Tag: science

Treasures of Ancient Egypt (Ep 3); Sacred Wonders of Britain; Tudor Monastery Farm; The Brain: A Secret History

The third and final episode of Treasures of Ancient Egypt covered the period from Ramesses II through to Cleopatra. In terms of the history of the period this can be seen as a long slow decline from the height of New Kingdom power through several foreign dynasties to the annexing of Egypt by the Roman Empire. Alastair Sooke’s thesis was that in terms of the art this was a new dawn – fuelled in part by foreign Pharaohs’ desires to be more Egyptian than the Egyptians, and during times of self-rule by a renewed sense of national pride and connection with their history.

This pieces he looked at were again a mix of iconic objects we all know about, and other less well known objects. This time there were several temples – starting with the temple at Abu Simbel, and later showing us the temple of Horus at Edfu and the temple at Dendera. One of the threads he used to hold the programme together was the gradual introduction of more realism to the art – for instance he looked at the art under the Nubian Pharaohs, and pointed out how the faces were much more lifelike. And this is taken further under the Ptolemies when there is some merging between the naturalistic Greek style and the more stylised Egyptian art. One of the places he took us to illustrate this was a tomb chapel that had the traditional layout and scene types that one would expect, but the figures were drawn in a much more lifelike fashion and looked almost Greek.

The interludes with modern artists were particularly good this week. I liked the chance to see how faience and faience shabtis were made. Faience shabtis as a group were one of his treasures, the first mass produced art in the world. The expert from UCL that he talked to about this first showed him some of the shabtis in the Petrie Museum, and then showed him how he made his own shabti inspired art. The other modern artist was a graffiti artist in Cairo who has taken inspiration from both the official iconography of ancient Egypt (like the Pharaoh smiting his enemies scenes) and from the ostraca found at Deir el Medina. Inspired by the latter he paints topsy-turvy scenes with the cat & mouse instead of people. His art also had a political twist – and he talked about how the same was true for the ancient Egyptians.

This has been a very good series. Although there were a few over simplified pieces of history Sooke generally did a good job of providing enough historical info for context without turning it into a history lesson. As I’m often approaching the objects from a perspective of learning about the history that produced them it was interesting to have someone talk about them as art in their own right. I thought the mix of objects chosen was good too. The “obvious” iconic pieces were there (but looked at from a fresh perspective) and there were several less obvious pieces so the whole thing didn’t feel like we’d seen it all before. At first I was dubious about the bits where Sooke talked to modern artists, but some of the later segments of that sort were really cool.

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We finished three other serieses this week, so I shall try & keep my commentary brief! The first of these was Sacred Wonders of Britain – a Neil Oliver series that looked at sacred places in Britain from earliest prehistory through to the Reformation. This is quite a large sweep of time, and I thought the last episode was the weakest of the three. In part because it didn’t feel like it was quite Oliver’s thing, being history not archaeology, and in part because they were having to take account of the fact that Christianity is a current faith. As always with a programme presented by Oliver I thought he went too far off into flights of fancy at times – taking the expert opinion of “maybe” and turning it into a long imagined story of how it “was”.

However, criticisms aside I do like his programmes overall and this series was no exception. There were a lot of places shown that I’d not heard of or seen before which was cool to see. I was particularly struck by the prehistoric flint mine which at first didn’t seem like it was a particularly good candidate for sacred. But as the archaeologists pointed out there was plenty of flint available on the surface in the very same location of the same quality as that from the mines. There were several tools left behind in the mines which didn’t seem in poor condition, and the few skeletons that have been found (in cave ins) were of young people on the cusp of adulthood. Taking all of that together they think it might’ve been some sort of rite of passage.

Another series we finished was Tudor Monastery Farm. This was part re-enactment and part documentary, presented by Ruth Goodman, Peter Ginn and Tom Pinfold. It’s part of a collection of serieses called SOMETHING Farm, each taking a different period of history and telling us about farming during that time, we’ve previously watched Wartime Farm (post). This was the first of these serieses that Tom Pinfold had been in – in the previous ones the third presenter was Alex Langlands – and sadly I didn’t think he had much on screen chemistry with anyone. From a quick look around the BBC website it seems he’s pretty new to being a presenter, so perhaps he’ll improve as he relaxes into the job.

There were 6 episodes in the regular series covering the whole year of farming and life as it would have been in the year 1500, and one special afterwards which looked at Christmas festivities. They’d picked this year as it was pre-Reformation and post-Wars of the Roses. So it was a peaceful, settled era and the people still observed all the Catholic rites. The farm type they were recreating was a farm owned by a monastery, but worked by prosperous lay people. One of the key themes of the series was that farming in this period was beginning to change – more and more the tenant farmers were growing grain and raising animals to sell as well as to feed themselves and give to the monastery. One of the things I like about these serieses is that the re-enactment portion of it really shows how things worked – like how you build a fence if you’re a Tudor farmer – and the documentary side of it fills in the little details you wouldn’t get just by looking at it (which woods you choose and how you get them, in the case of the fence).

Because this was about such a long ago period of time they didn’t just cover farming. There were, of course, a lot of details about everyday life (like clothes, or how they cooked). And they also covered more specialist things like how to make a stained glass window, how you mined and purified lead, how salt was produced, how they made fireworks and so on. All in all a rather good series 🙂

And we also finished up what we had recorded of The Brain: A Secret History – we were missing the first of the three episodes. It was a series about how the brain works and how we found out about it, presented by Michael Mosley. Of the two episodes we watched one dealt with emotions, and the other with mapping bits of the brain to functions. The emotions one was at times hard to watch as the sorts of experiments done to figure out how emotions work were generally not very nice – like frightening a young child to see if phobias could be induced (they can), or shutting up baby monkeys in too-small isolation cages to see what effect that has on their adult psyches (a bad effect). The other episode had more “wow, that’s weird” moments and less trauma – however it had a lot of footage from somebody’s brain surgery which I was too squeamish to look at (yeah, I’m a wimp).

So at times difficult to watch for a variety of reasons (and I think from the clips in the intro segment we missed the most disturbing episode) – but it was an interesting couple of programmes. There were a lot of “neat facts” about how our brains work, and the ethical quagmires of how one does experiments to find these out were well explained.

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 1 of Survivors: Nature’s Indestructible Creatures – series presented by Richard Fortey looking at three mass extinction events and showing us modern examples of the species that survived them.

Episode 1 of Pilgrimage with Simon Reeve – a programme about the history of (Christian) pilgrimage, pilgrimage sites and the modern incarnation of it.

Treasures of Ancient Egypt (Ep 2); Strange Days: Cold War Britain; Rise of the Continents

The second episode of Alastair Sooke’s series about the art of Ancient Egypt covered the Middle Kingdom (briefly) and most of the New Kingdom. He only picked a couple of objects from the Middle Kingdom – both from Senusret III’s reign. He gave the impression that this is because the New Kingdom was the Golden Age, which is true in some ways, but the Egyptians themselves looked back at the Middle Kingdom as their “classical age” where art and culture first achieved great heights. I think it’s a shame he didn’t make it more clear the reason it gets short-shrift in programmes like these is because not as much survives for one reason or another. Often because sites were re-used or updated by New Kingdom Egyptians wanting the association with past glories.

The other eight treasures on the programme were from the New Kingdom between the reigns of Hatshepsut and Tutankhamun. As well as looking at some of the iconic art from her reign he spent some time talking about the iconography of Hatshepsut as Pharaoh. Pharaohs are male, so Hatshepsut was represented with all the male accoutrements and a masculine body in her official art works. One thing I hadn’t realised before (or had forgotten) is that it was during Hatshepsut’s time that the term Pharaoh actually started to be used – it translates to “the palace” so it’s the equivalent of talking about the White House doing X or Y in the USA (and surprisingly the example Sooke used was Brits talking about the Crown which I don’t even think is the best of the possible UK equivalents – No. 10 would be better).

There was obviously some considerable discussion of the new art style that Akhenaten brought with him when he changed the state religion. Both in terms of the slightly bizarre body shapes of the earliest stuff, and the new informal poses and domestic scenes on official art works. Which does give a very different impression of the royal family of that time, even as I remind myself it’s propaganda first & foremost. Obviously the bust of Nefertiti featured in this section, you can’t really miss it out. But the item from around that era (just before it) that struck me most was the little glass fish, that’s now in Berlin. I’ve seen it before & it’s a lovely piece, but what made it the highlight of this programme for me was that they showed us how it was made. I’ve read about how these glass objects were made before but it’s different actually watching it happen. And as always I’m somewhat in awe of what people were able to do before the advent of modern technology.

Obviously the programme ended with Tutankhamun’s mask – another iconic piece you can’t miss out, which also illustrates how what we have to admire depends so much on chance. The next episode covers the rest of Egyptian culture up to Cleopatra, quite a wide range. There’ve been a few clips of the temple at Abu Simbel, so presumably that’ll feature 🙂

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This week we finished watching Dominic Sandbrook’s series about the Cold War – Strange Days: Cold War Britain. This three part series looked at British history from 1946 through to 1989 through the lens of how the Cold War affected politics and culture. So part of the series was Sandbrook telling us about the major events of the Cold War, and giving some indication what life was like on the other side, to give us context for the effects on Britain. And the other part was looking at events in Britain from a perspective we don’t always think of. Some stuff was obvious when you thought about it – like the popularity of James Bond films tying in to revelations about Russian spies in the UK. And the John le Carré novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold as the much less glamorous and more cynical take on the same thing. Other things less so – consumerism being a part of how we differentiated “us” from “them” makes sense when I think about it, but I’d never’ve thought of how capitalism was in some ways kept in check by a desire to prove it was better than the alternatives. Which made more sense when Sandbrook talked about it than I have quite managed to articulate here!

