#72: In Our Time

 

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.

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.

The Muses and the history of inspiration were another topic