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Space Sounds: The Music of the Cosmos

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.

BBC Radio in the Digital Era (1982–)

On 17 August 1982, the first commercial CD was released. Digital recording and editing have changed the face of music by making recordings easy to originate and share. But has this affected musical quality, and what are the financial and artistic consequences?

Russian Piano Masterpieces: Prokofiev

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”).

Cosmic Vision: Fast & Furious

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.

Russian Piano Masterpieces: Stravinsky

Stravinsky’s solo piano output contains one of the absolute pinnacles of piano virtuosity, the Three Pieces from Petrushka.

Cosmic Vision: Unravelling Rainbows

When light is dispersed into its constituent colours, it can become possible to discern rich dynamical information about an evolving system in space, for example cosmic explosions, collisions or accelerations.

Neutrino: The Particle that Shouldn’t Exist

In 1930, the great physicist Wolfgang Pauli invented a new particle to save the principle of energy conservation in certain radioactive decays he was studying.

BBC Radio in the LP Era (1948–1982)

The long-playing record and the BBC’s Third Programme changed the face of classical music in Britain.

Russian Piano Masterpieces: Scriabin

Scriabin was Rachmaninov’s classmate at the Moscow Conservatoire, and enjoyed comparable fame during his lifetime, and yet today he is much less known, especially outside Russia.

The Mathematics of Bell Ringing

This lecture will look at change ringing, which is ringing a series of tuned bells (as you might find in the bell tower of a church) in a particular sequence, and this has exciting mathematical properties. We will also ask: why are bells bell-shaped?

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