201st Birthday Bonanza - Mel Giedroyc, Deborah Meaden and Nish Kumar

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2:05BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. You're about to listen to The Infinite Monkey Cage. Episodes will be released on Wednesdays. Wherever you get your podcasts. But if you're in the UK, the full series is available right now. First on BBC Sounds. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Ince, and this is the 201st Infinite Monkey Cage. 16 years of searching for answers to some of the most important questions in science. What is death? Are we living in a simulation? How did life on Earth begin? What is the point of pandas? Is there any whatsoever? And is quantum theory just woo? I'll just stop you there.

2:43Why are you going to stop me? Pandas, pointless, they get in the way. Though, actually, I should say, later on in this series, you will hear a discussion about whether pandas would have more sex if they were on the International Space Station of that particular episode. Now, when we began, of course, Brian was just plain old Professor Brian Cox. Then he became Brian Cox OBE. Then he became OBE FRS. And now he is CBE FRS. And also, of course, won Rear of the Year in 2017 in the science communication category. I, of course, when this began, I was just plain old Robin Ince, whereas now I am Robin Ince, winner of Richard Osman's House of Games and owner of a bee hotel.

3:32I've got a bee hotel, Richard Osman luggage and a selection of things I can keep eggs in. Time will come. Yeah. Oh, no, I think that's it. That's all I want. Now, for our 201st birthday show, we've decided to do something special, and it should admittedly have been the 200th, but we missed it. We've invited three celebrity guests who have burning questions about science and engineering, and perhaps unfashionably in today's intellectual and political climate, we've also invited a panel of experts to answer them. So, to explore what they've always wanted to know, the burning questions we have on this birthday episode, a discerning dragon, a cake commissar and a mash master.

4:13And they are. Hi, I'm Mel Gedroych. I'm the cake commissar. And the first question that I ever wanted to ask my science teacher, Mrs Stone, I have not changed her name for legal reasons. That was her actual name. Brian, she was my physics teacher. The question I want to ask her, as I was then, age 14, why did you kick me out of my physics class? And have you got no inkling of why she kicked you out? I do have a bit of an inkling. You probably don't know about Mel, right? Mel created a little plot against Mrs Stone with the art teacher, Miss Paper. And Mr Rock. No, it's fair to say that I did...

5:03I don't know if this is Radio 4 friendly. I did tit about quite a lot in Mrs Stone's classes. But I thought, come on, man. Why did they do that to me, Brian? Because you titted about in the class. OK, fair deal. What level of titting are we talking about here? It's really lame. But the thing that was the sort of last straw on the camel's back, a.k.a. Mrs Stone, she did spit a bit as well, actually. She did spit a bit like a camel. but physics was on a Tuesday afternoon and showing on Tuesday evenings on ITV was Bride's Head Revisited and I used to sing the theme tune in the physics class quite loudly Would you like to do it now?

5:54Two things Firstly I would have kicked you out for that Secondly this is Radio 4 we can't afford the publishing You can use the first eight seconds, that's copyright free. What in the name of God is going on here? I don't know. It's like being the Manchurian candidate for people over 45. People in the audience just started going... Anyway, I wonder who our next guest is.

6:24Our next guest is scared and confused. My name is Nish Kumar. I am a stand-up comedian and the co-host of Pod Save the UK. And the question I would like to have asked my science teacher was on the first day of science, what is science? Because I was really bad at it. I was such a bad student. And so I'm here. I'm excited to be here. But I'm also, I should not be here. Can I say, at least you got to blooming do science till you were 16. Some of us, 14. At least that's because I wasn't there going, BAM BAM BAM We could do the Doctor Who theme tune together if you'd like. Oh, yes. Shall I go top or bottom?

7:08I don't think you can ask that on Radio 4 now. I think the third guest's still here. Hi, I'm Deborah Meaden. I am very unkindly sometimes referred to as a dragon, TV dragon, but an investor. And my question that I wanted... well, I did ask, actually, my first science teacher, because I was a big fan of Doctor Who, hence the Doctor Who theme tune, was, will we ever be able to time travel? Nice. Into the past, no. Don't spoil it. That might be the question Deborah's going to ask. This is our panel.

7:50Let's start with our first question. So each one of our panel has, as we mentioned, that has got a question, and we have a selection of scientists, and hopefully within the audience we have one that's suitable for each question. Of course we do, there's three people over there and we know exactly what's going to happen. Anyway, so, Mel, let's start with your question. Can we not do the Doctor Who theme tune really quickly? Ten seconds. I'll go low, someone else go high. Oh,

8:18my God. The tuning on that. There we are. Now, what would you most like to know about the universe and what lies within it? Right. I'm obsessed with trains, with tunnels, with tunnelling. The Elizabeth Line, which if you live outside of London and may not have used, is the incredible new east-west service from Reading on the one side to Abbey Wood slash Shenfield on the other side that basically goes underneath London and it's incredible. So it's my spiritual home and I just sit on the Lizzie line and marvel at the incredible engineering and the beauty of it and the air con and just the everythingness of it.

