Start the Week

14/03/2011

Andrew Marr with the physicists Brian Greene and Brian Cox explores the universe in all its wonder. And he attempts to understand our relation to parallel universes, which can be separated from us by enormous stretches of time and space, or hover just millimetres away. The science writer, Angela Saini, looks at why India is so successful in producing the next generation of doctors and scientists, in her book, Geek Nation.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 42m
Broadcast on:: 14 Mar 2011
Audio Format:: other

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Brian Greens, a professor of physics and maths, who specializes in string theory and is fascinated by parallel universes, was our big bang, only one of many. We'll be talking about quilted multiverse's holographic universes, and the ultimate universe in which every possible universe is a real one. Are these the fireside myths of modern man, or are they new realities revealed by maths? Later we're going to be talking about a nation determined to have its own space program and which is obsessed by physics and maths in the way other places are obsessed by football. That's India, subject of Angela Sainey's geek nation. First though, a man who's made physics popular and even sexy, Brian Cox, whose wonders of the universe, yes just sticking to one universe this time, is running on BBC2 just now and who's been dealing with time, the elements, gravity and light, so small matters. Brian, let's start with I suppose the tone, which is an interesting question, which is one of wonder and amazement and excitement which you convey to the audience. But a lot of the subject is, at another level I suppose quite bleak, isn't it? I mean it's the end of everything, as well as the beginning of everything. Yeah, it's a difficult balance to strike when you put a program on BBC2 at prime time. You clearly can't give a physics lecture and even if you could, four hours is the beginnings of an undergraduate course. So you can't really deliver a huge amount of physics. So you've got what we did, what I wanted to do was focus on certain things. And as you mentioned the first program about time, we focused on one piece of physics really, which is called the second law of thermodynamics, which basically says that everything will fall to bits. Why? Because it's more likely that that's what's going to happen. So we explained that this is a statistical law, but it has profound consequences for the universe. And you come quite close to defining time, that old, that old, ancient philosophical question as entropy, as the second law things fall apart. Yeah, and that's interesting because there are, it's still, and I'm sure Brian can talk about this as well, it's still not understood really what time is, that the first inkling of a definition in physics was this idea that it's the direction in which things become more disordered. That's called the thermodynamic arrow of time. And that's the path that we took, which is very conventional and of undergraduate physics, I suppose. Now actually when you get down to the very basic level to ask what time is, Einstein had it as a dimension. So he had this thing called space time. And so time is just a dimension you move through with some restrictions. But then when you go to the very small level, our understanding begins to break down. This is part of string theory, I suppose, in quantum theory of gravity. So it was one choice of very actual undergraduate physics through to tell a story of the universe. And you've taken another example when you're talking about gravity in another of the programs, and the notion of gravity being curved, for instance, which people struggle with. At what level of the procedure did you say, well, we're not going to do, we're not going to write up equations on the board, as it were. We're going to try and tell this through metaphor. We're going to try and tell it through geography. We're going to move around this planet and find ways of telling the story that way. Actually, interesting that the gravity program is next week. So I think it's by far the most ambitious attempt to tell a story as physics. I mean, we start with this bizarre observation that Galileo knew and Newton knew, that no matter how massive something is, it falls at the same rate in the gravitational field. They're very famous Apollo, I think it's Apollo 17 or Apollo 16, when one of the astronauts dropped a feather in a hammer on the moon. And because there's no air resistance, they hit the ground at the same time. Now, that's the key to understanding Einstein's theory of general relativity. And we do that, but it's very televisual. We start in the vomit comet, which is this famous NASA aircraft. - When you're moving to gravity... - Yeah, and then follows a path such that you're in free fall, and gravity goes away. And that's the other key in sight, which is related, actually. So we actually do try and tell a rather, again, standard undergraduate physics story all the way through. But you're right. I mean, I think the key thing for me is that because you've got a limited time, then what you really want to do is kindle some spark of interest in the audience in physics. You say how beautiful I think physics is, how profoundly important it is. And then further study is necessary, of course. But I think that's all you can hope to do in a documentary. It would be... It's a truism these days to say that you cannot be educated now if you don't understand anything about science. It's no longer possible to say I'm an