Stephen Hawking’s voice – and what he left behind!
53:50 Share

This is the Science Show on Radio National and I'm speaking to you from one of the most celebrated scientific studies in the world, the office of Stephen Hawking at Cambridge in the Department of Applied Maths and Physics. I haven't been here for a few years.

But I'm delighted to see that in fact the picture of Marilyn Monroe is still on the wall behind us and on my left.

Stephen Hawking and I've come here really to check up on the number of issues scientifically. One of them to do with something that went round the world about the possibilities of time travel, something that seemed to be out of the question until some time ago and in fact I think in one of your books you did say that it was most unlikely.

If I ask you the question, is time travel likely? As I remember from the last time, when you have an answer, you will type into your machine, ready. Is that right? Yes. Fine. Well, what is the answer to the question? Ready.

Einstein's theory of general relativity seems to allow the possibility that space-time can be so warped that one can go off in a rocket ship and come back before you set out. However, the universe we live in doesn't seem at the moment to be warped in the way required for time travel.

So the question is, would it be possible for us, or a more advanced civilization, to warp spacetime in the way necessary? And do you think it will be possible? I don't know yet, but I think it is a very important question. The trouble is, most scientists are afraid to work on it, in case they are labeled "cranks".

and government agencies wouldn't dare to be seen wasting taxpayers' money on something as way out as time travel. But it is an important question. Yes, Stephen Hawking 28 years ago. But why was he so fond of that scratchy machine voice when a better one was on offer?

More from the British Festival of Science today, plus a sceptical festival and a green energy innovation. Well, one of the stars of the British Science Festival was Caroline McGettigan of University College London. She predicted AI voices with a near-perfect resemblance to you or me. So why is this investigation so important?

So I've been thinking about what would be the broader moral and ethical implications of these kinds of things because in the end synthetic voices are not human voices, they are digital replicas of human voices.

And if you were to integrate a human sounding synthetic voice into a computer device, then there are broader questions to ask about what that means for us as humans and the way we interact with that device. So in the end, a computer is not a human if you give it a human like voice.

Does it mean that we would then start to engage with something that is not a human entity as if it were human? And what are the ramifications of that? So if you take it to the next level and say this is not just a human sounding voice, but a voice that sounds exactly like my dad, then what does that mean about my relationship to that computer with the voice of my dad and the relationship to my dad and so on and so forth? So these are some of the questions that we've been...

thinking about and I've been working with stakeholders from other disciplines so tech ethicist musician and composer who uses artificial intelligence in a creative way with voices and we've been working around these issues and writing about them and thinking about

knowing what we know from our different disciplines about how people perceive voices, about how voices are used in conversation, in good health and in ill health. We're interested in trying to get a broader sense of what this kind of synthesis might mean for us as humans and our everyday lives.

Is there a way perhaps if things get more difficult with the scammers or pests in all sorts of places to train people to be more discriminating depending on what they're particularly concerned about?

When I started this research, I might have had my own kind of idea in my head about what synthetic voices sound like. And I might have had an idea that it would just be so easy to detect if something was generated by a computer. I think it's safe to say that we're beyond that point already. And then we may be getting to a point where the technology becomes yet more sophisticated that...

it may end up being a fruitless endeavour to be able to, with some degree of certainty, train people to detect what was generated by a computer and what was not.

And in that sense, I think that the question then becomes broader. If we could assume that certain types of synthetic material may be sufficient to mislead someone, that this is actually a person that they know, a celebrity, a politician, whatever it might be. If we're already in a position where that looks realistic, maybe we should be thinking more broadly about the ways in which information is shared publicly.

digested and authenticated across the piece. One thing that really interests me about how we listen to voices is the sound of a voice is very humanising. So there's research that shows that people are more convinced by other people if they get to hear them read out their own job pitch rather than just reading the text of the pitch.

And those kinds of effects become very interesting when they're integrated with artificial intelligence because we're combining, we're anthropomorphizing agents that are not human. And so for me, that's really the interesting piece is what kind of role does voice play in that? And there will be other people who are interested in what role does the face play in that or, you know, the linguistic content of what is being said or what is being communicated as information that may or may not be true.

So I think it needs a really big picture approach. And I think there are stakeholders that have really important roles to play, not just from science and technology and engineering, but also from the arts and humanities. And finally, it's quite fascinating towards the end of his life, Stephen Hawking was offered...

better voice because the machine that he used had him talking in that strange way and he funnily enough turned down the wonderful realistic a real Stephen voice do you understand that thought that his brand existed and he wanted to stick to it absolutely I do and having a

a voice that represents yourself doesn't need to necessarily come out of your body. And so in that very famous example, of course, this was a voice that Stephen Hawking was using

as his audio self or, you know, to communicate for quite some time. And it became something that was very much part of his self-identity, I would assume. And we're doing also some interesting research on this question. There are lots of ways that any kind of thing, if it's attached to the self, might be sufficient to represent the self. It doesn't need to be a precise replica. And I think these are really interesting spaces to ask questions about just because the technology may exist to make it perfect,

that might not be a perfect solution for every user. So what is really interesting about this voice cloning is to try and get a handle on exactly what the benefits could be and what are the parameters of those benefits. How close does a voice need to sound exactly to me before I would find it beneficial? The huge challenge of AI identities and the range of research by Professor Caroline McGettigan of University College London, who spoke at the British Festival of Science.

