Begin Again Moments: The Power of the Sun & Moon | Dame Maggie Aderin-Pocock & Professor Brian Cox

In this special Begin Again Moments episode, inspired by this week’s solar eclipse, two of Britain’s most brilliant minds explore the extraordinary power of the Sun and Moon. Dame Maggie Aderin-Pocock explores the mystery and influence of the Moon, while Professor Brian Cox turns our attention to the Sun, the star at the centre of our solar system and the source of the light and energy that makes life possible. As the solar eclipse captures attention around the world, these two fascinating conversations offer a chance to look beyond the spectacle and understand the remarkable relationship between the Sun, Moon and our place in the universe. To hear the full conversations, watch the complete episodes on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  When fall comes back around, there's a sense of a reset. And new pieces from Lululemon's Fall Drop are an inspiration to push your goals and elevate your routines. As your calendar fills, easy-to-layer styles meet the demands of your day. And as you challenge yourself to try even more, versatile sets transition with you. The Lululemon Fall Lineup brings new levels of comfort and confidence, whether you're starting something fresh or starting something over. Check out the latest arrivals in-store and on lululemon.com now.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  My father loved the moon because it was his friend when he was in Nigeria because it helped him when he was cycling across the savanna on unlit roads.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  Oh, wow, it lit the way for him.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:41Speaker 02

  Is that why he loved the moon?

• 0:42Speaker 01

  I think so, yes.

• 0:44Speaker 02

  I love that.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the thing is, and also growing up in London, because we were sort of growing up in inner-city London, so you can't see many stars and that, but you see the moon shining through. Last night, we just moved to a new house, and it was quite cloudy, but I just saw sort of a patch of moonlight. So I ran up and looked out the window, and there it is shining, and it just lifts my heart. And so, yeah, even if you can't see the stars, you can see the moon, and the idea that people have gone there as well.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  Yes. Yes, it is mad, isn't it? The other night, there was a meteor shower.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Ah, yes.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  Wasn't there? And they said, "Look north.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah."

• 1:22Speaker 02

  "Go outside, look north, and you might be able to see it." And Michael and I went outside, and we looked north. We saw five shooting stars.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  Oh, it's...

• 1:31Speaker 02

  Five? In an hour?

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  It was unreal. I don't... We're out of town with no streetlights or anything. It was... Look, goosebumps. It was absolutely mind-blowing. So was it your dad then that gave you the kind of moon bug?

• 1:50Speaker 01

  I think so. So my dad was sort of mentioning this, and also, because I'm an insomniac, sort of growing up. Yeah, you're sort of, you're wandering around the house when everybody else is asleep, and you open the curtain, and moonlight shines in. So it's his friend, it was my friend, and so, yeah, my father always called himself a self-certified lunatic.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  Yes, he did that because when it said, "I was reading about you, and it said that you were a lunatic," and I was like, "Well, that's a bit rude." And then I, and then it came to me, I was like, "Oh, Luna."

• 2:19Speaker 01

  Yes, under the lunar cycle. Because he always said, "The self-certified is very important." So not just a lunatic, I'm a self-certified lunatic. So I brought this upon myself. And I think it was similar for him, he just loved the moon. And growing up, I used to go to the top of the flats and look out across London, and you could see London lit up by sort of moonlight, and it's beautiful. So, yes, and I always say, "It's hereditary," because my father passed it on to me, and I've passed it on to my daughter.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  And so we'd go outside, and so we moved into the new house recently, and I said, "Oh, look, there's the moon." I always said, "Stop that, mother." The old neighbors used to hear me howling at the moon. No, I'm 16 now. We're not howling at the moon anymore. "All right, come on."

• 3:08Speaker 02

  Always howl at the moon. Come on.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  I know, I think it's necessary, and it is so wonderful. It's liberating and cathartic, and you're like, "Ooh."

• 3:16Speaker 02

  I got slightly obsessed with these supermoons, and I've never really, never really got into astrology or the moon, but I did know, from having three babies, that babies often deliver on a full moon. Every midwife I met told me that if the due date was near a full moon, I would probably, you know, go into labor on a full moon. And then they also told me that the police brace themselves.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Is that true?

