The Entire Universe (2016) - full transcript
Musical about The Entire Universe in one hour, with lots of jokes.
[TRUMPETS PLAYING]
[DRUM ROLL]
[AUDIENCE CHEERS AND APPLAUDS]
Thank you very much.
Thank you, thank you.
Good evening.
Roughly 41 years ago,
today-ish,
Rutland Weekend Television,
the world's smallest
TV station,
did a special,
starring Beatle,
George Harrison.
And now, tonight,
41 years later, we're back
to put on another TV special,
with the Beatle of science,
professor Brian Cox.
[AUDIENCE CHEERS]
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDS]
And tonight, our subject is
the entire universe,
which we'll be covering
in one hour.
As a musical.
OK, so, without further ado,
please welcome,
all the way from Rutland,
Muriel Tritt.
And the Muriel Tritt
School of Music and Dance.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
♪ The Muriel Tritt
School of Music and Dance
♪ Gives young people
a wonderful chance
♪ To appear in a show
♪ To star in a play
♪ And one day we may be
♪ On Broadway!
♪ Through 30 years
through rain and snow
♪ Every year we put on a show
♪ We didThe Sound of Mucus
♪ AndZombie and Son
♪The Little Barmaid
♪ AndSecond to Nun
♪ We didSpamma-Mia
♪ AndPorky and Bess
♪ And an all new version
ofG and S
♪ We didMersey Boys
andRichard the Turd
♪ We didHello Polly!
♪ About a dead bird
♪ We sank theTitanic
on a real pond
♪ The 007 musical
Legally Bond
♪ So relax in your hats
and hang on to your purse
♪ For tonight
we finally present
♪ The entire universe
♪ Yes we've frankly been
thinking out of the box
♪ Will you all please
welcome our star
♪ Professor Brian Cox
[AUDIENCE CHEERS AND APPLAUDS]
Where the bloody hell is he?
Bit of a snag,
he's not here.
But he should be on the way
from the airport.
-This is a live show.
-Yeah, he'll be on his way.
I hope so.
Anyway, that's not the snag.
You see, I haven't
been able to speak to him
for the last few weeks.
-What?
-Well, I haven't been able
to explain to him...
This isn't so much
a kind of lecture,
it's more of a musical.
You didn't
get a hold of him?
Well, it's not my fault,
is it?
He's been to Patagonia
testing magnetism
or something.
You know, no cell phones.
So, he doesn't know
it's a musical?
-[MAN] He's here.
-Oh, jeez.
-Harry!
-Brian, where've you been?
Sorry, I'm late.
Can you just pay
for the taxi?
What?
We've already started.
I know, it's funny, isn't it?
We can to send probes
into space
at tremendous speeds,
but one lane closed on the M25
and you're stuck forever.
We've been trying
to reach you for weeks.
I've been to Patagonia,
measuring micro magnetism.
It's very interesting,
because the Earth's poles
are beginning to shift...
We phoned. We texted.
We tweeted.
I can't use cell phones,
because we measure
in micro-magnetism.
Tell me,
you did get the script.
What? Not unless
you sent it by llama.
What?
-What's this?
-It's just a costume.
No time to explain.
-I haven't got my lecture.
-It's all right.
It's all on the autocue.
And, here we are.
Here's the set.
Hey, Brian.
Robin,
what are you doing here?
Er... Helping.
I'm putting in
the correct number
of billions and billions
in the autocue for you.
I have put in loads,
you'll love it.
Now...
Pointer.
Clicker.
Showtime.
Ladies and gentlemen,
will you please welcome,
Professor Brian Cox.
[AUDIENCE CHEERS AND APPLAUDS]
[WHOOPING]
Thank you.
Good evening.
This...
Is the
Hubble deep field image.
It's the deepest image
of our universe ever taken.
[CHOIR SINGING]
It's the photograph
of a piece of sky,
you would cover
if you took a five pence piece
and held it about
75 feet away.
[CHOIR SINGING]
It contains
over 10,000 galaxies.
Each with a 100 billion stars.
[CHOIR SINGING]
-What the hell is that?
-It's the universe music,
Brian.
-[STAMMERING]
It's distracting.
-It sounds really good.
Yeah, it sounds really,
really... Really, kind of,
jazzes up the universe.
Tell them
I don't need any music
in the lecture.
Well, you know, with the BBC
broadcasting it worldwide
live...
Hang on a minute,
I thought it was only
broadcasted in Rutland?
Well, mainly Rutland,
but also,
the rest of the world.
Look. Just read the autocue,
please, because we're running
a bit late. OK?
Please welcome,
Professor Brian Cox.
[AUDIENCE CHEERS]
This is,
the Sloane digital sky survey.
This is real data.
It's a fly-through
of nearby galaxies
in the observable universe,
which contains around
350 billion large galaxies,
each with 200 billion stars,
just like our Milky Way.
So, if we multiply
350 billion galaxies
by 200 billion stars,
that means, in the
observable universe,
there are at least,
70,000 billion billion stars.
Seven followed by 22 zeros.
Seven billion trillion stars.
And that's just
the observable universe.
We've got good reason
to think
the universe extends
way beyond that little patch
we can see.
Might even be
infinite in extent.
Now, today,
after expanding
for 13.8 billion years,
we can see out to the edge
of a giant sphere,
centred on the Earth,
90 billion light years wide.
[TWINKLES]
[BRIAN] What's this?
What the hell is this?
Robin!
Eric, Eric, Eric!
♪ It's so damn big
♪ It's so damn vast
♪ It's so damn huge
and it's so damn fast
♪ It's so massive
with such weight
♪ It's so enormous
it's just great!
♪ We're living in a sphere
nearly 20 billion years
♪ Nearly eight billion
light years in diameter
♪ Standing in a bubble
At the speed of Hubble
♪ It's so damn huge
in each parameter
♪ 30.7 billion years
♪ On every side
♪ Which makes our universe
♪ 93 billion light years wide
♪ 350 billion galaxies
♪ With 70 billion
trillion stars
♪ That's 70,000, thousand,
thousand, thousand, thousand,
thousand, thousand stars
♪ It makes you feel so small
♪ Stuck on the surface
of the spinning ball
♪ When you consider the size
of it all
♪ It makes you
feel so small
♪ It makes you
feel so small
♪ Wondering why
we're here at all
♪ Trying to walk
before we can crawl
♪ It makes you
feel so small
♪ The universe
so big and vast
♪ And, oh, so very shiny
♪ It makes you
feel irrelevant
♪ So useless
and so tiny
♪ It makes you
feel so small
♪ The universe
holds us all enthralled
♪ When you consider
the size of it all
♪ It makes you
feel so small ♪
[PIANO PLAYS]
Yeah!
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDS]
Science isn't
a bloody musical.
Everyone is very excited.
I really look like a prat.
You have looked
like a prat before.
-Science isn't showbiz.
-Well, it can be.
This is not the
Morecambe and Wiseshow,
is it?
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
[APPLAUSE]
It could be.
Hey, you can see the join.
-Definitely a wig.
-Definitely.
Definitely.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDS]
-You all right, lad?
-Warwick Davis, big fan.
Warwick,
what are you doing here?
I'm playing "The Big Bang".
Ba-da-ba-ba!
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
-What?
-I know, irony.
But he's right tip-top
on science, Brian.
Per foot, he knows
more about science than
Tim Peake.
Yeah, that's right.
Isn't it, Tim?
[AUDIENCE CHEERING]
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDS]
That's right, Brian.
Absolutely, that's right.
-What?
-Really.
Warwick is really good
on science, Brian.
He's absolutely amazing
and he could've been
on the
International Space Station
with me.
He would've saved
a lot of space.
Cheers, Tim.
You still on for dinner
Tuesday?
Absolutely, yeah.
Your turn to pay.
Oh, OK.
Tim, I've got a couple
of questions.
Listen, ask me
any question you like.
All right,
what's a light year?
A light-year,
is when you don't have
very much on,
say, a panto in Woking
and a possible telly.
No, it's a measure
of distance.
The distance light travels
in one year.
-Which is...
-Six trillion miles.
Am I right?
-Yeah.
-Yeah.
Six followed by 12 zeros.
Now, let me ask you
a question.
What's hot, dense
and forever expanding?
-Well...
-The Kardashians.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
-Lovely joke, Warwick.
-Thanks, Eric.
-It's G-string theory.
There's another one.
-Ah, I love it.
We'll have a shot
of Kim's bum, you know.
-That could be like Saturn.
-What?
Like a great gas giant?
Oh, boo-boom!
You see, material like this,
writes itself, Brian.
So, moving on now,
on the autocue, love,
if you think
of the universe as...
If you think
of the universe
as a balloon...
Oh, great metaphor.
With the galaxies
represented by dots
on the balloon.
Then the expansion
of our universe
is just like
the expanding surface
of the balloon.
All the galaxies
appear to be rushing apart
from each other.
[BLOWING]
Carry on.
[CONTINUES BLOWING]
We used to think
the universe
was slowing down
under the effects of gravity,
until we measured
the expansion rate
very precisely
back in the 1990s,
and discovered that
it is in fact, speeding up,
because of the effects
of something known as
dark energy.
Now, we don't know
what dark energy is,
but it accounts for
70% of the energy density
of the universe.
[CHUCKLES] Dark matter
makes up a further 25%.
We don't know
what that is either.
And the stuff...
You all right?
Yeah, I'm hyperventilating,
quickly.
The stuff we
can actually see,
shining as stars
and out of which
we are all made,
is only five percent
of the universe.
So, the universe is expanding,
but from what?
If we're able to
reverse time,
wind back the clocks
until everything rushes back
together again.
[BALLOON FIZZLES]
Sorry.
If we wind everything
back to the beginning,
if we go back in time
13.8 billion years
before there were any stars
or galaxies,
and all the matter
of the universe
was crammed into
a tiny, wrinkly, little pea,
unimaginably hot,
unimaginably dense,
containing all the energy
and the ingredients
to build
the hundreds of billions
of galaxies,
and billions of trillions
of stars in our universe,
contained in
a single primordial atom,
we call that, "The Big Bang".
And hold it there, love.
For the Big Bang song.
-The Big Bang isn't a song.
-It is now.
[EXPLOSION]
[SINGING]
-What are they doing?
-It's pretty obvious,
isn't it?
They're elementary particles.
Look.
They're banging
into each other
and then disappearing.
-Particles?
-Yeah, much better than
your boring old equations.
[SINGING]
[EXPLOSION]
[EXPLOSION]
[EXPLOSION]
[EXPLOSION]
[EXPLOSION]
[EXPLOSION]
[EXPLOSION]
[EXPLOSION]
[EXPLOSION]
[EXPLOSION]
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDS]
[SIGHS]
So, what'd you think?