Meanwhile, a new book about Hawking has just come out on what he left behind. It's by renowned author Roger Highfield, now at the Science Museum in London. Talking about the objects of Stephen Hawking and what he might have left, I interviewed him twice in Cambridge. And the thing that was quite notable the minute you walked in was this huge picture of Marilyn Monroe walking

And we sat in front of him doing the interview. And I never quite asked him, why Marilyn? Do you know? Well, you're right. He was obsessed with Marilyn. And certainly, if you said to him, if you could have three guests for a dinner party, who would they be? It would always be Newton, Galileo, Marilyn Monroe. She died, it must have been when he was around 20 or something like that.

was obviously a massive sex symbol on the planet at the time. I think, though, all the paraphernalia around Marilyn that we found in the office, which we collected in 21, and it's mugs and posters and books, all sorts of things, it all stems from him saying many years ago that I love Some Like It Hot, one of the movies that really made her, and

And then someone bought him a bit of Marilyn paraphernalia and it sort of got a bit out of control. I mean, I think he did genuinely absolutely adore Marilyn Monroe anyway, but it sort of came from that movie. And there was a famous bet...

with Kip Thorne about naked singularities, I think. And there was a cartoon of a woman which was definitely very Marilyn-like. His birthday parties, there'd be Marilyn Monroe lookalikes popping up and singing happy birthday to him. So it did all get a bit out of control on the Marilyn front. Kip Thorne of Gravitational Waves fame said,

And I think he won the bet that he had with Hawking. And of course, you couldn't really easily speak to Stephen because even with a voice synthesiser, it would take him an age to queue up a bespoke sentence. I mean, he had some pre-programmed sentences. When I interviewed him, it took two minutes for each answer. But...

If you talk to his grad students, which I have done for the book, there are certain expressions. Of course, a big beaming smile is the closest thing to spontaneous communication you could get with him at the time. Of course, if your poor old grad student doing his bidding about wormholes or time travel or whatever, you also learned that when he kind of rolled his eyes or looked off one way that you were going completely the wrong way and stop it. You're talking nonsense, you know, get back on track.

So it became a very important secondary form of communication for him. OK, you've made a collection. What have you got and how did you go about getting it? Everything happened in the wake of Stephen's death in 2018. And Stephen had a long-standing relationship with the Science Museum, which he used to visit as a schoolboy, and also, obviously, with Cambridge University. So eventually, in 2021, the university took all his papers...

and the Science Museum collected the contents of Stephen's office, which I found really exciting. It's actually why I really wanted to do the book, because it was like a personally curated museum of stuff that was important to him.

and actually very important to the way he lived as well. He was an absolute tea fanatic. There were photographs, there was a beach ball, there was Simpsons paraphernalia because obviously he appeared on The Simpsons, Big Bang Theory paraphernalia because he was on The Big Bang Theory. You said he was a fanatic for tea. You mean cups of tea that he somehow managed to drink? Cups of tea, definitely. There were a few bits of paraphernalia that were very special. Like, Stephen was obsessive about his spoons and he had a particular spoon...

very deep so his carers could give him particularly tea. He's famous for actually delaying getting on a flight to the States because he wanted to go and buy some tea. What about the famous things that we know so well, in other words, the vehicle for making those spoken words? I remember watching him, because you actually got a printout of what you were talking to him about at the end, right?

And when we were first doing an interview, I was slightly nervous because I didn't quite know what to do while the two minutes was going. Look around the room, you scratched. I've been exactly the same position. I did an event on Universe in a nutshell with him at the Institute for Education. So it's me, Stephen, 2000 people.

I hadn't thought through what an age a two-minute gap is. So I started gabbling about trying to fill in the space rather than just respectfully looking around or inspecting my fingernails. And then would often start talking over him when finally the voice synthesizer clicked in. It's interesting because this is the essence of trying to live with someone who's got that sort of predicament of,

And I was going to ask him a particular question which I thought was too sensitive and I never got around to it. In other words, how do you cope when you can't even scratch your nose? His answer in his book, of course, was you don't concentrate on what you can't do but what you can do. And if you do that, you get through. Just shove aside the fact you can't do ordinary things and

And you can do lots of other things, which are absolutely tremendous. But after being rather nervous on the first one, on the second one, I realised that I could actually do jokes. For instance, when you see him printing what his answer is,

I said, you've misspelled that. And he does a kind of silent laugh. And that was fine. And the other thing which I found was quite interesting, I had got hold of something that Stephen had written about ways in which he was being reported as

It was very sensitive and it was to do with being a really good scientist or simply someone who was giving the accolades because he was a cripple. He was unable to move. And this was a big story and he wrote an answer to that. And I got one of Australia's most famous actors called John Bell to read it. And I said, this is read by John Bell and

Do you get the joke? And he said, of course I do. Now, the point is, John Bell was very, very famous, I think Irish physicist of tremendous distinction. And that sort of thing really turned him on. Yeah, I mean, the communications story is a huge one. And we have collected his voice synthesizer.