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Yes. One of the things I was exploring, I wrote a book about the moon, and it was my love letter to the moon, celebrating, and it was looking at sort of lunacy and the fact that, and some police forces do actually put extra cops on the beat.

• 4:05Speaker 02

  They do, yeah.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  When there's a full moon. And it's quite interesting because it's sort of a cause and effect, and we try and do it scientifically, because you can say, you're working in a hospital, and something interesting happens, and it happens to be a full moon, you remember that. But if something interesting happens, and it's not a full moon, you might not remember it. So it's trying to look at sort of the evidence and the sort of, yes, but I do like the idea.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  But also, a friend of mine that was a social worker, she also said that they used to have more call-outs for disruptions in the home.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  On a full moon, they would, they would all brace themselves for that.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Oh, the phones ringing more.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, and I thought, "That's fascinating," because we are made of water.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  And am I right in saying, "Does the moon affect tides?"

• 4:53Speaker 01

  It affects tides, and so large masses of water.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Well, actually, the thing is, gravity, the way gravity works, it affects everything. So for instance, when I jump up, I fall down because the Earth's gravity is pulling on me.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  But also, my gravity is pulling on the Earth. Now, my gravity compared with the Earth's gravity is insignificant, yes. But people do say if they've really jumped up at the same time, I still don't think it would have much difference, but it's a large mass moving, and so, yes, then it could have, you might see a noticeable effect. But yes, and so there is this interaction, the gravitational force, but it does, yeah, sort of, you know, pull the water, because the water is fluid. When you have sort of the moon on one side and the sun on the other, for instance, then the water gets all elongated, and you get high tides. So, and there's lots of things that spawn when there's a full moon, so, yes, it does have an influence.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  So they spawn at full moon?

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Yes, quite a few creatures.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  So that is, makes sense about having a baby at full moon.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Well, yes, but you see, you try to work out why they spawn at a full moon.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  And so, and I think it is a sort of, it's almost like timing. It's quite interesting, if you look back in time, people often use the moon as a calendar because it's of the order of a month, and so it's a nice cycle. And there are all sorts of things like menstruation and things like that, we sync together.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  It is, isn't it?

• 6:14Speaker 01

  So, yes.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  Think about it.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the thing is, it's nice to sort of analyze and get an understanding of it, but yes, I find it fascinating.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  There's something very satisfying about this synchronicity in the world, that when you start looking for it, it's everywhere.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Yes, and we are, as humans, we're akin to patterns. We pick them up, and we want to home in on them.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  We like, we like that, I don't know.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  Well, it's order.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Yes, in the chaos.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  Yes, there's some kind of order in a pattern that makes you feel safe.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  I went to see Brian Cox the other day.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  And the first half, I was like, "Oh, my God, I'm trying to remember all of this." I thought I should have taken a notebook and pen, but then the second half, he put it into practice.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  What it all meant.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  And what it did and why.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  And I thought, "God, this is it, this is so interesting, and that's what you do."

• 7:11Speaker 03

  There are very deep questions about why the universe is the way that it is. And if you think, what I mean by that is that, so we know that 13.8 billion years ago, very close to the Big Bang, all the universe was, was just the simplest elements, hydrogen and helium, just the stuff in party balloons, right? And hydrogen, which is the stuff that goes into water, and that's it, right? There's nothing else, really, it's just this soup of those things, and just some simple forces of nature, and that's it. 13.8 billion years later, those atoms have ended up in patterns like us that can have a conversation.

• 7:51Speaker 03

  So the universe can observe itself and think about itself through us here on Earth, right? It's a remarkable property of the universe. So you say, "Why? Why is it that the laws of nature and the building blocks are such that they can get, just this gas, right, can end up in patterns like human beings?"

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Could you talk me through what happened to the hydrogen and helium and how it evolved? Because it's such an interesting way that they came together to create something else which created something else, and I don't know.

