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Jan. 18, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:17:08

Edition 427 - Marcus Chown

A new conversation with "urban scientist" Marcus Chown and some untold stories about "the magic of science" and the people behind the biggest discoveries, taken from his new book "The Magicians"...

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	Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
	Thank you very much for your emails and communications.
	I'm going to be doing some shout-outs on this edition.
	Thank you if you've emailed recently.
	I do try to reply in person to as many of the emails that I get, and certainly those that require some kind of answer.
	I will get back to you, as they say.
	But thank you very much.
	And if you've made a donation to the show, by going to my website, theunexplained.tv, recently and leaving one there.
	Thank you very, very much.
	Your donation's vital for this ongoing work to continue.
	And as I've said before, I know I have said it before, but if you think about the cost of a cup of coffee, basic one in the United States, what are we talking?
	$3, $2.50.
	UK, £2.50 thereabouts for just the most basic coffee.
	And if you want bells and whistles on top of that, then you're going to pay another pound or maybe two.
	If you were to donate that to the unexplained, it would be a great help.
	And remember that a cup of coffee is going to last you 10 minutes.
	You may or may not enjoy it, depending on how well it's been made and how you're feeling at the time, how much of a rush you're in.
	The Unexplained, of course, you can listen to the shows and keep listening to them.
	So just a suggestion.
	TheUnexplained.tv, one-stop shop for your messages, emails, suggestions, and donations.
	The website designed and created by Adam from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
	Thanks, Adam, for your work.
	Guest on this edition, A Return Visit, a Brand New Conversation with Marcus Chown, recorded specially for this podcast, about his new book, which concerns the magic of science.
	And we'll talk about that in greater detail with Marcus Chown, the man that I've dubbed, and I think it's a name that will stick, the urban scientist on this edition.
	But before we get to Marcus in London, let's get to some of your emails here.
	Andrew, near Arundel, West Sussex, UK.
	I know this place very, very well, Andrew.
	I used to be a regular at the Wild Fowl and Wetlands Trust there.
	Got to go back.
	Lovely place.
	If you love nature and the little birds, then you will love the Wild Fowl and Wetlands Trust at Arundel.
	And Andrew, nice to hear from you.
	Andrew says, I've been a regular listener for a few years.
	It's mostly company on overnight trips to London.
	Thank you for the nice things you say about the podcast.
	Your question is about spontaneous combustion.
	Have we ever covered that?
	We have, I think, mainly on the radio show with a number of people, including somebody who was a man who'd written a book about medical oddities.
	If you don't know what spontaneous combustion is, it's something that I can remember newspapers when I was a kid occasionally reporting cases of people who simply seemed in their homes to burst into flames.
	Sometimes there would just be a pile.
	I mean, it's not a pleasant topic to talk about, so I'll talk around it, but, you know, sometimes it's just a pile of ash left on the carpet.
	And some experts say it's to do with gases building up in the body and combusting.
	And others have a paranormal explanation for whatever it may be.
	But we do need to return to that.
	And thank you for your email, Andrew.
	From Kayla in Winnipeg, Canada talks about the Kyle Gray show, which a lot of you enjoyed, the last edition.
	At the beginning of your podcast, Angel Numbers with Kyle Gray, you said, it can't be random, can it?
	I thought to myself, yeah, right.
	I paused the podcast to look at the time, and it read 12.34.
	In other words, 1234.
	Kayla says, I sat silently for a moment and I thought, what are the chances?
	I'm not sure, Kayla, but I know that a lot of these things happen.
	I keep seeing 1111 since I spoke to Kyle.
	And maybe it's mind over matter.
	I don't know.
	But interesting.
	Thank you.
	Kevin and Shesmin in Bristol, thank you very much for your numbers, experiences, and your support, Kevin and Shesmin.
	Adam, near Rendlesham Forest in the UK, thank you for your story, Adam, for taking time to get in touch.
	Alan enjoyed the edition we did with Rocky Elmore about the weird experiences and the spooky occurrences on the United States frontiers.
	And we must get Rocky Elmore back.
	Julia and Greg Pritchard, thank you for your email.
	Mike O'Connor in Germany, great email, Mike.
	Thank you for that.
	Have a happy 2020.
	Holly Ann in the UK, thank you for your email.
	Joel in Melbourne, good to hear from you.
	Alec in Arizona, ditto.
	Paul in Wisconsin, thank you for the information, Paul.
	Nick in Bar Harbor, Maine, USA.
	Beautiful place, Nick.
	Thank you for emailing.
	Andy in Florida, thank you for your nice email and the donation, Andy.
	My best wishes to you and your partner.
	31 years, you tell me, after getting your green card to work in the US after a life of traveling around the world.
	That sounds really interesting.
	Thank you, Andy.
	Shane in Sydney, good to hear from you again.
	Sharon, near Hartbeersport Dam, near Johannesburg, South Africa.
	Sharon, nice to hear from you.
	And Stan wishes me, and I think you too, happy new decade.
	Stan, happy new decade from me and all the listeners to the unexplained.
	Thank you very much for that.
	If you want to email me, please know that all of your emails I get to see.
	And if they require a response from me personally, then they get one.
	And that is more than you can say from the mainstream media, as they say.
	All right, let's cross to just a few miles away from where I live, about 50 miles away.
	Marcus Chown, the urban scientist and author of a brand new book called The Magicians.
	This conversation, as I say, recorded specially for this show, and I think you're going to enjoy this.
	Marcus Chown, thank you very much for coming back on my show.
	You're very welcome.
	I'm glad to be on.
	Well, listen, I always think that when I speak with you on the radio, you get shortchanged because we can never do it for as long as I want to.
	And you've always got, you know, great though the radio is for reaching people, you've always got interruptions like commercial breaks, things that get in the way.
	And so the nice thing about doing this, you know, we're both sitting, you've presumably got a cup of coffee like I have, and, you know, we're at home.
	And I think that makes a big difference.
	You know, I don't know what you think, but it just, it relaxes things.
	I think you're right.
	I mean, very often when you do interviews, for instance, on the radio, you know, just before you're on, they say, you've got 30 seconds, Marcus.
	And you think, my God, how am I going to compress what I was going to say into 30 seconds?
	But of course, that's what you have to do.
	Well, you do, and that has always been.
	Now, funny you should say this because we're going to get straight into the meat of it immediately.
	I was trained by some wonderful journalists who wrote our national newspapers.
	I was very lucky to be trained by those people.
	And we did various themes across the time that we were, you know, learning our trade.
	And of course, they taught us how to write and how not to use big words unless you needed to use them and all of those things that you learn when you're a journalist.
	But the one thing that came out of those sessions was that it is very hard, very difficult for a non-scientist journalist to explain what a scientist is going on about.
	I think the gap has got a little closer in recent years.
	I think it's becoming easier for us to explain science, but it's still a big gulf, don't you think?
	I do.
	I do.
	I think people need to recognize, journalists need to recognise, or interviewers need to recognise, that there is a slight difference between a normal news story and a science story.
	With the science story, you may have to give a bit of background before you get to the punch.
	You know, when we're talking about a news story, we're all aware of where Iran is.
	We're all aware that Donald Trump has just assassinated somebody in Iran.
	So we know all the background automatically.
	But with science, you tend to have to give a little bit of background before you get to the punchline.
	And sometimes that isn't recognized.
	And interviewers just jump in.
	And that's quite difficult for somebody being interviewed.
	I think that's absolutely true.
	We're going to try and do justice to your work here.
	There's one thing, there's something that's clicking, or you're knocking the table where you are.
	I know that you're in your kitchen, just to explain to my listeners.
	Yeah, I did it.
	I am actually knocking the table.