educated person if you don't understand science. Would you see this kind of project as a gateway? In other words, lots of people... It's always struck me. I mean, I taught science a very conventional way at school. I was bored rigid by the periodic table, and yet the 92 elements are going to appear in one of your other programs again. And I'm sort of... I don't know where one stands on the notion of we need to excite people more about science. We need more popular scientists, more people like yourself and another level, Richard Dawkins and so on, engaging people versus actually the old fashion notion that people have to be taught a large number of facts that they have to get inside their brain. It's quite hard work, and it has probably have to do this at school, otherwise they're not going to be able to go further than saying wow as it were. I think the first thing to say is I think science is so important, probably the most important thing that we do in culture. That's semi-controversial, I'll say it. And so I think it has to be part of popular culture. It has to be the case that no politician, no self-respecting commentator in any country can sit there and say well of course I don't understand science. I understand Shakespeare, I understand opera, I understand music, I don't understand science. That should be completely unacceptable because it's so important. Could you look at the great issues of the day, global warming, aging population, the fight against pandemic disease, all these big questions have their answers firmly rooted in science. So I think the key thing is to generate an understanding and a respect for the process. You see the scientists say, if the scientific opinion, let's take one so-called controversial area, childhood vaccination. Now it is obvious all the evidence tells you that vaccinating your children against diseases such as measles and rubella is the safest thing to do, right? That's clear. But the key thing is that you can't expect people to go back and look at the peer-reviewed papers and the scientific literature and make their own mind up because it's too complicated, people have better things to do. So you need to understand what the process of science is in order that the conclusions are brought into public debate properly. We mustn't go scooting off onto global warming and all the rest of it, but it only goes to show the danger when scientists become political and too polemical. They're not very good at it. And starting, they're not very good at it. And they do undermine that belief in the fundamental belief that science is different because of peer review that most people have got. Absolutely. I think this is why I think science being part of popular culture and being under the process, being understood is so important. You can't expect a scientist to stand in a political debate arena and be good at that. That's a politicians job. But I think scientists just need to be quite pure about the process. Just before we open this up, we can talk about the making of these programs. It's always a fascinating thing. But a lot of stuff in the papers today about the music in your programs being too loud. The BBC are going to have to go back and turn down all the music. What do you think about that? I mean, they did. And I thought it was a mistake actually. See, I think that I want to work on a film with Danny Boyle, a film called Sunshine, before he won the Oscar. And he always said that the music is an integral part of the emotional presentation of a film. He always ring fenced the budget for music, and usually for a British filmmaker. And I think that's the case with these documentaries, that they're films as well as lectures. And so I think it's an era actually. I think that we can sometimes be too responsive to the minority of people who complain. My view is it should be a rather more cinematic experience. And it's because you need the emotional punch, which is what it goes. Yeah, because at the end of the day, it's a piece of film on television. It's not a lecture. Brian Green, you are also making films on tough stuff. Any reflections on what you've heard from Brian Cox about the difficulty of what you put in and what you leave out and how far you can bring people with you in what are hard things for a lot of people to understand. Well, I think we're quite like-minded, actually, in the way we look at the way that you make science films. I think the point is there are a lot of wondrous ideas out there in physics that can inspire, that can excite the imagination. And what we need to do is to light that flame. That's really what these films can do. It's what books can do. You know, in school, you were talking about the details that you need to learn to actually call yourself educated to really understand the inner workings of science. My feeling is, in school, we focus in on the details far too quickly, because frankly, that's what we can test. So we teach the details and then we test it. And then someone feels like they've learned a little bit of science, but typically, like you say, they're bored stiff. Here's your Bunsen burner. Here's your periodic table. Here are your lists of- Here are the parts of the cell and so forth. And what we need to do in school and what these films are the first step to try to do is take the young mind out beyond the stars to show the big wondrous ideas that make learning the details something that you want to do because you want to understand the big ideas. And that commensurate focus on the big ideas is absolutely essential and is what we typically don't