The difference between ten and infinity

February 12, 2015 • 2:51 pm

By Grania Spingies

Brian Cox is Stateside at the moment, and was on The Conan Show promoting the US run of BBC 4’s The Infinite Monkey Cage, the science podcast brainchild of Robin Ince and Brian Cox that cannot be praised highly enough (it’s funny, it’s got science in and a whole lot of smart people who are passionate about their subject – what more could you possibly want?) and one which  our congenial host will be a guest on when the show reaches Chicago.

You can watch bits of the chat with Conan here.

oppo

 

Of course, the really important part of the discussion is Deepak Chopra’s glasses. Are they diamonds? Are they rhinestones? Will we ever really know?

Of course, it doesn’t matter because as we all know the definition of a Real Scientist is whether they take Dr Chopra seriously or not, so Brian Cox and his Ph.D. in high energy particle physics are disqualified straight out the gate.

 

h/t: Ant

100 thoughts on “The difference between ten and infinity”

  1. Are they diamonds? Are they rhinestones? Will we ever really know?

    According to the Deepak quote generator they’re nature inspired ephemeral possibilities.

      1. Based on the information from Wikipedia, I’m supposed to hate the TV presenter Gia Milinovich.

        Brian: the looks of a rock star (and he plays, too!) and the brain of a particle physicist. And a sense of humor. What else can a girl ask for?

          1. He was in some terrible bands though.

            That’s it. That’s all I can say against him. There’s nothing else. I think the guy even supports Manchester United. He’s impossible to dislike.

          2. He supports Oldham Athletic. No one actually from Manchester, supports Manchester Utd

            😉

      2. He is a great straight man to Robin Ince and Robin often talks about how they are the same age but Robin is ravaged by time or that everyone thinks Brian is hot.

      3. “How I hate him…”

        Oh, c’mon, two out of three ain’t bad.

        😀

        (Obviously I’m kidding–I’ve never seen you. 😉 )

          4. But maybe not as emotionally satisfying.

            My biggest regret is that I didn’t take up my dad’s offer to by me a proper drum kit when I was in my late pre teens. I was a Desi Arnaz Jr. fan. Of course, I could have been crap.

            * looks at bonus statement *

            But it’s OK, though.

            /@

          14. Hmmm. Very interesting. The suggested search returned this image for me. Have you been holding out on us Ant?

            What’s funny is, I just introduced my kids to this fine gentlemen just last night. I was playing old videos of him, trying to properly enculturate them, and we were dancing around the living room with near total abandon. The cat thought we had gone crazy.

          16. You look quite comfortable speaking to a crowd. I envy you that. I’d be sweating and making no sense. Never have gotten over that stage fright.

            Well, that’s not entirely true. As friends and family would be happy to attest to, if you give me a few drinks I’ll talk all you want. And likely more.

          17. Up to a few hundred is typical (the Warsaw gig was about 200, in one of the meeting rooms, not the stadium itself!), but my biggest audience was 2000+, in the main auditorium in the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès in Cannes. That *was* nerve wracking!

            I might exceed that this summer.

            /@

          18. Oh, such gravitas! Cool tie! And I think I want to pet that jacket…

            I’m with Darrelle–petrified of public speaking. (Apologies, Darrelle, if that’s too strong a verb for your case.)

          20. Well after all, the only reason we have kids is to keep us from getting too full of ourselves…

          24. “You look quite comfortable speaking to a crowd. I envy you that. I’d be sweating and making no sense. Never have gotten over that stage fright.” –darrelle

            Along the same lines, sitting down to play a concert, as Musical Beef does, would be equally terrifying to me.

  9. The title is evocative, but is there another connection with this show that I’m missing? Is it something they talk about on the show?

    2. Yes, one of the clips in the link is a short discussion of the angry mail TIMC gets about monkeys and cages and typewriters and infinity. Really actual angry mail.

      3. OK, watched all the clips now. The best part was when he asked the audience if science was popular and got a big response.

  11. I love the maple syrup analogy in his explanation of the Higgs boson. I think I finally understood what it’s about (at the kindergarden level, for sure).

