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Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Man, Welcome back to Coast to Coast, George Nori with you.

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Speaker 2: Marcus choundback with us. An award winning writer and broadcaster.

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Speaker 2: He's based in London, England, formerly a radio astronomer at

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Speaker 2: the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He's the author

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Speaker 2: of a number of popular science books, including The Magicians,

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Speaker 2: The Ascent of Gravity, Quantum Theory, Cannot Hurt You, We

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Speaker 2: need to talk to Kelvin, and Solar System for iPad now.

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Speaker 2: His latest book we're talking about tonight is called The

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Speaker 2: One Thing You Need to Know. Marcus, Welcome back to

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Speaker 2: the program.

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Speaker 1: How have you been?

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Speaker 2: Hi?

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Speaker 3: Thanks George, It's great to be on the program. Thanks

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Speaker 3: inviting me. I'm well, how are you? I mean? Unhappy

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Speaker 3: Independence Day?

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Speaker 2: Thank you very much. Thanks. Calming down in France right now? Boy,

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Speaker 2: what a mess?

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Speaker 3: Huh wow. It's very difficult to know. I don't know

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Speaker 3: how much you get on your news in the US.

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Speaker 3: It's covered a bit in Britain, but I think things

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Speaker 3: are coming. My sister actually lives in Nant, which is

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Speaker 3: in France, so I think they had a bit of

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Speaker 3: trouble there, but she lives in a main new kind

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Speaker 3: of rural country area, so hopefully it is quieting down.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, tragic story. Anyways, You've got your new book that

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Speaker 2: just came out, right.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, it's published in the US today, So that's really

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Speaker 3: exciting for me.

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Speaker 2: The one thing you need to know tell me about that.

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Speaker 3: Title, right, Well, basically it's about the one thing you

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Speaker 3: need to know to understand a particular topic. So I've

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Speaker 3: picked twenty one topics, things like relativity, the Big Bang,

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Speaker 3: plate tectonics, you know, evolution, all this kind of stuff,

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Speaker 3: and I've tried to think of what is the one

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Speaker 3: thing you need to know from which everything else follows logically.

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Speaker 3: So it's kind of a way of trying to make

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Speaker 3: a lot of really complicated science and what.

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Speaker 2: Is that one thing we need to know.

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Speaker 3: Well, for each topic, there's a different thing. So if

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Speaker 3: I were to tell you about, for instance, relativity, I'm

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Speaker 3: side to relativity. The one thing that you need to

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Speaker 3: know is that that light is uncatchable. You know, it's

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Speaker 3: impossible to catch up a light beam. This was something

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Speaker 3: that was realized by Einstein when he was just sixteen.

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Speaker 3: He was imagining what it would be like to travel

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Speaker 3: alongside the light, alongside the light beam, and he realized

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Speaker 3: that you would see something impossible. So he concluded that

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Speaker 3: you could never catch up a light beam. And all

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Speaker 3: of the stuff of relativity or that or the madness

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Speaker 3: of relative relativity follows from that sentence. You know, if

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Speaker 3: you were to someone must move past you traveling near

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Speaker 3: the light, you would see their times slow down, and

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Speaker 3: you would see them shrink in the direction of motion.

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Speaker 3: So they would have looked like they were walking through

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Speaker 3: treacle or walking in slow motion, and they would drink

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Speaker 3: like a pancake in the direction of motion. And we

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Speaker 3: see this all the time when we accelerate particles, for instance,

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Speaker 3: in particle accelerators like the large hadron collide. We see

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Speaker 3: these effects of relativity. But they all stem from this

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Speaker 3: simple idea that you cannot catch up light. So it

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Speaker 3: plays the role of the cosmic speed limit. So I

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Speaker 3: take things like this and I just you know, I

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Speaker 3: take the sentence that you need, and then I kind

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Speaker 3: of deduce from that all the consequences.

