Nature's Shapes - Dave Gorman, Sarah Hart and Thomas Woolley

The Infinite Monkey Cage

BBC

Comedy, Science

4.7 • 9.4K Ratings

🗓️ 26 March 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Brian Cox and Robin Ince unpick the hidden codes behind the shapes we see in nature with Mathematicians Sarah Hart & Thomas Woolley and comedian Dave Gorman. The panel marvel at how evolution so often beats mathematicians to finding the most elegant solutions, after all, it’s had millennia to experiment. How do trees achieve the optimal distribution of leaves and why tortoise shells are so geometrically exciting?

Plus we learn why the cheetah got its spots, thanks to the work of Thomas Wolley’s mathematical hero, Alan Turing, how numbers can be more or less irrational, and why Dave Gorman has a vendetta against oblongs.

Producer: Melanie Brown Exec Producer: Alexandra Feachem Assistant Producer: Olivia Jani

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Did you know that you can listen to many of your favorite podcasts first on BBC Sounds?
0:06.9	Like Friday Night Comedy, where you can hear the latest episode seven days earlier,
0:11.0	and a week is an extremely long time in politics.
0:14.4	Good things come to those who don't wait.
0:17.4	Listen to your favourite podcasts first on BBC Sounds.
0:22.9	BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts.
0:26.9	Hello, I'm Brian Cox.
0:28.0	I'm Robinx, and this is the Infinite Monkey Cage.
0:31.0	And today we are going to ask, what shape should the Infinite Monkey Cage be? If, if indeed something infinite can be a shape?
0:41.0	Because I was kind of wondering about that because you've already told me in it,
0:43.9	annoys audiences a lot about the fact there's not just one infinity,
0:46.5	there's bigger infinities and bigger infinities.
0:48.3	And yet even little infinities, they are infinite at the same time.
0:50.9	So I'm just wondering, can an infinite monkey cage have a shape?
0:53.5	Do you think that's possible?
0:56.0	Right, okay. The universe has got a geometry. Right, what's the universe?
0:58.0	Hyperbolic geometry, yeah.
1:00.0	And it can be curved or it can be flat.
1:02.0	Right, so it can be like the earth, or it can be curved.
1:04.0	Or it can be like a saddle.
1:06.0	Yeah.
1:07.0	Saddle. Because the flat earth is that's entirely everyone's monetised that as much as they can.
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in -6 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.