Human Intelligence

As a prelude to a new season of Human Intelligence on Radio 4 Naomi Alderman took the brand on the road. It was a road that lead to the upper Wye valley where Naomi and her guests Professor Rosalind Crone and Dr Sian Williams were met with the warmth and enthusiasm of a Hay Literary Festival audience. The ambition was to add three more names to the Human Intelligence roster, all of them connected...

Aristotle was a philosopher, teacher, collector and all-round polymath. He was also, importantly, a traveller, who allowed new places, especially the rich biodiversity he encountered on the island of Lesbos, to shape his thinking profoundly. Aristotle’s observations about the natural world were remarkably accurate. Many were proved correct by modern science thousands of years later. He dissected a...

Naomi Alderman looks at the mindset and legacy of Ida Pfeiffer, a woman who changed the very idea of travel, who is allowed to do it and why. Traditionally, travelling had always had a purpose – conquering, discovering, negotiating, pilgrimaging. Women were always accompanied by men – husbands, fathers, brothers, guardians. But in the mid-nineteenth century, a separated mother of two upped sticks...

Sir Patrick Manson shook the medical world when he first understood the infection route for vector-borne diseases like malaria. Naomi Alderman dissects the thinking of a scientific pioneer. In the late 1800s, no one knew how this kind of illness was spread. Manson, a Scottish physician working in China and later in a home laboratory in London, doggedly pursued the answer. Known as the father of tr...

Jean Rhys' sequel to Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, changed the way we think about stories forever. Naomi Alderman meets a fellow novelist who put a marginalised character at the centre of the action. Rhys left Dominica to go to school in cold, grey England, but she had always felt out of place. A perfectionist who needed every word in just the right place, she took decades to publish her masterpie...

Naomi Alderman explores the thinking of the Buddha, who, as a young prince, ventured outside the palace walls and began his journey towards enlightenment. Siddhartha Gautama lived in a life of rarefied luxury until an encounter with suffering changed everything for him. He became the Buddha, the awakened one, urged self-transformation and profoundly shaped the world we live in. But did his many in...

Albert Einstein was an international pop star of science who urged the US government to build an atom bomb. Naomi Alderman gets into one of the most famous brains of all time. Einstein rewrote our understanding of universe. He imagined hitching a ride on a light beam and pursued his famous 'thought experiments' to remarkable ends. He was a man who never swam with the tide. Despite a lifelong commi...

Lise Meitner was a world-class physicist, who saw what others could not. She recognised nuclear fission – the splitting of the atom, the powerful energy released – before anyone else. Naomi Alderman finds out how. Women weren't even allowed to attend lectures at the University of Berlin, when Meitner moved there in 1907. She began her career in a basement workshop, kept away from male students, an...

Naomi Alderman dives into the amazing intellect of John von Neumann, physicist, mathematician, economist, computer scientist – a visionary who predicted the rise of artificial intelligence decades ahead of time. As a child, von Neumann could recite the telephone directory and crack jokes in Ancient Greek. He waltzed into the Manhattan Project and solved a problem that had frustrated other top scie...

Niels Bohr said, 'Anyone who is not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.' Naomi Alderman investigates the remarkable insights of a scientific genius. Bohr is the man who figured out the structure of the nucleus at the centre of the atom, recognising that the quantum world of tiny particles behaves very differently to the tangible, everyday world ar...

Naomi Alderman explores the multifaceted mind of J Robert Oppenheimer, scientific lead on the Manhattan Project, a vast, top secret scheme to build the world's first atomic bombs in World War II. The Project was a remarkable feat of human intellect with a real, devastating human cost. It required close cooperation between the US military and a group of world-leading scientists. In many ways, Oppen...

Darwin asked big questions. His theory of evolution transformed our understanding of life on Earth. But Naomi Alderman discovers that he did it by looking at small things and tiny changes that other people had overlooked. From earliest childhood, he’d been a collector – pocketing shells, coins, minerals, bits of pottery and rooftiles – and his travels on HMS Beagle allowed him to amass a vast coll...

