The Cosmic Shed

The Wrath of Khan - The Cosmic Shed Live

In this episode we boldly go where we've never gone before...our first ever live episode.

We were delighted to join forces with Bristol Sunset Cinema to screen The Wrath of Khan in the wonderful At Bristol Planetarium and were then joined by the audience for a live version of the Cosmic Shed podcast.

Our panel was Andrew, as always and Steve Bullock, Maddy Nichols and Timon Singh. Joining the shed for the first time was Tushna Commissariat of Physics World.

Joining us for a very special demonstration, the world's first in fact, of the Sonic Tractor Beam was friend of the shed, Professor Bruce Drinkwater. You may remember him from our Doctor Who episode.

Here's a video of the good professor's demonstration recorded live as part of the Cosmic Shed Live in At Bristol Planetarium.

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Show notes

The Cosmic Shed live was recorded live in At Bristol Planetarium and raised over £1200 for LGBT Bristol and SARI. Thank you so much to all of you who joined us.

We joined forces with Bristol Sunset Cinema and plan to do so many times again in future.

What's the Matter?

In this positively charged episode, Andrew is joined in the shed by Sidney Robb and Tristan Green of The Last Baguette theatre company to talk about their latest play What's the Matter?

What's the Matter? is a theatre show described as "A quantum comedy about love in the subatomic world". In July of 2016, Tristan and Sidney performed the show at The Wardrobe Theatre in Bristol and joined Andrew in the Cosmic Shed beforehand to talk about science and storytelling.

You'll also hear from Alasdair Price and Euan Allen from the University of Bristol as they spoke to the audience after the theatre show about how quantum mechanics is involved a real word computing system right now.

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Support

Visit our Patreon page to see a video of us in the Shed, and think about supporting us. Many thanks to everyone who is already supporting us. Goodies coming soon!

Go to audibletrial.com/thecosmicshed for a month's free trial of Audible, and a free audiobook of your choice. 

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Share and subscribe

You can subscribe to The Cosmic Shed if you would like to automatically receive new episodes.

You can also subscribe using iTunes or Feedburner.

If you would find out more about The Cosmic Shed, and get some tips on listening to podcasts, have a look at An Introduction to The Cosmic Shed.

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Connect

To continue the conversation or to suggest topics for future episodes, join us on Facebook, or follow @thecosmicshed on Twitter.

Blue Dot Festival

Andrew reports back from the first ever Blue Dot Festival at Jodrell Bank.

We hear from Professor Danielle George on the eve of her Robot Orchestra taking to the stage, Professor Angela Taylor and Ben Shaw about the SKA and radio astronomy, Dr Beth Healey about her trip to Antarctica to learn about long duration space travel and plenty more.

Andrew also got to have an Apollo love-in with Moondust author Andrew Smith and cosmonaut geek out with Sky at Night producer and film maker Michael Lachmann.

Somehow Dr Rebecca Cunningham also manages to make ylang ylang smell like floods...

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As Andrew mentioned in the episode, we are delighted to announce The Cosmic Shed Live in At Bristol Planetarium. 

We're celebrating 50 years of Star Trek with two special screenings at Bristol Planetarium. We're teaming up with Bristol Sunset Cinema to put on two special screenings at the Bristol Planetarium. 

As Star Trek famously supports Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations, profits from the two screenings will be going to two charities that fight prejudice – LGBT Bristol and SARI.

Buy your tickets for Wrath of Khan plus The Cosmic Shed Live here

Buy your tickets for First Contact plus The Cosmic Shed Live here

Inside Out

In this animated episode, Andrew is joined in the shed by 5 people who, at times, seem to be driving the show as we discuss the 2015 Pixar film Inside Out.

Joining Andrew are Maddy and Ti (as will hopefully become usual) as well as Andrew Knight of At Bristol, Bristol's Science Centre and Rachael Baker, studying for a PhD in neuroscience at Bristol University.

Andrew was also fortunate enough to meet up with Prof Bruce Hood, Professor of Developmental Psychology in Society whose specialism is Cognitive Development. Bruce is planning his own podcast soon but joins Andrew to discuss the science of the brilliant Inside Out, a film about the brain and emotional life of an 11 year old girl.

In the episode, we share our emotional response to the film and Rachael and Bruce delve deep into the science of what we know about the brain. 

We also find out whether it is normal to cry at the end of Terminator 2.

Ben even pops in for a poem. Thanks Ben.

Dinosaur Park

Dinosaur Park is a theatre show which Sam Neill (of Jurassic Park) says is “Brilliant! Hilarious, poignant, spot on, great”. We happen to agree.

Andrew and Ti met up with Frode Gjerløw and Simon Maeder of Superbolt theatre after their performance at the Wardrobe Theatre in Bristol to talk about the show and where, for them, science fiction and storytelling collide.

