Tag: Bragg, Melvyn

In Our Time: Epicureanism

Epicureanism is another Greek philosophy I’d heard of but didn’t really know more than the name. Even less than I knew about scepticism, where at least I was vaguely aware of the idea. The experts dicussing Epicureanism on In Our Time were Angie Hobbs (University of Sheffield), David Sedley (University of Cambridge) and James Warren (University of Cambridge).

Epicurus was a Greek who lived around the 4th Century BC, who wrote extensively on many subjects including physics, natural history, ethics & philosophy. Many of his writings survived – partly the way things always survive, by being copied again & again as people find them useful and also by being referred to by other people. But they’ve also survived in a more surprising way – a library in the house of a Roman living near Herculaneum was preserved via being carbonised (so they said, I assume carbonised in a readable form) and there are works of Epicurus that are only known from this library. There’s also a poem written by Lucretius extolling the virtues of Epicureanism that passed on much of the philosophy, Hobbs in particular waxed lyrical about this.

They spent a while discussing Epicurus’s understanding of physics, as that underpinned his philosophy. He wasn’t the first Greek philosopher to believe the world to be made out of atoms, but he did write about this extensively. He argued it starting from the idea that our senses tell us that the world is made up of bodies, and that there must therefore also be voids otherwise no movement would be possible. He then argued that the bodies we see (like a person, an animal, a plant, a rock, whatever) must be made up of smaller bodies because the ones we see are divisible and change. So these small indivisible (and invisible) bodies are atoms, and they exist in a void. He also argued that this void must be infinite, because if there is an end to it then what’s beyond the end? Logically it must be infinite and then this implies that the bodies (atoms) are infinite in number – if there was only a finite number then they’d be spread too thin to form the larger bodies.

Epicurus also needed to explain how come we can have free will if everything is made up of atoms that move in precisely predictable ways, and he did this by means of “the swerve”. This is saying that an atom as it moves in its straight line might deviate a small amount in its course, and this then means that not everything is predictable so there can still be free will. This idea came back again in the early 20th Century – as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle allowed philosophers who were worried how free will could fit into a universe ordered by Newtonian physics to say that the universe wasn’t predictable. But the experts were saying that it’s not clear how that actually works, mechanistically speaking, to give free will it just feels intuitive that you need some sort of unpredictability to the universe.

These ideas about the physical basis of the world put him in opposition to the Sceptics. Because his arguments are all based initially on “our senses tell us …” he can’t share the Sceptics’ views that one cannot trust one’s senses. So he argued against that. His theory about how our senses work was that there was some film emanated by a physical body that passed through the air to the ears or eyes or whatever. And when it entered our sense organs then the brain’s interpretation of that was always accurate – but it might have been changed between the object and one’s sense organs. So an example is an oar half in & half out of water looks bent but feels straight. The Sceptical way to look at this was that it was a contradiction between your two senses so how could you tell which one was accurate? Epicurus said that your perceptions were both accurate – it looks bent, it feels straight – and it’s that something happens between the object and your seeing of it that makes it look bent.

This model of the physical world is what lead to Epicurus’s philosophy of life. If everything is made up from these bodies, including the soul, including the gods, then there is no afterlife and the gods are not our creators. So the right and good way to live your life should be based on something in this world, and Epicurus said that this should be pleasure. When a baby is born, it already knows the difference between pain & pleasure it’s not something taught – so choosing pleasure as your guiding principle is going back to basics. This wasn’t a philosophy of sybaritic luxury, Epicurus believed that true pleasure was when you were free of pain and it didn’t get better by adding on more luxuries. So if you weren’t hungry, then that was the same amount of pleasure regardless of whether you’d had a simple, filling meal or a fancy feast. They talked about this quite a bit on the programme – there was something about two sorts of pleasures, and the static ones (like freedom from hunger) being the greater ones. Epicurus also counted freedom from fear as being a foundational form of pleasure, so to follow his philosophy you needed to work on not being afraid of death. When it came to physical pain his idea was that if it’s mild pain then you can use your mind to remember past pleasure or anticipate future pleasure and eventually the pain will pass. And if it’s severe pain then it won’t last long (they were saying on the programme that this was because if it was severe pain then you were probably going to die, and as there was no afterlife then it’d all be over).

They were saying that Epicureanism lasted well into Roman times as a philosophical school, but it’s in many ways the opposite of Christianity. So as Christianity rose Epicureanism fell out of favour. The works of Epicurus were rediscovered in Europe in the Renaissance, but they didn’t have much time on the programme to discuss this.

In Our Time: The War of 1812

I knew that there was a war in 1812, but it was mixed up in my head with Napoleon & Moscow and I wasn’t really sure who was fighting in the 1812 war … but it turns out it was a war between the British & the United States of America. My lack of knowledge of it seems to be indicative of how important it actually was to the UK (as opposed to the US) but that’s getting ahead of the story a bit. The experts who discussed it on In Our Time were Kathleen Burk (University College London), Lawrence Goldman (University of Oxford) and Frank Cogliano (University of Edinburgh).

The programme was split into three sections – first the context, then the war itself and then a brief discussion of the aftermath & what the war meant to the countries involved. A major part of the context is the on-going war between Britain and France. Partly it was fought via trying to force the US to trade with one or the other party, and imposing sanctions when they disobeyed. But another part of that context is that the British were in dire need of sailors to man their warships, so pursued deserters (or those they could tenuously claim had deserted) even when said men were no longer British citizens. So British Navy ships would stop US ships in international waters, and board them to look for “deserters” who’d then get taken back & put to work in the British Navy. But these so-called deserters may not’ve been deserters at all and may’ve become naturalised US citizens. Or maybe were US born US citizens who’d been impressed into the British Navy at some point in the past despite not being British.

