You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.

Thank you for downloading the Life Scientific from BBC Radio 4.

Today's guest is someone who's worked on some of the biggest questions about our existence.

Martin Reese, a theoretical cosmologist, has tackled black holes, the formation of galaxies, and the Big Bang itself.

He's the Astronomer Royal and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and as former President of the Royal Society and across Venture the House of Lords,

he's at the heart of science policy. Martin describes himself as an atheist who enjoys the cultural and aesthetic traditions of the Anglican Church,

a view that's led to some criticism from other scientists.

He's also a futurologist and he supports the idea that instead of there being only one universe,

we may in fact be part of a multiverse.

So could life be found elsewhere in a different universe?

Welcome Martin. You've said that when you first started your research career in cosmology

in the 1960s that it was a good time to be a

cosmologist. What were the big questions at the time and how did they inspire you to

choose the field? Well at that time very little was known about the universe. It was

...