Antimatter (audio stream/wiki) is potentially a very tricky, very dry topic. It’s not something like evolution, where you can get a good argument going between Dawkins and someone else about punctuated equilibrium – it’s pure science, where the concepts are foreign and abstract. I wouldn’t have blamed anyone if In Our Time stumbled here.

To my delight, this was one of the clearest and most comprehensible science editions I’ve ever listened to. Val Gibson provided an exceptionally good introduction into the nature of matter and antimatter, and Frank Close and Ruth Gregory were equally skilled speakers. I suppose they may have covered this ground many times in lectures and elsewhere, which would explain the smoothness of their explanations, but it’s impressive nonetheless.

A good example comes about five minutes in, when Frank Close talks about Dirac’s equation that predicted the existence of antimatter. Equations are tricky – on the one hand, scientists don’t want to get bogged down in the details, but on the other, if you simplify it too much, you aren’t explaining anything at all. Here’s how he handles it:

Dirac came up with the idea of trying to combine quantum mechanics with the other great pillar of twentieth century physics, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and to apply it to the simplest thing then known, the electron. The surprise was that he found that he couldn’t do it, at least, not just by writing a single equation. He set out to write a single equation, to describe the energy of the electron, and the equation insisted on splitting into four parts – in mathematical jargon, he had to use matrices, but for our purposes, there were four equations where he only wanted one.

Now, they all had to mean something, and the question was, what? He quickly realised what two of them meant. As Val has said, the electron has a sort of corkscrew – think of it as a spinning top, going clockwise or anticlockwise – and that spin had been recognised must exist because people knew from the way atoms behaved that when electrons were in magnetic fields, they would spin one way or the other. For the first time, Dirac’s equation was saying, Aha! That is why there is a doubling-up of these two spin possibilities.

But what about the other two? That was the great puzzle, because as he looked at the equations, they seemed to be saying, the electron can exist with negative energy. Now, at this point, I imagine Dirac’s thoughts were probably like the listeners’ – ‘er, what’s going on here? Negative, with respect to what?’ Clearly, it’s a nonsense, phrased that way.

And then he had what to me was the great insight, which was there was another way of interpreting this doubling-up. It was that the negatively-charged electron with negative energy could also be read as saying a positively-charged electron with positive energy. So, now once he’d at least gotten something sensible – positive energy had appeared, which made sense – but positively-charged electron? There was no such thing – nobody knew of any such thing!

What Frank does well here is not merely explaining the equation, but importantly explaining Dirac’s great insight in a way that makes sense to listeneres. Frank goes on to say that the positron (the positively-charged electron) was later discovered by Carl Anderson in 1932, who used a cloud chamber to see its trail. The fact that it happened a mere four years after Dirac’s work was something that was somewhat disturbing for Frank.

I agree that it’s strange – almost as if the creation of a theory for the existence of positrons somehow removed a barrier that prevented their discovery. And perhaps it did; no doubt people were using cloud chambers for all sorts of things at the time, but even if you found evidence for a positively-charged electron, you were likely to think your equipment was malfunctioning rather than you’d made a major breakthrough. This theory may have not only spurred people to look for the positron, but given its discoverer a license to publish his findings. Einstein’s general theory of relativity, published in 1915/6 and subsequently ‘proved’ in 1919 by Arthur Eddington’s observations of stars close to the eclipsed sun is another notable example (although of course Eddington was looking for the effect).

From there, we move on to the fun stuff – what happens when matter and antimatter meet? Now, we already know the answer – an absolutely enormous explosion. How enormous? Well, the first nuclear bomb used in the Trinity test had about 6kg of plutonium. Only 1 gram of that plutonium was converted into energy during the explosion, which is still equivalent of a huge 20 kilotons of TNT. But if you replaced that plutonium with matter and antimatter, then the resulting explosion would be 6000 times bigger, because all of the 6kg would be converted into energy.

However, the central point of this edition was not about the nature of antimatter per se or explosions, but the question of why there is essentially no antimatter to be found in nature, when matter and antimatter are supposed to be identical? At the Big Bang, why weren’t equal amounts of matter and antimatter formed, and why didn’t they just annihilate each other? 18 minutes in, Val Gibson employs an analogy that will work particular well with fans of Sharpe:

At the beginning of the universe, we’ve got all this matter and antimatter around, and you can consider them as two armies that meet. If you had an army, say in the Napoleonic times, where you’ve got the ranks and you’ve got muskets* and they are firing at each other, and as they fire, the kneel down and reload and so you get waves that go through the matter and antimatter armies. You find the the matter is just slightly quicker than the antimatter army. The effect of that is that it soon annihilates all the antimatter, and you’re just left with the matter.

