What Is the Point of Plants?
The Infinite Monkey Cage
BBC
4.7 • 9.4K Ratings
🗓️ 16 February 2015
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What's the Point of Plants?
Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined on stage by plant biologist Professor Jane Langdale, physicist Professor Jim Al-Khalili and comedian and former horticulture student Ed Byrne to ask, "what's the point of plants?". How would the evolution of life on our planet have differed without plants, and what would our planet look like today? Most crucially that seemingly dull but necessary process of photosynthesis that we all learned about in school, is in fact one of the most important processes in our universe, and as usual it seems, the physicists are trying to take credit for it. Could there be a quantum explanation for how this amazing reaction works, and if so, are plants in fact the perfect quantum computers?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Robin Ents. |
| 0:01.2 | And I'm Braincocks. |
| 0:02.2 | And welcome to the podcast version of The Infilate Monkey Cage, |
| 0:05.3 | which contains extra material that wasn't considered good enough for the radio. |
| 0:09.1 | Enjoy it. |
| 0:10.0 | Hello, I'm Robin Ents. |
| 0:10.8 | And I'm Braincocks. |
| 0:11.7 | And today we're dealing with biology, which Brian never used to be keen on. |
| 0:14.8 | But he is now because apparently it also involves physics, |
| 0:17.7 | which is great news for Brian. |
| 0:19.2 | Very bad news for me, because I was just about to start understanding biology, |
| 0:22.8 | then they turn it into physics, which is far too difficult for me. |
| 0:25.9 | You're the same involves physics. |
| 0:27.5 | Yeah. |
| 0:27.9 | So I've includes physics. |
| 0:29.2 | It kind of biologies of wider subset of science and physics is some small little van diagram. |
| 0:34.1 | Is that what you meant? |
| 0:34.8 | Absolutely. |
| 0:35.1 | Inside the physics. |
| 0:36.0 | Is that absolutely... |
| 0:38.0 | Is this going to kick off now? |
| 0:39.2 | Well, my... |
... |
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