Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Man, Welcome back to Coast to Coast, George Nori with you.
Speaker 2: Marcus choundback with us. An award winning writer and broadcaster.
Speaker 2: He's based in London, England, formerly a radio astronomer at
Speaker 2: the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He's the author
Speaker 2: of a number of popular science books, including The Magicians,
Speaker 2: The Ascent of Gravity, Quantum Theory, Cannot Hurt You, We
Speaker 2: need to talk to Kelvin, and Solar System for iPad now.
Speaker 2: His latest book we're talking about tonight is called The
Speaker 2: One Thing You Need to Know. Marcus, Welcome back to
Speaker 2: the program.
Speaker 1: How have you been?
Speaker 2: Hi?
Speaker 3: Thanks George, It's great to be on the program. Thanks
Speaker 3: inviting me. I'm well, how are you? I mean? Unhappy
Speaker 3: Independence Day?
Speaker 2: Thank you very much. Thanks. Calming down in France right now? Boy,
Speaker 2: what a mess?
Speaker 3: Huh wow. It's very difficult to know. I don't know
Speaker 3: how much you get on your news in the US.
Speaker 3: It's covered a bit in Britain, but I think things
Speaker 3: are coming. My sister actually lives in Nant, which is
Speaker 3: in France, so I think they had a bit of
Speaker 3: trouble there, but she lives in a main new kind
Speaker 3: of rural country area, so hopefully it is quieting down.
Speaker 2: Yeah, tragic story. Anyways, You've got your new book that
Speaker 2: just came out, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's published in the US today, So that's really
Speaker 3: exciting for me.
Speaker 2: The one thing you need to know tell me about that.
Speaker 3: Title, right, Well, basically it's about the one thing you
Speaker 3: need to know to understand a particular topic. So I've
Speaker 3: picked twenty one topics, things like relativity, the Big Bang,
Speaker 3: plate tectonics, you know, evolution, all this kind of stuff,
Speaker 3: and I've tried to think of what is the one
Speaker 3: thing you need to know from which everything else follows logically.
Speaker 3: So it's kind of a way of trying to make
Speaker 3: a lot of really complicated science and what.
Speaker 2: Is that one thing we need to know.
Speaker 3: Well, for each topic, there's a different thing. So if
Speaker 3: I were to tell you about, for instance, relativity, I'm
Speaker 3: side to relativity. The one thing that you need to
Speaker 3: know is that that light is uncatchable. You know, it's
Speaker 3: impossible to catch up a light beam. This was something
Speaker 3: that was realized by Einstein when he was just sixteen.
Speaker 3: He was imagining what it would be like to travel
Speaker 3: alongside the light, alongside the light beam, and he realized
Speaker 3: that you would see something impossible. So he concluded that
Speaker 3: you could never catch up a light beam. And all
Speaker 3: of the stuff of relativity or that or the madness
Speaker 3: of relative relativity follows from that sentence. You know, if
Speaker 3: you were to someone must move past you traveling near
Speaker 3: the light, you would see their times slow down, and
Speaker 3: you would see them shrink in the direction of motion.
Speaker 3: So they would have looked like they were walking through
Speaker 3: treacle or walking in slow motion, and they would drink
Speaker 3: like a pancake in the direction of motion. And we
Speaker 3: see this all the time when we accelerate particles, for instance,
Speaker 3: in particle accelerators like the large hadron collide. We see
Speaker 3: these effects of relativity. But they all stem from this
Speaker 3: simple idea that you cannot catch up light. So it
Speaker 3: plays the role of the cosmic speed limit. So I
Speaker 3: take things like this and I just you know, I
Speaker 3: take the sentence that you need, and then I kind
Speaker 3: of deduce from that all the consequences.