I'm a professor,
no one will take me seriously
if they think I'm in showbiz.
Yeah, I think that ship
might've sailed some time ago.
Erm, and the BBC did say
that they were gonna pay you
more money.
The early cosmos
can be thought of as
a series of epochs.
As in
the gradually expanding
and cooling universe,
the forces of nature
separate out,
and the particles
we see today,
the protons, neutrons
and electrons,
out of which
we are all made are formed.
Time itself started
13.8 billion years ago.
And once time
had started...
Sorry, Brian.
Can we hold time?
-What?
-Can we just hold time
for a minute, please?
Well, time isn't here, yet.
-What?
-Hannah Waddingham
is playing time.
But, unfortunately,
she's late.
Er, she's stuck in traffic.
So, if you give us
just a bit more BS.
I'm sorry,
a bit more science
about the early universe
until she gets here.
Thanks a lot.
You could say that
more happened
in the first three minutes
of the life of the universe
than in the next
13.8 billion years.
By the time
the universe was around
three minutes old,
it had cooled down
to a temperature of only
a billion degrees.
And it was filled with,
what we call, a plasma.
A soup of electrically charged
particles
through which
light couldn't pass.
Now, light can be thought of
as a stream of particles
called photons
and they have no mass.
But other
fundamental particles,
like electrons,
do have mass.
And they get it
through the interaction
with the Higgs field,
which permeates the universe,
and has a particle
associated with it,
called the "Higgs boson".
Ha-har, Captain Cox.
Ha-har.
-Who are you?
-Got better. Um.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDS AND CHEERS]
Who?
I'm Higgs boson,
me hearties!
Ha-har!
Noel Fielding, meet Brian.
Brian...
Brian, huge fan.
Love your astrology.
Astronomy.
Whatever.
What's your star sign?
-I haven' got a star sign.
-Come on,
everyone's got a star sign.
All right, gin and tonic.
[CHUCKLES]
That's not a star sign.
-He's a Pisces.
-I knew it. I'm a Gemini.
-We get on instantly.
-We don't.
All right.
Unless, you've got
Jupiter rising.
I've got anger...
Rising.
I've got a very finely-tuned
drivel detector.
And it goes off
every time someone mentions
"Astrology".
It's all true, isn't it?
Well, it's not, really.
It's kak.
What kind of talk
is that?
Kak? You'll be saying
crop circles don't exist,
next.
Crop circles don't exist.
This is ridiculous.
Next you'll be saying,
global warming is a real thing
that we should
all be worried about.
-Eric, can we just have
a word?
-Just keep going, keep going.
Brian, the thing is,
I love science.
I love scientology.
I love all the sciences.
I hope one day,
to have a haemorrhoid
named after me.
-Like you.
-Asteroid.
Whatever, you get
what you want
named after you,
and I'll get what I want
named after me.
And I'm getting
a haemorrhoid.
Like you. [CHUCKLES]
Brian, do you know
my theory about the universe?
You've got a theory
about the universe?
Yes. You don't know
about my theory?
I don't know your theory
about the universe.
I've looked at all
the literature.
I've seen no record
of your theory
about the universe.
[CHUCKLES] You don't know?
This is gonna blow your mind.
I've been working on this
for over four and a half days.
I believe that
the universe is
entirely made of water.
It's just that the molecules
are so far apart,
you can't tell it's water,
unless you're outside,
looking in.
[IMITATES EXPLOSION]
[IMITATES EXPLOSION]
It's too much for you,
isn't it?
I can see.
Your knees are trembling.
[CHUCKLES] That's your theory?
That's your theory?
-That is my theory.
-All that?
All of that.
I've copyrighted that, mate.
In fact,
Deepak Chopra says...
Don't you like Deepak?
In my opinion,
Deepak is full of more methane
than Uranus.
[LAUGHING]
He's great, isn't he?
He's like
the rhinestone guru.
Why are you dressed
as a second-rate character
from Pirates of Penzance?
Second mate, he's got it.
He's very bright, isn't he?
Well, he is a professor.
Actually,
he's a double professor.
I thought he looked
a bit bi.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
He was
checking me out earlier,
in the lifts.
What are you supposed to be?
Well, I'm the Higgs boson,
aren't I? Get it?
Ha-har, me hearties.
-Boson...
-Yes?
-Is an elementary particle.
-Right.
Bosun, is the second mate
on a ship.
So, what's your point?
Well, my point...
My point is, it's silly.
It's not silly.
It's a metaphor.
They like it.
You like it, don't you?
[AUDIENCE] Yes.
Shall I sing?
[ALL] Yes.
Excusez-moi, Brian,
my audience calls.
Stay away
from my theory, yeah, Spock?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
♪ There's a Higgs boson
♪ And there's leptons
and there's gluons
♪ There's the Higgs boson
And there's positons
and muons
♪ There are photons
there are protons
♪ There's neutrinas
positinas
♪ There are quarks
and there's electrons in the
Higgs boson
♪ Oh, the Higgs boson
♪ All the particles
will scatter
Oh, the Higgs boson
♪ As they're starting
to be matter
♪ There are leptons
there are gluons
♪ There are positons
and neuons
♪ There are photons
There are protons
in the Higgs boson
♪ There's a Higgs boson
♪ And there's leptons
and there's gluons
♪ There's a Higgs boson
♪ And there's are positons
and muons
♪ There are photons
there are protons
♪ There's neutrinas
positinas
♪ There are photons
there's electrons
in the Higgs boson
♪ There's neutrinas
Angelinas
in the Higgs boson
♪ There are sauvignons
and pinots
in the Higgs boson
♪ There are Bonos, Yoko Onos,
Brian Enos, cappuccinos
♪ Latinas and Latinos
in the Higgs boson
♪ There are gluons
There are muons
in the Higgs boson
♪ There are many
There are few ones
in the Higgs boson
♪ There are gold ones
There are blue ones
♪ There are old ones
there are new ones
♪ We haven't got a clue
what's in the Higgs boson ♪
Ha-harrrr.
[CHEERS AND APPLAUSE]
Stop.
You stop.
Stop.
Stop clapping.
Stop clapping.
Number one...
Number one,
there's no such element
as a Brian Eno.
-And number two...
-Well, there should be.
[CHUCKLES]
Number two,
this isn't physics,
it's musical.
Thanks a lot.
-It's not a compliment.
-That wasn't a "Thank you".
-Noel.
-Please, call me Cuddles.
That's what Deepak calls me.
I call him, "Douchepak".
We have such a laugh
together.
You see, he's like you,
he's very clever,
but he's got a sense
of humour.
We can't upset him,
he's part Vulcan.
He's got no feelings.
We'll have to explain
to him later,
what went wrong.
Listen,
science isn't a panto.
-Well, it can be.
-It can't.
-Oh, yes, it can.
-[AUDIENCE] Oh, yes, it can.
Oh, no, it can't.
[AUDIENCE] Oh, yes, it can.
[NOEL] Oh, yes, it can.
No, it can't.
[AUDIENCE] Oh, yes, it can.
-Well, what's that then?
-Where?
[AUDIENCE] Behind you.
[MEOWING]
It's a pantomime cat.
A cat, but not just any cat.
Schrodinger's cats.
[AUDIENCE WHOOPING]
-[NOEL] And what's that?
-That's a box.
Right, so if the cat
goes in the box...
I might be able to salvage
something here.
This is Schrodinger's
famous thought experiment
about a cat in a box.
The cat represents
elementary particles
in an entangled quantum state.
So, the idea is,
you have a radioactive source
in the box.
When it decays,
it releases
radioactive poisonous gas,
something like cyanide,
into the box.
That means
that before you open the box,
the cat is both,
alive and dead.
But when you open the box,
the cat will be seen to be
alive or dead.
Like Keith Richards?
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
Well, let's see then,
shall we?
You wanna see
in the box, don't you?
[AUDIENCE] Yes.
-[DRUM ROLL]
-Ta-da!
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDS]
You see,
it demonstrates particles.
A cat met an anti-cat
and disappeared.
There's no such thing
as an anti-cat.
Oh, really?
Oh really, says Mr CERN,
Mr Particle Collider,
says, Mr "Let's bang things
into each other and see
what comes out".
Oh, really?
Says, Mr "I'm a Pirate
of Penzance
"and I don't know
much about quantum mechanics,
"but I dress Warwick Davis up
as a little cat and
put him in a box
"and make him disappear."
Was that Warwick Davis?
Should've got a selfie, right?
Well, let's see, shall we?
Let's see, yeah?
-Let's open the box, yeah?
-Go ahead.
OK.
-[DRUM ROLL]
-Ta-da!
Hannah Waddingham, everybody!
[HANNAH CACKLES]
Bless you.
Brian,
-Hannah's playing Time.
-I'm so sorry I'm late.
-Traffic on the M25?
-Gynaecologist in Hackney.
Off you pop, Cox.
[CLOCKS TICKING]
[BELLS CHIMING]
[CUCKOO CLOCK CHIMING]
♪ Time
♪ Will go on
♪ On and on, dear
♪ Forever
♪ Although
♪ Time is slow
♪ It will go on
♪ Whenever you hear
♪ This song play
♪ And you will say
"Oh, look there."
♪ Hey, there's a song
about time
♪ That will go on and on
♪ On and on
♪ On and on
and on, and on
♪ On and on, and on
♪ And on, and on
♪ And on, and on, and on
♪ This song will still go on
♪ Time's song
will still go on ♪
-[AUDIENCE CHEERS
AND APPLAUDS]
-Thank you.
♪ On and on, and on, and on
♪ On and on, and on
♪ It'll still go on
still go on
♪ Time still will go
♪Time's song
will still go on ♪
[AUDIENCE CHEERS AND APPLAUDS]
Oh, thank you!
Stop. Stop clapping.
Stop. Stop.
Stop.
It's not right.
-It's not right.
-Says who?
-Well, science, actually.
-Ugh.
What are you supposed to be?
I'm Time, Brian.
-There's no such thing
as Time.
-[SIGHS]
There's only space-time.
Facetime?
Space-time.
See. According to Einstein's
special theory of relativity,
published in 1905,
time and space
are no longer
to be thought of
as separate entities.
They're supposed to considered
as an indivisible whole.
Called space-time.
You see, Einstein said...
E equals MC squared.
[HANNAH LAUGHS]
[EINSTEIN] Hello, Brian.
[BRIAN] Hello, Albert.
Which means...
Energy and matter
are interchangeable.
Correct, Albert.
[EINSTEIN]
You're damn right, Brian.
Before that, we used to think
of space as an arena.
What, like Wembley?