The threat of nuclear war and how that shaped our culture was one of the strands running through the programmes, and the various attempts government made to prepare people for this. Sandbrook highlighted several times the contrast between the almost optimistic government handbooks which aimed not to panic people (even if this backfired at times) and the bleak films and TV serieses which were closer to what the reality might be. He showed us clips from The War Game (a 60s film that wasn’t shown on TV for about 20 years) which was a meticulously researched documentary, and Threads (an 80s film) which was more overtly fictional. Both grim enough even in excerpt that I know I don’t want to watch them in full. In the third programme Sandbrook also mentioned a book he’d read for class when he was 10 (I looked him up on wikipedia, he’s a couple of months younger than me) – as he started to talk about it I knew exactly which book he meant before the reveal. It was “Brother in the Land” by Robert Swindells, which I’ve read. Once. I’ve dipped into it occasionally since, and it’s still on my shelves, because I remember it as a good, well written book. But I’ve never re-read it cover to cover, despite my love of post-apocalypic novels. It’s just an extremely grim and depressing and unrelentingly bleak tale of the first months after a nuclear war. I read it at about 13 or 14, a few years after it was published, and it’s stuck with me since then – it must’ve been pretty traumatising to read at the age of 10 particularly when you had to think about it for school rather than stick your head in the sand (I’ve always adopted the ostrich approach to the idea of The End of the World As We Know It catastrophes).

Anyway, that was a bit of a digression. I liked this series, in particular I thought they did a good job of mixing archival footage with new stuff seamlessly switching between the two in a way that made the old stuff seem more immediately relevant. I even liked the somewhat overblown style, but I think J found the sweeping generalised claims made at times a little irritating.

We also finished another series this week – Rise of the Continents – which I really enjoyed so I wanted to say a few words about it even though this post is already quite long! This was a series about plate tectonics and the geological history of the earth, presented by Iain Stewart. Each week Stewart looked at a different continent (Africa, Australia, the Americas and Eurasia) and followed the geological story of the continent after it split from Pangea (the supercontinent that existed when the dinosaurs roamed the earth). He showed us the evidence that tells us about this geological story, and he also showed the impact that geology has had on both evolution and on human history. He’s a geologist so was strongest on that subject, pretty good on palaeontology but said a couple of dubious historical things we noticed (but otherwise was OK on that). Basically what you’d expect as he got further from his actual area of expertise. He was also a charmingly enthusiastic presenter.

One reason I enjoyed it so much is because I think the idea of plate tectonics is inherently cool. The earth not being static but consisting of vast sheets of crust all moving around and crashing into each other is awesome. It’s also an area I don’t know much about – I think the last time I read a book on it was in the 80s, when the science was still fairly new. So there were all sorts of things I didn’t know, and most of them were in the “neat facts” category. Like did you know that as India travelled on its way to crashing into Eurasia it moved over a magma plume, which turned a big chunk of it into a zone of volcanoes. This thinned the land so India started to move quicker. But also while it sat over this region for a few hundred thousand years the amount of volcanic eruption dumped toxins in the oceans and changed the climate – so this is thought to have contributed to the decline of the dinosaurs (before an asteroid finished them off). Or did you know the silver mines in South America exist because of subduction of the Pacific Ocean floor carries water down under the land. I can’t quite remember how Stewart said this then lead to the silver deposits, but the very idea of water being carried down under the crust is one I’d not thought of before (and it’s kinda cool as a concept).

I think J didn’t like the visual effects on the programme much – there were quite a few transitions where they used a jumble of still shots and mixed up audio before Stewart explained something. It didn’t bother me as much though.

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 2 of Sacred Wonders of Britain – Neil Oliver visits several sacred sites in Britain dating from prehistoric times through to the Reformation.

Episode 2 of The Brain: A Secret History – Michael Mosley series about brains, minds and experimental psychology. We never managed to record episode 1 but we decided to watch the other two anyway.

Episode 6 of Tudor Monastery Farm – part re-enactment, part documentary about what life would be like living on and running a farm in 1500.

In Our Time: Exoplanets

The first planet orbiting a star other than the Sun wasn’t discovered until 1992 and since then the subject of exoplanets has gone from being something you argue about the existence of to a rapidly expanding field with new discoveries all the time. The experts who discussed exoplanets on In Our Time were Carolin Crawford (University of Cambridge), Don Pollacco (University of Warwick) and Suzanne Aigrain (University of Oxford).

One of the reasons it took so long to discover any extra-solar planets, despite people speculating about their existence for centuries, is that they are very hard to directly see. In fact I think they were saying that none of the known ones have actually been seen. Instead a variety of more indirect techniques are used to detect them, and these required both sophisticated technology & sophisticated knowledge of physics before they could be used. The technology needed to develop to a point where small differences in stars could be measured accurately and consistently over time. And the physics is required to both predict how a star without planets would behave and then to figure out what the differences from this prediction mean.

In the programme they ran through a variety of techniques used to detect planets. One of these is to look at the colour of the star’s light and see if it’s changing between blue-shifted & red-shifted over time. If the star has no planets then you won’t detect that. When there’s a planet orbiting the star it’s not quite as straightforward as the planet circling the star, actually the star and the planet are both circling a point between them (that’s a lot lot closer to the centre of the star than it is to the planet). So the star will seem to move back & forth relative to us observing it. This is biased towards detecting more massive planets, as they’ll move the centre of gravity from the centre of the star more – so-called “hot jupiters” for instance, which are planets the mass of Jupiter that orbit close to their star.

Another method is to look for the changes in the star’s light caused by the transiting of a planet across the face of the star. Obviously this is only possible to detect if the planet is orbiting in the right plane for us to see it. But if you have one transiting where we can detect it then you can detect the existence of other planets in that system by looking at the perturbations of the orbit of the one that transits. You can also detect things about a planet’s atmosphere with this method. The changes in the light of the star can be used to tell you something about the size of the planet (in terms of diameter), and if you look at different wavelengths of light then you’ll see varying diameters. This tells you when the atmosphere of the planet is thin enough to be transparent to that wavelength, and different gases absorb different wavelengths differently so you can figure out the gases that are present. Apparently you can even detect the presence of clouds using this technique.

Another method uses the phenomenon of gravitational lensing. If the light from a distant star passes by a closer to us star on it’s way to the telescope then it will be bent by the gravity of the middle star. A planet orbiting that middle star will affect the lensing effect, and you can figure out things about the size & distance from the star by exactly how the lensing is affected.

If you use the first two methods together you can tell things about the density of the planet. Is it small & heavy? Is it big & fluffy? Or even small & fluffy? There seem to be a wide variety of planet types out there, not all of which are represented in our own solar system. There are also a wide variety of types of solar system out there – Pollaco pointed out that one reason there was argument about the reality of the first exoplanet discovered was because people were assuming that our own solar system was a good model for “all systems everywhere”. It turns out it’s not. The example they used in the programme was systems that have hot jupiters – the first exoplanet was one of these, and the very idea of a Jupiter type planet orbiting with a periodicity of only 4 days was almost unthinkable. They also talked about planetary systems detected around brown dwarves – stars which weren’t quite massive enough to ignite at the end of the formation process. And planets around pulsars (again like the first ones detected) – and one of the experts (I think it was Crawford?) made a throwaway remark about how these are probably not the first planetary system for the star in question. Before a star becomes a pulsar it goes through a supernova explosion, which would probably destroy any original planets – the ones orbiting afterwards are probably secondary captures.

They also discussed looking for planets which might be habitable. Bragg asked if we are thinking about life like ourselves, or germs. The answer was (paraphrasing) “yes”. At the moment no-one knows enough to know what we’re looking for in terms of life on other planets, and at first we’re obviously limited to things we know about life on Earth as a starting point for what to look for. So looking for rocky planets which are neither too big nor too small, that are in the right zone for liquid water. And other things about our own solar system might’ve been necessary – like the presence of Jupiter which draws away some of the comets that could bombarded Earth & wipe out all life. I think it was Aigrain who talked about other ways of detecting life – looking at what we can tell about the atmospheres of the planets. If there are very reactive gases present then they must be being made constantly – some of these we only know of biological processes that make them. So if one could detect such gases that’d be a sign of life.

It was a little bit of an odd In Our Time episode, because there was less of a sense of a narrative than they normally have. It felt like this is because the study of exoplanets is in its infancy – we’re at a point where most of the work is data gathering. I mean in the sense that a lot of planets are being discovered and categorised, but as yet they’re not classified and grouped into types. Nor are there overall theories about how solar systems in general work or were formed – it’s now clear that the one we know isn’t the only sort there can be, nor is it particularly typical of what we’re detecting now.

In Our Time: Pascal

Blaise Pascal was a 17th Century Frenchman who was a scientist, mathematician & philosopher. Several of his ideas are still recognised today – either still in use (for instance some of his mathematical work) or recognised by the naming of modern things (like the programming language Pascal). Discussing him on In Our Time were David Wootton (University of York), Michael Moriarty (University of Cambridge) & Michela Massimi (University of Edinburgh).

