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.
This lecture examines the work of Hugo de Vries, a Dutch botanist who was one of the first to claim that science would allow plants and animals to be designed to order.
This lecture examines the fascination surrounding works that are left unfinished at their composers’ deaths. It also looks at the urge that certain of us have to complete these uncompleted works, however unwisely and however unbidden.
Advances in medicine challenge allow us to sustain life for longer, but at what cost and at whose choice? Why might the court intervene when a devout Jehovah Witness parent refuses a life-saving blood transfer to their child?
We will trace the musical, visual and choreographical consequences of this new trend through several later Diaghilev ballets: Parade (Satie/Picasso), Chout (Prokofiev/Larionov), Le Pas d’Acier (Prokofiev/Yakulov).
The question “Will AI artefacts ever be conscious?” was raised by Turing seventy years ago, and will not go away even though no one quite knows what it means, nor how we would know they were conscious if they were.
On the 200th anniversary of George IV's accession to the throne, this lecture considers whether or not he had any real impact on the fast-industrialising world around him, and the turbulent political times he lived through.
The myth of Santa Claus has been translated into an extraordinary market on a global scale. But how did this marketing success materialise? How did Finland become the home of Christmas?