Gresham College Lectures

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.

This lecture explores how such dispersion can be designed to reveal the dynamics of distant worlds.

A lecture by Katherine Blundell 3 February

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:

https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/unravelling-rainbows

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk

Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

Solving climate change is not something that can be achieved overnight; it is a long journey, one that is complicated by the economic problems we face after Covid-19.

Every industry has a role in not only helping the economy recover from the pandemic, but also ensuring that any recovery is green-led.

The City of London is a world leader in ‘Green Finance’ and has an important role in helping the country – and the world – to ‘build back better’. Through supporting sustainable infrastructure and creating green financial products, the City – and the UK’s – financial and professional services can fight climate change and, at the same time, support economic growth.

Join the Lord Mayor and a panel of experts to find out more about how the City can help us transition to a sustainable and resilient future for all.

A lecture by The Lord Mayor William Russell, Mark Carney, Liv Garfield and Rhian-Mari Thomas. Chaired by Loyd Grossman 1 February

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:

https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/2021-lord-mayor

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk

Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

Niklaus Wirth said Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. But programs are more than that. They are ubiquitous in modern life, but only a tiny minority of the population know how to program. Programmers, coders or developers are therefore seen as the most rarefied of individuals – disconnected from society yet with enormous influence and power.

This lecture examines what programming is, who invented it, and how it is changing to better represent the needs of modern society.

A lecture by Richard Harvey 2 February

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:

https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/programs-intro

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk

Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

Is there is a level playing field between participants at inquests? What does 'equality of arms' mean? Is such a concept appropriate when looking at inquests? Are inquiries better?

How have they developed since the IRA Death on The Rock case? What are the problems faced by those representing families, is there a case for fundamental change? If so what model should we adopt to replace the present system?

A lecture by Leslie Thomas QC 4 February

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/inquest-equality

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

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The English Reformation - unlike many of the other Reformations convulsing sixteenth-century Europe - was at heart more about politics and law than about religion. It created the English state as we now know it, and established relationships between the nations of Britain and Ireland which still endure.

This lecture asks how a religious dispute came to rewrite the English constitution and traces that upheaval's legacies - some plain, some hidden - for England and its neighbours down to the present.

A lecture by Alec Ryrie 3 February

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/tudor-reformation

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

Support the show

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.

This lecture explores how such dispersion can be designed to reveal the dynamics of distant worlds.

A lecture by Katherine Blundell 3 February

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/unravelling-rainbows

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

Support the show

Niklaus Wirth said Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. But programs are more than that. They are ubiquitous in modern life, but only a tiny minority of the population know how to program. Programmers, coders or developers are therefore seen as the most rarefied of individuals - disconnected from society yet with enormous influence and power.

This lecture examines what programming is, who invented it, and how it is changing to better represent the needs of modern society.

A lecture by Richard Harvey 2 February

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/programs-intro

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

Support the show

Solving climate change is not something that can be achieved overnight; it is a long journey, one that is complicated by the economic problems we face after Covid-19.

Every industry has a role in not only helping the economy recover from the pandemic, but also ensuring that any recovery is green-led.

The City of London is a world leader in 'Green Finance' and has an important role in helping the country - and the world - to 'build back better'. Through supporting sustainable infrastructure and creating green financial products, the City - and the UK's - financial and professional services can fight climate change and, at the same time, support economic growth.

Join the Lord Mayor and a panel of experts to find out more about how the City can help us transition to a sustainable and resilient future for all.

A lecture by The Lord Mayor William Russell, Mark Carney, Liv Garfield and Rhian-Mari Thomas. Chaired by Loyd Grossman 1 February

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/2021-lord-mayor

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

Support the show

Scriabin was Rachmaninov’s classmate at the Moscow Conservatoire, and he likewise received a Gold Medal for his combined studies in piano and composition. His commitment was also as unswerving as Rachmaninov’s, and yet public knowledge of his music remains hazy, especially outside of Russia, and it still has an esoteric and forbidding aura. Scriabin’s starting point was Chopin, but where others were content to pay reverent homage to that earlier master, Scriabin took him as inspiration for bold experiments in his preludes, études and above all in his great series of ten sonatas, which span his career.

Working within the loose artistic movement known as “Symbolism”, his ambitions were fuelled by theosophy and his own syncretism of mystical ideas. For him, some of his later projects stretched far beyond the normal limits of art, and one partially written piece was designed to bring about the dissolution of the universe into nothingness. The Sonatas take us on a journey from his early post-Chopin soundworld through to refined sensations and rarefied sounds of his later Symbolism, and although his ideas descended through decadence to insanity, his musical judgement never left him.

A lecture by Marina Frolova-Walker and Peter Donohoe OBE 21 January

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:

https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/scriabin-piano

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk

Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

In 1930, the great physicist Wolfgang Pauli did something that "no theorist should ever do": he invented a new particle that he thought nobody could ever detect in order to save the principle of energy conservation in certain radioactive decays he was studying. Pauli's impossible particle turned out to be real: the neutrino, a particle that one of its discoverers called "the most tiny quantity of reality ever imagined by a human being".

This lecture will chart the fascinating history and science of neutrinos, from their discovery in 1956 to the role they played in understanding solar physics. We will see that neutrinos are today hunted for in the depths of the Antarctic ice cap, shot through the crust of the Earth and observed in huge water tanks under miles of rock. They are revealing the physics of distant supernovae, helping understand dark matter and might hold the key to the Big Bang itself.

A lecture by Roberto Trotta 1 February

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/neutrino

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

Support the show