The incidents that actually kicked off the war were two fold – reflecting both parts of this context. Firstly the British said that the US was no longer allowed to sell salted fish to the West Indies, because the British wanted the Canadians to supply it instead (which would keep the money in the Empire). And a US warship (as opposed to a US merchant ship) was boarded by British Navy forces, 4 men were killed and 4 “deserters” including native born US citizens taken off to the Navy. These insults combined with a sense that if the US didn’t defend its honour then it would be forever walked over by other countries, lead to the US declaring war on Britain.

The war itself Bragg described as desultory. Not many battles, the biggest battle actually happened after peace had been negotiated (in Belgium) but before the two forces in America could be told. There were three main areas where there was fighting – Canada, the Great Lakes region, and the Atlantic ocean/coastline. The US believed at the outset of the war that would be able to just march some of their militia into Canada and the Canadians would lay down their arms and join the US – not entirely a foolish idea for the US, they’d just acquired part of Florida through a similar campaign. But the Canadians didn’t, and the US invasion was pushed back. An attempted land invasion of the US by Canadian militia met equally little success though – both militias being good at defending their own territory but less good at invading.

In the Great Lakes region of the US the British were backing the Native Americans, in particular the Shawnee who tried to unite the various Native American tribes to push the white settlers out of their lands. This was ultimately unsuccessful even with British backing, and this conflict was a major factor in the later campaigns against the Native Americans pushing them out of their lands (including the Trail of Tears). Andrew Jackson who was president when the later persecution of Native Americans was carried out became a war hero during this war partly because of his successful battles against the Creek Indians.

The naval arena was the area where the British had by far the upper hand – their army was bigger too, but the British Navy was the première Navy in the world at this time. However two of the biggest successes for the US came in this area. The Battle of Baltimore, which has been memorialised by the poem that turned into the national anthem of the US (the Star Spangled Banner), and the Battle of New Orleans which occurred just after the peace treaty was signed. However the British did have successes as well – they successfully captured Washington after the local militia fled from the British Army force (that heavily outnumbered them as well as being better trained & armed). Originally the intent was to levy a fine (I think that’s what they said) as an indication that the town was captured, but as the Army marched into the town under a white flag they were fired upon – at which point they put to death the people in the house which had fired on them, and burnt down the various government buildings including the Presidential Palace & the Library of Congress. The experts were keen to point out that with the exception of the house which had fired on the army there was no damage done to civilian buildings.

The war came to an end after about 3 years mainly because the tensions that had lead to it went away – Napoleon was no longer ruler of France and Britain was no longer at war with France. Which meant that they weren’t so worried about US trade, nor were they so worried about tracking down deserters. Public opinion in Britain was also against the war – as being a waste of money & men, for no good reason. Peace was negotiated at a meeting in Belgium, and Burk summarised the treaty as saying not much of anything – nothing had changed since before the war & the treaty didn’t really mention any of the things that the war had been about. The other two disagreed with that as a general statement – but they did agree that from the point of view of Britain Burk was right.

From the point of view of the US this had been much more significant – it was almost a second War of Independence, and they felt they had asserted their right to be treated as a sovereign country. And as the news of one of their biggest victories in the war (in New Orleans) reached the majority of the country at the same time as news of peace did, it looked awfully like they’d won the war. Rather than it having been a bit of a damp squib that fizzled out. And from the point of view of the Native Americans it had been a disaster, which lead to public support for their persecution.

In Our Time: Romulus and Remus

The primary founding myth of Rome is the story of Romulus and Remus, which we know from written sources from the 1st Century BC. It’s clear that the story is older than that, but opinions differ as to how old it is. The three experts who talked about the myth & it’s origins on In Our Time were Mary Beard (University of Cambridge), Peter Wiseman (University of Exeter) and Tim Cornell (University of Manchester).

They opened the programme by giving us a recap of the basic form of the myth, which opens with Numitor and Amulius. Numitor is the true King of Alba Longa, but his brother Amulius usurps his throne and tries to ensure there are no true heirs left. He installs Numitor’s daughter as a virgin priestess to prevent her from bearing more heirs to Numitor’s crown, but despite this precaution she still gets pregnant. One version of the story is that the father of the children is the god Mars who appears in the holy fire as a phallus and impregnates her (which must’ve been a trifle disconcerting for the lass!). The children, Romulus and Remus, are exposed on the banks of the Tiber but instead of dying they are suckled by a she-wolf for long enough to be rescued by a shepherd & brought up. Skipping forward to when they become adults they return to the city of their birth, and once they realise who they are they overthrow Amulius and reinstate Numitor as King. Wanting a city of their own to rule (as Numitor doesn’t look like to die any time soon) they set out to found one. Because they’re twins there’s no obvious answer to which one’s in charge, so they ask the gods to give them a sign. Both see a sign that they think makes them ruler, and in most versions of the myth the arguments continue until Remus is killed (most often by Romulus himself, or by his orders).