	I would do my best not to now.
	I talk with my hands.
	I have to be careful not to hit things.
	When I'm on the radio, I keep hitting the microphone because I'm illustrating the points.
	I've just done it.
	I'm illustrating the points that I make.
	It's my problem.
	I just did an audio book, and believe it or not, I would get very animated when there was something in my book that I thought was interesting.
	And they couldn't identify what this unusual noise was on the recording of the first day.
	And it was the headphones were rubbing against the top of my head, my hair, whenever I became animated.
	So on the last day, when I thought, well, I've only got one chapter to read, they said, we've got to do the whole first day again because of that.
	So yeah, it is a problem, isn't it?
	Well, it's got to be, you know, for an audio book that will be around for years.
	I'm afraid it has to be perfect, as they say.
	But that's a good thing.
	Definitely, definitely.
	But I was so tired.
	I mean, obviously, you know, it's very difficult, you know, working down a mine and that's a hard job.
	But after 10 hours in the studio talking to myself, I felt completely, I got on a bus to get home and I was completely exhausted.
	I couldn't have actually spoken to a human being, really.
	I was so exhausted.
	Welcome to my world.
	It's all I can say.
	Now, before we get into the book, I just want to ask you about something that's been in the news in the last couple of days, because I think it ties in with the book, really.
	There are two stories, both run by the Independent newspaper, in the last couple of days, both of which I think you will have seen and will know about, because you were formerly a radio astronomer at Caltech, which I mentioned in my introduction to you, so you know about these things.
	Independent newspaper, as I say, reported this.
	A mysterious radio signal is coming from a nearby galaxy, say scientists.
	That galaxy looks surprisingly like our own.
	Together, the findings could help solve the mystery of fast radio bursts, the unexplained intense blasts of energy that are being sent through the universe, which has been a bit of an interest for journalists and scientists over the last couple of years.
	And then tied in with this story, a high school intern at NASA, who'd been at the job for just three days, helped discover a new planet with two suns.
	The planet, TOI-1338B, was found 1300 light years away in the Pictor constellation, the only planet in the system with two stars.
	Now, I don't know.
	I think in a way, those two stories about the cosmos tell us something about the way we make scientific discovery these days.
	One of those appears to be happenstance, which is good, and one of those seems to be the appliance of science.
	What do you think?
	Very interesting that you should say that, because obviously, remember that finding an interesting star or an interesting object in the universe is pretty much like finding an interesting sand grain, you know, on all the beaches in the world, because really there are countless trillions of objects.
	How do you find the interesting things?
	And what we tend to do with big telescopes tend to focus in on very, very small regions of the sky.
	So we know what we're looking for.
	So actually the second of those discoveries, as you said, was very directed.
	Somebody was looking for that.
	But what's so interesting now is that we're getting telescopes which can see a large area of the sky.
	There's a telescope called a Large Synoptic Telescope, which is being built in Chile at the moment, which will do that.
	We'll see the whole of the sky and be able to look for, you know, just random things, random flashes, you know, things that the big telescopes can't see.
	So we're in the business now of finding these rare events which we're not actually looking for.
	And that's what these fast radio bursts are.
	We don't know what they are.
	They could be the merger of stars or something, but they're kind of chance events.
	So that's very interesting because when we start finding things that we didn't expect, which we're not looking for, that is a kind of change in the way we do astronomy.
	And surprising that we see a galaxy that is quite similar looking to our own, it appears.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	I mean, well, there are two trillion galaxies in the observable universe, you know, so it's incredible that we're in 2020.
	I can tell you how many galaxies there are in the observable universe that we can actually see.
	So it's not really that unusual that there would be one relatively similar to ours.
	And of course, there are hugely more stars.
	A typical galaxy might contain 100 billion stars.
	So we're very interested in finding other stars that are like our sun.
	You know, just out of, well, just out of interest, really.
	Do you think it's inevitable that perhaps sooner rather than later, we are going to get the announcement that we've either found life or we have found a place that has supported life?
	I think it's inevitable that we will find, I think it's, well, there's a pretty good chance that we're going to find life within our solar system.
	I think there are plenty of other habitats.
	For instance, the subterranean oceans of the moons of Jupiter, big moons like Ganymede and Europa, Callisto, we'll probably find that they actually have some kind of primitive bacterial life, possibly on Mars as well.
	Mars in its very early years after the formation of the solar system had rivers and oceans.
	They've all gone now, but it's quite likely that life evolved there.
	As for advanced extraterrestrial life among the stars, we've been looking for 60 years and we haven't seen anything.
	And I mean, I worry when I look at the world today because I think just at the moment when we recognize the global threats to us, to the human race, you know, global warming, all this sort of stuff, fake news is becoming big.
	And so we're in effect sticking our head like ostriches in the sand at the very time we need to be recognizing these threats and doing something about it.
	So I wonder, does this happen to other civilizations throughout the galaxy?
	Have they all got to this point where they've stuck their head in the sand when they had a major existential threat and they became extinct?
	And that's why we don't actually pick up any signals.
	Or maybe they've got beyond that point and they're just more evolved than we happen to be at the moment.
	You're absolutely correct.
	So for instance, we only had radio waves.
	We've had radio waves for about a century.
	We don't know that people continue using radio waves for more than a century.
	Maybe they find some better means or different means of communication.
	I think Carl Sagan, the American astronomer and television presenter, once talked about New Guinea, where he said there are about 700 languages and people living in valleys which are isolated from each other.
	And they communicate sometimes between these valleys using drums.
	And if you ask them, how would an advanced civilization communicate, they say use a big drum.
	And again, we're thinking, well, how would an advanced civilization communicate?
	It'll use a big radio transmitter.
	Well, that may not be the case.
	All the time in New Guinea, the world's radio traffic, the voices of the world are going through those valleys and they may be unaware of it.
	I think you're absolutely right.
	I mean, it depends on the particular paradigm, the particular set of scientific circumstances that you adhere to at the time.
	In other words, if you're used to communicating with people by telephone or by radio, that's how you think they're going to do it.
	But they may have something that you don't have.
	Well, another thing is that we are assuming that we need to pick up the equivalent of radio one, you know, extraterrestrial radio one.
	So a particular frequency that is modulated in the same way that a radio station radio waves are modulated.
	However, the trend in the world is towards transmitting radio signals with no pattern.
	Because if you have no pattern, you can actually compress more information.
	So our radio signals and our communications by mobile phones are becoming more like the random radio waves that we receive from stars and the sun and things like that.
	So we could say that the big problem is that an advanced civilization's radio emissions would look very, very much like natural emissions because ours are becoming to look more like natural emissions.
	And so they'd be very difficult to spot.
	And a guy called Stephen Wolfram, who's a physicist in America, he's actually British, believes that it's virtually impossible to detect extraterrestrials because their signals will be indistinguishable from natural ones.
	Now that is interesting, isn't it?
	And I presume the current crop of scientists who are looking for signals or looking for indications from the cosmos are aware of that and are factoring that in, do you think?
	Absolutely.
	I mean, but then again, what can they do?
	You can only look using the techniques that you have.
	You know, they're really stuck.
	I mean, they can't look for some kind of signal they can't imagine.
	They can only look for the one that they can imagine.
	But that does handicap us.
	And it could be, I mean, for instance, say we're talking about a civilization that is millions or billions of years ahead of us.
	They would be as far ahead of us as we are ahead of maybe an ant or a bacterium.
	You know, how much sense does an ant in London have that it actually lives in this vast metropolis with trains and aeroplanes and people and organization?
	How much does a bacterium know?
	So, you know, would they recognize, I mean, would they recognize, you know, the advanced civilization around them?
