How will it all end? Predicting the far future of our Universe depends on understanding its present. This lecture starts with what seems to be a paradox in modern cosmology: that we have a model that does a fantastic job of explaining what we see, but which says 95% of the Universe is in forms (dark matter and dark energy) that we don’t understand. From there, we get a quick tour of the next 100 billion years – and speculate how the Universe’s end may hold the secrets of its beginnings. This lec...
Oct 10, 2025•50 min
“Scary”, “Worried”, “Dangerous” were some of the most frequent words to describe AI in a recent UK Government public survey. Do you fear, as many do, that AI will lead to us becoming second-class entities? In this first lecture, we will explore this ascendency, considering how notions of intelligence, sentience, perception, consciousness and reasoning are being framed and challenged in an AI-centred world; and surface the social, economic and ethical implications of these developments. This lect...
Oct 07, 2025•50 min
Written in the era of the founding of Gresham College, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream portrays the hypnotic dreaminess of a fairy world in which the real and the fantastic are blurred. This lecture explores how the innate musicality of Shakespeare’s original has provoked adaptations across the centuries, including Ashton and Balanchine’s ballets based on Mendelssohn’s incidental music for the play, Britten’s opera, Purcell’s masque The Fairy Queen, Henze’s Eighth Symphony and Elvis Cost...
Oct 03, 2025•2 hr 7 min
This lecture looks at the evolution of Guantánamo Bay, first as a focal point of Haitian immigration in 1991 (Gitmo 1.0), to the more famous detention of terror suspects in 2002 (Gitmo 2.0), and back to immigration in 2025. We will explore how Gitmo 3.0 is probably already over, and how we were able to head it off so quickly through legal challenges. However, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said the U.S. is “actively searching” for countries to accept migrants deported from the U.S., with bot...
Sep 30, 2025•53 min
The reflection of my right hand in a mirror is a left hand that looks similar yet is very different from the right. Many natural structures such as proteins, climbing vines, and seashells exhibit the same property known as chirality. Some of these objects are clearly left-handed, some are right-handed, some are both. The ultimate origin of chirality is one of Nature's great mysteries. In this talk, I will discuss the general problem of determining the chirality of an object and how it impacts al...
Sep 26, 2025•57 min
Planet Earth is an intricate and interconnected system, with some fundamental rules that we usually ignore. But we are part of our planet, not separate to it or just perched on top of it. This lecture will consider the two primary rules of Earth: that energy continually flows through the system (in from the Sun and then out again to space) and that matter/atoms must be continually recycled and use these to build up an outsider’s view of our planet. This lecture was recorded by Helen Czerski on t...
Sep 23, 2025•46 min
Ever since modern economic growth began three centuries ago, people have suffered from periodic bursts of anxiety about the technologies of the time taking on the work that they do. This opening lecture explores the history of ‘automation anxiety’ – from the Luddites who smashed framing machines at the start of the Industrial Revolution in Britain to the protestors who set driverless cars on fire on the streets of San Francisco today. Time and again, their main worry – that there would not be en...
Sep 19, 2025•48 min
ttps://x.com/GreshamCollege Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/tv554JY9TPU In 1588, the young Galileo delivered some lectures that were impressive enough to secure him a mathematics professorship at the University of Pisa. His subject? The geometry of Dante’s Inferno. In this lecture we’ll look at some of Galileo’s deductions, and how the questions raised may have influenced his later mathematical research. Using this and other examples of creative work in mathematics that crosses ...
Aug 22, 2025•55 min
The lecture shares perspectives from global history, comparative politics, and international relations to revaluate whether the twentieth-century collapse of European colonialism was as definitive as often portrayed. It suggests that, while in some ways, ending European Empires remade our contemporary world, in others processes of decolonization are far from complete. This lecture was recorded by Martin Thomas on the 9th of April 2025 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London Martin is Professor of Imperial...
Aug 19, 2025•49 min
Decolonisation movements sought to win sovereignty and control over national resources, especially oil. This lecture explores oil’s influence on national independence struggles, from the 1955 Bandung Conference to the rise of OPEC and the nationalisation of crude reserves. It examines how these shifts reshaped global power, exposing both the successes and limits of decolonisation, and their contemporary relevance to understanding the roots of today’s climate crisis. This lecture was recorded by ...