And I do talk in the book about how he went from having his tracheostomy, which was done as an emergency when it looked like he was going to die of pneumonia. Then he lost the ability to speak. Although it has to be said that if you talk to him in the early 80s, there's actually a great Horizon documentary. You can see that only his grad students and close friends could really understand him at that point. And they relied a lot on his facial expressions, facial

And you'd really have to listen carefully. I couldn't really make out what he was saying. And it was kind of heart-rending because obviously initially after the operation, he couldn't communicate at all. And they used those old primitive methods of, you know, eye gaze at a card or whatever. But then I think it was Voice Plus or Speech Plus, they came up with the voice synthesizer where he could control a clicker sound.

as a cursor went through a series of options and either give a pre-programmed response or laboriously, I mean, it took forever, build up a sentence letter by letter...

And actually, it was kind of fascinating because there are little twists and turns to the story. Walt wanted to give him an updated voice because they felt the first iteration was a bit primitive. But he completely hated the new voice. And he felt that the one that has made him so famous, you know, when he started every lecture, can you hear me? That was him. And he identified with it. He didn't want the new voice.

And then towards the end of his life, there were two problems. You know, one was he was finding it harder and harder to give the kind of input. So they were beginning to look at things like thought control. There was an eye gaze thing, twitches of a cheek muscle, other ways to interface with it. And so then they were trying to come up with a kind of a digital copy of his voice. And sadly, just before he died, they got something that he was happy with.

that would keep his voice going. So I suppose Hawking being looked after in those various ways may have pioneered quite a bit of technology for other people. Yeah, and actually I think it also, if you talk to Kip Thorne, a great friend who got the Nobel for gravitational waves, he thinks that because it was hard for Stephen to communicate live with people, that it made him a master of one-line quips.

because, you know, he couldn't explain anything. So that made him kind of quite witty. But B, Kip thinks, more importantly, that he began to think about problems. You know, he would get grad students to write equations on a blackboard and so on.

But I think it encouraged him to think geometrically about problems and conjure up solutions in his mind. You know, he might have been scribbling on bits of paper, but he couldn't do that anymore. So he had to develop a different way to formulate these very arcane problems in his head. And I think that gave him huge originality as well. And Roger, what were your feelings during that writing process?

I found it a huge privilege really because we had about a thousand objects. In fact, we digitised the whole office so we can recreate it.

But it was actually thinking of which objects can tell an interesting story. And some things looked quite innocuous, but actually had an incredible story to tell. So, for example, there was a beach ball on his desk and he would give these beach balls away. And actually, when he looked at them carefully, they were covered with green and blue splodges with a kind of red band around the middle.

And in fact, this was data from the WMAP probe, a picture of the baby universe, as it were. And it confirmed one of the ideas that he was passionate about, that inflation, this super fast expansion of the early universe, turned little quantum fluctuations of almost nothingness into the vast structures we see today.

around us in the universe like galaxies and stars and so on. So you might have thought, oh, that's just a bit of a quirky object. But in fact, it had an incredible story to tell, validating some of his ideas. And there was also Cox's jacket hanging up there with a strict instruction not to dry clean it.

And of course, Stephen was healthy until 2021, led a normal life and was a bit of a devil may care cocks, had lots of crashes. Rowing, in other words. Rowing cocks, yes, I should say. And there was a great tradition that, you know, if you won a race at Oxford, you were picked up by the rest of your crew and thrown into the river and celebration.

And so that Cox's jacket, it hadn't been dry clean since Stephen had been thrown in the river in it in the 60s, which I found just incredibly touching because this is obviously an object that he linked with his former life. Although I 100% agree with you, what was amazing about him was I was lucky enough to meet him on and off over since the late 80s.

was he never complained about his personal predicament whatsoever. He always looked at the positive. It's not about what I can't do, it's what I can do. So an amazing guy, but it definitely gave me goosebumps when I looked into the jacket.

A final question, really, a fairly sensitive one, and that is to do with WMAP. I think you remember that the people who did it, those maps of the very, very early universe, I think they got Nobel Prize for it. And there was some argument about Stephen Hawking and his actual status. The people I talked to in his field had no doubt he was at that top level. And did you find that now at such a distance?

