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.
Space today is terrifyingly silent. But it wasn’t always thus: the early universe was filled with a hot plasma in which sound waves could travel. The cosmos was quivering with the aftershocks of the Big Bang.
Cyberwar is not waged on physical battlefields following rules of engagement. Aggressors worry less about collateral damage, in part because they aren’t forced to confront the sight of an enemy bleeding to death before their eyes.
Prokofiev’s piano music struck his contemporaries as matching the new era: its dynamism was compared to sport (“football music”), and its grinding repeated patterns to industrial sounds (“machine music”).
Darwin’s Descent of Man was dominated by the theory of sexual selection, which Darwin used to explain peacock’s tails, but also to argue that white people were as superior to black ones as men were to women.
Even the most humdrum of electrical devices nowadays contains at least one computer; yet surprisingly few people are aware of their history, their form or function. In this talk we will see that not only is the history of computers rich and diverse, their architecture likewise.
Highly energetic particles from outer space travelling at the speed of light, known as cosmic rays, originate from the sites of extreme particle acceleration in the Universe.
There is a seismic shift underway in economics, hastened by the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. Communities and countries around the world are beginning to adopt/consider adopting well-being and prosperity as major guiding principles.
Mata Hari was an erotic dancer who, in 1917, was executed by the French army for treason. She has been portrayed as the ultimate femme fatale, extracting information from hapless men through exploiting her sensual charms.