In Our Time Folgen

Melvyn Bragg examines the spread of religious doubt over the last three centuries. Nietzsche proclaimed that God was Dead in 1882, Hegel in fact beat him to it apprising his Berlin students of God’s demise as early as 1827. By the end of the 19th century echoes of the death of God can be heard everywhere: in the revolutionary politics of Lenin, in the poetry of Tennyson and the psychoanalysis of Freud. The march of Science seemed to challenge the authority of the Bible at every turn and by the twentieth century almost all the great writers, artists and intellectuals had abandoned the certainty of their belief in God.So who or what was responsible for this sudden spread of religious doubt? If God could truly be said to be dead then who fired the first shot? Have we educated ourselves out of Christ only to embrace the bleaker creed of Mamon? Is God a human construct or did God construct us? Is there an argument from design, or was the Big Bang morally pointless, without what we could call a mind at all? Did Darwin and natural selection rebut the idea of a divine purpose? With A N Wilson, novelist, biographer, journalist and author of God’s Funeral; Victoria Glendinning, author, journalist and biographer of Anthony Trollope and Jonathan Swift.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Roman poet Ovid and explore the theme of metamorphosis from the transformation of Narcissus to the bug of Kafka’s story, and beyond. Ovid wrote at the beginning of The Metamorphoses - in Ted Hughes’ wonderful version - “now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed/Into different bodies/I summon the supernatural beings/who first contrived/The transmogrifications/In the stuff of life./You did it for your own amusement./Descend again, be pleased to reanimate/this revival of those marvels.”And descend they did: The metamorphoses is an extraordinarily wide sweep through the teeming, changing world of Roman and Greek mythology.The tales were immensely popular in their own day, they were an inspiration to Chaucer, Ovid was Shakespeare’s favourite poet, and two thousand years after they were written the stories of shape changing still seem relevant: Ted Hughes won the Whitbread Book of the Year with his translation of Tales from Ovid in 1997, and a new collection called Ovid Metamorphosed has garnered versions of the tales from authors and poets from all over the world.With A S Byatt, novelist and one of the contributors to Ovid Metamorphosed; Dr Catherine Bates, critic and Research Fellow, University of Warwick.

Melvyn Bragg examines 20th century physics’ quest for the ultimate theory of everything. Einstein left us with his theory of General Relativity, which explained how gravity works on the scale of stars, galaxies, and the universe itself and Schroedinger left us with the equation that explained the mechanics of the tiny quantum realm. Both theories work to wonderful effect in their own worlds, but (and this is the sticking point) gravity is strangely absent from the quantum realm and planets behave nothing like particles. The enigma for scientists throughout most of the last century is that, as they are currently formulated, general relativity and quantum mechanics cannot both be right. The history of twentieth century physics has been a struggle to find a way to unite them, to find what has become the holy grail of modern physics: The Grand Unified Theory. With Brian Greene, Professor of Physics and Mathematics, Columbia University and Cornell University; Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Royal Society Research Professor in Astronomy and Physics at Cambridge University.