Fortunately, I never got as far as Planckety Planck, Celebrity E=MC Squares or Custard Pi.
In fact I came up with ‘Infinite Monkey Cage’ quite early on. It was the Sasha’s idea to add ‘the’ at the beginning so that we became more definite – it is always useful in such an uncertain universe to find any way possible of making your existence more concrete, especially when so much of us is just empty space reliant on string forces.
I like thinking about infinity.
I hate thinking about infinity. It gives me cosmological vertigo.
Apparently this was a new malaise of the late nineteenth century. With the Earth uncentred from the Universe, Darwin showing our familial proximity to chimpanzees and rapidly increasing technological advances, the magnitude of it all became dizzying. So much so that this was given as one of the reasons why Gauguin went to Tahiti and pretended that all its female inhabitants were topless for most of the day.
I can’t remember when I first found out about infinity, but it made me wobble every time I thought about it. I would imagine the Universe had existed forever and I would start to topple. I would imagine travelling in a straight line in my pencil-drawn rocket ship and seeing no end in sight.
Eventually I was saved by hearing about the Big Bang, which put the whole idea of infinity into some perspective. At least our universe was now imaginably unimaginably vast.
But then I heard rumours that even with the Big Bang there was still room for a universe of an infinite size with all its associated ramifications. While thinking about that and watching the buses passing through Levenshulme, I thought of all those monkeys writing Macbeth or Titus Andronicus, as well as Fifty Shades of Grey, Delia Smith’s Cooking for One, the bus timetable for the Number 63 from East Dulwich to King’s Cross and all the works of L. Ron Hubbard. I had always been told that an infinite number of monkeys will eventually write the works of Shakespeare, but a jovial and intense mathematician informed me that they won’t eventually write the works of only Shakespeare, they will immediately write the works of Shakespeare and Milton and Dante and Chaucer and Ursula K. Le Guin, and every issue of 2000AD, Reader’s Digest and all the titles in the Mills & Boon collection.
I was wobbly again.
This infinity sure seemed big.
So I thought of a cage so big that it contained an infinite number of monkeys – and mused over whether that could even be a cage – and I imagined it as a flippant description of a vast universe. As we were hoping our new show would find time (if time exists) to cover everything in the known universe at least, this seemed like a lightly enigmatic title.
I came up with ‘Infinite Monkey Cage’ quite early on. It was Sasha’s idea to add ‘the’ at the beginning so that we became more definite – it is always useful in such an uncertain universe to find any way possible of making your existence more concrete, especially when so much of us is just empty space reliant on string forces.
It is an interesting question as to whether the ‘The’ at the beginning of The Infinite Monkey Cage is necessary. If we assume that the monkey cage in question is our universe, some important cosmological caveats are in order. Firstly, we do not know whether the Universe is infinite. We can only say that there is more of it than we can see. The part we can see is called the Observable Universe, and it currently contains around 2 trillion galaxies; not an infinite amount of territory for monkeys, but quite roomy. The number of accessible galaxies is falling, however, because we live in an expanding universe. As space stretches, the distance between galaxies that are not bound together by gravity increases. In a few tens of billions of years, the distance to most of the galaxies we see today will be increasing so fast that the light emitted from them will no longer be able to reach us, and conversely we will never be able to reach them. Their images will fade and redden until they are no longer visible. In the far future, the Universe we see through our telescopes will consist entirely of our local group of 50 or so galaxies, which will most likely have merged into a single super-galaxy. Beyond, there will be only darkness. Unless textbooks survive from the distant past, the cosmologists of the future will find it impossible to imagine the scale of the Universe beyond their horizon, or indeed have any inkling that such a thing exists. The accessible part of the cage will consist of a single galaxy, surrounded by a great all-encompassing void.
Secondly, the question arises as to whether there can be more than one infinite cage. It seems that there should only be room for one, but that is not necessarily the case. As we’ll see in the section that discusses Hilbert’s Grand Hotel, infinity is a slippery subject. There is a cosmological theory known as eternal inflation which leads to the idea of an inflationary multiverse. Our universe could be a single ‘bubble’ universe amongst an infinite sea of universes, each with potentially different low-energy laws of nature. Some may contain monkeys, others may not. Grammatically speaking, then, if our reality is really the multiverse of eternal inflation, the prefix ‘The’ may be necessary if we intend to refer to our specific monkey cage, rather than the infinitely many monkey cages that may exist.
From our first episode, we started to get emails and letters with listeners’ conjecture on what exactly was meant by an infinite monkey cage. This was on top of the complaint we received from an angry animal rights activist who wrote that ‘yet again, the BBC is celebrating animal cruelty and vivisection. Who spends their time imagining monkeys crammed in a cage?’ We wrote back to explain that an infinite monkey cage is roomy. We heard nothing more.
By week three, we were receiving letters complaining that the show was another of those arrogant shows that thinks you can prove anything with evidence and that the very title was based on a lie.
‘The idea that an infinite number of monkeys would write the works of Shakespeare is rubbish, as a recent experiment has proved.’
This was exciting news. A maverick scientist had gathered together an infinite number of monkeys? Surely we would have heard. It’s hard to be surreptitious with an infinite number of monkeys. It’s the noise and the smell.
Sadly, the experiment was somewhat smaller. One typewriter and six monkeys at Paignton Zoo. After a month, they had broken the typewriter and done a poo in it, and not so much as a disembowelling scene from Titus Andronicus was found. We attempted to explain that six monkeys really wasn’t enough, it was too far from an infinite number of monkeys – but to no avail. The correspondent was certain that at the very least it would be an accumulating system:
10 monkeys = a leaflet on banana safety.
100 monkeys = an article for GQ on aftershave. 1000 monkeys = a simian version of 50 Shades of Grey (Langur).
Just as with the complainant who was annoyed that we had no ghosts on the panel for our show, eventually the fury faded into an email memory, to be archived and trashed when in need of a new memory.
INFINITY
‘Infinity always gives me the urge to scratch my head. Perhaps it’s a rash. I worry about infinity,
it is much bigger than my brain.’
Professor Carlos Frenk
Series 10, Episode 5 (5 August 2014)
First, let us convince ourselves that the concept of infinity makes sense. Consider adding an infinite