Is there life after death? What happens when we die, with Brian Cox

We can learn a lot from scientists about getting comfortable with being wrong, says physicist Professor Brian Cox. In this chat with Fearne, Brian explains the difference between ‘having an argument’ and ‘making an argument’. The latter gives us confidence to ask curious questions, come to our own conclusions, and remain open to being wrong, without letting ego get in the way of connection or progress. Brian talks through what the physics behind the universe says about the meaning of being human, including finding personal motivation and purpose, and whether there’s life after death. Fearne and Brian also wonder how we can make sure young girls aren’t discouraged from pursuing science, and Brian tells the story of being on the set of a famous alien movie... Tickets for Brian’s 2026 world tour – Emergence – are available now. Brian’s reading list: Richard Feynman – The Value of Science Carl Sagan – The Demon Haunted World Johannes Kepler – Harmonice Mundi Arthur C. Clark – 2001 Erwin Schrödinger – What is Life? Sir Paul Nurse – What is Life? If you liked this episode of Happy Place, you might also like: Jane Goodall https://pod.fo/e/f257b Bjorn Natthiko Lindeblad https://pod.fo/e/10d79a Major Tim Peake https://pod.fo/e/1fcab9 Child on the line is a three-part documentary podcast series celebrating the Volunteer Counsellors of Childline, and the brave children & young people who contact the helpline service. Listen here: https://www.childonthelinepodcast.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hi, I'm Natalie Dormer and I'm proud to be an ambassador for Childline. This year, Childline turns 40. To mark it, I've made Child on the Line, a three-part documentary podcast. We hear why children needed a helpline in 1986, how it was built against the odds and the challenges children face today, from abuse and mental health to social media and AI. Search Child on the Line and listen wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:28Fearne Cotton?

  Hello, a massive welcome to Happy Place with me, Fern Cotton. This is the show that tries to make sense of what it means to be human. Today, I'm chatting to Professor Brian Cox.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  I went to a film set, I was talking to the actor, he was a very famous actor, and it was a scene that he was playing when he saw some aliens for the first time. And he said to me, what would you think if you saw the aliens, they landed like outside here now, what do you think? And I said, I'd just be relieved. And he was like really confused, but you're scared of things. I don't know, because the responsibility, I'd feel the weight of being the only repository of meaning in a galaxy of 400 billion suns lifted off my shoulders. And then he looked so confused, I thought, I wonder if I've ruined this scene.

• 1:12Fearne Cotton?

  So, I learned some good lessons this week. One of them was to remember to have fun. Now, like you, I'm sure, we adults get very bogged down with the serious, the nitty gritty, and also just the mundane of life, because we're busy, we've got no time to do anything for ourselves, it's just relentless. But I took my kids to a theme park at the weekend, and part of me was like, oh god, it's gonna be so hectic, there's gonna be people everywhere, the kids are gonna be all hyped up. It wasn't as if I was looking forward to it, put it that way, but I had the best day out I have had in so long. I bloody loved it. My kids wanted to go on this one roller coaster three times in a row, and I was thinking,

• 1:57Fearne Cotton?

  oh, I can't be bothered. As soon as I got on it, I was screaming like a kid, I forgot about all my worries. When this bloody roller coaster started going backwards, I properly shit myself. But it was just the most, do you know what it was? It was a nostalgic sensation I'd forgotten about, because I used to love going to theme parks as a kid myself, and I literally haven't been to one since childhood. And it was just that sort of like being out of control, letting go, screaming because you're allowed to. Honestly, I had the best time ever. So this is your reminder and my reminder to have a little fun where we can, because otherwise you could go like weeks can go by and you're like, God, I've just been so serious for like three weeks about

• 2:40Fearne Cotton?

  having a laugh or doing something a bit silly or doing something for the sake of it. Everything's got to have a purpose and meaning. No, it hasn't. No, it hasn't. Just have some fun. And I'm saying that for me as much as I am you, you lovely lot. Now, let's talk about Brian. Brian is a physicist and he's one of the best communicators about science, cosmology and astronomy in the world. You might be one of the many people who listen to his incredibly popular podcast, The Infinite Monkey Cage, and he's recently launched a new one called A Question of Science. And he's about to get significantly more busy because he's embarking on a huge world tour called Emergence in 2026. I wanted to

• 3:21Fearne Cotton?

  speak to him for many reasons. Like all of you lot, I've got big questions and big things that I think about. Not all the time as Brian does, but I like to think big. I like to remind myself constantly that we are on a floating ball in infinite space, just so I forget about the minutiae of day to day and the little worries that can really bog me down. And also I wanted to interview Brian because I had done so once before, but it was on radio for about eight minutes. And I thought, God, if I do near enough to an hour with Brian Cox, it's gonna really push me. I mean, like IQ wise, it's gonna really push me and my level of intelligence and understanding about things. I got a D in

• 4:05Fearne Cotton?

  science. Do you know what? I would have actually got more than a D, but I was already filming Disney Club during my GCSE, so I actually missed physics. Shame, because that's what we'll be talking about today. So if I'd gone to physics, because I did do biology and chemistry, I definitely would have got a C. Come on, come on. Anyway, I'm not naturally scientifically minded, so I knew it would be a push. And hopefully I've done this chat justice. You know, I'm, I'm never aiming for the perfect episode, but I do leave each week thinking, I could have done better, I could have done better. And I only see that as a good thing.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at go.o.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's go.o.gle/workspacewithGemini.

• 5:15Speaker 04

  Network freedom and flexibility, that's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 5:46Speaker 05

  Hello, I'm Joanna Fletcher.

• 5:48Speaker 06

  And I'm Marco Burchella.

• 5:49Speaker 05

  And this is Boots Off.

• 5:52Speaker 06

  We are friends who've spent a decade together, walking up mountains, across deserts, and along coastlines with some seriously awesome groups of humans.

• 6:01Speaker 05

  And something happens when you're out there, feet on the ground, surrounded by nature. The conversations just spill out of you.

• 6:07Speaker 06

  This series is about the adversities that lead to adventure.

• 6:10Speaker 05

  The adventures that lead to adversity.

• 6:12Speaker 06

  And how life can be one big adventure in itself.

• 6:15Speaker 05

  Listen every Thursday. Just search for Boots Off.

• 6:22Speaker 05

  Right, let's do it. Here's the show.

• 6:46Fearne Cotton?

  Professor Brian Cox, lovely to see you.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  Good to be here.

• 6:49Fearne Cotton?

  Last time I interviewed you was actually on Radio 2 and I think I had all of about eight minutes to talk to you, which is an impossible task.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  About the universe.

• 6:57Fearne Cotton?

  About the universe. Tell me what the universe means in eight minutes. But today, we can take our sweet time, so it's really great to see you. You are next year embarking on a whole massive world tour for quite literally like 12 months. You're off.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Well, more than that, actually.

• 7:12Fearne Cotton?

  Really?

• 7:13Speaker 02

  The last one, in the end, went on for about four years.

• 7:16Fearne Cotton?

  Oh my god, you're like Coldplay.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, you just keep adding on to it. Actually, The Boston Globe said that my tour was the Taylor Swift eras of science.

• 7:25Fearne Cotton?

  Yes!

• 7:26Speaker 02

  And I thought, I'll take that.

• 7:27Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah, put that on your poster.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  The Taylor Swift, I think it is on the poster. You're absolutely right.

• 7:31Fearne Cotton?

  I love it!

• 7:32Speaker 02

  So, and yeah, so this one, at the moment, is about 18 months, I think.

• 7:36Fearne Cotton?

  Wow.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  And here in the UK, the big, the big shows are in October and November next year. So they're, you know, the O2 and the arenas in Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, all that.

• 7:47Fearne Cotton?

  So amazing!

• 7:49Speaker 02

  And it's wonderful that, it's basically cosmology, you know, it's astronomy and cosmology, but it's kind of like prog rock as well in the sense, you know, because we've got the biggest possible screens that you can fit in those places, which is, at the moment, so we've got things like the James Webb Space Telescope, which wasn't active last time that I toured. And almost every day, you see beautiful images, like ultra-high resolution, magnificent images of sort of exploding stars and colliding galaxies, just beautiful stuff. And so putting those on those screens is really exciting to me because the screens are massive, as I said, as big as we can fit into those arenas.