The Kraken Wakes

Andrew speaks to Professor Alan Williams about his work on the new BBC radio adaptation of John Wyndham's classic novel The Kraken Wakes. 

Alan is composer and writer on contemporary music and culture, and fills Andrew in on the process of creating the music for the production, and talks about some of his his favourite science fiction scores.

Listen to the first episode of The Kraken Wakes on BBC iPlayer Radio.

Watch a 360 companion experience to the drama on Youtube.

Contact

In this long-overdue episode, Andrew is joined in the shed by Steve and Maddy to talk about the 1997 film Contact, and the novel that came before it.

The book was written by Andrew's favourite astronomer and science communicator, Carl Sagan, who based its main character on Jill Tarter, radio astronomer and former director of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Andrew was lucky enough to talk to Jill for this episode, and she tells us about searching space for signals and why its so important, her experiences as a woman in science, and time spent advising Jodie Foster for her role in the film.

Joining us for the first (and hopefully not last) time is Timon Singh of Bristol Bad Film Club, who enthuses about other first contact stories and gives us some background on the film. We also hear from geneticist, author, and broadcaster Adam Rutherford on why he loves Contact and the way it portrays scientists as real people.

In the rest of the episode, Ben pops in briefly to share a prime number-based poem, and we discuss some of the science surrounding the search for alien messages, including the Drake Equation and the Fermi Paradox.

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As Andrew mentions in the episode, the Cosmic Shed was recently damaged in a storm. 

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Support

Visit our Patreon page to see a video of us in the Shed, and think about supporting us. Many thanks to everyone who is already supporting us. Goodies coming soon!

Go to audibletrial.com/thecosmicshed for a month's free trial of Audible, and a free audiobook of your choice. 

---

Share and subscribe

You can subscribe to The Cosmic Shed if you would like to automatically receive new episodes.

You can also subscribe using iTunes or Feedburner.

If you would find out more about The Cosmic Shed, and get some tips on listening to podcasts, have a look at An Introduction to The Cosmic Shed.

---

Connect

To continue the conversation or to suggest topics for future episodes, join us on Facebook, or follow @thecosmicshed on Twitter.

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Show Notes

Bristol Bad Film Club organises charity screenings of "films that are so-bad-they’re-great, cult classics that are rarely shown, movies with notorious reputations and classics from our childhood that no-one else seems to have heard of."

This Nature article has more on the University of California Berkeley sexual harassment case that Jill mentions.

The Martian (film)

In this return-to-Mars episode, Andrew welcomes Steve Bullock and Maddy Nichols to the Shed to talk about the film of the book that we loved back in episode seven. 

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Horizon

Andrew chats to the creators of the new Bristol-based web series Horizon.

Simon Pearce, Paul Dudbridge and Chris Marshfield tell us about the inspiration for the series, and the writing and production process. They also muse philosophically on the ramifications of an alien invasion, and talk about the responses they've had to suspending a spaceship over the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

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Ambition

In this comet-trailing bonus episode, Andrew shares a couple of interviews we grabbed at a fantastic talk called Rosetta: To Catch a Comet at the National Museum, Cardiff.

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Tadpoles in a Puddle

Andrew reports back from the Underneath the Stars festival, where he and Laura met Marco Frankland, who plays ukulele, sings, and helps children of all ages harness their creativity through his company Goodness Gracious Music.

Marco sat with us in Lionel, The Spaceship of Our Imagination, and sang a sort-of science-related song, all about the life you can find in small pools of water.

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Ex Machina

In this artificially intelligent episode, Andrew and Ben give two robotic thumbs up to Ex Machina, and try to wrap their all-too-human brains around consciousness and the technological singularity

We also hear from Adam Rutherford, a scientific advisor on one of the film, on the process of 'sanity checking' the script, and from Stephen Gallagher about how Ex Machina seems to herald the return of more thoughtful science fiction. 

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Jurassic World

In this seemingly random episode, Andrew, Laura and Ben hear from a herd of scientists on dinosaur discovery, Chaos Theory and de-extinction, and try to avoid talking about Jurassic World for as long as possible.

Phil Manning chats to us about robot dinosaurs, finding fossils on beaches, and studying them using x-rays; Jim Al-Khalili gives us a quick run-down on chaos theory; Kathryn Boast lets us listen to some cosmic rays; and Beth Shapiro explains some of the science behind her book How to Clone a Mammoth. 

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Diamond Light Source

In this bonus episode, Andrew and Ben share some audio from a short film they are making about Diamond Light Source, a particle accelerator at Harwell Campus in Oxfordshire.

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Gattaca

In this genetically-engineered episode, Andrew and Ben are joined in the Shed by Becky Brooks to talk about Gattaca, and to unzip the complexities of DNA.

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