I'm Rory Stewart and I grew up wanting to be a hero and I'm still fascinated by the ideas of heroism.

In my new series, I'm taking in the long sweep of history from Achilles to Zelensky and asking, what is a hero?

Simply doing your job, being a decent human being.

A true hero is someone who just kind of shines by

their own light and that light is to be recognised by others. The long history of heroism

with me, Rory Stewart. Listen on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. Hello, I'm

Robin Ince and I'm very pleased to welcome you to another new Infinite Monkey Cage show. In particular, I'm excited because apparently I'm going to find out that I'm just a hologram, and that's going to take a lot of pressure off me. If you're just a hologram, does that mean you'll speak less and give me a bit more chance? Anyway, look, listen to the show. You're going to find out that the world of black holes and beyond

is something that is very discombobulating, but in a good way.

Hello, welcome to the Infinite Monkey Cage.

Yet again, we are recording over four time zones, if time really exists.

I'm Robin Ince.

And I'm Brian Cox.

On today's show, we aim to offer a distraction

from the frequently disappointing reality of human ignorance by exploring the naturally occurring objects that best reveal our ignorance.

Right. I have no idea what you talk about. This sounds even more ridiculous than when we did that show about quantum mechanics.

Now, let me explain to two sorts of ignorance, Robin. There's the disappointing sort of ignorance made manifest when trying to explain to someone on Twitter that the Earth is round.

And then there's the magnificent ignorance that stimulates curiosity and the generation of new knowledge.

In this case, our ignorance about the strangest objects we know to exist in the universe, black holes.

Right. Can I find out, are we going to do the former or the latter? The latter. I am much better on the former, whereas I know very little about what happens to the sails of a ship when it goes over the event horizon, but I presume you'll probably be explaining that. It's a very good question, actually, Robin. What would happen if a ship crossed the horizon of a black

hole? Would it cross into the interior unharmed? Would it be incinerated as it approached the horizon?

Does a black hole even have an interior? And could our attempts to understand these questions

suggest that the universe we experience may be a hologram? To explain these most remarkable

...