Modern World

Welcome to the Infinite Monkey Cage 3.2, which is a scientific way of saying third series episode two.

Alternatively, it's the way of saying something if you're middle-aged and think it makes you seem younger, like a man wearing a wig attempting to body pop shortly before going to hospital, bald and with a slipped disc.

I am Robin Ince.

And I'm Brian Cox.

This programme was originally called The Modern World, Is It a Force for Good or Evil?

But we very quickly realised that questions such as what is good and what is the origin of evil, if evil itself actually exists as an entity, are questions that have troubled philosophers for approximately 5,000 years.

We don't have that kind of time, so Brian's come up with a well-defined, snappy, but slightly longer title.

Yeah, I've decided to call it the modern world is better than the middle ages, so what's the problem with all these whinging hippies?

And yet again, the agenda sign has crashed on behalf

of your home.

Agenda, this will be a properly balanced show.

We have gathered together a panel of experts and interested people to help us.

So if we hadn't reached the modern world, this guest would have been at a loose end.

Unable to examine computer games and other products of the modern age, she would have had to resort to critiquing groups of men kicking pigs' heads through the streets.

It's social psychologist and technology writer Alex Kratoski.

He is a chemist and pro-vice-chancellor of science at Sheffield University, but without modernity, he might have been an apothecary with a good knowledge of nettles and a sometime wizard, Professor Tony Ryan.

And without the modern world, he'd still be doing what he does now, which is make people laugh.

With an increased likelihood, of course, of being decapitated if his whimsy was presumed treasonous.

I've seen him, sometimes it is.

It's comedian and mathematics graduate, Paul Foote.

Well, we looked up what modernity meant on the internet, but it turned out to be rubbish, so we went into the past and used a big book called A Dictionary Made of Paper.

And the definition was of the present and recent times, a person living in modern times or in current fashion.

So basically, modernity means modern.

So, that was very useful.

Well, we should start off actually by asking that question because it is a difficult thing to define.

Tony, if I can ask you first, what for you defines the modern world?

So, it would be easy to say the iPod, but for me, as a chemist, the modern world has to be the post-Haber Bosch world.

So, the Haber-Bosch process basically allowed the Earth to support more people than it could have previously supported.

So, it allowed us to enrich the Earth by putting fertilizer in to fix nitrogen directly from the air in a way that allowed the earth's population to grow by developing new plants, high-yield plants.

And so in our lifetime, the earth's population has quadrupled, whereas for millions of years before, it hadn't doubled.

Is that when Tesco started?

Tesco's came shortly after.

When was it?

So 1908.

So Fritz Haber.

Fritz Haber's a nasty little fellow who also invented chemical warfare.

But before he did that,

he worked out how to fix nitrogen.

And it's a fantastic reaction.

So 500 million tons of nitrogen is fixed into ammonia every year.

And most of it's converted into fertilizer.

And it's 3% of the Earth's energy budget.

And two-thirds of us depend existentially on it.

See, rather than that's modernity.

Science saves the world.

Yeah, but you told me that chemistry wasn't really a science, it was just mixing.

That's what you were.

I'm used to physicists calling me deliosars.

What have you made for us today?

Oh, look, it's blue and goes bang.

Alex,

with a relatively late definition of the start of modernity, 1908.

When would you say the modern world began, and what's your definition of modernity?

Tony hinted at it, and I'm going to take this back even further.

1908, I'm surprised that

that's when all of this happened, because I'm thinking the 1450s.

I'm thinking the printing press basically, which people have said that as soon as the printing press happened, knowledge became power, and knowledge was distributed amongst the population.

Everybody suddenly had access to knowledge, and that was what ushered in things like the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, and then ultimately the modern world.

So I'm going back beyond...

chemical processes and I'm talking about the people, man.

The people.

And I'm talking about more people.

Well, yeah, brilliant.

You got some people, more people, people.

Hang on, what about the Library of Alexandria then?

I'm going to go back another 1,400 years where they all had to share the documents that were taken into that port there.

And then some idiot went in.

I think his name was Cyril St.

Cyril.

In fact, it was.

Indeed, it was St.

Cyril who fleed, a piece of death.

Yes, the only thing that I've ever seen, by the way, is I've watched Cosmos 500 times, which is why I'm allowed to be on this show.

What do you know, Robin?

If it was in the 13-part series by Carl Sagan, I am well covered.

