"APPLAUSE" "Welcome!" "Good evening!" "good evening." "Welcome to QI. festooned with a fellowship of far-seeing forecasters." "Sean Lock!" "CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Thank you." "Rob Brydon!" "CHEERING AND APPLAUSE who had a crack at a PhD in novel quantum effects in Quasi-Zero Dimensional Mesoscopic Electrical Systems!" "CHEERING AND APPLAUSE" "Wow!" "who has also come along." "LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE" "Let's have a foretaste of your futuristic fingerings." "Sean goes..." "THEME FROM "TWILIGHT ZONE" "Rob goes..." "THEME FROM "STAR TREK" "Ben goes..." "THEME FROM DOCTOR WHO" "And Alan goes..." "# There may be trouble ahead... #" "TREE FALLS AND MAN SCREAMS" "CAT MIAOWS" "Thank you." "the future begins...now!" "what do you do?" "Nothing." "Wha...?" "Oh!" "SIREN WAILS on any level has there ever been discovered to be such a thing as nothing." "holding my pen." "So many things." "Exactly." "It's impossible to do and think nothing." "There is no such thing as nothing." "as well." "Does it?" "In what way? so nothingness is really a swarm of elementary particles." "there's considered to be a field permeating the whole of space which gives elementary particles mass." "yes..." " And the Higgs field..." " Heard it!" "we need a Higgs boson." "Yes... to detect the Higgs boson." "You are the best supply teacher we have ever had." "That is fabulous." "APPLAUSE does it not?" "This is a really interesting thing." "LAUGHTER" "There are four..." "We are interested!" "Ben." "This is me looking interested." "really interesting." "There are..." "LAUGHTER gravity... which causes radioactivity. and the electromagnetism are all of a similar strength..." "Right." "But gravity is incredibly weak. and defeat the whole force of the earth pulling down on it. are actually part of a much bigger space. which means that it becomes weakened by a corresponding amount." "LAUGHTER but I have to depart from that theory! that all matter has its corresponding antimatter." "and see..." "LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE" "Isn't that weird?" "Never been seen in the same room before." "won't some awful thing happen?" "we can't actually touch." "Let's check..." "Whoa!" "Whoa!" "Whoa!" "Whoa!" "there are a lot of horse-faced people in the world..." "Sorry!" "No." "But it is remarkable." "indeed!" "What would happen if they put you two in the Hadron Collider and send you underneath the ground in Switzerland and impact you?" "That would be brilliant." "You'd get the finest comedian in the world." "Black hole would result." "leaving nothing but chocolate. to have someone who knows what they're talking about on this programme." "We're very pleased for the heads-up on what's going on in particle physics." "That Rob Brydon knows a lot about science!" "LAUGHTER" "It's a win-win." "It's true!" "It's true!" "anyway. there's nothing to stop you!" "HE LAUGHS SHEEPISHLY nothing in the laws of physics forbids time travel." "where are all the time travellers?" "She could do so much better than him." "doesn't he?" "I can't believe my luck! could you shoot your own grandfather? you could never have existed and can't have killed him. because there are people who think time travel may be possible in the future." "you have to have someone else with one. which might well cause wormholes to exist that would allow people in the future to connect." "I was there two weeks ago." "Really?" "Yeah." "Very exciting." "wasn't it?" "! not..." "Just ordinary people." "You could actually be making it up." "Until it makes machines work." "That's the point." "I think you'll find...!" I was the same with the leaf blower." "LAUGHTER" "One day you won't have to rake up the leaves." "mate." "if that's not a contradiction in terms." "is obvious with hindsight." "But now it's time to poke predictable fun at people who are foolhardy enough to make forecasts and have the misfortune to get them hopelessly wrong." "please." "Variety Magazine predicted that" ""gone before June"?" "Rob." "May." "SIREN WAILS" "Oh!" "LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE" "I said they predicted WRONGLY..." "# There may be trouble ahead... #" "You made me look a fool." "you did that!" "Ho-ho!" "Television." "Television is not..." "But you're much..." "Cinema." "It's an F show." "Frisps." "LAUGHTER" "I'll tell you what it was..." "Remember them?" "it was Elvis Presley." "Wider..." "Rock'n'roll." "That's the right answer." "do I?" "no." "You don't." "But all things are relative." "LAUGHTER in 1977 Ken Olsen said there is no reason for any individual to have a WHAT in their home?" "Butler." "unnecessary..." "Japanese prisoner of war." "but no." "No need for it. the Digital Equipment Company." "he was wrong." "He was very wrong." "I know quite a few people who've got one." "I believe." "eh?" "Oh!" "what nuclear-powered device did Alex Lewyt predict would be a reality within ten years?" "TV remote." "really." "Hover boots." "that is the invention that