• 8:34Fearne Cotton?

  It's so beautiful, you know, I think a lot of the time, we just think, oh god, everything's so doom and gloom out there and everyone's feeling rubbish and a bit down. And then you filling venues of that size, like huge arenas.

• 8:50Fearne Cotton?

  There are so many people out there that want to feel awe and wonder and have big questions to ask, and I think we forget that.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I mean, almost everybody, I would say everybody that I meet is interested in the questions that are raised by astronomy and cosmology, but also biology, just science in general. It's how you phrase the questions, because there are questions, you know, are we alone in the universe is a question that people think about. Even are we alone in the solar system, are there microbes on Mars? But also these bigger questions about how did the universe begin? Why is there a universe at all? How come there are things like us in the universe, which are just little patterns of atoms that can have a conversation? You know, we, there's an observation a few weeks ago from the James Webb Space Telescope

• 9:39Speaker 02

  of a galaxy from which the light had been travelling for thirteen point five billion years to reach us. So the universe is thirteen point eight billion years old. So you're seeing this thing as it was just after the universe began.

• 9:54Fearne Cotton?

  Wow.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  And so you can see that, so you say, well, how did the universe go from that, which is these early galaxies, and even before that, just a load of hydrogen and helium, nothing else? How did it go from that to us? Which is really part of what the show's about. One of my great heroes, Carl Sagan, said that, said that a physicist, a physicist is a hydrogen atom's way of learning about hydrogen atoms. And you go, that's what a beautiful way of putting what a, what a human being is. We started off as just a load of hydrogen.

• 10:24Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  A couple of minutes after the big bang.

• 10:26Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  And now we're these things.

• 10:29Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  And that story is quite majestic. So I think everybody's interested in that.

• 10:34Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah, and I think we are desperately wanting to land on that because we get so bogged down with the minutiae of our everyday lives and our worries and our idiosyncrasies and the issues that we've got going on, that actually, when we pull focus and we go, oh my, like, we ask big questions like that. How the hell did we end up in this civilised world with AI and all of these technological advances? I think we want to constantly pull focus, but we get dragged back to the minutiae again and again on a daily basis. Do you think? Because this is such a huge part of how you operate in the world, who you are, how you think, do you think having that greater perspective impacts your happiness levels and helps you maybe distract from the everyday stresses?

• 11:18Speaker 02

  I think it does for several reasons, and one is a bit more abstract, as you said, the perspective. I mean, it is a remarkable thing to be a human being, and we don't know how far you'd have to go out into the universe to find anything remotely as complicated or wonderful as us. It might be beyond our galaxy you'd have to go. So, but that's, as you rightly say, that's a, it's a very wide perspective and it's kind of a luxurious thing to be able to think like that when you're busy every day and you've got real things to do. But I also think that it's almost meditative in a way. So, learning about nature, which is what we're talking about, and nature's not just leaves and plants,

• 11:59Speaker 02

  it's stars and the universe beyond, is kind of quite a diverting experience and it's full of, it's quite a joyful, pleasurable thing to, and ask very simple questions about, you know, for example, why is, why is the grass green is a good question. So you can sit there and look at the grass and maybe you don't think about it too much. We say, why is it green? And it's green because it does photosynthesis and so it takes energy from the sun and you say, why does it do that and why does it reflect the green light? So we see it as green. And in the end, actually, you will end up going on a journey that takes you back through the whole history of life on earth. And so suddenly you start asking questions about, you know, how did the plants come to be on the land? And it was 500 million years ago or something like that.

• 12:43Speaker 02

  And so it's actually, I think it's a joyful, distracting experience as well as, so it's just like doing a crossword really or something else, whatever people do. But it's also has this profound quality. That ultimately, by asking those little questions, you end up going on journeys in your mind that span billions of years and billions of light years. And so, yeah, I think that, I mean, obviously, I would recommend it.

• 13:10Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  That's what I'm saying.

• 13:11Fearne Cotton?

  Well, that, and also, I think it forces you to be open minded, because with science, things change constantly. And although we can maybe get, we can land on a theory or land on something that we know to be true, in a hundred years, that can all change. So it's really important to remain open minded.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  It's a really important point, that, because there was, in 1955, actually, one of the great physicists, Richard Feynman, wrote an essay called The Value of Science. And so, what is the value of this? So it's obvious that we wouldn't have an iPhone, you wouldn't have modern medicine, you wouldn't have all those things, right? That's obvious stuff. But actually, he said what you said, which is, it's because you're trying to understand nature, and the amount of knowledge we have is changing all the time. And so, the picture we have of how things work and the theories and our understanding changes all the time. You get used to the fact that you're often wrong. So as a scientist, you're almost always wrong, actually. If you're doing a PhD or something like that, you go, I think it works

• 14:08Speaker 02

  like this, and nature will say, no. And you go, okay. So you learn to be delighted, actually, when your opinion turns out to be incorrect.

• 14:17Fearne Cotton?

  Hmm.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  And that is a skill that I think we can all agree that many people in public life and elsewhere have lost.

• 14:25Fearne Cotton?

  Gone.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  That, and so, but of course, if you're not comfortable with uncertainty and comfortable with being on the edge of the known, then you never learn.

• 14:36Fearne Cotton?

  Hmm.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  And Feynman, actually, in his beautiful essay, I strongly recommend it, you can download it from anywhere, it's Richard Feynman, The Value of Science, it's about four pages. And he says in there that, even if you think about what democracy is, democracy is the admission, fundamentally, that you don't know how to run a country.

• 14:53Fearne Cotton?

  Hmm.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  Because you accept that you change the government every four or five years. And that's a positive thing. So the moment you see someone saying, this is the way to do it.

• 15:05Fearne Cotton?

  Yep.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Then you know that it's, that you know that is not the right person for the job. They're not actually a Democrat. Because democracy requires you to think that you're flawed and your understanding improves and you get most things wrong. But sometimes you get something right. And that's how we make progress.

• 15:20Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  And that's what science is. So there would be no modern medicine without that process.

• 15:26Fearne Cotton?

  You need to almost be egoless because I think, you know, ego is the thing that is, you know, if we look at all the biggest problems in the world right now. It's because of everything you just said, that people are so certain, this is how the world should run. This is who should be in power. This is who should control this part of the world. And that's where, why we're seeing so much conflict and divisiveness and these huge canyon between different people's sets of ideas. And actually, we need more uncertainty to create a level of peace, which is maybe sort of a bit of a general sweeping statement. But it seems like uncertainty is so undervalued.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting that Feynman, also, he worked, he worked on the atom bomb. He works on the Manhattan Project. So it's not surprising that in the 50s, he was thinking about this stuff. Cause he thought he delivered the power to destroy ourselves. He had delivered us the power to destroy ourselves. And the other, more famously, Robert Oppenheimer, you know, so everybody knows Oppenheimer.

• 16:24Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  Especially because of the brilliant film recently. So Oppenheimer did this, wrote about the same things in the 50s. And again, he was writing about this idea that you have to embrace doubt and not fear doubt, but embrace it. And also, actually, Oppenheimer, he gave the BBC wreath lectures, you know, really famous lectures in the 50s, I think it was 53. And he spoke about this stuff. And he said, there's a wonderful thing I remember where he said that. Everyone, to be a person of integrity, to a thoughtful person, you'll have an anchor. You're anxious, you'll have beliefs and you'll have a framework, a moral framework. And you'll believe things. So that, and that's really important. To be a person of substance, you have to have a position.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  But the trick, the key is to realise other people have different anchors. And so we all have our different anchors. And the challenge on this planet is to make sure that we work together in the interests of the planet as a whole and the civilisation. And that sounds like a bit hippie maybe and whatever, but actually if you think about it, if you're the person who built the atom bomb and you saw two of them dropped on Japan. And so you know what the power of those weapons is. One of the things you might think about is how to not do that.

• 17:42Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  And they're worth reading, these people, because I think in some ways we've forgotten it.