Pascal was born in 1623, and died in 1662 age 39. David Wootton gave us some context for the France of the time which he called essentially the time of the Three Musketeers – so Richelieu is in charge in France, the country is allying with Protestants in the Thirty Years War but in terms of internal politics there is a big crackdown on Protestantism. In the wider world Galileo is active at this time – which took me by surprise as I think of Pascal as nearly-modern but Galileo as end-of-medieval and clearly that’s not a sensible distinction! Descartes is also still alive when Pascal is born.

Pascal was educated at home, his father had planned that the boy should be told about various subjects young but then not study them until later when he was ready for them. But the young Pascal had other ideas – for instance figuring out Euclidean geometry himself once he’d been told about it, rather than waiting till he was taught the subject. One of the people on the programme (I forget which one) said that Pascal was Mozart type levels of genius – just in maths, science & philosophy rather than music. One of Pascal’s first notable works was inventing a mechanical calculator while he was still in his teens – he did this to save his father time (his father was a banker and thus had lots of adding up to do).

Pascal’s work in physics was on one of the big questions of the day – could there be such a things as a vacuum or not. Aristotelian ideas said no, but an actual experiment suggested yes. Pascal repeated the experiment – taking a tube filled with mercury & closed at one end, then inverting it in a basin of mercury. The level of the mercury in the tube drops and a space opens up at the top of the tube, there’s nothing this space can be full of, so it must be a vacuum. Pascal also took these experiments further – looking at different liquids (like water), and testing the effects on the height of the mercury at different heights above sea level. He was one of the first to demonstrate that air had pressure, and that this pressure varied with altitude.

Pascal also had an influence on the future of science & the scientific method. He hadn’t been brought up reading Aristotle as the “answer” to all the questions about the natural world, and he didn’t believe that you required a metaphysical starting point to answer a physical question. So he said that in science there was no appeal to authority, nor was there Truth, just that you looked at the facts as they were and explained them as best you could. Then when more facts were known you might have to change your mind – you’d not have Truth, just have got as close as you could under the circumstances. One of the experts said that Pascal was one of the first people to actually demonstrate this way of having scientific progress – other writers before him had talked about how you could progress in science but he actually did it.

Pascal was also interested in mathematics & he corresponded with Fermat. One of his theorems to do with the geometry of conic sections is still used by mathematicians today. Pascal’s triangle was mentioned briefly on the programme as another example of his mathematical legacy. He was particularly interested in probability, and would work on gambling problems for French aristocrats he knew. He & Fermat worked on a particular problem to do with what the pay out should be for a game of Points that is interrupted before the end. In Points a coin is flipped multiple times, each time it’s heads player A gets a point, each time it’s tails player B does. First player to 10 points wins the pot. How the pot should be split if it’s terminated early depends on what the probabilities of each player winning from the state it’s in (rather than just splitting it according to how many points so far). Pascal & Fermat’s work has had far reaching implications in a lot of the business world, not just in gambling or the specific problem – like insurance for instance.

Later in life (if you can call it that for someone who dies so young) after some sort of intense religious experience Pascal turned away from science & towards religion & religious philosophy. Here he believed strongly in appeal to authority – he built on the work of earlier philosophers who said that human reason is too weak to comprehend the Truth of the world in a metaphysical sense. And so in contrast to his scientific ideas Pascal felt that religious Truth is revealed and is unchanging. Pascal had become a member of the Jasenists, a Catholic sect that built on the ideas of Augustine in the same sort of way that Protestants did – in particular believing that people cannot come to a state of grace through their own efforts, they must be chosen by God to receive God’s Grace and so only the chosen are saved. Mainstream Catholicism of the day believed that by doing good and repenting sin you could come closer to being saved, and so the Jesuits regarded the Jansenists as heretics just as much as Protestants were. One of Pascal’s later works was written to argue that the Jesuits & mainstream Catholicism were wrong, and it was partly arguing based on appealing to the authority of Augustine and saying that the Jesuits were diluting the true Christian morality to make it more palatable to the masses. This work is credited by some later Catholics as having damaged the reputation of the Jesuits enough to have been a contributing factor in their suppression in the late 18th Century.

Pascal’s Wager is one of his philosophical ideas that is still remembered today. Massimi pointed out that it was never intended to convert an atheist, but was aimed at sceptical Christians. In it Pascal says that given there are two states – either there is a God or there isn’t – then there two ways to wager: either bet for God or bet against God. Given this, how should you bet to maximise the chance of a good outcome? If you bet against God and you are wrong, then you will suffer eternal damnation after death, so the best thing to do is to avoid that – bet for God and even if you’re wrong you’ll suffer no consequences. This doesn’t work if you believe there is no God, you need to have doubt about that. It also doesn’t say anything about whether or not Christianity is the Truth – Massimi pointed out that one objection to Pascal’s Wager is that the same argument can be made for any religion. And if you enjoy this world’s pleasures then there is also a down side to betting for God, making it a less obvious choice (definitely no pleasure now as vs. possibly no pleasure later, a more complex situation to weigh up) – which was not a problem that Pascal had. He said once that life was like being chained in a dungeon in the dark, and every so often the guards come in and strangle someone. Cheerful fellow …!

In the summing up section of the programme they discussed how Pascal’s legacy lives on in science & mathematics but is most influential in religious thought. The three experts credited him with laying the foundations of modern Christianity – in that faith & religion now are seen as something that you choose to believe in without needing a rational argument. And that is a very Pascalian way to see it.

She Wolves: England’s Early Queens; Caligula with Mary Beard; Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: Meet Your Brain

The last episode of She Wolves: England’s Early Queens covered the three Tudor Queens. Castor started by giving us a bit of context – when Henry VIII died his son Edward succeeded him, at the age of 9. Edward took ill & died at the age of only 15, before he’d had a chance to produce an heir. Which was a problem, as that meant there were no legitimate male heirs and England would have to be ruled by a Queen. Castor didn’t dwell on it, but I thought it was interesting that no man tried to seize power at this point – perhaps it wouldn’t be legitimate, but it’s not like Henry VII had a terribly good claim to the throne. Times had changed a bit from the more “might makes right” of previous centuries.

Henry VIII’s will had provided instruction for who was to succeed Edward VI if he died without heirs – first Mary, Henry’s eldest daughter, then Elizabeth. But for the staunchly Protestant Edward & his equally Protestant regency council this was a problem – Mary was very much a Catholic, and they felt that this Would Not Do. So even before he became ill Edward set about drafting a new order of succession if he was to die without heirs. He used the fact that Henry had declared both Mary & Elizabeth illegitimate to say that the next legitimate claimants were the descendants of Henry’s sister Mary. He skipped over his cousin Frances in favour of her three daughters, and his initial draft excluded women from ruling directly and was to leave the throne to the heirs male of the Grey sisters (in order, by age). However when it became clear he was dying the Grey girls were still too young to’ve had children (although Jane was married by this stage), so he altered this to leave the throne to “Jane Grey and her heirs male”. Castor pointed out that Edward’s council were also probably heavily involved in this – Jane’s father-in-law (the Duke of Northumberland) just happened to be the head of the council.

So Edward dies & Jane is summoned to meet her father-in-law & the rest of the council … much to her surprise she’s offered the throne. Castor said Jane tried to refuse it, because she believed Mary was the rightful heir, but she was “persuaded” to accept. After that Edward’s death & Jane’s ascension to the throne was announced to the country – met, Castor said, by somewhat confused silence by the general population who thought Mary was next in line. Jane moved to the tower to prepare for her coronation, but alas that was not to be – only 9 days later Mary had succeeded in rallying her allies and installing herself on the throne as the rightful Queen. Northumberland died a traitor’s death, but Jane was spared at first and remained in the tower as a prisoner. Even if Northumberland had succeeded in keeping Mary from the throne it seems unlikely that Jane would’ve been the obedient & docile pawn he’d’ve hoped for. Even in the 9 days she was Queen she’d started to show her Tudor heritage of strength of will & intelligence. Northumberland had assumed that his son would be crowned King when Jane was crowned Queen, but Jane was quite clear that she would make her husband a Duke but he would not be King.

Mary’s most pressing concern after actually taking the throne was to have an heir – a proper Catholic one. So she needed to marry, and soon, because she was in her late 30s by this stage. She too had the problem that if she was Queen then was any husband of hers to be King, and she too was adamant that this would not be the case. Her solution (a bit to the dismay of her council) was to marry Philip of Spain – he was the son of her biggest ally (the Holy Roman Emperor) and was already ruler of Spain. She drew a distinction between herself as a woman (who was subordinate to her husband) and herself as a Queen (who ruled England) and marrying a foreigner of the same status as herself meant that she wasn’t subordinating herself to someone she also ruled. And there was a lot of diplomacy involved in making sure she did rule England, rather than Philip doing so, and to ensure that in the event of her death Philip had no claim on the throne.

Castor next ran through the sad story of Mary’s two phantom pregnancies, and the increasing crackdown on Protestants in the country. Castor presented the two things as sort of linked, in that as Mary became more convinced she wouldn’t have a Catholic heir she also became more keen to stamp out Protestantism so that Elizabeth couldn’t bring it back. It’s for her fanaticism that Mary is most remembered (as Bloody Mary), but Castor tried to spin that as being hyped up because Mary was a woman and this was unwomanly behaviour. It wasn’t an entirely convincing take on the reputation, although I do agree that Mary probably got worse things said about her than a King might’ve done for the same behaviour – just that condemnation for burning people at the stake seems perfectly fair to me.