Speaker 2: You've got twenty one great chapters in this book will
Speaker 2: digest some of them, and maybe by the end of
Speaker 2: this interview over the next couple hours, Marcus, you'll help
Speaker 2: us learn about the Big Bang, which I still don't understand.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well nobody does really, Let's face, that's good to
Speaker 3: hear that. Well, we don't know. We know a lot,
Speaker 3: you know. So we can see that the universe is expanding,
Speaker 3: and we can kind of imagine it the expansion running
Speaker 3: backwards like a movie in reverse. And you know, we
Speaker 3: come to this point about fourteen billion years ago when
Speaker 3: everything was concentrated into a single location, which we call
Speaker 3: a Big Bang, and we see all around us the
Speaker 3: heat of to glow with the Big Bang. So incredibly,
Speaker 3: the whole universe is growing with the afterglow of the
Speaker 3: Big Bang fireball. About ninety nine point nine percent of
Speaker 3: all the light in the universe is the afterglow of
Speaker 3: the Big Bang, and only point one percent, that's one
Speaker 3: thousandth of the light in the universe is coming from
Speaker 3: stars and galaxies. But of course it's not light that
Speaker 3: we can see with our with the naked eye, which
Speaker 3: is why we didn't spot it until two guys at
Speaker 3: Bell Lads in nineteen sixty five. So the evidence that
Speaker 3: the universe began in a hot, dense phase and a
Speaker 3: big bang of exploded outwards and the galaxy is like
Speaker 3: a milky way of kind of coalesced from congealed from
Speaker 3: the cooling debris. That's kind of beyond doubt. But of
Speaker 3: course the questions you're you're wondering about are what was
Speaker 3: the Big Bang? You know, what drove the Big Bang?
Speaker 3: What happened before the Big Bang? You don't know the
Speaker 3: answers to those questions?
Speaker 2: Will we ever right? Will we ever get the answers?
Speaker 3: Marcus got I really hope, I really hope. So, I mean,
Speaker 3: I think we're in an amazing position at the moment.
Speaker 3: I think previous generations would would have killed to have
Speaker 3: the kind of information we've got, you know, I mean
Speaker 3: James Webb Space Telescope, And that's as James Webb's Space
Speaker 3: Telescope was launched Christmas twenty twenty one, and it's looking
Speaker 3: back to very very close to the Big Bang, and
Speaker 3: it's already surprising us with its discoveries. You know, so
Speaker 3: we we we can look at how the galaxies began
Speaker 3: to can jeel out of the cooling stuff of the
Speaker 3: debris of the Big Bang, and we can kind of
Speaker 3: learn more and more about this this Big Bang picture
Speaker 3: so yeah, I think I think we I mean, the
Speaker 3: incredible thing is that we have a good chance of
Speaker 3: asking answering these ultimate questions, you know, like what happened
Speaker 3: before the Big Bang? What is space? What is time?
Speaker 3: All these really really big questions. We have a good
Speaker 3: chance of answering them, maybe in the next couple of decades,
Speaker 3: you know. So that's an amazing position to be in
Speaker 3: the history of science because it's there's so many these
Speaker 3: incredible space experiments that are up there. You know. James
Speaker 3: Webb Euclid was launched, i think this week, and it's
Speaker 3: trying to probe dark matter and dark energy. These are
Speaker 3: the two biggest mysteries in the whole of astronomy are
Speaker 3: the universe is filled with this dark matter stuff that
Speaker 3: doesn't give out any light, and dark energy, which doesn't
Speaker 3: give out any light and is speeding up the expansion
Speaker 3: of the universe. So that there's another chance that we'll
Speaker 3: well had, maybe in the next few years, to figure
Speaker 3: out what they are. So yeah, I think there is hope.
Speaker 3: There's hope.
Speaker 2: Who are you structuring and going after with the book?
Speaker 2: The one thing you need to know, who do you
Speaker 2: want to read?
Speaker 3: Who do I want to read it. I kind of
Speaker 3: aim it all on my wife's she's a nurse in Britain,
Speaker 3: you know, and she doesn't have any science background, so
Speaker 3: I kind of I kind of aim it at her. Really,
Speaker 3: you know, I was very lucky, as you pointed out,
Speaker 3: to go to caw Tech, and I was taught by
Speaker 3: a lot of really interesting people, I reach of women.
