Episode 0 - Welcome Ashlee

Tomlin Hawthorne

Before anything else, a question. It's the only one I'll ask today, and you don't have to answer it out loud.

Tomlin Hawthorne

What's the one thing about the universe you've always wanted to understand, and quietly assumed you never would?

Tomlin Hawthorne

Hold on to it. I'd put money on it being somewhere in the next fifty episodes. And I'd put more money on you understanding it by the end.

Tomlin Hawthorne

Ashlee. Welcome.

Tomlin Hawthorne

This series was made for you. Not for a physics student, not for a general audience, not for someone who needs a qualification at the end. For you. Which means it was made for someone who knows a great deal about plays, and books, and the ancient world, and how people and institutions actually behave.

Tomlin Hawthorne

This is episode zero. There's no physics in it. Think of it as the programme note you read in the foyer before the curtain goes up. Who's in it, how long it runs, and roughly what happens. I'll keep it short, because the good part starts in the next episode.

Tomlin Hawthorne

First, the premise.

Tomlin Hawthorne

Physics is usually taught as a set of problems. A ball rolls down a slope; calculate its speed. A spring is stretched; find the force. And that's a perfectly good way to train an engineer. But it's a bit like teaching Shakespeare by having people parse the grammar of the stage directions. You'd learn something. You'd miss the point.

Tomlin Hawthorne

This series treats physics the way a good seminar treats a great body of literature. As a set of ideas. Arguments between brilliant, difficult, often very funny people. Evidence, and how it was weighed. Wrong turns. Feuds. Moments where somebody looked at a perfectly ordinary thing, a shadow, a spoon, a hiss on a radio, and saw that the whole world was different from what everyone had assumed.

Tomlin Hawthorne

So here's my promise. There will be no problem sets. You won't be asked to calculate anything you don't want to. A handful of equations will turn up over the year, and when they do, we'll read them the way you'd read a line of verse. What does it claim? What would the world look like if it were false?

Tomlin Hawthorne

And here's the warning that goes with the promise. This will still be hard, in the way a great novel is hard. Some of these ideas took the cleverest people who ever lived decades to accept, and a few of them died still refusing. So if something strikes you as absurd, that's good news. It usually means you've understood it.

Tomlin Hawthorne

And I'm going to lean on what you already know. A lot. You'll find Galileo writing a play, and Tom Stoppard explaining chaos better than most physicists. Lucretius, Goethe, Voltaire, Primo Levi, Borges, Calvino. The arguments in this series are arguments you're already equipped for. You just haven't been handed this particular text.

Tomlin Hawthorne

Now, how each episode works, so you know the shape.

Tomlin Hawthorne

Every one opens with a question, and I'll ask you to commit to an answer before I tell you anything. Out loud, if you're alone. Getting it wrong is the best thing that can happen; that's where the learning is.

Tomlin Hawthorne

Then a story. A person, a place, a date. Then the idea, built up one step at a time. Then something I call the myth of the week: one thing almost everybody believes that isn't so.

Tomlin Hawthorne

And each episode ends with two things. A question to take away, one that nobody's settled, to chew on over dinner. And a small challenge. Something to try at the kitchen table, with a coin, or a torch, or a bar of chocolate. Yes, chocolate. You'll measure the speed of light with one in episode seventeen, and then you'll eat the apparatus.

Tomlin Hawthorne

Each episode runs about twenty minutes. There are fifty. At one a week, that's a year. And it's a year with a shape.

Tomlin Hawthorne

So here's the arc. Nine parts. And I'll admit I've been looking forward to telling you this bit.

Tomlin Hawthorne

Part One, episodes one to five: Learning to see like a physicist. We start in ancient Greece, with a man who said everything is water, and his student, who had the nerve to tell him he was wrong. A librarian measures the size of the Earth with a stick. We'll travel from the inside of a proton to the edge of the visible universe in twenty minutes. We'll find out why there are no ants the size of horses. And we'll end with Galileo, who launched modern physics by writing a play, and Newton, who realised that the Moon is falling. Right now. And has been for four billion years.

Tomlin Hawthorne

Part Two, episodes six to ten: The clockwork universe and its cracks. Newton's world at the height of its confidence. We'll find out what energy is, which turns out to be a surprisingly embarrassing question, and why a chocolate-chip cookie holds more of it than dynamite. We'll meet Emmy Noether, who found one of the most beautiful ideas in all of science and wasn't allowed to be paid for lecturing. Voltaire picks a fight. And then a weatherman goes for a cup of coffee and discovers that the future can't be predicted, even when it's completely determined.

Tomlin Hawthorne

Part Three, episodes eleven to fifteen: Atoms, heat, and the arrow of time. This is the one I'd most like you to hear. We'll start with a Roman poet watching dust in a sunbeam. And we'll end up answering what I think is the deepest question in the series: why time only goes one way. Why you can scramble an egg and never unscramble it. Why you remember yesterday and not tomorrow. The answer is so simple it'll make you laugh, and it involves a pack of cards. And there's a novelist who said that not knowing it is like never having read Shakespeare. By episode thirteen, you'll be able to answer him.