After Mary’s death Elizabeth was next in line for the throne, and this transition went relatively smoothly. There was again the assumption that Elizabeth would marry promptly, and that her choice of husband would indicate the direction her rule would take the kingdom. But Elizabeth had other ideas – her solution to the “who is in charge” problem for a married Queen was not to marry. Castor pointed out that Elizabeth’s method of dealing with this – with prevarication & putting off decisions to a later time – was the method she used throughout her life to keep from being railroaded into decisions by her councillors. She also “failed” to choose either fanatical Protestantism or fanatical Catholicism, famously saying that she would “not make windows into men’s souls” – as far as she was concerned if you had the outward appearance of conformity to the Church of England then that was sufficient. (And she returned the Church of England to a not quite Protestant, not quite Catholic state after the pendulum swings of the previous two reigns).

Elizabeth was the last of the Queens that Castor was discussing so the end of the programme was wrapping up – a combination of “look how far we’ve come” and “look how little has changed”. While I’d agree with Castor that the political power in our country is still disproportionately held by men, I think I’m more optimistic about how far we’ve come than she is. I was also surprised that she drew a distinction between these Queens she talked about & later ones as the earlier ones ruled, and the later ones just reigned. And she postulated that’s why our current Queen, for instance, was accepted as Queen without any worries about her gender. My surprise was because I thought the myth of Good Queen Bess was also instrumental in changing attitudes – finally a precedent of the country not falling to pieces when a woman ruled.

Overall an interesting series, particularly as it told us about the history of some key players in England’s past that aren’t often given a lot of screen time. However, I’m not sure the evidence Castor presented always supported her thesis (that these women have bad reputations because of misogyny & they’d be better remembered if they’d been men doing the same things). But that could partly be due to streamlining the story for television, I should read the book and see what I think of that.

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Caligula is one of the most notorious Roman Emperors – remembered for levels of debauchery & tyranny that were shocking even by the standards of the Romans. Mary Beard presented this programme about what we actually know about the man behind the myth. The answer is “surprisingly little” when it comes to his actions once he was Emperor.

Caligula was born Gaius Caesar Germanicus (sometimes he was refered to as Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus & I wasn’t entirely sure if that was him adding to his name once he was Emperor or if it was just a variant version of his name). He was the son of Germanicus, a popular Roman General who was the nephew of the Emperor Tiberius, and was thought likely to become Emperor. Caligula’s mother was Agrippina, the granddaughter of the Emperor Augustus. So on both sides he’s descended from the rulers of Rome. He was brought up mostly in army camps in the north of the Empire, in modern Germany. He was a sort of military mascot – his mother dressed him up in a miniature legionary’s uniform. This is where he got his nickname from – “Caligula” is a diminutive which refers to the caligae, the boots, that a legionary wore. Beard said it was a bit like calling the boy “Bootikins”. Unsurprisingly the adult Caligula became did not like being called that – and would’ve been furious if he’d known that was how he would be remembered in the future.

When Caligula is still relatively young his father dies – probably poisoned, certainly that’s what Germanicus said with his dying breath. There was a trial in Rome, but the accused man conveniently committed suicide early on in the proceedings so the trial became more of a public inquiry. Beard showed us one of the proclamations that were put up in all major cities afterwards – which basically say “the accused was acting on his own, nothing to do with Tiberius, no sir not at all”. After his father’s death Caligula lived with the Emperor Tiberius, Beard said it isn’t clear quite why – was he a hostage? did Tiberius like him? did Tiberius see him as heir & so want to make sure he was kept an eye on? However while he was living there most of his other relatives died – bumped off by Tiberius’s agents.

Succession to the position of Emperor wasn’t well defined – Beard laid this partly at the door of the Emperor Augustus. While Augustus had children, and Augustus’s wife Livia also had a children, they didn’t have any children with each other and so there wasn’t an obvious “legitimate” heir. So the succession tended to involve the removal either before or afterward of other potential candidates. And assassination of the ruling Emperor by the next-in-line was also common. It’s thought that Caligula smothered Tiberius, or instructed someone to smother Tiberius.

When Caligula became Emperor he was only 24, and in many ways he was trading on his boyhood status as military mascot to keep the army onside. He only reigned for a little under 4 years, and in the end he was to be assassinated by the army – Beard pointed out that’s a problem a lot of tyrants & despots face even today. If you use the army to gain power, the army can tear you back down again – the army has the real power.

A lot of the information we have about Caligula’s time as Emperor comes from Suetonius, and he wrote later and his biographies of the Emperors are full of salacious gossip. Tho even he couldn’t quite bring himself to say that Caligula did have an incestuous relationship with his favourite sister, just that “some men say that …”. There is some contemporary evidence for Caligula’s personality & actions as Emperor, though – Beard told us about an eye-witness account of a delegation from the Jews of Alexandria who went to meet Caligula. Instead of getting to business at their appointment, instead they had to trail round after Caligula as he decided how he was going to renovate a part of his palace. And then when he deigned to notice them he was more interested in why they didn’t eat pork rather than the business they wanted to discuss with him. As Beard pointed out this was a power display – they weren’t worth his time or attention, and he could humiliate them on a whim.

Beard also made the point that many of the tales of debauchery may also be tales about Caligula showing his power – stories of Caligula eyeing up the wives of important Romans at dinners, and then choosing one to take off & have sex with, only to return and make some remark about her not being much good in bed. That’s a display of power, and a humiliation for his target. Beard also talked about the story of Caligula making his horse a Consul, which is a later story she thought was likely to’ve derived from some petty humiliation by Caligula. That he was saying something like “you lot are all useless, my horse could do a better job than you, I should make him a Consul”. (She also said, imagine it as if the Queen has called one of her corgis “Prime Minister” – we’d all know what that would mean about the Queen’s opinion of her government.) And later writers turned that into a done deed, not a petty remark.

Caligula lived in a paranoid world where assassination could be just around any corner, and in the end it was. He only ruled for a little under 4 years, which surprised me to learn – I’d assumed he was in power for longer to’ve built up quite such a reputation. After his assassination there was some brief attempt to return to the Republic as a mode of government, but Claudius (Caligula’s uncle) was soon Emperor.

An interesting programme 🙂

The second lecture of the 2011 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures was called “Who’s In Charge Anyway?”. It felt a little more disjointed than the first one, with a bit less information & a bit more entertainment. It covered memory, learning & how the sum total of your memories shapes who you are. And also the frontal lobes & their role in personality & decision making. Again, not a lot I didn’t already know but still fun to watch. Things that particularly stuck in my mind were the demonstration of how poor eyewitness testimony can be (they had someone run off with a cuddly toy, then a later line-up of possible people & the audience mostly got it wrong). And also the “did you see that gorilla?” thing, which demonstrates how you can just not notice even quite strange things when you’re concentrating on something else.

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Horizon: What Makes Us Human?; Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: Meet Your Brain

What Makes Us Human? was a recent episode of Horizon, presented by Alice Roberts while she was pregnant with her second child. So the frame was lots of gooey shots of little babies or shots of Roberts looking pregnant, and the meat of the programme was about some of the things that do or don’t set us apart from our closest relatives in the animal kingdom (chimpanzees, of course!).

One obvious difference between people & chimps is that we’re more intelligent than them. But actually the differences appear to be more subtle than one might expect. Roberts visited some researchers who look at co-operation in chimps & humans. Chimps will co-operate to get a reward, but if the reward is uneven – one gets more or one gets the reward before the other – then the chimps don’t care. Well, the one that loses out does, but not in a way that gets them their “fair” share. But if you do similar experiments with young children (toddler age) then an unequal reward gets shared out. Importantly this only happens if they had to work together to get the reward – co-operating means sharing.

Another difference is the helplessness of a human baby when it arrives on the scene. This is something that has had an “answer” for decades, but recent research has suggested the “answer” isn’t the whole story. Babies are born at the point where they only just fit through their mother’s pelvis, and it has been assumed that there are two selection pressures on the width of the birth canal – one is that wider makes it easier to have bigger headed babies, and the other is that narrower makes walking more energy efficient. So the theory is that women’s pelvises are at the sweet spot between easier childbirth with more developed babies and walking efficiently. But new research is suggesting that women’s walking (and running) is no less energy efficient than men’s despite a difference in gait because of the different shape of pelvis. So that may not be the explanation, you’d think if walking efficiency was the important factor then women’s hips could be wider. The new theory is that women’s metabolisms can’t continue to improve to keep up with the demands of their unborn child – babies are born at the point where their mother can no longer supply all their energy needs. Something about this segment left me with questions about whether there was more data than was explained, because it felt a bit pat & a bit too much jumping to conclusions.

When you look at a human brain & human nerve cells they show more connections (and dendrites) than other animals. Humans have more duplicates of a particular gene to do with dendrites than chimps & if you duplicate this gene in mice then you get more dendrites & connections – in the right proportion to explain the difference between humans & chimps. In this segment Roberts also talked to a scientist who is starting to map, to visually image, actual brains – at the moment he’s just doing mouse brains (very slowly) as they’re small. But eventually the plan is to be able to investigate a human brain this way. They end up with a colour coded three dimensional diagram of all the nerve cells in a brain with connections mapped etc. This looked cool, but I’m not sure how much it actually tells us in the long run – as I understand it brains are all unique in detail, even if similar in general. And does “neuron A connected with neurons B, C, D & E” tell us much about what any of these do?