That’s the bit I knew already of the myth, but the story continues. Once the city was founded Romulus (and Remus if he’s still alive) wanted to attract new citizens, so that they had people to rule over. And so they allowed refugees and asylum seekers to join their population – regardless of the reasons they were unwelcome at their place of origin. So not just political refugees, but also criminals or runaway slaves were welcome. Most of these people were male, which presented a problem for the proto-city and its ability to sustain its population. So Romulus tried to negotiate marriage agreements with surrounding settlements – but these were turned down on the basis that the citizens of Rome were the dregs of society. So Romulus held a festival and invited all these other settlements to it – they came, with their daughters as well. And then Romulus and the citizens of Rome abducted the women – this is the rape of the Sabine women (which is a phrase I’d heard, but I didn’t remember the story if I’d ever heard it). The other settlements were obviously rather annoyed, and went to war with Rome – most were easily defeated but the Sabines were not. At the height of battle in Rome itself the women (who had now had children with their abductors) appealed to both sides to stop fighting – on the basis that their fathers were killing their sons-in-law, and this was senseless. The two communities made peace, and merged with Romulus now ruling jointly with the Sabine King. The Sabine King later dies, under suspicious circumstances which some versions of the myth pin on Romulus. Romulus lives to a ripe old age, then rather than dying he vanishes – in some versions ascending directly to heaven.

So that’s the story, and then the programme moved on to talking about how old it was and what the Romans themselves thought about it. There are no texts before the 1st Century BC, so what evidence there is for the story being older is more tenuous and based on art. Beard presented a couple of different things – a generally agreed upon one, that there was a statue of Romulus and Remus erected in Rome in the early 3rd Century BC. So there must’ve been a version of this myth then. The other piece of evidence is a mirror from the 4th Century BC which has a design on it that is a pair of infants and a wolf. Beard said that she thought this was pretty good evidence for the existence of the myth at that time. Wiseman disagreed – saying that the design also includes the god Mercury who has no place in this myth but does in a different with with twins in (but no wolf). He also thought that the myth cannot be older than 300BC because that’s when Rome & Sabine merged as a historical event so thus the story must have been invented to explain that.

And then the three experts had a very robust (yet utterly courteous) disagreement about myth, story and the origins of stories. This was clearly a debate these three had had before, they were all aware of each other’s positions on the matter before they started. I’ll attempt to summarise – Wiseman holds the opinion that a story has a single point of creation and that this is a conscious act by a specific person, who is inventing the story in order to explain some event. Beard and Cornell on the other hand think that the stories grow out of older stories and change with time and with telling. That you can compare the writing down of the Romulus and Remus myth in the 1st Century BC to the Grimm brothers collecting old folk tales by going and listening to people telling them and then writing down a “definitive” version of a fairytale which is not necessarily the only or the original version. I’m with Beard & Cornell, personally – I don’t see why there can’t’ve been a Romulus and Remus myth dating back a long time into Rome’s history (perhaps growing out of something earlier), that later incorporated bits & pieces of other stories and events as they seemed relevant to the people at the time*. Yes, Wiseman is right that by definition there must be a first time a particular story is told – but how do you decide when it counts as this story and stops being that other story that’s got a lot of similar features.

*Worth noting that the lack of evidence is lack of evidence for both theories – pre-1st Century BC it’s an oral tradition and we have no way of knowing what exactly that was.

At the end of the programme they also talked about how the Romans thought about the myth, and about what it said about what the Romans thought about themselves. Cornell (I think) pointed out that the Romans often seem embarrassed about this myth – it involves a fratricide, and the earliest Romans are “riff raff”. So some Roman authors try and explain away these elements to sanitise it and make it more “suitable” for their great civilisation. And Beard talked about how it’s interesting that this myth makes Romans foreigners in their own city – and even the other founding myth (Aeneas fleeing Troy and founding Rome) is still a tale of refugees. And I think it was Wiseman who talked about how during the civil wars around the 1st Century BC there was a feeling that of course Rome was turning on itself because didn’t their city start with a fratricide and weren’t they doomed because of this.

In Our Time: Comets

Comets are an astronomical event/phenomenon that have exerted quite a hold on the imagination of people in the past & it’s only relatively recently that we have any understanding of what they are or why they happen. The In Our Time programme that discussed them primarily focused on the astronomy but did touch on the omens and portents side of them as well. The experts on the programme were Monica Grady (Open University), Paul Murdin (University of Cambridge) and Don Pollacco (University of Warwick).

They discussed what is known about comets and what the current theories are about where they come from etc. Comets were formed at the same time as the rest of the solar system – when the nebula that formed the sun and planets coalesced at a particular distance from the sun is what is known as the snow line, and beyond this small lumps of ice formed. These are the comets. Grady told us about the Oort cloud, which is a spherical region around the outside of the solar system where the comets orbit. When something perturbs this – gravitational changes due to the relative movements of our solar system & other parts of the galaxy, for instance – a comet might get jostled free and plunge in towards the sun. I specified that it was Grady that discussed the Oort cloud because one of the others (Pollacco, I think) was of the opinion that it wasn’t so much a sphere around the solar system, but more that this is how the spaces between the gravitational wells of different stars are filled (if that makes sense).

Once a comet is jostled free it still orbits the sun, but now the orbit is an eccentric one as compared to the planets. All the planets orbit in the same plane, in the same direction, in roughly circular orbits. But comets can be in any plane, and often move very close to the sun before returning to a much further out position. Comets are split into two classes – short-period and long-period. Murdin (I think it was) said that they’d like to be able to classify them by composition or something like that, but sadly we just don’t know enough about them to do that. So long-period comets take a long time to come back – this might be a few hundred years, or it might be forever. Some comets break up when they get close to the sun, due to the heat & gravitational pull. Some comets swing round the sun once and then go back to the Oort cloud (or whatever the true situation out there is). Short-period comets come back more often – Halley’s Comet is an example of this sort of comet.

