Is Cosmology Really a Science?

Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

And I'm Robert Ince, and we are here at the Cheltenham Science Festival 2011.

For some people, Cheltenham is best known as being the birthplace of the electric light, the creation of the internal combustion engine, the discovery of the double helix, the birthplace of quantum electrodynamics and general relativity, and the home of both Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

When I say for some people, they are two people, the authors of How Everything Was Created in Cheltenham,

but which has been largely discredited over the last few years.

The good news today is that our discussion may have philosophical overtones, and as regular listeners will know, Brian Cox loves philosophy.

Yes, today I'm going to approach ideas about the nature of the universe with a logical positivist approach, though I cannot rule out that I won't occasionally look at this from a deontological perspective using a Kantian approach.

I did not write any of this, and I have no idea what I'm talking about at all.

Stay classy, Cheltenham Spa.

Told you they'd get that one.

Today.

Today we ask: is cosmology really a science?

It's a ludicrous title that has nothing to do with me at all.

Of course, it's a science.

So that's basically the end of the show.

That is, is cosmology a science?

Yes.

If you would like to go further than merely the yes or no answer, then you can keep listening for 26 minutes.

To help us come to a conclusion, we have three guests.

Our first guest decided to avoid a midlife crisis, choosing instead to go completely insane and declare he was a wizard.

Author of Watchmen, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and publisher of Dodge and Logic, it is Alan Moore.

Our next guest lived in in the same street as Alan Moore, though we haven't merely booked him to give him a lift home after the show, though that would be helpful, Dallas.

He is the only person we've ever had on a panel to have worked with Jimmy Nail, but has since moved on to popularise science with the excellent BBC series, Bang Goes the Theory.

It is Dallas Campbell.

Our final guest works on constraining particle physics in SMIDE models of inflation and dark energy in the universe using observational data.

Robin data.

Formerly chair of Sussex University Physics and Astronomy Department and now head of Nottingham University's Particle Theory Group, Professor Ed Copeland.

And this is our panel.

Ed, we'll start with you because for a lot of people when they hear the word cosmology, I'm not entirely sure they know what it is.

Some people may well be thinking of astronomy, astrophysics and merely other studies of the universe.

What defines cosmology?

It's a well-defined topic.

It's our universe.

That's it.

So that's all it is.

It's only just the universe.

In particular, I suppose it's the understanding the large-scale features of our universe.

So today, the large-scale features are on scales bigger than, say, a galaxy and going all the way up then to the edge of our observable universe.

And then, maybe, as we'll go on, perhaps, into the world of many universes, we may broaden it.

But the special thing about cosmology, which really means that it can interact with particle physics, which is the physics of the very small, is that our universe is evolving.

It's getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

So earlier on, it was smaller and smaller and smaller.

So each day, if I go a day before and a day before and a day before, I'm studying smaller regions.

And if I go all the way back to about 13.7 billion years ago, I'm studying the world of particle physics.

So cosmology, although it studies the large-scale features of the universe, because it's the whole evolution of our universe, it actually studies all length scales.

So it sort of is studying all length scales, scales, all time scales, therefore it's everything.

But Alan, it's everything, cosmology, the study of everything.

But it is one of those areas that seems to lend itself to, I suppose, a more mystical approach.

You say, where's the universe come from?

What is the fate of the universe?

It's one of those crossover areas, in a way, I suppose, isn't it?

I think you're prompting me to claim that my glove puppet, second-century Roman snake god, created the universe, but I'm not going to fall for that price.

But you do think that.

Yes, I do think that, but I'm not going to say it on a radio.

I think that, I mean, cosmology is fantastic, mainly because of the extraordinary ideas that it allows us to at least believe for a little while until a better idea comes along.

And

given that cosmology is talking about things that are very far away in some instances or are kind of ambiguous, then there's a lot of room for coming up with some marvellously crackpot theories, including my own, that a glove puppet created everything.

I shall have a book out soon and you'll hear about it then.

Dallas, this idea that the

well, it seems there's an innate human desire to explain things such as origins.

Many, most cultures perhaps share this, if not all.

I think probably all cultures.

I mean, the human brain is hardwired for curiosity.

We're hardwired to observe things.

We're hardwired to figure out how it all works.

And yeah, we can go back in time.

I think every point in history there has been an attempt to try and understand cosmology.

We have to make the difference between cosmology, the science, and cosmology, as in sort of ancient world views.