• 17:48Fearne Cotton?

  Well, we massively have. I mean, I had this episode of the podcast quite a few years ago now, but it's one that I always come back to. We had this amazing, sadly late ex-Buddhist monk, he had sort of finished his monastic lifestyle and was living in Sweden. And he wrote a book called I May Be Wrong. And that was the mantra constantly was in any conversation or conflict to have that in the back of his mind. I may be wrong, which immediately sort of like takes the heat and the anger out of certain situations. And it's really interesting because in the lead up to this talk, I listened to a bunch of podcasts where you've been the guest just to see. Because obviously your, your subject matters are widely spanning and you could go on any different path of conversation.

• 18:29Fearne Cotton?

  So it's really interesting hearing you talk, but one common theme was that you use the word argue a lot. But in a way that we don't normally use it. I think, you know, if you were just to say, I was arguing with or I argue in an everyday setting. You imagine it's kind of heated and people are pissed off and they're butting heads. But actually, within the context of science, you use it in a much gentler way. Perhaps in like the truest way that it should be spoken, that you're, you're bringing another idea to the forefront of the conversation.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's really, I didn't know that I used that word a lot. So thank you for that analysis. But yeah, it's right. In the context of science, you make an argument, I think in other disciplines as well. You talk about making an argument, not having an argument, but making one, which is laying out a position.

• 19:16Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  And that's what science is, you know. What is a theory, a scientific theory? It's basically a guess. So you guess, Einstein guessed about the nature of gravity in nineteen fifteen. And it looks like he was pretty close because, and that theory ended up suggesting there may be an origin to the universe. So it was quite a good guess then. But we still, we still don't think it's complete and completely right. So that's the process. So you make a guess and then you'd make an argument and then, in that sense, and then you'd test it. And so you do some experiments and you'd see, and, and, and really, what you're doing is not looking for confirmation of your guess. You're looking for the thing where it's frayed, where it starts to not give the right answer, because there's the place to go next to learn some more.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  And you're right, what you said earlier, it was interesting about ego, because I think if you really are, if you're a scientist and you really are a good scientist, what you're interested in is finding out how nature works. You're not interested in being seen to be right.

• 20:22Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  And that's the difference, I think. And of course, I'm not naive enough, and I'm not suggesting that scientists don't have egos, because they do. There's all sorts of politics now. I mean, the Nobel Prizes were awarded today. Everyone wants a Nobel Prize and people feel really good about it. But ultimately, most scientists I've met are pure in the sense they just want to find out how things work.

• 20:42Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah. And also curiosity is such a brilliant, again, underrated quality, because you can never be bored. There's no chance of being bored if you're relentlessly curious about things. And that's probably something we all have as children. We're curious about the world around us. And then it sort of gets beaten out of us a bit and we kind of stop wondering and stop thinking. And that's why, I guess, again, your shows are so popular, because people are naturally deeply curious.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, actually, it reminds me of this, one of my heroes is Carl Sagan. So he did a great series called Cosmos when I was growing up. But he wrote a book called The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. And I strongly recommend it. And beautiful book. But right at the start, he tells this story of getting in a taxi in New York, and the taxi driver was like, you're the astronomer off TV, aren't you? And he's like, yeah. And so he said, what about aliens? Do you think UFOs have landed? And so Sagan said, no, I don't. He said, what about Atlantis? Do you think there used to be a city under the sea? And Sagan said, no, and whatever. And what about horoscopes and things? And he said, no.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  But Sagan, he was really wise, I think, because he said he didn't think he is a person who's just asking silly questions. He thought he is a curious person who's really interested. And really, he just hasn't been served well by society, by education, because there are answers to some of these questions. And the real universe is infinitely more wonderful than imagined civilizations beneath the waves and things. It's far more interesting than that. But he hadn't had access to the information. And I think that's a really important thing to remember, that you said at the start, I think, there are no, there aren't silly questions. There are just people being curious.

• 22:29Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  And if they don't know the answer, you know, how did the universe begin is a very good question. And actually, we don't know. We don't even know we had a beginning, right? We know it was very hot and dense 13.8 billion years ago, but we don't know what happened before that, if there was a before. And so I think that it's really important to, as you said, that the curiosity is the important bit. And then it comes down to, it's part of the responsibility of a society to give people the tools to satisfy their curiosity and investigate their questions.

• 23:02Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah, I think people are nervous to ask questions because we hate feeling like we're a bit stupid. You know, we hate thinking, is that such a basic question? Or I think the thing we hate the most is saying, I don't know. You know, even if someone goes over, have you read that book? And you're like, um, yeah. And you know, you're lying. Like, you don't want to admit that you don't have that knowledge. And actually, I think, again, science seems to be constantly humbling, because although we know a hell of a lot, we know there's like so much we don't know, so much we don't know.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  I'll get it slightly wrong. There's a great scientist called John Wheeler, who's one of the most famous physicists of the 20th century. And he said that we live on a, we live on this little island of knowledge, surrounded by an ocean of ignorance. But as the size of our island of knowledge increases, so do the shores of our ignorance.

• 23:52Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  It's a lovely way of putting it.

• 23:55Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  And actually, the live show that I'm doing now, it starts with a story about a scientist called Johannes Kepler. So Kepler was working in the early sixteen hundreds. And he's famous for the laws of planetary motion. So in a way that I cannot conceive how he did it. Just from watching the planets like Mars and Jupiter and Saturn, which was some other astronomers had catalogued where they are in the sky. You know, which we'd known for thousands of years. It's part, it's astrology, right? You know, where the planets are against the stars. So he took that data and figured out that planets go in ellipses around the sun. And they, and he figured out a relationship between how, how long their year is and how far away from the sun they are.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  It's remarkable just from this data. But he was really clever. And in sixteen oh nine, there's a beautiful story that he wrote about. Where he was walking across the Charles Bridge in Prague in a snowstorm. And it was snowing and it was New Year's Eve, as he tells it. And he was going to his benefactor's house to a party. So he was going over the New Year's Eve party to the guy that pays him. And he realised he hadn't brought him a present. And so he noticed the snowflakes landed on his arm. And he, and he looked at them and he said, why are they all six sided? Right, they're all different and really beautiful, but they're all six sided. So what is it about that? So he wrote this book going, why? And, and he said, well, they come from water. So maybe there's something in the water.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  Maybe it's what the water's made of that makes the snowflake, which is right. He didn't know, it was sixteen hundred. Yeah. And maybe so something to do with it, maybe he didn't know about molecules. But he, he makes all this progress and he talks about beehives and pomegranate seeds and everything that's got these geometric shapes. And he's on the right track. Yeah. We now know it's the water molecule and we know about that. But it's a twentieth century discovery. But right at the end, after he's written this wonderful book, which you can just buy, I recommend it. It's called The Six Cornered Snowflake. We need like a whole book list off this episode in the notes. Yeah, The Six Cornered Snowflake. Right at the end, he says, he just says, I can't, I can't go any further with what I know. And he says, I leave it to you, dear reader.

• 26:06Fearne Cotton?

  Wow.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  To the, to the people of the future. And he says, in the, the translation I have, he says, I'm knocking on the doors of chemistry.

• 26:14Fearne Cotton?

  Wow.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  But we didn't have chemistry, we didn't know anything. So, but you see, you see this brilliant mind asking all these questions. And then almost being happy at the end going, oh, it's great, it's something for the people of the future.

• 26:26Fearne Cotton?

  I think also, like, I, cause I watched the trailer for your show and heard that story. And I was again, sort of bowled over by the simplicity of a question that, you know, that many of us probably haven't wondered. Why does a snowflake look like that? And actually, our appreciation for the natural world and the fact that we know we're not really looking after it. Probably does boil down to the fact that we've lost that sort of simple curiosity about.

• 26:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:51Fearne Cotton?

  Why a snowflake has six sides? We sort of don't give a shit. We're like, oh, well, how, you know, can we go to space? And I know we'll get on to that, but you know, we, we've lost that sort of simplicity, that curiosity about the real simple aspects of the natural world around us.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, and this is one of the greatest minds, I would say, the Kepler. I mean, he was a genius. But you're right, he's asking this really childlike question, which is a very deep question.

