The first recording today is an episode of House – Resignation. we’re back to ‘new’ episodes here. The mystery patient today, Addie, suddenly started coughing up blood during a karate class.
Foreman resigns, not wanting to turn into House.
A couple come to see House because his poop floats. They’re vegans. He has to break the news that the man has been cheating. He’s been eating meat, and the fat causes the floating.
Addie has to have a blood sample taken from her eye. This is real nightmare stuff.
House buys a coffee for Wilson. He’s suspicious, which he’s right to be because House put amphetamines in it.
More terrifying symptoms from Addie, as she suddenly starts bleeding from the head.
Wilson becomes rather manic under the influence of the drugs. And House uses it to spot that Wilson is taking antidepressants.
Hose has to break the news to Addie and her parents that Addie is going to die. They become very upset when they notice that House is smiling. Which is news to House until he checks his reflection.
House realises that Wilson has been giving House antidepressants in the coffee he was giving him. And he realises what’s causing the symptoms in Addie. She tried to kill herself with kitchen cleaner, but in such a way that she caused a bridge between a vein and an artery, which is where all her infection symptoms were coming from. “Why’d you do it?” “I don’t know. I just… have never been happy.”
House ends the programme asking out the vegan nutritionist.
Media Centre Description: US medical drama about a maverick, anti-social New Jersey doctor. A 19-year-old college student is brought in after she collapses spitting blood and starts displaying other mysterious symptoms. The team is shocked when Foreman suddenly hands in his resignation. House is interested when an attractive young nutritionist comes into the hospital.
Recorded from Five on Thursday 16th August 2007 20:58
The recording stops after the start of an episode of Shark.
The last recording today starts with the end of The Book Quiz, trails for Stephen Fry: Secret Life of a Manic Depressive and Consenting Adults.
Then, the last episode of Atom – The Illusion of Reality. Professor Jim Al’Khalili is up in a hot air balloon to open this episode, telling of the discovery of cosmic rays, at the same time as scientists were studying radioactivity. “No one really understood what they were, let alone believed that they might be connected. Then an incredible story unfolded. Cosmic rays and radioactivity turned out to be connected in a way so shocking that it beggars belief. The discovery of this connection would force us to rethink the nature of reality itself. The world we think we know, the solid reassuring world of our senses, turns out to be just a tiny sliver of an infinitely weirder, more wonderful universe than we could have ever conceived of in our wildest fantasies.”
He talks about Paul Dirac’s work to unify quantum theory with Einstein’s special theory of relativity.
Here’s the Dirac equation. “Don’t try and understand it, just look at it and marvel.”
It’s an equation that predicted the existence of Antimatter. Here’s Jim and the Anti-Jim, who disappointingly has neither a goatee nor an eyepatch.
Next, he visits Richard Feynman’s office. “In our story of so many geniuses of science, Feynman stands, in my view, second only to Einstein in the list of greatest 20th century physicists.”
He describes the theory that Feynman and his contemporaries worked on, Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), as “Nothing less than the most far-reaching and accurate scientific theory ever conceived.”
The theory talks about the vacuum of space not being empty, but being a “quantum foam” where pairs of particles, matter and antimatter, spontaneously come onto being, then instantaneously annihilate each other. It seems unbelievable, and QED was initially derided by the physics establishment when it was introduced. But “Since the late 1950s, direct evidence that empty space isn’t in the slightest bit empty, but is in fact seething with activity, has been observed time and time again in laboratories. And what’s wonderful about the proof that emptiness isn’t empty is that the first clue came from a jar of mayonnaise.”
Hendrik Casimir was working on the question of why Mayonnaise isn’t runny. “Why doesn’t it behave like a normal liquid? It’s as if some strange force holds the molecules of mayonnaise together, making it viscous and sticky. In an astonishing insight, Casimir realized that the mysterious force that attracts molecules of mayonnaise together is related to the mysterious virtual particles in empty space.” So he devised an experiment to prove it. “You suspend two metal plates very close to each other in a vacuum. These plates aren’t magnetic or electrically charged, so you’d expect them just to sit there immobile, unaffected by each other. In fact, over time they start to move towards each other due to a tiny force that pushes them together. And this force doing the pushing Casimir showed was caused by the virtual particles that fill the vacuum.”
