Under our Night Sky

The Infinite Monkey Cage

BBC

Comedy, Science

4.7 • 9.4K Ratings

🗓️ 18 January 2021

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Under The Night Sky

Brian Cox and Robin Ince discover the importance of the night sky to human history and how our relationship with the stars has changed over the centuries. They are joined by star-gazer Jon Culshaw, astronaut Tim Peake, astrophysicist Lisa Harvey-Smith and astronomy writer Stuart Clark as they chart the changing nature of our relationship with the sky above us. They discuss ancient cave paintings depicting Orion's belt, the astronomical revolution that came with our understanding of how planets orbit the Sun, and how astronauts like Tim who have "touched the sky" have seen the stars in a totally unique way. Has our ever expanding knowledge about the stars twinkling above us removed some of the magic, or have modern missions and the incredible images of space we now see brought us closer, quite literally, to the sky above us?

Producer: Alexandra Feachem

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.
0:04.9	Hello, I'm Brian Cox, and I'm Robin Inc.
0:07.1	And this is the Infinite Monkey Cage.
0:09.6	And, well, I suppose we should just start by saying,
0:11.8	science ruins everything.
0:14.2	That's the new angle.
0:15.4	We're taking to broaden our potential audience.
0:17.4	It's a more kind of post-modernist approach
0:19.5	that has come from my immersive reading of continental philosophy,
0:22.6	including Foucault for Fools and Derrida for Dunces.
0:25.4	Derrida for Dunces.
0:27.4	I mean, I suppose it's any other kind of derrida.
0:29.6	Look, don't talk about philosophy, OK?
0:31.4	Because that is, we will be here all day if we do that.
0:33.8	Well, we'll be here for 5,000 years,
0:36.0	won't we, with no answers at all?
0:37.4	We'll be going good.
0:38.4	This is...
0:39.4	LAUGHTER
0:40.9	Because for the last few series,
0:43.0	the chemists have been annoyed at being called an art.
0:45.3	Brian said, let's annoy the philosophers just for a week,
	...

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