Gresham College Lectures

The Greeks famously identified many patterns and rhythms in the sky, deducing detailed information about eclipses and orbits that still have relevance today. The Chinese, on the other hand, made landmark discoveries of supernovae and comets - events that were unexpected (stochastic) in nature and not forming any part of any rhythm. This talk will consider how expectation plays a role in discovery...

How can we deliver clean and affordable energy to even the poor, especially in rural settlements, as set out in UN Sustainable Development Goal 7? Environment Professor Jacqueline McGlade will examine how renewable energy systems, ranging from large-scale hydroelectric dams, solar arrays and geothermal plants, to small-scale solar micro-grids can offer immense opportunities for climate mitigation...

The science of feet and footprints has a long, yet often forgotten, history. In this lecture, I look at what people from the late eighteenth century to the present thought they knew about toes, arches, heels, and ankles. What makes a beautiful foot? How have ideas of foot-beauty changed over time? Size, shape, colour, smell, and even taste have been important markers in the literature, science, an...

Medical care often frames patients as the passive 'recipients' of expert professional knowledge and skill. This lecture explores what comes into view if we reframe clinical treatment as hospitality, and patients as guests. Drawing on collaborations with leading restaurants and their chefs, this lecture explores parallels between the worlds of fine dining and medical care. In a hospital,...

Diaghilev would often look at past art and then do the opposite. He playfully abandoned plot, elaborate costumes, emotional expression, and even meaning, but reinstating them whenever he felt like it - this was his undogmatic approach to modernism. In this final lecture, we will focus on one of the best-preserved Diaghilev productions, The Prodigal Son, a strikingly beautiful ballet by Prokofiev/B...

This lecture addresses the potential links between AI and religious belief, which include the question of whether an artificial "superintelligence", were one to arise, would be well-disposed towards us. Religious traditions historically assume that creations are well disposed to those who made them. The lecture also looks at the recent US cults claiming to be ready to worship such a &quo...

2020 marks the 500th anniversary of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, one of the most extraordinary diplomatic events of the late medieval period. Although commonly regarded as a 'peace festival', the meeting might more usefully be described as a two-week long war game. The lecture will set the Field in context, examine the crucial role played by Cardinal Wolsey in organising it, and the s...

Some of the atrocities of the age of Europe's religious wars immediately became notorious. The execution of tens of thousands of women and men for witchcraft, by contrast, passed largely unremarked - until modern times, when this history was revived, rewritten and wildly exaggerated. This final lecture will ask why it suits each age to select, reinvent and suppress different parts of the hist...

Robocop (1987) embodied a particular vision of an electronic crime fighter but what is the reality of electronic crime fighting? How are the police and security services using technology to trap villains? In this lecture we will examine not only the murky world of electronic crime but also how information technology can be used to solve physical crimes. A lecture by Richard Harvey 05 May The trans...

At the time of writing, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has killed many thousands worldwide, infected many more - and changed lives around the world in ways that were unimaginable just weeks ago. What is COVID-19, how has it been managed and what role will science play in combating it? Gresham Professor of Physic (and Chief Medical Officer for England) Chris Whitty, one of the key figures in t...

Recent evidence about the extent of plastics and litter in our oceans has led to grassroots rejection of single-use plastics. This lecture will draw on McGlade's own research (published in 2020) on plastics in our seas. She will show that banning single-use plastics is not enough to safeguard the health of our oceans, and that what is needed is a complete redesign of global production systems...

This final lecture will celebrate some of the great mathematical equations, and related algorithms, which have both changed the world as we know it and which are likely to change it in the future. The lecture will focus on a number of equations and algorithms including Laplace's Equation, the Navier-Stokes Equations, Schrödinger's equation, the Kalman Filter, the FFT, the Page Rank Algor...

Dark matter and dark energy together make up 95% of our Universe. Yet, very little is known about them. This lecture will present the endeavours of cosmologists and particle physicists, as they attempt to explain the fundamental nature of these mysterious dark components. The existence of dark matter might open new vistas in particle physics, while dark energy might even hold the key to the multiv...