(And am I cynical about Horizon’s presentation of science because I go in thinking it’ll be shallow, or do I go in thinking it’ll be shallow coz it often leaves me with questions?)

The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures are a series of lectures aimed at children and broadcast on the BBC. I used to watch them every year when I was a kid. We recorded the series in 2011, and have only just got round to watching them – that year they were about brains and the lectures were given by Bruce Hood. The first lecture in the series was titled What’s In Your Head? and covered the basics of what a brain is, how nerves work and the sort of modelling brains do to make sense of the world.

As it’s aimed at children I don’t think it covered anything I didn’t already know, but it did it with style and involved a lot of demonstrations – some of which were rather neat. For instance Hood & another scientist showed that brains work on electricity by disrupting the ability of the other scientist to move his hands properly using in electromagnet against the head. So the chap was clapping and then they switched on the moving magnetic field & he could no longer co-ordinate bringing his hands together. There was also a little bit about MRI scanners to look at brain activity – with a striking visual demonstration of how powerful the magnets involved are: a nurse went into the room with a spanner on a string and then the machine was switched on and the spanner swung up and pulled towards the machine.

Another bit was about how the brain sets up patterns as it learns about the world and how that can lead to being disconcerted by new experiences – like if you eat grapes then your brain learns that round, green, sweet is a pattern associated with grapes. The first time you meet a green olive, you see round and green and then your brain fills in “sweet” because that’s the learnt pattern. So when you eat it you get a nasty surprise. This example particularly stuck in mine & J’s heads coz until recently neither of us ate olives (I’ve somehow acquired a taste for them over the last couple of years) – so the “yack!” reaction he was talking about amused us 🙂

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She Wolves: England’s Early Queens; A Night at the Rijksmuseum; Horizon: Little Cat Diaries

She Wolves: England’s Early Queens is a series we’ve had sitting on the PVR for a while now – it’s presented by Helen Castor who has written a book with the same title & premise. She’s looking at the history of seven Queens of England, in medieval & Tudor times. Some of these Queens ruled in their own right, some were wives of Kings but all of them exercised power. The second episode will be about the woman who was actually referred to as a she wolf, none of them were entirely popular with their subjects. Castor’s thesis is that this is all down to the people of that time regarding power as male, so these women were slandered & put down for behaviours that would’ve been regarded as normal for a King. In this series she’s very much presenting the stories from the women’s point of view – J wasn’t so keen on this in the one we watched the other night. He thought she was too partisan, tho I think she was just obvious with her partisanship, everyone’s got biases after all.

The first two-thirds or so of the first episode covered the Empress Matilda who was never crowned, but was very nearly the first woman to rule England in her own right. Her story starts off fairly normally for a woman of the time, she is the daughter of Henry I (and granddaughter of William the Conqueror) born in 1102AD and at the age of 8 she’s married off to Henry V King of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor. She lives in Germany from then until her husband’s death nearly 16 years later when she’s 23. She wasn’t heir to the English throne at first because she had a brother, William. However he died when the ship he was travelling in from Normandy to England ran aground just outside the harbour – Castor told us that everyone on the ship was drunk when they left (it was the Prince & his entourage most of whom were teenagers) and so not paying enough attention. In the cold November water there was no way rescue could get there before they died. With the death of her brother Matilda was now the only legitimate child of Henry I, and as yet she had no children of her own. Once her husband died Henry I married her off again quickly, to try to get grandsons soon enough that they could inherit when he died.

Matilda’s second marriage was to Geoffrey, Count of Anjou. This marriage didn’t go down well with her – it was her father’s choice, both for strategic reasons (the County of Anjou bordered Normandy so was a useful ally to have) and dynastic reasons. But Geoffrey was much younger than Matilda, and very much lower status (she was an Empress after all, he was merely a Count). The couple were estranged quite quickly, but Henry I subsequently enforced a reconciliation that appears to’ve worked out – the couple had two healthy children, and even better both of them were boys.

More than once before his death Henry I had had his nobles swear allegiance to Matilda as his heir. Castor told us that there was no precedent for whether or not a woman could rule the country, as the Norman invasion had effectively reset the clock. If Henry I had managed to live long enough for one of his grandsons to grow up he would probably have named him heir, but he died long before this could happen. When her father died Matilda was in Anjou (and not on good terms with her father) so couldn’t get to England quickly. She did actually set out, but on arrival at one of the castles in Normandy she delayed her journey – this might’ve been due to complications of pregnancy as she was pregnant with her third child at this point. Castor said that a contemporary chronicler just says she remained there “for certain reasons” which is maddeningly opaque.

The delay in Matilda reaching London gave her cousin Stephen of Blois time to seize power. This is where J thought Castor’s biases were most apparent – she presented it as “and of course this worked because Matilda was a woman”, however as J points out if a male heir had delayed that long then someone else might’ve seized power. Power vacuums tend to be filled, after all. It’s just that as Matilda was a woman it was easier for Stephen to rally support to his side.

What followed was 20 years or so of civil war, a period that is called The Anarchy (we listened to an In Our Time episode about it a while ago). Stephen was the anointed King, by virtue of his coronation ceremony, but Matilda was the legitimate heir, by virtue of blood and the oaths sworn to her father. At one point, in 1141, Matilda had the upper hand and had even captured Stephen. She was preparing for her coronation in London, having got the Church and several of the powerful nobles on side. But the chronicler (who was very much on Stephen’s side) writes that she became too arrogant and unwomanly, and so the people of London rose up and chased her out of the city. Again Castor was quite sure that Matilda was only regarded as arrogant because she was a woman, and that the same behaviour in a man would’ve been perfectly fine. It’s hard to tell, tho, as all the chronicles that still exist are on Stephen’s side. Stephen was also freed not long after this, so it was back to square one. In the end Matilda had to give up her ambition to rule in her own right, but she secured the crown for her son Henry as Stephen had no heir.

The last third of the programme was about Matilda’s daughter-in-law, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who never ruled England in her own right but did do the actual ruling of the country for a while as well as have a powerful influence on the politics of the realm at other times. Eleanor was born & brought up in Poitiers, the daughter of the Duke of Aquitaine, and she inherited the Duchy on her father’s death. She was married first to Louis VII, King of France, and this was not a happy marriage. Eleanor pronounced Louis “more monk than man”, but the couple did eventually have two daughters (which wasn’t good enough, as girls definitely couldn’t inherit the Kingdom of France). Louis & Eleanor went on Crusade to the Holy Land as part of the Second Crusade, and during this expedition their marriage broke down almost completely (this is between daughters 1 & 2).

Eleanor’s close friendship with her uncle (the ruler in Antioch) caused scandal, and then to make matters worse when Louis prepared to leave Antioch & move on with the Crusade Eleanor refused to accompany him. She tried to get a divorce from him at this point, citing their relationship to each other (which was within the prohibited seven degrees) – Castor pointed out this was Eleanor trying to use the same sorts of laws that powerful men used to get rid of no longer convenient wives. But unfortunately for Eleanor she didn’t have the same sort of power as a man would and her husband’s desire to remain married trumped her desire for an annulment. The couple were reconciled, at least to a degree that meant that after their return to France they had a second daughter. Not long after this tho they were estranged again, and this time Louis was willing to divorce. 8 weeks later, Eleanor married Henry, son of the Empress Matilda & Geoffrey of Anjou (not yet King Henry II of England). Castor said that Eleanor & Henry must surely have met when Henry visited the French court not long before Eleanor divorced, but there’s no record of this.

So now Eleanor is married to the King of England, and this marriage was initially much more successful. The couple had 8 children over 15 years, with three sons surviving to adulthood. Between his own inheritance & Eleanor’s own lands Henry ruled over a pretty big empire stretching from the Pennines to the Pyrénées. After Henry’s mother’s death (Matilda definitely exercised power via her son after he took the throne) Eleanor became more important in the politics of Henry’s realm. By this time she’s 43, and she lived in Poitiers again ruling the Duchy of Aquitaine in Henry’s name. Unlike her mother-in-law who never got to rule, because Eleanor was ruling in a man’s name she didn’t have the same problems of being regarded as un-womanly. (And possibly she was better at acting in a suitably “feminine” fashion while exercising power.) Castor noted that the sorts of stories that surround Eleanor during this time focus on tales of courtly romance (this is the time & the place for the troubadors), which are suitably feminine subjects even tho there’s no evidence that any of the stories actually happened.

Once Henry II & Eleanor’s sons were teenagers they began to want to share power with their father, but he made promises and never actually delegated any power. It struck us while we were watching this that Henry II probably couldn’t win here – either he delegated power to them, and then they got too powerful & weakened his own rule, or he didn’t and then they got annoyed & rebelled which is what they did. This wasn’t unusual in itself – sons taking up arms against their father – but what was unusual was that Eleanor sided with her sons against her husband. Castor read excerpts from a letter written to Eleanor by a bishop that said she was going to bring about the ruin of all of society due to these actions! The rebellion ultimately ended in victory for Henry II – it seems Eleanor was the brains of the operation and after Henry managed to capture her the rebellion soon ended with the sons begging for mercy.

