Gresham College Lectures

Watch the Q&A session here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKaTcobzidk In a year of elections, climate change is emerging as a divisive political issue, and in many countries for the first time. This may be partly a consequence of past efforts to keep it apolitical through over-reliance on stealth policies and technocratic institutions. This lecture will discuss the need political debate abou...

While Lycurgus of Sparta and Solon of Athens are now the best-known lawgivers of Greek antiquity, there were many others, from king Minos in Crete to Zaleucus and Charondas in southern Italy. This lecture explores the specific roles attributed to Greek lawgivers in fact and legend, revealing how and why they captured later political imaginations – with mention of how some even set laws to music. T...

This first lecture looks at the power that is given to advocates in a country that has a constitutional structure like the US. I have brought  The American Constitution powers an American lawyer in ways unavailable to the British. I will illustrate this difference from my own experience of bringing 88 cases against the President of the US. I have thus far lost just one. This lecture was recorded b...

What is modern Paganism, and how does it relate to witchcraft, Druidry and other phenomena? This lecture is designed to answer that question, and in doing so to provide an overview of the different traditions that make up Paganism today. It will show what they have in common, and what makes each one unique. It will suggest the ways in which Paganism differs from other religious traditions and what...

Watch the Q&A session here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFCDvsq6N5g For centuries scientists have tried to identify what is special about the human brain. How do we approach this problem from a mathematical standpoint? The first hypothesis is that bigger is better, in some sense.  In this introductory lecture, scaling laws and simple ideas from statistics will be used to study this problem...

The first lecture in the series considers the most famous telescope of all, the Hubble space telescope. A project more than forty years in the making, Hubble overcame an initial disaster with a misshapen mirror to drive a revolution in every part of astronomy, providing iconic views of everything from a comet crashing into Jupiter to a surprisingly vibrant, distant Universe. This lecture focuses i...

Many decades ago, as a young graduate from drama school, I was presented with a stark choice – either to shape my story myself, through writing, or to feel aggrieved at the detrimental narratives circulating about people like me in Britain at that time. I chose the latter, and in this talk I will talk about how story-making is a conscious act of speaking ourselves into being - drawing on literatur...

The Gray's Inn Reading 2024 Does the UK’s constitution provide too much freedom for those that wish to abuse it?  Specific examples of this might include Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s lawbreaking during COVID, the selection of Liz Truss as Prime Minister, the ability of the Government to force controversial policies (such as the Rwanda Bill) and the sacking of the Cabinet Secretaries and Per...

In The Republic, Plato explores the predicament of the Cave: a passive citizen body, a conniving and self-interested set of sophistic opinion-formers and demagogic political leaders, a systematically misleading and damaging order of political structures and common beliefs and appetites. Does this have lessons for tackling climate change? In clinging to our current way of life and its fossil-fuel i...

This lecture will explore the world of the second Bloomsbury generation, delving into the intricacies of being young and queer in the 1920s, and how their open way of living and loving is still relevant to our present day. Lesser known than their predecessors, they continued the celebration of freedom of expression and creativity. The lecture will introduce artists and intellectuals such as Eddy S...

One of the crucial ideas in finance is that markets are efficient – that they fully reflect all available information. If so, what about market bubbles? Over the last year, people have been willing to pay exorbitant amounts for extremely odd assets such as Non-Fungible Tokens, meme stocks etc. Why do they do this? This lecture will explore some investors’ systematic behavioural biases, and how the...

This lecture confronts the worldwide phenomenon of the persecution of suspected witches, now a serious, contemporary problem condemned by the UN in 2021. It will show what has been unusual about Europe in this global pattern, and why the notorious early modern witch hunts there commenced and ended. This lecture was recorded by Ronald Hutton on 5th June 2024 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London The t...