Well, if you like.
It's a good metaphor.
But Einstein showed us
we were wrong.
Absolute space doesn't exist.
And...
Nothing goes faster
than the speed of light.
Oh, sorry.
In the new
Einsteinian worldview,
moving clocks run slow,
and moving rulers shrink.
Right, so, if the Queen
could travel at
the speed of light...
Not that kind of ruler.
-Er, if the sheikh of Qatar...
-Not that kind of ruler.
It's more like a measure.
Right, so...
Would the Queen
shrink at the speed of light?
Well, hypothetically, yes.
As Her Majesty
approaches the speed of light,
she would shrink
and become more massive.
What?
She'd become Queen Victoria?
Brian, I has
a question for you.
We know
the speed of light, yeah?
That's one of mine.
Thank you.
What is the speed
of darkness?
-It's the same.
-Oh.
Coincidence.
Hey, guys.
Maybe I see you afterwards,
yeah?
For some crazy fun times.
OK.
♪ It's a Higgs boson...
Brian, I've actually got
a science question.
Go on.
Can you have sex
in zero gravity?
Why don't you ask Tim Peake?
Tim Peake!
[HANNAH STAMMERING]
Hi...
Can we have sex
in zero gravity?
-Well...
-[GASPS]
[HANNAH LAUGHS]
As the universe
continued to expand and cool,
gravity began to take hold
of the particles of matter
and club them together
to become the first stars
in galaxies.
Do you remember
the Sloan Digital Sky Survey?
That snowstorm of galaxies?
This shows us the distribution
of those galaxies
across the universe.
So gravity
pulls everything together.
And hold it there
for the gravity song.
You're gonna love this one.
It's really your era.
-Yeah, '80s.
-Hmm.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]
[MAN] It's all right, Brian,
things can only get better.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHS AND APPLAUDS]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
♪ Ever since the apple fell
♪ On Newton, from his tree
♪ He began examining
the force of gravity
♪ His ruminations
gave equations very logically
♪ Explanation gravitation
was the force to free
♪ Free that apple from
the tree
♪ It applies to you and me
♪ Isaac Newton simply found
what keeps our feet down
on the ground
♪ It's the force of gravity
♪ Gra-gra-gra
Gra-Gravity
♪ Gra-gra-gra
Gra-Gravity
♪ Gra-gra-gra
Gra-Gravity
♪ Gra-gra-gra
Gra-Gravity
♪ It's a force of gravity
[MAN 1] Galileo!
[MAN 2] Galileo!
[BOHEMIAN RHAPSODYPLAYING]
♪ One day Albert Einstein
watched a worker
on the roof
♪ Instantly he thought of what
he called his happiest truth
♪ If the man was careless
and he slipped and had a fall
♪ Einstein realised he
wouldn't really fall at all
♪ He's not crashing to
the ground
♪ Waiting there to greet him
♪ He is simply floating 'round
when the ground
comes up to meet him
♪ It's a force of gravity
♪ Gra-gra-gra
Gra-Gravity
♪ Gra-gra-gra
Gra-Gravity
♪ Gra-gra-gra
Gra-Gravity
♪ Gra-gra-gra
Gra-Gravity
♪ It's a force of gravity
♪ You can sneer at gravity
♪ Up here in
the 17th century
♪ But eventually
we have to face
♪ It wasn't
that corrupt in space
♪ Einstein then began to see
♪ That light dispelled
by gravity
♪ Energy is matter
♪ And matter, energy
♪ We live in four dimensions
♪ And space-time is its name
♪ Then Einstein found
the formula
♪ Which really changed
the game
♪ For E equals MC square
♪ For E equals MC square
[VOCALISING]
♪ For E equals MC square
♪ Gra-gra-gra
Gra-Gravity
♪ For E equals MC square
♪ Gra-gra-gra
Gra-Gravity
♪ For E equals MC square
♪ Gra-gra-gra
Gra-Gravity
♪ It's a force of gravity
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING
AND CHEERING]
Well, no one is more
surprised than me,
but that's right.
Einstein did come along
with the general
theory of relativity.
Modifying the Newtonian
view of gravity.
We now know that space-time
is four dimensional,
and massive objects
curve and warp it.
So matter tells space-time
how to curve,
and space-time tells matter
how to move.
Now relativity
describes everything
down to the quantum level.
But, at
very small distances,
the high energies
at the subatomic level,
general relativity
breaks down...
All right, who are you?
-Who are we?
-Who are we?
[LAUGHING]
-Who are we?
-Quantum mechanics.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]
Shouldn't have asked.
Hey, carry on, sunshine,
carry on. You're doing well.
You're doing well.
[WHISPERS] Let's go.
The centuries since Einstein
published his theories
have been filled with
the most spectacular
scientific discoveries.
We've discovered
a universe filled with
wonders, pillars of gas
thousands of light-years tall,
clouds of bright gas
where young stars are born.
And we see
the deaths of stars,
producing pulsars, quasars,
and super massive
black holes
at centre of galaxies.
This...
Is the CMB.
It's the cosmic microwave
background radiation.
This is the picture of
the whole sky,
the celestial sphere.
It's a stunning image.
Now this is the afterglow
of the Big Bang.
It comes from every
direction in space.
So this really
is a picture of
the universe as it was
380,000 years after
the Big Bang.
This is the oldest light
in the universe.
These tiny fluctuations
that you see as
different colours
are density fluctuations
in the early universe.
These are the reasons
that we have galaxies
at all.
So this is a, kind of,
a static buzz
that permeates the universe.
You used to be able to
pick it up on old TV sets.
A bit like Morecambe and Wise.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]
There's no need for that,
is there, eh?
As the universe continues
to expand and cool after
the release of the CMB,
matter eventually
began to collapse and clump
around the denser regions
to form stars and galaxies.
And the universe was filled
with light, once more.
Only around 200 million years
after the Big Bang,
the age of stars had begun.
[MUSIC PLAYS]
[AUDIENCE WHOOPING]
♪ Baby, let me tell you
what it's all about
♪ Lying on your back
with your tush hanging out
♪ Hanging out...
-♪ All you need is a...
-[VINYL RIPS]
-[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
-Oh.
What are you now?
I'm a star, darling.
It's not the kind of star
that I meant.
Did you mean an astronomical
object in which
nuclear fusion happens?
Protons being fused together
to make helium.
-Yeah.
-[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
Actually, the oldest stars
in the universe are over
13 billion years old.
But there's one
very special star,
which formed
4.6 billion years ago
in an outer spiral arm of
the Milky Way galaxy.
-And we call this star...
-The sun.
-Sun.
-[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
And that was followed
in less than a million years
by the most significant moment
in our history.
The birth of the Earth.
[TONGUE CLICKS]
[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
♪ The Earth
♪ The Earth is
the planet of our birth
♪ But the girth of
the Earth
♪ Is quite small
♪ So to understand
the size of it all
♪ Lets take a flight
into the night
♪ Remembering Einstein's
great sound bite
♪ Nothing goes faster than
the speed of light
♪ Nothing, nothing
nothing, nothing
nothing, nothing
♪ Nothing, nothing
Nothing goes faster than
the speed of light, hey
♪ Albert Einstein
one bright night said
♪ Nothing goes faster than
the speed of light
♪ A shy German man
but quite polite said
♪ Nothing goes faster than
the speed of light
♪ His equations
were quite right
♪ As we worked in the office
of the Swiss copyright
♪ Despite a moving car
with its headlight
shining bright
♪ Nothing goes faster than
the speed of light
♪ Yeah
♪ Nothing, nothing
nothing, nothing
nothing, nothing
♪ Nothing
Nothing goes faster
than the speed of light, hey
♪ Suppose I could fly
at the speed of light
♪ And I took off from
the Earth
up into the night
♪ In 1.3 seconds
which is really quite soon
♪ I'm flying past
the lovely Moon
[CHORUS]
♪ Flying past the lovely Moon
♪ Heading for the Sun
which is really far
♪ Takes me 8.5 minutes
to our local star
♪ From the Sun and Mercury
each three minutes away
♪ And three minutes more
to Venus
[CHORUS]
♪ That's not too hard to say
♪ Our Earth is nine minutes'
flight
from the Sun
♪ And Mars at light speed
is 30 minutes further on
♪ Nothing, nothing
nothing, nothing
nothing, nothing
♪ Nothing, nothing
Nothing's goes faster than
the speed of light, hey
♪ To fly on to Jupiter
at maximum power
♪ Takes me another
three quarters of an hour
♪ Saturn with its rings
make a lovely display
♪ But they're still
90 minutes away
[CHORUS]
♪ That's very far away
♪ Beautiful Uranus
such a delight
♪ Two and a half hours at
the speed of light
♪ Yeah
♪ Nothing, nothing
nothing, nothing
nothing, nothing
♪ Nothing, nothing
Nothing goes faster than
the speed of light, hey
♪ Two hours flying along
like a great balloon
♪ Is the giant gas mass
that we called Neptune
♪ Six hours away at
the speed of light
♪ Suddenly Pluto
comes into sight
♪ And Pluto maybe feeling
a little bit sore
♪ For Pluto's not
a planet any more
♪ No, Pluto's not
a planet any more
[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]
♪ Its days of glory faded
♪ Its reputation jaded
♪ It is sadly
being downgraded
♪ And Pluto's not
a planet any more
♪ First they heavily
promoted it
♪ And now
they have demoted it
♪ Because it's being
confirmed by all that it was
"Just too small"
♪ It's enough
to give you haemorrhoids
♪ There are 10,000 planetoids
♪ Each of them as big as Pluto
circling around the sun
♪ I guess it needed
to be done
♪ In size it is deficient
♪ They thought it
more efficient
♪ To get rid of it
[CHORUS VOCALISING]
♪ But still I feel quite sore
♪ That Pluto's not a planet
♪ Any more
[ALL]
♪ No, Pluto's not a planet
♪ It's been relegated
damn it
♪ And Pluto's not
a planet any more
♪ And so I leave our
solar system
for our brightest star
♪ Centauri Proxima
is still very far
♪ Four and a half
light years of flight
♪ To reach our
closest neighbour at
the speed of light
[CHORUS]
♪ At the speed of light
♪ To cross the Milky Way
at 17 billion miles a day
♪ Takes a hundred
thousand Earth years
[CHORUS]
♪ No way
♪ To reach the next galaxy
Andromeda appears
♪ It would take me
two and a half million years
[CHORUS]
♪ That's a lot of years!
♪ I know
♪ Nothing, nothing, nothing
nothing, nothing, nothing
♪ Nothing, nothing
Nothing goes faster than
the speed of light
-♪ Yeah
-♪ Nothing, nothing, nothing
nothing, nothing, nothing
-[CHOIR VOCALISING]
-♪ Nothing, nothing
♪ Nothing's going faster than
the speed of light, hey ♪
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING
AND CHEERING]
Actually, that's not right.