• 8:28Speaker 03

  It's the grandest of stories.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  It's amazing.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  So you have this, and this is part of the heart of the show, really, you have this hydrogen, helium, just these gases, right? But there's slight differences in, they're almost just featureless, the universe is almost nothing, but it's got these little bits where there's a bit more gas here and a bit less here, and a bit more there and a bit, like I say, tiny little variations. Then gravity, as the universe goes, expands and cools, gravity can allow them to collapse into galaxies and stars, and that, by the way, is a huge story about how does that work and how, but essentially, just where it's a bit denser, gravity takes over and

• 9:14Speaker 03

  they collapse and they make stars. And stars shine by sticking lighter elements into heavier elements. So the sun at the moment is making hydrogen into helium, and that's why it's doing it, it's just making heavier elements. But then, at the end of its life, when it runs out of hydrogen to make into helium, it starts making carbon and oxygen and those things. So those things, out of which we are made, come from generations of stars that assembled them and then died, threw that stuff out into the universe, and then gravity takes over and it re-collapses that into new stars, and then ultimately planets. And that's the story of the universe.

• 9:55Speaker 03

  So it's, the story is 13.8 billion years, of which the Earth's been around four and a half billion, by the way, so to get a scale of it. You end up from this simplest of elements, the heavy elements get made in stars, gravity collapses it all back together again, and ultimately you get places like this. And some of it, by the way, so you've got like gold, you've got like a gold ring or some wedding ring or something like that, if you're listening now or watching, you look at that, it was one of the great mysteries, actually, where is that made? Because we didn't quite understand it until very recently.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  Gold?

• 10:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we...

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 10:31Speaker 03

  Thought it's made, maybe it's made in supernova explosions when they explode. But then, a few years ago, we had these experiments, and they're called gravitational wave experiments, and they, in their own right, are amazing. So we can see things like black holes colliding and sending ripples out in the fabric of the universe, space and time.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  What happens when a black hole...

• 10:54Speaker 03

  So they merge into two black holes.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  Do they become massive?

• 10:57Speaker 03

  But it's really a bigger black hole. But it's really violent, and they, so they make space and time ripple, and these things are called gravitational waves, and they go out. A friend of mine, Kip Thorne, actually, got the Nobel Prize for this work, called it "A Storm in Time."

• 11:13Speaker 02

  Ooh, how nice.

• 11:13Speaker 03

  So this time storm goes, and we can measure it. So we saw one of these time storms in our detector, and it was the collision between these things called neutron stars, which are stars that are the mass of the sun, but they collapse to the size of a city. They're about 10 kilometers across these things.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Wait, wait, say that again.

• 11:32Speaker 03

  So a star, actually more massive than the sun.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  Bigger than the sun, collapses.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  Till it's about the size of London.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  And are you talking about that's when it runs out of, so it dies and collapses into London?

• 11:45Speaker 03

  Gravity just collapses it. So you get these remarkable, they're like a single atomic nucleus, these things, really violent, the last step towards a black hole, right? If they get any bigger, they just go, and they, but so these things are around, and we saw two of them collide with these ripples, and we got our telescopes and sent them and looked in the sky and watched, and we saw gold being made. So we think that a lot of the gold, and this is this gold that you're wearing now, that came, a lot of it, perhaps most of it, from the collision between neutron stars. Isn't that amazing?

• 12:20Speaker 02

  And ended up in Earth.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then, so it got made in these collisions, and then gravity collapses it, and we dig it up and make it into jewelry. It's the most, it's part of that remarkable story.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  When fall comes back around, there's a sense of a reset. And new pieces from Lululemon's Fall Drop are an inspiration to push your goals and elevate your routines. As your calendar fills, easy-to-layer styles meet the demands of your day. And as you challenge yourself to try even more, versatile sets transition with you. The Lululemon Fall Lineup brings new levels of comfort and confidence, whether you're starting something fresh or starting something over. Check out the latest arrivals in-store and on lululemon.com now.