They were saying that we only actually know the orbits & can predict 150 comets out of the many millions that there are. And Pollacco was crediting Halley’s prediction about his comet’s return as being one of the factors that helped to get the Enlightenment going. Basically he was saying that it was a very good demonstration of the power of science – Halley predicted the return of the comet despite this occurring after his death via scientific observations & mathematics, and then this prediction came true.

There is a little known about the composition of comets – due to space missions that have flown past comets and through their tails. One of those missions was named Stardust and it brought back some of the particles in a comet tail. They know that comets are lumps of ice, that are pretty small by cosmic standards – up to a few hundred kilometres across. They aren’t white like you expect when you say “ball of ice”, they’re black due to all the dust and rocky particles in them. Bragg asked what the difference was between an asteroid and a comet & the answer was partly the place you find them orbiting, and partly it’s a continuum where asteroids are icy bits of rock, but comets are rocky bits of ice. As a comet gets closer to the sun (inside the orbit of Mars) it develops a coma, which is gas that has sublimated out of the ice. A comet has two tails, both created by the effects of the sun. One of these tails is lots of bits of dust – melted out of the comet by the sun’s heat & left behind as the comet moves. The other tail is the coma being pushed back by the solar wind & radiation – this is the ion tail. The Stardust mission brought back bits of the first type of tail, and they found that these are little bits of rock much like rocks on earth – made up of silicon, plus some carbon, some nitrogen etc.

Bragg brought up Fred Hoyle’s theory that life on Earth was seeded from outer space by comets – discredited some time ago – and was slapped down by Grady (politely, but firmly). Hoyle was postulating that bacteria were present on comets and this is where life came from, but at best comets may’ve brought some of the water and minerals needed for life to the Earth.

While on the subject of how astronomy is a science where you might have things you want to know but you have to live with the things you can find out, they talked about the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact on Jupiter. This comet was discovered in 1993, and it shortly afterwards became apparent that it had not just been captured by Jupiter’s gravity but was going to crash into Jupiter. In 1994 this happened – sadly not quite in full view of all the telescopes, but the aftermath was clearly visible. Despite the relatively small size of the comet the marks it left were spectacular – about 80% the size of Earth! The comet broke up into about 25 pieces, and these hit in turn generating a straight line of marks. As each piece hit it ploughed through the atmosphere leaving a hole behind itself, and once it had hit the lower region of the atmosphere spurted back up the hole leaving a dark mark on the surface of Jupiter. Having seen the pattern of marks astronomers looked at craters on other planets/moons, and could see other examples of a row of craters in a straight line – presumably also from being hit by comets or asteroids that fragmented before they hit.

Thinking about comets is one of those things that makes it clear just how fragile life is on this planet …

In Our Time: Le Morte d’Arthur

The form of the Arthurian legend that was written by Thomas Malory in Le Morte d’Arthur was the first English language prose form of this legend, written around the 1460s & it had a lot of influence on later stories about Arthur. Discussing it on In Our Time were Helen Cooper (University of Cambridge), Helen Fulton (University of York) and Laura Ashe (University of Oxford).

They opened the programme by setting Malory in context – Cooper told us a little about the times he lived in, which was the end of the Hundred Years War and the start of the Wars of the Roses. This meant that he lived through unsettled times in a political sense. He himself wasn’t a very nice man – Cooper said that even by the standards of the time he was a thug, and he spent at least 15 years imprisoned for crimes ranging from cattle rustling to rape (the latter might’ve been consensual adultery – a husband could bring charges of rape under such circumstances). Being as he was a gentleman he was under house arrest rather than shackled in a dungeon, and he must’ve had access to a library during this time as his imprisonment is the period when he wrote Le Morte d’Arthur.

The Arthurian legend already existed in various forms by the 1460s. One of these forms was a pseudo-historical Arthur – crowbarred into the time between the end of the Roman Empire (in Britain) and the Anglo-Saxons, a mythical King who was British not Roman or Anglo-Saxon and who lead armies into battles & nearly defeated the Roman Empire. I think they were saying these English sources were in poetic form. There were also various French prose romances which were about Arthur & the Knights of the Round Table and their deeds, and chivalrous exploits. Malory’s tale took both these Arthurs and wrote one coherent book which both had elements of the pseudo-history and elements of the chivalrous romance. And was an English prose work, which was also new.

One of the experts (I forget who :/ ) made the point that Malory’s work was ground-breaking for romances of the time. His prose style was a lot more direct than the French sources he drew upon, which was a refreshing change (or so she was saying). And his focus on the characters and their stories was fairly new in English prose literature of the time – and is a part of what’s made this work last and influence more modern literature.

They also spent some time discussing the content of Le Morte d’Arthur – the theme they talked about that’s stuck with me is how the tragedy of the Arthurian Court is built into the premise. Arthur isn’t one of the Knights, he’s the King who sends out his Knights on their quests etc. Lancelot is the “best Knight” (although not the most spiritually pure Knight, he doesn’t get to find the Holy Grail after all) – and who should the “best Knight” be with but the “best Lady”, and that’s the Queen. And the downfall is brought about because other Knights are jealous of Lancelot, and so bring the whole thing out into the open where it can’t be ignored. So it’s that Lancelot is best that’s what brings about the tragic end. (The experts were also all saying that Lancelot seemed to be Malory’s favourite character.)

After Malory’s death the manuscript was printed (and edited) by Caxton and two forms of that have survived to the modern day. A while after the publication the book fell out of favour, but in Victorian times it was revived – chivalry as a concept was part of the cultural attempt to deal with having an Empire, and Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur as a chivalrous romance became popular again. And spawned more Arthurian stories & re-tellings from then through to the modern day.