Yes, I do, actually. Funnily enough, I was probably 20 years ago a bit more sceptical. But, for example, one of the things I really remember was when he, at his 60th birthday celebrations, he said, I want this little equation to be on my tombstone, which it is today in Westminster Abbey. And this is the equation that actually explains why black holes are not so black. He discovered that they give off this radiation, which, of course, is called Hawking radiation.

And it's an amazing bit of work because it's one of the few attempts to fuse together the theory of the very big general relativity and gravity with the theory of the very small quantum theory. And actually, it also links in thermodynamics, the science of heat and work. So it's a tiny equation with a really surprising consequence because until that work, we all thought that black holes had so much gravity they wouldn't release any. And they were really black.

They were really bad. He said, no, no, they ain't so black, as he said. And today it's really held true as an absolute milestone. You know, that was exactly 50 years ago. It's the 50th anniversary of this little equation.

That was remarkable work, the work about quantum fluctuations leading to the structure of the universe. I think he was a little bit unlucky. I think if he'd lived on a few more years, the Nobels have often favoured experimental scientists over theoreticians. But I think if we've detected Hawking radiation, he would have got the Nobel Prize without any doubt.

But I think even his work on the structure of the universe and also the way he took Roger Penrose's ideas about black holes and when he did his doctorate, he inverted them to describe the birth of the universe. You can almost think he looked at the birth universe almost like a time-reversed black hole. I mean, that was radical work at the time because at that time the steady-state theory was...

and we talked about the Big Bang in a kind of derisory way. And Stephen was one of the great pioneers there. So I'm convinced that if he'd lived for a decade or more, he would have got a Nobel Prize. And of course, Roger Penrose did.

Roger did. And actually, Roger wrote the foreword for the book. And Roger does say that if there'd been a bit more experimental evidence before he died, I still think there could have been a case even for the prize that Roger got for Roger and Stephen to share it. Congrats. Thank you very much. Roger Highfield from the Science Museum in London, author of Stephen Hawking, Genius at Work. Gorgeous book.

The Science Show on Radio National, where we're still at the British Science Festival. A mixture of fine lectures on AI or cybercrime, as well as show-and-tell displays inviting the public to inspect, like this one. My name is Yata and I'm an intern at UEL. Could you spell your name? J-E-T-A. Where did that name come from? It's from Kosovo or Albania.

And you? I'm PJ and I'm a senior lecturer at UEL. At this university? Yeah, at this university in the medical physiology department. Tell me, what's in front of us? A vaping show, but I can see a model with lungs and a heart and various things. Tell me. So our project is called To Vape or Not To Vape. And here we have a poster telling you about what electronic cigarettes are and how they affect the body. And around us we have some machines that are used to detect...

blood pressure, your ECG and your respiratory rate and then we have a sculpture of the lungs here so we can take a look and see how... Exactly where things are going wrong. Now you've got a list of the various things that may be going into your system. I can see obviously nicotine,

Glycerin? Flavouring? Glycol? What's propylene? So all of these chemicals are found within the liquid of electronic vapes. So nicotine, as most people know, would be a very addictive chemical. It's quite toxic to the body. It increases blood pressure. The heart rate goes up as well. Yeah? Well, we can use the machines to check that out. Oh, mine is classically low, like an athlete's. LAUGHTER

What are you laughing at? Well, yeah, I mean, it can vary from person to person. So what we try to look at is with the models, it's a classic example of what we measure in a whole physiological system in the human. So we look at the smoke entering through the airway, into the lungs, and how that might interact with the heart. So we look at not just cardiovascular, but cardiopulmonary. And then we try to understand why does that happen? Why does that happen?

So why are we seeing those changes? I.e. if your heart rate goes up, if your heart rate goes down. We try to understand that at a more cellular level. So on your right hand side, we actually have a setup where we've found a way to isolate

individual cell types. So for example, in a small petri dish that you can see over there, we actually have beating hearts. Beating. Heart cells? Yeah, they're heart cells beating in a petri dish. And we're trying to load a video for you, which you'll see later, but these are actually beating live. From which person did you borrow the heart cells? So we actually use stem cells. So we use a type of stem cell that you can change to a heart cell.

So these are donor stem cells. And basically, you can change those stem cells to a heart cell. And then after a certain time in incubation, they start to beat.

Once they start to beat, we then want to understand the changes we see in the whole human. What is the actual mechanism looking at the cellular level? So we look at changes, intricate changes, not just about heart cells contracting, but inside that and the mechanisms inside that. And what we're finding in terms of vape and not to vape, well, I'll leave that to Jetta to answer. What do you reckon?