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Speaker 2: You've got twenty one great chapters in this book will

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Speaker 2: digest some of them, and maybe by the end of

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Speaker 2: this interview over the next couple hours, Marcus, you'll help

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Speaker 2: us learn about the Big Bang, which I still don't understand.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, well nobody does really, Let's face, that's good to

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Speaker 3: hear that. Well, we don't know. We know a lot,

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Speaker 3: you know. So we can see that the universe is expanding,

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Speaker 3: and we can kind of imagine it the expansion running

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Speaker 3: backwards like a movie in reverse. And you know, we

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Speaker 3: come to this point about fourteen billion years ago when

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Speaker 3: everything was concentrated into a single location, which we call

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Speaker 3: a Big Bang, and we see all around us the

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Speaker 3: heat of to glow with the Big Bang. So incredibly,

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Speaker 3: the whole universe is growing with the afterglow of the

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Speaker 3: Big Bang fireball. About ninety nine point nine percent of

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Speaker 3: all the light in the universe is the afterglow of

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Speaker 3: the Big Bang, and only point one percent, that's one

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Speaker 3: thousandth of the light in the universe is coming from

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Speaker 3: stars and galaxies. But of course it's not light that

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Speaker 3: we can see with our with the naked eye, which

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Speaker 3: is why we didn't spot it until two guys at

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Speaker 3: Bell Lads in nineteen sixty five. So the evidence that

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Speaker 3: the universe began in a hot, dense phase and a

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Speaker 3: big bang of exploded outwards and the galaxy is like

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Speaker 3: a milky way of kind of coalesced from congealed from

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Speaker 3: the cooling debris. That's kind of beyond doubt. But of

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Speaker 3: course the questions you're you're wondering about are what was

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Speaker 3: the Big Bang? You know, what drove the Big Bang?

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Speaker 3: What happened before the Big Bang? You don't know the

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Speaker 3: answers to those questions?

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Speaker 2: Will we ever right? Will we ever get the answers?

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Speaker 3: Marcus got I really hope, I really hope. So, I mean,

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Speaker 3: I think we're in an amazing position at the moment.

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Speaker 3: I think previous generations would would have killed to have

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Speaker 3: the kind of information we've got, you know, I mean

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Speaker 3: James Webb Space Telescope, And that's as James Webb's Space

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Speaker 3: Telescope was launched Christmas twenty twenty one, and it's looking

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Speaker 3: back to very very close to the Big Bang, and

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Speaker 3: it's already surprising us with its discoveries. You know, so

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Speaker 3: we we we can look at how the galaxies began

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Speaker 3: to can jeel out of the cooling stuff of the

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Speaker 3: debris of the Big Bang, and we can kind of

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Speaker 3: learn more and more about this this Big Bang picture

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Speaker 3: so yeah, I think I think we I mean, the

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Speaker 3: incredible thing is that we have a good chance of

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Speaker 3: asking answering these ultimate questions, you know, like what happened

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Speaker 3: before the Big Bang? What is space? What is time?

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Speaker 3: All these really really big questions. We have a good

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Speaker 3: chance of answering them, maybe in the next couple of decades,

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Speaker 3: you know. So that's an amazing position to be in

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Speaker 3: the history of science because it's there's so many these

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Speaker 3: incredible space experiments that are up there. You know. James

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Speaker 3: Webb Euclid was launched, i think this week, and it's

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Speaker 3: trying to probe dark matter and dark energy. These are

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Speaker 3: the two biggest mysteries in the whole of astronomy are

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Speaker 3: the universe is filled with this dark matter stuff that

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Speaker 3: doesn't give out any light, and dark energy, which doesn't

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Speaker 3: give out any light and is speeding up the expansion

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Speaker 3: of the universe. So that there's another chance that we'll

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Speaker 3: well had, maybe in the next few years, to figure

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Speaker 3: out what they are. So yeah, I think there is hope.

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Speaker 3: There's hope.

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Speaker 2: Who are you structuring and going after with the book?

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Speaker 2: The one thing you need to know, who do you

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Speaker 2: want to read?

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Speaker 3: Who do I want to read it. I kind of

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Speaker 3: aim it all on my wife's she's a nurse in Britain,

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Speaker 3: you know, and she doesn't have any science background, so

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Speaker 3: I kind of I kind of aim it at her. Really,

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Speaker 3: you know, I was very lucky, as you pointed out,

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Speaker 3: to go to caw Tech, and I was taught by

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Speaker 3: a lot of really interesting people, I reach of women.

