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Gresham College Lectures
Gresham College
1000 episodes
1 day ago
We often talk about living on a blue planet, but when we think we’re talking about the ocean we’re generally only discussing what’s in it: fish, whales, pollution and ships. But that is to miss the biggest story on Earth, because it’s the water itself that sets the scene for everything else. This lecture will outline how the ocean engine works – its internal anatomy, how the components move, and how this engine has directly influenced our history and culture. This lecture was recorded by Pr...
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Education
History,
Science
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We often talk about living on a blue planet, but when we think we’re talking about the ocean we’re generally only discussing what’s in it: fish, whales, pollution and ships. But that is to miss the biggest story on Earth, because it’s the water itself that sets the scene for everything else. This lecture will outline how the ocean engine works – its internal anatomy, how the components move, and how this engine has directly influenced our history and culture. This lecture was recorded by Pr...
Show more...
Education
History,
Science
Episodes (20/1000)
Gresham College Lectures
Ocean: The Liquid Engine That Dominates Our Planet
We often talk about living on a blue planet, but when we think we’re talking about the ocean we’re generally only discussing what’s in it: fish, whales, pollution and ships. But that is to miss the biggest story on Earth, because it’s the water itself that sets the scene for everything else. This lecture will outline how the ocean engine works – its internal anatomy, how the components move, and how this engine has directly influenced our history and culture. This lecture was recorded by Pr...
Show more...
1 day ago
54 minutes

Gresham College Lectures
Music of Animals - Milton Mermikides
Do animals make music? Are the languages of whales and birds truly songs? To answer this, we must first understand what we mean by music as human animals—and how it might emerge across the animal kingdom. From Messiaen’s transcriptions of bird calls to the rhythmic gaits of horses echoing in the blues, we’ll hear how animal behaviours form an unwitting orchestra and explore whether music is uniquely human or a shared language with our animal cousins. This lecture was recorded by Milton Merm...
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5 days ago
51 minutes

Gresham College Lectures
The Economics of Work and Technology - Daniel Susskind
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/v0RoRG2YA-0 Why has automation anxiety – the fear that new technologies cause mass unemployment – proven wrong over the centuries? This lecture explores how technology affects the labour market. While new technologies can substitute for workers, reducing demand for their efforts at certain activities, they can also complement them, increasing demand for them to do activities that haven’t been automated. Historically, people have focused on the...
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1 week ago
52 minutes

Gresham College Lectures
Whither War; Whither the Law of War - Professor Sir Geoffrey Nice KC
How might we change the way we – and all our leaders think – so that we never go to war? The war between Russia and Ukraine, as well as the conflict in Gaza, have galvanised thinking about, and action by, the bodies administering, the laws of war. National court processes - applying ‘universal jurisdiction’ for example – may bring international war criminals to justice. Informal processes can provide material capable of developing national laws and of providing evidence to assist ...
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1 week ago
1 hour 1 minute

Gresham College Lectures
From Tyranny to Athenian Democracy - Melissa Lane
When – and how – did Athenian democracy begin? There is no unambiguous answer to this question. This lecture explores one plausible origin: the popular uprising in 508 BCE overthrowing foreign invaders (who had previously expelled an Athenian-bred family of tyrants). In the aftermath of that revolution, the Athenians – led by Kleisthenes – reorganised their political system to foster new identities and interactions. As further political and social changes were made, Athenian democracy took sh...
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2 weeks ago
49 minutes

Gresham College Lectures
China and Chineseness: Lessons from the Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan - Steve Tsang
This lecture is about the meaning of China and being Chinese. It examines critically how the Chinese state, under the control of the Communist Party defines them. It highlights the historical reality that the Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan adopted different political systems. The Communist Party installed a powerful Leninist party-state on the Mainland. Laisses-faire British colonial rule gloomed Hong Kong people to desire democratization. Taiwan has become a vibrant democracy. This l...
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2 weeks ago
45 minutes

Gresham College Lectures
War's Toxic Legacy - Ian Mudway
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/3LrIEG26m78 War's environmental legacies disproportionately burden the civilian populations left behind. While research focuses on combatant exposures, civilians face chronic contamination from heavy metals, chemical residues, unexploded ordnance, and asbestos, often exacerbated by disrupted infrastructure and psychological trauma. Framed through the exposome, this lecture highlights the need for greater research and policy focus on these long...
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3 weeks ago
59 minutes

Gresham College Lectures
How Does Mathematics Last? Heritage and Heritage-making in Mathematics - Caroline Ehrhardt
How is mathematical knowledge recorded and preserved across generations? Contrary to the idea that mathematics itself is somehow ‘permanent’, in this talk we will explore heritage-making in mathematics, that is the people, institutions, and material objects that can give mathematical ideas longevity. We will explore the heritage-making found in two very different types of French nineteenth-century libraries: those of famous mathematicians and those of secondary schools. We will especially foc...
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3 weeks ago
46 minutes

Gresham College Lectures
Evoking Empathy through Animal Portraiture
The natural world faces unprecedented threats, challenging historical perceptions of nature as inexhaustible. Photographer Tim Flach draws on his acclaimed works, including Endangered, More Than Human, and Birds, to reveal how photography transcends traditional wildlife representation. By employing critical anthropomorphism and human portraiture techniques, Flach’s images foster empathy and kinship with animals. Collaborating with social scientists, he illustrates how visual storytelling evok...
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4 weeks ago
47 minutes

Gresham College Lectures
Why Do We Fear? - Robin May
Fear is one of the earliest emotions to have evolved. Most vertebrates – and possibly some invertebrates – show fear when they are threatened. At its most core, fear keeps us alive, helping us flee from predators or avoid dangerous environments. But why does this process sometimes backfire, leaving us paralysed by otherwise harmless phobias? And why do so many people deliberately seek out fearful situations, from horror movies to parachute jumps, when instinct tells us to do the opposite? Can...
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1 month ago
45 minutes