do enough of. I'd love to hear Angela say anything about this because we'll be talking about India later on in 'Geek Nation', but it's very clear from your book that there is a great tradition of rote learning in Indian physics and mathematics teaching that actually people do sit and grind their way through the numbers. Yeah, I mean, there's a wonder about science as well, and there's a love of technology, but what I found fascinating about Brian's approach to making this series was that there were no other voices. There were- there was just your voice all the way through, and the places you went to- I mean, there was one example I think in one of the earlier episodes where you go to the hotel at the end of the universe, I think in the Himalayas, and I wondered what- I mean, what drove you to choose which places you chose? Do you know it was- it was more difficult in this series than the previous one, Solar System. It was in the Solar System series, if you want to talk about volcanoes you go to a volcano. In this case you have to find backdrops that I think add to the message and also emotionally connect with the- with the audience, but it's very difficult if you want to talk about, for example, the synthesis of elements in stars to say, well, where can we go to film this? You can't do it in a room in London, so- so what do you do? And actually, the Himalayas, it was one part of one trip to Kathmandu, because we began with the- the Hindu myth or the- the religious belief- the statement that all things are recycled, which is actually true in the universe, so we thought it was a nice backdrop to begin that debate of- of where do the elements come from and where do they go when we die, you know, they recycle into new planets, so that was the motivation behind that. Those ideas, those philosophical and religious ideas, if you like, are the roots of very early scientific thought, even though that wouldn't- that wouldn't be what we consider modern science today, obviously, it's very far from modern science, but, you know, these- this inquiry, this spirit of trying to understand the world, is still there in India in lots of ways, and you can agree with it or not agree with it, but there's a love of science there that has roots in that kind of- Well, it is, as I said, an intro- it is very fundamental. People have always cricked their necks and looked upwards and tried to work out what was going on originally through astronomy, astrology and astronomy, and to what extent do you think people now get the notion that when you say the universe is 13.7 billion years old or whatever, that these are- these are hard and incontestable facts that you are describing, because they're not all hard and incontestable facts, aren't they? Well, none of them- none of them are actually. There's no incontestable facts in science, and even that- that age depends on a model, which is the standard model stems back from Einstein's theory in 1915 of general relativity. I mean, there are theories that Brian may talk about them, whether the universe can have been around forever. The evidence is that 13.7 billion years ago, given some assumptions, something very interesting happened that caused space to be very hot and very dense, have lots of energy in it, and it's been expanding ever since. But there are theories that the universe has been around forever, and these two things sheets of space-time, called brains, bump together. We live on one of them, there are other ones, and that could have triggered what we see as the Big Bang. So, I think it's very important, actually, that there are no absolute truths in science, and that's the key to its success, actually. Well, that takes us perfectly onto to Brian Green, because in your book on parallel universes, or multiverses, and so on, one of the early episodes, I think, takes Einstein and his notion of the universe being fixed and not changing, and the shock and horror when he is confronted by the mathematical conclusions from his own work, which suggests the universe is expanding. Yes, this was an episode in the early 20th century, where Einstein was trying to understand the laws of gravity. The general theory of relativity is the idea that he finally came up with, and when he studied the mathematics, when applied not to say the earth going around the sun, but to the entire universe, he found that math said something unexpected. It said the universe couldn't have a fixed size. It had to either be expanding or contracting, which was completely countered to the prevailing wisdom and completely countered to what he expected the universe to be like on its largest of scales. I mean, you look up, you don't see stars wildly moving through space, so you kind of think that it's probably fixed and unchanging on the largest of scales. So when he confronted this mathematics, he basically said, "I'm going to try to fiddle with the math to try to avoid this unpalatable conclusion." That's right, he introduced his cosmological constant that is a kind of anti-gravity force that could counteract the usual attractive pull of gravity and create a kind of balancing act, where the universe wouldn't expand or contract, it would be static. But 12 years later, observations largely by Edwin Hubble, United States, looking at distant galaxies showed that they're actually all moving away from us. The universe is expanding. At that point, Einstein kind of hit himself in the head, erased this little change to the mathematics, his cosmological constant, and basically wished he would have just trusted the math. If he had, he would