just.

Speaker 12 You did in this instance because you were looking for a thing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, actually, two years ago, I hope it wasn't there.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 11 When I used to be a proper scientist,

Speaker 11 when I used to be a proper scientist years ago, before I started messing around on television and radio,

Speaker 12 I wrote a paper with John.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I think that's quite wonderful, and it's definitely a way that art and aesthetics play a role in science, for sure.

Speaker 11 I mean, I mean, Andrew, do you want to say

Speaker 11 I mean, this idea of being able to predict how useful scientific discoveries are going to be in the future?

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 It's very hard to imagine that leading directly to new technology. But what you can do, of course, is point to spin-offs.

Speaker 11 It's not just that

Speaker 14 you get a new theory of physics and

Speaker 13 that

Speaker 14 lets you build something new. Also, actually, building the stuff that lets you look into the physics is very helpful in itself.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And that is now in every mobile phone. Otherwise, it would just simply be involved.

Speaker 12 It's the moon landing frying pan, so to speak.

Speaker 11 Yeah. It's always mobile phones, isn't it?

Speaker 11 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,

Speaker 11 whilst that hasn't had a direct technological use, it's been inspirational in a great deal of art and literature.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I don't think you can just know, or just be exploring how we're here on its own.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Science keeps people alive.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 10 But you need art.

Speaker 4 We know why that's not.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 They have no, basically,

Speaker 12 they survive, they live, and they have no art. So

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 I mean, come on, Robbie.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 11 So

Speaker 11 the only way you can make existence palatable is to paint stuff.

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Really?

Speaker 12 Paint stuff, sing lovely songs.

Speaker 11 What about exploring nature as it really is? Well,

Speaker 12 they're the same thing.

Speaker 10 Let's go for a walk.

Speaker 4 Isn't that the

Speaker 4 biggest brilliant artist?

Speaker 12 And the Turner Prize go to the Ramblers Association.

Speaker 4 Or Chorleywood to Richmond's World along the canal route.

Speaker 11 I can't let him get away with that.

Speaker 11 He just said that science, the whole glorious emergence of a technological civilization, is the same as going for a walk.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 4 Well, think about that.

Speaker 12 I'm not even going to defend that point of view. I'm just going to stick to it.

Speaker 12 You must have done question time. You must have done it.

Speaker 4 No, I haven't done that.

Speaker 12 Well, I won't do it. The last thing they need is comedians on that.

Speaker 4 But that's the.

Speaker 10 I like the someone at the back just shouted, why can't you all get along?

Speaker 12 And the nice thing is, after the show, we will. The whole thing is merely a construct.

Speaker 4 But for now,

Speaker 11 security, have them thrown out.

Speaker 11 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?

Speaker 14 Yeah, I think it does. I mean, if you look at the way these things develop, they do develop hand in hand.
John?

Speaker 1 People need art, scientists are people, so yes. Wow.

Speaker 12 And Al, if you could just sing the theme tune to different strokes.

Speaker 12 No!

Speaker 12 That's what you want, isn't it?

Speaker 4 Of course, of course,

Speaker 12 science and art should happily coexist and walk into the future holding hands.

Speaker 12 Sarah, do you think science and art should kiss more? Yes.

Speaker 3 What's been so interesting for me, listening to you guys, is hearing about creativity in science. Because it's imagination.

Speaker 11 It is, but imagination, I suppose, guided by reality. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 3 But sometimes unreality is more fun. Like, unreality is fun.

Speaker 12 Yeah, because don't you need, you need, like you were saying, you need an escape.

Speaker 12 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?

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 1 And that is why I play on my guitar. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Do you know what to mean?

Speaker 12 That's the question whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 3 So, this is a story all about how.

Speaker 4 My life doesn't just stand upside down.

Speaker 3 I'd like to take a minute, just sit right there.

Speaker 4 John, your song.

Speaker 12 Now we've turned this into stars in your eyes.

Speaker 12 And who are you going to be tonight? Tonight, I'm going to be Albert Einstein doing a George Formby song.

Speaker 12 Well, thank you very much to our guests: Sarah Pascoe, Andrew Ponce, and John Butterworth, Al Murray, and to the Latin Festival.

Speaker 12 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?

Speaker 1 We're trying to think of some new stuff to do, but

Speaker 12 a couple of loose ends, yeah.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 So Robin is now going to generate irrational complaints to the BBC for the summer.

Speaker 12 So, this is what our producer thinks of some of you who are listening.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 Homeopaths do not have a physical brain, but merely skull water with the memory of brains.

Speaker 12 Thank you very much. Goodbye.
Goodbye.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 To find out more, visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio4.

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