In Our Time: The South Sea Bubble

The South Sea Bubble is one of the more famous early boom-bust financial scandals in Britain, in which a large number of people lost money & the government were thought to’ve been all too involved in the whole thing. The experts who talked about it on In Our Time were Anne Murphy (University of Hertfordshire), Helen Paul (University of Southampton) and Roey Sweet (University of Leicester).

They started the programme by setting the scene a little. The South Sea Company was set up in 1711, which is very early in the history of the financial stock market in London – which was only really set up in 1690s. Queen Anne was on the throne, and Britain was involved in the Spanish Succession War (attempting to prevent the French Bourbons from gaining the Spanish throne). War is expensive, and the government debt was rising – so the South Sea Company was set up to take on some of the government debt, and hopefully also make a profit (the model here would be the East India Company, which as we all know was spectacularly successful and gained a whole colony for Britain).

All three experts seemed sure that there was a chance for the Company to make a reasonable profit, it wasn’t an actual scam. It had a monopoly on British trade to South America – which was important politically because the Spanish controlled South America & so this played into the war efforts. They did in fact trade with South America. The Spanish never got a proper foothold in Africa, so they relied on other countries to provide them with African slaves to work in their colonies in South America, and the South Sea Company got one of these contracts (the war over the Spanish succession had Spanish on both sides, so that’s not as much of a surprise as one might think).

So the Company continued to finance the government debt, and make some profits, in a normal sort of fashion until 1720. And then a combination of factors all came together to make the prices of shares first rise stratospherically (from about £100 per share up to £1000 in a few months) and then crash back down. One of these factors was that companies were beginning to figure out how to advertise their shares to make them seem more attractive as investments thus drawing in ever more investors. And they were making it easier to buy those shares – you could pay in instalments, or get a loan from the Company itself which you paid back over a longer time (or with the profits you’d “inevitably” make rolls eyes). Another factor was the rumour spreading that the South Sea Company had “something big” in mind. And this big thing was that they were going to take on even more of the government debt. I admit to a blind spot about economics & how capitalism works – it always seems a confidence game to me, where it all just works because the economists believe it will – so I have to take it on faith that this would prompt investment. Or equally perhaps I’ve misunderstood this point 🙂

As the share price began to rise, people started to make lots of money (on paper) and this fuelled the desire of other investors for shares in the Company (I do understand how that bit of economics works 🙂 ). Other companies began to spring up – some with sensible sounding ideas, some less so – and to take advantage of this desire to invest, a bit like the dot com bubble with all the little start ups. And here’s where the South Sea Company started to shoot itself in the foot – they actually got Parliament to pass a law restricting the setting up of these new joint-stock companies and that started to change the mood of the investors (I think that’s how it was a bad idea).

And then it went pop! The mood changed, and the price dropped, and a lot of people lost money – some of it money they’d not actually had in the first place. One of the reasons that it’s so famous is because for the first time it affected a large cross-section of society – including a lot of writers who wrote about it. And not just wealthy people – because of the loans-to-buy-shares thing there were quite a lot of less well off people who’d thought they were going to make their fortune, and now had lost even what they’d started with. However, the experts were unanimous in saying that actually it wasn’t as bad as one might think from the reports and the writing about it – it didn’t drive the whole country’s economy into recession (or not for long), and even the South Sea Company itself continued along for another hundred or so years making modest profits. And even some of the vocally upset people only lost money “on paper” – if you’d bought in before 1720 then your shares were worth around the same or a little more in 1721. Of course some people made a lot of money by selling out at the right time, but they tended to keep rather quieter about it. This (as they said a couple of times on the programme) was definitely a period of history that was written by the losers.

Suspiciously one of the people who made money on the deal was Walpole – a leading (Whig) politician (who wikipedia tells me was the first Prime Minister of Britain – it didn’t really exist as a role till around the 1720s). There was definitely government corruption involved in the setting up & running of the Company (the debt financing side of it) – the experts talked about bribery with the Company doing things like promising politicians shares which they then had an incentive for passing laws etc to raise the value of. The collapse of the bubble damaged the reputation of Walpole, the Whigs & even the King (George I was on the throne by this point). Although Walpole was still one of the premier politicians for another decade or two, at the time of the end of his political career satirical cartoons about his involvement in the South Sea Bubble were still being circulated.

I can’t remember which of the three experts it was, but one of them brought up the effect the bubble and its collapse had on wider perceptions of women & finance. Because of the opening up of share buying and the advertising and encouragement for new investors to join in there was a much more significant number of women as shareholders of the South Sea Company – as many as 20% of the investors were female. Some of these women did well – they mentioned a particular Duchess whose name I’ve forgotten who sold out at the right moment, then made even more money lending it to people who’d lost money. But at the time that this hysteria & mania for shares that lead to the boom & bust wasn’t really understandable – economists today know this is how markets work when you have these conditions, but at the time it was seen as irrational. And there was a perception at the time that it was in part due to letting silly, irrational women make financial decisions – that they’d followed some notion of “fashion” and that had lead to the bubble and to its bursting.

I think I’ve missed out loads they talked about on the programme – like there was a bit about the French financial market which collapsed a bit before the South Sea Bubble. All three experts & Bragg were definitely very enthusiastic & kept wandering off on to tangents and having to re-track to get back to the actual topic on hand.