9:04With the Elizabeth line, the Lizzie as I call it, sometimes the Lizzo just for lols but every time I'm on it I just think how is this marvellous contraption getting me from A to B without bumping into any other things underground, how was it built, how did they make the tunnels, why does London not fall down, I'm obsessed. Well hopefully we've got a scientist who could answer that so let's find out with scientist number one.

9:35Hi, my name's Isabel Coman and I'm the Director of Engineering at Transport for London. And I spent seven years of my life working on the building of the Elizabeth Line. So let's have your first question then. To put this into perspective, Isabel, I moved my entire family to what we knew would be an Elizabeth Line station. And I remember saying to my two then small girls, I think there were sort of three and five at the time. I said, girls, you're going to be seven and nine, and then you're going to be riding this line. This is going to be incredible. Anyway, cut to, they were 23 and 21. And had very much left home, but it doesn't matter.

10:20It was late, but it was so worth the wait. What you're saying is you haven't got a question. I was going to say, can I just butt in and maybe just ask a science question? Yes. Which is, what's the first thing you do when someone says, right, we need a line, needs to go from here to here under a city like London? I was just about to ask that process. So you need to know what's underground. So you need to make sure you're not going to hit something first. And there's all sorts of things underground, especially in a city like London. So whether that's the piles for tall buildings, underground rivers, sewers, obviously other underground lines.

10:58So you need to make sure you don't hit anything. But you also want to connect into other key points. so it's important when people are travelling they can connect into other stations and other transport modes so that becomes really important and you try and balance all of those things together. And then the other thing you need to know is what's the ground condition? So what's the soil that you're going to be building in? So there's lots and lots of things you have to think about. Wasn't there a really tense moment where the Elizabeth Line Tunnel at Tottenham Court Road had to go between the northern and the central line and there was something like millimetres.

11:32It was about a metre between the tunnelling. To be fair, but it's millimetres. A thousand millimetres. It was non-specific about how many millimetres. A thousand of them. You're digging a seven-metre hole underneath a tube line with the trains running up and down. And is it true also, Isabel, that Mark Brunel, Isambard Brunel's dad, had didn't he start building a tunnel he wanted to build to france i think didn't he and isn't part of that tunnel that he originally started now one of the tunnels i can sense from your face isabel that maybe that's not correct isn't it the wrong tunnel i'll i'll look into that again but how has it changed over the years because i suspect the well the accuracy with which we know the underground has improved somewhat yeah so the main tunnel routes that were built for crossrail and the elizabeth line were built with earth pressure balanced tunnel boring machines so they're a big machine that gets launched and drives underground or it's dropped into a hole and it bores underground and the the technology that's on those machines nowadays is absolutely incredible so there are lots of monitors and sensors and they have a basically have a big cutting wheel at the front of them that that spins around and excavates the material ahead and the whole time that you're digging them the the teams that aboard those are like are watching for all the information that's coming to them because of course you can't see ahead of yourself so you're just trying to interpret the ground that and the material that comes through and balance the pressure of the earth in front of you as you cut a hole they have a shield that presses behind it that creates pressure to hold it all up so you don't get the ground ahead of it falling in and obviously the buildings and the railways and everything else that's going on in London falling into the hole as you dig it.

13:25Being very practical, what happens to all the dig out? Oh, that's amazing. They shake it out of their trousers.

13:34There's millions of tonnes of material excavated and actually for the Elizabeth line, I think over 90 % of it got transported by railway and barge down the River Thames and it built a bird sanctuary actually there called Wallasey Island. And it was clean enough to do that? Yes, because you're digging through ancient, ancient ground. So the London clay, which is where most of the excavation came from, is completely inert material. So it's absolutely perfect for building a bird sanctuary. That's so cool. I've got a bit of beef with the Elizabeth line. Just a little bit, if that's allowed. So in my career, I have done quite a few voiceovers, Isabel.

14:14Are you doing your voiceover voice? I am slightly doing your voice. Anyway, I said to my voiceover agent, Susan, I said, God, you know what? I would retire if I could be the voice of the Elizabeth line. You know, the voice that goes, and the next train to Shenfield will be two minutes from platform four. You see how good that would have been? Thank you. Anyway, so I said to Susan, look, any chance you get me in, can I do an audition? Never heard a word, Isabel. Not a word. I think it should be me, because I've got quite an aggravating nasal voice. And I think they should use my voice to be like, your train is so late.