have predicted the expansion of the universe a dozen years before it was observed. How amazing would that have been? That would have been an extraordinary moment, but your book, I suppose, is all about following the maths, because it describes a series of potential multiverses or universes that most people will find it impossible almost to imagine, and you're using metaphors and similes all the time to try to explain them. But let's just run through, I mean, talk to us a little bit about the quilted multiverse, because that's really where things start, isn't it? Well, that's in some ways a simplest multiverse proposal. As you're noting, the book actually covers nine variations on the theme of our universe being one of many universes, perhaps it's worth just saying, you know, when you hear universe, you think everything. So what could multiple universes be multiple, everything's? And the idea is that our research is suggesting that we have long thought to be everything might be a small part of something much, much bigger, that bigger thing may contain other realms rightly called universes. Now, there's one example that you're referring to what I call the quilted multiverse comes from the supposition that space may go on infinitely far. You go into a spaceship, you travel out, what happens? Do you hit a brick wall? Most of us don't think so. Do you cycle back to your starting point like Francis Drake did on the planet Earth? No, we don't think that's possible. We don't have evidence for that. Or do you keep on going forever? Now, if you go on forever, there's a startling conclusion, which is that there are other copies of us out there in the universe having this conversation. Because if it's infinite, every possibility of particle arrangement must be there somewhere. That's right. You can even be a little bit more precise than that. In any given finite region of space, matter can only arrange itself in finitely many different ways. You can establish this quite directly. And I like to think of a deck of cards as a good analogy. When you shuffle the deck, the cards come out in different orders. And you can shuffle again and again, you get different orders. But sooner or later, the order of the cards has to repeat because they're only finitely many different possible orders. Similarly, in infinite space, the particle arrangements region by region ultimately have to repeat too. There aren't enough different arrangements to go around. Now, you and I, we are just arrangements of particles. So if the arrangement of particles here repeats out there, then there are versions of us out there having this kind of discussion. I can hear a lot of people listening to this and saying, okay, I understand the mathematical logic behind this. But what is the order of reality that we're talking about? I simply cannot accept or believe that there is another universe out of there where I'm having a conversation with you, but you're not called Brian, you're called Tim. But otherwise, everything else is the same. Right. And I understand that reaction quite well. I have to tell you, it's my gut reaction too, when I hear these kinds of ideas. But I'm trained in mathematics. So I follow the math. I don't follow it blindly. There are loopholes. Well, for instance, space may not go on infinitely far, or perhaps way out there, the laws are so vastly different that we can't say anything about what happens far away from here. These are possible ways out of this conclusion. So we've talked about quilted multiverse. It just talked to us about the brain. That's B-R-A-N-E, by the way, not A-I-N, the brain multiverse that Brian Cox was talking about. Yes, this is an idea that comes out of string theory, this approach to a unified theory that many of us around the world have been working on for some time. And the math there suggests the possibility that what we have long thought to be the universe may actually take place on a kind of giant membrane, a kind of giant sheet of space time as Brian was referring to it. Every star, every galaxy may actually be on this membrane, and brain is the shorthand that we use for this term. The metaphor I like there is think of a giant slice of bread. Imagine that everything we know about is not one big giant piece of bread. The idea is there could be other slices of bread out there, other universes populating a big cosmic loaf of universes. I'm going to say we were on a radio show together in New York a few years ago now with Alan Older, the comedian, and when Brian said that he said, "Brian, next time you're going to be telling those there are a whole other bakeries." That was brilliant. But I cut you, yeah, there's not, now lots of bits of bread, but I come back to the sort of daft-lady questions we say in Scotland. What is the, when you say the story is, it seems to be, or whatever it might be, what does it seems to be come from? What is the story? Well, let me just answer that in the following way. You brought a mindset as a good example where maths had something he didn't believe it, but then observations confirmed it and he had to finally accept that. When we do these mathematical calculations which suggest these weird possibilities of other us is out there in these brain universe and so forth, we don't believe it until there is experimental or observational proof. So the math tells you what to look at. It reveals what's just beyond the horizon, but until there's an observation or experiment, you can't believe it. So explain to me this because Brian Cox works at CERN where the Large Hadron Collider is smashing