everybody always says." "will there be hover boots when I'm grown up? and Ben now is gonna talk for a little while about..." "The possibility..." "Just how possible it is!" "Hover gloves I'd like." "It's not hover gloves." "Surely you can do your own hovering! but it is a domestic appliance..." "Electric toothbrush." "..that we thought would be nuclear powered." "Not an electric toothbrush." "Fridge." "Hoover." "yes!" "Electric vacuum cleaner." "He honestly thought in 1955 that within ten years there'd be a nuclear-powered one." "They had vacuum cleaners in America in the 19th century and they were huge." "They had to go on a cart drawn by horses." "I remember seeing that on a programme called QI." "Yeah." "Well done." "LAUGHTER" "But well remembered." "APPLAUSE" "It goes in somewhere!" "yeah!" "the nuclear-powered domestic vacuum cleaner." "But not everybody gets it wrong. the 4th-century Bishop of Milan." "What did St Augustine of Hippo catch St Ambrose doing but which nearly all of us now can do?" "THEME FROM STAR TREK" "Was he using his mobile in a crowded compartment?" "let's be honest." ""This is mobile-free." "You still kind of think it doesn't apply to you." "actually." "I don't." "Rob." "people think it's you." "it seemed it." "it seems natural to us." "But it was just not done." "And it involved reading." "is the point. who could read without moving his lips." "I know!" "It's very odd! and St Ambrose... if you could read you wanted to show off the fact." "There's an element of that." "He did the opposite." "This is what St Augustine wrote in his confessions." "his eyes scanned the page but his voice was silent and his tongue was still." "Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced so that often when we came to visit we found him reading in silence." "For he never read aloud." "it was considered a remarkable trick. and I just wish that I'd been around then." "I would have blown them away!" "I can read whole books like this!" "LAUGHTER" "But I have to say they would have been in Latin." "That's where I would have fallen down. which goes..." "MIMICS RONNIE CORBETT:" "It's not the one about the chap that reads the book without moving his lips." "Very good!" "APPLAUSE" "They might have burned you as a witch but they'd have been impressed." "A common theme of science fiction B-movies set in the future is robot invasions." "has Britain ever actually been invaded by robots?" "they have." "And when?" "'40s." "1880s. '40s is the right answer." "I'm afraid the point there goes to young Alan." "Was it the Germans?" "The Germans." "Had to be." "The doodlebug." "The doodlebug and the buzz bombs." "The V1 and V2. they were CALLED robots." "They were called robots more than they were called doodlebugs in the '40s. the British authorities were terrified of letting the Germans know how successful or otherwise the V1 and V2 were." "it was widely discussed." "it would be." "not in the newspapers." "has Britain been invaded by robots? that took a swipe at modern life in Britain... and those robots are the bloody call centres that we have to put up with." "Oh!" "APPLAUSE and it's happening now." "You should be a standup comedian. the bloody cameras that take photographs of us everywhere we go summons and fines. and yet we can't catch anybody who kills somebody!" "The Acton Bowling Club!" "Why is nobody ever murdered in front of a camera?" "A couple of mad old men moaning about the state of Britain..." "LAUGHTER" "IRRITATED MUMBLING" "I agree with you." "I like you." "I like you." "it's like listening to me!" "Yeah!" "yeah!" "They're going to fuse into one horrifying Rob Miller." "This is like a sort of Siamese twin." "We're quite keen to have the operation but obviously we're not sure how we'd get on without each other." "Mmm." "All right." "Er..." "Christ!" "Oh!" "CHEERING AND APPLAUSE" "Oh!" "Oh!" "Whoa!" "That's what it's like!" "I can see the attraction." "Now I know why my wife married me." "Yeah!" "That was good!" "Goddamn!" "Just horrible!" "thank you." "You can make up for it by telling me where the word robot comes from." "Where do we get the word robot from?" "I can't get that out of my head." "We get the word robotic from the word robot!" "you've got robot." "Stephen." "This dance." "Something you can shout at a machine it's got a chance of understanding?" "You robot! it might not pick up how angry you are." "right? a labourer." "like a drone." "And it was from a play by a man called Karel Capek called Rossum's Universal Robots." "back to the future." "What will be the language of the future here on earth?" "it'll be the sort of hoodies that Ben and I are so firmly against." "and that's gonna be the way of the future." "It don't matter where you come from." "You's gonna talk like that..." "IN OWN VOICE:" "Which I hate." "APPLAUSE" "I think you all guessed that!" "Yeah!" "Yeah." "dear." "Is it gonna be Mandarin or Spanish?" "Interesting thought." "is it a trick qu...?" "Is it binary?" "though you have a picture on there. but a