Henry II was merciful to his sons, but Eleanor lived in captivity for the next 16 years until Henry’s death. One of the first things Richard the Lionheart did when he inherited the throne was send word that his mother should be freed. She’s now about 65, and freeing her wasn’t just an act of filial affection it was a necessity. Richard needed someone to rule the country in his name while he was off on Crusade, and Eleanor was just the person for the job. She ended up holding the reigns of power for longer than anyone anticipated because Richard was captured on his way home from Crusade. She also outlived Richard, and when his younger brother John inherited she was instrumental in smoothing his way to power. She eventually died at the age of around 80, and was buried next to her husband despite their differences in life.

The next programme in the series is going to be about the wives of Edward II (Isabella of France) and Henry VI (Margaret of Anjou) who played pivotal roles in their husbands’ reigns.

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The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has been shut for 10 years while being refurbished. A Night at the Rijksmuseum was Andrew Graham-Dixon acting a bit like a child in a sweetshop while being allowed to go behind the scenes just before the re-opening of the museum earlier this year. The programme was part about the renovation & the history of the museum, and part about what the contents of the museum are & how they’re organised. So mostly “look at the pretty things” which is always hard to write about.

The original building was built in the 19th Century, designed by a Catholic architect and it reminded me a bit of the V&A Museum in style and a bit of a cathedral. Graham-Dixon said that when it was originally built the resemblance to Catholic religious architecture was a bone of contention for many of the staunchly Protestant Dutch. The new additions have kept a similar sensibility, but with a more modern style (and the architect this time was Spanish which seems about as historically inappropriate as a Catholic amongst Protestants!). The interior of the original building has also been refurbished and restored to its former glory – including parts that were whitewashed over by a particularly modernist director in the 1950s.

The refurbishment was “only” supposed to take a few years, 2 or 3. Apparently the obstacle that caused the biggest slippage in the project time was the bike tunnel. Prior to the museum being shut there was a bike route that ran through a tunnel through the building, and the original plans for the refurbishment altered this route. However people objected, petitions were organised etc etc – but somehow this wasn’t discovered to be a problem till after the plans were finalised and work had begun. So the architect had to re-design that part of the building and that cost significant amounts of time & money.

While it was shut the curators not only had the chance to completely overhaul their vision of how the collection should be displayed, but also to do conservation & research on the paintings & other objects. In a particularly overenthusiastic segment of the programme Graham-Dixon was shown the work they are & have done on X-raying & 3D-imaging of the paintings in the collection. It was kinda neat, but I didn’t really understand the levels of excitement over being able to see the brush strokes more clearly. That was the 3D-imaging, the X-ray stuff was more obviously exciting to this non-artist because you could see how the composition of a painting had changed while it was being worked on.

The objects used to be organised by type, but the new layout organises them by date. There are 8 main galleries which each cover a hundred years of Dutch history. So you have the paintings and the objects all mixed in together. It being Holland there’s a lot of maritime related stuff – paintings of ships, models of ships, cannon from ships … even the English Royal Coat of Arms from the prow of a ship the Dutch captured from us in Charles II’s time. And there’s also another wing of the museum with Asian related objects – the Dutch have traded with the Far East for several centuries, in particular they were the only Western nation allowed to trade in Japan during the Sakoku Period.

This was a fun programme to watch, but it did feel awfully like a piece of advertising for the Rijksmuseum. Kinda did the trick, I’d quite like to go to it some day, but a bit odd as a BBC programme.

Little Cat Diaries was a half-hour follow up to the previous Horizon programme The Secret Life of the Cat (post). It went into a little bit more depth about 4 of the cats that were in the first programme. As it was only half an hour this still wasn’t terribly much depth on each! There was a bit about the cat that was the best hunter (the family don’t really feed him much cat food because he eats so much of the wildlife), there was a bit about the cat that roamed furthest (his family said it was a bit like being at a parent/teacher evening & being told your child did well). And a bit about a stray cat who was spotted in people’s houses when they were filming their own cats (and he was subsequently captured & re-homed with one of the households he was visiting).

The bit that was most interesting for me was the short segment on whether one’s cat returns one’s affection. They set this up by talking to the previous & current owners of a cat that had run away – the previous owner said something along the lines of “as she got older the cat seemed to get less keen on the children, but when I got the dog it was the last straw. The cat walked in, saw the dog, the dog started to go for her and she left and never came back!”. I was left thinking that there are ways to integrate pets into a household, and that was Not It 😉 However the interesting bit was that there is research being done on whether cats are attached to their owners. This is based on a 70s experiment that shows that babies are attached to their mothers – if the mother leaves the room while a baby is being distracted by a stranger the baby is concerned, and obviously pleased to see the mother return. If you do the same experiment with a dog & its owner, the same is true. Cats however don’t get nearly as bothered by either absence or return of their owner. Of course that doesn’t actually test if a cat loves its owner, just that a cat doesn’t associate their owner with security in the way a dog does (or a baby does its mother). But still, interesting 🙂

In Our Time: Relativity

Physics is one of those subjects where I can very clearly see the boundaries of my understanding – as soon as we get to quantum physics or Einstein’s theories of relativity I can follow the surface level explanations & analogies, but I’m always aware I don’t understand it on a deeper level. I assume the same is actually true of all subjects at some point – I’m not a genius, and I spread my self-education widely among many subjects rather than deeply delving into one – but for physics I can see the fence. It’s a peculiar sensation.

The three experts who talked about Einstein’s theories of relativity on In Our Time were Ruth Gregory (Durham University), Martin Rees (Astronomer Royal and University of Cambridge) and Roger Penrose (University of Oxford). The programme started with a bit of context: in 1905 Einstein published four papers, including one on Special Relativity. At the time he was working as a clerk in a patent office & was previously unknown as a physicist. Ten years later he published a paper extending Special Relativity into General Relativity.

Prior to Einstein’s theories of relativity the assumption was that there was some sort of objective measure of time in the universe, the same no matter how it was observed. Einstein theorised that the motion of the observer affected the observation of the passage of time – hence relativity. Apparently he later regretted using that word for his theories because it’s been used since to imply that physics is all just subjective & depends on your point of view, but actually there is still an objective physical reality which can be described mathematically & rigorously it’s just that within the system the point of view of the observer is important for the observations made.

One of the things that Einstein’s theories grew out of was the observation that the speed of light remains constant no matter what direction you’re travelling in or how fast you’re travelling. This seems to be a paradox. Say you think about driving a car towards or away from another car that’s driving towards you – when you’re travelling towards it, it gets closer to you quicker than if you’re travelling away from it. (I hope that makes sense.) But with light if you’re travelling towards it it appears to be travelling the same speed as it travels if you’re travelling away from it. Einstein’s theory explains how this happens by explaining how time is running differently (I think).

Special Relativity implied that time is another dimension like the spatial dimensions, and Minkowski built on this theory to mathematically describe spacetime. Einstein then used this mathematics as part of his theory of General Relativity. One of the key insights of General Relativity is that spacetime is curved by the presence of mass and this curvature explains why gravity exists. Gregory used an analogy I’ve heard before to describe spacetime & its curvature – thinking of spacetime as being like a four-dimensional version of a two-dimensional rubber sheet. If you have your rubber sheet suspended as a flat horizontal plane and then you put something large like a bowling ball on it, the sheet will be distorted & curved where the ball weighs it down. Then if you roll a marble across it it will accelerate down the slope towards the bowling ball – or if you get your angles and speed right you can make it orbit the bowling ball.

There was some discussion of the twin paradox at two different points in the programme. This is a thought experiment where you have twins one of which remains on Earth, and the other one travels away to a different star system at close to the speed of light, and then returns. When the twins meet again the one that stayed on Earth will be older than the one that went to the stars and back. This is a staple of science fiction, and I think the first time I ran into the idea was in “Time for the Stars” by Robert A. Heinlein which I read when I was at middle school. The first time it was discussed on the programme was in the context of Special Relativity as the way of demonstrating what Einstein is talking about. And they mentioned that this has actually been shown experimentally – by getting a very accurate clock (synchronised with a matching clock) and putting it on a plane and flying it to the other side of the world & back. Then when you compare the two clocks the one that travelled has measured less time than the one that stayed put. Gregory pointed out that the observations demonstrate both the effects of relative motion and the effects of distance from a massive object (the maths needs to take into account that the plane is up in the air while the other clock is on the ground). I had no idea prior to this programme that the effects were measurable on such a human scale.

The second time the twin paradox came up was in the context of talking about the geometry of spacetime. Penrose was explaining that with his theories Einstein was trying to explain the universe in geometrical terms. Spacetime is four-dimensional, three dimensions are the familiar spatial ones that can be explained using Euclidean geometry. For the fourth dimension, time, Einstein (and Minkowski?) showed that you could use almost the same geometric rules only needing to reverse a sign – turn a plus to a minus. The way Penrose explained what he meant by this was to use the twin paradox – one twin is moving from event A to event B along a straight line in the time dimension, the other is moving from A to B on a curved line in the time dimension. For the spatial dimensions a curved line is a longer path than a straight line, for the time dimension a curved line is a shorter path than a straight line. (And this is what I mean by being able to see the edge of my understanding – I can write that last sentence as a fact and accept it is true, but I don’t understand why or how.)

