In Our Time10 Helmi 2000

Goethe and the Science of the Enlightenment

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great poet and dramatist, famous for Faust, for The Sorrows of Young Werther, for Storm und Drang and for being a colossus in German literature. Born in the middle of the eighteenth century he lived through the first third of the nineteenth. He wrote lyric and epic verse, literary criticism, prose fiction, translations from 28 languages, he was a politician as well and was hailed by Napoleon as the boundless measure of man; but for much of his time, often to the exclusion of everything else, Goethe was a scientist. That was also part of this late flowering Renaissance man. Some say he paved the way for Darwin, some say he pre-dated the chaos theory, that he foreshadowed Gaia. In an age of romantic giants he was certainly a titan. He gave us the term morphology and sometimes he is even credited with inventing biology itself. How important were Goethe’s discoveries, and where does he really stand in the history of science? With Nicholas Boyle, Reader in German Literary and Intellectual History, Magdalene College, Cambridge, and biographer of Goethe; Simon Schaffer, Reader in the History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University and Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge.

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Jaksot(1092)

Joseph Roth

Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the great writers on Central Europe after the first world war and on the dying of the old orders with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire. As a German s...

4 Kesä 55min

Cybernetics

Misha Glenny and guests discuss cybernetics – the field of study which gave us the prefix ‘cyber’ and helped lay the foundations for the information age. After the Second World War, cybernetics emerge...

28 Touko 52min

Indian Indentured Labour

Misha Glenny and guests discuss how, after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, sugar planters recruited workers from India to replace or compete with their formerly enslaved labour...

21 Touko 51min

M.C. Escher

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the work of Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972), the graphic artist and printmaker best known for his impossible buildings, paradoxical perspectives, and repeating geom...

14 Touko 55min

Handel's Messiah

Misha Glenny and his guests discuss the most famous oratorio of George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) and his librettist Charles Jennens (1700-1773). For his libretto, Jennens drew from Old and New Test...

7 Touko 54min

The Spanish-American War 1898

Misha Glenny and guests discuss a turning point in world affairs in 1898 that left Spain greatly reduced as an imperial power and the US the owner of the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico, with a sign...

30 Huhti 55min

Silicon

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the physics, biology and chemistry of the element silicon which is at the heart of some of the most useful and beautiful objects on the planet. While it is still being...

23 Huhti 52min

Dadaism

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the provocative artistic phenomenon that first startled audiences in 1916 in Zurich. There, at the Cabaret Voltaire at the Holländische Meierei on the Spiegelgasse, Emm...

16 Huhti 50min