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Speaker 3: But I want to communicate the kind of things I

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Speaker 3: learned to everyone, you know, because I think when people

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Speaker 3: understand how amazing science is, they realize, you know, that

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Speaker 3: it's a fascinating topic. And maybe at school, you know,

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Speaker 3: they learned the whole and boring science, but actually it's

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Speaker 3: really you know, when you tell them about what we know,

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Speaker 3: it really fires their imagination. So my aim is really

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Speaker 3: to communicate some of this stuff that I learned to everybody, really, anybody,

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Speaker 3: even if you have no science background whatsoever.

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Speaker 2: Back in the eighteen fifty four, there was a scientists

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Speaker 2: that not a lot of people knew about. Unie's Foot.

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Speaker 2: Tell us about her.

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Speaker 3: That's right. So she was an American scientist called Unice Foot,

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Speaker 3: and she's pretty much nobody knows her name, but she

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Speaker 3: did an incredibly important experiment and it's such an simple

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Speaker 3: experiment that any one could do it in high school,

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Speaker 3: you know. So what she actually did was she got

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Speaker 3: some glass tubes and she filled them with different gases.

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Speaker 3: She filled one with oxygen, she filled one with water vapor,

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Speaker 3: another one with carbon dioxide, nitrogen, all these kind of things.

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Speaker 3: And she's start thermometers in these sealed glass tubes and

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Speaker 3: she put them in the sun, and to her amazement,

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Speaker 3: the tube that contained carbon dioxide and the tubes that

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Speaker 3: contained water vapor in there, the temperature rose dramatically. So

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Speaker 3: she realized she was the first person to realize that

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Speaker 3: these gases, I mean, carbon dioxide is a made there's

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Speaker 3: hardly any of it in the in the atmosphere. I

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Speaker 3: mean it's I don't know, it's a fraction, a very

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Speaker 3: small fraction of one percent of the atmosphere of cambraxer.

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Speaker 3: So this gas that appears to have no be to

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Speaker 3: be really unusual and really there's not much of it,

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Speaker 3: was having this tremendous effect. So she made the she

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Speaker 3: spentated in eighteen fifty four that changes in the amount

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Speaker 3: of carbon dioxide might be connected with changes in the climate.

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Speaker 3: So she was the first person in history to recognize

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Speaker 3: what we now call the greenouse effect. And now an

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Speaker 3: Irish physinessist three years later called John Tyndall made the

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Speaker 3: same discovery. And in all the history books we remember

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Speaker 3: John Tyndall, and Unice Foot has kind of been written

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Speaker 3: out of history. So we need to remember Unie Foot,

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Speaker 3: the American scientist who basically discovered the greenouse effect.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, Unis is not mentioned in many high school books

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Speaker 2: on science.

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Speaker 3: No that she should be. But this is really common

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Speaker 3: that you get these women who make these enormous contributions

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Speaker 3: and are completely forgotten. I mean, my favorite is the

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Speaker 3: Celia Paine and she was English, but she went from

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Speaker 3: Cambridge to Harvard in the nineteen twenties and they didn't

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Speaker 3: I mean, I think she was paid on equipment expenses

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Speaker 3: something like that. And she actually discovered that the Sun

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Speaker 3: was made of ninety eight percent hydrogen and the helium. Now,

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Speaker 3: these are two gases which are almost nonexistent on the

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Speaker 3: Earth basically because they're very light, so they float off

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Speaker 3: into space. So Ever, since Greek times, people have thought

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Speaker 3: that sun was made of iron, you know, because it

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Speaker 3: looks like it looks like a ball of glowing iron.

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Speaker 3: It glows orange, glows in a golden color, and so

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Speaker 3: until then people have thought it that had. Her supervisor

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Speaker 3: was called Henry Norris Russell was one of the great

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Speaker 3: American astronomers. He told her in her PhD thesis to

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Speaker 3: actually write that her result was almost certainly wrong. But

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Speaker 3: ten years later, when it was discovered that she was right,

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Speaker 3: he mentioned her on about one hundred and page one

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Speaker 3: hundred and fifty of a paper that he wrote, and

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Speaker 3: he got the credit. But part of the Celia Pain

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Speaker 3: basically discovered the major component of the whole universe because

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Speaker 3: most of the universe that we see is hydrogen and helium.