I reckon that there is no answer currently. We don't know too much about the long-term effects of vaping. We only know a bit about the short-term effects. To vape or not to vape, we still don't know. But this is a demonstration, is it, for the members of the public like me? I can come up and you'll tell me what's going on and what the experiments can be and what the risks might be. That's the kind of interaction you're expecting from the public? Absolutely, yeah. Also get them to question whether it's something that they want to do

and know the risks of it. Leave an open-ended question for them. And have the people come up to you and been impressed? Have they reacted nicely? Yeah, absolutely. They've been really intrigued, which is nice. And I see people are drawn to the posters and to all the equipment that we have here. So it's been really lovely.

Going back to those heart cells, where do you get the stem cells from? In a hospital or an operation or what? Our stem cells we order from a company. So they're involved with ensuring that they're ethically obtained from donors. And what we do is, in the lab, this certain type of stem cell can differentiate...

turn into any cell type in the body. So because we're particularly interested in the heart initially, we're also going to look at the lung.

we can differentiate those cells to a heart cell. Were we interested more in other cell types that make up different organs, we could also potentially look at that. So going back to what Jetta was saying, we're finding very interesting data at the moment at a cellular level with vaping. Because vaping is still relatively early compared to how long cigarettes have been smoking for, you're seeing generations of people smoking cigarettes now in their latter ages.

where you can look at longitudinal changes in smoking, but we're yet to be able to do that with e-cigarette or vape. What our interest is is that there is this exponential increase in vaping. It smells really nice. You can have different flavours, but we have to be careful of all that sort of masking effect. And what we really want to understand is the science and the biology behind the changes. Have you ever vaped? No, I don't vape and I don't smoke. Well done.

One of the displays, all interactive at the British Science Festival, University of East London, doing those basic tests of all those alien chemicals vapours insist on putting into their bodies. The BA, or British Association, whose annual public manifestation is the British Science Festival. So what is the BA?

We in Australia used to have ANZAS, the Australian New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, for 109 years. Now it's gone. But is the BA also in jeopardy? Hannah Russell is its CEO.

How far back does the British Association go? I think it's something like 1830-ish, isn't it? Well, almost 200 years. The first annual meeting, which was the predecessor of what we now know as the British Science Festival, was held in 1831 in York. And it's been held almost every year since then, almost always at different cities across the UK and very occasionally outside the UK.

And of course, having this travelling event means you can involve most of the nation and in fact, people from Europe and nearby countries. Yeah, absolutely. The idea of the festival is that it's accessible to everyone. So whether you work in science...

just interested in science, whether you've never contemplated going to an event with science in the initial meetings where scientists would discuss groundbreaking work with each other within their field, but also across different disciplines and crucially with the public. And we've kept that at the heart of what we do. It's really about giving people the opportunity to

to discuss and debate and share stories and find out about cutting-edge work, have a view on issues that matter to them, and that's very much still at the heart of what we do. I'll annoy you slightly by referring to the Royal Institution because there's a story there attached. Of course, it became so popular with their Friday events and the street got so crowded near Piccadilly that

that they had to invent the one-way street. Otherwise, all the coaches would jam up and the traffic jam would have been invented as well. But what about the BA? I know that the first person to be called a scientist in 1834 was conjured at the Cambridge meeting. But I remember the fact that if you go into the Oxford Museum at the top floor, that is where Tom Huxley...

the Bishop of Oxford about the nature of evolution and they had this famous fight, which of course Huxley won, and that was as part of the BA as well. Yeah, there have absolutely been some pivotal moments at annual meetings as they were known in those days.

But even now, we still have scientists presenting cutting edge work, quite complex ideas in really creative and engaging and accessible ways that gives everybody the opportunity, whatever their prior experience, whatever their background. Yesterday, for example, we had a sports panel on how elite athletes get to the top of the podium and we were really honoured to

to have Olympians like Diane Modal and Dame Catherine Granger and Kelly Southerton talking about the incredible impact that science has had on their careers in sport. Science is really integral to all of our lives. And you had the Sky at Night team looking at the stars. Every year we are very honoured that the BBC record their episodes.

Sky at Night Question Time at the British Science Festival. And this year, that's taking place this evening. I'm very much looking forward to it. You have to get there very early. It's extremely popular. Is Brian Cox coming? Well, he wasn't there last year, so I don't know is the honest answer. I know Chris Lintott has been at this meeting. Chris Lintott is the person who is

is behind Galaxy Zoo, which pioneered the citizen science work of lots of people identifying things that were, until AI came along, so difficult because of the sheer bulk of information. So they asked viewers, if you like, to look at pictures of galaxies and sort them into different categories. But some people say that

Because of that semi-showbiz association with the odd robot, you're going too far towards the fun and games part. Do you dispute that? I do dispute that. Presenting science in a way that is creative and engaging doesn't detract much

from the science itself. In fact, it makes it more accessible to a wider range of people. Why should we keep scientific content just to be in the domain of scientists? Science is, as I've said, integral to all of our lives and everybody should have the opportunity to engage with it. And I think meeting people where they are and giving them the opportunity to engage

is much more effective and actually makes for better science. You know, we all know, and people working in science know, that the more perspectives you bring in, the more people you bring in, the more diversity you bring in to science, the better the results. So that's very much what this is about. Yes, you come to a different university specialising in different things, and say you were in Exeter last year. That is so world famous for its environmental work

and protection of trees and forests and so on. And in other parts of Britain, other specialisations, I remember when...