particles into each other with great verven enthusiasm all the time, and you say that there is a possibility of getting some hard proof of a brain multiverse from that work going on there. And I've read the relevant paragraph in your book several times, and I'm still my simple brain struggling with it. So take it through it again. Yes, it's a fairly straightforward idea. You know, when those enthusiastic protons are slammed into each other at CERN, the possibility is the following can happen. When the protons slam into each other, they create debris. Some of that debris can get ejected off of our universe, off of our slice of bread, off of our brain. Now, how would we know that? Well, if debris exits our brain, it will carry away some energy with it. Now, if it carries away energy with it, that means it'll be less energy in our detectors after the collision than before. There'll be missing energy signatures. Now, if we could find these missing energy signatures, giving us some hard evidence that we are living on this brain, then there's no reason to suspect there aren't other brains out there. That is going on at the moment. And so that's what we're looking for. And the thing is, it's very difficult because there are other things that can take energy away. There are particles called neutrinos, which are streaming through the Earth now from the sun, 60 billion per centimeter squared per second, actually going through our heads now. The thing is they don't interact with matter very strongly. So they escape as well. So we know how to look for missing energy. The thing is that these signatures would be different to those. So it's a very main line, kind of run of the mill analysis in a way. It sounds very difficult to measure, but we're very well practiced at measuring that sort of signature. There are other signatures as well. You can find what's called towers of so-called kalooza-cline particles, essentially the particles that we know of. You can see resonances of them. So you can see exact copies of them that are heavier that stack up in a tower. So you see one heavy one, we're heavier on, heavier one. And again, they're signatures for perhaps extra dimensions. So this is really in the realm of experimental physics in that sense. And just one, I want to talk about one other multiverse, which is the holographic multiverse, which is one of the strangest ones of all. Yeah, that one is hard to wrap your mind around, even if you think about it every single day. Again, an idea that culminated with string theory, but has a nice long history largely from the study of black holes, which suggests that everything that we see in the three-dimensional world around us may be kind of like a holographic projection of fundamental processes that take place on a thin two-dimensional surface that surrounds us, much as an ordinary-- Wait, wait, let me finish. Much like an ornate hologram. What is it? It's a thin piece of plastic. You illuminate it the right way, it creates a realistic three-dimensional image. We are finding a similar thing may be true of reality itself. So, okay, what are these ideas, whether they're tested, whether verified or not, what are they going to do to sort of mankind's view of itself? Because at one level, they sound very much like ancient myth stories that people used to sit around the fire and tell each other about the nature of reality. And, of course, if there are many other universes, we're not going to reach them. So, it's not going to affect our lives, as it were, but it is going to affect our sense of who we are. You know, there's one great piece that Brian alluded to it in his book about Maxwell's equation. Look back into history. The 1860s, we had the great synthesis, and I understand any electricity and magnetism by the Scottish physicist James Clark Maxwell. He essentially triggered the line of thought because he had the speed of light in his equations as a constant thing that led to relativity. Now, relativity underpins our modern view of the world. You can't do, understand, transistors and things without relativity and quantum mechanics, and that was kind of, in a way, the basis for the seed that led us onto that line of understanding. Now, so whilst in itself it looked like some just mathematics and an elegant piece of mathematics, it led in many ways to the 20th century to the modern world. And I think the same can be said about these investigations, understanding nature at a fundamental level, has always in the past proved to be astonishingly useful. So, I would just follow up that with the perhaps more philosophical notion that the last 500 years have witnessed one after another cosmic demotion for humanity. There was a time when we thought the earth was the center of everything. That gave way to the sun being the center. That gave way to the sun being one of 100 billion stars in the galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy, which gave way to the Milky Way being one of hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe. Which we learned from Brian is about to be hit, not about to be hit by Andromeda and other galaxy in due course. That's right. Now, if this progression is going to repeat, the next step would be our universe being one of many universes. So, we may just find ourselves increasingly marginalized in the grand cosmic scheme in terms of how we fit in, but to me, I flip it around the other way. I find it thrilling that we can sit here on planet earth around this little nondescript star, do some calculations, and maybe learn things about the grandest picture