“I’m a curious human. That’s all I am”
The Infinite Monkey Cage’s Robin Ince is a comedian with a mission: to prove that space can be a serious laughing matter
You graduated with a degree in English and drama, but what inspired your passion for science?
I was always interested in science. Yet when I was about 13 or 14 years old, I got a particularly terrible exam result in physics and it really put me off. It was one of those things that happened during the change between schools and I don’t think our physics teacher realised we weren’t all up to the same stage.
Did you find it wasn’t being taught in a way that worked for you?
Teaching science can be problematic because it seems entirely separate to the world around you. There’s this series of equations and ideas that sometimes aren’t connected to everything that you see. That’s why I think the great science popularisers and communicators are those who will show you something that you have experienced and then get you to think about that moment when you’re looking up at the Moon or something. It could just be about the heat of water or why you see your reflection in a pane of glass, but all of those things that make you think, ‘this is science; everything is science.’
How did you get back into science?
When I was in my mid-20s, I read The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan. Of course, when I was around ten years old I would watch Cosmos and I loved
Carl Sagan. That was really the thing that ignited my interest in science.
Would you describe yourself as a scientist now?
If I call it a job – which may actually be an exaggeration to anyone who actually has a job they have to do – then it’s to make people excited about ideas. All my shows, whether they’re my stand-up shows, the shows I make on the radio with Brian [Cox] or the documentaries I make without him, are about making people excited. But most of what I read about is science – most of my days are at some point spent trying to interrogate something in the world, whether it’s biochemistry, epigenetics or particle physics, but I’m not in any way a scientist. I am science-interested; I’m a curious human. That’s all I am.
Were you proud to become an honorary doctor of science?
You see, that’s the terrible thing. I have a couple of those things, and Richard Feynman always said that we should turn them down. But I realised Feynman was always in with a chance of winning a Nobel Prize, whereas I’m not. When someone does say, “Do you want to turn up and you can put on a robe and then we’ll have free very small pieces of pastry and wine?” Then I say, “Yeah, why not?”
You mention Carl Sagan a lot in your show on BBC Radio 4, What was it about his programmes in the 1980s that caught your imagination?
I still think they are some of the greatest programmes in terms of dealing with a kind of understanding of why the universe appears to be as it is. The programmes start beautifully anecdotally. One I remember in particular involves the story of the Heike crab, which he uses to talk about evolution. There’s this wonderful story
involving a child emperor. It’s melancholy and melodramatic, and then it ends up with this story involving a crab, which I’ve since found out may be a slightly flawed story. But that doesn’t matter. The story itself was a springboard, a fantastic primer in understanding natural selection and evolution. Even when Sagan’s talking about things like the Doppler effect and how he got his own understanding of the expanding universe, he starts off with ten minutes of delightful story. And that’s where a lot of teachers have a problem.
In what sense?
They’re up against the wire to make sure they have taught all the things they are supposed to. They don’t have the time to say, “You know what, today’s lesson is just going to be a story and then this story is going to be your doorway into understanding this particular idea” – or at least be willing to go on a journey to understand it. I was at Fay Dowker’s first lecture on general relativity with a set of third-year university students. It was the first time they had touched on general relativity and it was fascinating to see these people, who have spent 10 or 15 years since their first science assignment, finally being primed enough in the language of physics to be able to approach this fantastic and beautiful idea. When you have seen the excitement in young people’s eyes, it gives you the encouragement to make a show that gets people excited about ideas.
Is there a certain knack to getting the right balance in a show?
You have undergraduates who are able to approach general relativity and eventually understand it with a depth that will elude me until my dying day, but we want to explain to people that you don’t have to have total comprehension. With science, we’re constantly dealing with the idea of understanding the least wrong version of events. That’s what science is – it’s constantly going, “right, here’s an idea and this is definitely less wrong than the previous version.” Lord Kelvin was wrong when he said that “there’s nothing new to be discovered in physics now,” because shortly after that there was the incredible revolution in quantum physics.
Can science be daunting to a lot of people?
It’s important that people don’t pick up a book on quantum mechanics, read it and at the end think, “I don’t understand it; I must be an idiot and I must never read it again.” Enjoy the ride. Pick up books on space exploration, quantum mechanics and artificial intelligence. Don’t expect at the end of the book or the documentary that you’ll be able to build a sentient robot. Just enjoy building up these ideas. This is great. Every now and again I look out of the window and things look slightly different to me today then they did yesterday because I have learned new things about our understanding of the universe.
The Infinite Monkey Cage has been running since 2009. Why do you think it’s been so popular?