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Speaker 3: I mean, all the elements that we're made of calcium

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Speaker 3: and oxydshire and oh and all the things that are

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Speaker 3: in our body are am I in a contaminant at

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Speaker 3: the universe. So she was the person who basically discovered

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Speaker 3: what the universe was made of.

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Speaker 2: Marcus, when I was young in school, very very young,

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Speaker 2: our teacher said that the son's going to burn out

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Speaker 2: folks in the four and a half billion years, there'll

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Speaker 2: be nothing anymore. And I would go home really upset.

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Speaker 2: I talked to my dad and my mother, and I

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Speaker 2: would say, the son's going to burn out. We're all

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Speaker 2: going to be gone. And I didn't comprehend what four

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Speaker 2: point five billion years from now was.

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Speaker 3: And we've got plenty of time. We can sleep tonight.

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Speaker 2: We can, we can. But I don't know why the

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Speaker 2: teacher didn't explain that part of it to us, Like

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Speaker 2: four point five billion years, folks is a long time.

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Speaker 2: We're just kids.

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Speaker 3: Well maybe they should have done. I mean, the interesting

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Speaker 3: thing is that when people started thinking of this in

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Speaker 3: the nineteenth century, they obviously thought the lump of the

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Speaker 3: sun is a lump of coal, because in the nineteenth

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Speaker 3: century it was an age which was driven by steam,

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Speaker 3: so they thought it was a lump of coal. And

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Speaker 3: they were able to look at a lump of coal

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Speaker 3: in the grate, you know, and they could see how

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Speaker 3: long it took before it burnt out, and they could

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Speaker 3: extrapolate to something the size of the sun. And the

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Speaker 3: calculation showed that, in fact, it was only five thousand

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Speaker 3: years that the sun would burn before it burnt out,

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Speaker 3: which was not enough for anybody, you know, It wasn't

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Speaker 3: really enough even with every guy called Bishop Usher, who

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Speaker 3: was an Irish bishop who calculated from the Bible that

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Speaker 3: the Earth was created on. I think it was twenty

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Speaker 3: third of October four thousand and four BC, So it

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Speaker 3: wasn't even enough for him, and certainly not for geologists.

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Speaker 3: You know, we know that mountains rise up out of

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Speaker 3: the sea, and for the biologists because we know that

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Speaker 3: organisms have diverged from a common ancestor, but that process

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Speaker 3: takes a long time. But it's this thicker you're talking

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Speaker 3: about comes from analysis of meteorites, you know, the builder's

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Speaker 3: ravel left over after the formation of Sosis, and we

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Speaker 3: can date them, and you're actually right. We find out

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Speaker 3: what the Earth is about four point five billion years,

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Speaker 3: which seems a long time, doesn't it.

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Speaker 1: It doesn't, it.

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Speaker 2: Does, Marcus. What does this mean in terms of a

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Speaker 2: divine creator? When you think of all the different things,

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Speaker 2: just just by reading your book, we talk about gravity, electricity,

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Speaker 2: all these incredible things. There seems to be so much

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Speaker 2: order in the universe to make all these things happen.

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Speaker 2: Where does the divine creator come in on this? Do

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Speaker 2: you think about that much?

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Speaker 3: A matter of choice? Really? Where you can I mean

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Speaker 3: some of the great physessests in history, like Isaac were

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Speaker 3: very religious. They believed that in figuring out how the

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Speaker 3: universe was working, they were actually laying bare the mind

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Speaker 3: of God. So actually incredibly Newton is one probably the

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Speaker 3: greatest scientist in history, but most of his work was

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Speaker 3: analysis of the Bible, alchemy, and hardly any of his

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Speaker 3: work was actually science. But he thought these were all

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Speaker 3: ways of appreciating God. So he would he, you know,

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Speaker 3: the lord of gravity. He imagined that God had imposed

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Speaker 3: the law of gravity. So you see this throughout history.