of reality. I emphasize, we don't believe that picture until there's experimental evidence, but the math is suggesting a grand vista that we otherwise just wouldn't think of. And the extraordinary thing is that the evidence is all around us, Brian. I mean, that's, I suppose, part of the message of your films is that you look around you and ancient time and the basics of the fabric of the universe are all around us. You said right at the beginning of the show that there's this innate wonder, I suppose, is the right word. There's this human need to understand nature's proven to be very useful, as I mentioned, but it's there. And this is where it's driven us. You know, there's the world observing the world and trying to make sense of it has driven us to string theory, has driven us these extra dimensional ideas, holographic universes. You know, these are not invented to be obtuse or difficult. They're invented that they come up with by theoretical physicists because we can't explain nature as we see it. A lot of people then start to think about religion. Angela, I'm very interested in the use that you've made of and other people describing other people making the use of ancient Hindu scriptures, which sort of tell stories about matter and space and the nature of things, which suddenly come round again and collide with modern physics and at least produce echoes of modern physics. Yeah, I mean, Brian Cox mentioned it in one of his, in one of the series in his programmes. I mean, what you can take your sense of reality and your sense of the world from so many different sources. Some people take it from religion. I don't take it from religion. What I found fascinating about Brian Greensburg was that I'm not religious, but I find it somehow reassuring this idea that this Angela Saney here in this universe can might make wrong decisions, but there are other Angela Saney's and other universes who are making the right decisions. So in that way, that's moral relativity. That's not general relativity. But I find it philosophically reassuring and it's nice to engage with these ideas because somehow we put science back into that realm of not just being about learning the facts anymore, but also about engaging with the implications of philosophical implications of things. And that's, I think, something we need to reintroduce into science in this country at least, but they already have in India. I mean, India, it's always been a part of their thinking. Doesn't it undermine hard atheism, however, that if there are 11 different dimensions and there are all sorts of things around us, including dark matter and dark energy that we can't understand, how can you be absolutely certain about anything? I mean, I decide with Jonathan Miller here. He said that he rejects the label of the atheist because he thinks about the existence of God as often as he thinks about the existence of which is, which sounds dismissive, but in a sense, it's true that the labeling of someone as an atheist, I find unhelpful actually. I mean, I think science is quite simple. It's the investigation of nature. And so, as I said at the start, saying there are no universal truths in science really means that. So, I'm not sure. I mean, I don't have a religious faith myself, but I don't think there's anything in science that tells you that you can't have at some level. There is, if you think that the Bible tells you they're 6,000 years old, then you're wrong, right? So that's clear. But I think that the battle between science and religion, I think it's almost unhelpful and almost unfounded. I agree with that completely. And I mean, what I found incredible about traveling through India is here we have this militant atheism, which in some way has clashed against huge sections of society who are religious and feel they're not stupid for being religious, obviously. But whereas in India, it kind of sits side-by-side religion and science, not always comfortably, but generally learning from each other in a way, which is healthy, I think. Well, let's talk a bit more about India then, and as you've described it geek nation, because one aspect of it is there's this belief in Hindu science, which, and the ancient belief that there were flying machines and all the rest of the aircraft in ancient times, which can seem a bit visible and you can laugh at. And at the same time, an enormous energy and enthusiasm for hard science in India, which probably puts this country, certainly puts this country to shame and most of the west to shame. And you suggest comes from a desperation to get out in escape poverty. There are lots of drivers, I think, for science in India. I happen to come from a very geeky Indian family. My dad was a chemical engineer, I have lots of engineers and scientists in my family, and I studied engineering myself. And you know, I've traveled to India lots of times. It was only recently that I went there, and I noticed this explosion in interest in science and engineering. These huge industries coming up, especially the IT industry. And I just thought this has to be chronicled. Somebody has to talk about this. But then at the same time, there is overwhelming poverty, like you say, there is overwhelming illiteracy. There are more illiterate adults in India than there are people in the United States. And you can't get away from these things. It's a birthplace of many of the major faiths. And so how do you square that love of science and technology with these ideas? Well, one, I suppose, attempt to square it comes from politics, because India, very unlike Britain or