Does Science Need War?
The Infinite Monkey Cage
BBC
4.7 • 9.4K Ratings
🗓️ 21 July 2014
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Does Science Need War?
Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined on stage by comedian Katy Brand, science writer Philip Ball and medic, author and broadcaster Kevin Fong. They'll be asking whether scientific progress needs the pressures and casualties of war to drive it, or whether some of our biggest scientific breakthroughs, that have resulted from periods of conflict, would have happened anyway? It's a serious topic, but never fear, on the way the intergalactic battles faced in Star Wars, and why only the French could come up with onions as a cure for burns, are all equally seriously investigated.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Robin Ents. |
| 0:01.4 | And I'm Brian Cox. |
| 0:02.4 | And welcome to the podcast version of The Infilate Monkey Cage, |
| 0:05.3 | which contains extra material that wasn't considered good enough for the radio. |
| 0:09.0 | Enjoy it. |
| 0:09.9 | Hello, I'm Robin Ents. |
| 0:11.0 | And I'm Brian Cox. |
| 0:11.8 | And today we are asking, |
| 0:13.5 | what is it all the fault of scientists? |
| 0:16.7 | That's not what we're asking at all. |
| 0:18.6 | That's a very simplistic approach, Robin. |
| 0:20.2 | Well, it is obviously a simplistic approach, |
| 0:22.5 | because we are very much pandering to modern media, |
| 0:25.0 | and therefore it's much better to approach ideas by approaching them simply and wrongly, |
| 0:29.4 | because then you trend on Twitter. |
| 0:31.6 | Hashtag war bad. |
| 0:34.8 | I don't expect nothing less from an English literature graduate. |
| 0:39.0 | Who hasn't been trained to think Hashtag art rubbish lol? |
| 0:44.4 | No, no, it's saying this book by one of our guests, Philip Ball, |
| 0:48.6 | that historian, I quote, |
| 0:50.1 | historians, philosophers and sociologists, |
| 0:52.6 | can offer little more than compromised contingent half-truths. |
... |
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