• 27:17Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  And, and actually, I, someone wrote recently, um, it was a, a Nobel Prize winner, I've forgotten who it was, but he was asked like, if you were to go to kids to school and say, everything's made of atoms, things are made of atoms. Is there anything you can do as an experiment in a school to show that? It's very difficult, you know, this is 20th century discovery. And he said, it's probably the shapes of things like snowflakes. Because if you see something, and Kepler said, you know, I, I, I cannot believe that this beautiful shape exists at random.

• 27:52Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  There's a reason why this thing is like that. And the reason is the water molecule. Uh, we, we, and you have to know quantum mechanics and all sorts of things to know, understand why the water molecule is the way that it is.

• 28:03Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  But that idea that crystals, like crystal structure like a snowflake is telling you something about a deeper picture.

• 28:12Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  Is a really modern way of looking at it, and it's right, it's correct. So it's probably snowflakes, snowflakes are probably the example of something that's telling you there's something else going on.

• 28:22Fearne Cotton?

  How does that play into just like our human lives? Do you personally believe that life is a random?

• 28:30Fearne Cotton?

  String of events that happen, or is there some sort of destiny, fate, preordained, something about how we're living as humans?

• 28:40Speaker 02

  No, I think it's a random series of events.

• 28:44Fearne Cotton?

  We are not snowflakes.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Well, the snowflake, so it's the snowflake, so they're all six sided, but then you say, why are they all different then? Which Kepler also noticed, they're all different, but they're all kind of similar. They're all different because they have different formation histories. So it's the path they take through the clouds when they form that gives them their shape. That's true of human.

• 29:08Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  That's true of us.

• 29:09Fearne Cotton?

  Yes, very much so.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  So we're shaped by the path we take through life.

• 29:13Fearne Cotton?

  Oh, I like that.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  So in that sense, we are the same as snowflakes. We're a frozen history in a way, which is what a snowflake is. But in terms of the, the thing about destiny, so it has a name in science, it's called teleology, which is the idea that there's a final, there's a, the cause is in the future. So you're evolving towards something, you're going towards, and that's not the way that we think of the universe scientifically. So evolution, for example, like why, why are we the way that we are? It's all about our evolutionary history. We're not evolving to become smarter or something like that. You, you evolved to fit your environment, but it's, so it's not that there's a, that we're not some kind of ascent to some grander.

• 29:59Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  Form. So that's not the way that we, we think in science.

• 30:05Fearne Cotton?

  Well, because I guess also if you look at the human race, we are undoubtedly getting smarter, but in some ways getting so much more stupid.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  I'm not sure if we're getting smarter. I mean, when you, when you look at even recently, people like Kepler. If you read that book, you see a modern. Mind, a very, very clever person. So I don't think we've got smarter in the last few hundred years. In fact, in the past few thousand years, no one's got smarter. The really interesting question is what happened to civilization and society that allowed us in about sixteen hundred to suddenly start basically doing science, which has led to the modern world. Because if you think about it, without being dismissive to everyone who lived before that, we didn't really do, we didn't make much progress, right?

• 30:53Fearne Cotton?

  Just walking around with horses.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, if, if, if someone from ancient Greece went back two thousand years to ancient Egypt, they wouldn't really notice a lot different.

• 31:05Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  It, but they'd, you know, be a bit different. They'd have pyramids rather than temples.

• 31:09Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  But it basically, the amount, the knowledge they had about the world hadn't changed. So it didn't change ever, basically, thousands and thousands, thousands of years. And then around fifteen hundred, sixteen hundred, suddenly we start accumulating knowledge. And in only four hundred years from Kepler, thinking about these points of light, we've visited them all, four hundred years. We'd been to every planet that Kepler saw and discovered some that he didn't know about. And now we have a spacecraft, the Voyager one, it's fifty years since it was launched. It's on the edge of the solar system. It's on the way to the stars. And that happened in four hundred years.

• 31:52Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 31:53Speaker 02

  So I find it really interesting that it's that, it's not people have got smarter, it's that our society got smarter.

• 32:04Speaker 03

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini.

• 32:43Speaker 07

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• 33:07Speaker 08

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• 33:22Speaker 04

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• 33:55Fearne Cotton?

  How important is space travel in terms of our longevity as a human race? Is it essential?

• 34:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is.

• 34:06Speaker 02

  Well, so, I mean, you could say, well, it's going to be essential eventually, but it's essential now, actually. So if you look at the way our civilization works, a large amount of the things we take for granted are delivered from space. So there's a number. I think there was a report from the Royal Society, which is the UK's big, oldest scientific society, about a year ago. And I think the number is 16% of UK GDP requires space-based infrastructure. It's a very big number. And because if you think about it, we use it for all our communications, we use it for the timing of our computer networks, financial transactions, weather forecasting, understanding

• 34:49Speaker 02

  climate and all that kind. So the list goes on and on and on.

• 34:53Fearne Cotton?

  Also how they're making certain medicines kind of essential that they're.

• 34:57Speaker 02

  In the future, yeah. So already we're talking about that there's experiments to manufactured drugs and medicines, as you say, on the space station. It's some things are better manufactured in zero G and so on. So but even now, it's so integrated with our society that if we lost that infrastructure, we that it would literally, the civilization would grind to a halt.

• 35:20Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  So we're already completely entwined with it. And I think so we make a mistake when we think of space as science fiction. It's really not. It's part of the I had a discussion with someone the other day, I was gonna say argument, but it was a discussion about and they said, you shouldn't think of the you we talk about the space economy, which is growing. And we're thinking about things like mining asteroids and putting power stations in space and so on. And then the earth economy. But they said, no, it's just the economy. It's all the same. We're expanding outwards.

• 35:56Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 35:56Speaker 02

  We're already near earth orbit is completely entwined with everything that we do. So it's becoming very important, actually, to manage it as well and to regulate it, to make sure it's not the wild west up there, because it's essential to all our lives.

• 36:12Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah, well, exactly. And I guess also like looking at how, you know, meddling with asteroids, for instance, putting power stations on certain other planets is going to impact everything is going to impact.

• 36:25Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah, it's, I mean, asteroids. So there's the resources, there's an argument which a lot of the people, the early sort of evangelists for space, there's a guy called Gerard O'Neill, later a guy called Robert Zubrin, who influenced Elon Musk quite heavily. And they all had this view that the what we're putting too much pressure on the planets, obviously, which I think everyone agrees upon, about resource extraction and so on. But the thing is that there are resources, an infinite amount of resources up there above our heads.

• 37:03Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 37:03Speaker 02

  If we can access them. And, and, and a lot of the early sort of pioneers and thinkers felt that that would relieve the pressure on earth. And it would in principle, if you can do it, relieve the pressure on earth because you're not fighting over resources on earth.

• 37:17Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 37:18Speaker 02

  You, you, you've realised that you can just go, go to that asteroid, that asteroid, that asteroid, the moon, Mars and so on. And it often sounds like, as I said before, it sounds like science fiction and naive. And it maybe was in the seventies, you know, maybe it was rather sort of wishful thinking, but it sort of isn't now.

• 37:35Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  It's coming. And so I think there's, there are great benefits to be had from moving into space. And it gets a bad name sometimes because, you know, we all know about the controversies around some of the people who go there and space tourism and all those things, which would be fun. I'd quite like to do it, but obviously it's a, you know, whatever. But actually, the, the real potential there is to allow us to expand as a civilisation without damaging the planet.

• 38:03Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  That's the potential.

• 38:05Fearne Cotton?

  It seems like it needs to rally alongside us actually just taking care of the planet as well. Because I think, yes, you know, absolutely, we can see how that could be the future of us and not annihilating the planet that we're living on. But equally, will that make people even more apathetic? Like, oh, we don't need to worry about earth because we can just go up there and go to an asteroid and nick something off of that.

• 38:24Speaker 02

  And that's definitely not true.

• 38:26Fearne Cotton?

  No.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  So the thing to say, and this always has to be said, you're right, at the same time, it's talking about the potential of space, is that this planet is the only one that we can live on in large numbers, in the way that we do. It's perfect for us because we evolved on it. So it is the best place in the universe by far to be a human.