Speaker 3: But I want to communicate the kind of things I
Speaker 3: learned to everyone, you know, because I think when people
Speaker 3: understand how amazing science is, they realize, you know, that
Speaker 3: it's a fascinating topic. And maybe at school, you know,
Speaker 3: they learned the whole and boring science, but actually it's
Speaker 3: really you know, when you tell them about what we know,
Speaker 3: it really fires their imagination. So my aim is really
Speaker 3: to communicate some of this stuff that I learned to everybody, really, anybody,
Speaker 3: even if you have no science background whatsoever.
Speaker 2: Back in the eighteen fifty four, there was a scientists
Speaker 2: that not a lot of people knew about. Unie's Foot.
Speaker 2: Tell us about her.
Speaker 3: That's right. So she was an American scientist called Unice Foot,
Speaker 3: and she's pretty much nobody knows her name, but she
Speaker 3: did an incredibly important experiment and it's such an simple
Speaker 3: experiment that any one could do it in high school,
Speaker 3: you know. So what she actually did was she got
Speaker 3: some glass tubes and she filled them with different gases.
Speaker 3: She filled one with oxygen, she filled one with water vapor,
Speaker 3: another one with carbon dioxide, nitrogen, all these kind of things.
Speaker 3: And she's start thermometers in these sealed glass tubes and
Speaker 3: she put them in the sun, and to her amazement,
Speaker 3: the tube that contained carbon dioxide and the tubes that
Speaker 3: contained water vapor in there, the temperature rose dramatically. So
Speaker 3: she realized she was the first person to realize that
Speaker 3: these gases, I mean, carbon dioxide is a made there's
Speaker 3: hardly any of it in the in the atmosphere. I
Speaker 3: mean it's I don't know, it's a fraction, a very
Speaker 3: small fraction of one percent of the atmosphere of cambraxer.
Speaker 3: So this gas that appears to have no be to
Speaker 3: be really unusual and really there's not much of it,
Speaker 3: was having this tremendous effect. So she made the she
Speaker 3: spentated in eighteen fifty four that changes in the amount
Speaker 3: of carbon dioxide might be connected with changes in the climate.
Speaker 3: So she was the first person in history to recognize
Speaker 3: what we now call the greenouse effect. And now an
Speaker 3: Irish physinessist three years later called John Tyndall made the
Speaker 3: same discovery. And in all the history books we remember
Speaker 3: John Tyndall, and Unice Foot has kind of been written
Speaker 3: out of history. So we need to remember Unie Foot,
Speaker 3: the American scientist who basically discovered the greenouse effect.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Unis is not mentioned in many high school books
Speaker 2: on science.
Speaker 3: No that she should be. But this is really common
Speaker 3: that you get these women who make these enormous contributions
Speaker 3: and are completely forgotten. I mean, my favorite is the
Speaker 3: Celia Paine and she was English, but she went from
Speaker 3: Cambridge to Harvard in the nineteen twenties and they didn't
Speaker 3: I mean, I think she was paid on equipment expenses
Speaker 3: something like that. And she actually discovered that the Sun
Speaker 3: was made of ninety eight percent hydrogen and the helium. Now,
Speaker 3: these are two gases which are almost nonexistent on the
Speaker 3: Earth basically because they're very light, so they float off
Speaker 3: into space. So Ever, since Greek times, people have thought
Speaker 3: that sun was made of iron, you know, because it
Speaker 3: looks like it looks like a ball of glowing iron.
