Episode Details

Ancient stone circles and modern telescopes turn out to share the same impulse: to decode the universe. In this condensed version of Into The Impossible, Brian Keating talks with Lucio Piccirillo, Keith Grainge, and Simon Garrington about how Stonehenge may have functioned as a Neolithic calendar, what its builders reveal about engineering and astronomy, and how that story connects to Jodrell Bank, the Lovell Telescope, pulsars, gravitational waves, e-MERLIN, and the Square Kilometre Array. This full conversation has been distilled into a time-saving listen that keeps the key ideas while cutting the runtime down to minutes. Listeners will learn how Stonehenge’s transport and construction likely relied on human ingenuity, why solstice alignments matter, and how radio astronomy evolved from tracking Sputnik and Apollo to mapping the early cosmos. Listen now to get the key ideas in minutes.