• 38:49Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  And that's just a statement of fact. That's the way that it is. So, yes, we can build colonies on Mars and the moon first, probably. And there'll be a few hundred people, maybe a few thousand people, but it'll be horrible. It's not a nice place, Mars. And it never will be a nice place.

• 39:07Fearne Cotton?

  No.

• 39:07Speaker 02

  It might have some nice greenhouses and some big sort of buildings, but imagine living your life confined to a building. There are not going to be rivers on the surface of Mars anytime soon.

• 39:18Fearne Cotton?

  No.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  If at all, you know, even if you can terraform the planet in hundreds of years' time. It's just not nice. So we we have to remember that as a human being, this is the best planet in the universe. Because we evolved on it.

• 39:32Fearne Cotton?

  Mm hmm.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  And there will not be a replacement.

• 39:34Fearne Cotton?

  No, I mean, you started a global um summit with all of the world leaders, giving this quite punchy statement that. Like, this is it. And and you were saying, you know, even they were kind of perhaps. Assuming you would turn up and go like, have a great time chatting about leadership guys. And actually, you delivered some. Extremely punchy facts that they needed to hear.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  What I said to them was that, so we could ask the question, how many civilizations are there in a galaxy like the Milky Way? Or specifically in the Milky Way Galaxy. And the answer is, we don't know. So it's a big galaxy, four hundred billion stars. Most of them have planets, so there'll be trillions of planets. There's an estimate that there might be over ten billion potentially Earth-like worlds in the Milky Way Galaxy. So there's a lot of places where life could begin and evolve. But on this planet, it took four billion years roughly to go from the origin of life to us. And four billion years is a third of the age of the universe. And so many people I speak to make the argument that that might be unusual.

• 40:40Speaker 02

  It might it might be microbes on Mars and all over the place. But if that's what it usually takes, which is what it took here, to get things like us. There's probably very few planets which have been stable enough to allow life to live on them for four billion years. So what I said at that climate summit was to the world leaders was. Let's imagine that we're the only civilization in the Milky Way Galaxy, just a working hypothesis. Might not be, but might be. So let's imagine that we are. And let's imagine that you, being the leaders, through deliberate action, which would be something like nuclear war. Or inaction, like, you know, failing to address the climate crisis or whatever it is.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  You caused this civilization to be damaged or even removed from the earth. If you do that, then each of you may be personally responsible for destroying meaning in a galaxy of four hundred billion suns, potentially forever. Have a nice meeting. Was my. It's the best thing forever. Which is true. You know, the thing is, I think, we don't know that it's correct then, but it's possible. Yeah. So I think it's just, just let's work on the basis. Does that terrify you? That there's nobody else. That terrifies me, that thought. It sort of does. There's a very famous quote by Arthur C Clarke, you know, the guy who wrote Two Thousand and One, amongst many other things.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  He said that either we are alone in the universe or we're not, and both of those are terrifying. Yeah. So, I mean, I agree with you. I, I, I wish I could talk about it, but I can't because I went to a film set. And I won't even say when it was because you'll never, well, anyway, but it was a science fiction film and they were there and I signed an NDA and everything. So I can't say. But it was that I was talking to the actor, he was a very famous actor about, and it was a scene that he was playing when he saw some aliens for the first time. Or saw his alien spaceship. And, and we, and it was before he did it. And he said to me, what would you kind of feel?

• 42:44Speaker 02

  If, what would be your reaction if you saw it? And I know that you, you have interviewed actors, right? You know what they do? They watch you and they ask you questions and then they nick the. Killian Murphy, as an aside, Killian Murphy. I worked on a film called Sunshine years ago with Danny Boyle and Alex Garland wrote it. Killian was to play the physicist. And we spent a lot of time together on that film and I took him to CERN, right? Where I worked at the time and, and we, we had a great fun and went out for a few drinks and got to know each other. In the film, he does this thing where he's sending a message back to Earth and he knows they're going to the sun. And he knows that his, his family won't receive it. He'll never see them again, really. And he does this thing like that with his like, and he's kind of nervous and he does this thing.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  And I said to him, why, why'd you do that? And he said, because you do it. He said, when I ask you difficult questions deliberately, then you, if it's a personal thing and you're not really comfortable, you do this thing. I love it. And so he does it. He nicked it. They said, yeah, and he said, we did a thing recently and he said, he said, yeah, I just did an impression of Brian. So great.

• 43:49Speaker 02

  But so this, this actor had said, yeah, what would you think if, if you saw the aliens, they landed like outside here now, what do you think? And I said, I'd just be relieved. Yeah. And he, and he was like really confused. He was like, but, but you're like, you're scared of things. I don't know. Cause the responsibility, I'd feel the weight. Of of of being the only repository of meaning in a galaxy of four hundred billion suns lifted off my shoulders.

• 44:14Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  And then he looked so confused, I thought, I wonder if I've ruined the scene. Because I wonder if he's like, I know what I'm gonna do it.

• 44:21Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah, I'd be terrified.

• 44:22Speaker 02

  And then he's like, yeah, and then he's like, what was he gonna do? Is he gonna look relieved when he sees this thing, which wouldn't kind of work? So, yeah.

• 44:29Fearne Cotton?

  I mean, that is, the terrifying bit, I think, is the lack of meaning, isn't it? Because, yes, there's the lack of life, but the lack of meaning, which is only cultivated via the human brain.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  That's what I, yeah, that's my position. You know, I think that, I mean, you could, you know, argue, if you're religious, you would not say that, right? But I think that, as far as we can tell, meaning is a property of consciousness. It comes from consciousness, it comes from thinking. And thinking is something that we do, and we're physical structures. So it's something that emerges from a very complex physical system. The most complex thing we know of anywhere in the universe, which is the human brain. So my argument is that if there are no structures as complex as human brains on any of these other planets in the Milky Way galaxy, then there's likely no meaning there.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  So it means, meaning, I have a friend who was, who was the dean of Guildford Cathedral, a wonderful man called Victor Stock, who's great, and we, I had loads of conversations with him. And in the end, we figured out that the only thing we disagreed on was that he thinks meaning is eternal and universal, right? Because he believes in God.

• 45:44Fearne Cotton?

  Like an energy?

• 45:45Speaker 02

  Well, he believes in God, right? He ran a cathedral, whereas I think it's local and temporary.

• 45:50Fearne Cotton?

  Right.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  So I think it comes from us, it's a property of things like us. And I think that it's sort of weird to say that, because it's a very, it's a scientific way of looking at the world, right? It's just, there's nothing, that's what it is. But it kind of puts us back at the centre of the universe in some strange sense, or elevates us, I think. It makes us very valuable. Because of the rarity of structures like us.

• 46:18Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  So, I mean, scientists spent, we've spent the last four hundred years demoting ourselves from the centre of the universe physically and finding that we're physically insignificant. But I also think we've got more and more knowledge about what a remarkable and probably rare thing a human being is.

• 46:38Fearne Cotton?

  I mean, you say when you open shows, often you'll say, what does it mean to live a finite life in an infinite universe? And I wonder what your personal reaction to that question is, because for me, it feels extremely motivating, like, oh, my God, I mean, it is quick, it's ephemeral, I need to get a move on, I need to experience life and live it to the max. But I think equally, it could make you feel quite nihilistic and go, what's the fucking point in anything?

• 47:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there are two, two reactions to it. But I think, you know, if you, if you're, if you're walking through some forest and you're, and you, and you just tread on it on an orchid, let's say a rare orchid is there, it's just there, and it's one thing you tread on it. What was your reaction to that? Is it, is it to say, it doesn't matter, it was going to be gone tomorrow anyway, it's a little, it's a rare thing, they don't last very long. Or do you think that there's something of immense beauty that should have, should be protected because of its ephemeral nature of its existence?

• 47:35Fearne Cotton?

  Yes.