-[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]
-The reality is that nothing
travels through space time
faster than speed of light.
But Galaxies can recede
from each other
faster than light.
Because they ride along
with space time as it expands
and it can stretch
at any speed that it wants.
Now, there is a remarkable
new theory about
the origin of the universe
called Inflation.
We've got good evidence
to suggest
that before
the universe was
hot and dense,
and what we used to call
the Big Bang,
the universe
was still in existence
in a different form.
It was doing something else.
It was doubling in size,
unimaginably fast.
This exponential expansion
stopped, certainly,
to form our universe.
But some cosmologists think
that it may only have stopped
in patches.
The bits that stop,
form universes
through a Big Bang,
like our own, but the rest
keeps on going.
If this theory is correct,
it's known as
Eternal Inflation,
then there's a striking
and, I think,
mind-blowing prediction.
The prediction is
that there will be
other universes out there.
Some being created
as we speak.
And this process
may have been going on,
possibly, forever.
There may be
an infinite number
of universes.
And if there are,
then it's possible
that we all could exist
somewhere out there
in a multiverse,
in quite different forms.
So, for example, in this
universe I'm wearing this
T-shirt and I look like me.
In another universe
I might be wearing
this rather fetching
off-the-shoulder red dress.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
Now you see, in this universe
I'm obviously dressed in
this dowdy nerd garb.
But in another universe
I might be dressed
in this blue mini skirt
showing off my beautiful,
beautiful knees.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
In this universe, I'm me.
But in another universe,
I might be a beaver.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
In our universe,
I can be me,
but in another one,
a camel in a poncho.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
In this universe,
I can be the size I am.
But in another,
I could be as tall as
the Eiffel Tower...
-[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
-And French.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
In this universe, I'm looking
a little bit saucy and fierce.
But in another universe,
I might be the queen of
the fairies.
[AUDIENCE] Aww.
Here, the Royal Family,
are dressed for
a Royal occasion.
But in another universe,
they might be dressed
for a tribal dinner.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
And in another universe,
they might be gorillas.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
And in yet another universe,
they could all be aquatic
sea creatures from space.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
So the speculation is endless
and it might seem ridiculous,
but it's not.
It's illustrating
the possibilities
of an infinite universe.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
♪ I find quantum mechanics
confusing today
♪ Now science is all the rage
♪ The Hadron Collider
is banging away
♪ Trying to guess our age
♪ A particle here
♪ A particle there
♪ In this weird quantum world
bits can be anywhere
♪ Which might just explain
why I'm losing my hair
♪ In the infinite monkey cage
♪ Till the day I heard
Mrs Schrodinger say
♪ I'm going to put
out the cat
[CAT MEOWING]
♪ Mrs Heisenberg said
♪ Oh, it might be quite that
♪ I might tell him
and you should prove that
♪ Unless you've got that
robin in, Professor Cox
♪ I'd leave that poor pussy,
alone in his box
♪ "That cat may be both
dead and alive," said the sage
♪ In the infinite monkey cage
♪ Scientists say
"All the world's
just a stage"
♪ But physics
is passing through
♪ There may be an infinite
number of mes
♪ And an infinite number
of yous
[CHORUS]
♪ God help us
♪ In an infinite universe
seems a bit nuts
♪ Scientists sometimes
talk through their butts
♪ Proof you can't do
♪ That there are more of you
♪ In the infinite monkey cage
♪ This linear
super-positional thing
♪ Is blowing my mind away
♪ The multiverse seems to be
made out of string
♪ That's what some
particle physicists say
♪ The infinite monkeys
write every day
♪ They may accidently
writeHamlet the play
♪ But they probably
just poop on it
and throw it away
♪ In the infinite monkey cage
♪ They're naughty monkeys
♪ In the infinite monkey cage
♪ They have no trousers
♪ In the infinite
monkey cage ♪
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING
AND CHEERING]
Nothing lasts forever.
Stars die, galaxies die,
even universes
gradually wind down.
The formation of new stars
grinds to a halt. We already
see evidence of this
in our own Milky Way galaxy.
So, ultimately,
eventually, the universe will
-die.
-Oh.
It's not very cheery-uppy.
When stars run out of fuel,
there are only
three possibilities.
Our sun will keep fusing
hydrogen into helium
for another
five billion years or so,
until it burns through
the last of its hydrogen fuel.
After that, it swells
to become a Red Giant
approaching the Earth's orbit,
before collapsing like
a dying fire.
The core will compact
to a planet-sized ember.
And it will become
a White Dwarf...
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
Sorry?
A White Dwarf,
it's a technical term.
-Like Black Hole.
-Oh, racist as well.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
More massive stars
will collapse in
Supernova explosions
that for a few brief moments,
are amongst the brightest
objects in the universe.
The core will be squeezed
by gravity
into a neutron star,
a spinning ball,
12 miles in diameter.
Oh, about the size
of Oldham.
Well, yes, but with the mass
of the sun,
a sugar cube fragment
would weigh
a billion tons on Earth.
If you took
a marshmallow
and dropped it,
the gravitational pull
is so big, it accelerates
towards the ground
and hits it with the power of
an atomic bomb.
Hold up, where would
the marshmallow come from?
It's a metaphor.
Oh, like White Dwarf?
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
Brian, does anything
become spam?
-Spam?
-Yeah, spam.
Most of the stars we see
today in the night sky
have planets around them.
Data from observatories like
the Kepler Space Telescope
tell us that around
one in 10 stars
may have Earth-like
rocky planets around them.
Perhaps with rivers,
seas and oceans.
That's around 20 billion
potentially Earth-like planets
in the Milky Way galaxy alone.
And there are
350 billion galaxies in
the observable universe.
So the question is.
Are we alone?
No, we're here with you.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
No, what I mean is,
is intelligent life common
in the universe?
It's not even common at
the BBC.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
Why are we here?
-Eric asked us to come.
-Yeah.
To be honest, there's no way
we'd come if you asked us.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
Where do we come from?
-You've come
from Peterborough.
-Yeah.
Kentish Town.
No, we think that life
started only once
on this planet.
Do you know where?
Oldham?
-No, 3.8 billion years ago.
-Oh, Manchester.
-[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
-In the oceans.
And here it took
3.8 billion years
for the first living things
to become us.
What's wonderful,
and, at the same time,
a little bit scary,
is how frequently our own
evolutionary path came
close to ending.
In the Permian Extinction,
250 million years ago,
for example,
96 percent of all
marine life became extinct.
The odds against
our survival were huge.
The Earth has been
a volcanic hell.
It's been a frozen ice ball.
It's been an ocean
free of land.
The Earth has been
a target for meteorites.
30,000 objects a day
burn up in our atmosphere.
And surely,
after its formation,
a glancing glow from
a planet-sized object
smashing into our Earth
caused the formation
of our moon.
Against all the odds,
there's an unbroken chain of
light stretching back
3.8 billion years,
just one-third of
the age of the universe,
to some primordial life form
in an ancient ocean.
And those first living things
have, over geological time,
assembled themselves into
intelligent, conscious beings
inside a superbly complex body
that can replicate, evolve,
and pass on our genes.
With an enormous brain
that's learnt to communicate
with the finest of its peers,
both past and present,
and leave a legacy
into the far future,
through language, writing,
maths, science...
Panto.
Shopping.
A Hominid intelligence
staggering on
the edge of space,
pondering the immensity
and our next steps.
The age of stars will close
in a hundred trillion years,
and with it,
the window for life in
the universe will close.
Do we define
the end of our universe
to be the time
the last super massive
Black Hole evaporates?
That takes place in...
When?
-Roughly?
-Yeah, go on.
I've got this one.
10,000 trillion, trillion,
trillion, trillion, trillion,
trillion, trillion,
trillion years.
-Correct.
-Yes.
-[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING]
-Don't leave me hanging.
That means, that means,
that life will have
been possible
for only one thousandth
of a billion, billion,
billion, billion, billion,
billion, billion, billion,
billions of one percent
of the age of the universe.
Imagine that.
We live in a tiny, minute,
golden bright age.
The briefest of moments
in cosmic time.
We don't know how
the universe came
into existence,
or why it came
into existence.
But we do know
where it is.
It's all around us.
It's in us.
It is us.
We are the means
by which the universe
understands itself.
But we may be
effectively alone.
An isolated island
of meaning
in an imaginably vast
and hostile universe.
Ugh, that's
a bit of a downer,
isn't it?
Terribly depressing.
That's a terrible ending,
Brian.
Yeah.
Well, no, it isn't. Cheer up.
You know what they say.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
♪ Just remember
that you've standing on
a planet that's evolving
♪ And revolving at
900 miles an hour
♪ That's orbiting at 19 miles
a second so it's reckoned
♪ The Sun that is
the source of all our power
♪ The Sun and you and me
and all the stars
that we can see
♪ Are moving at
a million miles a day
♪ And out of spiral
half a million
miles an hour
♪ In a galaxy they call
the Milky Way
[CHORUS VOCALISING]
♪ Our galaxy itself
contains 500 billion stars
♪ It's a hundred thousand
light-years side to side
♪ It bulges in the middle
6,000 light years thick
♪ But by us it's just
a thousand light-years wide
♪ We're 30,000 light-years
from galactic central point
♪ We go 'round every
200 million years
♪ And our galaxy is only one
of millions and billions
♪ In this amazing
expanding universe
[CHORUS VOCALISING]
♪ The universe itself
keeps on expanding and
expanding
♪ In all of the directions
it can whizz
♪ As fast as it can go
at the speed of light
you know
♪ 12 million miles a minute
that's the fastest speed
there is
♪ So remember when
you're feeling very small
and insecure
♪ How amazingly unlikely
is your birth
♪ And pray that there's
intelligent life somewhere
out in space
♪ 'Cause there's bugger all
down here on Earth ♪
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING]
[AUDIENCE CHEERING]
The Entire Universewas
brought to you by
Rutland Weekend Television,
with John Dupre,
and the Rutland
Light Orchestra.
With the Muriel Tritt
School of Music and Dance
ensemble!
With Arlene Phillips
as Muriel Tritt!
Special guest star, Tim Peake.
With Jonty Stephens
and Ian Ashpitel
as Morecambe and Wise!
Robin Ince as Robin Ince!
Hannah Waddingham!
Noel Fielding.
Warwick Davis!
Eric Idle!
And Professor Brian Cox.
Please join us again
in another 41 years
for another
Rutland Weekend TV Show.
Thank you and good night.