The idea of proof is fundamental to mathematics. We could argue that science consists of testable theories, and therefore that it is about what can be disproved, not what can be proved. In law, the test is “beyond reasonable doubt”. Famous conjectures in mathematics have been tested by computers for trillions of numbers – but we still call them conjectures. In this lecture we’ll talk about what ma...

Socrates sought to test the expertise of everyone around him: the bombastic know-it-alls, the bashful youths, the confident generals, those (including the enslaved) with unsuspected mathematical competence, the workaday artisans. Aristotle later explored the ways in which expert claims can be made credible to popular judgement. This lecture considers the role of experts in contributing to public d...

The final lecture in the series returns to the theme of how insight is derived from observations, considering the cosmic microwave background. This oldest light in the Universe, emitted just 400,000 years after the Big Bang, contains the seeds of the structures we see around us, and tells us about conditions at the Universe's beginning. It will also consider how measurements of the Universe&a...

This lecture traces the history of race and disability law in the English education system. It examines the impact of discriminatory policies on Black children, children of colour, and disabled children, and how narratives around race and disability have changed. The lecture questions why inequality persists and explores possible solutions. This lecture was recorded by Leslie Thomas KC on 23rd May...

Logarithms were perhaps once thought of as just an old-fashioned way to do sums on slide rules. But they underpin much of modern life, from modelling the COVID pandemic to Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of information (which makes mobile phones a reality) and making sense of Cristiano Ronaldo’s crazy Instagram follower numbers. This lecture will explore the basics and history of logarithms,...

Eventually, net zero needs to include everyone: for emissions to continue in half the world while the other half mops them up is both unsustainable and unfair. But this does not mean every country should reach net zero at the same time. Historical emitters like the UK should aim for net zero before the world as a whole, but a “staggered net zero” also carries risks for developing countries, lest t...

In every financial transaction, one side has more information than the other. For example, when someone buys a used car, the seller will know better than the buyer whether the car is a plum or a lemon. Does more information leave you better off? One of the fascinating ideas behind the concept of asymmetric information is that more information can lead to you being actually worse off. This lecture...

This lecture explores the very limits of music: investigating historical efforts to catalogue musical materials including the melacarta of Carnatic music, the wazn of Arabic maqam, Slonimsky’s Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns, Schillinger’s Encyclopedia of Rhythms, Forte numbers, and contemporary attempts to ‘pre-copyright’ every possible melody yet to be written. It also tackles the bigge...

Starring in My Fair Lady (1956), The Sound of Music (1965) and Cinderella (1957) gave Dame Julie Andrews unparalleled profile. These were among the most successful Broadway, Hollywood and TV musicals of their time. Yet following this golden decade, she made few films and appeared in no Broadway shows during her forties and fifties, typically an artist’s most productive period. How did she then bec...

Weather and climate-related events can cause significant mortality and disability. Sudden cold, heat, storms and floods all present risks to health, especially to the most vulnerable. Even in countries with temperate climates like the UK, weather-related deaths can be in the thousands, for example cold snaps causing cardiovascular deaths. In countries with more extreme weather this can be much gre...

In this lecture I will show you some mathematical illusions: “proofs” that 1=0, that fractions don’t exist, and more. There are curious and important implications behind what’s going on. These “proofs” reveal some very common logical slips that can go unnoticed when we are trying to prove more plausible statements. And the stakes are high. As I’ll show you, once you have “proved” one false claim,...

Evolution has led from amoebae to blue whales and from algae to giant redwoods.  So what might it do in the future? What species might evolve in the next ten million years? How will evolutionary processes change as a result of human innovation and what are the risks of us getting it disastrously wrong? What might evolution look like if we ever set up home on another planet, or if inhabitants of ot...

Come take a ride in the Tech Time Machine and explore how IT may change our lives in the next fifty years. By employing techniques used by science fiction writers, we can imagine how Artificial Intelligence, extended reality, mobile connectivity, quantum computing, and others will develop. How will they converge, enable and accelerate each other? We can anticipate the opportunities and challenges...