    1. An important aspect where the analogy fails is that the Higgs field doesn’t brake stuff which is moving through it due to the energy loss from friction, as opposed to the syrup where movement is stopped this way.

          1. I thought that too but it’s almost hairsplitting in terms of the analogy. I suspect any analogy between ‘quantum things’ and the normal world is going to be very loose.

          2. That’s the thing, too – one can write down the Higgs mechanism in a classical form without quantum, in which case the presence of the Higgs field mainly changes the relation between frequency and wave length of matter waves. What that has to do with Inertia is even less intuitive.

        2. I’d say the better you understand the limitations of the commonly used comparisons, the more you know about it!

          1. “I can’t explain it to you in terms you’d understand, because *I* don’t understand it in terms that you’d understand.” — Richard Feynman (from memory)

            /@

          2. Exactly. Although I think Feynman meant something slightly different in that famous video. Sure, If one learns the math one has a language with which to understand it, in terms of mathematical objects, but usually not in terms of everyday experience. With a bit of luck you find something in everyday experience which closely mimicks the mathematical situation in question. What Feynman means, I think, as far as I understand it, is that such explanations can’t truly be a fundamental explanation of the phenomenon, and are actually in danger of being circular, because the everyday objects used for the demonstration depend on the phenomenon itself (such as a rubber band working with electromagnetic, therefore being a circular explanation for magnetic attraction). That’s to me a complaint on a slightly deeper level than the analogy breaking down because it reflects some properties (such as viscosity) incorrectly.

          3. Just a personal question, if I may – you wouldn’t be the same ‘Alex’ who was commenting at length in a God-friendly way in the recent thread ‘Stephen Fry on God’?

          4. No, I’m certainly not God-friendly. Should find the settings for user name and change it to something recognizable!

          5. I did think there was a difference in posting style between his and yours.

            With the number of posters on here, duplication of name is quite likely to happen. (Though not, I hope, to me 😉

          6. For folks without a WordPress account and a gravatar, I suspect WP generates icons based on the email address, so a different icon indicates a different person (or at least a different email address!).

            /@

          7. I went back to the ‘Stephen Fry on God’ thread to check. And that ‘Alex’ had a WP-generated icon almost the same colour as the Alex we’re conversing with here. Hence my query. (On close inspection it is different, but close enough to trick my memory).

  12. I notice that Brian seems to know his audience (or Conan’s) and is wary of throwing insults or criticizing to sharply. Conan’s audience is pretty broad, but can take some teasing. He laughingly condemned homeopathy and astrology, but avoided calling Deepak a fraud directly. He only suggested Conan provide him a blackboard and ask if could solve Schrodinger’s equation.
    Amazing what you can get away with, though, behind an agreeable smile.

    1. Actually he is being pretty harsh about all of them. What he’s saying is absolutely dismissive, it may just be how this comes across as he’s said similar on British TV and had complaints. That were also dismissed as before.

      Very dry humour, and he keeps up with pro comedians like Robin Ince and Dara O’Briain!

  13. Before you praise Brian too highly. You should be aware…..he has a barely concealed contempt for philosophy.

    6. I’m sure he supports philosophy that takes its root in science, that is lead by the scruff of the neck by science, that allows science to correct it when it goes horribly wrong….

  14. OK guys, I’ll do the chorus and others can tackle the verses:

    “Like a rhinestone guru
    Riding out on a horse into a quantum woo

    Like a rhinestone guru
    Getting barbs and tweets from scientists I don’t know”

    1. I’ve seen most of Wonders of Life ( plus his other two Wonders series) on TV and he really does express the wonderment so well, as well as the science so clearly. He must be an incredible professor.

  17. Seriously, I had no idea that the Chopralite was supposed to be dead calm. I have only ever seen him going ape at Harris, Shermer and Dawkins, as well as trolling our good host. The universe has raised my consciousness. x

  18. The difference between ten and infinity

    To misrepresent the old joke, isn’t that the difference between people who can count in decimal and those who count in Octal and can’t tell up from sideways?
    OK, maybe they’re counting in Nonal. Which would be credible if you had a 3-fold axis of symmetry. If we want to play SF games, give them Pauling (triple-strand) DNA. There’s a challenge for Craing Ventner and the “synthetic biologists”!

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