Gresham College Lectures
Gresham College has been providing free public lectures since 1597, making us London's oldest higher education institution. This podcast offers our recorded lectures that are free to access from the Gresham College website, or our YouTube channel.
Podcasting since 1984 • 2937 episodes
Gresham College Lectures
Latest Episodes
Why Do We Fear? - Robin May
Fear is one of the earliest emotions to have evolved. Most vertebrates – and possibly some invertebrates – show fear when they are threatened. At its most core, fear keeps us alive, helping us flee from predators or avoid dangerous environments...
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45:14
Hitler, Jesus & How to Win a Culture War - Alec Ryrie
Since 1945 Hitler and the Nazis have been the Western world’s one fixed moral reference point: the way we know what evil is. But that consensus has always been more fragile than it felt, and now it is unravelling. This lecture will trace how we...
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45:51
How It Ends: What We Know about the Fate of the Universe - Chris Lintott
How will it all end? Predicting the far future of our Universe depends on understanding its present. This lecture starts with what seems to be a paradox in modern cosmology: that we have a model that does a fantastic job of explaining what we s...
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49:41
AI Will Be Your Overlord: Faster, Brighter, Better Than You?
“Scary”, “Worried”, “Dangerous” were some of the most frequent words to describe AI in a recent UK Government public survey. Do you fear, as many do, that AI will lead to us becoming second-class entities? In this first lecture, we will explore...
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49:47
Shakespeare’s Musical Fairies - Dominic Broomfield-McHugh
Written in the era of the founding of Gresham College, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream portrays the hypnotic dreaminess of a fairy world in which the real and the fantastic are blurred. This lecture explores how the innate musicality of...
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1:06:49