One of the most dangerous phrases is "evidence shows that …", because you can almost always find evidence to support any viewpoint. Experts are similarly distrusted, because they may have motives other than the truth. These problems are particularly severe in the digital age where we are bombarded with data and supposed expert opinions. This talk will explain how to discern what and who...

Modernity kept seeping into ballet, a genre that had traditionally looked to a distant, mythical or magical past. First, the tutu gave way to an everyday tennis costume in Jeux by Debussy/Nijinsky, then ragtime rang out in Parade by Satie/Picasso, and in the 1920s Diaghilev decided staged a series of ballets drawn from contemporary life, and in particular, the French high society in which Diaghile...

Should a composer leave the listener wanting more, or must a musical ending be definitive? Is a 'fade out' actually a cop-out, and is a decisive ending preferable to an abrupt one? In short, is the object of a musical ending to bring an audience to its feet? And what about false endings? Do they excite or belittle the audience? This lecture will certainly not be the last word on the subj...

Nowhere in Europe have the wars of religion lasted longer than in Ireland. At the heart of this are two rival sets of memories of atrocities: above all, Protestants recall the massacres of the 1641 rebellion, and Catholics recall the massacres perpetrated by Oliver Cromwell in 1649. A lecture by Alec Ryrie 1 April The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresh...

BOOK LAUNCH Business has lost the public's trust. Concerns that capitalism only serves the elites has led to major unrest throughout the world and the election of populist leaders. Many people claim we need to overhaul capitalism - but that may throw the baby out with the bathwater and harm the many good businesses that exist. This lecture, based on a brand new book, uses the highest-quality...

Are humans fit to be gardeners of this planet? Today's biotechnology companies promote themselves in distinctly utopian ways, but increasing numbers of people find their claims difficult to reconcile with the daily evidence of the damage that technologies like intensive agriculture have done to this planet. This lecture explores these notions through an examination of the film Silent Running...

Vertical banded gastroplasty surgery (or stomach stapling) has drawn attention in recent decades to the hidden, but unruly, stomach. This organ has been the focus of weight-control regimes for centuries, however. This lecture looks at nineteenth-century fads involving stomachs, including the medical prescription of tapeworms that were supposed to live in a person's stomach and "eat"...

For a decade after the execution of Charles I the Stuart courts were based in the Low Countries and France. Always short of money, but determined to maintain splendour and dignity, Charles II rented a series of mansions and used them as the headquarters of the exiled monarchy. These hitherto unknown royal 'palaces' became the nursery of courtly fashion and etiquette where the king and hi...

This lecture explores how digital landscape modelling can help unlock the secrets of Britain's ancient pathways. Focusing on "corpse roads", pathways taken by coffin bearers over the countryside before the Enclosures, it discusses the significance of such routes, and how a mapped understanding of factors such as slope, elevation and distance can shed light on the stories behind them...

In the age of exploration, Catholic missionaries fanned out across the world, meeting with extraordinary success but also extraordinary opposition: nowhere more so than in Japan, where the fast-growing Catholic community was brutally suppressed in the early seventeenth century. This lecture will explore how this bloody crisis shaped myths of Japanese cruelty and cults of Catholic sanctity in Europ...

Mathematics and art are more similar than is commonly thought. Each is concerned with the process of being highly creative with abstract objects and of producing everlasting work of great aesthetic beauty. Early art inspired by geometry, symmetry, numbers and algebra will be considered, as will the role maths played in the art of the Renaissance. Mathematics' influence on other artistic forms...

This lecture provides an insider's brutally honest guide to what it's like to be a self-employed barrister - the highs and lows of the career, the work behind the scenes that makes a difference to outcomes in court, and the art of persuasion in it. What are the ways of working that can make a difference to success and failure, for the client and to professional development for the barris...