In Our Time: Crystallography

Crystallography is a technique that uses the diffraction patterns created by passing x-rays through a crystallised substance to determine the structure of the substance. It was first described in 1912 & has become very important to many scientific disciplines since then. The experts who discussed it on In Our Time were Judith Howard (University of Durham), Chris Hammond (University of Leeds) and Mike Glazer (University of Oxford and University of Warwick).

The programme opened with a brief description of crystallography & its wide-ranging uses in the sciences and then moved on to discuss the history of the technique. X-rays were discovered by chance at the end of the 19th Century, and were given the name “x-ray” because they were unknown rays. One of the questions physicists were trying to answer about these new rays was “are they particles or waves?”. As I understand it the modern physicist’s answer to this would be “yes.” but at the turn of the 20th Century they were still trying to categorise things as one or the other. A German physicist called Laue figured out an experiment to look at this – light waves split and are diffracted if passed through a diffraction grating, but the holes in these are far too wide to do the same at the sorts of wavelengths that x-rays have. So when he learnt about crystals – that they are regular arrangements of atoms or molecules – he realised these might act as diffraction gratings for x-rays. As he was a theoretician he got his students to do the actual experiment (I thought Hammond was quite sarcastic about this as he was telling us about it) – which neatly showed both that x-rays act like light waves when you use a fine enough diffraction grating and that crystals have this regular structure.

The next step on the way to using crystallography to determine the structures of molecules was done by a father & son team called William Henry Bragg & William Lawrence Bragg. Glazer told us a bit about the family – that they came from Wigton, Cumbria (just like Melvyn Bragg, in fact) and William senior moved out to Australia where he met his wife & had children (including William Lawrence). The family moved back to England, where William senior became a professor of physics at Leeds University & Lawrence became a student at Cambridge University. And they both worked on x-rays & x-ray diffraction through crystals. It was Lawrence who figured out the formula (Bragg’s Law) that describes the way that x-rays pass through the crystal structure & how the interactions between the different wavelengths and the differing spaces between the parallel planes of atoms produce a particular configuration of spots on the photographic plate. This formula is now used to work out the structure of a molecule from knowing the wavelengths of X-rays that are put in, and analysing the diffraction patterns that come out.

William senior in parallel was developing the X-ray spectrometer which provides a quantitative measure of the diffraction patterns. The original set up for these experiments was to shine a beam of X-rays through a crystal onto a photographic plate, and then look at the intensities of the spots to work out what structure would’ve generated that pattern. And for simple structures this works out OK, but as it gets more complicated you have a much more complex pattern where differing dots of differing densities might be hard to tell apart. So William developed a technique & machine that shone different wavelengths of x-rays through the crystal at a variety of angles sequentially rather than simultaneously, and then passed the diffracted beam into an ionising chamber to measure the intensity. This was initially a slow & laborious process, but essentially the same principle is used in today’s crystallography experiments – just the advent of computers & more refined technology has made the whole process much easier.

The first structures solved were simple ones – the very first was that of salt, NaCl. People then moved on to slightly more complex molecules (such as the benzene ring). And from there to much more complicated things, like proteins which consist of hundreds of thousands of atoms. The first of these to be published was the structure of haemoglobin, which was solved by Max Perutz – I think I once went to a lecture given by Perutz (but about 20 years ago so I can’t really remember it). The most famous is the structure of DNA, the discovery of which was published by Watson & Crick but relied heavily on data from Rosalind Franklin (which she wasn’t aware had been given to the other two, and she wasn’t credited for her work at the time).

During the programme the conversation went off on some interesting tangents. The first of these was that there is a relatively large number of women working in crystallography at all levels, and has been since the early days of the science. Howard said that this was down to both the newness of the field (relatively speaking) and the attitudes of the initial founders. Both Braggs welcomed anyone who could do the work into their groups, and didn’t discriminate based on gender, and there weren’t previous entrenched attitudes about the “place of women” in the field to overcome.

They also briefly discussed the way that modern science funding would’ve stifled some of the pioneering work in the field. I shan’t get up on my soapbox here, but it’s something I’m in agreement with. The examples from this discussion include the discovery of both x-rays themselves, and the technique of crystallography, which revolutionised several scientific fields and wouldn’t’ve happened if the scientists had had to figure out in advance why it was worth spending the money on that research. And some of the initial work solving structures was incredibly long term by modern standards – it took Perutz 25 years to be able to publish the structure of haemoglobin, no direct pay off in a 3 year project that’s easy to point to when you’re writing a grant application. You need some blue skies research and long term projects, as well as the more directed and more obviously relevant stuff – that’s how you expand the boundaries of knowledge & find out truly new things.

And they discussed how crystallography is a multi-disciplinary field – and that’s one of it’s strengths. People come from different scientific backgrounds, and collaborate across the boundaries of these fields.

In Our Time: The Cult of Mithras

The cult of Mithras was one of several cults that sprang up in the Roman Empire during the 1st Century AD. It was a mystery cult and so what we know of it now comes from archaeological evidence and the writings of people who were not members. The experts who discussed it on In Our Time were Greg Woolf (University of St Andrews), Almut Hintze (SOAS, University of London) and John North (Institute of Classical Studies, University of London).

The historical origins of the Mithras cult aren’t clear – back in the late 19th Century it was thought that the cult had a direct connection to Zoroastrianism, mostly because there is a Zoroastrian god called Mithra. But more recent scholarship suggests that the connection isn’t particularly direct – it’s more like the Romans took the name & some very basic idea of the worship of Mithra and then reinvented it completely for their own cult. (Which meant it felt a little like Hintze was invited to the programme based on a faulty understanding, as she’s a Professor of Zoroastrianism – she did have other things to contribute, but I felt like she got unfairly cut off a few times.) Other cults that sprang up at the same time had similar types of origins, although possibly had closer links to their parent religion – things like the Roman Isis cult, or a Demeter cult. And of course Christianity can be seen as another of these – Pauline Christianity is partly a reinterpretation of Judaism for Gentiles.