Tomlin Hawthorne

Part Four, episodes sixteen to twenty: Light and fields. A bookbinder's apprentice with no mathematics looks at iron filings and decides that empty space isn't empty. A Scottish poet-physicist writes four lines that turn out to explain what light is. Goethe spends twenty years trying to prove Newton wrong about colour, and isn't entirely wrong himself. A French philosopher announces that we'll never know what the stars are made of, and is proved wrong within twenty-five years. And Edison and Tesla fight a very dirty war over the plug in your wall.

Tomlin Hawthorne

Part Five, episodes twenty-one to twenty-six: Relativity. A twenty-six-year-old clerk in a Swiss patent office asks a simple question about a beam of light, and by the time he's done, space and time have stopped being what you thought. Clocks disagree. Twins age differently. You'll learn why your phone's map would drift by ten kilometres a day without Einstein. We'll read E equals m c squared slowly, as a sentence, and meet the woman who used it, sitting on a log in the snow, to understand how to split the atom. And we'll finish by listening to the sound of two black holes colliding a billion years ago. That's a real recording. I still get chills.

Tomlin Hawthorne

Part Six, episodes twenty-seven to thirty-four: The quantum world. Eight episodes, and I won't pretend this part isn't strange. It's the strangest thing anyone has ever discovered about reality. A single particle goes through two doors at once. Opening a second door makes some places impossible to reach. Two things on opposite sides of a city behave as one. And with a pencil and a sheet of paper, you'll prove, yourself, the theorem that won the 2022 Nobel Prize. Then we'll look at the five rival accounts of what it all means, which is a problem of interpretation, and you are better trained for that than most physicists. And then I'll show you that this impossible theory is running your telephone.

Tomlin Hawthorne

Part Seven, episodes thirty-five to thirty-nine: The deep structure of matter. We go all the way down. Marie Curie's notebooks, which are still radioactive. The antimatter coming out of the bananas in your kitchen. Quarks, named after a line in Finnegans Wake. The Higgs boson, explained to a British minister using Margaret Thatcher at a party. And a particle so shy that tens of billions of them are passing through your thumbnail every second, and turned out to break our best theory of what everything is made of.

Tomlin Hawthorne

Part Eight, episodes forty to forty-six: The cosmos. And we turn round and go up. A woman paid thirty cents an hour, and not allowed to touch the telescope, works out how to measure the universe. You'll find out where the gold in a ring was made, and it wasn't anywhere quiet. Edgar Allan Poe answers the question of why the night sky is dark. The afterglow of the Big Bang turns up on a television screen. And then the floor gives way. Everything you've ever seen, every star, every person, turns out to be about five per cent of what's out there. The rest we can measure and can't explain. We'll go to the end of the universe, and to the beginning, and I'll be honest with you about how much of that is known and how much is very clever guessing.

Tomlin Hawthorne

And Part Nine, episodes forty-seven to fifty: The big questions. Is anybody else out there, and why haven't we heard from them? What are space and time actually made of? And if we found the final theory of everything, would it explain a market, or a mind, or a poem? That one, I think, will make you feel very much at home. And the last episode brings us back to where we started, with a question I'm going to ask you next week and ask you again a year from now. I'm very curious whether your answer will change.

Tomlin Hawthorne

Twenty-six centuries of human thought, in a year. From a stick in the Egyptian sand to the edge of time.

Tomlin Hawthorne

I want to tell you why I'm so excited about this, and it's not the black holes, though I am excited about the black holes.

Tomlin Hawthorne

It's that nearly every one of these ideas came from someone looking at something ordinary, a falling apple, a fogged photographic plate, a cup of tea going cold, and refusing to stop asking why. That's not a scientist's skill. It's a curious person's skill. You already have it. This series just points it at the sky.

Tomlin Hawthorne

One small challenge, and it's the easiest of the year.

Tomlin Hawthorne

Get a notebook. A nice one, if you like. Write on the cover: Things I No Longer Believe.

Tomlin Hawthorne

It starts empty. Over the next fifty weeks, every time an episode takes away something you were sure of, write it down. A single line. I can tell you the first entry will probably arrive in episode four, and it'll be something you've believed since you were about six.

Tomlin Hawthorne

By the end of the year, I think that notebook will be the best record there is of how far you've come. And I think you'll enjoy reading it.

Tomlin Hawthorne

And write down your answer to the question I asked at the very beginning. The thing you always wanted to understand. We'll see.

Tomlin Hawthorne

Next time, episode one. We go back two and a half thousand years, to a port on the Turkish coast and a man who thought everything was made of water. He was wrong. It didn't matter. What he started is the reason for everything that follows.

Tomlin Hawthorne

I'm so glad you're here. Let's begin.