I know I’ve missed out various things they discussed but I shall only mention another couple before I finish the post. Firstly there are real world applications of the theories of relativity, it doesn’t just help physicists understand the universe – it’s an important part of the underpinning of how GPS works. The other thing was that Rees was saying that Einstein was in some ways more like an artist than a scientist. By this he meant that for an artist their work is generally unique, if they didn’t exist no-one else would produce the same artworks. But for science generally if one person doesn’t come up with the theory or do the experiment then someone else would not long after. Rees thought (and the other two agreed) that while Special Relativity would probably have been thought of by someone else soon after, General Relativity was such a large jump that if Einstein hadn’t thought of it then we might still have not thought of it.

The Genius of Marie Curie: The Woman Who Lit Up the World; Wild Shepherdess with Kate Humble

The Genius of Marie Curie: The Woman Who Lit Up the World is part of a loosely linked series of programmes that each examine the life & work of a pivotal figure in Western history of the last couple of centuries or so with an emphasis on science or invention. We’ve watched the Newton one recently (post) and the Turner one last week (post) and on Monday we watched the one about Marie Curie. And it was interesting, a look at both her life and the work that made her famous. But my enjoyment of it was tainted by the way they chose to frame it.

For the Newton programme the opening segment talked about how he wasn’t just interested in things we’d think of as scientific today, he also worked for several years on alchemical experiments and developed his own theological understanding of Christianity. For the Turner programme the opening segment talked about how he’d lived through the Industrial Revolution and painted works that were of that time – they talked about his painting of the Temeraire being towed by a steam tug to be broken up and how that symbolised so much about the age. So the focus in both is on the achievements of the man in question – intellectual or artistic.

For the Marie Curie programme it started off well enough – the opening segment runs through her achievements (2 Nobel Prizes, a woman who succeeded in a man’s world, someone who refused to conform to societal expectations etc). But then the voiceover said something akin* to “In every great life there’s a pivotal moment and the reaction to that is what comes to define their life”. And this moment that they chose to present as “defining” was the discovery of her relationship with a married man by the press & the resulting scandal. Rather than, say, her Nobel Prizes. Or if you’re after a human interest angle what about her work driving a mobile X-ray unit during the First World War, which they suggested later in the programme was what lead to her death. But no, they’d rather frame it as a woman who had a scandalous love affair (while doing science on the side). Gah.

*We’ve deleted the programme already so I can’t check the exact wording.

I hadn’t even heard of that before, I know of her as “Polish woman who discovered radium, married Pierre Curie, eventually died from radiation related disease” – so I don’t see that relationship as something that’s permeated into the zeitgeist as defining. Gah.

To be completely fair, they did later in the programme make the point themselves that the press & public interest was because she was a woman, and that this was sexist. Einstein had affairs & no-one talked about them instead of his physics, why should it be different for Curie. But that doesn’t let the programme off the hook for centring this scandal, and presenting it as at least as important as her work (if not more so).

Two other irritations before I talk about the interesting bits. Firstly, every time they showed us a photograph they did this jerky pan across & around it which was intensely distracting. And secondly, the soundtrack was very obtrusive and the choice of songs not nearly as funny as they thought it was.

So. Despite my irritation with the programme on a philosophical level and on a technical level it was still interesting. What I knew about Marie Curie before was fairly bare bones & it was nice to get that fleshed out a bit (even despite the above). She was born Maria SkÅ‚odowska in Poland and grew up in Warsaw during a period where it was ruled by the Russians. At that time there were supposed to be no schools or universities in Polish, no Polish music or dancing – basically the Russians were trying to wipe out Polish culture. Her mother died when Maria was 12, from tuberculosis. Her father was a teacher of physics & maths, and he taught his children these subjects. Maria and her elder sister BronisÅ‚awa made plans to move to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. They had to move because the Russian run universities in Warsaw at the time would not admit women, whereas the Sorbonne did. The scheme was that Maria would work as a governess in Poland to earn money to support her sister at university, then once her sister was established Maria would move to France & her sister would support her at the Sorbonne. While working as a governess Maria fell in love with the eldest son of the family (not one of her charges) but his parents wouldn’t agree to the match because she wasn’t a suitable class of person – he was unwilling to go against his parents’ wishes and this rejection sent Maria into a depression.

She had at first given up the dream of studying at the Sorbonne, but she enrolled at the illicit “floating university” in Warsaw and studied chemistry (and other subjects?) there. This was a Polish run, Polish language, university and was forbidden by the Russian rulers – and they would teach any Pole who wanted to learn whether male or female. This rekindled her interest and she went on to join her sister in Paris. She excelled in her studies, graduating first in her class. And then she went to work in the lab of a man named Pierre Curie. Her first studies were on magnets – this was relatively lucrative work, because there were commercial interests that would pay for the development of new alloys to make better magnets for better electrical generators. Over time she & Pierre fell in love, and when the homesick Maria talked about returning to Poland he talked about following her there. However in the end they married & remained in Paris (I can’t remember if the programme said why – wikipedia suggests that Warsaw University wouldn’t have her as a PhD student because she was a woman, whereas she could do research in France).

Marie Curie started to work on radioactive materials not long after the initial serendipitous discovery of the phenomenon by Becquerel. She developed (and with Pierre’s help built) apparatus to measure the radioactive rays coming off a sample, and analysed a large number of different substances which was painstaking & tedious work. One sample, pitchblende (a uranium containing mineral), was more radioactive than anything she’d previous analysed including uranium itself. So she theorised that there must be some new element present – and set out to isolate it. This was a mammoth task, as the element was only present in trace amounts. They had some footage of her stirring a great vat of what I think was pitchblende & nitric acid. Eventually she and Pierre isolated and purified their new element – Radium. So called because it glows.

During this time period the Curies had two children. Marie Curie was more interested in her work than her children and they were mostly brought up by her father-in-law. This caused a rift in the family, although Curie and her eldest daughter reconciled by the time she grew up. Curie & her younger daughter didn’t reconcile until Curie was dying many years later. Both Marie & Pierre Curie suffered increasingly from ill health during this time – the effect of their work with radioactivity. Pierre tragically died – not as a direct result of his ill health, which I hadn’t realised. He was actually run over by a horse & carriage, the implication was that if he’d been in better health he might’ve got out of the way.

Curie’s first Nobel Prize was in 1903 for Physics – originally this had only been intended for Becquerel & Pierre Curie but Pierre complained and insisted that Marie’s name should be on the award too otherwise he wouldn’t accept it (good man!). The second one came in 1911, 5 years after Pierre’s death, in Chemistry. This came at the same sort of time as the scandal of her relationship with a married man broke – and the Nobel committee made noises about how if they’d known she was that sort of woman then they wouldn’t’ve given her the prize. Her displeasure with this broke her out of the depression she’d fallen into after the scandal and the end of the relationship*. (The man in question kind of didn’t quite fight a duel to restore his honour, and came away reputation intact, somehow *eye roll*)

*The programme spent more time on this, but I’m irritated by that so I’ve skipped the details here.

In the First World War Curie read that shortage of X-ray machines meant that the French army was losing soldiers who might’ve been saved – and she designed a mobile X-ray unit and drove one (of several?) herself. She and her elder daughter operated this unit for most of the war. There was still no idea at the time that X-rays or radioactivity were dangerous, so Curie didn’t have any protection from the X-ray machine. The programme later said that this is now thought to’ve lead to the aplastic anaemia that killed her (her body wasn’t radioactive enough for it to’ve been the radium).

After the war Curie continued with her work on radium, founding an institute for investigating the element. She was a respected scientist, attending invite-only conferences with other prominent physicists (like Einstein). And was the only one of them to have two Nobel Prizes in two different disciplines – an achievement that is still unique. Despite all this she still had difficulty securing funds for her research & at one point didn’t even have enough radium for her work to continue. This came to the notice of an American journalist (Marie Mattingly Meloney) who had written articles about her, and who organised a fundraising drive throughout the USA to buy Curie’s Institute a gram of radium. When the money was raised Curie visited the US and toured the country giving many lectures before being presented with the radium by the President in a White House ceremony.

Curie eventually died of aplastic anaemia, caused by exposure to radiation or X-rays, and was buried with her husband. In 1995 their bodies were exhumed (hence knowing how radioactive she was) and re-buried with a full state funeral in the Panthéon in Paris – she’s the first (and only) woman to be buried there because of her own achievements.

So, an interesting but flawed programme. But I did at least learn more about Marie Curie and her work.

Wild Shepherdess with Kate Humble is a new series about sheep farming. The hook for it is that Humble owns and lives on a sheep farm in Wales, and for this series she’s visiting sheep farmers in other countries. I think the three episodes will also roughly speaking cover past, present & future (the intro segment hinted at that) but I won’t know that for sure till I’ve seen them all!

This first episode was set in a very remote village in Afghanistan where they still farm in traditional ways dating back thousands of years. The people Humble visited live in the Wakhan Corridor which is part of Afghanistan due to European colonialism. To the north of this narrow strip of land is Tajikistan, once part of the Russian Empire, to the south Pakistan, once part of the British Empire. The Russians and British didn’t want their Empires to meet, so the borders are drawn so that a finger projects from the east of Afghanistan to separate the two countries. The programme opened with Humble travelling through Kabul (the most dangerous part of the whole trip) because this was the only place they could fly to the Wakhan Corridor from. After flying for 250 miles across the mountains they landed in the valley where the Wakhi people live in winter. During the summer months (Humble arrived towards the end of summer) half the population live here, and grow wheat & barley. The other half travel over the nearby mountains to a plateau called the Great Pamir where they graze their flocks of sheep.

