The Robin Ince and Brian Cox Sort of Chat Show concludes this month. Robin – You were saying there about the fact that, you know, when you’re doing TV shows, sometimes you have to…there are certain things that will be required to be left out because you have to…you’re giving people a sense of an idea, they might have to do a lot more...
The Brian Cox and Robin Ince Sort of Chat Show Continues… Robin – What for you is…there’s a beautiful moment where Peter Higgs is sitting in an audience in CERN and they’re going through the results that are basically, actually, confirming the idea that a man in his thirties, now in his eighties…and there’s a little bit where you could see that he’s,...
There are some seriously kick ass women scientists There are some seriously kick ass women scientists that I know: Mandy Fisher in particular, a woman I worked with, is absolutely amazing; there’s a woman in Cambridge called Anne Ferguson-Smith who’s great; Dame Anne McLaren, whom I also worked with; these are really, really great women, but they’re not the kind of, you know, standing...
The Brian Cox and Robin Ince Sort of Chat Show continues… When we last left them, Brian had decided consciousness was just an emergent property… Robin – So, this year in physics one of the great things was Peter Higgs’ Nobel Prize and not even winning the Nobel Prize but not knowing about it until a neighbour shouted, well done, and he said, what...
The Brian Cox and Robin Ince Sort of Chat Show continues… When we last left them, Robin had decided it was unscientific to suggest there was definitely no life after death. Robin – You know, we don’t know, do we, we’ve got to be reasonable, we can’t say there’s definitely no life after death? Brian – Yes, we can. R – How...
It’s just a fat man at an organ rewriting a press release. So that’s a really difficult question: how do you…if you read something a bit worrying in a newspaper, how do you make your own informed judgment? Um, the first thing you have to do is that you have to get to the original research, for example you have to know whether it...
The Brian Cox and Robin Ince Chat Show starts here… Robin – So what do you think is the best complaint that we’ve had on Infinite Monkey Cage? Brian – Well, I’ll tell you the best email that I’ve had. R – OK. B – I got a worried email today, actually, so recently, there’s a story apparently in the Daily Mail –...
The internet is getting really fat Well, the internet is getting really fat, you know, this is one of the problems that we’ve got, that the more bells and whistles technologically that we begin to throw at websites in order to give you the eye candy you need…I mean, we’re very visual creatures and the internet has a certain amount of time to grab...
If you’re going to have an interest in conservation you’re just asking to be kicked over and over again So the Ugly Animal Preservation Society is a bit of a passion project for me. It actually started whenever I was off giving public lectures and talks and things about biology and I was finding they ended with me answering some questions from members of...
Professor Marcus Du Sautoy I got really excited when I heard there’s a possibility that the abc conjecture has been proved. Now, the abc conjecture is about the equation a + b = c. Now, you think, well that sounds rather a simple equation, doesn’t it? But actually trying to understand what the solutions are to this and the relationship about the prime...
You would never design a television transmitter using quantum electrodynamics. Robin Ince – How do you deal with this? A journalist wrote to me the other week and he said, he actually said, ‘If science is so good why do they keep having to change it?’ Brian Cox – (Laughs) RI – Yeah, I know, and I thought this is one of the hardest...
Essentially the maths of zombies is the same as the maths of flu or maths of measles On calculating survival of a zombie outbreak The best use of mathematical biology I’ve seen applied to zombie outbreak. So, a few years ago a guy called Robert Smith? in Ottawa, Canada, he just…very simple, everyday maths that I would use, he applied it to zombies and...
Is there a limit to the amount of things that we can know? We have…we are part of the five great apes, like to gorilla, chimpanzee, orangutans and gibbons, and humans are one of them. All of them show a high degree of intelligence, a high degree of community, of emotional attachment, and language – in very, very crude ways in the case...
It also tells you a little bit about time and how we’re in a long now. So palaeontologists believed this fish – which is a way distant ancestor of all living land creatures, I don’t know how many hundreds of millions of years ago – it had seemed to have gone extinct, disappeared from the fossil record but in 1938, in South Africa...
Professor Richard Wiseman I think, as a psychologist, the moment I got so excited about the human mind was simply looking at an optical illusion which was simply two coloured squares and one looked to be darker than the other. And there was no way to me that they looked to be the same and yet they were. And so my eyes, my...