As later pointed out, this flaw in the symmetry between matter and antimatter is so small that there is only one extra particle of matter for every ten billion particles of antimatter; so in a way, the entire universe is just one ten-billionth of what was present at the Big Bang (yes, I know that this is probably a simplification, but it’s a wonderful image).

Speaking of images, Ruth Gregory comments around 33 minutes in that it’s hard for us to comprehend what conditions were like in the ultra-hot birth of the universe. Someone without an understanding of physics would think that as we heat up water and it turns from solid to liquid to gas, we are seeing three completely different substances; yet we know that at zero and one hundred degrees celsius, H2O goes through phase changes due to the breaking of particular types of intermolecular bonds, and that explains things. Imagine, she asks us, the same sort of thing, but with matter as a whole – when you heat it up enough, it acts completely different, just as steam acts completely differently to ice.

I could go on, but you should just listen to the programme.

I’ve sometimes thought that one reason why shows on science aren’t as interesting as those on history, politics or art is because science aims to describe the world as it objectively is, and as such, there can only be one correct description. Now, if you talk about science that is ‘known’ (or at least, that we have a very high level of confidence in) then you’re just describing stuff; and even worse, you’re describing concepts that are often non-intuitive and complicated (unlike history, which deals in incest, wars, assassinations and the like).

Alternatively, you could go down the different and recently very popular route of talking about ‘controversial’ science, where people don’t agree about how the world is. In theory, this is fine notwithstanding the obvious difficulties in explaining the concepts involved; practically all branches of science, physics in particular, have become so specialised that the disagreements are incomprehensible to even informed laymen (I read a recent interview with an eminent physicist who, when asked his opinion of string theory, said that he would need several years of study to provide a useful response). Unfortunately, in practice, ‘controversial’ science actually means pseudoscience (e.g. homeopathy) or politics (e.g. climate change).

I’m making one false assumption here though, and that’s that ‘describing stuff’ must be boring. On the contrary, scientists get to explain how the universe really, genuinely works! Who else gets to do that? Not historians or artists, that’s for sure. Explaining how the universe works ought to be fascinating and fun, and it’s practically a crime that it can be made boring. This programme on Antimatter shows us how it’s supposed to be done.

Nothing, as it turned out. This was a very pleasant yet oddly unremarkable edition. Possibly this is because I’ve already read up on basic philosophy (try The Dream of Reason by Anthony Gottlieb – it’s an excellent starter) but it was nevertheless an interesting refresher.

Some choice quotations on non-violence that stuck with me:

Angie Hobbs: This is [Socrates'] big move: he says, we all agree that we want happiness – the ‘flourishing life’ and what I’m telling you is that you’re not going to get the flourishing life unless you live virtuously because otherwise you’re going to be harming yourself more than the other people you hurt, because you will harm your own soul. You can only hurt other people’s bodies or their possessions; only the agent can harm his or her own soul. That was the controversial claim.

David Sedley: In fact what Angie’s talking about is one of Socrate’s most distinctive doctrines … that it’s never, in any circumstances, right to harm another person. You should not return wrong for wrong, you should not return harm for harm. This rejection of retaliation, he makes it quite clear, is a rejection of a whole moral tradition.

It’s a shame, because they sound utterly fascinating. Right now, I can only guess as to what Mathematics and Storytelling is about, but if the guests are as interesting as the title, it’ll be a great read. As for Cyberspace, which has the following guests:

…the Rev Dr John Polkinghorne, a distinguished scientist, as well as being an ordained priest, a fellow of Queens College Cambridge, and Canon Theologian of Liverpool, he’s spent his scientific career as a theoretical physicist, looking at elementary particles. For him, religion and science are united in their quest for ultimate truth in the universe, and Margaret Wertheim is fascinated alike by religion and science, author of the critically acclaimed, “Pythagoras’s Trousers”, which looked at religions intimate historical connection with physics, today she publishes her latest book, “The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace:A History of Space from Dante to the Internet”.

it wins the ‘Most Categories’ award from me, belonging to Science, Religion and Philosophy. There’s an argument to put it in History and Culture as well, if only to give it the quintuple, but I decided to err on the side of caution for this one.

I suppose it’s inevitable for a programme that’s been on the air as long as it has, but I noticed that In Our Time has covered the same ground a few different times: there are multiple editions about the Brain, Memory, Psychoanalysis, and Consciousness. Sometimes they concern different topics inside the same subject, but sometimes they appear to be about exactly the same things, just with different guests. Very odd.