• 47:36Speaker 02

  Um, I once visited Frank Drake, actually, so there's a thing called the Drake Equation that is very famous. It was Frank Drake in the fifties and sixties was one of the founders of SETI, the Search for Astrrestrial Intelligence. And so he had a thing which, how many, can we try and work out how many civilizations there might be in a galaxy? But I went to meet him quite late in his life, he died a few years ago, but it was wonderful, his house. And he collects orchids. And there was an orchid there that we'd arrived, and it, it blooms for one day a year.

• 48:08Fearne Cotton?

  Wow.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  And it was just happened to be on the, on the day that we arrived. And he said, you know, this make, obviously makes it more beautiful. No one could argue that this one that blooms on one day a year is less beautiful than the one that's just always there. It's obviously, it's a beautiful thing. So we all understand that, but he but he said, actually, that maybe that's what civilizations are like. So maybe the fact that we haven't seen anyone or heard anyone is just because they're like these little orchids that just flower and then disappear.

• 48:39Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:40Speaker 02

  But that would make them more beautiful to me.

• 48:43Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah, without a doubt. Yeah. And that is.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  That's what we are.

• 48:45Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 48:46Speaker 02

  We're just things. If we're kind of immortal, that's the thing in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that Douglas Adams wrote, where someone got made accidentally immortal.

• 48:54Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  And life was so pointless.

• 48:56Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  That they went around the galaxy insulting everybody in alphabetical order.

• 49:01Fearne Cotton?

  So good.

• 49:02Speaker 02

  Not even per planet, but in alphabetical order.

• 49:05Fearne Cotton?

  So good.

• 49:06Speaker 02

  Maybe that's the only thing that would be left if you're immortal.

• 49:09Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 49:12Speaker 03

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of the best one yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini.

• 49:45Speaker 04

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• 50:17Speaker 09

  It's time. It's the most wonderful time of the year. Halloween.

• 50:25Speaker 10

  And you guys know we don't do Halloween by halves. Full costume, full prosthetics, full commitment. I'm a rat. And I'm the chef. It's our Ratatouille special. Then we're grabbing our broomsticks for the witches. We've got a spooky hotline caller. An update from our woman who was in love with the ghost of Prince Albert. And your tarot card dilemmas. Listen to our Halloween specials. Search for The Girls Bathroom.

• 50:54Fearne Cotton?

  I mean, what are your thoughts on life after death? Because again, I'm going to quote you and I've got to try and find, I've got a whole list of quotes here, but you say, "Life is a conduit through which energy in the universe passes." So say a human, an animal, a plant dies, where is that energy going?

• 51:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's, what is life? I mean, that's a very good question, by the way. The answer is, we don't really know. There are two very famous books on the reading list.

• 51:22Fearne Cotton?

  The reading list is immense.

• 51:23Speaker 02

  One is called What Is Life?, by Erwin Schrodinger, which was a very famous book in the 40s that sort of predicted the existence of DNA, which was discovered later. A great friend of mine, actually, Paul Nurse, Sir Paul Nurse, who's got a Nobel Prize, who runs the Francis Crick Institute here, or founded it in London. He wrote a book recently called What Is Life?, which is brilliant, from a Nobel Prize winning biologist. And he ultimately says that we don't really know, but you can pin some things down. So one, as you said, is it's something that happens. It's, it's that there's energy, a flow. By energy, I mean, what do we do? We burn food in oxygen. And if we stop burning food in oxygen, then we die. So there's, there's an energy in the way a steam engine does things.

• 52:07Speaker 02

  So there's that part of it. And then there's information, it processes information as well. So that's what we do. We, so there's an information component and an energy component. But the point is, it's, it just, at a fundamental level, it's no different to something like a, a computing device in the sense that it obeys these basic physical laws, which there's got to be a source of, of energy and you've got to be able to do things and your structure is remains and things like that. So that would imply that it's the same as if you...

• 52:47Speaker 02

  Your iPhone will stop processing information if you take the battery out.

• 52:51Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 52:51Speaker 02

  So it's dead, it's a dead iPhone then. Admittedly, you can bring it back to life, so it's probably not a good analogy because you can recharge it.

• 53:00Fearne Cotton?

  We are yet to do that currently.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  So but you get the idea is that we, and this was all the way back in Schrödinger's book, he said this in the 40s. Life obeys the laws of physics, so it is part of the physical universe. And so therefore, there's no conceivable way that your conscious experience can persist when the thing, the machine stops working. So and that might sound harsh, but I would flip it around as we did before and say, isn't it remarkable that there's this kind of thing, it's just obeying the laws of physics, and the laws of physics are pretty simple.

• 53:41Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 53:42Speaker 02

  You know, there are only four forces of nature that we know of. And it all started out as hydrogen and helium 13.8 billion years ago. And we've managed to get into these patterns that can genuinely, I really mean it, bring meaning to the universe.

• 53:56Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah. Do you find that that, again, personally enables you to look at your reactions to, I'm talking about everyday stuff here. You know, nothing particularly traumatic or extra stressful, but like the everyday, either mundanity or maybe it could be the bombardment of like outside news we're receiving daily or stuff you've got going on in the family home. Can you look at everything through the lens of science and go, I'm reacting to this because of, you know, my history and the data and whatever, can you apply it to your own life in that way?

• 54:29Speaker 02

  Well, no, obviously, I just get pissed off.

• 54:34Speaker 02

  But, but.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  I think there is something to be said, like you mentioned data. So it's quite liberating if you say, like, let's say you don't like flying, for example. So some people don't like flying and you get nervous. But you can actually go and look at the data and find out that it's safe compared to other modes of transport.

• 54:57Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 54:58Speaker 02

  So you could just say, okay, I'm not going to be scared of flying then.

• 55:01Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 55:01Speaker 02

  If you really, if you really can trust the data. So it does, it is useful to look at. Facts are useful.

• 55:11Fearne Cotton?

  I agree.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  Data's useful. I know it's difficult and I know that we all have different, you know, sort of things that worry us for different reasons. And that's, you know, that's still, that's part of being human. But you can kind of liberate yourself a bit from it.

• 55:24Fearne Cotton?

  I agree. I think like I, I don't deal with it so much now, but I had like really bad OCD at one point. And you have to apply logic and facts to it because it's so illogical. It's so like fantastical and over the top and enlarged at times that you need to have, whether it's like photo evidence, fact, data that you've done this thing before. It's nothing bad's going to happen.

• 55:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:49Fearne Cotton?

  And treat yourself like a machine, like a computer.

• 55:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, because, I mean, it's, I mean, you are basically, I mean, it's, it's a good question. I did, talking about the Crick Institute, there's a podcast, I'm not promoting that, but I'll promote it. Anyway.

• 56:03Fearne Cotton?

  We're like a very friendly podcast. We'll promote other ones.

• 56:06Speaker 02

  We did, there's a podcast called The Question of Science and I love it actually. And it's out at the moment. They're coming out once a week. And it's just at the Crick Institute and it's just experts on the panel and I chair it. And the audience ask questions. So it's like question time, but with people who know what they're talking about, basically is the difference.

• 56:24Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 56:25Speaker 02

  So we did one on, we did, for example, can we cure cancer, which we, because it's mainly a lot of the Crick Institute's cancer research. And it was a tremendously optimistic programme actually, because you realise how. Rapid the progresses in understanding this disease and just look at the statistics, as you said earlier, the survival rates. Anyway, so we did cancer, aging, dementia, those things. But also, we did one on AI, which was really interesting to me because the question is, you know, is there any difference between us and a computer, let's say. So could you imagine it? They call it AGI, general, artificial general intelligence, that's like us, rather than just a thing that does one thing at a time, which is what we have now.

• 57:10Speaker 02

  And there was some debate, actually, and the more neurosciency people felt know that it's really very difficult, that the human brain is much, not that there's anything mystical going on, but it's so complicated and it's all to do with our experience of the world. It's connected to our bodies. So you can't have a brain in a jar, you know, that thing that you could just imagine just having you taking your brain out and putting it in a thing and just leave. But yeah, so it's like, so I think the jury is still out on, on whether we are just, whether you could, whether we now, in our conversation, whether we could be having this in a big computer. Right. It's kind of the are we living in a simulation kind of question.