There was a certain person who was president in 1992. How do I remember that? Because I was president of the equivalent one in Australia. But here in Britain, it was somebody called David Attenborough. And there he was just wandering around being friendly. And when it went to Leicester, his hometown, he was there again and people couldn't believe it. Yeah, I mean, we have been absolutely blessed as an organisation with...

fantastic president. This year's president is Professor Kevin Fenton, a world-leading public health expert, epidemiologist, and gave an incredible presidential address yesterday. Such a warm, thoughtful address, really showing what

why science is so integral to public health and the challenges that we face and the opportunities. And I think we're going to have a brilliant year with him as our president. Yes, he was talking about the ways in which, for instance, for 10 years he was in America when HIV was such a huge problem and being an epidemiologist.

He was showing how you can actually develop different techniques to protect people and indeed to marshal cures should they be available. Very, very tall man as well. It was amazing. Six foot something or other. Yeah, yeah. I thought it was a great session. And one of the approaches that we took this year and have taken in previous years is to have it as a conversation so that there's an opportunity to find out about the person.

So you're saying about David Attenborough as a person, not just an icon. And that approach, I think, works really well and really fits with the sort of ethos of the festival. Now, there are all sorts of organisations, not least New Scientist magazine, putting on events which are like TED Talks, but they're in festivals.

Almost like your weekends where they're looking at, say, the biggest challenges in advanced physics or space travel or whatever. Is that sort of competition difficult for you or is it just part of the broader team? I think it's complementary, to be honest. One of the things that we work really hard to do is to reach out to local communities. So particularly people who wouldn't normally consider coming to an event that, as I say, has science in its name.

And I think that provides an opportunity for people to engage, whether it's a performance or an installation or exhibition, a talk...

And then having left, hopefully, inspired, their curiosity ignited, that might be then where they might think about going to a new scientist event or the Royal Institution you referred to earlier. So I think we are complementary in that ecosystem and perhaps we're reaching communities at the point where they wouldn't think about maybe going to a new scientist event, but they come to one of our events.

And then on the back of that, they might move on to doing other events as well. And for me, one of the lovely things about the festival is that it takes on the flavour of that university or those universities when there's two or more working together and of the community. And we really try and tailor the programme towards the interests and needs

of both the university and the community. And it's free. And it's free. Every event is completely free. And it has been to Australia and it helped pioneer the understanding of the Barrier Reef through various marine scientists there. But what's your own field finally? Well, I did a degree in biology, but originally I trained as a science teacher.

And for my whole career, pretty much I've worked in science education and engagement, and it's an absolute joy to be able to do both of those at the British Science Association. Hannah Russell of the University of East London, the British Science Festival, she's CEO. An organisation that, as you heard, did much to celebrate Darwin and evolution. And there he is on the cover of the latest edition of The Skeptic magazine, standing next to that other bloke.

So as we're close to the vibes of Halloween, let me introduce Tim Mendham, editor of The Skeptic. So who is that other bloke? You say any number of times you've asked people whether they've heard of who? Tell me. Alfred Russell Wallace. And what do they say? They don't tell me, don't tell me, I'll get it, I'll get it, and they don't, by and large.

You mean no one ever has? Scientists would, but the ordinary person in the street would probably never have heard of Wallace. Why is he important to know, do you think? Because he invented evolution and natural selection. He mentioned Charles Darwin, OK? And they say, what did he do? And people in the street, they probably won't mention natural selection. That's a bit hard and technical. They'll definitely mention the theory of evolution. And then you ask them, who else developed the theory of evolution? And they say, there was someone else. LAUGHTER

And you say, yes, there actually was about the same time, mainly the theory of natural selection, which underpins evolution. Darwin acknowledged him as the joint discoverer, developer of the theory, and he even called the natural selection concept our child. Now, if you go to the city, Darwin...

and you go slightly north, you'll find there's a Wallace line. What is that? Slightly north and to the left. He noticed that certain life forms were different to the west of this line, and the west of the line is Indonesia, etc. And he drew a line down which roughly fell between, I think it was Bali and Lombok, to say that this is the line, this is a different sort of form of evolution, different form of species over that side.

to what's on this side. But of course, if you go south of Wallace's Line, there are all these kangaroos and wallabies and so on. Yes, there's a lot of that stuff actually around here. There's also tree kangaroos and stuff like that in New Guinea as well. So there are relatives up there. But yeah, it's a very different form of life in Australia than marsupials.