Speaker 3: It glows orange, glows in a golden color, and so
Speaker 3: until then people have thought it that had. Her supervisor
Speaker 3: was called Henry Norris Russell was one of the great
Speaker 3: American astronomers. He told her in her PhD thesis to
Speaker 3: actually write that her result was almost certainly wrong. But
Speaker 3: ten years later, when it was discovered that she was right,
Speaker 3: he mentioned her on about one hundred and page one
Speaker 3: hundred and fifty of a paper that he wrote, and
Speaker 3: he got the credit. But part of the Celia Pain
Speaker 3: basically discovered the major component of the whole universe because
Speaker 3: most of the universe that we see is hydrogen and helium.
Speaker 3: I mean, all the elements that we're made of calcium
Speaker 3: and oxydshire and oh and all the things that are
Speaker 3: in our body are am I in a contaminant at
Speaker 3: the universe. So she was the person who basically discovered
Speaker 3: what the universe was made of.
Speaker 2: Marcus, when I was young in school, very very young,
Speaker 2: our teacher said that the son's going to burn out
Speaker 2: folks in the four and a half billion years, there'll
Speaker 2: be nothing anymore. And I would go home really upset.
Speaker 2: I talked to my dad and my mother, and I
Speaker 2: would say, the son's going to burn out. We're all
Speaker 2: going to be gone. And I didn't comprehend what four
Speaker 2: point five billion years from now was.
Speaker 3: And we've got plenty of time. We can sleep tonight.
Speaker 2: We can, we can. But I don't know why the
Speaker 2: teacher didn't explain that part of it to us, Like
Speaker 2: four point five billion years, folks is a long time.
Speaker 2: We're just kids.
Speaker 3: Well maybe they should have done. I mean, the interesting
Speaker 3: thing is that when people started thinking of this in
Speaker 3: the nineteenth century, they obviously thought the lump of the
Speaker 3: sun is a lump of coal, because in the nineteenth
Speaker 3: century it was an age which was driven by steam,
Speaker 3: so they thought it was a lump of coal. And
Speaker 3: they were able to look at a lump of coal
Speaker 3: in the grate, you know, and they could see how
Speaker 3: long it took before it burnt out, and they could
Speaker 3: extrapolate to something the size of the sun. And the
Speaker 3: calculation showed that, in fact, it was only five thousand
Speaker 3: years that the sun would burn before it burnt out,
Speaker 3: which was not enough for anybody, you know, It wasn't
Speaker 3: really enough even with every guy called Bishop Usher, who
Speaker 3: was an Irish bishop who calculated from the Bible that
Speaker 3: the Earth was created on. I think it was twenty
Speaker 3: third of October four thousand and four BC, So it
Speaker 3: wasn't even enough for him, and certainly not for geologists.
Speaker 3: You know, we know that mountains rise up out of
Speaker 3: the sea, and for the biologists because we know that
Speaker 3: organisms have diverged from a common ancestor, but that process
Speaker 3: takes a long time. But it's this thicker you're talking
Speaker 3: about comes from analysis of meteorites, you know, the builder's
Speaker 3: ravel left over after the formation of Sosis, and we
Speaker 3: can date them, and you're actually right. We find out
Speaker 3: what the Earth is about four point five billion years,
Speaker 3: which seems a long time, doesn't it.
Speaker 1: It doesn't, it.
Speaker 2: Does, Marcus. What does this mean in terms of a
Speaker 2: divine creator? When you think of all the different things,
Speaker 2: just just by reading your book, we talk about gravity, electricity,
Speaker 2: all these incredible things. There seems to be so much
Speaker 2: order in the universe to make all these things happen.
Speaker 2: Where does the divine creator come in on this? Do
Speaker 2: you think about that much?
Speaker 3: A matter of choice? Really? Where you can I mean
Speaker 3: some of the great physessests in history, like Isaac were
Speaker 3: very religious. They believed that in figuring out how the
Speaker 3: universe was working, they were actually laying bare the mind
Speaker 3: of God. So actually incredibly Newton is one probably the
Speaker 3: greatest scientist in history, but most of his work was
Speaker 3: analysis of the Bible, alchemy, and hardly any of his
Speaker 3: work was actually science. But he thought these were all
Speaker 3: ways of appreciating God. So he would he, you know,
Speaker 3: the lord of gravity. He imagined that God had imposed
Speaker 3: the law of gravity. So you see this throughout history.