I can do a bit of Jacob Bronowski as well.

Do you see how he seamlessly mentioned who he'd done the impression of?

It's a very bad impressionist, that again.

That was Carl Sagan.

Ronnie Covet.

Who am I going to do next?

The universe is brilliant.

Brilliant.

There we are.

A lot of antagonism, isn't it?

Everything drives a lot.

So you're going with the printed press.

Paul, what for you would be the dawn of the modern age?

I don't personally think it's started yet.

I can tell by the way you're dressed.

This is not appreciated on radio, but I'm dressed from the past.

I remember when I was a child, which occurred in the 1980s,

there used to be books and it was about the future, which was about now, 2010.

And it showed there were robots.

We were specifically promised robots.

And not just like a machine that does something, like an iPod, like a thing that moves around and says, where'd you like tea?

I will make it proper.

You know, then we'd pour the kettle out and everything.

Everything looked modern and it was all lights and it was all flashing and you could just press a button and then you saw a picture of your granny and you just spoke hello granny and she would materialise in another room.

So sorry you mean much like Skype which exists in the current time.

Yeah but it it's not the same is it in the in that we were promised it actually works.

It wasn't, oh, you turn a computer on, then wait for about fifteen minutes for it to fire up, then it says it has to install an update, then

it crashes.

It was just a thing, you pressed it on the fridge, and there was Granny, and there was a a robot that could deal with anything anyway.

Uh uh so it basically, until that happens, I'm not convinced the modern world has started.

I I was promised it and I want it.

Tony,

there's a serious side, hopefully, to this debate.

I mean, if we start with this nature against science, which is something that you hear about a lot, there seems to be a presumption in a way that nature is something that's good and old-fashioned,

whereas science is something that GM food or drugs, chemical fertilizers, bad things.

So, progress is somehow anti-natural and bad.

Is that a logical position?

Well, I do have to say that natural philosophy was where science started.

So science and nature are intrinsically linked.

And this feeling that science is something that kind of does nasty things is, to me, just crazy because all science tries to do is understand nature, understand the very nature of nature.

And then it gets transformed into something else.

You know, it gets transformed into whatever makes money or whatever wages war.

It's not the science that's evil, it's what's done with it that's evil.

See, why is it?

I mean, even talking about what we've created there, I think, slightly awkward boundary to say they're two different things.

You know, the word natural now on most products is that, don't worry, this product is natural.

This has been naturally made, it's not been made by something evil.

But oxygen.

Yes.

For example.

This is

natural remedies.

We always hear from these people say things like, you know, well, you know, this is a remedy that actually comes from 5,000 years ago.

And, you know, it's a natural remedy.

And you go, go, yeah, have you checked how long people lived 5,000 years ago?

Well, Alex, what do people mean when they're saying this is natural?

What is natural?

I mean, ultimately, I think what people think is natural is that of nature.

You know, as soon as you start mucking around in a lab with a lab coat and putting things together and making things do robots and stuff, flying cars, people would say that's not natural.

But frankly, you know, you were talking about Botox and arsenic is a natural ingredient and all of these things could potentially kill us.

And so, possibly, the flying cars and the robots aren't unnatural, it's just our relationship with them is.

So, is this one of the problems that we have?

If we're talking about what is the problem of the modern world, that our rational minds have meant that we've moved on, we have vaccinations, we have an ability to feed an enormous population, but our kind of instinctual minds, so you know, the sexual mind, for instance, means that people still have large families.

So, that we have there is a certain battle between the rational and then what what is irrational, kind of the animal instinct.

Well, I think the issue here, though, is that the rate of inventing is much, much higher than the rate of evolution, right?

So, so basically, you know, you've got this modern person and a modern society inhabited by people who have the urges of cavemen, right?

So, you know, the uh kind of

back to cave, you know, whether it's you know a young lady or a or or a meal, right?

You know, and and uh it really

these days are going to be like you know, they're the two basic needs, right?

So and the way the way the way we deal with modernity is governed by those kind of protein-driven processes.

You know, that there's not we've not evolved sufficiently to be able to take away those kind of primeval urges.

So that's why, you know, that's why that's why we have so many obese kids, right?

Because kids are programmed to eat high energy density food.

You know, if you take kids to a party, they don't do bits of cucumber, carrot sticks, if there's peanuts and crisps, right?