The literary sources of information about the Mithras cult are pretty slim – a lot of it is written by Christians who are trying to show how their religion is a real one, and this Mithras nonsense is a work of the devil. That was apparently a mainstream Christian opinion during the first couple of centuries after Christ, that the devil had started up all these other cults so that the truth of Christianity would be obscured by competing cults. And later in the 4th & 5th centuries Christians were involved in the destruction of Mithraic temples (as part of a wider movement of the destruction of pagan temples).

The archaeology tells us more about the iconography & so on of the cult, but as I said at the start it was a mystery cult and so the iconography is not explained. One of the images that is present in nearly all excavated temples is of Mithras killing a bull, while a dog & a serpent lap up the blood and a scorpion & a raven are also involved in the killing. Hintze pointed out that this is very different from the Zoroastrian Mithra in the level of violence protrayed – whilst there is a Zoroastrian myth that death entered the world with the killing of a bull, it’s the force of evil who does the killing in Zoroastrianism and doesn’t come with so much violence. Whereas in the Mithras cult it’s the god doing this, and it’s a violent scene – still possibly having to do with creation of the cosmos in some fashion. Other scenes include some sort of story for how the bull ends up in the cave where it is killed (although these are not always in the same order which seems odd if they are a sacred narrative). And a meal that Sol & Mithras eat together.

The temples themselves represent a cave – the cave that the bull was killed in. And there are indications that the gathered worshippers (20-40 of them) ate a communal meal. There is also from one temple some recent evidence that there may’ve been some sort of ritual meal for non-initiates around the outskirts of the temple. But by the way this was presented on the programme it seems this is still very much a conjecture based on a single data point.

Another archaeological source for the cult are the dedicatory inscriptions from members of the cult. These are all from men, and as there are a few thousand of these (I think they said) this seems to suggest that there were no women members of the cult. They are also all from the middling sort of people – not poor, not rich. And are primarily members of the military or the bureaucratic hierarchy.

It seems that the cult had seven levels of initiate, the lowest ones were called ravens & the highest paters (fathers). One of the middle levels was called a leo (lion) and from some of the texts & inscriptions this seems to be the “normal” level of an initiate. There could only be one pater per temple, and when there were too many worshippers a new temple would be built. I think they have depictions of the initiation ceremonies for progressing up the levels & it seems that these were fairly brutal. Presumably they also involved transfer of the sacred knowledge, but we don’t have any record of this.

Towards the end of the programme they had a little segment doing a compare & contrast with Christianity, because that has always been one of the things that’s brought up when discussing Mithraism in a modern context. They talked about how the 25th December was supposed to be significant in the Mithras cult, but it seems this was based on a single calendar and it’s not even clear that that’s what the calendar meant! That’s the one I’d heard before, that Mithras’ birthday was the same as Christ’s but that doesn’t appear to be true. They also discussed how Christianity was actually more similar to the Demeter & Isis cult than it was to the Mithras cult – there’s no death & resurrection in the Mithras mythology (that we know of) for instance. And in the Mithras cult your position in the secular hierarchy was often reflected in your position in the initiate hierarchy – which is again not the case with Christianity.

When I set out to write this I wasn’t sure how much I was going to remember, but it seems the answer is “quite a lot” 🙂

In Our Time: Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell was, among many other things, one of the influential British philosophers of the 20th Century. The experts who discussed his life & ideas on In Our Time were A. C. Grayling (New College of the Humanities, London and St Anne’s College, Oxford), Mike Beaney (University of York) and Hilary Greaves (Somerville College, Oxford). The programme concentrated on his mathematical work and on his philosophical ideas. They started the programme with a brief description of Russell’s early life – he was born in 1872 as a part of an aristocratic family & didn’t go to school until his teens, just before he went to study at Cambridge University. The bit that stuck in my mind from this part of the programme is that he wasn’t sent to school because he was thought of as the sensitive sort – his brother went to school, but that was because he was more into sports & more robust.

He started out studying mathematics, and then moved onto philosophy, and worked in both fields over his life. In mathematics he was particularly concerned with building the whole of maths up from logic alone – so in arithmetic instead of accepting as an axiom that 1+1=2 you first have to prove that. This was partly because of a philosophical point of view that why should you accept those axioms on trust, and partly because if your system of deciding if a proof is valid or not depends at any point upon intuition then it’s possible for different mathematicians to disagree about the validity of proofs.

So to derive something like 1+1=2 from logical principles alone he first had to define the numbers based on logical principles and the operation of addition. He used the then new idea of sets – called “classes” at the time. I think the idea for how to use sets to define numbers worked as follows: the idea of identity (something is identical to something else) is a logical principle. The idea of non-identity is also such a principle. If you have a set that contains all things that are not identical to themselves, then you have a set with nothing in it – this is the null set, or zero. This set is a singular object. If you have a set that contains the null set and nothing else, then it is a member of the set of all sets that only contain one thing. Which you can use as the definition of the natural number 1. Now you have two objects (the null set, and the definition of 1) and can use those in the same way to define the natural number 2. I am a little confused here why this isn’t using the number to define itself – but I suspect the confusion arises from me (and the experts on the programme) using words to discuss something that’s better done symbolically. They didn’t cover how Russell used sets to define the operation of addition, but I suspect that’s even more complicated.