	So would we actually recognize a super advanced civilization?
	We might not recognize it at all.
	Which leads us to a very chilling and thought-provoking point.
	The fact that we think we are so clever and we have so much and we can do so much, but actually compared with another civilization who may be here already or may be aware of us already, we are very, very low down the pecking order and we may not even be aware of them.
	Absolutely right.
	Absolutely right.
	And again, you know, I go back to that example of, you know, the radio emissions, which are flooding through the air all around us, which we are aware of because we know that's happening.
	But maybe if you were, you know, I don't know, if you lived in the Amazon jungle and you hadn't seen modern civilization, you would have no idea that was actually happening.
	And so the transmissions, the chatter of, you know, extraterrestrial civilization could be all around us around us at this moment, but we wouldn't have the means to actually detect it.
	You know, how would you detect radio rays if you didn't have a radio?
	You know, anyway.
	The book, let's get on to the book because I promised I would, but I could talk to you about a million other subjects for the entire duration of this day, I think.
	But the book is called The Magicians and basically deals with something that not a lot of scientific books do.
	And that is the human stories, the animated human stories of scientific discovery.
	And if I may, just to go into this, I want to read a little bit from an early part of the book, if that's okay.
	I know you've done the audio book.
	I hope you don't mind me.
	Okay, here's a little bit.
	Dateline, Karlsruhe, Germany, 13th of November, 1887.
	And I quote, Today was the day.
	He was sure of it.
	Heinrich Hertz bolted down his breakfast, kissed his wife Elizabeth and his baby daughter Johanna goodbye, and hurried through the streets of Karlsruhe to the university campus.
	On reaching his laboratory, he pulled down the blinds and switched on the oscillator circuit that he and his assistant, Julius Aman, had been building these past few days.
	The current surged through the 20,000-volt induction coil, and he heard a faint crackle but could see nothing.
	Only when his eyes adjusted to the gloom was he sure that a spark was stuttering in the 7.5mm air gap that he'd left in the circuit.
	Satisfied that his transmitter was working as intended, he turned to his receiver.
	Beautiful story about the technology that has allowed me to make a living for a for all of these years that I've done it.
	Absolutely.
	And I actually cut to another time, which of course is the time when somebody had predicted And he was going to pick it up across his laboratory desk about, I think, about a meter and a half away.
	He was going to pick it up with a receiver.
	So this is the first time that someone actually demonstrated sending a radio signal through space and detecting it.
	And as you actually say, this is the foundation of our ultra-connected, you know, 21st century world.
	But I cut back to the person who predicted this, who was James Clerk Maxwell.
	I feel an affinity with, because I live in central London and I walk in Hyde Park.
	And James Clerk Maxwell used to ride his horse around Hyde Park with his wife Catherine when he was based in London.
	And he was the person who predicted that there would be what we call electromagnetic waves, radio waves, and he predicted it about 15 years before.
	But unfortunately, he died of a painful kind of stomach cancer when he was in his 40s.
	But he was building on the work of another person, Michael Faraday, who I'm again, who used to live close to where I live in central London.
	And Faraday is a fantastically interesting person.
	He was a son of a blacksmith and he had no formal education.
	But he worked for a bookbinder's in Marylebone in central London.
	And one day somebody came in with some tickets for the Royal Institution.
	And they didn't, you know, they wanted to give them away.
	And Faraday's boss gave the tickets to Faraday.
	And he went on to the Royal Institution and you saw Humphry Davy lecturing.
	And Humphry Davy was kind of like the Brian Cox of his day.
	And so basically this ticket that Faraday got was like the golden ticket in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory because it eventually led to Faraday becoming Humphry Davy's assistant at the Royal Institution, which is in central London.
	And there the two of them, until Davy died, investigated electricity.
	And electricity was like the frontier of science at that time.
	It was a satanic, thought to be a satanic thing.
	That's why Mary Shelley had written Frankenstein.
	And Faraday really wanted to understand electricity and he recognised something that nobody else would recognise.
	And that is that electricity is not the important thing.
	The important thing is the force field.
	So there is this magnetic, an electric field that extends through space.
	So a magnetic field extends, a force field extends from a magnet.
	That's why if you bring two magnets together, they actually push each other apart, even though they're not touching.
	And so he was ridiculed for this idea that there were these force fields that extended through space.
	So ridiculed by the physicists of the day because he was uneducated, he was completely humiliated.
	And then eventually he got a letter from this guy called James Clerk Maxwell, who had been to Cambridge, he was a mathematical physicist, who was the only person who took Faraday's idea seriously.
	And he was the person who turned Faraday's kind of pictorial picture of these magnetic and electric fields into a mathematical theory.
	We call them Maxwell's equations.
	And the thing I write about in my book is the morning that Maxwell went to the library in King's College where he was a professor.
	He'd come down from his summer holidays in Scotland.
	He was Scottish.
	He realized that these magnetic fields and electromagnetic fields could be vibrated, rippled, and that they would actually produce a wave of electromagnetism.
	But he didn't have the numbers he needed.
	He needed to plug a couple of numbers into his theory.
	And he did that by finding the numbers in a textbook in the library at King's College, which is in the Strand.
	And when he plugged these numbers in, he realized immediately that the velocity of an electromagnetic wave was exactly the same as the velocity of light.
	So when he stepped out onto the Strand, this was in about 1860, and it would have been busy with hay wagons going past and costumongers and beggars and because it was Victorian London.
	He was the only person in the world that knew that light was a wave of electricity and magnetism.
	And he also knew that his theory didn't put any constraint on how fast, how sluggish or how rapidly that electromagnetic wave could vibrate.
	And therefore, there must exist electromagnetic waves which we could not actually see.
	So the electromagnetic waves that produce the light that we see, the colours of the rainbow, were a certain speed of vibration.
	But there would be waves that oscillated or vibrated more sluggishly.
	And there would be ones that would vibrate more rapidly.
	And these would produce invisible electromagnetic waves.
	And of course, you started your program by talking about Hertz, and that's what he detected.
	He detected radio waves.
	And of course, we now know the existence of X-rays, radio waves, ultraviolet, infrared.
	These are all types of invisible electromagnetic waves which make our modern world possible.
	Now, the story of science, as it was taught to me at school, and the science teaching that I had, I have to tell you, was not particularly good.
	And a lot of these things depend on the teacher.
	I don't think I had good science teaching, so I never prospered as a scientist At school, I became an arts person.
	But the story being told, and the story that you've partly told there, is the story of the progression of one person's work building on another person's work.
	But what the book does is hint and discuss something else, and that is the magic of actually being able to not only extrapolate, but to be able to actually do something with research that's happened already.
	In other words, to make a leap.
	It's almost like that movie 2001, isn't it?
	To make that giant leap and make that discovery.
	So you've got extrapolation, one person's work building on another, but you have, and the book is called The Magicians, you have an element of magic in it.
	Well, this is why I called the book The Magicians, because what I want to do is highlight the central magic, right?
	And the central magic is that you can actually scroll on a piece of paper, or a scientist can and scroll on a piece of paper or on a blackboard or a whiteboard, arcane mathematical formulae.
	And those formulae predict the existence of things which nobody suspected existed.
	And then when you go and look, you actually go and find them.
	So for instance, in the case world we were just talking about, Maxwell's theory of electronomagnetism predicted the existence of an electromagnetic wave, which was then detected 15 years later.
	But this has happened multiple times in science.
	So, for instance, Paul Dirac, the British physicist, his theory of the electron predicted the existence of antimatter, which was- I have a quote from the book about Dirac in front of me.
	Really weird.
	We came to the same place at once.
