Gresham College provides outstanding educational talks and videos for the public free of charge. There are over 2,500 videos available on our website. Your support will help us to encourage people's love of learning for many years to come.
Stereoscopic photography rapidly became a worldwide craze after the Great Exhibition of 1851. Cheap viewers and mass-produced stereographs brought startlingly vivid images within reach of a mass audience, making this the form in which most people first encountered photography.
View the sky through an x-ray telescope and the conception of the universe changes dramatically. Black holes are best seen in x-rays, because impinging gas collides with the black hole at near light speed, resulting in intense x-ray and gamma ray emission.
Isaac Newton saw his demonstration of the regularity of the universe as having great religious significance. Newton’s ideas were initially seen as very supportive of religion; yet within 50 years, they were being seen in a very different light.
Theories of the multiverse suggest that life-containing universes are incredibly rare. We live in one of these, whether by cosmological natural selection or by the consequences of a theory yet to be formulated.
Homer’s Iliad, the earliest Greek poem, narrates the archetypal war between ‘Europeans’ and ‘Asiatics’ divided by the Hellespont. Looking at Wolfgang Peterson’s blockbuster Troy (2004), the lecture describes the genesis of the Iliad between the Mycenaean Late Bronze Age and the 8th centu
What did the sky-watchers of the ancient world think about the night sky, and its implications for human existence? Moving on to the great discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, we will consider the basic science and ask about the deeper significance of these discoveries.
An economic model for news that have existed for 200 years or more is disappearing. Are we facing the prospect of societies without 'news' as previously understood? And why does it matter?