I mean, the ancient Egyptians had all sorts of ideas, sort of marble tables and the stars hanging up from threads.

You can imagine the ancients looking up in the sky and seeing these pinpoints of light, and it's quite a natural thing to join the dots and make little pretty pictures and sort of come up with some ideas.

Do you remember that bit?

There was a bit in life, universe and everything.

There was the planet cricket.

Do you remember that?

So the planet cricket,

they had no cosmology because their whole planet was shrouded in dust and it had never occurred to them to look up.

Nobody had ever looked up before and they were the very peace-loving people.

And then one day one of them noticed a crashed spaceship and they went hang on a sec and suddenly someone tilted their head up and looked up and realized the universe was out there and they went oh no that'll have to go and then uh and then declared war on the entire universe so yeah we like to know what's going on i mean the cool thing is now we've got this fantastic tool called science which reins in our imagination to a point and even though there are things in modern cosmology that we we don't know, lots of things are observable and we're sort of honing into something that is closer to truth than the Earth on a stack of turtles.

Ed,

keeping on the history, just briefly,

when did human beings get just some sense of the size of the universe?

Because someone like the Big Bang is very, I mean, really, it's in our lifetime, so that's become accepted.

I would say it was 13.7 billion years ago.

Oh, I'm sorry, yeah, you misunderstood me.

I, as an artist graduate, was using English, not numbers.

But

the idea of the size of the universe,

I was wondering where, for many people, in fact, there are still people now who don't really know the difference between the Milky Way, the universe, and the solar system.

And we lived in quite a parochial universe, didn't we?

And w when was the point where people started to go, this whole thing is a lot bigger than we imagined?

I think it's when they started introducing chocolate bars.

So you have a Milky Way and a galaxy.

No, I think

it was probably around the time of Hubble, when Hubble was this brilliant astronomer who used the telescope at Mount Palomar in California and was able, the telescope was big enough that it could probe deep enough into the universe that it could make out individual galaxies.

And by looking at the light from those galaxies, which, by the way, this is the stunning thing about astronomy, okay?

What have you got to use?

You've got light.

That's it.

You can't go out there and measure things with

tape measures.

You've got light, and you have to infer things from that.

So it's one of the most brilliant aspects, I think, of astronomy and then cosmology.

That that's the ingredient you're using.

Anyway, he

saw these galaxies receding, and from it, he inferred something about the size of the universe, because he was looking at wherever he saw as far back as he could see he was seeing these objects moving apart and they've got this very particular way of moving apart the distant galaxies they follow what's known as Hubble's law named after him so the the speed with which they move apart the the speed of recession is proportional to their separation so the further away they are apart the faster they're moving apart.

It's a bizarre result.

And from it you can infer that the universe is expanding.

But I I would say that's the first time that people began to realize this universe is way bigger than our own Milky Way.

Alan, do you think that, you know, not that many, you know, a few centuries ago, we believed we were the center of the universe.

Then we were shifted to being something that was going around the sun.

And then, really, in the last century, the idea of the size of the universe, people were, you know, for instance, there are meant to be five times as many stars as there are grains of sand on a beach.

We live in a pretty big place.

Do you think it becomes harder and harder for human beings to just comprehend where we live and where we are?

Well, I think that if they actually do comprehend the scale of the universe, then for an awful lot of them, that can get them into terrible trouble.

I mean, one of my favourite writers, the American Uber paranoid, H.P.

Lovecraft, who filled his stories with these huge tentacled monsters.

And the thing is, in the 20s, he was starting to get a handle upon how big those black bits are between the stars and how we are in the western spiral arm of one galaxy out of potentially thousands, hundreds, millions, you know, a vast amount of galaxies.

And so that was what he was reacting to.

It was this sense of alienation.

And it was suddenly a big, scary cosmos and he turned it all into tentacled monsters.

You know, which is one approach.

I wouldn't recommend it, but it worked for him.

It's interesting, isn't it, that when you begin to remove the mysticism in a way, you replace it with a sort of sense of fear almost, which is an odd contradiction in some ways, isn't it?

Well, you also replace it with things that are potentially even stranger than mystical ideas.

I mean, they may be real, they may be true, but they are undeniably very, very strange.

Like the Goldilocks problem with our cosmos, which as I understand it is that we are living in a very hospitable and habitable universe.