And human beings are basically preparing for a famine.

That's why people eat the way they do.

So everyone's preparing for a famine, but the famine's not coming.

But you can't turn your physiology off.

How come some people, thin people like me,

have not prepared for the famine?

People like you weren't meant to survive.

But I must say, though, Paul, I mean, this sounds t to me, we could be accused of being rather aggressive on this show.

And often, I think, scientists do come across as being people who are arrogant.

I know everything, the scientific method is paramount.

Absolutely.

You know, scientists say, oh, this is how you get into space.

You need a space rocket with a certain amount of thrust.

But it's up to other people to fight back and try it with our own methods.

For example,

faith rocketry

sit on a rocket and with the new power of your mind you go into space.

No one's like that.

Well, no, no, they're all sat there trying to get into space by the power of their mind.

They're all just sat on the ground.

It's typical of your arrogance to assume.

That they're just going to sit there.

People do it.

See, whereas you arrogant scientists, oh, look, we're NASA.

We've used a rocket.

He was like, I've used the power of my mind, but best just to keep it quiet.

You know, I show off.

But Alex, implicit in this discussion, there's a sense of a distrust of science.

And I'd like to say rational thought.

I mean, maybe we should discuss how synonymous science and rational thought are.

But why do you think this there does seem to be a distrust in our society at the moment of science or the scientific method?

I think generally, you know, we lived through the 80s, we lived through the 70s, we lived through the polyester pants period.

Paul, you're still there.

And

thank you very, very hot for representing.

But you know, we lived through that period where the 20th century was dominated by this idea that you can mash things up in a lab and it will be cheaper, better, faster,

whatever.

And so now there's a rebellion, a sense of, right, let's go back to nature, let's go back to our agrarian roots and

hoe the fields with Shire horses.

But it wasn't entirely positive at, perhaps in the 50s, if you look at the 50s or the 60s, the white heat of technology, that was the way that the human race would better itself, the way we would grow more food, food, the way we would progress.

But at the same time, you look at the fiction around that time, and there's so much fear associated with the modern world.

They're talking about the Andromeda chain, they're talking about the potential for the nuclear, for all of this nuclear threat to destroy society.

So the modern world, the now, the organic now,

it's nothing new, but it's referring back to all of that kind of stuff.

And it's a reaction, of course, to all the bad things that the white heater technology gave us,

like white bread.

You know,

nuclear war.

Actually, I reckon white bread's most likely killed more people than nuclear war.

No, I'm being quite serious.

And how would you kill someone with white bread?

Would it be with the baguette?

When you've got a baguette, it's nice and hard.

If you just have one of those soft loaves, especially with no crust, smothering.

I'll assume sweet.

To kill your mother with mother's pride is the ultimate Greek tragedy,

So, is science then necessarily amoral?

It's a process for understanding nature, and scientists should really take no

care, I suppose,

in how the science is going to be used.

No, no, so we have to have, and you know, you know, we have to have a moral responsibility for what we do

and think about the ethics of what we do, what happens in a lab, you know, what what things we try and understand.

But that's the whole thing about your definition of modernity, of knowledge.

And once knowledge is being created, it can't be controlled.

So who knows what nefarious purposes someone might take a new bit of knowledge?

I mean, okay, you'd struggle to batter someone to death with a Higgs boson, but

who knows where that's going to take us?

I think as well, though, I don't think it's amoral in the sense that the people who are making science have such reverence reverence for their subjects.

You know, and if you didn't have reverence for your subject, then you wouldn't recognize that it is something that needs to be preserved, protected, and respected in so many ways.

But it is a rather ideological and idealistic pursuit, actually, isn't it?

I mean, it's a blue sky's science.

It's curiosity-led.

You go where your curiosity about nature takes you.

The things we're discussing,

say nuclear weapons and white bread, as you say, I mean, those things are essentially the fruits of curiosity-driven research.

Does that mean that there has to be some kind of, I don't know, consideration of what you might do?

I think

there's a move afoot now

amongst lots of scientists that actually we need to concentrate on

doing the science and providing for energy and food sustainability.

So they're the two things that lots of practical scientists are starting to work on.

There was the announcement recently of a big investment in Cambridge for the physics around the physics of sustainability.

At Sheffield, I run this thing called Project Sunshine, where we're kind of trying to corral a bunch of scientists to use their own little bit of science towards a bigger goal to make sure that we can provide for all the people on the earth.

