Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchFaust
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the myth of Faustus." Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss!Her lips suck fo…
Published on 20 years, 11 months ago
The Second Law of Thermodynamics
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Second Law of Thermodynamics which can be very simply stated like this: "Energy spontaneously tends to flow from being concentrated in one place to becoming diffus…
Published on 21 years ago
Machiavelli and the Italian City States
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli. In The Prince, Machiavelli's great manual of power, he wrote, "since men love as they themselves determine but fear as t…
Published on 21 years ago
Jung
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the extraordinary mind of the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. In 1907 Sigmund Freud met a young man and fell into a conversation that is reputed to have lasted for 13 h…
Published on 21 years ago
The Venerable Bede
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Venerable Bede. In 731 AD, in the most far-flung corner of the known universe, a book was written that represented a height of scholarship and erudition that was n…
Published on 21 years ago
Higgs Boson
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Higgs Boson particle. One weekend in 1964 the Scottish scientist Peter Higgs was walking in the Cairngorm Mountains. On his return to his laboratory in Edinburgh t…
Published on 21 years, 1 month ago
Zoroastrianism
Melvyn Bragg and guests discusses Zoroastrianism. "Now have I seen him with my own eyes, knowing him in truth to be the wise Lord of the good mind and of good deeds and words." Thus spake the real Za…
Published on 21 years, 1 month ago
Electrickery
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the dawn of the age of electricity. In Gulliver's Travels, published in 1726, Jonathan Swift satirised natural philosophers as trying to extract sunbeams from cucumber…
Published on 21 years, 1 month ago
Witchcraft
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss witchcraft in Reformation Europe. In 1486 a book was published in Latin, it was called Maleus Mallificarum and it very soon outsold every publication in Europe bar the…
Published on 21 years, 2 months ago
Rhetoric
Melvyn Bragg and guests discusses rhetoric. Gorgias, the great sophist philosopher and master of rhetoric said, "Speech is a powerful lord that with the smallest and most invisible body accomplished …
Published on 21 years, 2 months ago