[AUDIENCE CHEERING
AND APPLAUDING]
[DRUM ROLL]
[AUDIENCE CHEERS AND APPLAUDS]
Thank you very much.
Thank you, thank you.
Good evening.
Roughly 41 years ago,
today-ish,
Rutland Weekend Television,
the world's smallest
TV station,
did a special,
starring Beatle,
George Harrison.
And now, tonight,
41 years later, we're back
to put on another TV special,
with the Beatle of science,
professor Brian Cox.
[AUDIENCE CHEERS]
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDS]
And tonight, our subject is
the entire universe,
which we'll be covering
in one hour.
As a musical.
OK, so, without further ado,
please welcome,
all the way from Rutland,
Muriel Tritt.
And the Muriel Tritt
School of Music and Dance.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
♪ The Muriel Tritt
School of Music and Dance
♪ Gives young people
a wonderful chance
♪ To appear in a show
♪ To star in a play
♪ And one day we may be
♪ On Broadway!
♪ Through 30 years
through rain and snow
♪ Every year we put on a show
♪ We didThe Sound of Mucus
♪ AndZombie and Son
♪The Little Barmaid
♪ AndSecond to Nun
♪ We didSpamma-Mia
♪ AndPorky and Bess
♪ And an all new version
ofG and S
♪ We didMersey Boys
andRichard the Turd
♪ We didHello Polly!
♪ About a dead bird
♪ We sank theTitanic
on a real pond
♪ The 007 musical
Legally Bond
♪ So relax in your hats
and hang on to your purse
♪ For tonight
we finally present
♪ The entire universe
♪ Yes we've frankly been
thinking out of the box
♪ Will you all please
welcome our star
♪ Professor Brian Cox
[AUDIENCE CHEERS AND APPLAUDS]
Where the bloody hell is he?
Bit of a snag,
he's not here.
But he should be on the way
from the airport.
-This is a live show.
-Yeah, he'll be on his way.
I hope so.
Anyway, that's not the snag.
You see, I haven't
been able to speak to him
for the last few weeks.
-What?
-Well, I haven't been able
to explain to him...
This isn't so much
a kind of lecture,
it's more of a musical.
You didn't
get a hold of him?
Well, it's not my fault,
is it?
He's been to Patagonia
testing magnetism
or something.
You know, no cell phones.
So, he doesn't know
it's a musical?
-[MAN] He's here.
-Oh, jeez.
-Harry!
-Brian, where've you been?
Sorry, I'm late.
Can you just pay
for the taxi?
What?
We've already started.
I know, it's funny, isn't it?
We can to send probes
into space
at tremendous speeds,
but one lane closed on the M25
and you're stuck forever.
We've been trying
to reach you for weeks.
I've been to Patagonia,
measuring micro magnetism.
It's very interesting,
because the Earth's poles
are beginning to shift...
We phoned. We texted.
We tweeted.
I can't use cell phones,
because we measure
in micro-magnetism.
Tell me,
you did get the script.
What? Not unless
you sent it by llama.
What?
-What's this?
-It's just a costume.
No time to explain.
-I haven't got my lecture.
-It's all right.
It's all on the autocue.
And, here we are.
Here's the set.
Hey, Brian.
Robin,
what are you doing here?
Er... Helping.
I'm putting in
the correct number
of billions and billions
in the autocue for you.
I have put in loads,
you'll love it.
Now...
Pointer.
Clicker.
Showtime.
Ladies and gentlemen,
will you please welcome,
Professor Brian Cox.
[AUDIENCE CHEERS AND APPLAUDS]
[WHOOPING]
Thank you.
Good evening.
This...
Is the
Hubble deep field image.
It's the deepest image
of our universe ever taken.
[CHOIR SINGING]
It's the photograph
of a piece of sky,
you would cover
if you took a five pence piece
and held it about
75 feet away.
[CHOIR SINGING]
It contains
over 10,000 galaxies.
Each with a 100 billion stars.
[CHOIR SINGING]
-What the hell is that?
-It's the universe music,
Brian.
-[STAMMERING]
It's distracting.
-It sounds really good.
Yeah, it sounds really,
really... Really, kind of,
jazzes up the universe.
Tell them
I don't need any music
in the lecture.
Well, you know, with the BBC
broadcasting it worldwide
live...
Hang on a minute,
I thought it was only
broadcasted in Rutland?
Well, mainly Rutland,
but also,
the rest of the world.
Look. Just read the autocue,
please, because we're running
a bit late. OK?
Please welcome,
Professor Brian Cox.
[AUDIENCE CHEERS]
This is,
the Sloane digital sky survey.
This is real data.
It's a fly-through
of nearby galaxies
in the observable universe,
which contains around
350 billion large galaxies,
each with 200 billion stars,
just like our Milky Way.
So, if we multiply
350 billion galaxies
by 200 billion stars,
that means, in the
observable universe,
there are at least,
70,000 billion billion stars.
Seven followed by 22 zeros.
Seven billion trillion stars.
And that's just
the observable universe.
We've got good reason
to think
the universe extends
way beyond that little patch
we can see.
Might even be
infinite in extent.
Now, today,
after expanding
for 13.8 billion years,
we can see out to the edge
of a giant sphere,
centred on the Earth,
90 billion light years wide.
[TWINKLES]
[BRIAN] What's this?
What the hell is this?
Robin!
Eric, Eric, Eric!
♪ It's so damn big
♪ It's so damn vast
♪ It's so damn huge
and it's so damn fast
♪ It's so massive
with such weight
♪ It's so enormous
it's just great!
♪ We're living in a sphere
nearly 20 billion years
♪ Nearly eight billion
light years in diameter
♪ Standing in a bubble
At the speed of Hubble
♪ It's so damn huge
in each parameter
♪ 30.7 billion years
♪ On every side
♪ Which makes our universe
♪ 93 billion light years wide
♪ 350 billion galaxies
♪ With 70 billion
trillion stars
♪ That's 70,000, thousand,
thousand, thousand, thousand,
thousand, thousand stars
♪ It makes you feel so small
♪ Stuck on the surface
of the spinning ball
♪ When you consider the size
of it all
♪ It makes you
feel so small
♪ It makes you
feel so small
♪ Wondering why
we're here at all
♪ Trying to walk
before we can crawl
♪ It makes you
feel so small
♪ The universe
so big and vast
♪ And, oh, so very shiny
♪ It makes you
feel irrelevant
♪ So useless
and so tiny
♪ It makes you
feel so small
♪ The universe
holds us all enthralled
♪ When you consider
the size of it all
♪ It makes you
feel so small ♪
[PIANO PLAYS]
Yeah!
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDS]
Science isn't
a bloody musical.
Everyone is very excited.
I really look like a prat.
You have looked
like a prat before.
-Science isn't showbiz.
-Well, it can be.
This is not the
Morecambe and Wiseshow,
is it?
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
[APPLAUSE]
It could be.
Hey, you can see the join.
-Definitely a wig.
-Definitely.
Definitely.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDS]
-You all right, lad?
-Warwick Davis, big fan.
Warwick,
what are you doing here?
I'm playing "The Big Bang".
Ba-da-ba-ba!
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
-What?
-I know, irony.
But he's right tip-top
on science, Brian.
Per foot, he knows
more about science than
Tim Peake.
Yeah, that's right.
Isn't it, Tim?
[AUDIENCE CHEERING]
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDS]
That's right, Brian.
Absolutely, that's right.
-What?
-Really.
Warwick is really good
on science, Brian.
He's absolutely amazing
and he could've been
on the
International Space Station
with me.
He would've saved
a lot of space.
Cheers, Tim.
You still on for dinner
Tuesday?
Absolutely, yeah.
Your turn to pay.
Oh, OK.
Tim, I've got a couple
of questions.
Listen, ask me
any question you like.
All right,
what's a light year?
A light-year,
is when you don't have
very much on,
say, a panto in Woking
and a possible telly.
No, it's a measure
of distance.
The distance light travels
in one year.
-Which is...
-Six trillion miles.
Am I right?
-Yeah.
-Yeah.
Six followed by 12 zeros.
Now, let me ask you
a question.
What's hot, dense
and forever expanding?
-Well...
-The Kardashians.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
-Lovely joke, Warwick.
-Thanks, Eric.
-It's G-string theory.
There's another one.
-Ah, I love it.
We'll have a shot
of Kim's bum, you know.
-That could be like Saturn.
-What?
Like a great gas giant?
Oh, boo-boom!
You see, material like this,
writes itself, Brian.
So, moving on now,
on the autocue, love,
if you think
of the universe as...
If you think
of the universe
as a balloon...
Oh, great metaphor.
With the galaxies
represented by dots
on the balloon.
Then the expansion
of our universe
is just like
the expanding surface
of the balloon.
All the galaxies
appear to be rushing apart
from each other.
[BLOWING]
Carry on.
[CONTINUES BLOWING]
We used to think
the universe
was slowing down
under the effects of gravity,
until we measured
the expansion rate
very precisely
back in the 1990s,
and discovered that
it is in fact, speeding up,
because of the effects
of something known as
dark energy.
Now, we don't know
what dark energy is,
but it accounts for
70% of the energy density
of the universe.
[CHUCKLES] Dark matter
makes up a further 25%.
We don't know
what that is either.
And the stuff...
You all right?
Yeah, I'm hyperventilating,
quickly.
The stuff we
can actually see,
shining as stars
and out of which
we are all made,
is only five percent
of the universe.
So, the universe is expanding,
but from what?
If we're able to
reverse time,
wind back the clocks
until everything rushes back
together again.
[BALLOON FIZZLES]
Sorry.
If we wind everything
back to the beginning,
if we go back in time
13.8 billion years
before there were any stars
or galaxies,
and all the matter
of the universe
was crammed into
a tiny, wrinkly, little pea,
unimaginably hot,
unimaginably dense,
containing all the energy
and the ingredients
to build
the hundreds of billions
of galaxies,
and billions of trillions
of stars in our universe,
contained in
a single primordial atom,
we call that, "The Big Bang".
And hold it there, love.
For the Big Bang song.
-The Big Bang isn't a song.
-It is now.
[EXPLOSION]
[SINGING]
-What are they doing?
-It's pretty obvious,
isn't it?
They're elementary particles.
Look.
They're banging
into each other
and then disappearing.
-Particles?
-Yeah, much better than
your boring old equations.
[SINGING]
[EXPLOSION]
[EXPLOSION]
[EXPLOSION]
[EXPLOSION]
[EXPLOSION]
[EXPLOSION]
[EXPLOSION]
[EXPLOSION]
[EXPLOSION]
[EXPLOSION]
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDS]
[SIGHS]
So, what'd you think?