The start conditions of the universe only needed to be out by a fraction and we would have had a universe where stars couldn't cohere or where the universe would have only lasted for a fraction of a second before winking out of existence again.

We're very, very lucky.

Now, of course, the creationists and the intelligent design people will pounce upon this and say, ah, well, there you are.

Is it luck?

Or is it perhaps our Lord Jesus?

And

so,

what we have had to do to actually explain this away, the gymnastics of our minds, I am in awe of some of the theories that we've come up with to explain away the unusual qualities of our universe.

Well, this is, Ed, one of the great, I suppose, the criticisms of modern cosmology at the edge.

So I'm thinking of perhaps string theory, for example, which is an attempt to explain the weakness of gravity, and it's an attempt to bring gravity into the fold.

But many people criticise it for not making experimentally testable predictions.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's a bit harsh on the string theorists trying to say that.

String theory does one vital thing which no other theory has yet been able to do.

So before we talk about the cosmology, I'll just for a few seconds tell you, remind you of that.

And that is one of the big goals of physics is to unify the forces of nature.

We experience four major forces that we're aware of.

We experience electromagnetism, the lights burning here.

We experience the weak force, which is the sun radioactive decay that keeps us alive.

We experience the strong force, which is the force binding the nuclei together and prevents you from exploding.

And then we experience gravity.

Now, the first three of those have been effectively unified.

In other words, there's been a common description of those forces.

And so the natural goal is to try and include gravity.

But we realize in order to do it, we have to include quantum mechanics, the physics associated with the very small.

And gravity is the physics of the very big.

And you're trying to reconcile these two together.

And no one's been able to do it.

String theory, as far as I'm aware, is the one area which has so far managed to do it.

It can actually, it's a theory which replaces a point particle with a small little string.

You're made up of small little strings vibrating away.

And the fact that you've gone from this point particle to this little string means that quantum mechanics and relativity can be combined because the string actually has gravity in it.

But then, indeed, it now needs to start making some predictions about things that can be observed.

And that's where the problems begin to arise.

Because one of the things that you need in string theory is you need more than four space-time dimensions.

Right?

Why four?

You experience four.

One is time, and then the other three are your X, Y, and Z coordinates.

String theory needs 10.

We'll just talk to Alan.

He's got a few.

Alan could handle that.

He's got a few extra dimensions.

When I was talking to Brian Green, he said that it might need 11.

And it might need 11.

And I believe the 11th one, that is kind of wrapped up

around

the other 10, isn't it?

Like a little kind of bit of celloton.

It can be, but it can also sort of separate out.

And that's where the world of brain worlds emerges, which we parallel universes, if you like, which is quite exotic.

But just back to this prediction issue.

So, one of the things that people are trying to do now is they're trying to look for consistent models in string theory which will both account for all the particles that we see and account for the cosmology that we see.

And, well, it's early days, it's not worked yet.

Use cats.

They love string.

Also, whether string theory, if we've got Goldilocks Enigma, can string theory become the Rapunzel effect?

There we go.

Vibratingly.

This is something.

Actually, I wonder how true this is of cosmology, and I'll ask this to you, Darcy, first of all, whether we've now returned to a kind of Aristotelian method of science, where, of course, Aristotle said, oh, you don't observe, you know, you know, think hard, think hard, you don't need to do experiments, you just need to think very hard.

And now we've got a certain amount of evidence that's gathered together.

And is cosmology perhaps a return to going, now I need to go back into a dark room and think very hard?

Well, you do have to think, and the trouble is, you know, I guess with our technology and the way we think, they don't sort of move at the same speed.

So often our technology is down here, but we're already predicting ideas using mathematical models and things up here.

It doesn't mean we shouldn't think.

We shouldn't sort of wait

to be able to observe it.

I love the big questions in physics.

I love the edge of science stuff because it fires the imagine.

I enjoy the stuff that we don't understand.

To me,

my passion in science is really there.

But I also sort of trust that the scientists didn't sit around and get drunk and make it up.

I'm sort of assuming there is a little bit of work gone into sort of string theory and coming up with these models.

My problem is ever since you've used the term luck or Jesus, I'm trying to work out how I can turn that into a game show.

Actually, this is something that fascinates because when you talk about vibrating strings, because this is one of the things that I haven't read, is it's very hard to actually get a sense of the size of them.