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Speaker 3: So you have scientists who don't believe and scientists who do.

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Speaker 3: But it doesn't really make much difference, you know, because

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Speaker 3: either you believe the universe is this fantastically incredible beautiful

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Speaker 3: thing or you think it's a fantastically incredibly beautiful thing

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Speaker 3: that God made, it doesn't really make a lot of

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Speaker 3: difference really. So but what we actually see is that

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Speaker 3: laws of physics that we've actually discovered do actually produce

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Speaker 3: the universe that we that we see around us. So,

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Speaker 3: for instance, we kind of know what's what the universe

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Speaker 3: was like very early on in a big band, because

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Speaker 3: we can see the art to go with the big Bank,

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Speaker 3: so we could we know what the universe was like

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Speaker 3: within within a few hundred thousand years of the Big Bank.

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Speaker 3: We can run in our computers forward the history of

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Speaker 3: the universe using the laws of gravity, you know, the

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Speaker 3: law of gravity in the laws that we see, and

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Speaker 3: it gives us the universe which is very similar to

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Speaker 3: the one that puts around us, you know, with galaxies,

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Speaker 3: the size of the Milky Way, and all the properties

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Speaker 3: of the universe. So it doesn't appear to be any

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Speaker 3: divine hand is actually needed. So that's why I say

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Speaker 3: it's a matter of choice, really, And some some physicists

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Speaker 3: are or scientists are religious, and others are not. I mean,

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Speaker 3: Eiseen used to make loads of statements that use the

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Speaker 3: word God. He wasn't religious himself, but he used to

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Speaker 3: say things like God does not play dice with the

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Speaker 3: universe and all that kind of stuff. But that's that's

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Speaker 3: so that's really as I say, that's that's you can

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Speaker 3: or you can't. It depends on your your own belief really.

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Speaker 2: Sure do you think gravity is the glue that keeps

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Speaker 2: everything together?

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Speaker 1: Well?

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Speaker 3: Gravity is that is the glue that keeps large things together.

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Speaker 3: Because gravity, and this is one of the absolute mysteries

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Speaker 3: of science, is one followed by forty zero strong weaker

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Speaker 3: than the forced the electric force. That's holding together the

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Speaker 3: atoms in your body. So that's ten thousand, billion, billion,

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Speaker 3: billion billion times weaker. Okay, So that's a real mystery

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Speaker 3: why the electric force is so much stronger. But it

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Speaker 3: turns out that the electric force comes in two types,

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Speaker 3: So it says a repulsive type and an attractive type,

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Speaker 3: and in your body, those two forces completely cancel out.

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Speaker 3: But gravity only comes in one form. It's only attractive.

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Speaker 3: So the more material you get, the more gravity you get.

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Speaker 3: So when you get to a certain size a certain

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Speaker 3: amount of material, gravity begins to dominate. And in our

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Speaker 3: solar system, that size is an object about three or

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Speaker 3: four hundred kilometers across. Okay, So when you get beyond that,

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Speaker 3: gravity is so strong it can gather everything, crash everything

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Speaker 3: into a sphere. When you have less material and that

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Speaker 3: it can't. So when you look out across the Solar system,

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Speaker 3: everything that's less than three or four hundred kilometers across

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Speaker 3: is like a potato potato shaped, and everything that's more

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Speaker 3: than three or four hundred klometers across is a sphere.

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Speaker 3: And that's because that's the scale of which gravity begins

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Speaker 3: to dominate. So after that scale, it dominates everything. So

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Speaker 3: it dominates planets, It dominates stars, it dominates the galaxy,

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Speaker 3: and it dominates the universe. So in a way, it

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Speaker 3: controls everything that matters to us. But of course it

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Speaker 3: doesn't control the physics in your body, because that's the

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Speaker 3: electric force. But so yeah, yeah, it is the dominant

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Speaker 3: force because it only comes in one form and it

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Speaker 3: only gets strong the more matter. The more matter you have,

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Speaker 3: the more gravity you have.

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