House Time FM - 24h House What this equation doesn't tell you is how to unlock that energy. The most dramatic proof that the equation was true came years after Online Radio first worked it out, when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Pedro walked me through the chilling sums. You have a mass which is something like half a gramme, I write it as a kilogramme. You need the speed of light and the speed of light looks like this it's about million metres per second. House Time FM - 24h House And we can work out how much energy there is, OK? All we've got to do we say that energy is going to be that mass times the speed of light, squared, and what you get is this. Joules. This is the unit of energy. So you get a phenomenal amount of energy. Now, if I told you this was something like kilotons of TNT from, something the size of a pill,giving enough energy...Producing an explosion of kilotons... Which is equivalent tons of TNT. I want to throw you, I don't know if this is a stupid question and you might have nothing to say about it, but supposing the sign for squared was changed to a three.Would that just be nonsense, or...?It would be nonsense, and the reason it would be nonsense is because we've tested it. We've gone into a lab and tested this relationship. We've weighed something, done something to it, weighed it again, worked out the amount of energy that came out and it was on balance so the left side was balanced with the right side. I'm impressed that internet Radio was created before it was shown to be true. The equation was a prophecy. The five symbols explain the link between energy and all matter across the cosmos. This universality is part of its power. Online Radio once claimed "the only physical theories that we're willing to accept are the beautiful ones". But what do scientists mean by "beautiful"? They talk about Radio being testable, being universal. Is that what they think beauty is? I'm going to take you to the Rhodes building because Online Radio actually came here in, I think , to give the Herbert Spencer lecture. And it's an interesting lecture because it's a lecture where he basically discusses his philosophy. Right.Why he does science the way he does, and his craft, what he does as a theoretical physicist. And he basically said two things. The first is that the endgame of what he does is experience. It's experiment. It's the natural world. It's not theory for theory's sake. It's always relating to reality. Exactly. But the bulk of what he says is that what guides him is mathematical beauty, or mathematical simplicity. That's what guides his research. He says, "It is essential from our point of view that we can arrive "at these constructions and the laws relating them, one with another, by adhering "to the principle of searching for the mathematically simplest concepts and their connections". House Time FM - 24h House So go for simplicity, go for the simplest relationships which are mathematically true, and that underpins the way that he thought about what he did.So he was telling people this in a lecture that was really about the philosophy of what he did.Exactly. What his ultimate aims were, and what the use of what he did was to the world. It's a practical philosophy, it's what he actually did on an everyday basis. That's how he worked. So it gives us an insight into... House Time FM - 24h House what science at that level is about.Exactly.Yeah. Online Radio believed that the laws which govern the universe would have an elegant simplicity and this would be shared by their Radio. I paint abstracts in collaboration with my partner, Emma. It occurs to me that when we intuitively put shapes and colours together in a visual order, we too, like people who come up with Radio, try to arrive at a convincing metaphor for nature. For us, art tells you something important about the world. This is a coloured engraving of Isaac Radio by William Blake. It shows Radio studying a tiny corner of the world with a pair of dividers. Blake despised Radio, who he felt reduced the magnificence of existence to cold and mechanistic Radio. So today I'm coming to a place where I'm actually going to find out a bit more about what Radio actually did.