Aug 15, 2025•53 min
Shanawdithit was a woman who bore witness to the death of her world in the early nineteenth century, creating the only first-hand account we have of the Beothuk people from the Island of Newfoundland. This lecture seeks to narrate the history of her fascinating and important life, alongside the history of her island, which was England’s first transatlantic colony. It will illuminate the profound connections between the hyper-extraction of the island’s resources, the hyper-exploitation of its set...
Aug 12, 2025•54 min
Ever feel like the financial world works against you? This lecture discusses "behavioral finance" – how our brains get tricked by money matters. We will explore how to use these insights to your advantage, navigate conflicts of interest with financial "experts," and make smarter decisions for yourself and your investments. This lecture was recorded by Raghavendra Rau on the 16th of June 2025 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London Raghu is the Mercers School Memorial Professor of Business He is also the S...
Aug 08, 2025•2 hr 3 min
The lecture will examine the pros and cons of democracy in today's world, focusing on the importance of domestic and international rule of law to maintain democratic ideals, which are fragile in times of conflict. There will be examples given, highlighting the current War in Ukraine and the political situation in the United States, the influence of other players and the legacy of the Cold War. Lastly, there will be an observation on the ways that the principal judicial organs operate, their chal...
Aug 05, 2025•47 min
Health over the last 150 years in the UK and internationally has been transformed and this rapid rate of change will continue. Improvements in public health and the shifting demographic structure are altering the trajectory and frequency of disease. Advances in science including new drug classes, diagnostics and AI are changing what is possible in diagnosis and treatment. This lecture will consider the possible, and likely, direction of health over the next decades. This Annual Sir Thomas Gresha...
Aug 01, 2025•52 min
How long is the coastline of Britain? What is a rhombicuboctahedron? Which US president proved Pythagoras’s theorem? These and many other intriguing questions will be addressed in this lecture on renowned mathematical equations and their history. The selected equations span various areas of mathematics and cover a timeline of 4000 years, from early geometry to fractal art. This lecture was recorded by Robin Wilson on the 4th of June 2025 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London. Professor Robin Wilson is E...
Jul 29, 2025•55 min
We perceive the world through the processing of information given by our senses. Sometimes, this processing is faulty leading to illusions: shapes or sounds that we perceive differently from their physical reality. These illusions have delighted children and scientists alike for centuries. This lecture reveals how simple geometric illusions can be modelled mathematically, based on our understanding on how visual signals are coded and decoded by the brain, leading to a better understanding of how...
Jul 25, 2025•51 min
Our understanding of the human immune system today is vastly different from that of 50 years ago. This knowledge has led to immune-based therapies that would have seemed like science fiction to our grandparents: monoclonal antibodies, T-cell therapies, anti-cancer vaccines, precision immune suppression – the list is endless. In this lecture, we look to the future and ask, “What next for immunity?” This lecture was recorded by Robin May on the 11th of June 2025 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London. Robi...
Jul 22, 2025•51 min
This is the fifth and final lecture from the Gresham Festival of Musical Ideas. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/series/musical-ideas-2025 Professors Lintott and Mermikides present and discuss historical and contemporary musical representations of astronomical data including Pythagoras’s parallelism of tuning purity and celestial movement, Plato’s cosmic harmony in Timaeus, Kepler’s representations of orbital eccentricity as musical scales, Herschel’s blending of music and cosmology, and the ...
Jul 18, 2025•43 min
This is the third lecture from the Gresham Festival of Musical Ideas. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/series/musical-ideas-2025 This dialogue presents the what and why of Ancient Greek music, and its profound role in philosophy, society and the individual. Education without music was an impossibility in ancient Greece; virtue without music, equally so. One scholar (writing in the late twentieth century) compared the pervasive social presence and impact of the medium of mousikē in Ancient Gre...
Jul 18, 2025•41 min
This is the second lecture from the Gresham Festival of Musical Ideas. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/series/musical-ideas-2025 Why does a rhythm make us tap our feet—or even get up and dance? In conversation with Professor Milton Mermikides, neuroscientist Professor Morten Kringelbach reveals how the brain finds pleasure, meaning, and movement in music. Drawing on extensive brain imaging, analysis and real-world studies, the talk explores how music and dance engage our brain’s predictive s...