One of the things about radio is that you’re allowed to make the thing that you want. It’s basically three people – Brian [Cox], our producer Sasha [Feachem] and me, together with the other people who are involved, like the BBC’s head of science, and there’s a hands-off approach. We’re allowed to sit down and say, “What are the six things we want to do in the next series?” And we choose the guests ourselves. It’s something we feel we own; it’s our show and we’re not just coming in as presenters. Every show that we make is a show that we really want to make, and I think perhaps its success is that it has allowed us to just be the people that we are. Brian is a fantastic communicator of scientific ideas and I’m reasonably good at being facetious towards him when he’s gone too far and I realise the audience are being lost. But underneath it all, we have a lot of similarities. We are friends and we just really love it and I hope it comes across. There’s that lovely quote from Carl Sagan when someone said, “Why do you want to communicate these ideas?” And he said, “When you’re in love you want to tell the whole world.” And that’s a beautiful way of putting it.
Do you get a lot of feedback from listeners?
The excitement when you get emails and letters from 10 to 89 year olds with their own ideas and questions, confusions or illuminations from what they’ve heard – it means you think this is part of the conversation. Also, we are not trying to say, “Here is a half-hour module on this subject.” We write three sets of questions the afternoon
before the show and talk about the ideas, and we never really get past the first set of questions.
Do you run into complaints about the show? Are there any accusations that it’s too scientific?
There’s always going to be a battle when you popularise scientific ideas. You have some scientists who see it as frivolous and pointless, and they ask, “Why are you being so silly with this?” Our general relativity shows went out in a different time slot and were in a slightly different format. I thought it was worrying in some ways because people have got used to what we’re like at 16:00, but for people who normally tune in to Radio 4 at 09:00, well, they may think, “Who are these idiots?”
But we received some of the most positive stuff we’ve ever had. There were just two who said we had done it entirely wrong, and what they meant was that with science programmes, you should deal with them in a way that has a tremendous amount of gravitas. It’s serious-minded… do not be playful. But nearly all of the scientists that I know and interview are tremendously playful people.
The greatest scientists we know from history – Einstein or Feynman, or many Nobel Prize winners like Paul Nurse – are very playful people. And that’s what we’re trying to get across. You don’t have to say, “Welcome to science. Today we are looking at general relativity. This idea...” You can mess around. Sometimes I think, ‘My god, we did a show about dark energy and dark matter. We should have done one or the other, and seven minutes was just me messing around with Jon Culshaw.’ But the next 23 minutes was mostly hard science. I’m there to mess around and lure people into a false sense of security.
Of all the scientists you’ve met, who has been the most inspirational and fun?
When I go to Jodrell Bank [Observatory], it’s great to sit down with someone like Tim O’Brien as he explains how the Lovell Telescope works and to get a chance to stand in the dish. All of the radio waves that are being fed in via this dish help us understand about pulsars and quasars.
In terms of communicating ideas of space, I’d say Chris Hadfield – I know he’s an astronaut rather than a scientist, but it’s the way he frames his experiences of being on the International Space Station [ISS] and looking back down on Earth and how that changes him as a human. I think he’s fantastic at communicating and has done an enormous amount to excite people about human space exploration – plus it’s hard not to be excited meeting an astronaut.
I remember that moment the day Neil Armstrong died, I walked down the South Bank [in London] and looked up at the Moon, which looked particularly vibrant because it was a harvest Moon, thinking, ‘Oh my god, at some point on this planet we may well return to a time when there is not a living human being who has stood on the Moon.’ But, of course, we see so much excitement in terms of journeying to Mars, who knows what will come from that?
I’ve read that Brian Cox wouldn’t want to go into space. Is that true of yourself?
It’s certainly true of me. I don’t have the temperament to go into space. When you meet astronauts, they have this incredible control. If I can’t get the lid off a jam jar, I’d be looking at throwing it at the cupboard and there’d be jam everywhere. I’m not the sort of person to have on the ISS. But I think Brian would like to pop up on the Virgin [Galactic] thing – the idea of bouncing to the outer atmosphere and back again. I think he’s definitely keen to do that. But I would imagine he’s got to an age now. I know he looks young, but it would be tremendous jeopardy putting someone of Brian’s age up there. Gravity would mean that a lot of the glue that keeps his skin and hair in place to make him appear so young would come loose, and people would see the hideous reality of his ravished visage.
What is the biggest scientific space breakthrough?
When we see something like Curiosity on Mars, the idea that we have incredibly clear images of the surface of Mars is amazing, even though it’s very parochial in terms of the size of our galaxy. I think there are also remarkable things when you look at the longevity of space exploration. Voyager was the fastest humanmade object to go into space, and the fact that I was 8 when it launched and over 40 when it reached the ‘edge’ of our Solar System is incredible. The signals and images that have been gathered over those decades allow us to become familiar with the surroundings of our Solar System.
What space advances are of interest to you?
One thing is the way that we are developing machines that can interrogate various territories. We’re looking to create objects that have a level of thought to them, and that is of tremendous importance. We’ll question whether we should send humans into space: will that be an advantage or should we create machines with a level of thought to ask the right questions? What are the right things to send towards a planet, and what will have the ability to have some form of judgement? I also think, in terms of the speed that we can send things into the universe, that we are waiting for an enormous breakthrough, but it would mean we can really begin to get further out of our own Solar System.