America or anywhere else that I know of, in Nehru, has an early Democratic leader who says, I'm going to quite a bit of Nehru now, that only science can solve problems of hunger and poverty and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening custom and tradition. The future, he said, belongs to science, and to those who make friends with science. And that has been a theme, there's lots of problems, as we know, with Indian politics. But that's been a theme in Indian politics all the way through, doesn't it? Absolutely. It's a baton that's been carried by every Indian leader, subsequent Nehru. So in those very early days of Indian independence, he instilled this idea that India should be a more scientific nation, that we should have nuclear power, that we should have hydroelectric dams, we should have more colleges. He set up the Indian Institutes of Technology. Just tell us about these because these are very unusual places in world terms. Absolutely. They are amazing. They are these huge engineering colleges, incredibly competitive to get into. So around half a million kids sit the engineering college entrance exams every year, only 10,000 will get a place. It makes oxford easy, easy, by comparison to Harvard or whatever. And once you're there, it's incredibly tough, and it's demanding, but the graduates have gone on to do incredible things. They're politicians, technocrats, many of them are running Silicon Valley companies, many of them are running big IT companies in India. So there was this idea very early on in India's independent history that science would build the nation. And it's been carried forward to this day. One of the places that you visit in this book, people have probably heard of Google's extraordinary campus on or headquarters in Silicon Valley. But Infosys, the Indian company, has something at least as odd or extraordinary in India. Well, I went to Bangalore, which a lot of people will know as the geeky heart of India, the IT capital. And there are two satellite districts on either side of Bangalore. And one of them is called Electronic City, which is no coincidence. The aim was to build, many years ago, a Silicon Valley competitor. And within that city is the emphasis campus, which is incredible. There's this huge glass pyramid that modeled on the Louvre in Paris. There's this another massive building that looks like a washing machine. It's got a circle cut out of the middle. And these grand buildings, I interviewed the founder of Infosys, Narayanamurti, who is like the Bill Gates of India. Very incredibly famous there. And I asked him, why have you built these incredible buildings here in India, surrounded by poverty? And his answer was that they are temples to technology. And that wasn't a religious thing. He was saying that they are symbols of aspiration. They are objects that young people can look at and say, India is as good as anywhere else in Science 90. One of the things that I took from your book, I didn't understand before, was the very intense connection between America and India, the number of Indians over in the states in California running things, but also the number of Indians who have come back from the states and are running companies and are bringing some of the technical know-how, but also the commercial spirit of the states back into India. When we think of the 1980s and 1990s, Indian scientists were contributing to this kind of brain drain out of India into the West. It's the reason that today the NHS, one in five doctors, is of Indian origin. And the same in Silicon Valley, if you go there, there are lots of Indian scientists. I'm actually going there for the first time next week to speak at Google. And Google has a lot of Indian scientists. So does Microsoft. And Bill Gates has commented on the power of the IITs to man his organization. That's the incredible influence of these places. It's difficult not to read your book and to think about Britain. So your family migrated to Britain, but actually compared with what's going on in India, Britain seems very soft, very weak, very unenergetic in the world of science. We're not putting the effort in. We're not putting the work in that India is now putting in. Well, let me give you an example. My dad graduated as a chemical engineer in India in the 1960s. And he came here to London in the 1970s to look for work. He had worked in India, but India wasn't known for its engineering. Britain was the engineering leader at that time. And in the time between him graduating and me graduating in engineering from the UK, everything has switched. India is the famous engineering nation now. We do not think of Britain that way so much. So it just goes to illustrate how drastically things have changed. Brian, if you look globally, India is very exciting because if you just care about science, then a nation of that size and that power embracing science engineering is absolutely wonderful. If you look at it from a very local perspective, we're on the British Broadcasting Corporation. It's a tragedy, I think, that we are still, we have the most amazing, astonishing foundation. Our university is by some measure the best in the world, by any measure second only to the United States. We have the foundation to be a global powerhouse in science and engineering. We still are by most measures, but we under invest to an almost criminal level, I think. And it's very cheap. I mean, the investment in research just to set the scene in Britain, government investment in research councils is about 3.2, 3.3 billion a year. Now, so it's single figure