Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss perception: how the brain reacts to the mass of data continually crowding it. Barry Stein's laboratory at Wake Forest University in the United States found that the shape of a right angle drawn on the hand of a chimpanzee starts the visual part of the brain working, even when the shape has not been seen. It has also been discovered that babies learn by touch before they can properly make sense of visual data, and that the senses of smell and taste chemically combine to give us flavour.Perception is a tangled web of processes and so much of what we see, hear and touch is determined by our own expectations that it raises the question of whether we ever truly perceive what others do.What governs our perception of the world? And are we correct to distinguish between sight, sound, smell, touch and taste when they appear to influence each other so very much?With Richard Gregory, Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Experimental Psychology, Bristol University; David Moore, Director of the Medical Research Council Institute of Hearing Research, University of Nottingham; Gemma Calvert, Reader in Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Bath.
Wissenschaft & Technik
In Our Time: Science Folgen
Scientific principles, theory, and the role of key figures in the advancement of science.
Folgen von In Our Time: Science
293 Folgen
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Folge vom 28.04.2005Perception and the Senses
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Folge vom 17.03.2005Dark EnergyMelvyn Bragg and guests discuss 'dark energy'. Only 5% of our universe is composed of visible matter, stars, planets and people; something called 'dark matter' makes up about 25% and an enormous 70% of the universe is pervaded with the mysteriously named 'dark energy'. It is a recent discovery and may be only a conjecture, but it has been invoked to explain an abiding riddle of the cosmos: if the expansion of the universe is powered by the energy of the Big Bang, then why isn't the expansion slowing down over time as the initial energy runs down and the attractive force of gravity asserts itself? Scientists had predicted a Big Crunch as the logical opposite of the Big Bang, but far from retracting, the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating...it's running away with itself.How do we know that the universe is behaving like this and what's causing it? If dark energy is the culprit, then what is this elusive, though omnipresent entity?With Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics, Cambridge University; Carolin Crawford, Royal Society University Research Fellow at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge; Sir Roger Penrose, Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Maths at Oxford University.
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Folge vom 24.02.2005AlchemyMelvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of Alchemy, the ancient science of transformations. The most famous alchemical text is the Emerald Tablet, written around 500BC and attributed to the mythical Egyptian figure of Hermes Trismegistus. Among its twelve lines are the essential words - “as above, so below". They capture the essence of alchemy, that the heavens mirror the earth and that all things correspond to one another. Alchemy was taken up by some of the most extraordinary people in our intellectual development, including Roger Bacon, Paracelsus, the father of chemistry, Robert Boyle, and, most famously, Isaac Newton, who wrote more about alchemy than he did about physics. It is now contended that it was Newton’s studies into alchemy which gave him the fundamental insight into the famous three laws of motion and gravity.With Peter Forshaw, Lecturer in Renaissance Philosophies at Birkbeck, University of London, Lauren Kassell, Lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, Stephen Pumfrey, Senior Lecturer in the History of Science at the University of Lancaster.
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Folge vom 17.02.2005The Cambrian PeriodMelvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Cambrian period when there was an explosion of life on Earth. In the Selkirk Mountains of British Columbia in Canada, there is an outcrop of limestone shot through with a seam of fine dark shale. A sudden mudslide into shallow water some 550 million years ago means that a startling array of wonderful organisms has been preserved within it. Wide eyed creatures with tentacles below and spines on their backs, things like flattened rolls of carpet with a set of teeth at one end, squids with big lobster-like arms. There are thousands of them and they seem to testify to a time when evolution took a leap and life on this planet suddenly went from being small, simple and fairly rare to being large, complex, numerous and dizzyingly diverse. It happened in the Cambrian Period and it's known as the Cambrian Explosion.But if this is the great crucible of life on Earth, what could have caused it? How do the strange creatures relate to life as we see it now? And what does the Cambrian Explosion tell us about the nature of evolution?With Simon Conway Morris, Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology, Cambridge University; Richard Corfield, Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Earth, Planetary, Space and Astronomical Research, Open University; Jane Francis, Professor of Palaeoclimatology, University of Leeds.