14:59Oh, my God. It is so late. And I'd love to tell you why, but full disclosure, someone's taken a dump in the carriage. So once you've built the line, so what are the challenges in running the trains? you mentioned that they're not on time it's difficult how many trains are going through there per hour how close do they get to each other how do you manage that so elizabeth line runs 24 trains an hour they have to travel through three signaling systems so the signaling is the thing that controls and protects the train from crashing into each other but also it makes sure that you they run to to time so the technology and software inside has to be able to tell the train has to know where it is so it has to know which kind of signaling is being is telling it what to do and that has to it has to change between the systems and they have to speak to each other they have to sort of talk to each other the beautiful when you get all three is going out of Ealing Broadway which is mainline into I'm going to say suburban Paddington which is kind of the midway signaling system and then into the tunnel which is the fully underground one if I happen to be on that part of the line I do a little Tim Henman when he scores a point like a yes to myself.

16:12How do you know that? I like to look on websites, Brian. It's quite funny to hear the studio audience for this show laugh at something as if to go, that's too geeky for me. But I presume that when the digging actually begins, there will still be moments of surprise. What cannot be detected from above ground surveying? So you could have faults in the soil where it changes condition and basically what you you end up having is you have geologists who are experts who who watch the material coming that gets excavated coming back out through through the front of the face of the tunnel and the senses around you are sensing pressure they're sensing changes the the machines are designed to cope with a lot of different situations yes nish do you have a question you wanted to ask yes i'm now embarrassed because my question was going to be and what is the situation vis-a-vis buried treasure?

17:12But it's a good question. Very good question. Well done, Mish. And if you find buried treasure, who gets to keep it? Is it the individual who finds it, or does it get pumped back into the TFL system? So where the tunnels go, you're not going to find much buried treasure, but where the stations were built, so particularly at Liverpool Street, they actually excavated through the Bethlehem Hospital graveyard, which was between the mid-16th century and the mid-18th century. And they had to exhum over 3 ,000 bodies from that graveyard. So they're national artefacts, they get re-buried. And any treasure, archaeological treasure, is kept and preserved.

17:54And actually, many, many things have been found out about the population of London in that time through the various things that were excavated out. There was a really good exhibition, I don't know if it's still on, of all the artefacts. That was so great. and there was like a water bison or something found in the Acton area. Horns from like a pre-Jurassic water bison. I've been to Acton. That's one of the least scary things. Well, thank you so much. Thank you very much, Isabel Conner. Thank you. Wow. Love her. It's so many questions. September's always busy. Whole Foods Market can help. Their September Stock Up event makes it easy to load your pantry and freezer with flavorful, nourishing food.

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21:09Now, Debra, you have the next question. Yeah, so this is one that my vet and I disagree over. And the question is, do animals grieve? So what does your vet think then? Well, he thinks it's unlikely that they grieve, but I've got a lot of animals, I've had a lot of animals, they don't all respond the same way, but when we've had to put one down, definitely the animals have changed their behaviour. So I wonder whether or not that is grief or what that would be. And, you know, there are emotions around all of that, really. Well, let's find out. Now, meet our next scientist.

21:51Hello, my name is Dr Liz Paul. I'm from the University of Bristol and I'm a comparative psychologist. That means I study humans, but I study all sorts of animals as well. And I'm interested in emotion and how it evolved and how we can define it in animals and how we can study it in animals. So what's your initial reaction then to Deborah's question? I think there's a little cluster of thoughts. One of them would be that maybe your vet is being careful not to over-anthropomorphise, you know, to sort of not slip into the trap of assuming that all animals are sort of just like mini-usses, you're furry people.

22:28I have the thought that actually, as scientists, we're interested in answering that question experimentally, but also understanding theoretically what emotion is, what grieving might be, what kind of factors are involved with that. Then finally, the main thought that I have is that we have to sort of point out or say that emotion is a multifaceted phenomenon, so that feeling emotion is only one part of it and that we also do emotion in terms of our behaviour and we do emotion in terms of our physiology and we also change our cognition or our information processing when we're doing emotion. So maybe we can't always answer the question of do they feel but we can perhaps answer the question of is their physiology or their behaviour changing?

23:12And I guess also not all animals are the same. So is there a difference in groups of animals? Yes, definitely, yes. So I guess what you're thinking about tends to be, you know, most of us are experiencing... Horses, cats, dogs, sheep and geese. Companion. And ducks. So most companion animals are mammals. And so we're going to get a lot closer to grief in the mammals or human-like grief because we're mammals as well. Geese, yeah, going to be a bit more tricky. So in the wild, there are a lot of anecdotal stories that are reported about chimpanzees. There was a very widely reported story about an orca carrying its dead baby.