Another interesting fact is that the first sixty or seventy editions – about two years worth – had only two guests, not three. On the balance, I think three is better; two risks the guests taking up adversarial positions, and also reduces the quality of the anecdotes (having two people waiting to speak inside of one means double the time to think of interesting stuff to say!).

Finally, something completely unrelated to the transcripts: I was listening to The Schism (audio stream/wiki) and discovered that the Eastern Orthodox Church is essentially descended from the Greeks, and for much of the first millennium they looked down on the Roman Catholic Church as being uncultured and inferior; sure, they might not have St. Peter, but they certainly had the language that the Bible was written in!

Given the central place that Rome and the Catholic Church occupies in Christianity now, and indeed for the past thousand years, it was a real surprise to learn that it used to be otherwise.

These ‘lost editions’ include topics such as Science and Religion, Childhood, Consciousness, The End of History and Quantum Gravity, and they’re discussed by guests including Nobel prizewinner Amartya Sen and the sadly deceased Stephen Jay Gould. The term ‘treasure trove’ is bandied around quite casually these days, but for anyone who enjoys In Our Time, these transcripts are very valuable.

With the invaluable help of Ben Burry, I’ve cleaned up and reformatted the transcripts for the After Our Time wiki. So far, eleven transcripts are online, with more going up over the next few weeks. I hope you like them!

Andy Martin: If Flaubert were pitching this story as a movie today, he would have to summarise the story as something like: one wedding, a couple of adulterers – liaisons, and a funeral.

It was so awful, I didn’t even realise it was a joke until five minutes later. So let’s say that I didn’t have high hopes for this edition. Things got even worse when Melvyn got into an argument (somewhat justifiably) with Andy about whether the book was any good or not, and proceeded to shut down his digression into his theory that there are two different sorts of readers and that reading great literature won’t always be good for you – which sounded quite intriguing, but I suppose there’s only so much time to spend. At this point, Melvyn is clearly looking forward to a well-deserved holiday in the nice, flooded countryside.

I’m a scientist at heart, and I have to admit that I sometimes skip over the ‘culture’ editions of In Our Time. To be honest, I didn’t find the discussion of Flaubert’s style of writing at the beginning of the programme to be interesting at all; perhaps if I’d read the book, I’d feel differently. In any case, I was more drawn to Robert Gildea’s description of France as the ‘second empire’:

The second empire is a sort of hybrid regime. It was a monarchy, but based on the idea of popular sovereignty and when the empire was declared, it was put to a popular vote. It was one of those attempts that you get in the 19th century to reconcile the revolutionary tradition with the counter-revolutionary tradition… it was a regime which had a different birth…

One of the big problems with the empire was liberty. Although Napoleon III said that he was a friend of liberty and ultimately would allow liberty to flourish, there was a sense that France had to go through a period of dictatorship, of constraint, that the politicans had to be gagged or disciplined, and that eventually there would be greater liberty – but not for the moment.

What I found most surprising was the notion that in the mid 19th century, marriage was ‘less about love than about property’. I suppose this was the case in most countries (and continues to be the case in many, even now) but, well… you think France, you think romance. So much for that.

The trial itself is fairly predictable. I did enjoy the supposed fact that the prosecutor, Pinard, went on to write obscene literature himself later in life, so impressed was he with Flaubert’s novel. Also good was Andy’s summary of one of the defense’s points, that:

…this marriage was an arranged marriage. Like all marriages in the 19th century bourgeois milieux, it was basically about property. You had an older man who’d established himself – a man wasn’t allowed to get married until he’d established himself – who would marry a girl who was meant to be a virgin – hence the convent education, because convent educations were basically about preserving virginity – and Balzac, for example, said, ‘This is a time bomb, because what happens when the man gets to fifty and the woman gets to thirty, and there are young men, banging on the door trying to get in – young men who haven’t had the right to get married… It’s a critique of the bourgeouis marriage.

