Archive: What Are the Chances We Exist at All? With Brian Cox and Alice Roberts

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Connor Boyle (1:00)

Who are we? Why are we here? And how unlikely is it that any of us exists at all? Hello, I'm Head of Programming, Connor Boyle. And in this episode, we're going back into the archive to join physicist Brian Cox and evolutionary biologist Alice Roberts to explore the extraordinary chain of cosmic accidents, evolutionary twists and chance encounters that made human life possible. From the origins of the universe to the evolution of our species, they ask how the laws of physics and the forces of natural selection combine to produce creatures capable of asking the biggest questions of all, including why we're here in the first place.

We hope you enjoy the episode, and let's join our speakers now.

Brian Cox (1:43)

Hello.

Alice Roberts (1:44)

Good evening, everybody.

Brian Cox (1:46)

And we thought we'd start by just giving a brief introduction to our research, to our science, which is what you don't see on television, but what we're doing in our day jobs, as it were. So I suppose I should invite Alice to start.

Alice Roberts (2:03)

So my research is very focused on the skeleton, it's focused on bones.

For some reason, I've always been interested in ancient bones. And I originally trained as a medic, as a medical doctor, and then got sidetracked into anatomy. And once that had happened, it was almost inevitable that I was going to start looking at bones, because I've been fascinated by them since I was a child. And the world of the skeleton gives us this incredible insight into evolution, because most of the fragments of ancestors that we have are skeletal fragments, because that's what fossilizes. And we can also get really good ideas about how animals move and how they adapt to their environments, looking at their skeletons, and then trying to reconstruct all the soft tissue around that.

So my research is, I suppose, in a very narrow way about the human skeleton. In a broader way, it's about human evolution. It's about comparative anatomy, comparing ourselves with other animals in order to actually learn more about ourselves.

Brian Cox (3:19)

Okay, so very briefly, my research, as was mentioned in the introduction, I'm a particle physicist. I started, though, working in astroparticle physics. So the first bit of research I did was on supernova neutrinos. So neutrinos are particles, three of the 12 particles of matter. Perhaps unfamiliar, but they carry 99% of the energy of a supernova explosion. They're intimately involved in nuclear fusion in the sun. There is something like 60 billion per centimeter squared per second passing through your head now from the sun, from the nuclear reactions in the sun. They interact very weakly with normal matter, and so it's very difficult to detect them, fortunately for us, because there's a rain of them falling down on us. And most of them pass straight through the earth unimpeded. So I worked on building detectors to detect those things. Then I started working on electron proton collisions, an accelerator called DAISY in Hamburg.

Then I moved on to proton anti-proton collisions in Chicago, an accelerator called Fermilab. And now I work on proton proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider at the LHC.

The main results, as most of you, I suspect, will know, is that we found this new particle, a completely new fundamental particle called the Higgs particle, whose job it is to give mass to everything else in the universe. So we think that less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang or so, empty space stopped being empty.

The lowest energy configuration, if you like, of emptiness is not to be empty, but it's to be filled with Higgs particles or a Higgs field, if you prefer that language. So the idea is that the Higgs condensed out into the vacuum of space sometime, less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. It's been there ever since. And your particles now, the particles that make up your body, are at the most fundamental level. So let's say the electrons in the atoms in your body get their mass because they interact with this condensate that permeates the universe. So that's what I've been working on for a while.