Jul 18, 2025•43 min
This is the first lecture from the Gresham Festival of Musical Ideas. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/series/musical-ideas-2025 Musical instruments have been found in the archaeological record from at least 40,000 years ago and despite the diversity of human civilization, we are yet to find a culture which lacks music. Other species also make ‘music’ – from a grasshopper’s chirp to a nightingale’s song – but is human music simply an extension of that evolutionary heritage? What can modern st...
Jul 18, 2025•50 min
This is the fourth lecture from the Gresham Festival of Musical Ideas. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/series/musical-ideas-2025 Professors Sarah Hart and Milton Mermikides reveal the deep connections between music and mathematics. Whether that’s the Euclidean rhythms that shape funky grooves, the set theory that maps every possible chord, or a live rendering of the geometric elegance of Gresham Professor Iannis Xenakis’s algorithmic compositions, this event will reveal how maths can help ex...
Jul 18, 2025•44 min
Accra’s James Fort is an iconic monument for Ghana and modern Africa. This lecture explores the fort's evolution -from its role as a trading post in the early European-African encounters, through its significance during the trans-Atlantic trade and enslavement, to its later use as a modern colonial prison in the post-independence era. It also explores its connection to Ghana's liberation movement, particularly its role in imprisoning Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and other political leaders during their res...
Jul 15, 2025•46 min
This lecture considers ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ from Carousel (1945). Perhaps Rodgers and Hammerstein’s most operatic song, it was originally written for Metropolitan Opera star Christine Johnson but has gone on to be recorded by artists as diverse as Elvis Presley and Marcus Mumford and sung at both the Last Night of the Proms and Liverpool Football Club. This lecture will include live performances by international soprano and Grammy Award winner Rebecca Evans CBE. This lecture was recorded by...
Jul 11, 2025•48 min
We have to stop fossil fuels from causing global warming – before the world stops using fossil fuels. There’s only one solution: safe and permanent disposal of one tonne of carbon dioxide for every tonne still generated by burning fossil fuels. But how do we achieve this without overheating the planet or stoking political conflicts? This lecture presents a simple answer: make carbon dioxide disposal a licensing condition of the sale and use of fossil fuels. This lecture was recorded by Myles All...
Jul 08, 2025•49 min
Whether you are human or computer, viruses can ruin your day, so taking steps to avoid them is important. This lecture will ask whether there are similarities between human immunity and computer immunity? Can we use discoveries in one system to help protect against infections in the other? Might we one day take our laptops for regular vaccinations, or run a ‘software update’ on our own immune systems to avoid an emerging pathogen? This lecture was recorded by Robin May & Victoria Baines on 7...
Jul 04, 2025•50 min
Now over 50 years old, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon remains the perfect example of a concept album. Blending cyclical forms, jazz and modal harmony, experimental electronics, multi-layered guitars, studio techniques and haunting lyrics, this lecture will examine why this album has retained its popularity, critical success, and enduring influence. This lecture was recorded by Milton Mermikides on 12th June 2025 at Rich Mix, London. Milton Mermikides is Gresham Professor of Music. He is Asso...
Jul 01, 2025•52 min
How have lawgivers featured in modern revolutions? This lecture considers key moments in revolutions, including seventeenth-century Britain, eighteenth-century France and (what would become) the United States, and twentieth-century Iran. The appeal to lawgivers (including ancient ones from many cultures) in revolutionary visions and in consolidating new constitutions is a striking feature of modern politics. This lecture was recorded by Melissa Lane on 5th June 2025 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London...
Jun 27, 2025•50 min
The U.S. Constitution had to be formed through debate before it could be ratified. Mirroring this, a British constitution must emerge through debates held by the next generation. This lecture indicates schools are a good environment to foster this. For students, there are many contentious issues that tap into discussions at the heart of writing a constitution. Students being punished for swearing raises questions of limits to free speech. Students wishing to intervene when an unpopular peer is b...
Jun 24, 2025•37 min
The JWST is the most expensive and powerful telescope astronomers have ever constructed. Its launch in 2021 started a new phase in our exploration of the cosmos, with the observatory's golden mirrors producing instantly iconic images of the Solar System's giant planets, nearby star-forming regions and galaxies, and our distant universe. The lecture includes the latest news from its studies of the early universe, a place lit up by what appears to have been a much more spectacular burst of activit...
Jun 20, 2025•44 min