• 57:55Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 57:56Speaker 02

  And I think the jury seems to be still out amongst the experts on that, or whether biology is really difficult to simulate.

• 58:03Fearne Cotton?

  I mean, our brains are not that different to space in terms of the fact that there's so little we know still. There's so much more to be learned about how it works and.

• 58:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's amazing. I probably get it wrong now, but someone was telling me at the Crick about some work they've done on mice and they're working on how they smell, you know, the olfactory sort of system. And they had these sort of, they're just beginning to see that there's little co-processors in the brain. So a smell will come in and this thing will kind of take that data, which is just some, it's the same data that comes from your eyes or your ears, right? They're all just neurons going in there. So your brain sort of figures out what is it? It's a smell thing. It's not a sight thing. And then what is it? And then. What would that do? Where is it? So it sends some data to a spatial bit of the brain that is dealing with where it is and how far away it is. And then another bit, is it

• 58:55Speaker 02

  something you should not like or like a reflex sort of thing? Or is it something that you used to build your model of the world? So is it telling you there's some, a forest around the corner or something like that? And it's so remarkable that just beginning to map out which bits of the brain do this and how they get the data and where they distribute it to. And it was amazing to me because you're right, we don't know, we know a lot about it, but we don't know as much as we would like to know about it. It's like the universe, as you said, in that sense.

• 59:25Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah, and we're, we're living amongst, you know, there's been bad, poor mental health forever, but it seems like, and that's the sort of thing that I'm deeply interested in is people's mental health and how we can help ourselves better it. And, you know, we're still yet to crack that one because we're in, you know, we're up Schitt's Creek with that one at the moment.

• 59:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I, I think it all comes back to what we were talking about earlier, that we've not figured out how to run a world, definitely. And we, we've sort of figured out how to run societies, but maybe we're not doing a very good job at the moment.

• 1:00:06Fearne Cotton?

  No.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  And I, I, I would guess it's something to do with the rate of change and the, you know, the, I suppose social media and things have fed into that. And we're, we're having to live in a different way and interact with people in a different way. And we've not adapted to it.

• 1:00:21Fearne Cotton?

  No, no.

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  And, but I think it's the, it's the number one challenge that we face for all the reasons we've spoken about how valuable this society is. But you know, one of the, one of the possible explanations for why we don't see any other civilizations out there is because they don't get very far. So if you think about us at the moment, it's only in the last. Century, half a century that we've had the power to destroy ourselves.

• 1:00:51Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:51Speaker 02

  And and we don't, we've managed to avoid it. It's remarkable, probably, that for seventy years or so, since the the invention of the atomic bomb, we haven't used them again.

• 1:01:04Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  After we used the two hundred.

• 1:01:06Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  But we might do. And maybe there's there's a theory that essentially says it's too difficult to manage your planet. So so when you when you have so many billion living things, people in this case on the planet, you just can't get along. It's too many.

• 1:01:23Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  So I would hate that to be the case. Because I think that we're so valuable and so rare.

• 1:01:29Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  But we don't really, you you know, the the progress we've made seems to be unraveling somewhat at the moment.

• 1:01:35Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah, I mean, as we are running out of time really quickly, there's so many different tangents again. We're all like, ah, the world's gonna end.

• 1:01:46Fearne Cotton?

  But I think one burning question I have, and this is more from talking to my kids. So my son, who is twelve, is bang into science. Like, it's his whole world. He loves it. He and I'm constantly trying to learn from him and go back to the drawing board with my like lack of scientific knowledge. And my daughter, who's ten, she's, you know, I spoke to her in the car yesterday about this chat today. And what would you ask Professor Brian Cox? And it was all around aliens, obviously. But there seems to be a point in the education system where girls are, whether it's discouraged or feel like they don't have so much of a place in the science world. And we can see that reflected throughout history with the few scientific women that are, you know, historically held up. And shown as an example of someone that's done, I can think of like Marie Curie, and then I'm sort of out of ideas.

• 1:02:32Fearne Cotton?

  How can we encourage women to get more into science or for young, I think this starts at the school, doesn't it? How can we, how can we really focus on that and ensure that we're creating space and room for young women to really find their place in this conversation?

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  I think, a- a- as you said, we have to, and this applies to all fields, actually. You have to, when when a. A child shows interest in something, you've got to really make sure that you don't snuff out that curiosity, that you encourage it. And also, you're right, that there's, what could it be that's preventing girls going into science? That is quite complicated. And and I, the only bit I know is I was involved a few years ago now in a prize, the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, which looked at this, because engineering, there's there's

• 1:03:28Speaker 02

  an equal problem, if not a larger problem. And one of the things that was found is that there are unconscious biases from parents. If you if you think of engineering, your your view of what engineering is might be building a road with a with a hard hat on. Now, that's actually quite high tech now and really interesting, but you might think, I don't want my daughter digging up roads, you know, with all these big blokes or something. So you have preconceptions.

• 1:03:56Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:56Speaker 02

  And so in engineering, that is the case. And so then, and it wouldn't be that, it's very rare that parents would try and put their daughter off going into something. But your reaction might not quite be, might not be quite as encouraging as it should be, because you might be on the, and so science maybe has that image that maybe, you know, like being a rocket engineer, for example. And we have a shortage of spacecraft builders in the UK. We're very good at it. It's one of our great industries that we're world leading in. And we don't have enough people going into the industry.

• 1:04:32Fearne Cotton?

  Wow.

• 1:04:33Speaker 02

  So it could be that if if your your daughter, you say, which rocket building, you might have this unconscious image of a load of geeky blokes in a room, you know, playing with computers or something. So that we have to make sure that teachers and parents don't transfer any lack of understanding of the career to their daughters in this case. But it applies to sons as well. It's we try and let them do what they want to do and encourage them whichever way that they want to go.

• 1:05:01Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  And then, but and then you're right, and then you get into more complicated issues about career structures, which many industries have that. And that's true in academia as well, that and people try to do that. So yeah, it's a very good question.

• 1:05:16Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:16Speaker 02

  But in terms of real youngsters, I really believe that it's. It's making sure that if your, like if your daughter says, I'm interested in astronomy, you go, right.

• 1:05:27Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:27Speaker 02

  So you take them outside and you start to know what the stars are. If you could, you buy them some binoculars maybe and, and which you can get, you know, and, and you can start, you encourage it. So I, I think it's all about encouragement.

• 1:05:39Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:40Speaker 02

  And not putting barriers in the way. The, the one thing I would say also is that it's really important as parents that you can, if, let's say you, you haven't been to uni-, let's say university, you haven't been to university. And your, your son or daughter says, I'd like to do that. Then you can go to the universities as a parent and you can find out what it's like. Cause you might not know people who've been to university and that's one of the big blocks actually. And so the universities are really happy. If you say, what would happen to my child if they came to, where would they stay? What the, where would they live? What it, cause you might be anxious about that and you can transfer that to your child as well. But all the universities, higher education colleges, all this are really happy. If you come and say, I don't, I don't understand this myself, can you show me?

• 1:06:25Speaker 02

  And then you can provide encouragement and you can, you can begin to remove the blocks that might be there.

• 1:06:31Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah. I think there's just some brilliant young women out there who are ready to change the world and it's, it's exciting.

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  There are, you know, I mean, you said about the scientists, I mean, so one, one of the questions I get asked a lot is how do we know how far away the stars are? I got asked that in the school the other week. How do we know how far away the stars are? One of the most important measurements, it was a, a, a great astronomer called Henrietta Levitt, who was the first to work out that there are some stars, they're called sea feed variable stars. But it allows you to work out how bright they actually are by looking at them. And she noticed that in the early part of the 20th century. That's the foundation. That work was used to prove that the Andromeda galaxy, which is our nearest neighboring galaxy, is far outside the Milky Way. But it was her work.

• 1:07:18Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:19Speaker 02

  So there are actually quite, quite a lot of famous women in the history of. Astronomy, but also science. But as you said, it's usually Marie Curie.

• 1:07:28Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:29Speaker 02

  But there's, I mean.

• 1:07:30Fearne Cotton?

