The Bizarre Brilliance of Athanasius Kircher
pplpod10 Juni

The Bizarre Brilliance of Athanasius Kircher

Picture a 17th-century man being lowered by fraying rope into the smoking crater of Vesuvius because he wants to see a volcano's engine from the inside. The same man outlined how to stop the bubonic plague with masks, quarantine, and burned clothing centuries before germ theory, designed an infamous cat piano, believed armadillos came from turtles mating with porcupines, and faked his way through Egyptian hieroglyphs so convincingly the world accepted it for generations.

Athanasius Kircher, the Jesuit "master of 100 arts," was once the most famous scientist alive. This episode follows him from the chaos of the Thirty Years' War through the shipwreck that stranded him at the center of the Catholic world, where he ran a 760-correspondent Jesuit network like a 17th-century internet. It weighs his genuine breakthroughs against his spectacular delusions and asks why the man who tried to know everything was erased by the age of specialists.

  • Into the crater: the Vesuvius descent and the hunt for the world's hidden machinery
  • Plague protocols before germ theory: masks, quarantine, and burning infected clothes
  • The Coptic breakthrough and the hieroglyph catastrophe: brilliance driven off a hermetic cliff
  • The Jesuit network as analog internet: 760 correspondents feeding one mind in Rome
  • Dismissed by Descartes, revived by novelists: what we lost when the generalists went extinct

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(8442)

Aespa: How K-Pop's Metaverse Group Conquered the Charts

Aespa: How K-Pop's Metaverse Group Conquered the Charts

Aespa turned a bold sci-fi avatar concept into one of K-pop's defining acts of the 2020s. Built by SM Entertainment and debuting in November 2020 with Black Mamba, the group of Karina, Giselle, Winter...

2 Juli 19min

Alanis Morissette and the Fury Behind Jagged Little Pill

Alanis Morissette and the Fury Behind Jagged Little Pill

Alanis Morissette went from being dubbed the Debbie Gibson of Canada, a synth-pop teen who opened for Vanilla Ice, to the queen of alt-rock angst behind a single album that sold over 33 million copies...

2 Juli 21min

Thank U, Next: How Grief Rewrote the Pop Rulebook

Thank U, Next: How Grief Rewrote the Pop Rulebook

In late 2018, at the peak of her career, Ariana Grande's personal life shattered publicly. Rather than issue careful PR statements, she locked herself in a studio with friends and champagne and made a...

2 Juli 20min

Ariana Grande: From Rejected R&B Kid to Pop Mogul

Ariana Grande: From Rejected R&B Kid to Pop Mogul

At 14, Ariana Grande was laughed out of a Los Angeles boardroom for pitching a soulful R&B album. Years later she held the top three spots on the Billboard Hot 100 simultaneously, a feat untouched sin...

2 Juli 20min

Arlo Parks: The Cost of Comforting a Generation

Arlo Parks: The Cost of Comforting a Generation

Arlo Parks went from a teenager writing poems and listening to too much emo music to winning the Mercury Prize, touring with Billie Eilish, and co-writing for Beyonce. This deep dive traces her accele...

2 Juli 17min

Beabadoobee: The Misfit Who Escaped Her Viral Fame

Beabadoobee: The Misfit Who Escaped Her Viral Fame

Expelled from a strict Catholic school for misfit behavior, a teenager taught herself guitar from YouTube and uploaded a song as a joke under a gibberish Instagram name. Years later she was opening fo...

2 Juli 20min

Bebe Rexha: The Secret Hitmaker Who Claimed Her Voice

Bebe Rexha: The Secret Hitmaker Who Claimed Her Voice

She wrote a Grammy-winning track for Eminem and Rihanna, penned K-pop hits, and shaped the sound of pop radio, yet could walk through a coffee shop unrecognized. This deep dive into Bebe Rexha examine...

2 Juli 17min

Beyonce's Cowboy Carter and the Reclaiming of Country

Beyonce's Cowboy Carter and the Reclaiming of Country

When Beyonce performed a country song at the 2016 CMA Awards, the response was to scrub the evidence and reject the song as not country enough. This deep dive into her 2024 landmark album Cowboy Carte...

2 Juli 17min

Populärt inom Nöje

mellan-himmel-och-jord-med-jlc
filip-fredrik-svarar
badfluence
mardromsgasten
dialogiskt
rss-p3-musikdokumentar
chilla-med-de-vet-du
fem-i-topp
hemma-hos-strage
skandal
mannen-utan-spar
schulman-show
karatefylla
gott-snack-med-fredrik-soderholm
podme-bio-4
alex-room-service-en-podcast-om-kiss
sexet
skalla-dagen-med-mia-skaringer
vardagsmysterier
rss-made-in-sverige-podcast