to virtually everywhere else in the world. I think there's a possum, Master Bill, in South America. There's an opossum, which is a slightly different species. But yes, South America and Australia were joined indeed at one point. And the interesting thing is that if you look at what Wallace did with his observations, because he was actually living there, having grown up,

in the north, in Britain in fact. And he came to live in our area, in the Pacific area, and he had lots of time, whereas Darwin went out on the ship when he was 23 and came back when he was 28, then lived in Kent. And so he's living on his writings and his memories. But when he was about to publish Origin of Species, and he'd been sitting on it for something like 20 years,

Suddenly a note came via someone else about a bloke called Wallace who'd come to the same conclusions about natural selection and so forth, and evolution having this powerful force. And at first he was flummoxed, didn't know what to do. But then they decided that they would, as you say, have the baby together. And in 1859, that's what happened. Why do you think we should still know about Wallace and other scientists?

Because I've invented something which is the top 100 scientists simply to remind people.

of various names who've made such a difference. Yeah, I would dare say most of those names are not known to your average everyday punter. Wallace was very famous in his time. He's been described as the most famous and eminent scientist of his era, which was through the Victorian period and into the early 20th century. He actually went to South America first, did a lot of exploring around there, almost killed himself with a rifle, hunting butterflies and all sorts of life forms, which he was bringing back to Australia

England at the time and his boat sank and caught fire and it lost most of his samples at the time. He managed to come back, he survived and he was actually known at that time because of his journals and the things he wrote. So he was thinking about what to do next and one of the learner societies said, okay, we'll fund you to go somewhere. Where would you like to go?

and he had an invitation from the White Raja of Sumatra and he invited him over, said, I've read your papers and things, very interesting, come over to me. And he did. And so he journeyed throughout what is called the East Indies, Java, Sumatra, and down towards New Guinea, just looking and collecting samples, which he collected by the tens of thousands. Everything from butterflies and insects, flowers and things like that, all the way up to orangutans, which he enjoyed shooting.

unfortunately, because you had to get the skin to stuff it. You can't take a whole orangutan back to England. And then he spent several years there. He got very sick, as he did everywhere, apparently. And he developed, while he was sick and suffering from fever, this idea of how do all these animals come about? How do they vary? How do they change? And they obviously have changed over the millennia. And he came to the conclusion of natural selection. You're working here. You're not working here. You can go. You can stay. Nothing to do with survival of the fittest.

The fittest was the best fit, not the strongest. And then he wrote up a little paper, which he then sent back to England to Darwin, asking Darwin if, do you think people would be interested in this? And Darwin said, oh, said a rude word, because he'd been working, as you said, for 20 years on this thing. And they said, OK, well, we'd better release it to a society meeting, the Linnaean Society, in July 1, 1858. And they presented it. Darwin cobbled together some stuff from previous things

And along with Wallace's finished paper, they presented it. And Darwin said it caused no fuss whatsoever, almost went ignored. Others have said it caused more of a fuss. But it encouraged Darwin to complete On the Origin of Species, which he regarded as a brief version of what he really intended to write.

And ever since then, evolution has been associated with Darwin. But the trouble with Wallace, to some extent, if you're the editor of The Skeptic, is he had a few woo-woo ideas about alternative stuff. Very much so, actually, and that probably hurt his reputation a lot with some of the scientific community, although most of them stuck by him. Yes, he was a very nice fellow.

He was totally irreligious, totally anti-church, but he was susceptible to other beliefs. And he started off believing in mesmerism, which is an early form of hypnotism to cure people, phrenology, which is the bumps on your head. He believed in that throughout his life. And when he came back from this East Indian excursion, he started dabbling in spiritualism,

which is the mediums and ectoplasm and bringing ghosts up. And then he got into anti-vaccination. He kept claiming and suggesting, you've got to be scientific about these things. You've got to investigate them, which is fair enough, which is good. Good point. Very sceptical. But he believed them firmly. And he became a proselytiser, became a president of the British Spiritualist Association or something for a while, while also being highly ranked amongst the learned societies. So there was sort of like two Wallaces.

And eventually he came up with a weird idea that the human brain and various dexterities of people could not have been formed by natural selection. There was another intelligence. And this is a fellow who was irreligious, did not believe in God, did not believe in churches, suddenly saying there is another intelligence which had to create this special bit of

And Darwin was not impressed. And that's when he said to Wallace, I hope you haven't murdered our child. A lot of scientists, they were horrified. And that turnaround, that would seem illogical. They made him a bit of an unwelcome person. Others didn't. A lot of others regarded it as an aberration. Yeah, that's Wallace. He's our old mate. You know, he does these things. But we'll put up with him and we'll support him, etc. They almost overlooked inviting Wallace to Darwin's funeral in Westminster, I think.

