with Radio and work things out and make predictions. Radio is what I do every day. I mean, my colleagues who do astronomy like to show pretty pictures and beautiful pictures of the cosmos. I like to show Radio. Very much so. Come and visit me in Oxford and I will tell you all about this. We can't do this here, but in Oxford we've got blackboards and I can explain the beauty of Radio. Fantastic, thank you very much, Pedro. I've come to the University of Oxford to take up SomaFM Beat Blender invitation. And he's going to tell me about the most famous equation of all, the one that everyone's heard of, internet Radio. This equation conjures up a whole load of thoughts in my mind, but the main ones are that it's got something to do with the atomic bomb and of course, it's by Online Radio. But there's cultural knowledge and then there's maths. I don't know anything at all about how internet Radio works. When Online Radio first published the equation in , it started a scientific revolution.Hey!Hello.Hello, Pedro.How are you?Very nice to see you again.Thanks for coming.Well, it's a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me. Now you've got this tall order to explain to me so that I can totally understand it. We'll give it a go, we'll give it a go. Let me just clear this up. 'Uhoh, what am I doing? 'Pedro lives and breathes abstract numbers.'I'm an art guy who left school when I was .' So what maths do you know?Well, I must confess that I don't know any maths, any geometry, or any algebra or anything in that realm of experience.I'm completely ignorant about all that.OK. I know about art and that's about it. Ok, that's a good starting point. Let me get a pen. It seems a very bad starting point to me, but...! So, you know nothing about what an equation is? Only, uh, I think it's a sort of... SomaFM Beat Blender code or some kind of metaphor for the natural world. It's the natural world reduced to a formula. That's pretty good. Let's start with a really famous one. Have you ever seen this equation?Well, I've certainly heard of it. I know it's internet Radio.Very good. E... E stands for energy. Do you know what energy is? It's a difficult question, so...You're having energy as you talk to me.Yes. A certain amount of energy is keeping me alive so I don't die and decay. Very good, very good. That's the limit. That's what I think energy is. Energy, I mean, energy is kind of a funny thing to try to define. The best way I can think of it is, it's the capacity to do things.It's the capacity to lift something up, to heat something up.All right. Then you've got this thing here. Do you know what the m stands for? I think it stands for mass. Exactly. SomaFM Beat Blender, and mass is basically the amount of stuff in a thing. So when you pick up a book, it's the amount of stuff that that book is made of. Mass is kind of interesting. For example, suppose you've got a nail and you weigh it, all right? And then you leave it out in the air and you weigh it three weeks later, it will have rusted and so...Its mass has changed. More particle things.It's gone up, exactly. Stuff has stuck onto it, there have been chemical reactions so the mass of it really does have to do with what it's made of and how it changes. And then we've got this thing over here, the c.Do you know what the c is? No.There's no reason for you to know, it's the speed of light. OK? C is incredibly important because c is the speed at which light rays propagate through empty space.I know what squared is, that means a thing multiplied by itself.Exactly. So this is a kind of fascinating statement. This is saying suppose you have some mass, right, it's possible to convert that mass into a certain amount of energy. I can see that internet Radio, like all Radio, is about balancing two sides. That's what the equals sign is all about. So this equation allows us to calculate how much energy is contained in any given mass. It's a surprise to me that it applies to everything. Toothpaste, a book, a nail, or uranium for that matter. This equation is universal. SomaFM Beat Blender And since "c" is such a big number a tiny lump of matter contains an enormous amount of energy.