Samuel Johnson was living proof that a person can be extremely messy and disorganised but still do work of great worth. He compiled and almost single-handedly wrote an English dictionary that changed the language for good. ‘Dictionary Johnson’ established the spelling and meaning of many words; he looked at etymology; he poked fun and cracked jokes. He lived hand to mouth, writing for money, and h...

Naomi Alderman examines the intelligence and sharp humour of an ancient Greek historian known as Pamphila of Epidaurus. She was a female historian working in a society that believed women were constitutionally unsuited to the rational and peculiarly masculine task of recording facts for posterity. She wrote thirty-three volumes of her famed Historical Commentaries from her home. She wrote for fun,...

Naomi Alderman looks at the remarkable way Denis Diderot connected ideas and people. In 18th-century Paris, he edited one of the very first encyclopaedias: twenty-eight volumes with tens of thousands of articles on everything from the concept of liberty to cutting-edge medical research, the manufacture of silk stockings and a recipe for apricot jam. Diderot was the perfect man for the job – energi...

Naomi Alderman wonders at lady-in-waiting, writer and all-round entertainer Sei Shōnagon, who wrote The Pillow Book over a thousand years ago in the Japanese imperial court. The Empress and her entourage lived in a closed world, glimpsed through half-shut blinds, while political machinations went on all around them. Poetry and wit were highly prized; and Sei Shōnagon was unmatched. In dark times,...

Naomi Alderman investigates the eccentric brilliance of Diogenes. He was a ‘cynic’ philosopher, which originally meant ‘dog-like’, and wanted to teach us that humans could learn from dogs and the simple authentic manner in which they went about their lives. Diogenes was sharp, hilarious, downright rude and a menace in the market place. Special thanks to Dr Robert Cromarty, Classics Master at Welli...

Naomi Alderman meets Peter Ramus – a teacher determined to simplify and systematise the teaching of difficult things. He spoke his mind and thrived on stirring up trouble. Ramus was behind one of the most important learning devices in history. A system of organising knowledge that helped overthrow the primacy of Aristotle in medieval universities and allowed everyone to access ideas, regardless of...

Mary Somerville was a brilliant polymath who found time to correct the work of Isaac Newton whilst looking after her infant children. Naomi Alderman investigates her extraordinary work ethic and expansive interests. Somerville's writings, across a range of disciplines – maths, astronomy, botany, geography – became essential reading for those learning science, and helped to define what a scientist...

Naomi Alderman explores one of the greatest minds of the medieval world and in the history of Jewish thought. His work, The Guide for the Perplexed, is among the most influential works of medieval philosophy. In his efforts to reconcile faith and reason, Maimonides was having parts of the Enlightenment in his head 600 years early. Special thanks to Rabbi Dr Raphael Zarum, Dean of the London School...

The modern world is inconceivable without this son of a blacksmith and his meticulous, relentless brain. Naomi Alderman meets the mind behind huge scientific advances – who made breakthroughs in the understanding of electricity, changed the technology by which we live and contributed to our theoretical understanding of the forces underpinning the universe. Faraday also devoted his life to spreadin...

While in prison, Malcolm X read furiously after lights-out and changed his entire life trajectory. Naomi Alderman looks at his extraordinary capacity for learning. Prominent as a black nationalist, skilled orator and remarkable organiser in the black freedom struggle in mid-20th century America, Malcolm X was, above all, a learner – a thinker prepared to change his mind. He left hustling behind fo...

Luther's vivid, wild words – powered by new printing technology – set in motion a chain reaction that split the Catholic Church, powered the Reformation and changed the world forever. Naomi Alderman meets this determined thinker. Famously, Luther walked up to a church in a backwater town and nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door. The son of a metal smelter, he knew how rough and dangerous life...

Mary Wollstonecraft argued with passion and moral certainty in her great work, A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Naomi Alderman meets the first modern woman, who lived the ideas she espoused – travelling to revolutionary France, living unmarried to her lover, arguing, debating, persuading and showing, with the quality of her arguments, the justice of her own cause. She died tragically young, g...

Washington may be better known as a man of action rather than ideas. However, he gave the world one idea of huge power, an idea that was also about power. As a military General, Washington won the American War of Independence. Then, as the first ever US president, he helped establish a nation and guide it through its early life. And then he did something extraordinary – he voluntarily gave up his...