Science Fiction, Science Fact
The Infinite Monkey Cage
BBC
4.7 • 9.4K Ratings
🗓️ 28 June 2010
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Special guests Jonathan Ross, graphic novelist Alan Moore and string theorist Brian Greene, join Brian Cox and Robin Ince on stage for a special edition of the science show that boldly goes where no other science show has been before. In a special science fiction themed programme, recorded in front of an audience at London's Southbank Centre, Brian, Robin and guests discuss multiple dimensions, alternate universes and look at whether science fact is far more outrageous than anything Hollywood or science fiction authors could ever come up with.
Producer: Alexandra Feachem.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thank you for downloading this program from BBC Radio 4. For more information visit bbc.co.uk-flash- Radio 4. |
| 0:12.0 | Hello and welcome to the Infinite Monkey Cage. I'm Robin Inc. |
| 0:14.0 | And I'm Brian Cox. And this week we're at London Southback Centre as part of the Royal |
| 0:18.4 | Society's Summer Festival of Science and Arts. And today we're looking at the most overt illustration |
| 0:22.6 | of science meeting art, the science or possibly non-science of science fiction. Brian, where does |
| 0:29.2 | science meet art? What kind of equation would that be? I would say that if you represent them both |
| 0:35.5 | as vectors, then their scalar products would be non-zero. And of course for listeners at home, |
| 0:42.9 | that means that they are not orthogonal. So, 350 years ago, the first members of the Royal Society, |
| 0:48.9 | including Boyle, Ren and Newton, stood around a workbench tampering with the laws of nature |
| 0:53.8 | and finding out things that were never meant to be known. He's learnt nothing. |
| 0:59.2 | Originally described as an invisible college of natural philosophers, there are societies now |
| 1:04.3 | the oldest continuous scientific society in the world, funding more than 1600 young scientists every |
| 1:09.6 | year to research into everything from robotics, the age crisis in Africa, sources of renewable fuels, |
| 1:14.9 | the particle physics, astronomy and space exploration. And despite supposed advance in genetics, |
| 1:20.2 | Boyle, Newton and Ren still remain unreplicated. Lazy, lazy geneticists. So, |
| 1:27.9 | in place of Newton, we have a physicist of immense gravitas, Brian Green. Our alternative |
| 1:33.6 | Ren is the architect of the finest comic books of the last 50 years, Alan Moore. And in violation |
| 1:38.4 | of Boyle's law, proving that you can be absolutely full of hot air and still remain anchored to the |
| 1:43.6 | Jonathan Ross. Pretty impressive an equation and a joke involving Boyle's law, |
| 1:55.9 | this early in the show. So, I'll start off with you, Alan. You started working probably most |
| 2:01.4 | famously with 2000 AD, which was an enormous success. And then within 10 years, you've written |
| 2:05.6 | V for Vendetta and Watchmen. And as you progressed in the kind of narratives you were dealing with, |
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