	And I quote, if you don't mind me quoting again, as Dirac himself said, I think it's a peculiarity of myself that I like to play about with equations, just looking for beautiful mathematical relations, which maybe don't have any physical meaning at all.
	Sometimes they do.
	Well, you just put your finger on the central mystery.
	We have no idea why the real universe has a mathematical twin.
	So something that we can write down on a blackboard on a piece of paper that mimics the real universe in every single respect.
	So, you know, somebody, Peter Higgs in 1965, sits down at a piece of paper in his office in Edinburgh and he writes an equation that predicts the existence of a subatomic particle, which later became known as the Higgs particle.
	45 years later, at a cost of 5 billion Euros, there it is.
	They find it at a Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.
	And nobody knows why this magic works.
	So for instance, it's so unbelievable that the scientists themselves can't believe it.
	So famously, Einstein in 1915, he came up with his theory of gravity at the height of the First World War.
	He did not believe two of its predictions.
	So it predicted the existence of black holes and it predicted the Big Bang.
	But he didn't believe it because it's almost impossible to believe that it's true, that you can write something down on a piece of paper and it predicts the existence of things that no one suspected that actually exists.
	We don't know why this is.
	I mean, you just mentioned Paul Dirac there.
	Paul Dirac said, and I think he was only half joking, God is a mathematician.
	But that would suggest then something that is almost mystical, that there is a code to everything and we are just simply, we are, what's that word?
	My father used to use a great word when he used to say, how do you describe yourself at work?
	And he would say, general factotum.
	So general fact, we are mere factota.
	We're mere ghosts in the machine.
	We are spirits in the material.
	We're mere cogs in the machine, I guess is the way to put it.
	There's me quoting police song titles there.
	But we are mere cogs in the wheel.
	We are discovering something that is there to be discovered.
	In other words, we are there to find bits of the map.
	But are we?
	You see, this is the weird thing.
	You see, if you take a physicist like James Clerk Maxwell, he actually uses mathematics to describe Faraday's picture of an electromagnetic field.
	So he's actually going from nature to mathematics.
	But in the case of Dirac, as you just quoted in the thing that you read out, that isn't the way he worked at all.
	He was fiddling on a piece of paper and inventing pieces of mathematics which he thought were beautiful.
	Then that piece of mathematics, which has come from his mind and is a human invention, turns out to actually reflect something in the real world.
	So there's a really deep mystery here, you know, because we think of mathematics as a human invention, yet it seems to explain the real world.
	And it's a two-way street as well, because not only does mathematics explain the universe around us, but the universe around us can be actually used to point the way to new mathematics.
	It's a two-way street.
	And this problem and this puzzle was summarized by the Austrian physicist Eugene Wigner.
	And he talks about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.
	And in fact, it goes back, even Galileo recognized this, that the language of the universe is mathematics, but we don't know why.
	Which is astonishing.
	They say, don't they?
	And they did in movies like Contact, suggest that if we wanted to contact another civilization, then the best way, perhaps the only way to do it, would be through mathematical formulae.
	It's a universal language, literally.
	But we don't, yes, exactly.
	Most physicists would agree completely with you.
	I would say 99% of people would agree with you.
	However, Stephen Wolfram, who I've mentioned before, who's a physicist in America and invented a computer language called Mathematical.
	He's actually a billionaire.
	He doesn't believe that at all.
	He believes that mathematics is a human invention.
	And the universe is clearly organized.
	I mean, you know, it's clearly not random.
	You know, we can predict things that will happen in our physics experiments and we can understand stars.
	So it's clearly not random.
	But he thinks it's based on something much more fundamental than mathematics.
	And he thinks what the universe is doing is running computer programs, simple computer programs.
	And what led him to this belief was in the early 1980s, he bought one of the very first IBM PCs when they first you could buy a desktop computer for the first time and take it home.
	And he started playing with very simple, the simplest computer programs that you can think of.
	They're called cellular automata.
	And he basically, they would produce an output, which you would feed back in as the input, rather like a snake, you know, eating its own tail.
	And he found that in certain instances, what was spat out by this cellular automata never repeated.
	So endless novelty, nothing.
	So a simple program produces an infinitely complex and very complicated output.
	And it made him think, is this what the universe is doing?
	You know, is the universe running very simple computer programs that have very, very complex outputs?
	Is this what creates a rose?
	Is this what creates a galaxy?
	Is this what creates a newborn baby?
	So his belief is that mathematics is not a universal language at all, as most people believe, but that the universe is doing something a bit simpler.
	So if you think of these little computer programs, most of them produce outputs which are unpredictable.
	The only way you can find out the outcome is to run a computer program.
	And he thinks this is what most of the universe is doing.
	So what most of the universe is doing is unpredictable.
	However, within this is a small subset of programs where the eventual output is actually predictable.
	And that is called mathematical physics.
	That's mathematical science.
	So he thinks that it's rather like a drunk looking for their keys at midnight, their lost car keys.
	They look under a street lamp.
	And they look under a street lamp because that's the only place they can look.
	They can't see anywhere else.
	And what Wolfram thinks is that mathematics is illuminating only the bit of the universe, only the small bit of the universe that mathematics can illuminate.
	But what most of the universe is doing is not mathematical.
	So that isn't actually a mainstream view, but it is a kind of a counter view to the idea that mathematics is, the universe is mathematical and it would be a universal language even to extraterrestrials.
	See, Wolfram thinks it wouldn't be.
	How does everything you've said and the idea of mathematics and the idea of randomness or not randomness, how does that square with the cosmos, the universe being infinite?
	How can any scientific model, whether it's mathematical or whatever it is, that's a philosophical question, isn't it?
	Or is it?
	It is a philosophical question.
	Well, we don't know if the universe is infinite or not.
	I talked earlier about the observable universe.
	Okay, so the universe, probably the greatest discovery in the history of science was the discovery that the universe was born.
	Okay, so we know the universe was born about 13.8 billion years ago.
	So that's basically, the universe is quite young.
	I mean, the universe is only three times older than the Earth is.
	So this is an amazing thing to discover.
	So the universe has not existed forever, but it burst into being in a big bang 13.8 billion years ago.
	What that means is that we can only see the objects in the universe whose light has taken less than 13.8 billion years to get to us.
	So if light from Nabi Nikka is going to take 14.8 billion years, well, it's light still on its way.
	It hasn't arrived at the Earth yet.
	So we don't see that.
	So because of this, the universe has a horizon around it.
	So imagine a giant soap bubble, with the Earth at the center.
	Within that soap bubble of space, there are two trillion galaxies.
	They're all the galaxies where light has had time to get to us.
	And beyond the membrane of that soap bubble are all the galaxies whose light has not got here yet.
	So we haven't seen them.
	But just as a horizon or we know there's more of the ocean beyond the horizon at sea, we know there is more of the universe beyond the horizon.
	So beyond the membrane of this soap bubble.
	And according to the best theories, which we have a theory called inflation, which describes the origin of the universe, there's an infinite amount of the universe beyond.
	So you imagine our two trillion galaxies are in this little soap bubble, and beyond are an infinite number of other soap bubbles which have their own stars and galaxies like ours.
	But as you say, philosophically, is it meaningful to talk about an infinite number of other places in the universe?
	We don't actually know.
	So really, we only have access to this observable universe, which grows every year.
	So because as the universe gets older, the object from more distant objects comes over the horizon and we can see it.
	So is this the one aspect of science where that model of prediction and great people through history predicting something that will ultimately be so and then that thing being discovered to be real by somebody else?
	But is that the one place where that model falls down?
	Because we can't predict what's there.
	Absolutely right.
	Yeah.
	I mean, you know, there's a lot of debates about this because we suspect there are other regions beyond the observable universe.