And

so, you know, we've developed our own morality.

Isn't one of the big problems?

I mean, everyone talks about the planet's under threat.

The planet isn't under threat.

No, absolutely not.

It's the population.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's the human population that's under threat.

So all we need to do is just for one generation, just encourage people not to procreate so much and

invest in homosexuals.

If that's serious, if we encourage homosexuals for one generation, the population would go down.

There'd obviously be some people who just say, even with the incentives, I'm just too much.

And those hardcore people could still create more children.

And then we would reduce the number, and then there'd be maybe two billion people again, and all be happy.

But this is the interesting thing, is we we've been uh talking about the fact that people perhaps don't know what they're actually taking, don't what they're doing, they don't know what certain kind of foodstuffs are, and sometimes we are living in an uncertain world.

Now, is this part of the problem, Alex, that we do live in this world where technology has bombarded us with so much information, but it's actually in some ways much easier to be stupid.

I think the the problem is that we've got so much choice.

And in my particular field, in the internet, we literally, it is the printing press

multiplied by 10 gazillion, 10 Googleplex, as it were.

And we've got so much information that's out there.

We've got so many different boxes on our shelves that we can choose from that, frankly, we are completely overwhelmed.

And so the way that people choose now is they choose by filtering out information based upon what it is that their friends think.

They follow links based upon

the things that they hear about.

And instead of accessing this ginormous library of information, they only go for the information that actually confirms what it is that they think anyway.

So instead of expanding our horizons, we're actually making them narrower.

We're creating an echo chamber of information.

This, to me, seems to be one of the problems, is there is so much choice now.

And

if you go into a bookshop and you look, for instance, diet sections,

there are hundreds of different diet books, and yet you think, how has this industry happened when the truth is, well, do a bit more exercise and eat more healthily?

That's that's the ultimate.

There we go.

It's as simple as that.

But there is an industry around these things, and so you're bombarded by, I mean, is it possible fictional choices, really?

Well, it's because people they want to live the, they want to buy a book that gives them a sort of sense of, oh, this is how I'm going to lose weight with all these methods and follow this 17-step plan, and it's all fun, isn't it?

It's much more exciting than just take control of your own life.

Get a bit of self-esteem.

Just pull yourself together.

I mean, you know, in the war, people didn't go around with diet books, did they?

They just went around saying, oh, no, it's been another

bomb over there.

Let us clear that up.

Oh, run, run, run.

Oh, have you got any cakes?

No, there haven't been any cakes since 1939.

Have you got an egg?

Yeah, I've got one powdered egg that will last us the month.

Oh,

I'm so thin.

And that one minute of Paul Foot is going to be edited down and available as a self-help take.

So

the.

It seems to me we've confused many things.

We've got technology, science,

consumerism.

Getting back to this question of modernity,

I take a rather pure view that science is the understanding of nature.

Now, flat-screen television to me are a different matter entirely.

But purely in terms of science,

is there any possible argument for not continuing the march of knowledge?

So, so

that's a bit weighted question, isn't it?

And I'm going to give you a really weighted answer.

So, I would say pure science, as you describe it, is applied science

that's run out of usefulness.

That's an interesting way of looking at it.

Paul.

Right.

No,

continue down this fascinating path for a moment.

Well, so why did we start?

You know, why did science start?

Science started because

we, people, wanted to understand what was around us.

And once we learnt to understand what was around us, you know, then we thought, well, you know, how can we improve on it?

How can we make that work better for humans?

And thermodynamics, we have thermodynamics because people wanted to make better engines.

We don't have better engines because people people understood thermodynamics.

You know, we've got to get this the right way around sometimes.

Well, but I mean, if we follow that logic for a moment, it would seem to suggest: are you implying that we know enough now by some measure, and now we're in the process of commercializing and refining the knowledge that we know?

Okay, so, and one of the benefits of knowing so much and

being able to create so much is that we have the luxury of being able to keep on searching to know more.

And if we didn't have that luxury,

then there wouldn't be any more science, would there?

Because we'd all be back to surviving.

So, because we no longer have to struggle to survive, then we can afford the luxury of your pure view of science.

But prior to that, science was just there to make life better for people.

Right, well, Brian calms down.

I mean, in all of the science,

Brian, your job would be the first to go.

