Science for Fiction

Our guest this time is Prof Jane Greaves from Cardiff University who tells us about searches for pebbles, a critically important stage in the formation of planets, with eMERLIN, and then talks about astrobiology and the search for life elsewhere in our own Solar System.

I talk to Dr James Kirk about the discovery and study of exoplanets - planets orbiting other stars -, how we find them, what we know about them, what strange new worlds we have found, and what the future prospects are for the discovery of life on them.

An interview with Prof Andrew Jaffe about his new book, The Random Universe. We discuss how science works, the links between the very large and the very small, why statistics, and doing it right, is important, and what is quantum mechanics telling us about the nature of the universe.