I'm a professor,
no one will take me seriously
if they think I'm in showbiz.
Yeah, I think that ship
might've sailed some time ago.
Erm, and the BBC did say
that they were gonna pay you
more money.
The early cosmos
can be thought of as
a series of epochs.
As in
the gradually expanding
and cooling universe,
the forces of nature
separate out,
and the particles
we see today,
the protons, neutrons
and electrons,
out of which
we are all made are formed.
Time itself started
13.8 billion years ago.
And once time
had started...
Sorry, Brian.
Can we hold time?
-What?
-Can we just hold time
for a minute, please?
Well, time isn't here, yet.
-What?
-Hannah Waddingham
is playing time.
But, unfortunately,
she's late.
Er, she's stuck in traffic.
So, if you give us
just a bit more BS.
I'm sorry,
a bit more science
about the early universe
until she gets here.
Thanks a lot.
You could say that
more happened
in the first three minutes
of the life of the universe
than in the next
13.8 billion years.
By the time
the universe was around
three minutes old,
it had cooled down
to a temperature of only
a billion degrees.
And it was filled with,
what we call, a plasma.
A soup of electrically charged
particles
through which
light couldn't pass.
Now, light can be thought of
as a stream of particles
called photons
and they have no mass.
But other
fundamental particles,
like electrons,
do have mass.
And they get it
through the interaction
with the Higgs field,
which permeates the universe,
and has a particle
associated with it,
called the "Higgs boson".
Ha-har, Captain Cox.
Ha-har.
-Who are you?
-Got better. Um.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDS AND CHEERS]
Who?
I'm Higgs boson,
me hearties!
Ha-har!
Noel Fielding, meet Brian.
Brian...
Brian, huge fan.
Love your astrology.
Astronomy.
Whatever.
What's your star sign?
-I haven' got a star sign.
-Come on,
everyone's got a star sign.
All right, gin and tonic.
[CHUCKLES]
That's not a star sign.
-He's a Pisces.
-I knew it. I'm a Gemini.
-We get on instantly.
-We don't.
All right.
Unless, you've got
Jupiter rising.
I've got anger...
Rising.
I've got a very finely-tuned
drivel detector.
And it goes off
every time someone mentions
"Astrology".
It's all true, isn't it?
Well, it's not, really.
It's kak.
What kind of talk
is that?
Kak? You'll be saying
crop circles don't exist,
next.
Crop circles don't exist.
This is ridiculous.
Next you'll be saying,
global warming is a real thing
that we should
all be worried about.
-Eric, can we just have
a word?
-Just keep going, keep going.
Brian, the thing is,
I love science.
I love scientology.
I love all the sciences.
I hope one day,
to have a haemorrhoid
named after me.
-Like you.
-Asteroid.
Whatever, you get
what you want
named after you,
and I'll get what I want
named after me.
And I'm getting
a haemorrhoid.
Like you. [CHUCKLES]
Brian, do you know
my theory about the universe?
You've got a theory
about the universe?
Yes. You don't know
about my theory?
I don't know your theory
about the universe.
I've looked at all
the literature.
I've seen no record
of your theory
about the universe.
[CHUCKLES] You don't know?
This is gonna blow your mind.
I've been working on this
for over four and a half days.
I believe that
the universe is
entirely made of water.
It's just that the molecules
are so far apart,
you can't tell it's water,
unless you're outside,
looking in.
[IMITATES EXPLOSION]
[IMITATES EXPLOSION]
It's too much for you,
isn't it?
I can see.
Your knees are trembling.
[CHUCKLES] That's your theory?
That's your theory?
-That is my theory.
-All that?
All of that.
I've copyrighted that, mate.
In fact,
Deepak Chopra says...
Don't you like Deepak?
In my opinion,
Deepak is full of more methane
than Uranus.
[LAUGHING]
He's great, isn't he?
He's like
the rhinestone guru.
Why are you dressed
as a second-rate character
from Pirates of Penzance?
Second mate, he's got it.
He's very bright, isn't he?
Well, he is a professor.
Actually,
he's a double professor.
I thought he looked
a bit bi.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
He was
checking me out earlier,
in the lifts.
What are you supposed to be?
Well, I'm the Higgs boson,
aren't I? Get it?
Ha-har, me hearties.
-Boson...
-Yes?
-Is an elementary particle.
-Right.
Bosun, is the second mate
on a ship.
So, what's your point?
Well, my point...
My point is, it's silly.
It's not silly.
It's a metaphor.
They like it.
You like it, don't you?
[AUDIENCE] Yes.
Shall I sing?
[ALL] Yes.
Excusez-moi, Brian,
my audience calls.
Stay away
from my theory, yeah, Spock?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
♪ There's a Higgs boson
♪ And there's leptons
and there's gluons
♪ There's the Higgs boson
And there's positons
and muons
♪ There are photons
there are protons
♪ There's neutrinas
positinas
♪ There are quarks
and there's electrons in the
Higgs boson
♪ Oh, the Higgs boson
♪ All the particles
will scatter
Oh, the Higgs boson
♪ As they're starting
to be matter
♪ There are leptons
there are gluons
♪ There are positons
and neuons
♪ There are photons
There are protons
in the Higgs boson
♪ There's a Higgs boson
♪ And there's leptons
and there's gluons
♪ There's a Higgs boson
♪ And there's are positons
and muons
♪ There are photons
there are protons
♪ There's neutrinas
positinas
♪ There are photons
there's electrons
in the Higgs boson
♪ There's neutrinas
Angelinas
in the Higgs boson
♪ There are sauvignons
and pinots
in the Higgs boson
♪ There are Bonos, Yoko Onos,
Brian Enos, cappuccinos
♪ Latinas and Latinos
in the Higgs boson
♪ There are gluons
There are muons
in the Higgs boson
♪ There are many
There are few ones
in the Higgs boson
♪ There are gold ones
There are blue ones
♪ There are old ones
there are new ones
♪ We haven't got a clue
what's in the Higgs boson ♪
Ha-harrrr.
[CHEERS AND APPLAUSE]
Stop.
You stop.
Stop.
Stop clapping.
Stop clapping.
Number one...
Number one,
there's no such element
as a Brian Eno.
-And number two...
-Well, there should be.
[CHUCKLES]
Number two,
this isn't physics,
it's musical.
Thanks a lot.
-It's not a compliment.
-That wasn't a "Thank you".
-Noel.
-Please, call me Cuddles.
That's what Deepak calls me.
I call him, "Douchepak".
We have such a laugh
together.
You see, he's like you,
he's very clever,
but he's got a sense
of humour.
We can't upset him,
he's part Vulcan.
He's got no feelings.
We'll have to explain
to him later,
what went wrong.
Listen,
science isn't a panto.
-Well, it can be.
-It can't.
-Oh, yes, it can.
-[AUDIENCE] Oh, yes, it can.
Oh, no, it can't.
[AUDIENCE] Oh, yes, it can.
[NOEL] Oh, yes, it can.
No, it can't.
[AUDIENCE] Oh, yes, it can.
-Well, what's that then?
-Where?
[AUDIENCE] Behind you.
[MEOWING]
It's a pantomime cat.
A cat, but not just any cat.
Schrodinger's cats.
[AUDIENCE WHOOPING]
-[NOEL] And what's that?
-That's a box.
Right, so if the cat
goes in the box...
I might be able to salvage
something here.
This is Schrodinger's
famous thought experiment
about a cat in a box.
The cat represents
elementary particles
in an entangled quantum state.
So, the idea is,
you have a radioactive source
in the box.
When it decays,
it releases
radioactive poisonous gas,
something like cyanide,
into the box.
That means
that before you open the box,
the cat is both,
alive and dead.
But when you open the box,
the cat will be seen to be
alive or dead.
Like Keith Richards?
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
Well, let's see then,
shall we?
You wanna see
in the box, don't you?
[AUDIENCE] Yes.
-[DRUM ROLL]
-Ta-da!
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDS]
You see,
it demonstrates particles.
A cat met an anti-cat
and disappeared.
There's no such thing
as an anti-cat.
Oh, really?
Oh really, says Mr CERN,
Mr Particle Collider,
says, Mr "Let's bang things
into each other and see
what comes out".
Oh, really?
Says, Mr "I'm a Pirate
of Penzance
"and I don't know
much about quantum mechanics,
"but I dress Warwick Davis up
as a little cat and
put him in a box
"and make him disappear."
Was that Warwick Davis?
Should've got a selfie, right?
Well, let's see, shall we?
Let's see, yeah?
-Let's open the box, yeah?
-Go ahead.
OK.
-[DRUM ROLL]
-Ta-da!
Hannah Waddingham, everybody!
[HANNAH CACKLES]
Bless you.
Brian,
-Hannah's playing Time.
-I'm so sorry I'm late.
-Traffic on the M25?
-Gynaecologist in Hackney.
Off you pop, Cox.
[CLOCKS TICKING]
[BELLS CHIMING]
[CUCKOO CLOCK CHIMING]
♪ Time
♪ Will go on
♪ On and on, dear
♪ Forever
♪ Although
♪ Time is slow
♪ It will go on
♪ Whenever you hear
♪ This song play
♪ And you will say
"Oh, look there."
♪ Hey, there's a song
about time
♪ That will go on and on
♪ On and on
♪ On and on
and on, and on
♪ On and on, and on
♪ And on, and on
♪ And on, and on, and on
♪ This song will still go on
♪ Time's song
will still go on ♪
-[AUDIENCE CHEERS
AND APPLAUDS]
-Thank you.
♪ On and on, and on, and on
♪ On and on, and on
♪ It'll still go on
still go on
♪ Time still will go
♪Time's song
will still go on ♪
[AUDIENCE CHEERS AND APPLAUDS]
Oh, thank you!
Stop. Stop clapping.
Stop. Stop.
Stop.
It's not right.
-It's not right.
-Says who?
-Well, science, actually.
-Ugh.
What are you supposed to be?
I'm Time, Brian.
-There's no such thing
as Time.
-[SIGHS]
There's only space-time.
Facetime?
Space-time.
See. According to Einstein's
special theory of relativity,
published in 1905,
time and space
are no longer
to be thought of
as separate entities.
They're supposed to considered
as an indivisible whole.
Called space-time.
You see, Einstein said...
E equals MC squared.
[HANNAH LAUGHS]
[EINSTEIN] Hello, Brian.
[BRIAN] Hello, Albert.
Which means...
Energy and matter
are interchangeable.
Correct, Albert.
[EINSTEIN]
You're damn right, Brian.
Before that, we used to think
of space as an arena.
What, like Wembley?
Well, if you like.
It's a good metaphor.
But Einstein showed us
we were wrong.
