Cox - The Infinite Monkey Cage – How to Build a Universe

A joyous trip through our understanding of the universe

Daily Express

Praise for BBC Radio 4s The Infinite Monkey Cage:

A witty and irreverent look at the world according to science

Independent

Praise for Professor Brian Cox:

Engaging, ambitious and creative

Guardian

He bridges the gap between our childish sense of wonder and a rather more professional grasp of the scale of things

Independent

Professor Cox shows us the cosmos as we have never seen it before a place full of the most bizarre and powerful natural phenomena

Sunday Express

Praise for Robin Ince:

Bursting with energy and ideas

The Times

It goes without saying that without The Infinite Monkey Cage radio show, there would be no book, and so our first thanks must go to our wonderful colleagues at BBC Radio 4. The biggest thank-you must go to our patient and wise Editor Deborah Cohen who runs the BBC Radio Science Unit, and our amazing production coordinator Maria Simons, without whom there would be no production. She is monkey number 4.

Huge thanks also to our brave and visionary Commissioning Editor at Radio 4, Mohit Bakaya. He took a huge gamble putting us on air back in 2009, and has stuck with us and supported our sometimes frankly crazy ideas, for some 17 series and counting. Thanks, Mo, Gwyneth Williams and all at Radio 4.

Our final thanks at Radio 4 are to our genius colleagues in the studio management team who record our somewhat chaotic anarchic shows and make them sound smooth and professional (well, they do their best). Thank you, Giles Aspen, Gayle Gordon, Bob Nettles, Gary Newman, Jill Abram and Mark Wilcox.

Wed like to thank many of the regular guests on the show, who have also provided invaluable support for this book, most notably Professor Jeff Forshaw who spent a great deal of time reading the proofs of this book, and Professor Nick Lane, without whom the dead strawberry debate could never have been put to rest (and, actually, we are still not sure it has been?). Our thanks also to Hannah Fry, Lucy Cooke and Adam Rutherford for their input and the wonderful Katy Brand, monkey cage panellist extraordinaire, and now PhD in strawberry philosophy. Wed also like to thank Professor Carlos Frenk, and all the extraordinary scientists who have appeared on our show, whose work and enthusiasm for their subject have inspired so much of the science we have featured in this book.

A very special thanks to The Cheeky Monkeys for our theme tune, featuring writer Eric Idle and performer and producer Jeff Lynne. We are happy to have given them a break in the business and hope they achieve their dreams in future.

Thank you to Natalie Kay-Thatcher whose illustrations Robin first came across in a brilliant exhibition of two cultures colliding and to Ben Jennings for taking a break from barbed and eloquent satirical swirls to create Darwins worms and other wonderful illustrations in this book.

And finally, thanks to the patient team at HarperCollins who have put this book together with incredible speed and skill, most notably Julia Koppitz and Myles Archibald, but also the designer Zo Bather and illustrators Charlotte Ager, Holly ONeil and Oliver Macdonald Oulds. Theyve taken a vision that resided in our heads until disturbingly recently, and turned it into an actual thing. A thing we love and hope you will, too. Theyve remained encouraging, enthusiastic, patient and professional throughout, unlike the three of us, and their experience of the infinite monkey cage must have been far more literal than even they could have anticipated. They are clearly wizards if we believed in them.

Brian Cox, Robin Ince and Sasha Feachem
September 2017

The Producers Tale
by Alexandra (Sasha) Feachem

Hello, Im Sasha. I produce the radio show The Infinite Monkey Cage . I say produce, I use the term loosely. Youll understand why in a moment. Brian thought it would be a good idea if I wrote something about what it is like to work with him and Robin. Im not sure he had fully thought through that suggestion when he made it. I responded with hysterical enthusiasm. Brian looked scared. Perhaps punching the air and shouting Yes! Finally the world will hear my story was a nanometre over the top. Despite this, and trying desperately to hide his alarmed expression behind a nervous smile, Brian realised that retracting the suggestion was clearly not an option that the horse, or monkey keeper, had well and truly left the infinite zoo enclosure at something approaching the speed of light.

So here I am, with the producers tale; to tell you how The Infinite Monkey Cage evolved into existence and what its like to work with the infinite monkeys. And although the title of the show was in no way chosen to reflect the personalities of the people involved, or the way the radio show is put together, there is no doubt that we have all gloriously grown into the title. Thank goodness we didnt call it Top Geek .

Back in 2008, CERN switched on the mother of all science experiments: the Large Hadron Collider. It is still the longest, fastest, most expensive science experiment ever undertaken. A particle smasher of biblical proportions, it recreates the moment just a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, and is the ultimate testament to what happens when human beings get together and ask why and what if? And when the Large Hadron Collider did switch on, Brian and I were sitting in the control room at CERN, alongside Andrew Marr, broadcasting to the nation, live on the Today programme. It was quite an odd experiment in itself, doing live coverage of a science experiment that is hidden underground and involves minuscule particles that I think even David Attenborough would fail to do justice to, especially on the radio. As Evan Davis commented from the safety of the Today studio back in London, its a bit like Olympic taekwondo. It all sounds very interesting, but no one is quite sure what is actually going on.

Luckily, the much predicted black hole that had gripped the popular press did not materialise and we all lived to tell the tale. And of course just a few years later, this extraordinary machine discovered the elusive Higgs particle, and with it gave us the origin of mass and opened a whole new chapter in our quest to understand the Universe we live in.

But perhaps the most extraordinary achievement of this jaw-dropping experiment was the interest it ignited in the general public; suddenly, incredibly, science was cool. Not just science, but particle physics. Some very well-known voices and faces emerged from the shadows and declared themselves fans of physics. Science had become, dare I say it, a little bit rock n roll, and so the idea for The Infinite Monkey Cage was born.

Brian had told me some hilarious tales about celebrities hed encountered on his travels, from dinners with Dan Aykroyd to finding himself in a hotel suite with Cameron Diaz and Queen Noor of Jordan all fans of particle physics, not just Brians hair. One of Brians friends told us that we should try to get hold of Mick Jagger (hes way up on this shit, apparently!). What could be more rock n roll than that? (Mick if youre reading this, wed still love to hear from you.) Robin, at this point, was regularly performing and curating his hugely popular stand-up shows, mixing scientists with comedians, and so this odd idea of a Radio 4 panel show featuring scientists and celebrities was born. Robin came up with the title and now, nearly 10 years later, it doesnt seem like such an odd idea to have comedian Katy Brand on stage with Professor Carlos Frenk, one of the worlds most esteemed cosmologists. Or Ross Noble sitting alongside an expert in early human fossils. Or even a Python (Monty) and a geologist.