Oceans: The Last Great Unexplored Frontier?
The Infinite Monkey Cage
BBC
4.7 • 9.4K Ratings
🗓️ 18 June 2012
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Brian Cox and Robin Ince return for a new series of the award-winning science/comedy show, as they take a witty, irreverent and unashamedly rational look at the world according to science. In today's programme they'll be looking down rather than up as they consider the great mysteries that still remain uncovered in the watery depths of our oceans and asking whether they are truly the last unexplored frontiers for science. It has often be said that we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about much of what lies beneath the ocean waves, so how come we know so little about the vast majority of our own planet? They'll be joined on stage by comedian Dave Gorman, British Antarctic Survey scientist Lloyd Peck and Bramley Murton from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton.
Presenters: Robin Ince and Brian Cox Producer: Alexandra Feachem.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a download from the BBC. To find out more, visit bbc.co.uk-radio4 |
| 0:08.0 | Welcome to Series 6 of the Infinite Monkey Cage. For those who have only just joined us, the story so far |
| 0:16.8 | Episode 6, The Impericist Strikes Back |
| 0:20.8 | After a ruthless battle, the Earth has been removed from the centre of the Solar System |
| 0:24.5 | and been replaced by the Sun. After a powerful instant on a big tower, |
| 0:28.2 | it appeared that all objects fall at the same rate in a gravitational field. |
| 0:31.9 | Actually, Einstein showed that all objects are simply following geodesics in curved space |
| 0:35.4 | times, so really, I would argue that they are all in inertial frames. |
| 0:38.4 | Yes, fair enough. Meanwhile, people were furious after light was shared on human origins. |
| 0:44.3 | Although light behaves in some ways like a parcel, in some ways like a wave, |
| 0:46.9 | try to explain a defraction, for example, using a particle framework. |
| 0:49.5 | Actually, you can, with Feynman's sum of a history as approach to quantum theory. |
| 0:52.9 | Yes, the life was more of a metaphor really there. |
| 0:55.2 | At the close of the last episode, something was going on somewhere in Switzerland, |
| 0:59.3 | where there was a tantalising glimpse of a particle that might give us mass. |
| 1:03.9 | 2.8 sigma isn't a tantalising glimpse, it's a precisely defined confidence level. |
| 1:07.6 | Yeah, tantalising glimpse is a little bit more charming, isn't it? |
| 1:10.4 | There you go. Oh, I was sort of tantalising glimpse related the other day at the bar. |
| 1:13.4 | Oh, my constant. Oh, man, your science takes the poetry, doesn't it, knowing stuff? |
| 1:19.5 | This is the Infinite Monkey Cage. |
| 1:25.5 | I'm Brian Cox, and since I was last on air, I'd been filming Wonders of Life for BBC 2, |
| 1:31.5 | and in doing so, I've discovered that biology is a science. |
... |
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