Quest to solve the mysteries of human life
Wonders Of Life BBC2
"WHAT," ponders professor Brian Cox, "is the difference between the living and the dead?" I'm no scientist but I'd say not much in the case of Bruce Forsyth.
"What is life?" added the smilesome academic. "What is it that animates living things? What is the difference between a piece of rock carved into a gravestone and me?" The answer: You don't need an A-level refresher course to understand a piece of rock carved into a gravestone.
To be fair, Cox is trying, in terms most of us can understand, to explain the origins of life.
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"The question 'what is life?'," he said, "is surely one of the grandest." Right up there with 'can you pass the ketchup?' and 'who's that at the door?'.
"How is it this magnificent complexity that we call life could have assembled itself on a planet that itself formed from nothing more than a collapsing cloud of gas and dust?" It's a question rarely used as an ice-breaker at a swingers' party.
Where some believe life to have been created by a higher being, Cox sees it in more black and white terms. "Living things can be explained by the laws of physics," he says, "the very same laws that explain the falling of the rain."
Despite this, physicians are still baffled by the existence of John McCririck.
Cox accepts though, that some things that don't quite appear to add up. For instance, while dead stuff decomposes, "how can it be that a living organism avoids decay?" Clearly he hasn't clapped eyes on Princess Anne for a while.
To get his ideas across, Cox tries to incorporate familiar objects. At one stage, for example, he tried to explain changes in energy by showing thermal images of a chicken. "The chicken," he said, "is radiating disorder out into the wider universe." I've no idea what he meant but, if that's their game, I don't feel quite so bad about eating them.
Later Cox performed a neat trick where he isolated his DNA with washing-up liquid, salt, and vodka. "In that cloudy innocuous looking solid," he revealed, "are the instructions to build a human." For Loose Women presenters, double the vodka.
"We're connected," he stated, "to every single thing that has ever lived." Surely not the dung beetle.
"Life," he concluded, "is not a thing, it's a collection of chemical processes." So there you have it. Our precious existence. Nought more than de-scaling the kettle.
4 Comments
by FFDP1
Tuesday, January 29 2013, 10:48AM
“Ever heard of a thing called empathy Miss D. Fyed85, all about coming to an understanding of what a person goes though. Mind you, it takes a brain to work this out, so I would not expect you to know anything about it. I would think its TNA Wrestling for you.”
by miss_d_fyed85
Tuesday, January 29 2013, 10:33AM
“nurses wearing nappies”
by FFDP1
Tuesday, January 29 2013, 4:00AM
“A excellent program that must have been totally wasted on most of the population round hear. Please stick to Dancing on Ice and Call the Midwife or TNA Wrestling on Challenge Late Zone or your head will surely explode.”
by Backdoored
Monday, January 28 2013, 10:35PM
“Reminds me of the cartoon I saw in a newspaper in the 50s which depicted a prison classroom -where a group of prisoners sat at their desks, all dressed in traditional 'standard prison uniform', and staring blankly at the blackboard -as the professor of physics stood in front of it, pointing to the complex array of mathematical equations he'd chalked up.
The caption underneath read....
(Professor to prisoners) -"You may not realsise it, but LIFE is made up of lots and lots of tiny little cells".”