One of my favourite
programmes on BBC Radio 4 is the long-running series ‘In Our Time’, in
which three guests, usually academics, discuss central topics, events and
people from history, science, religion, philosophy, literature, natural history
and more. Three weeks ago it was Italian writer Italo Calvino. The previous
episode was on the Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient Greek bronze object
rescued from the seabed in 1900 which experts think was a kind of analogue
computer for calculating the movements of the planets and stars.
What does the programme contain?
Typically the three
participants introduce the topic broadly, then explore it in more detail and finally
comment on its legacy for present and future times. The programme is 42 minutes
long (plus some ‘bonus material’ available on catch-up, in which guests add
something they didn’t have time for). Veteran presenter Melvyn Bragg manages
the discussion.
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| The medieval composer Hildegard of Bingen has featured |
One of the programme’s
attractions to me is that it explores these topics on their own terms rather
than through the filter of present-day preoccupations and values. It usually
starts by placing the person, work or idea firmly in their own time (despite
the title of the series). Only towards the end of the programme does Bragg ask
explicitly about current opinion of the topic. The programme also eschews
modern parallels with its subjects. And despite the efforts of the ‘In Our
Time’ website to provide click-bait soundbites (‘it remains shocking today’ on
the Sistine Chapel), this is long form listening without bells and whistles –
just talk.
Why listen instead of read?
So why listen to
the programme when you could read Wikipedia, more quickly, for an overview?
One reason is that
because it is spoken, one is somehow more aware of the fluidity of knowledge,
that it is always developing. In addition, something of the personality of the
speakers and their enthusiasm comes across, and it is interesting to hear the often
skilful way both they and Bragg marshal the material.
As an example of
all of these, here is a fairly long, lightly edited, excerpt from the September
2024 programme on wormholes (shortcuts between galaxies):
Katy Clough: One speculative idea that’s quite fun to
think about is the idea that universes are born in black holes. So when you
have a black hole, instead of having a singularity, you actually balloon out
into a new universe, so maybe the collapse of a star can be the birth of a new
universe. And I’ve always kind of liked that, but I think I like it for purely
aesthetic reasons and not for any good scientific reason.…
Melvyn Bragg: There’s talk that in one sense physics is as
imaginative as science fiction – what do you make of that?
Andrew Pontzen: I agree that physics is fundamentally a
very imaginative endeavour… We were talking about Newton and his unification of
the heavens with earthly phenomena – if that’s not a leap of imagination, I
don’t know what is.… Science more broadly requires a huge amount of imagination
as well as experimental rigour – [we need to find] the right balance, and we’ve
been right on the edge of that talking about wormholes because we are so far
away from experiment.
Toby Wiseman: I might say actually it’s creative rather
than necessarily imaginative. Particularly when we talk about these fundamental
sciences, our understanding of the universe is really a mathematical one…
Newton didn’t just give us gravity, he gave us the notion that you could really
analytically control physical phenomena through mathematics, and he developed
calculus in order to do that. Then for hundreds of years, the theme that has
dominated is, you can imagine wonderful things and be creative in working with
maths, but at the end of the day the mathematics keeps you honest. We would
never understand the universe in the way it is today if it wasn’t for for the
fact that it didn’t require imagination – it’s all there in the mathematics.
When for example in 1916 the first black hole solution was written down… it
wasn’t understood to be a black hole solution, but at the same time there it
was.
Andrew Pontzen: I think we’ve finally found a point of
disagreement, which is an achievement! If you look at someone like Faraday, for
example, Faraday did remarkable experiments on electricity and magnetism in the
mid nineteenth century and had very little mathematical ability… And yet he was
able to extrapolate… He wrote about things like ray vibrations… – these were
things that came out of his mind, they were not mathematically elucidated. And
the fact Michell was writing about black holes in the time of Newton, long
before someone came along and got the maths correct. So I don’t think it’s as
clear cut as you say.
Actually the
disagreement above is a rarity on ‘In Our Time’; the academics usually support
or praise each other’s speeches. This is one deficiency of the programme, since
differing viewpoints make a good discussion, and is a reason for inviting
different guests. Another disappointment for me is the literature episodes,
since guests talk about the literature but rarely quote it. This is a missed
opportunity to let people, both guests and listeners, respond to poetry or
novels moment-by-moment or to compare knowledge about the writer as a person with
their actual writing. For example, in a programme on Simone de Beauvoir, Melvyn
Bragg asked Professor of French Margaret Atack to give listeners a ‘taste’ of
some of the disturbing content of the letters between Beauvoir and Jean Paul
Sartre. The Professor responded in generalities and it was left to Bragg to say
that the letters include details of how the two philosophers took the virginity
of girls and passed them between them. Even then there were no direct quotes
from the letters. One can also hear Bragg’s occasional frustration with
academics being over-subtle rather than defining their terms or stating their
position straightforwardly.
My top three?
Three that stick in my mind are on Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the idea that you can accurately measure either the position or momentum of an atomic particle, but not both; the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, about 50 million years ago, when crocodiles swam at the North Pole; and The Economic Consequences of the Peace, on John Maynard Keynes’s book attacking the 1919 Versailles agreement at the end of World War I. There’s also a listeners’ top 10 here.
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| The Muses and the history of inspiration were another topic |