We wouldn't need you, would we?

No, would we say, oh, we need to know the origins of the universe, how did it happen, how does gravity work?

People would be just saying, oh, there's someone with a lance there.

I think the comedians might, we may well go before the scientists.

I think we'll be the first.

There's a man with a hat.

So,

what are the ramifications of the modern world for mathematics?

Only one man can answer that, or alternatively, only one man who's here can answer that.

There's probably lots of men who can answer it, but this person was available.

It's stand-up mathematician, Matt Parker.

Now,

I have faith that maths and science can solve our problems.

I believe that as technology continues to advance, our lives will continue getting better and better, right up to the point where iPhones become sentient,

which is pretty much the end for us.

The future's less Skynet and more iNet.

But between now and then, I think technology can even fix our energy problems.

I think the price is a bit of a good start.

They have, thank there wasn't a punchline, but thank you for laughing.

No, they do, they have a dynamic energy flow chart on the dash.

So at any point in time, you know precisely how smug you're allowed to be.

Down to the nearest Millibono, which is the

metric unit of smugness.

They even...

Gradually getting it at the back there.

Thanks, guys.

No, they even have leaves that light up.

So you can be driving there going, oh, look, I'm now hugging three trees a gallon.

But they are just leaves covering our guilty bits.

I mean, electron-powered cars probably are the part of the answer, but we still need the energy.

Last year, the UK used 1,776 terawatt hours of energy, mostly derived from burning dinosaurs.

And the trouble with that is you get toxic dinosaur gases.

I don't know what they are, I'm not a paleontologist, but I do know we just put them in the atmosphere where they can do maximum damage.

It would be beneficial if we could put them in a box.

And we can.

Nuclear power, apart from giving us all the energy we want and being safe for dinosaurs, gives us much less waste that we can put in a box, put the box in a desert, and put a please don't touch sign on it.

Now, I admit I am for renewable energy technology.

That's fine.

And for every wind farm that starts, we'll turn off one nuclear reactor.

Because by now, we could be all nuclear, having absolutely no impact on the environment as we gradually wean onto sustainable energy.

And then, sometime in the future, I think with technology, we can have solely sustainable energy.

And more likely than not, with science, we can take that nuclear waste and turn it into, I don't know, lead or gold or something.

And frankly, that will be very much to the pleasing of our then nuclear-powered iPhone overlords.

Thank you very much, guys.

Thank you very much, Matt Parker, who'll be back with us again next week.

This is a question I'm going to ask all of you as well.

We asked the audience who are with us this evening, which modern-day invention would you uninvent and why?

I have a lot of entries, we can't go through all the polystyrene, more trouble than it's worth.

Twitter, this is an interactive Twitter, because then my wife would be unable to virtually stalk Brian Cox.

Finished with a long grrrrr.

chemistry

celebrity physicists

the iron so I could get around four hours a week of my life back so that's nice some people need their whole life back sometimes just for us um Tony is there anything that you would uninvent instant coffee yeah that's yeah

now with a radio two audience they'd be furious

these people are prepared to wait.

Some of them own a second café tier in France.

Alex, have you got

it's pretty straightforward, my alarm clock.

Excellent.

That's and Paul?

Well, I was just thinking about this here.

The lady says she would un-invent the iron so she could get four hours a week of her life back.

Just don't iron.

I mean, what she's really wanting to un-invent is the need within society for people to feel that they need to have trousers that are pressed in order to, I suppose, impress people.

Nothing wrong with the invention, it works perfectly well.

Well, that brings us to an end this week.

So, thanks to our guests, Paul Foote, Tony Ryan, Alex Kotowski, and Matt Parker.

Hopefully, you may now be content to live in the modern world.

If not, why not try a little exercise in quantum mechanics and go into one of the the many other universes that may be around where technology hasn't taken hold?

Possibly, I think you just have to collapse a wave function, Brian.

No.

Oh.

I do think there's a more prosaic explanation for the apparent confusion in the quantum theory about when to apply non-unitary evolution, probably along the lines of a GRW-like mechanism.

That would be my guess.

Of course.

Next week, we're joined by Tim Minchin, the rationalist orchestral minstrel, and we'll be discussing randomness, probability, and chance.

Until then, I'm off to invent a perpetual motion machine with some elastic bands, a greyhound, greyhound, and a slinky.

Frankly, I'm not very confident.