Gresham College Lectures

Gresham College Lectures is the podcast feed of a London public lecture programme, and it sounds like one. There is no host in the usual sense. Each episode is a single speaker, either introduced from the stage or introducing themselves, addressing a hall of people who applaud, react and in at least one case boo, while a second audience follows online. The talk runs to its closing thank-you and that is the episode. What varies, wildly, is the subject. Physics and astronomy make up one strand. In 'On the Nature of Time According to Modern Physics', Jim Al-Khalili sets out how different areas of physics define time differently, uses temperature to explain what an emergent property is, floats quantum entanglement as one candidate for what time might emerge from, and then declares his own view: time is real and the arrow of time is fundamental. Chris Lintott, who appears more than once, handles the astronomy. 'Pluto Isn’t a Planet' walks from the 2006 International Astronomical Union decision back through the mid-century hunt for something perturbing Uranus and Neptune, and ends by asking the audience to stop arguing about labels and think about a world hanging in deep space. 'The Universe’s 100th Birthday: Galactic Fireworks and Little Red Dots' is, by his own admission, a lecture without a punchline: it concerns a set of small red objects whose story starts with the launch of the JWST, and which he reckons are a couple of years from being understood, so he lays out everything known so far instead. The second strand is politics and law. Clive Stafford Smith, speaking as a lawyer, says the real subject of 'Current Challenges to the US Constitution' is power rather than law. He measures today's Supreme Court against the rulings usually counted as its worst, including the one later overturned in Lawrence v. Texas, and is blunt about a recent presidential-immunity ruling he considers idiotic. His closing advice is to laugh at the political right, because being laughed at is the one thing he says they cannot stand. The rest fit no single category. Di Wang, an art historian and curator, uses 'Shock of the Nude: Pioneering Women Artists and the Cultural Politics of Modern China' to show how the Chinese female body was first undressed in public through medical imagery, beginning with an 1892 illustrated-newspaper report of a C-section in a missionary hospital in Canton, and closes on a woman's memory of cycling an hour through snow in 1988 Beijing to reach a packed exhibition on the human body. Robin May, Gresham Professor of Physic, begins 'Why Do We Hate?' with a show of hands on who has truly hated someone, then asks whether hatred can be located in the brain, whether other animals feel it, and whether early intervention could cut the toll of hate crimes and genocide. The common thread is the form, not the content. Speakers commit to a thesis, are frank about what remains unknown, and are frequently funny about it. A listener gets the entire argument, delivered live, with the room still in the recording.