billions we're talking about. Now, we could still aspire to be the best place in the world to do science and engineering with a relatively small investment. And I do not understand for the life of me while we don't take the foundation we have and carry it forward. Globally, of course, it doesn't matter because India, China, those countries will do it because they see the benefits. Is there a kind of cultural fatalism that's a danger here, that countries are energetic, everybody works hard, they do the hard stuff, they do the hard science, they do the hard business, they kind of put in the eyes, they don't have leisure as they come up. And then they reach a certain standard, you know, everybody goes to make films or write poetry or kind of relax a bit, and they go through an inevitable downward spiral. Do we believe that or do we think actually that good politics and good investment and so on can prevent that fatalism? To some extent, that is what is happening in Japan at the moment, that here is a country that experiences phenomenal rise in science and tech, and now the kids are, you know, exploring other options, and that's natural. And in fact, that's already happening in India. You see many more fashion designers and jewellery designers and things like these artists and writers than you used to. My dad's time, everyone wanted to be an engineer. But there is still, I think, in Asia, particularly this love of the new, this love of technology and science, which somehow, in the West, we seem to have dipped away. I mean, obviously, Brian Cox's programme is reigniting that love, but it's still not the same. But I think part of it too is what we spoke about at the earlier part of the programme, there is an absolute need to have a radical cultural shift in which we see science, we see technology, we see engineering as a vital part of a full life when we look around, right? Who would ever say, oh, music, yeah, you can probably do away with that literature. Man, not that important theatre, you know, whatever. We don't do that because we recognise those as the pillars of a full cultural life. Science needs to stand right beside all of those entities, and that we look at it as something that you don't have a full life if you don't engage with it. And that, I think, would change some of the shift that you're talking about, where early on you see the value of it, but then you rise to a level and you don't. If it's part of the cultural fabric, then it would be interwoven in the tapestry of life. It's one thing to say that the reality is very different. Calling myself an engineer in this country, a lot of people think of me in the same kind of sphere as a garage mechanic. When I go to India, they're astounded that I chose to do journalism because it's a career that you would only do as a last resort. They're like, you know, if you're an engineer, you're at the top of the marriage stakes in the matrimonial ads. That would be my number one line. I'm an engineering graduate. It's a very modern disease in Britain, isn't it? Because if you look back a hundred years, 150 years, Brunel, Stevenson, you know, these are the great heroes. I think you yourself, don't you, Brunel, or was it Jeremy Clarkson? Sorry, I'm sorry. Jeremy Clarkson, Brunel, I was Darwin. Yeah, much superior figure in my view, but there we go. They're not an engineer. But certainly at the turn of the early 1900s, anybody who was kind of radical and ambitious and so on wanted to go and get into Kensington and study biology and physics. And it's a mystery to me how we've lost that because obviously the potential of engineering and science to change people's lives, to change the quality of life is there for all to see. It's here. You know, we use it every day. Every measure tells you that. It is a bit like, is it not, the old classical education, where if you didn't, if you hadn't done the basics of understanding Greek and Latin, then you were cut out of what people were talking about. Now, if you haven't understood the basics of physics and chemistry and biology, then you can't be part of that, which comes straight back to schools and education. Yeah, the mystery is not one that is impenetrable at least in the United States. I'm not sure the situation here. But when you look at those who are teaching young kids science, the vast majority of those teachers have no real experience in science in the United States. Now, look, would you send a kid to learn piano from someone who hadn't any real experience in piano? I don't think so. It doesn't make any sense. How can we teach kids about physics, chemistry, biology, if someone isn't impassioned about the subject because they don't really know much about it. They're one step ahead. And government clearly has the key role in this, because the only education is in general state provided for most people. And so you need to make it possible for professional scientists to teach children it's clear and that's it. Well, we've run out of time. I just hope a minister or two was listening to all of that, and we'll take note. But thank you very much to my guest this week. Angela Saney's geek nation and Brian Greene's The Hidden Reality are both out now, and Brian will be speaking at Queen Elizabeth Hall at the South Bank Center on Thursday. And you can, of course, see Brian Cox's wonders of the universe on Sunday evening, the next one. Next week, I'm going to be talking about genocide and the Arctic and great design with John Makepeace, Pamela Yates and Melanie McGrath. But for now, thank you and goodbye.

Producer: Katy Hickman.