“In their more fanciful moments physicists speculate that this so-called vacuum energy might one day be harnessed. They imagine it powering intergalactic spaceships that would carry humans to the far reaches of the cosmos. Now who knows if this will ever come to pass, but that mayonnaise might lead to space travel? That’s a connection Douglas Adams would have been proud of.”
The next set of discoveries was of more and more exotic particles, “The neutrino, the positive pion, the negative pion, the kaon, the lambda, the delta and of course each of these had their antimatter counterparts.” This leads to the next physics genius, Murray Gell Mann. His theory of quarks, tiny sub-particles that make up the other subatomic particles, was remarkable, but “He knew that for his colleagues, even those used to the strangeness of the atom, quarks were a step too far. And in any case there had been no evidence of anything remotely like a quark. He was convinced his new theory would be declared outlandish, or just wrong. So Gell Mann sat on his revelation, and one of the greatest ideas in science was almost lost forever.”
But nearby, at the Stanford Linear Accelerator, they discovered that “protons have internal structure. In other words, protons were themselves made of more elementary particles. Here were Gell Mann’s quarks.”
Next, he talks about “the measurement problem”. “The measurement problem is this, an atom only appears in a particular place if you measure it. In other words, an atom is spread out all over the place until a conscious observer decides to look at it.” Which leads us to one of the most famous hypothetical experiments in the whole of science. Schrodinger’s Cat. At this point, he looks like he’s going full super-villain.
This in turn leads to the many-worlds theory of the universe, and he talks to its greatest exponent, David Deutsch, who’s even namechecked in Avengers Endgame.
He also talks to Paul Davies. “The experimenter today in the lab can make a measurement which will affect the nature of reality, as it was, say, five billion years ago. And I think there’s a sort of feedback loop between the existence of living organisms and observers and the laws and conditions which have given rise to them. Because otherwise it just seems a bit miraculous that the universe happens to have started out with the right laws and the right conditions that will lead to observers like ourselves who are able to not only make measurements but make sense of it all.”
Andrew Jackson isn’t quite so controversial. “All of the things we can measure give us questions that we can answer from quantum mechanics. So that the quantum mechanics itself without the need for an interpretation, as far as I know, provides us with answers to predictions regarding the result of every experiment we can do. So I don’t know. And that’s enough for me.”
Media Centre Description: The final part of Professor Jim Al-Khalili’s documentary series about the basic building block of our universe, the atom. He explores how studying the atom forced us to rethink the nature of reality itself, discovers how there might be parallel universes in which different versions of us exist and finds out that ’empty’ space isn’t empty at all. Al-Khalili shows how the world we think we know turns out to be a tiny sliver of an infinitely weirder universe than which we could have conceived.
Recorded from BBC FOUR on Friday 17th August 2007 02:28
BBC Genome: BBC FOUR Friday 17th August 2007 02:30
After this, there’s another trail for Stephen Fry’s Weekend.
Then, the recording ends with the start of an episode of Time Shift.
Here’s the ad breaks from House. This one also has a Channel Five News bulletin at the start, which leads with a crash in the stock markets around the world. Well, it’s 2007, I should have been expecting that.
Adverts:
- trail: How To Be a Property Developer
- Channel Five News
- trail: The Forgotten
- T-Mobile
- Tropicana
- Johnson’s Holiday Skin
- Holland & Barrett
- Herbal Essences
- Nat West
- Ambi Pur 3volution
- Toyota Auris
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in cinemas
- trail: Numbers
- Corn Flakes
- WH Smith
- L’Oreal Recital Preference
- Bertolli
- Sainsbury’s Insurance
- Fruit-tella
- Knocked Up in cinemas
- expedia.co.uk
- L’Oreal Collagen Skin Re-Modeller
- Ty-phoo
- trail: Search for the Lost Treasure of Afghanistan
- Actimel
- Elvis The King
- Kia cee’d
- Elvis Magazine
- Specsavers
- Air Wick
- travelsupermarket.com
- Oats & More
- trail: Shark
- trail: House
- Fairy Dishwasher
- Frosties
- Fiat Grande Punto
- trail: Vertical Limit
VHiStory 