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We did Glastonbury two years ago and they asked us to again and Brian said well if we're doing Glastonbury why don't we do something simple and gentle about poetry or why stars are pretty and I said no we have got an audience of people who will be quite confused by this stage of the festival quantum cosmology is the only idea and you are the perfect audience for quantum cosmology because I believe you are displaying quantum behavior many of you are both dead and alive you are here and you are not

here you are indeed all in super positions yes today we'll be looking at quantum cosmology our time and space as Einstein envisaged a smooth fabric with the future as real as the past or does quantum theory save us from deterministic drudgery are there really an infinite number of parallel universes or is this it what happens inside a black hole was there anything before the big bang is there a possibility that I might one day meet another me from another worlds where I am sure that

I will be able to answer without my trademark good looks and great hair and with no realist understanding of particle physics at all

am I the other Brian Cox have I come here to this world to kill him in some kind of Philip K. Dick nightmare so to help explain and when I say yes I do not include me because I have no idea we were actually up last night talking about these ideas and they are fantastically bamboozling

our first guest is a professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College London where she specializes in quantum cosmology she has never been to the glassary festival before but as someone who studied many worlds interpretations you also know that she has been to every single glassary festival before

sometimes as a human sometimes as a sentient droplet of pear juice she is someone dealing with very confusing worlds it is fade out her

our next guest works on the phenomenology of elementary particle physics and trying to say phenomenology without thinking about the muppets is difficult

try it phenomenology

he is also co-writer of books with a popular TV scientist such as widows equals mc squared in the quantum universe it is professor Jack Borscher

and like so many of our regular guests professor Richard Dawkins of Paul nurse and the astronomer royal to Martin Reese today one of our guests is also a former podium dancer like then

Richard Dawkins of course used to be a podium dancer at the heaven night club until a falling out of their refusal to change its name to a finite existence followed by an inevitable death without any sense of being night club

he is a regular on a my got used to you the now show and sometimes also goes on the name jazz we'll be honk and he is Marcus Brickstar

and our final guest is a musician who we had to have on because she titled her albums I to the telescope and present moon

and became a musician despite being brought up in a house with only one album in it but it was satirist and scientist Tom Leera so that's a good start

you might hear more of that later

it is the great Katie Tundstill and this is our panel

now I thought we'd start because we have two of the most eminent professors in the UK here a professor by David professor Jeff Borscher

I thought we'd start by getting a feel for what quantum cosmology is and the ideas behind it so Marcus Brickstock quickly can you explain quantum cosmology in a minute

yes I certainly can is that with deviation repetition and hesitation and can the benefit of the doubt go to anybody but me

yes I can explain it perfectly simply if you go to the top of the glass to be festival by top I mean the highest point here

you reach the green fields and then you can look down on the entire glass to be festival and that in a way is probably the best metaphor in this short amount of time that I can think of

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