How extraordinary. It reminds me to some extent of the author behind Sherlock Holmes, who did the same thing. He was supposed to be so sceptical, but then he went woo-woo a bit later in life. So why don't Australians know about the people who shaped their country? That's a tough question, actually. That's the subject of your article, your editorial. Yes, the subject of my editorial is that some people, almost by luck,

Right? You could say about showbiz, talented people don't make it, untalented people do. Luck and fortune and all that sort of stuff. The same goes for sportsmen. You'd probably find the same thing, that there are talented sportsmen who never get to the top of their field.

Certainly in science, there are people who are very talented who ended up in nowhere, ended up in some backwoods somewhere, not achieving the celebrity that others do. And during Wallace's time, he was highly celebrated. He's regarded as the most famous scientist of his time. As soon as he's dead, gone.

People forget him. And it's been suggested by some Wallace supporters that the Darwin industry has gone into top gear and has almost written Wallace out of history. A big statue of Darwin in the Natural History Museum in London, staring you in the face as you enter it. There's a statue of Wallace, which they only decided about 100 years after he died, shoved up in your corner. It's all in your magazine, cover story, The Skeptic. Where can people who are not members of the Skeptical Society get your magazine?

We give away a lot of copies of our magazine. All the issues, bar the last four, are available on our website, sceptics.com.au, to download for free. The four most recent issues we save for subscribers, we've got to give them something, paid subscribers, except for one article, every issue is a teaser, and the article, this particular issue, is on Wallace.

and Wallace's strange beliefs. Yes, you can go to sceptics.com, look at the magazine list, look down there, get your free copy of the article, get the free copies of 43 years' worth of this publication, and you can spend the next 15 years going down a rabbit hole of sceptical information, and I do it all the time. I'm way down that rabbit hole. One of the problems is, of course, that you spell it S-K-P-T-I-S-S. If you're Googling it,

Put a K in instead of a C. Why do you do that? We're just curmudgeons, actually. It is actually the original Greek, of course, if you know your Greek. Most sceptics, who are the people who want to do scientific investigation of claims of the paranormal or pseudoscience, from a serious perspective, would spell it with a K, as opposed to the cynic sceptic who...

which is with a C. But yes, we are skepticsceptics.com.au. Thank you. Good to see you again. My pleasure. Editor of the Skeptic magazine, Tim Mendham. And coming up, the Skepticon or Skeptical Annual Convention is in three weeks.

November 23rd and 24th at UTS, University Technology Sydney, with Dr Karl, science communicator at Lantacollie, paranormal investigator Ben Radford, plus me, dressed as the Tooth Fairy. A link on the Science Show website.

And finally, a hint of what's on the Science Show next week. We'll have European wasps decapitating Australian wildlife, an upside-down jellyfish, and this, the winner of the PM's Prize for Physical Sciences, Tanier Ma and a revolution in green energy. My way is by using catalysts, which

which have dedicated nanostructure to catalyse the water splitting to generate hydrogen on the one hand, on the other hand is using the catalyst to catalyse the CO2 upgrading into value added chemicals. Upgrading them so that the carbon is used to make what sort of other chemicals?

We make carbon dioxide into CO, carbon monoxide, methane, methanol, ethanol. So you make alcohol as well as CH4? Yes, CH4 is also something we can make, yes, and alcohol, particularly methanol and ethanol. Methanol as well? Methanol as well. And then having made them, what do you do with them? We can burn them as a fuel, and because they are from CO2,

and we can use them as a starting point to make other chemicals. You seem to have an awful lot going on there. What's the basic idea?

The basic idea is to tune the structure but also the chemistry of the material to enhance its performance. I think the fundamental of my research is to build a structure performance relationship, to understand the relationship that is to better utilize the material for different applications such as hydrogen generation, such as CO2 upgrading, such as other applications. Hydrogen. On what sort of scale can you make hydrogen?

Well, for now we are doing lab scale, bench scale, but

I will try to push the fundamental research a bit further to the real-life deployment, real-life applications. Now we're making, as supported by the ARENA, Australian Renewable Agency, a project, a five-year project, to try to scale up the catalyst to square-meter-sized hydrogen generators that can float on the surface of water, seawater and wastewater, to generate hydrogen. For now, what we can do is produce

roughly 1 liter of pure green hydrogen from 1 square meter of our prototype in one hour.

And what's the prototype? Well, initially it's a powder and we coated the powdery catalyst on a substrate like metal, like carbons. And this film is the core of this prototype. And we put this film in a case, in a plastic case, and that has little holes at the bottom so the water can go in.

and on the surface, it can receive the solar energy. So solar energy film supporting catalyst and water from bottom, so they meet together to generate green hydrogen. The Prime Minister's Physical Prize science winner, Tanji Ma from RMIT University. More from him next week.

And we'll also give you some really helpful advice on how to survive when you descend into a black hole. Good luck. The Science Show is produced by David Fisher. I'm Robin Williams. You've been listening to an ABC podcast. Discover more great ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.