	And one of the phrases we use that describe this is a multiverse.
	You know, there are multiple domains, multiple universes.
	And philosophically, this is a problem because science then can't have access to these regions.
	So we can't do tests.
	Another philosophical problem is that the universe appears to be a one-off.
	And generally, we do experiments by standing outside of our experimental domain.
	We can't stand outside the universe.
	So when we talk about the universe as a whole, it's philosophically different from talking about components of the universe.
	So that could be a problem.
	But is it amazing that we arose on an African plane three million years ago?
	We came down from the trees.
	We have a brain which weighs three pounds of jelly and water.
	And we're now talking about the extent and origin of the universe.
	I mean, how incredible Is that I mean, this is not in the book, but it's an interesting thing to ask.
	What about ancient civilizations?
	We are constantly discovering that we may well be a lot older.
	You've only got to look at the work of people like Graham Hancock, but many others too, that we may well be a lot older than we've been told.
	We're constantly finding that our history goes back further.
	What do you think of that?
	What do you think that people may have known in the past?
	There are indications that perhaps they were cleverer than we gave them credit for.
	Well, since people were certainly cleverer than we give them credit for, people in history, did you know that 30,000 years ago, people's brains were about 10% bigger than they are today?
	And that we were about 10% taller?
	Yeah, that's true.
	Does that mean then if our brains were, and I know that brain size doesn't necessarily equate with how clever you are, does that mean we were in fact sharper then?
	Definitely.
	And one of the possible explanations for our shrinking brains, our brains are shrinking and our size is shrinking, is that we live in a much tamer world.
	So 15,000 years ago or whatever, people lived in a harsh world where they had to defend themselves from ferocious animals, where they had to catch their own food.
	Basically, they had to do everything.
	Today we live in a world where our food is provided for us, where we don't have to live in fear all the time.
	We don't have to hunt all the time.
	And so we don't actually need the capacity that they had.
	So we don't need the computing power to deal with the threats.
	Exactly.
	Hence, our brain is smaller.
	Does that mean that there could be a threat out there that our smaller brains are not able to compute and that one of these days is going to do for us?
	Well, conceivably.
	But I mean, what's actually happened is we've domesticated ourselves.
	So if we look at the animal kingdom, everywhere where an animal has been domesticated, it's smaller.
	So the domesticated cattle is much smaller than the wild versions that existed.
	Because again, a domesticated cattle is put in a field, it's given the grass to eat, it's given feed or whatever.
	It doesn't have to worry about surviving in a tough world.
	So everywhere when an animal has been domesticated, their bodies and their brains get smaller.
	So basically, we've actually domesticated ourselves.
	But I think the people living 30,000 years ago were every bit as quick as we are.
	Their knowledge was of probably the natural world and their brain was as crowded with information as ours is.
	But the information was probably about the colour of the sky and what weather it meant, how to track a particular beast that they needed to eat.
	So I think these people were as sharp, if not sharper, than people today.
	I think we have more to discover.
	Back to the book, The Magicians.
	Neutrinos.
	You know, I've always loved the word, but there is a whole story behind how they were discovered.
	First of all, what are they?
	Right.
	Well, they are subatomic particles which are produced in prodigious numbers by the sunlight generating nuclear reactions in the center of the sun.
	If you were to hold up your thumb at this moment, there would be 100 billion neutrinos streaming through your thumbnail every second.
	Okay.
	And eight and a half minutes ago, they were actually in the center of the sun.
	Now, their central characteristic is they're unbelievably antisocial.
	They're so unsociable.
	They hardly ever are stopped by the atoms of normal matter.
	So they just stream right through.
	Most of them stream right through you.
	In fact, if you were to fill our entire solar system with lead, most of them would not, most of them would still get out of the solar system.
	And they were predicted in 1930 by a physicist called Wolfgang Pauli, who was famous for actually being quite cocky.
	And at a lecture given by Einstein when he was 20, Einstein gave a lecture and Pauli stood up afterwards and he said to the audience, what Professor Einstein has said isn't as stupid as it sounds, which was a bit of a cocky thing to say.
	Anyway, imagine doing that.
	Pauli was having a terrible time in the late 1930s.
	His mother had committed suicide a few years before.
	He was a Catholic, so this undermined his faith in the church.
	Then he got married to a Berlin cabaret dancer, and she kept seeing her previous boyfriend, a chemist.
	In fact, moved in with him across the road.
	So Pauli was so distressed by this, he actually went to see Carl Jung, the famous psychoanalyst, to get help.
	And one of his distractions was physics.
	And there was a major problem at the time, and it was called beta decay.
	So you may have heard of radioactivity.
	Radioactive atoms are unstable.
	They contain too much energy, and they need to shed that energy to become stable.
	And one of the ways they do it is to emit what we call a beta particle, and that's just an electron.
	Okay, and it was thought that because these atoms, as they decay, you know, would actually shed the same amount of energy, the electron would always come out at the same speed.
	But it didn't.
	Sometimes they came out slowly, sometimes quickly.
	Imagine how amazing this is.
	So imagine you've got a gun and you fire bullets.
	And occasionally the bullets, you know, they come out at high speed, but occasionally they just kind of dribble out and just fall to the ground.
	That never happens, does it?
	So that's what the beta particle mystery was.
	So Wolfgang Pauli, he came up with this idea that in beta decay, it's not just an electron that is spat out by the unstable atom.
	There's another particle, a neutrino.
	And these two particles, the electron and neutrino, share the energy.
	So if the neutrino takes all the energy, then the electron comes out with hardly any.
	It's got hardly any left.
	If the neutrino takes very little, then the electron is spat out very fast.
	So he predicted the existence of this particle.
	Now, no one had actually seen it in any experiment, so he had to say that it's very unlikely that this particle interacts with normal matter.
	And he actually bet a case of Champagne that no one would ever detect a neutrino.
	But then if you Fast forward to 1956, we come to a guy called Frederick Reiners and his colleague Clyde Cowan, and they've been exploding hydrogen bombs all over the Pacific during the 1950s.
	The Americans were terrified about the Russian nuclear threat, and this was a time when they were just testing incredible nuclear bombs in the Pacific.
	I mean, it's unthinkable by our standards today because they were unleashing the most stunning forces that we wouldn't begin to consider doing something like that today.
	But back then, it was all pioneering technology.
	And as you say, there was an arms race.
	Typically, the bombs they were exploding, this was in the atmosphere, were a thousand times more destructive than the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
	And they were doing these things at monthly intervals, and they were devastating.
	I mean, they did creating mushroom clouds, which were hundreds of miles across.
	They were exploding these things in the atmosphere.
	I mean, it was a terrible time.
	But Ryan has got fed up with this because, I mean, you know, if you spend your life just building the weapons of Armageddon, you get a bit fed up after a while.
	And he went back to America, to Los Alamos, which is in New Mexico, which is where they put the first atomic bomb.
	And he asked the head of the lab, could he have some time off just to think about physics?
	And he thought, what should I do with my life?
	And then eventually he went on a plane trip and it was to a conference.
	And there was someone else on the plane who was also somebody who'd been exploding these bombs, but he didn't know him.
	His name was Clive Coward.
	And the aircraft had engine trouble and they got stuck in Kansas City.
	And while they were stuck, they realized they got on really well.
	And they asked each other, what is the most difficult experiment in the whole of physics?
	And both of them agreed, detecting a neutrino.
	And they had this unbelievable idea.
	They realized that a nuclear explosion would produce loads of neutrinos.
	So they had this idea to put their experiment 50 meters away from ground zero of an atomic bomb blast.
	Okay, so they started digging a 150-foot deep vertical shaft at the Nevada test site.
	They used to test bombs there as well in Nevada, in America.