Now, Alan, do you have a because I was told that there was if you the vibrating strings, you are talking about if you take the size of the universe and the size of the earth and the differential between those two,

if you then imagine an atom is the size of the universe, the string is the size of Earth.

Because that, I mean, when you get to that, this is the hard thing about it, is we really are talking about sizes, again, beyond really

our imagination.

I think one of the things that I actually heard was that to actually find one of these things wouldn't we need a collider that was actually went all the way around the Milky Way?

Yeah, you'd be.

That would be a very large collision, wouldn't it?

Well, what the extra dimensions can do for you, though, is they can lower the energy at which you could reveal these properties to actually, in some cases, within the reach of the Large Hadron Collider.

So one of the more speculative things that might happen at the the Large Hadron Collider is you may see a hint of these extra dimensions.

I think then

string theorists would begin to legitimately claim that

there is

validity.

That's right.

I mean, people are actively looking at the Large Hadron Collider.

It's up and running and

colliding things

and getting loads and loads of data.

And in it, they're looking for evidence of, for example, these extra dimensions that might be there.

And

you'll see them by the fact you typically will lose energy.

You'll have missing energy from,

you know, we all learnt at school, right?

Conservation of energy.

Energy in is energy out.

And sometimes, if you do the balance the books, there'll be a bit of energy missing, and that may be a sign of a string, a string type of event, like something emerging from the extra dimensions.

One of the major questions, I think, one of the major questions in cosmology is: can cosmology be used for song?

Yeah, there we go, that's a link.

We have actually got someone, a wonderful singer-someone who's come directly from a benefit.

They're trying to raise money to buy exhausts for cars in Cheltenham.

Very exciting idea.

For many, the problem with attempting to approach concepts of cosmology has been exacerbated by the lack of ukulele's, in much the same way that theories of infinity were slowed down by lack of a bassoon.

Fortunately, this has been solved by one woman who combined keen scientific knowledge with the ukulele.

Please welcome Helen Arney.

So, yes, this week I've been completely captivated by these videos of the solar explosion.

Have any of you seen these on YouTube, actually?

That bastion of scientific knowledge,

the same one that brought us the news that cats can play the piano.

So, I've been completely enraptured by this video of an exploding sunspot.

And I've spoken to a couple of people about it.

And solar physicists aren't sure whether it's something significant or whether it's just something quite ordinary.

But I've got my own theory, which is that the sun has got his huff on.

I used to be someone,

now I'm just another sun,

one of a hundred thousand billion, billion.

You treat me insignificantly.

Name a tabloid after me.

Synonymous with Paparatzi.

Just a backdrop for Brian Cox on TV.

Since Edwin Hubble, it's never been the same.

Those pictures of other stars pushed me out the frame.

You never even gave me a proper name.

Like Alpha Centauri, Epsilon

Tauri,

Delta Libre,

HR2948, or

Kevin.

You've achieved nuclear fusion.

Well done!

Fused some helium from hydrogen.

Well, every second I do that to 620 million tons.

If I was Marilyn Monroe, you'd be Stacey Solomon.

You should have stopped at Copernicus.

Then I'd be the center of your universe.

You say I'm just an average ball of gas.

I say you're talking out of Uranus.

I have said that right, haven't I?

1.4

million

kilometers.

That's my diameter.

Tell me seriously with those parameters.

Have you ever tried to put a hat on there?

Hip, hip, hip, hooray.

I'll be a red giant someday,

and your world will explode in flames.

But until then, can you join my Facebook fan page?

We are genuinely trying to become the kind of two Ronnies of science programming, and now we've found Elkie Brooks as well.

So we've kind of it's all back to

Alan.

One of the ideas I suppose is that point of philosophy versus science, where some ideas in anthropic principles say that life is required for the universe to exist.

That if there isn't something to observe it, then it itself doesn't exist, that you have to actually collapse it into existence.

And I just wondered how you feel about that as an idea of philosophy versus science.

Well, I mean, that's the, I believe, the like the strong anthropic principle, which, if I understand it correctly, yeah, the universe is quite big, I think we've agreed, but it started out really, really tiny.

And by observing, from however remote a distance or time the origins of the universe, then according to Heisenberg, we're kind of affecting them.

And I think that the idea was that we had retroactively made this a fit universe to live in so that we could evolve across the billennia

to make those observations in the first place, which is kind of spectacularly mad.

I really like that one.

