Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchPrime Numbers
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss prime numbers: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17 … This sequence of numbers goes on literally forever. Recently, a team of researchers in Missouri successfully calculated the hig…
Published on 19 years, 11 months ago
The Oath
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the importance of the oath in ancient Greece and Rome, The importance of oaths in the Classical world cannot be overstated. Kings, citizens, soldiers, litigants all sw…
Published on 19 years, 11 months ago
The Oresteia
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ‘Oresteia’, the seminal trilogy of tragedies by Aeschylus. The composer Richard Wagner recalled the visceral sensations of reading Aeschylus' great trilogy for the…
Published on 19 years, 11 months ago
Heaven
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss ideas of heaven and the afterlife. The great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote 'that in the end language can only be related to what is experienced here, and gi…
Published on 20 years ago
The Peterloo Massacre
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, a defining moment of its age. In 1819 Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote: 'I met Murder on the way He had a mask like Castlereagh Very smooth he…
Published on 20 years ago
Artificial Intelligence
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss artificial intelligence. Can machines think? It was a question posed by the mathematician and Bletchley Park code breaker Alan Turing and it is a question still being …
Published on 20 years ago
Hobbes
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great 17th century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes who argued: "During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condi…
Published on 20 years ago
The Graviton
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the search for the Graviton particle. Albert Einstein said "I know why there are so many people who love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees the resul…
Published on 20 years ago
Pragmatism
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the American philosophy of pragmatism. A pragmatist "turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad apriori reasons, from fixed princip…
Published on 20 years, 1 month ago
Greyfriars and Blackfriars
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the religious orders of the Dominicans and the Franciscans, known as the Blackfriars and Greyfriars. "Just as it is better to light up others than to shine alone, it i…
Published on 20 years, 1 month ago