	And the idea was to have this experiment.
	And the minute the bomb went off, they would drop their experiment down this 150-foot shaft.
	And the idea was that then the experiment would be insulated from the shock waves from the bomb, which would be coming through the ground.
	And at the bottom of this shaft would be like mattresses and feathers.
	And so the experiment, hopefully having picked up neutrinos, would have a soft landing at the bottom of the shaft.
	And then maybe two or three days later, some poor sod would have to work their way across the radiation-scarred landscape and retrieve the experiment.
	But at the very last minute, somebody at Los Alamos said, well, why don't you use a nuclear reactor instead?
	And it turned out, although a nuclear reactor does not produce as many neutrinos, you can actually observe it for months.
	You don't have to wait, observe your neutrinos in a short burst of an explosion.
	So they began looking for neutrinos in South Carolina, where there were these nuclear reactors, a lot of them had been built by the Americans to basically create fuel for hydrogen bombs.
	So eventually they actually detected the neutrino and they won a Nobel Prize.
	Wow.
	And what about that original experiment close to the site of the nuclear bomb detonation?
	Did anybody ever go back and retrieve all of that?
	They never actually did the experiment, you see, because it was just a plan.
	But what I'm trying to emphasize there is their amazing can-do spirit because they've been building these weapons and blowing up entire islands and these devastating weapons.
	They thought big.
	And no one else would have thought, you know, we could actually piggyback a physics experiment on a nuclear blast.
	But in the end, they did it with a nuclear reactor.
	And in 1956, they detected a neutrino and they sent a telegram to Wolfgang Pauli, who was amazed that they've managed to do it.
	And incredibly, neutrinos, by the way, neutrinos, although they're flooding through your body and you don't notice at the moment, they're the second most common particle in the whole universe after photons of light.
	And it turns out they've become key to our understanding the entire universe now.
	We're only having this conversation because of the existence of neutrinos.
	So the heavy elements that you're built from, the iron in your blood, the oxygen in your lungs, the calcium in your bones, these are all forged inside massive stars, stars which died before the Earth was born.
	Now those elements, those atoms would have been locked inside those stars forever unless those stars exploded.
	And what actually causes the stars to explode are neutrinos.
	Okay, so what initially happens when a star grows very old, a massive star, is that there's no longer any heat in its core to push back against gravity.
	So gravity starts crushing the core of the star, but eventually the atoms all get pressed together to make neutrons and neutrinos are created.
	And it's this huge flood of neutrinos that blows apart the star and makes sure that all those elements, that iron and calcium and everything that you're made of, get into space, become incorporated into new generations of stars.
	So actually neutrinos, we're actually having this conversation because of the existence of neutrinos.
	But the other thing is that we've now discovered that there are three different types of neutrino and on their way from the sun they oscillate one into another.
	And this is not predicted at all by our best theory of physics, which is called the standard model.
	And the standard model is the high point of 300 years of physics.
	It really explains what the universe is made of, why there are these forces which glue all the particles together, but it does not predict that neutrinos oscillate from one into another.
	And so neutrinos are now absolutely at the Frontier of physics because we know that there's a deeper, better theory of physics which we haven't found, and neutrinos are giving us the hint about what that theory is and where to find it.
	And as we learn more about them, and as you've just said, we've learned something fundamental about them, that they're not just one thing, they are a number of things.
	Could this hold the key, this is a crazy question or may not be, to things that we may have thought impossible, like, for example, traveling at unfathomably fast speeds to places further away than we thought we could get, or indeed things like time travel?
	We really don't know.
	I mean, again, we have a theory of physics, but we know that it's, and it's fantastically successful, but we know that it's incorrect.
	For instance, we have two the two towering achievements of the 20th century are Einstein theory of gravity, which basically describes big things like stars and planets and galaxies, and we have quantum theory, which describes small things like atoms.
	And quantum theory has created the modern world.
	It's why we have iPhones and lasers and nuclear reactors.
	Quantum theory has formed all these things.
	But these two theories have not been united.
	So we know that there is some other framework, which we might call quantum gravity or something like that.
	Hawking called it a theory of everything, which is at a deeper level.
	And so we don't know what that theory will permit.
	And it is plausible, it's possible that what you talk about, which is faster than light travel, may actually be possible.
	We don't actually know.
	There were, and you talk about in the book, occasions, and we've already discussed one of them, where somebody predicting something didn't actually believe that that thing could be realized.
	Black holes is a case in point.
	That's a very interesting one because, I mean, another wonderful story.
	A man dying of a terrible skin disease in a World War I field hospital predicts the existence of black holes.
	Karl Schwarzschild was actually, he shouldn't have even been a soldier in the First World War, but he had Jewish ancestry.
	He was actually, he had one of the highest physics posts in Germany.
	He was director of the Berlin Observatory.
	But when war came, because of rising anti-Semitism in Germany, he wanted to prove that he was a German citizen and he would fight for the fatherland.
	So he actually signed up and he kind of, I think he calculated shell trajectories in Belgium.
	He worked in a weather station and eventually he ended up on the Eastern Front.
	And he started getting these blisters in his mouth and they got worse and worse until they covered all of his body.
	He was covered in these sort of suffering, weeping, bleeding blisters.
	And he had a disease called pemphigus vulgaris, which is actually when your immune system actually attacks your skin.
	There's no cure for this disease even today, even though it can be cured by steroids.
	Now, the problem with this disease is obviously your skin is a barrier against pathogenic organisms in the atmosphere, bacteria.
	So if your skin is compromised, then eventually you'll get an infection and die.
	Also, your skin is the means by which you shed heat.
	So if your skin is compromised, you can overheat.
	So he was dying in this field hospital on the Eastern Front.
	But he was aware that about a month before, Einstein had presented in Berlin, this is at the height of the First World War, a new theory of gravity, which we now call general relativity.
	And he got hold of a paper.
	And the problem with Einstein's theory, remember Newton, the law of gravity, it's a single formula.
	But in Einstein's theory of gravity, there are 10 formulas.
	So immediately you see the theory is much more complicated.
	And Einstein had realized that what gravity is, is the curvature of space.
	So we can't actually see it, but around the Earth, the space is actually curved.
	The space-time is curved.
	It's as if we're at the bottom of a valley.
	And the reason that bodies, like balls, you throw them in the air, come back down to the earth is because they roll down the sides of this invisible valley.
	So the problem is to find out what is the curvature of space for any particular mass.
	Now, Einstein thought this was impossible.
	He thought with 10 equations, this is impossible.
	But Schwarzschild solved the problem lying in his hospital bed, and he found how the space was curved for a discrete mass, like a star.
	And he found that there would be a valley of space-time.
	But then, when he was thinking about it, he thought, what happens if you concentrate the mass, you squeeze it even smaller and smaller?
	And he realized that the valley of space-time around the mass would become steeper and steeper and steeper until it became a bottomless well that not even light could escape from.
	And so this star would then become cut off from the universe.
	Now, absolutely everyone on the planet at this moment knows the name for the body that he just discovered.
	I mean, no one knew at the time, but everybody knows the name, and it's a black hole.
	So this man dying of this skin disease, and he actually unfortunately went to Berlin and he died in hospital about a month later, predicted the existence of black holes.
	But as you were just alluded to, Einstein didn't believe it.
	And for most of the 20th century, people thought this is too ridiculous.
	This is too monstrous.
	You cannot have this body that sucks in everything, that sucks in life.
	It's too mad.
	But of course, we now know that they actually exist.
	And frightening, too, to think that there is something so beyond elemental out there, something that we can't begin to...
	And we can't rationalize that.
	Well, absolutely.