There was a writer, I can't remember who it was, but he described that as the completely ridiculous anthropic principle.

And you can look at the acronym in your head later.

It's not very BBC.

Not quite sound at Toxvig level, but it's getting there.

It's getting there.

Ed, I mean, I think we've ranged across some rather bizarre concepts in this show.

And I think that's one of the criticisms, if that's the right word, of cosmology.

And Martin Rees, yesterday I'm royalist, said that it's possible that these questions will remain forever beyond us.

And the fact that we're being led into these rather more

strange and esoteric regimes, string theory, 11-dimensional universes, actually says that we're not capable in principle of understanding and answering these big questions.

What's your view as to whether we may actually get to something like a string theory, a theory of the origin of the universe?

Oh, God, that's simple, isn't it?

In about a minute.

I'm a little more concerned now than I was, say, 10 years ago, when I thought string theory might come up with a unique solution.

But then it gradually became clear that, in fact, a lot of very senior physicists who have worked in this area have decided that basically we won't be able to say there's a unique solution, we won't be able to find one and that there'll be many that will be compatible with the kind of universe that that we exhibit.

I I don't like that myself.

I'd rather think that we can get there, but it's going to be hard.

Alan, do you do you feel that you know, now we're near the end of this discussion, do you feel any more confident that Glycon may well have been the overpowering sock puppet in the creation of the universe and has a much more important part in cosmology to play than someone like Ed would cynically think.

Well, I'd have to say, Robin, that I certainly haven't heard anything to dissuade me from that opinion.

Dallas,

in balance, having sat there listened to Ed's point of view and Alan's point of view, where would your sympathies lie?

Well,

you know, my heart's obviously with Alan, because Alan's socks seem.

I'm interested now.

I'm interested in Alan's socks, definitely.

I think they.

It's not his socks on his feet.

No, no, no, I know.

I know, no, I know.

It's a sock.

He doesn't, you don't wear Glycon.

But I provide the beautiful.

I provide the string for his shoes.

There you go.

I'm always fascinated about where we are with this question.

I think in all that, you know, I look at all different areas of science doing Bango's Ethereum.

I always come back to this question of cosmology and the very edge of cosmology and what are we able to know, and what will we never know?

What's interesting, it is one of the areas that is most perhaps requested, or it perhaps is the question to you on Bangoza theory.

However, it's very difficult to cover.

Well, it is difficult to cover.

And we've done

quite a bit of cosmology in Bang.

I mean, we've done general relativity in five minutes.

We've sort of demonstrated time dilation by flying an atomic clock around the world.

We've looked at the scale of the universe.

We've done all those kind of things

because, well, certainly for me, and I think for everyone, it does something to the mind.

It just it it the wonders of science, if you like, are encapsulated within those ideas, within those thoughts, I think, more than perhaps more than anything else.

So, uh, hopefully, there we have a mix of hope, melancholy, and socks.

We should actually make it very clear, by the way, that uh there was some confusion there over Alan's socks and actually uh uh Glycon.

Never wear your deity, uh, it's a very important thing.

A deity is always annoyed if it's given a varuca.

Um, so we're going to attempt to finish this show before we get to the point where we realize how small and insignificant we are.

And hopefully, we haven't haven't gone too far as yet.

You might be small, remember, but that is all relative.

Small by the sounds of the galaxy, tiny by the sounds of the universe, but a positive colossus compared to a superstring.

And even more than that, unlike a superstring, you definitely exist.

You know, I've got a whole host of things to read out here, but I'm just going to say that I find it much easier standing on a mountain smiling at the sky.

And if any of you would like to go to Leckhampton Hill

this evening in Cheltenham, you'll see Brian Top going, ee, when that accumulo nimbus.

So

it's not all stars.

Sometimes clouds get in the way.

Thanks to our guests, Ed Copeland, Dallas Campbell, and Alan Moore.

Next week, Brian is going to try and find himself on a ley line.

You're looking forward to that, aren't you?

I'm going to build the rational tent at Glastonbury, and I'm sure it'll be stormed at the end by irate hippies, but I'm going to do it anyway and make a stand.

They've already sent the plans for the rational tent.

It's shaped a little bit like a kind of wooden man for some reason, but

made of wicker.

And we are going to be joined by Billy Bragg, Shappy Gore Sandy, Graham Coxon, and Tony Ryan.

Thank you very much for listening.

Goodbye.