Absolute space doesn't exist.
And...
Nothing goes faster
than the speed of light.
Oh, sorry.
In the new
Einsteinian worldview,
moving clocks run slow,
and moving rulers shrink.
Right, so, if the Queen
could travel at
the speed of light...
Not that kind of ruler.
-Er, if the sheikh of Qatar...
-Not that kind of ruler.
It's more like a measure.
Right, so...
Would the Queen
shrink at the speed of light?
Well, hypothetically, yes.
As Her Majesty
approaches the speed of light,
she would shrink
and become more massive.
What?
She'd become Queen Victoria?
Brian, I has
a question for you.
We know
the speed of light, yeah?
That's one of mine.
Thank you.
What is the speed
of darkness?
-It's the same.
-Oh.
Coincidence.
Hey, guys.
Maybe I see you afterwards,
yeah?
For some crazy fun times.
OK.
♪ It's a Higgs boson...
Brian, I've actually got
a science question.
Go on.
Can you have sex
in zero gravity?
Why don't you ask Tim Peake?
Tim Peake!
[HANNAH STAMMERING]
Hi...
Can we have sex
in zero gravity?
-Well...
-[GASPS]
[HANNAH LAUGHS]
As the universe
continued to expand and cool,
gravity began to take hold
of the particles of matter
and club them together
to become the first stars
in galaxies.
Do you remember
the Sloan Digital Sky Survey?
That snowstorm of galaxies?
This shows us the distribution
of those galaxies
across the universe.
So gravity
pulls everything together.
And hold it there
for the gravity song.
You're gonna love this one.
It's really your era.
-Yeah, '80s.
-Hmm.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]
[MAN] It's all right, Brian,
things can only get better.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHS AND APPLAUDS]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
♪ Ever since the apple fell
♪ On Newton, from his tree
♪ He began examining
the force of gravity
♪ His ruminations
gave equations very logically
♪ Explanation gravitation
was the force to free
♪ Free that apple from
the tree
♪ It applies to you and me
♪ Isaac Newton simply found
what keeps our feet down
on the ground
♪ It's the force of gravity
♪ Gra-gra-gra
Gra-Gravity
♪ Gra-gra-gra
Gra-Gravity
♪ Gra-gra-gra
Gra-Gravity
♪ Gra-gra-gra
Gra-Gravity
♪ It's a force of gravity
[MAN 1] Galileo!
[MAN 2] Galileo!
[BOHEMIAN RHAPSODYPLAYING]
♪ One day Albert Einstein
watched a worker
on the roof
♪ Instantly he thought of what
he called his happiest truth
♪ If the man was careless
and he slipped and had a fall
♪ Einstein realised he
wouldn't really fall at all
♪ He's not crashing to
the ground
♪ Waiting there to greet him
♪ He is simply floating 'round
when the ground
comes up to meet him
♪ It's a force of gravity
♪ Gra-gra-gra
Gra-Gravity
♪ Gra-gra-gra
Gra-Gravity
♪ Gra-gra-gra
Gra-Gravity
♪ Gra-gra-gra
Gra-Gravity
♪ It's a force of gravity
♪ You can sneer at gravity
♪ Up here in
the 17th century
♪ But eventually
we have to face
♪ It wasn't
that corrupt in space
♪ Einstein then began to see
♪ That light dispelled
by gravity
♪ Energy is matter
♪ And matter, energy
♪ We live in four dimensions
♪ And space-time is its name
♪ Then Einstein found
the formula
♪ Which really changed
the game
♪ For E equals MC square
♪ For E equals MC square
[VOCALISING]
♪ For E equals MC square
♪ Gra-gra-gra
Gra-Gravity
♪ For E equals MC square
♪ Gra-gra-gra
Gra-Gravity
♪ For E equals MC square
♪ Gra-gra-gra
Gra-Gravity
♪ It's a force of gravity
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING
AND CHEERING]
Well, no one is more
surprised than me,
but that's right.
Einstein did come along
with the general
theory of relativity.
Modifying the Newtonian
view of gravity.
We now know that space-time
is four dimensional,
and massive objects
curve and warp it.
So matter tells space-time
how to curve,
and space-time tells matter
how to move.
Now relativity
describes everything
down to the quantum level.
But, at
very small distances,
the high energies
at the subatomic level,
general relativity
breaks down...
All right, who are you?
-Who are we?
-Who are we?
[LAUGHING]
-Who are we?
-Quantum mechanics.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]
Shouldn't have asked.
Hey, carry on, sunshine,
carry on. You're doing well.
You're doing well.
[WHISPERS] Let's go.
The centuries since Einstein
published his theories
have been filled with
the most spectacular
scientific discoveries.
We've discovered
a universe filled with
wonders, pillars of gas
thousands of light-years tall,
clouds of bright gas
where young stars are born.
And we see
the deaths of stars,
producing pulsars, quasars,
and super massive
black holes
at centre of galaxies.
This...
Is the CMB.
It's the cosmic microwave
background radiation.
This is the picture of
the whole sky,
the celestial sphere.
It's a stunning image.
Now this is the afterglow
of the Big Bang.
It comes from every
direction in space.
So this really
is a picture of
the universe as it was
380,000 years after
the Big Bang.
This is the oldest light
in the universe.
These tiny fluctuations
that you see as
different colours
are density fluctuations
in the early universe.
These are the reasons
that we have galaxies
at all.
So this is a, kind of,
a static buzz
that permeates the universe.
You used to be able to
pick it up on old TV sets.
A bit like Morecambe and Wise.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]
There's no need for that,
is there, eh?
As the universe continues
to expand and cool after
the release of the CMB,
matter eventually
began to collapse and clump
around the denser regions
to form stars and galaxies.
And the universe was filled
with light, once more.
Only around 200 million years
after the Big Bang,
the age of stars had begun.
[MUSIC PLAYS]
[AUDIENCE WHOOPING]
♪ Baby, let me tell you
what it's all about
♪ Lying on your back
with your tush hanging out
♪ Hanging out...
-♪ All you need is a...
-[VINYL RIPS]
-[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
-Oh.
What are you now?
I'm a star, darling.
It's not the kind of star
that I meant.
Did you mean an astronomical
object in which
nuclear fusion happens?
Protons being fused together
to make helium.
-Yeah.
-[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
Actually, the oldest stars
in the universe are over
13 billion years old.
But there's one
very special star,
which formed
4.6 billion years ago
in an outer spiral arm of
the Milky Way galaxy.
-And we call this star...
-The sun.
-Sun.
-[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
And that was followed
in less than a million years
by the most significant moment
in our history.
The birth of the Earth.
[TONGUE CLICKS]
[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
♪ The Earth
♪ The Earth is
the planet of our birth
♪ But the girth of
the Earth
♪ Is quite small
♪ So to understand
the size of it all
♪ Lets take a flight
into the night
♪ Remembering Einstein's
great sound bite
♪ Nothing goes faster than
the speed of light
♪ Nothing, nothing
nothing, nothing
nothing, nothing
♪ Nothing, nothing
Nothing goes faster than
the speed of light, hey
♪ Albert Einstein
one bright night said
♪ Nothing goes faster than
the speed of light
♪ A shy German man
but quite polite said
♪ Nothing goes faster than
the speed of light
♪ His equations
were quite right
♪ As we worked in the office
of the Swiss copyright
♪ Despite a moving car
with its headlight
shining bright
♪ Nothing goes faster than
the speed of light
♪ Yeah
♪ Nothing, nothing
nothing, nothing
nothing, nothing
♪ Nothing
Nothing goes faster
than the speed of light, hey
♪ Suppose I could fly
at the speed of light
♪ And I took off from
the Earth
up into the night
♪ In 1.3 seconds
which is really quite soon
♪ I'm flying past
the lovely Moon
[CHORUS]
♪ Flying past the lovely Moon
♪ Heading for the Sun
which is really far
♪ Takes me 8.5 minutes
to our local star
♪ From the Sun and Mercury
each three minutes away
♪ And three minutes more
to Venus
[CHORUS]
♪ That's not too hard to say
♪ Our Earth is nine minutes'
flight
from the Sun
♪ And Mars at light speed
is 30 minutes further on
♪ Nothing, nothing
nothing, nothing
nothing, nothing
♪ Nothing, nothing
Nothing's goes faster than
the speed of light, hey
♪ To fly on to Jupiter
at maximum power
♪ Takes me another
three quarters of an hour
♪ Saturn with its rings
make a lovely display
♪ But they're still
90 minutes away
[CHORUS]
♪ That's very far away
♪ Beautiful Uranus
such a delight
♪ Two and a half hours at
the speed of light
♪ Yeah
♪ Nothing, nothing
nothing, nothing
nothing, nothing
♪ Nothing, nothing
Nothing goes faster than
the speed of light, hey
♪ Two hours flying along
like a great balloon
♪ Is the giant gas mass
that we called Neptune
♪ Six hours away at
the speed of light
♪ Suddenly Pluto
comes into sight
♪ And Pluto maybe feeling
a little bit sore
♪ For Pluto's not
a planet any more
♪ No, Pluto's not
a planet any more
[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]
♪ Its days of glory faded
♪ Its reputation jaded
♪ It is sadly
being downgraded
♪ And Pluto's not
a planet any more
♪ First they heavily
promoted it
♪ And now
they have demoted it
♪ Because it's being
confirmed by all that it was
"Just too small"
♪ It's enough
to give you haemorrhoids
♪ There are 10,000 planetoids
♪ Each of them as big as Pluto
circling around the sun
♪ I guess it needed
to be done
♪ In size it is deficient
♪ They thought it
more efficient
♪ To get rid of it
[CHORUS VOCALISING]
♪ But still I feel quite sore
♪ That Pluto's not a planet
♪ Any more
[ALL]
♪ No, Pluto's not a planet
♪ It's been relegated
damn it
♪ And Pluto's not
a planet any more
♪ And so I leave our
solar system
for our brightest star
♪ Centauri Proxima
is still very far
♪ Four and a half
light years of flight
♪ To reach our
closest neighbour at
the speed of light
[CHORUS]
♪ At the speed of light
♪ To cross the Milky Way
at 17 billion miles a day
♪ Takes a hundred
thousand Earth years
[CHORUS]
♪ No way
♪ To reach the next galaxy
Andromeda appears
♪ It would take me
two and a half million years
[CHORUS]
♪ That's a lot of years!
♪ I know
♪ Nothing, nothing, nothing
nothing, nothing, nothing
♪ Nothing, nothing
Nothing goes faster than
the speed of light
-♪ Yeah
-♪ Nothing, nothing, nothing
nothing, nothing, nothing
-[CHOIR VOCALISING]
-♪ Nothing, nothing
♪ Nothing's going faster than
the speed of light, hey ♪
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING
AND CHEERING]
Actually, that's not right.