	And one of the amazing things is that we initially, so they thought for a long time that they were pathological, they would never happen.
	But unfortunately, a 19-year-old traveling on a ship from Bombay to Cambridge in about 1930, his name was Chandra Sekar, that was his surname.
	He thought that there would be some force which would prevent a star collapsing to form a black hole.
	And he knew about quantum theory, which was the theory of atoms, which was being developed.
	And he realized that you may have heard of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
	What it actually says is that when you try and compress something into a small volume, atoms in a small, they buzz about faster and faster, like a swarm of angry bees.
	And so, as you try and compress matter, there is this force pushing outwards, trying to stop it, which comes from quantum theory.
	But what he discovered on the deck of this ship going through the Suez Canal or whatever in 1930 was that actually, if the star had a mass beyond what we now call it the Chandrasekhar limit, which is about, I think, one and a half times the mass of the Sun, this quantum force could not stop the collapse to a black hole.
	So he'd shown that, in fact, black holes were inevitable.
	And then they were discovered, and this is the amazing thing, in 1971 by Paul Murdin at the Royal Greenwich Observatory and Louise Webster, who was an Australian.
	And the observatory was at Herthman Su Castle, which is this 14th century castle.
	And they found, basically, a star which was being orbited by something else which they couldn't see.
	And they were able to infer that it was massive enough to be a black hole.
	So they discovered a black hole.
	And if I just tell you the story, Merdin was actually, he had two young children.
	He didn't have a permanent post.
	So the discovery of the black holes basically earned him a permanent post.
	So he was the first person in history to have his mortgage paid by a black hole.
	And him and his wife and his two children celebrated in a beach cafe on the Hastings waterfront with Knickerbocker glories.
	And his sons, who were about, I think they were about three and eight or three and five, obviously hoped that dad would find more black holes because they would get Knickerbocker glories.
	So, you know, one of the interesting things that comes out of my book is the amazing contrast between the tragedy of Carl Schwarzschild dying in a field hospital in World War I, who predicts the existence of black holes, and then, you know, the celebration of the discovery of black holes.
	Sadly, Louise Webster died quite young.
	She was the first, she was an Australian, she was the first Australian ever to have a liver transplant.
	So if you get anything out of this book, we need to give Louise Webster the credit that she deserves, because literally you will find in no book that she was the co-discoverer of black holes.
	And isn't that sad that she's such an unsung hero?
	And there are lots more.
	She's not the only woman.
	There is this woman called Cecilia Payne, Cecilia Payne-Koboshkin.
	She was English and she wrote the most important astronomy PhD of the 20th century.
	Yet nobody knows her name.
	She was the person who figured out that the sun and all the stars are made of 98% hydrogen and helium.
	These are elements that are almost unknown on the Earth.
	So she found out what the major mass component of the universe was.
	She used quantum theory, the newfangled quantum theory, to analyze the light from the sun.
	And at the time, people thought because the light from the sun seemed to show emission from iron, that the sun was made of iron.
	And she was the first person to realize that hydrogen and helium are the most common elements and they compose 98% of the universe.
	Her supervisor, by the way, I should tell you that she was not able to do a PhD at Cambridge because you couldn't as a woman.
	So she went to Harvard in America where she was paid on equipment expenses.
	And she worked for Henry Norris Russell, who was one of the greatest American astronomers.
	And he made her say in her PhD thesis, my result is almost certainly wrong.
	Okay.
	And then 10 years later, when he'd actually realized that she was right, he presented the idea that the sun and the stars are hydrogen helium.
	And he mentioned her on about page 158 of this long paper.
	So she didn't get the credit that she deserved.
	I should tell you, I wrote an article in New Scientist magazine, a weekly science magazine, about this several years ago to try and give her the credit that she deserved.
	And when the magazine appeared in the office, because I was working on the staff at the time, I quickly, you know, quickly flicked through to the page and there'd been a cock-up at the printers and they'd only printed the corner of her hat.
	So poor old Cecilia Payne might be fated never to get the credit.
	How very sad.
	And that's just such a horrible coincidence, isn't it?
	But look, this book is a fantastic narrative.
	If you're not interested in science or you don't understand science, let's put it that way, you will love the story, you know, the way that it's written.
	And you describe it here, or whoever's written your PR material says it's a rip-roaring page turner that skillfully interweaves human stories of discovery with frontier science.
	And that's true.
	And my favorite, well, one of my favorite paragraphs in the book is this one.
	And this is to do with more recent science and very much cutting-edge science.
	And I quote, lovely paragraph.
	John Butterworth was pissed off.
	He was pissed off because on this day, which was destined to be one of the most memorable, remarkable of his 45 years, he was stuck in London.
	He didn't want to be in London.
	He wanted to be in Switzerland, where the action was.
	And we know what that action was.
	It was the discovery of the Higgs particle, which was the last building block of, I talked about the standard model.
	The standard model predicts that basically all of normal matter is made of two quarks and two leptons.
	So the up quark and the down quark compose you, an electron, and the electron neutrino, which doesn't play much of a role in everyday life.
	And there was a missing particle in this model.
	And it's a particle which is part of what we call the Higgs field.
	And the Higgs field is an invisible treacle that fills all of space.
	You're not aware of it.
	In the same way that a fish is probably not aware of the water it's swimming through, or you're generally not aware of the air that you walk through.
	The Higgs field is everywhere.
	And it's the interaction of you with the Higgs field that gives you mass.
	Okay, so it's almost like it provides resistance.
	So the Higgs field explains why a fridge is difficult to budge.
	And the Higgs particle is a kind of excitation of the Higgs field.
	And it was found in Geneva at the Large Hadron Clinder in July 2012.
	And it was the last jigsaw piece of the standard model of physics.
	And John Butterworth, who was so pissed off, quoting your book.
	Because he worked on one of, he was the UK, he was in charge of the UK team working on ATLAS, which was one of the two experiments that actually found the particle.
	I mean, I could tell you something about this.
	Basically, they race these subatomic particles, protons, around a subterranean ring, which is 27 kilometers long.
	It goes beneath the fields where cows are grazing, you know, on the French-Swiss border.
	It's about the same size as the circle line on the London Underground.
	And they whiz these particles around and they collide them.
	And it's out of the debris, the shrapnel that flies out from the collision point that they try and detect particles like the Higgs particle.
	It's like a kind of needle in a haystack.
	And the two experiments, they had two experiments at two different places on the ring because they needed one experiment to confirm the other.
	So they wanted to find it and they wanted another experiment to find it as well.
	And I have to tell you that Atlas is as big or it's as massive as the Eiffel Tower.
	So, I mean, once upon a time, Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge, he built experiments on a tabletop, you know, with elastic bands and sellotape.
	And he discovered things like the atomic nucleus.
	You know, he transmuted one element into another.
	He did these amazing experiments in the history of science.
	But nowadays, you have to do big science.
	And this connects to something we were talking about earlier, because I talked about the detection of the neutrino by Rylers and Cowan at a nuclear reactor in 1956.
	Their experiment weighed several tons.
	They had a team of 10 people.
	And this was the future.
	They were the first big experiment.
	You know, they were shown that in the future of physics from 1956 onwards, it was going to be big science.
	And the Higgs particle was discovered by a team of people, maybe 3,000 people, something like that, 5,000 people, at a cost of, you know, four or five billion euros.
	So unfortunately, it's difficult to do science as an individual now.
	You have to be part of a large team.
	You know, we think we're very clever, though.
	But isn't it true that the collider was actually interrupted or stopped for a while by a mouse?
	Do you remember that story?
	It could have been a mouse.
	I'm not actually sure.
	One of the things is it has these incredible magnets.
	I think they each weigh about 3,000 tons, and they go around the perimeter of this tube.