Speaker 3: So you have scientists who don't believe and scientists who do.
Speaker 3: But it doesn't really make much difference, you know, because
Speaker 3: either you believe the universe is this fantastically incredible beautiful
Speaker 3: thing or you think it's a fantastically incredibly beautiful thing
Speaker 3: that God made, it doesn't really make a lot of
Speaker 3: difference really. So but what we actually see is that
Speaker 3: laws of physics that we've actually discovered do actually produce
Speaker 3: the universe that we that we see around us. So,
Speaker 3: for instance, we kind of know what's what the universe
Speaker 3: was like very early on in a big band, because
Speaker 3: we can see the art to go with the big Bank,
Speaker 3: so we could we know what the universe was like
Speaker 3: within within a few hundred thousand years of the Big Bank.
Speaker 3: We can run in our computers forward the history of
Speaker 3: the universe using the laws of gravity, you know, the
Speaker 3: law of gravity in the laws that we see, and
Speaker 3: it gives us the universe which is very similar to
Speaker 3: the one that puts around us, you know, with galaxies,
Speaker 3: the size of the Milky Way, and all the properties
Speaker 3: of the universe. So it doesn't appear to be any
Speaker 3: divine hand is actually needed. So that's why I say
Speaker 3: it's a matter of choice, really, And some some physicists
Speaker 3: are or scientists are religious, and others are not. I mean,
Speaker 3: Eiseen used to make loads of statements that use the
Speaker 3: word God. He wasn't religious himself, but he used to
Speaker 3: say things like God does not play dice with the
Speaker 3: universe and all that kind of stuff. But that's that's
Speaker 3: so that's really as I say, that's that's you can
Speaker 3: or you can't. It depends on your your own belief really.
Speaker 2: Sure do you think gravity is the glue that keeps
Speaker 2: everything together?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 3: Gravity is that is the glue that keeps large things together.
Speaker 3: Because gravity, and this is one of the absolute mysteries
Speaker 3: of science, is one followed by forty zero strong weaker
Speaker 3: than the forced the electric force. That's holding together the
Speaker 3: atoms in your body. So that's ten thousand, billion, billion,
Speaker 3: billion billion times weaker. Okay, So that's a real mystery
Speaker 3: why the electric force is so much stronger. But it
Speaker 3: turns out that the electric force comes in two types,
Speaker 3: So it says a repulsive type and an attractive type,
Speaker 3: and in your body, those two forces completely cancel out.
Speaker 3: But gravity only comes in one form. It's only attractive.
Speaker 3: So the more material you get, the more gravity you get.
Speaker 3: So when you get to a certain size a certain
Speaker 3: amount of material, gravity begins to dominate. And in our
Speaker 3: solar system, that size is an object about three or
Speaker 3: four hundred kilometers across. Okay, So when you get beyond that,
Speaker 3: gravity is so strong it can gather everything, crash everything
Speaker 3: into a sphere. When you have less material and that
Speaker 3: it can't. So when you look out across the Solar system,
Speaker 3: everything that's less than three or four hundred kilometers across
Speaker 3: is like a potato potato shaped, and everything that's more
Speaker 3: than three or four hundred klometers across is a sphere.
Speaker 3: And that's because that's the scale of which gravity begins
Speaker 3: to dominate. So after that scale, it dominates everything. So
Speaker 3: it dominates planets, It dominates stars, it dominates the galaxy,
Speaker 3: and it dominates the universe. So in a way, it
Speaker 3: controls everything that matters to us. But of course it
Speaker 3: doesn't control the physics in your body, because that's the
Speaker 3: electric force. But so yeah, yeah, it is the dominant
Speaker 3: force because it only comes in one form and it
Speaker 3: only gets strong the more matter. The more matter you have,
Speaker 3: the more gravity you have.
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