But using sets to define the basic logical underpinnings of arithmetic introduces a paradox – called Russell’s Paradox, because he described this flaw. If you have a set that contains all sets that do not contain themselves, then does that set contain itself or not? The word picture they used to make the paradox more clear was to say imagine there’s a barber in a village who shaves all the men who do not shave themselves, and only the men who do not shave themselves. If he does not shave himself, then he is a man who does not shave himself and so must be shaved by the barber. But the barber is himself, so if he shaves himself then he is ineligible to be shaved by the barber. But the barber is himself, so now he is not shaved by himself and so must be shaved by the barber etc etc. So Russell took his theory back to pieces and tried to rebuild it without this flaw (and ultimately failed, I think they said). He tried to categorise the sorts of objects that can exist into a hierarchy – there are objects that aren’t sets, then there are level one sets that contain objects that aren’t sets, level 2 sets can contain objects that are level 1 sets etc etc.

And I was reminded that I should re-read “Gödel, Escher, Bach” at some point 🙂

On the philosophy side of things Russell was the founder of something called Analytic Philosophy, which is apparently the dominant philosophy in the English speaking world these days. He was reacting against Idealism which was the dominant philosophy when he was studying at Cambridge. I think the key thing was that the Idealists thought of the mind as the dominant thing, the world exists as it is perceived – essentially a sceptical philosophy where you don’t know if anything is real except that which you have perceived yourself. Russell was more of a Realist (technical term, I think) who was on the side where if you can express a thought about something then that thing must in some sense exist (even if what you are saying is “fairies don’t exist” then the very fact you can conceive of fairies means they do somehow exist even if not actually in the actual real world). Analytic philosophy isn’t as far from Russell’s mathematics as one might imagine at first glance – a large part of his system is breaking down language into logical components and using this to express ideas with clarity. I have a feeling I’ve completely mangled this explanation, and looking at wikipedia hasn’t helped. I do remember the example they gave of the sort of thing he was talking about, which is that the sentence “The present King of France is bald” is actually made up of three logical sentences. In words this would be “There is a thing that is the King of France”, “All things which fit the definition of this thing are this thing” and “The thing that is this thing, is bald.” So when you look at the original sentence it’s hard to tell if it’s true or false – and Russell wanted this to break down to a binary system, either a statement is true or it’s false. The original sentence is actually quite complex – with no King of France, is he bald or not? But if you look at the three logical sentences that make it up, then you can assign it to the “false” category because the very first logical part of it is clearly false (there is no thing that is the King of France).

They ended the programme by saying that Russell did lots of other things as well as mathematics & philosophy – for instance he was heavily in politics, wrote several popular books. But clearly there just wasn’t enough time in the programme to do more than scratch at the surface of his life. And even then it felt like one of the more complex episodes of In Our Time that we’ve listened to.

In Our Time: Shahnameh of Ferdowsi

The Shahnameh is an epic poem, twice as long as the Odyssey & the Iliad put together, written in 10th Century AD Persia about Persian history. It took its author, Ferdowsi, 30 years to write and is still regarded today as one of the important pieces of Persian literature. The experts who discussed it on In Our Time were Narguess Farzad (University of London), Charles Melville (University of Cambridge) and Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis (British Museum). The two women are Iranian, and particularly towards the end of the programme were very enthusiastic about how important this poem is to Iran & to the cultural identity of the Iranian people.

At the time it was written it was a few centuries after Persia had been conquered by the Muslim Arabs at a time when the Caliphate was no longer a strong force across the Islamic Empire. The Persian people had kept oral traditions of their culture, and their own language, and during this period there was a reassertion of Persian culture. Ferdowsi was writing as part of this cultural movement & he was setting out to retell pre-existing prose records & oral tradition as poetry because he believed this would be easier to remember. So it was a self-conscious effort at writing something for posterity. It’s written in early modern Persian, so is still understandable today even if somewhat archaic. The format is rhyming couplets, and a specific meter – I think they said it was 11 syllables, a pause, 11 more syllables for each line, and the middles and the ends of the lines in a couplet rhyme. I’m not sure if that means it’s A: A, A: A, B: B, B: B or if it means it’s A: B, A: B, C: D, C: D (if you see what I mean). They said he was a very good poet and within the strict meter he uses the feel of the language to fit the things he’s writing about. So battles have words that feel short and energetic, but scenes like banquets are more flowing words.

The poem is split into three parts – myths, legends & history. The myths are what we might think of as pre-history – the first people (cave dwellers), the coming of gods, that sort of thing. The legends are the stories of heroes, and of early kings and early battles (and these may or may not’ve happened, but certainly didn’t happen like they’re told). And the history is the stories of the Kings of the Sassanid Empire – which runs from around 200AD to the Islamic conquest of Persia in about 650AD. This is accurate in the sense that the right kings are named in the right order, but it’s not really telling you about what happened when, it’s more of a manual for “how to be a good Persian King”. There are lots of dialogues where the wise advisor tells the new King how to rule – reminds me a bit of Ancient Egyptian literature which has a whole genre of that sort of thing.

After it was written it wasn’t all that popular at first – it must’ve survived, and been copied around because it’s referred to in other literature. But it comes into its own once the Mongols conquer Persia, as a way of Persianising the new rulers and of showing what it means to be Persian. Since then it’s occupied a central role in Persian education & culture – they were saying that it’s taught in schools and that even people without formal schooling would learn sections of the poem.