23:54There's also been observations of elephants, not just the mother, but other members of the group coming and having a look at a young elephant that's died and spending a lot of time hanging around, kind of, you know, touching it and walking around and things. So there's a lot of these kind of, on the whole, larger, bigger-brained mammals doing these sorts of perhaps a bit more sadness-like responses. And that's also been observed by owners in more systematic studies where sort of owners are asked to report how their dog or their cat has responded to the death of another dog or cat in the household.

24:31And again, there seem to be more, not always sadness responses, but some kind of behavioural change and potentially some sort of physiological change, so like a stress response. But I guess the question is, yeah, are they really feeling a sadness? And I think the answer is, well, I think mammals, at least, we have evidence that they can experience what they can do, let's say, behaviourally, physiologically do loss in some way. They recognise that they had a good thing and it's now gone. Specifically grief, you have to be a social animal to recognise that loss. But whether grief is somehow special and different from any other loss, like your family going on holiday for a fortnight, And you not knowing whether they're coming back or not, I doubt.

25:13Because I suspect that that conception of death as a complete end and they're never coming back is something even us humans find it difficult to grasp. And I guess that the question would be, I mean, evolutionary terms, everything we feel has a benefit to us, doesn't it? We feel fear, it keeps us alive, we run away. What would be the purpose of grief? So if I come back to sort of maybe focusing on the purpose of loss in general, if that's where grief comes from, then the thing that I find interesting as a scientist studying that whole extension, that evolution of all of the amazing complexity that we have as humans in our emotions, but all the seeds of that, the roots of that in our evolutionary history, then I think we can say that loss might have an important adaptive function, particularly in detecting not just the value of things, whether something's good or bad, but detecting the relative value of things.

26:09So if you give them a very nice food, they know that that's high value. If something bad happens to you, they know that's low value or it's a negative value. But a lot of particularly, again, mammals, some birds probably as well, and we haven't studied all animals, can recognise and respond apparently emotionally to when they had a good thing going for them and then it kind of cut back and it wasn't as good anymore. So they're learning. that gives them the capacity to learn about the world changing. And that's a very important piece of information. What about kind of what you might call interspecies grief, I suppose, which is you think, and I'm sure you may have seen this, Deborah and Nish and everyone else, which is I remember when my dad died and his dog, it was very much out of sorts and a level of confusion and it didn't have the same kind of vim and verve.

27:00So what do we know about that? Well, that has been studied, yeah. And it's mostly been studied at the moment, as I say, with owner reports, rather than somebody sitting in your house when somebody's just died, you know, observing what your dog did, because that would be a little bit ethically problematic. What a weird job, isn't it? It would be a weird job, like, knock on the door. Did he have a dog? Yeah, yeah. Can I come and sit in your house and watch your dog while you're organising the funeral? So I think, yeah, dogs are very, very social animals. They've been domesticated for over 40 ,000 years.

27:29They have learned to live with humans. they've changed genetically to live with humans so they're just as attached I would say to their humans as they would be to another dog in the same way that you know wolves would have been attached to other wolf pack members so I think it's not surprising that if you've got an animal like a dog that's a highly social animal that you know when it understands that somebody who has always been there in its life is no longer there of course as I say they may not understand the finality of death necessarily but they are definitely going to change their behavior having said that it's not all dogs and this is what deborah said as well you know it does depend on the nature of the relationship so more arrogant dogs or narcissistic dogs you mean it depends on like the like hitler's dog was like thank god do you think they recognized death i'm just thinking of one of my horses put down the other two horses went over poured sniffed you know poked around a bit and then just wandered off and carried on eating grass um what was that yeah so i think it's something really surprising it's a and it's this is called expectancy violation i suppose in in animal behavior so that would be they would normally expect it to get up again it tallies very closely with the reports that people have done as i say of wild animals and elephants and giraffe and things like that you know responding going over to the body interestingly the primates do something as i say the orca and dolphins do this infant carrying and particularly with infants as though they're trying to revive it in some way which i think the elephants and the and the giraffes and these larger animals who can't pick them up.

29:03Maybe they're just inspecting it and they may hang around for a while but they leave. Whereas quite shockingly in a way, some of the chimpanzees have been videoed carrying really quite rotten babies around with them for weeks and if not months. When Her Majesty the Queen died, I swear, no I swear. Oh my God, if it was so Prince Charles went over and he sniffed her a little bit and then he just walked away.