-[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]
-The reality is that nothing
travels through space time
faster than speed of light.
But Galaxies can recede
from each other
faster than light.
Because they ride along
with space time as it expands
and it can stretch
at any speed that it wants.
Now, there is a remarkable
new theory about
the origin of the universe
called Inflation.
We've got good evidence
to suggest
that before
the universe was
hot and dense,
and what we used to call
the Big Bang,
the universe
was still in existence
in a different form.
It was doing something else.
It was doubling in size,
unimaginably fast.
This exponential expansion
stopped, certainly,
to form our universe.
But some cosmologists think
that it may only have stopped
in patches.
The bits that stop,
form universes
through a Big Bang,
like our own, but the rest
keeps on going.
If this theory is correct,
it's known as
Eternal Inflation,
then there's a striking
and, I think,
mind-blowing prediction.
The prediction is
that there will be
other universes out there.
Some being created
as we speak.
And this process
may have been going on,
possibly, forever.
There may be
an infinite number
of universes.
And if there are,
then it's possible
that we all could exist
somewhere out there
in a multiverse,
in quite different forms.
So, for example, in this
universe I'm wearing this
T-shirt and I look like me.
In another universe
I might be wearing
this rather fetching
off-the-shoulder red dress.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
Now you see, in this universe
I'm obviously dressed in
this dowdy nerd garb.
But in another universe
I might be dressed
in this blue mini skirt
showing off my beautiful,
beautiful knees.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
In this universe, I'm me.
But in another universe,
I might be a beaver.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
In our universe,
I can be me,
but in another one,
a camel in a poncho.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
In this universe,
I can be the size I am.
But in another,
I could be as tall as
the Eiffel Tower...
-[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
-And French.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
In this universe, I'm looking
a little bit saucy and fierce.
But in another universe,
I might be the queen of
the fairies.
[AUDIENCE] Aww.
Here, the Royal Family,
are dressed for
a Royal occasion.
But in another universe,
they might be dressed
for a tribal dinner.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
And in another universe,
they might be gorillas.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
And in yet another universe,
they could all be aquatic
sea creatures from space.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
So the speculation is endless
and it might seem ridiculous,
but it's not.
It's illustrating
the possibilities
of an infinite universe.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
♪ I find quantum mechanics
confusing today
♪ Now science is all the rage
♪ The Hadron Collider
is banging away
♪ Trying to guess our age
♪ A particle here
♪ A particle there
♪ In this weird quantum world
bits can be anywhere
♪ Which might just explain
why I'm losing my hair
♪ In the infinite monkey cage
♪ Till the day I heard
Mrs Schrodinger say
♪ I'm going to put
out the cat
[CAT MEOWING]
♪ Mrs Heisenberg said
♪ Oh, it might be quite that
♪ I might tell him
and you should prove that
♪ Unless you've got that
robin in, Professor Cox
♪ I'd leave that poor pussy,
alone in his box
♪ "That cat may be both
dead and alive," said the sage
♪ In the infinite monkey cage
♪ Scientists say
"All the world's
just a stage"
♪ But physics
is passing through
♪ There may be an infinite
number of mes
♪ And an infinite number
of yous
[CHORUS]
♪ God help us
♪ In an infinite universe
seems a bit nuts
♪ Scientists sometimes
talk through their butts
♪ Proof you can't do
♪ That there are more of you
♪ In the infinite monkey cage
♪ This linear
super-positional thing
♪ Is blowing my mind away
♪ The multiverse seems to be
made out of string
♪ That's what some
particle physicists say
♪ The infinite monkeys
write every day
♪ They may accidently
writeHamlet the play
♪ But they probably
just poop on it
and throw it away
♪ In the infinite monkey cage
♪ They're naughty monkeys
♪ In the infinite monkey cage
♪ They have no trousers
♪ In the infinite
monkey cage ♪
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING
AND CHEERING]
Nothing lasts forever.
Stars die, galaxies die,
even universes
gradually wind down.
The formation of new stars
grinds to a halt. We already
see evidence of this
in our own Milky Way galaxy.
So, ultimately,
eventually, the universe will
-die.
-Oh.
It's not very cheery-uppy.
When stars run out of fuel,
there are only
three possibilities.
Our sun will keep fusing
hydrogen into helium
for another
five billion years or so,
until it burns through
the last of its hydrogen fuel.
After that, it swells
to become a Red Giant
approaching the Earth's orbit,
before collapsing like
a dying fire.
The core will compact
to a planet-sized ember.
And it will become
a White Dwarf...
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
Sorry?
A White Dwarf,
it's a technical term.
-Like Black Hole.
-Oh, racist as well.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
More massive stars
will collapse in
Supernova explosions
that for a few brief moments,
are amongst the brightest
objects in the universe.
The core will be squeezed
by gravity
into a neutron star,
a spinning ball,
12 miles in diameter.
Oh, about the size
of Oldham.
Well, yes, but with the mass
of the sun,
a sugar cube fragment
would weigh
a billion tons on Earth.
If you took
a marshmallow
and dropped it,
the gravitational pull
is so big, it accelerates
towards the ground
and hits it with the power of
an atomic bomb.
Hold up, where would
the marshmallow come from?
It's a metaphor.
Oh, like White Dwarf?
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
Brian, does anything
become spam?
-Spam?
-Yeah, spam.
Most of the stars we see
today in the night sky
have planets around them.
Data from observatories like
the Kepler Space Telescope
tell us that around
one in 10 stars
may have Earth-like
rocky planets around them.
Perhaps with rivers,
seas and oceans.
That's around 20 billion
potentially Earth-like planets
in the Milky Way galaxy alone.
And there are
350 billion galaxies in
the observable universe.
So the question is.
Are we alone?
No, we're here with you.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
No, what I mean is,
is intelligent life common
in the universe?
It's not even common at
the BBC.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
Why are we here?
-Eric asked us to come.
-Yeah.
To be honest, there's no way
we'd come if you asked us.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
Where do we come from?
-You've come
from Peterborough.
-Yeah.
Kentish Town.
No, we think that life
started only once
on this planet.
Do you know where?
Oldham?
-No, 3.8 billion years ago.
-Oh, Manchester.
-[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
-In the oceans.
And here it took
3.8 billion years
for the first living things
to become us.
What's wonderful,
and, at the same time,
a little bit scary,
is how frequently our own
evolutionary path came
close to ending.
In the Permian Extinction,
250 million years ago,
for example,
96 percent of all
marine life became extinct.
The odds against
our survival were huge.
The Earth has been
a volcanic hell.
It's been a frozen ice ball.
It's been an ocean
free of land.
The Earth has been
a target for meteorites.
30,000 objects a day
burn up in our atmosphere.
And surely,
after its formation,
a glancing glow from
a planet-sized object
smashing into our Earth
caused the formation
of our moon.
Against all the odds,
there's an unbroken chain of
light stretching back
3.8 billion years,
just one-third of
the age of the universe,
to some primordial life form
in an ancient ocean.
And those first living things
have, over geological time,
assembled themselves into
intelligent, conscious beings
inside a superbly complex body
that can replicate, evolve,
and pass on our genes.
With an enormous brain
that's learnt to communicate
with the finest of its peers,
both past and present,
and leave a legacy
into the far future,
through language, writing,
maths, science...
Panto.
Shopping.
A Hominid intelligence
staggering on
the edge of space,
pondering the immensity
and our next steps.
The age of stars will close
in a hundred trillion years,
and with it,
the window for life in
the universe will close.
Do we define
the end of our universe
to be the time
the last super massive
Black Hole evaporates?
That takes place in...
When?
-Roughly?
-Yeah, go on.
I've got this one.
10,000 trillion, trillion,
trillion, trillion, trillion,
trillion, trillion,
trillion years.
-Correct.
-Yes.
-[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING]
-Don't leave me hanging.
That means, that means,
that life will have
been possible
for only one thousandth
of a billion, billion,
billion, billion, billion,
billion, billion, billion,
billions of one percent
of the age of the universe.
Imagine that.
We live in a tiny, minute,
golden bright age.
The briefest of moments
in cosmic time.
We don't know how
the universe came
into existence,
or why it came
into existence.
But we do know
where it is.
It's all around us.
It's in us.
It is us.
We are the means
by which the universe
understands itself.
But we may be
effectively alone.
An isolated island
of meaning
in an imaginably vast
and hostile universe.
Ugh, that's
a bit of a downer,
isn't it?
Terribly depressing.
That's a terrible ending,
Brian.
Yeah.
Well, no, it isn't. Cheer up.
You know what they say.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
♪ Just remember
that you've standing on
a planet that's evolving
♪ And revolving at
900 miles an hour
♪ That's orbiting at 19 miles
a second so it's reckoned
♪ The Sun that is
the source of all our power
♪ The Sun and you and me
and all the stars
that we can see
♪ Are moving at
a million miles a day
♪ And out of spiral
half a million
miles an hour
♪ In a galaxy they call
the Milky Way
[CHORUS VOCALISING]
♪ Our galaxy itself
contains 500 billion stars
♪ It's a hundred thousand
light-years side to side
♪ It bulges in the middle
6,000 light years thick
♪ But by us it's just
a thousand light-years wide
♪ We're 30,000 light-years
from galactic central point
♪ We go 'round every
200 million years
♪ And our galaxy is only one
of millions and billions
♪ In this amazing
expanding universe
[CHORUS VOCALISING]
♪ The universe itself
keeps on expanding and
expanding
♪ In all of the directions
it can whizz
♪ As fast as it can go
at the speed of light
you know
♪ 12 million miles a minute
that's the fastest speed
there is
♪ So remember when
you're feeling very small
and insecure
♪ How amazingly unlikely
is your birth
♪ And pray that there's
intelligent life somewhere
out in space
♪ 'Cause there's bugger all
down here on Earth ♪
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING]
[AUDIENCE CHEERING]
The Entire Universewas
brought to you by
Rutland Weekend Television,
with John Dupre,
and the Rutland
Light Orchestra.
With the Muriel Tritt
School of Music and Dance
ensemble!
With Arlene Phillips
as Muriel Tritt!
Special guest star, Tim Peake.
With Jonty Stephens
and Ian Ashpitel
as Morecambe and Wise!
Robin Ince as Robin Ince!
Hannah Waddingham!
Noel Fielding.
Warwick Davis!
Eric Idle!
And Professor Brian Cox.
Please join us again
in another 41 years
for another
Rutland Weekend TV Show.
Thank you and good night.
[AUDIENCE CHEERING
AND APPLAUDING]