After walking to the plateau, with the help of some locals & their yaks to transport their gear, Humble & her camera crew stayed in a couple of different villages to see how these shepherds live. In the first one they were made welcome immediately & encouraged to film whatever they wanted. Here Humble saw the everyday life of the shepherds – a routine of driving the sheep out to graze, bringing them back to be milked in the middle of the day and then at night to protect them from predators. The grazing here is better than in the home valley, and there’s not the space to both grow crops and graze sheep, so the increased risk of predators is worth it. Humble pointed out how the sheep didn’t look like her sheep in Wales – they have much bigger bottoms where they store fat for the winter ahead. They’re also tamer as they’re milked every day, unlike Humble’s sheep which are grown for meat and so not handled by people often. She also seemed envious of their good health, despite the harsh conditions – there are diseases sheep get in the damp climate of Britain that they don’t get in places like Afghanistan which are drier & more like where sheep evolved.

After a bit of time in this first village Humble moved on to another village, because she wanted to film the migrations that these people do as winter starts drawing in – they move progressively down the valley away from the winter. The first village was already quite low (relatively, a mere 4000 feet above sea level …), so they had to go elsewhere to film. This second village weren’t so keen to have foreigners come in & film, and negotiations were protracted. At first a faction among the men were refusing any access, but the women encouraged Humble to sneak a camera in & film them cooking food. The next day the overall chief turned up from the other half of their village (the wheat growing half) to supervise the impending move & he was happy for them to film & quashed the refusals.

Through the whole of the programme Humble showed us how these people lived, and how hard their life is. She talked in particular to one woman who listed the people in her family who had died – two brothers, two sister, her husband, and of her seven children only one was still alive. An appalling list of grief. Their diet is very basic, and mostly the stuff they produce themselves – bread and (buttery) tea for everyday. A sort of flour & butter porridge for more special occasions. And every once in a while they’ll eat meat – one sheep will be spread around the whole village (50 people or so in the second village). A lot of babies die – 1 in 5 before they’re one year old. Half of all the under-twos are malnourished. For the little that they don’t produce themselves they need to buy – and the only way they have of earning money is to sell off a yak. Humble filmed some traders who’d walked up the the Great Pamir to buy yaks, they said they came to the area because they would get good animals and a cheaper price than anywhere else. But while they were talking about how hard this subsistence farming is they were also talking about how they’re glad they’re not closer civilisation and to the war.

I like Kate Humble’s programmes – we saw the ones she did about the Frankincense Trail and the Spice Trail a few years ago. She’s got a knack of not ever making it seem like “look at these funny foreign people”. In fact in this one the sympathies of the narrative (so’s to speak) were clearly with the Wakhi people as they were vastly entertained by how this grown woman didn’t know how to do any of the basic necessities of life. One woman was consumed with laughter as Humble tried to milk a sheep – “what’s she doing? she’s just tickling it!”. Another got Humble to help her churn butter and then could barely believe how she wasn’t strong enough to really help out.

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Fit to Rule; Horizon: The Secret Life of the Cat

The second episode of Fit to Rule covered the end of the Stuarts, and the four Georges. Lucy Worsley skipped over Charles II entirely, and only briefly mentioned James II. Unlike his brother, James did actually manage to have a male heir, but unfortunately for him this is what led to his being deposed. James had converted to Catholicism much to the disgust of Parliament so when his second, Catholic wife had a son it Parliament invited William of Orange to invade. William was married to Mary, the eldest daughter of James (by his first wife) and both of them were staunch Protestants. William turned up with an army, but when he got to London James II and family fled. Worsley pointed out that this was a paradigm shift – Parliament were now the deciders of who should succeed to the throne.

William & Mary might’ve been strong in the right religion, but their health was another matter. William was physically weak – he was short & he was also asthmatic. His asthma got worse once he was living in London, so he & Mary moved to Hampton Court. This removed them from the political centre of the kingdom, which didn’t help to ease the friction between the foreign King & his Parliament. Worsley said that Mary was mentally fragile – she suffered greatly from guilt over being involved in deposing her father (which he made sure to fan the flames of, quoting the Commandments in letters to her etc). She also believed that women should not involve themselves in politics, but ended up being regent while her husband was away at war. The couple also failed to have any children – not even a single pregnancy. Worsley said that even at the time there was speculation that this was William’s fault – either through physical problems or possibly that he was gay. Whatever it was, they had no heir. Mary died young, of small pox in her 30s and William died 8 years later.

By this time Parliament had had some time to determine who should be next – Mary’s younger sister Anne who was also a Protestant. Anne’s medical history is rather sad – in 16 years she had 17 pregnancies most of which ended in miscarriage or still birth. Of the 5 who made it out alive, the longest lived child was only 11 when he died (which was before Anne took the throne). Worsley told us that contemporary doctors thought that Anne’s difficulties with pregnancy were due to an imbalance in her humours (that was still the dominant medical theory at the time) – in effect they thought she was slippery (had an excess of cold & wet humours) so the foetuses just slipped out. Obviously implausible to us today, but there’s not enough evidence of what was wrong to diagnose her from this distance of history. One thing that Worsley & the expert she was talking to did draw out was that Anne was obese, which can lead to pregnancy problems (but this wasn’t the whole problem).

Towards the end of her reign there were also rumours about her sexuality. Blenheim Palace was built by Queen Anne (using public money) for the Duke of Marlborough after his victory at the Battle of Blenheim. This caused a certain amount of political problems but it wasn’t Anne’s relationship with the Duke that caused raised eyebrows, instead it was her relationship with his wife. The two women had been very close friends for years, and scandalously treated each other as equals even after Anne became Queen. The Duchess had a lot of power and held the most important offices for a Lady of the Bedchamber and this caused resentment among others of the aristocracy. I’m not sure if there was any truth to the rumours – I don’t remember Worsley saying one way or the other.

After Anne the Stuart dynasty was over – and Parliament cast around for a suitable heir, eventually settling on George, the Elector of Hanover who was a Protestant. Worsley skipped quickly past George I, clearly other than being too German for comfort for his new country there wasn’t much wrong with him. George II didn’t have any medical problems (that Worsley told us, anyway) instead he had family drama. The Hanoverian monarchs were much more fertile than the Tudors & Stuarts had been but this lead to its own issues. Frederick, the eldest son & heir of George II, fell out with his father and this helped to further polarise British politics. The political party system was starting to get going during this era, but wasn’t yet as defined as modern political parties. Now with an adult heir who wasn’t getting on with the King there was an alternative court, so politicians in disagreement with the policies of His Majesty’s Government had a new centre they could revolve around. And the Prince of Wales could attract people to his court with promises of what would happen once he was King.

Sadly for him tho Frederick pre-deceased his father. Instead his son, George II’s grandson, George inherited. George III is famous for his madness, but Worsley was saying that it shouldn’t overshadow what was actually a very long and mostly sane reign. The madness itself is often thought to’ve been porphyria, but Worsley told us that the current theory is actually that this was a manic episode. She spoke to a doctor who has used the same techniques he uses to diagnose modern patients to look at the letters of George III before & during his madness, and he seemed fairly convinced that were George III to see a doctor today he’d be diagnosed as having bipolar disorder.

George III might’ve been mad, but he was also fertile and so his eldest son was old enough to be regent during his father’s madness. Worsley told us that this George (later George IV) was probably reacting against his childhood all his life. He’d been sent away from the family as a child to be educated strictly, and to have discipline instilled in him. In adulthood he indulged himself in as much vice as possible. He overate, he drank to excess, he took large quantities of laudanum (which is opium in alcohol), he was a notorious womaniser. Worsley showed us several satirical cartoons of George IV which were drawn by his contemporaries. When he died he was apparently not much mourned.

And that was the end of this episode, saving the rest of the Hanoverians for next time.

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We decided we were just about ahead enough of the PVR filling up to watch one of the non-HD programmes we recorded more recently – because we were both intrigued to watch the most recent Horizon episode: The Secret Life of the Cat. For this programme some researchers had fitted GPS-tagged collars to 50 cats living in the same village. They recorded the tracks of the cats over a week, and also filmed some with cameras set up round the village and attached cameras to others. They picked where & which cats to film based on the early data from the first couple of days of GPS tracking.

There was a bit much “gee wow isn’t this exciting” and fluffy time-filling interviews with the families that owned the cats for my tastes. I’d rather’ve seen more of the data & some more in depth analysis. However there were some interesting results. There was quite a lot of variance between different cats, with some staying close & some ranging much further. They said that the male cats tended to have a longer range than female – I wanted to know if that was entire males or if it was also true for neutered males (and if there’s a difference does it depend on age at neutering?) but they didn’t talk about that. Where the cats are more tightly packed in the centre of the village they saw them time-share territories, which was interesting. And amusing (although not surprising) were the cats that left their own house, sauntered across the village into another house through some other cat’s catflap and finished off that cat’s food. The video they recorded of one of these showed that it wasn’t particularly wary as it did this – clearly it was something usual & the cat felt safe.

Overall it was still fun to watch, just I would’ve preferred something more in depth. It did make me wonder (not for the first time) where Toby goes when he goes out. We’ve thought before about fitting him with a camera or a gps device, but if he goes into our neighbours’ houses I think I’d rather not know 😉