Gresham College Lectures
Hitler, Jesus & How to Win a Culture War - Alec Ryrie
Since 1945 Hitler and the Nazis have been the Western world’s one fixed moral reference point: the way we know what evil is. But that consensus has always been more fragile than it felt, and now it is unravelling. This lecture will trace how we came to build our values around the memory of the Second World War, why that consensus isn’t enough to deal with our current predicaments – and why the resolution to all this might be more hopeful than you think. This lecture was recorded by Ale...
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1 month ago
45 minutes

Gresham College Lectures
How It Ends: What We Know about the Fate of the Universe - Chris Lintott
How will it all end? Predicting the far future of our Universe depends on understanding its present. This lecture starts with what seems to be a paradox in modern cosmology: that we have a model that does a fantastic job of explaining what we see, but which says 95% of the Universe is in forms (dark matter and dark energy) that we don’t understand. From there, we get a quick tour of the next 100 billion years – and speculate how the Universe’s end may hold the secrets of its beginnings. This ...
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1 month ago
49 minutes

Gresham College Lectures
AI Will Be Your Overlord: Faster, Brighter, Better Than You?
“Scary”, “Worried”, “Dangerous” were some of the most frequent words to describe AI in a recent UK Government public survey. Do you fear, as many do, that AI will lead to us becoming second-class entities? In this first lecture, we will explore this ascendency, considering how notions of intelligence, sentience, perception, consciousness and reasoning are being framed and challenged in an AI-centred world; and surface the social, economic and ethical implications of these developments. This l...
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1 month ago
49 minutes

Gresham College Lectures
Shakespeare’s Musical Fairies - Dominic Broomfield-McHugh
Written in the era of the founding of Gresham College, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream portrays the hypnotic dreaminess of a fairy world in which the real and the fantastic are blurred. This lecture explores how the innate musicality of Shakespeare’s original has provoked adaptations across the centuries, including Ashton and Balanchine’s ballets based on Mendelssohn’s incidental music for the play, Britten’s opera, Purcell’s masque The Fairy Queen, Henze’s Eighth Symphony and Elvis C...
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1 month ago
1 hour 6 minutes

Gresham College Lectures
Lessons from Guantánamo Bay - Clive Stafford Smith
This lecture looks at the evolution of Guantánamo Bay, first as a focal point of Haitian immigration in 1991 (Gitmo 1.0), to the more famous detention of terror suspects in 2002 (Gitmo 2.0), and back to immigration in 2025. We will explore how Gitmo 3.0 is probably already over, and how we were able to head it off so quickly through legal challenges. However, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said the U.S. is “actively searching” for countries to accept migrants deported from the U.S., with ...
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1 month ago
53 minutes

Gresham College Lectures
The Shape of Hands: Symmetry, Chirality and Handedness - Alain Goriely
The reflection of my right hand in a mirror is a left hand that looks similar yet is very different from the right. Many natural structures such as proteins, climbing vines, and seashells exhibit the same property known as chirality. Some of these objects are clearly left-handed, some are right-handed, some are both. The ultimate origin of chirality is one of Nature's great mysteries. In this talk, I will discuss the general problem of determining the chirality of an object and how it impacts...
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1 month ago
57 minutes

Gresham College Lectures
Earth – Our Planetary Life Support System - Professor Helen Czerski
Planet Earth is an intricate and interconnected system, with some fundamental rules that we usually ignore. But we are part of our planet, not separate to it or just perched on top of it. This lecture will consider the two primary rules of Earth: that energy continually flows through the system (in from the Sun and then out again to space) and that matter/atoms must be continually recycled and use these to build up an outsider’s view of our planet. This lecture was recorded by Helen Czerski ...
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1 month ago
46 minutes

Gresham College Lectures
Automation Anxiety - Daniel Susskind
Ever since modern economic growth began three centuries ago, people have suffered from periodic bursts of anxiety about the technologies of the time taking on the work that they do. This opening lecture explores the history of ‘automation anxiety’ – from the Luddites who smashed framing machines at the start of the Industrial Revolution in Britain to the protestors who set driverless cars on fire on the streets of San Francisco today. Time and again, their main worry – that there would not be...
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2 months ago
47 minutes

Gresham College Lectures
Galileo’s Journey to the Underworld: The Case for Interdisciplinary Thinking - Sarah Hart
ttps://x.com/GreshamCollege Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/tv554JY9TPU In 1588, the young Galileo delivered some lectures that were impressive enough to secure him a mathematics professorship at the University of Pisa. His subject? The geometry of Dante’s Inferno. In this lecture we’ll look at some of Galileo’s deductions, and how the questions raised may have influenced his later mathematical research. Using this and other examples of creative work in mathematics that...
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2 months ago
55 minutes

Gresham College Lectures
A World Remade by Decolonization? - Martin Thomas
The lecture shares perspectives from global history, comparative politics, and international relations to revaluate whether the twentieth-century collapse of European colonialism was as definitive as often portrayed. It suggests that, while in some ways, ending European Empires remade our contemporary world, in others processes of decolonization are far from complete. This lecture was recorded by Martin Thomas on the 9th of April 2025 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London Martin is Professor of Imp...
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3 months ago
49 minutes

Gresham College Lectures
We often talk about living on a blue planet, but when we think we’re talking about the ocean we’re generally only discussing what’s in it: fish, whales, pollution and ships. But that is to miss the biggest story on Earth, because it’s the water itself that sets the scene for everything else. This lecture will outline how the ocean engine works – its internal anatomy, how the components move, and how this engine has directly influenced our history and culture. This lecture was recorded by Pr...