	It's an evacuated tube.
	So this has the best vacuum.
	It's an evacuated tube, a ring 27 kilometers across.
	But you have to bend the particles, the protons, because obviously they all tend to go in a straight line.
	So you use magnets to bend them.
	And in order to get strong magnets, you need very strong electric currents.
	I mean, the first electromagnets were made by Faraday, we were talking about earlier.
	So basically, you put a current through a coil and the coil becomes magnetic.
	And if the coil is embedded or goes around a piece of iron, you get an even stronger thing.
	You get an electromagnet.
	You see these in scrapyards, you know, they're used to pick up bits of cars or whatever.
	So the bigger that you want, in order to constrain, in order to build a Large Hadron Collider and make these amazingly fast protons circulate around this 27 kilometer ring, you need to defend them with the strongest magnets possible.
	And that required the strongest electrical current.
	When you put, sorry, the biggest electrical currents, when you put a big current through something, it gets hot and it melts.
	So these magnets have to be what we call superconducting.
	If you cool things down with liquid helium to almost the lowest temperature possible, a current will flow without any resistance, without actually producing any peace.
	But what actually happened, and it may well be a mouse, I'm not sure if it was a mouse, you might be right.
	Somehow the current in one of these magnets stopped being superconducting.
	So the magnet melted, you know, and it was like a domino.
	So suddenly the magnets all around it became non-superconducting and melted and exploded.
	And it actually put back the opening of the Large Hadron Collider by, I think, about a year and a half.
	Now remember, the BBC did this huge thing when they thought the Large Hadron Hadron Collider was going to work.
	And they kind of pretended it was like the moon landings, you know, when they switched this thing on.
	But basically, they were just switching it on and there was a particle collision somewhere.
	So it wasn't really like, you know, as a viewer, I remember being a bit later on.
	But of course, as you just say, it took about a year and a half and I think it cost a fortune to replace all those magnets.
	My listener will tell me whether that was so, but I think there was some kind of rodent that got into the machine at some point anyway.
	And has it been a matter of time?
	Quickly and finally, what do you think of these people who have said over the years that the collider is such a big and elemental thing that it's actually dangerous, that it might be affecting the Earth in a way that would be deleterious to us?
	Well, I have to say, I mean, I can use one word and that's rubbish.
	And the reason for that is that there are people who say that we're creating these high-energy particles, these high-energy protons, and that they could actually somehow trigger the breakdown of physics or whatever and destroy the Earth and in fact the entire universe.
	These collisions.
	But what you have to remember is that the Earth is being bombarded by high-energy particles from space all the time.
	They're called cosmic rays.
	They're passing through you at this very instant.
	Remember during the time of Apollo, the Apollo astronauts didn't mention for many years that they saw these flashes of light.
	You know, it was only many years later they admitted it because they thought that this was thought to be weird.
	And it turned out it was cosmic rays which were actually passing through the liquid of their eyeball and creating flashes of light.
	And that's what they were picking up.
	Well, anyway, these cosmic rays, which we don't know where they come from, but they probably come from duck holes and things like that.
	They are millions of times more energetic Than the particles that we can create at the Large Hadron Collider.
	So, if anything was going to cause the breakdown of the universe and the laws of physics, one of these cosmic rays would have done it already.
	We cannot do what nature can do.
	We don't know how nature manages to accelerate particles to energies a million times bigger.
	So, the takeaway point, I guess, is that nothing can stop the march of science.
	I love this book, and I've only done a speed read of it this morning.
	But the writing is fabulous.
	It's such a great narrative.
	And it's obvious to me about you, but I've always known this really, that you not only love the, you know, people tend to think of scientists as geeks, okay?
	Sometimes geeks who perhaps don't have, you know, social graces like the rest of us because they're so committed to what they're doing and they're so focused and stuff like that.
	But actually, it's good to hear the real humanity, the real human stories that you tell.
	That's what I really enjoy.
	I mean, one of my first popular science books was called The Magic Furnace, and it was about how we discovered where the atoms in our body were made.
	We now know they were made in the Big Bang and stars.
	And what really I liked about it was it was a human story, right?
	Where people got the wrong answer, as you just have mentioned before, they got the wrong answer for the right reason and things like that.
	They went down dead ends, you know, and it's a human story of people just getting things wrong.
	And one of the big problems, I think, with us trying to, a scientist, for instance, trying to encourage children to do science and become scientists is that we present them with the final picture, right?
	And we don't tell them that it's actually a human process.
	You're done by human beings who make mistakes.
	A classic example here is Einstein.
	Einstein's theories look beautiful.
	And we think he's a genius because he actually destroyed all the steps on his route to any of his theories.
	So we don't know all the missteps, many of the missteps he made.
	But if children knew that scientists are human, they make the, you know, they, I mean, to give you an idea there, one of the first demonstration of the magic of science was the prediction of the planet Neptune.
	Okay, a planet was discovered, Uranus, Uranus, however you want to pronounce it, and its orbit was being perturbed.
	And from that, it was possible to deduce the existence of a perturbing planet.
	No one had seen Neptune.
	And it was found later by someone in Berlin who went to look for it.
	But a team in Britain had looked for it and they'd seen it twice, but had actually missed it, you know, had overlooked it.
	And it turned out that Neptune had been seen much earlier and people had overlooked it.
	So again, you know, you have to be receptive to make a discovery.
	And there's lots of people who, you know, make a mistake.
	And I think that's interesting.
	And so I tell the story of people who are human and the ins and outs of their discoveries.
	And science is, hence the title, The Magicians.
	There's an element of magic in it.
	I love the book.
	I hope you do well with it, Marcus.
	Just quickly, what are you working on at the moment then?
	What's the next project?
	I haven't really thought about it, but often something comes out of the previous book.
	And I'm really, really interested in black holes because, you know, the first ever image of a black hole was obtained in April 2019.
	So less than a year ago.
	We're discovering the merger of black holes now from the gravitational waves they emit, you know.
	So there's kind of quite interested in that.
	I don't know.
	We'll see.
	We'll see.
	Well, you know, we'll be talking about it, whatever it is.
	Marcus, thank you very much for giving up your time to do this with me.
	And thank you for making science colourful, I guess is the word.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Well, thank you very much.
	And the book is called The Magicians.
	Who's publishing this?
	It's published by Faber and Faber, and it appears on the 20th of February this year.
	There is an audio book as well, which I think will appear at the same time.
	So fingers crossed, it's always exciting when a new book comes out.
	You've got no idea whether it'll be completely ignored or whether.
	No, I don't think this one will be.
	And I hope we're giving it a bit of a push today because it's well worth seeing.
	Marcus, thank you so much.
	I appreciate it.
	Thank you very much.
	The remarkable Marcus Chown, check him out online.
	Hope you enjoyed that conversation.
	You know, sometimes we do the spooks and the spirits and the specters and sometimes we do hard science or space or aliens.
	We just mix it all up here.
	And I think that's what makes this show, you know, pretty unique.
	It is a mix of so many different things.
	And thank you very much for being there for me as we step boldly into 2020.
	And as I say those words, and I talked at the beginning of this show about the weather being so grim, a shaft of sunlight, as so often happens when we're recording these things, has appeared.
	Is it a sign?
	I have no idea.
	I'd like to hope it is.
	Don't forget, the one-stop shop for communications with me, go to my website, theunexplained.tv and follow the link from there and send me an email message, guest suggestion, or whatever.
	And if you'd like to make a donation, you can also do that at theunexplained.tv.
	So, until next we meet, there are more great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained.
	My name is Howard Hughes.
	I am in London.
	This has been The Unexplained Online.
	And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
	And above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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