  I felt embarrassed that I couldn't think of any more value. I was like, I'm gonna have to ask ChatGPT cause I'd like, I need to like know about more of them. The men you can list off, but the women, they're they're maybe harder to find. Maybe that's a slight block for young girls too. They're not seeing it.

• 1:07:44Speaker 02

  Role models.

• 1:07:44Fearne Cotton?

  In history, yeah.

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, but there are increasing numbers now.

• 1:07:47Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  Of role models. But you're right. It's just, you know, the history of science. I said that it really did start, modern science in like sixteen hundred.

• 1:07:56Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:57Speaker 02

  So those names like Newton and Einstein and Galileo, they're men. But of course, we're talking about a society in sixteen hundred.

• 1:08:07Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:07Speaker 02

  When that, so there's part of that, I think, just historically, until you get to the twentieth century, it was extremely difficult to be a woman.

• 1:08:16Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  And go into science.

• 1:08:18Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:18Speaker 02

  And it's changing, but as you said, when you say, I was gonna say not fast enough. The reason I would say that is because what we need in all sort of areas of human endeavour are people who are who are good at it and want to push the boundaries. You need talent. And if you're only drawing talent from a small pool, in this case, you should say men, right? You're you're you're missing.

• 1:08:45Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:45Speaker 02

  Half the potential to advance human knowledge.

• 1:08:48Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  So it's it's it's, there's a practical point to be made as well. You just want to find the best talent.

• 1:08:56Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah, exactly. To end things, where is your happy place?

• 1:09:01Speaker 02

  I think it, I think it is, if you're allowed to, does it have to be a physical place?

• 1:09:07Fearne Cotton?

  No, no, it can be.

• 1:09:08Speaker 02

  Can it be kind of a state of mind?

• 1:09:09Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah, exactly, yeah.

• 1:09:10Speaker 02

  I think it is trying to understand something that I don't understand. And at some point, figuring it out. I really love that process.

• 1:09:21Fearne Cotton?

  Is the figuring out essential? Does that lead to frustration if there's not a conclusion of sorts?

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  I think that if you're trying to understand something that is understood, but if someone understands it, but it might be very difficult, then that process of trying to.

• 1:09:40Speaker 02

  Trying to find your own way of internalising that idea so that it becomes natural to you and you really understand it is is a really exhilarating thing to do. And I always say to students, actually, so I I teach at the University of Manchester, I teach first years. And I always say to them that the these ideas, I I talk about relativity, right? Relativity is a bit confusing quite a lot.

• 1:10:03Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:04Speaker 02

  Um. But ultimately, it doesn't matter how long it takes you to get a particular thing i- i- into into your mind, right, to understand it. And it's different for everybody, and it's different for each different idea. Some ideas, someone will get in ten seconds, they go, yeah, I understand that. And sometimes it might take a month for someone else, but it doesn't matter. And there was, I I interviewed a recently, a great Nobel Prize winning mathematician, Roger Penrose, Sir Roger Penrose, who got the Nobel Prize for, in the in the sixties, he proved that black holes would form. So his very famous paper in nineteen sixty three, and he got the Nobel Prize in twenty twenty. And someone asked him, so a young person from the audience said to him, how do you win a Nobel Prize?

• 1:10:48Fearne Cotton?

  Mmm.

• 1:10:49Speaker 02

  And he said, he said, he said, I I was really slow at school. So and actually, I was so slow that they thought I wasn't very good at maths. And he's one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth and twenty first century. But he's slow. So so he understood that, really, that the thing, the thing that's really enjoyable is just taking your time and keeping going until you understand something. You know, then, you don't need to do an exam, or have anyone get test you. You know when you understand something.

• 1:11:20Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:20Speaker 02

  And the thing is not to be worried about the fact that it might take you ages.

• 1:11:23Fearne Cotton?

  Well, our culture is like tomorrow, yesterday, like it should have been done. Why am I, why, why things not moving more quickly? So it's amazing advice i- in life in general to not be in a rush for any conclusion or any moment.

• 1:11:36Speaker 02

  You can't rush understanding. You can't be in a rush to understand stuff.

• 1:11:40Fearne Cotton?

  No.

• 1:11:41Speaker 02

  You just, you don't, you know it when, when you understand it, you know it.

• 1:11:44Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah, I think, you know, that goes for just learning about yourself, doesn't it? You know, you think, if you look back to my thirties, I'm like, oh, my God, I don't know who the hell I was or what I was doing. And you can't rush that. You, it's with age and experience. Um. Basil, who I work with, said that I should have asked you, where is your happy space instead of place?

• 1:12:02Speaker 02

  Happy space. Yeah, well.

• 1:12:05Fearne Cotton?

  Is there anywhere in space that you love? If you look at the history of the universe, in which point in that history would you like to hang out in?

• 1:12:13Speaker 02

  Now.

• 1:12:14Fearne Cotton?

  Right.

• 1:12:15Speaker 02

  Here, because I think that all the things that we talked about earlier about the challenges that we face. It is true that there's no better time to be a human being than now. You know, it's obvious in some ways, the way if you go back, go back to our grand, when our grandparents were born. There were no antibiotics. They didn't exist when our grandparents were.

• 1:12:40Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah, it's mad.

• 1:12:41Speaker 02

  It's post Second World War, really, that we have access to antibiotics in any large amount. So really, if you think about it, certainly in a country like this, that we're lucky to live here. There is no better place in history to live. Now it's up to us whether that continues to be the case. It might not, you know, we could, we could have the Third World War and then it would not be the best place to live. But that's a choice.

• 1:13:11Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:12Speaker 02

  That we have to make.

• 1:13:13Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  But at the moment, I would rather live in a time where there were antibiotics.

• 1:13:17Fearne Cotton?

  Me too, me too. Well, look, I wish you all the luck with your tour. I want to bring the kids, they will just love it. From what I've seen from the trailer and what I've read about it, it just sounds like it's going to be an amazing show. And I am definitely going to be all eyes open, wanting to learn as much as I can. So have an amazing tour. Thank you so much.

• 1:13:37Speaker 02

  Thank you very much.

• 1:13:40Fearne Cotton?

  Bloody hell, my brain hurts. Does your brain hurt? My brain hurts. Thing about having a chat like that is you're actually left with more questions at the end. It's just, there's eight more. Like I walked away and then as soon as he left, I was like, oh, I didn't ask that. Oh my God, I asked that, but what about that follow up question? It's never ending, it's never ending. That's why you need to go and watch his tour. Tickets for Brian's 2026 World Tour Emergence are available now. I'm going, I'm taking the kids 100%. My son Rex is massively into science. By the way, there will be a list of all the books that Brian mentioned in the show notes. If you didn't write them down, do not worry. And talking of books, do you want to know what book we're reading next month in November in the Happy Place Book

• 1:14:21Fearne Cotton?

  Club? Oh, it's my wonderful mate Elizabeth Day's latest novel, One of Us. Ah, this book, there's betrayal. There are buried scandals in this one. Do you know what? It's just so different from Elizabeth's other books. She is just, not that she needed to find her stride because she was already a very accomplished writer before she started writing books, but this is just like, she is charging ahead with this one, guys. Come and read along with us and join in the chat on Instagram at Happy Place Book Club over the next few weeks. And there's something quite exciting that I'm going to be revealing on that Instagram account, by the way, at Happy Place Book Club. Go over to it, follow it. Something really cool happening soon. That's all I can say. All right. A huge thanks

• 1:15:04Fearne Cotton?

  again to Brian, to the producer, Anushka Tate at Happy Place Studios, and to you, you gorgeous ball of stardust.

• 1:15:38Speaker 03

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of the best one yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithgemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithgemini.

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• 1:17:11Speaker 11

  Hello, this is Susie Ruffel. And Maisie Adams. And together we host Big Kick Energy. Hey Mais, what is it? Only the best podcast ever. Yes! A comedy entertainment podcast with a focus on all things women's football, all things hilarious, all things friendship. It's a laugh, is what it is, Ruffel. Yeah, and a fair bit of gossiping, too. Oh, and a lovely bit of gossip. Chow down on the gossip. Nom, nom, nom, nom, nom. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts. Just need to search Big Kick Energy. Grab a knife and fork and tuck in, baby.