certain kind of English." "As many as 80% of the people..." "English?" "No!" "Kind of like English?" "That sort of like English?" "Cos I hate that." "I hate that too." "apparently as many as 80% of people who speak English do not speak English as their first language." "They're speaking it with other people for whom it is their second or third language. a kind of everyman English." "Chinese and Malay." "Singaporean equivalent to Franglais." "See if you can see what these words mean." "it's actually one." "L-A-Y-L-E-O." "it's just radio." "LAUGHTER" "You're not on Clue now!" "it's radio. "Layleo." "Layleo?" "That's just bad!" "Layleo." "Well done!" "you know!" "he hasn't learned to speak!" "Lolex." "A Rolex watch." "Exactly!" "That's rubbish!" "T-Z-U." "See you soon." "actually it's a drink. "I have glass of orleng tzu." Orange juice. they give you an orange juice." "They really must try harder." "LAUGHTER What have they done with our language?" "They must try harder." "Cos we've evolved it into what we call English." "They'll do it into what will be their language." ""What are you wearing?" "But there are more sensible ones." "Esperanto." "wasn't it?" "An entirely invented language. it takes you a year less to learn to speak another language reasonably fluently." "So in that sense it's quite useful." "Here's an example." "What am I saying?" "Saluton." "Saluton?" "Hello." "Greetings." "Yes." "What could be easier than that?" "Cu vi parolas Esperanton?" "Quidditch." "do you have Esperanto words?" "But this is..." "Mia kusenveturilo estas plena da angiloj." "My cousin is a meerkat of strange angles." "nothing." "Eel." "is it?" "Kusenveturilo..." "Jellied eels?" "the Hammer Horrors?" "Cushion vehicle..." "Eel cushion?" "Hovercraft." ""My hovercraft is full of eels." "Seriously?" "Yes!" "LAUGHTER" "I thought you were a bit cross with me then and you were saying that to move on." "that's what it is in Esperanto. and we'll only understand it if we're lucky." "it is possible to imagine a future in which there will be no war and no poverty but I confidently predict there will always be general ignorance." "please." "picture the scene." "I look up and I see on the horizon a ship." "How far away is it?" "21 miles." "No." "I thought it was always 21 miles." "No." "They didn't even get flagged for that." "No." "I didn't know that anybody always thought that it was 21 miles." "How far away is the horizon? and he'll tell you very quickly." "I'm actually a bit taller." "The distance in miles is approximately the square root of one-and-a-half times your height in feet." "doesn't it?" "Three miles." "Three miles is the right answer!" "Well done." "AAPLAUSE" "It's a lot closer than you think." "If you're standing at sea level the normal horizon is only about three miles away." "Back home now." "What kind of weather kills more people in Britain than any other?" "Bad weather." "Wind." "It's wind." "Not wind." "SIREN WAILS dear." "bugger." "Is it rockets?" "They come down like weather." "Sort of." "Snow." "No." "Hail?" "SIREN WAILS" "No!" "Fog." "Heat wave..." "Fog is the right answer!" "I'm afraid." "Ben?" "What happens is... for quite a long time." "So all their breath gathers up." "And they'd left a little window open and it all goes out and that collects in the valley all together." "And it gets blown around by the lorries driving up and down." "Are you still with me?" "I like it." "Do you know the difference between fog and mist?" "There is an official difference?" "Is it the height?" "it's actually the density." "isn't it?" "Fog is visibility of less while mist is usually between one and two." "whereas in fog they can't see you at all." "you're gone. as a way of hiding yourself." "So you can go about your beastly business unobserved." "I'm just putting stickers on things." "Oh!" "It's you!" "Yeah." "Putting silly stickers on people's faces." "Nothing pervy." "cheers me up." "smoke and fog." "Sulphur dioxide and fog mixing together." "The last really bad one in London was in 1952 and lasted four days." "roughly?" "256." "No." "didn't they?" "killed by the smog of 1952." "This hurried in the clean air and smokeless zones." "isn't it?" "in Honolulu." "Hawa-i-i-i." "they have..." "do you know what they call it?" "It's not smog or fog." "Sun." "No." "They have lots of that." "But they have..." "Is it alo-hog?" "It's vog." "Why vog?" "The Jewish people have moved there." "I can't see it." "I can't see her." "I don't know." "where are you?" "what's going on?" "God!" "Thank you." "Jackie Brydon." "it's a volcanic fog." "It's the fact there's a volcano going off." "It mixes with natural mists and fogs and creates this denser thing called vog." "it causes that's the thing about it. it's time for a look at the scores." "my goodness me!" "it's Ben Miller!" "it's Sean Lock!" "Thank you! it's Rob Brydon." "Alan Davies! and I leave you he said." "Especially about the future." Good night." "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd" "Email subtitling@bbc.co.uk"