(A few days after this, a friend informed me that one of Casanova’s most famous exploits was bedding two nuns)

The defense actually claims that Madame Bovary is a salutary moral tale, since she gets her just desserts in the end – a painful death. As Andy says, ‘the author is being tremendously sadistic to his own heroine.’ Melvyn is so taken with this that he wants to pick it up later in the programme – a good catch. Not long after, he becomes distracted by Mary Orr:

Mary Orr: One of the really important parts of the trial was that the text itself was used as the basis for the evidence. Any student going back to those key scenes – the carriage ride -

Melvyn: For people who haven’t read the novel, there’s a ride in a carriage through Rouen with one of her lovers, and they close the curtains so nobody can see inside, and we hear a lot about the horses at the front, how they sweating -

Mary: They’re sweating, and the coachman is sweating, and -

Melvyn: It’s extremely erotic, and very well done (laughs)

Mary: And no-one can actually pinpoint exactly where the offence to public sensibility might be, that it’s all in the imagination of the reader. Most of the scenes of similar ilk in the novel again play with that hugely charged eroticism. It’s like films where you’ve got a couple who are just about to enjoy one anothers pleasures* and all you see in the camera is the waving grass and the blue sky -

Melvyn: Or the train going in to the tunnel.

Mary: Indeed, so Flaubert does exactly that, well before the cinema caught up with it.

Two points. Firstly, exchanges like these are why I love listening to In Our Time – it’s a perfect mix of education and madness. Secondly, who still says ‘enjoy one anothers pleasures’ these day?

Where things really get interesting is about 35 minutes in. Andy has been trying, unsuccessfully, to shock people for the entire programme so far, with his claim that the book isn’t so great and that he would’ve convicted Flaubert. Maybe he did actually succeed with the bad joke, but sensing the end of the programme, he kicks it up a notch:

Andy: In a sentence, I think of Flaubert as a rapist- because he forces sex on his heroine.

Melvyn: Surely… it’s the people in the book who force sex on his heroine, and she herself is looking for sex from the people in the book -

Andy: Now you’re following the Flaubertian line, of dissociating. Let us dissociate the author from his own book. There’s the book, floating in mid-air, as he says. It’s just a text, as Barthes would say. However, if want to return to the real world, as you’re suggesting, clearly Flaubert wrote it. He made those things up! He made those characters do what he wanted them to do. It’s not as though they have a life of their own.

It starts off as mildly shocking, and then becomes pretty intriguing when Andy says that Flaubert – and other (male) novelists – claim to understand what was going on inside the mind of a woman, ‘to speak on her behalf’. Again, Melvyn sounds genuinely impressed by this and suggests revisiting it next series.

By this point, I doubt any listeners are that concerned about the end of the trial any more, so the programme meanders around a little, only to recover with another of Andy’s weird theories about Flaubert being autistic and his writing is trying to compensate for that cognitive deficit. Now, as someone who knows a little about autism, I really don’t buy this theory, although I would suggest that perhaps he did have high-functioning autism at most – a slightly ‘extreme form of the male mind‘ (as espoused by psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen).

Despite not generally enjoying ‘culture’ editions of In Our Time, I found this one quite memorable, mainly due to the quantity of great ideas that came up during the programme, and the good rapport the guests had. If you haven’t listened to it, I suggest you do.

Now, I don’t intend to write posts this long for every single edition, partly because I don’t have the time, and partly because most editions don’t have quite so many great quotes. Still, this is the general idea – a commentary on the programme that includes quotes, links to additional resources and some of my own theories. If you have any thoughts on how it might be improved, let me know!

And if you’re interested in reading Madame Bovary, you have a number of choices. You can download it from Project Gutenberg in the original French, or in English as translated by Eleanor Marx-Aveling. You can also read the same translation in a more friendly web version.

Many things weighed into their ultimate decision, such as misinformation about the number of armies that might intercept them, the availability of French troops and the coming winter. These are all well known – but there was another factor that is little known and rather fascinating to hear about…

Allan Macinnes: There’s also one other factor, believe it or not, that comes into this. Both in the Fifteen but also in the Forty-Five there was a major outbreak of cattle disease in the south of England. If you look at the local press, there’s a conviction that this cattle disease can also spread to humans. Now, if you’ve also got a lot of Highlanders coming down – and their whole trade is based on cattle, so they reach Derby – and it’s almost the limits of the cattle disease. You can find (laughter) – seriously, you can find whole areas in Essex saying the French could be bringing with them foot and mouth or something! So there is a cattle -

Bragg: Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Foot and Mouth Disease?

Murray Pittock: Bioweapons!

Allan Macinnes: (Laughing) There is this issue that comes in the press, a serious issue, of the cattle disease that’s affecting decisions.

This is the reason why I love In Our Time – you get to hear some of the more unlikely but colourful details of our history that would never appear in textbooks (or the web, for that matter – I couldn’t find anything about this on Google).

I’d watched and listened to interdisciplinary programmes before, and I hadn’t liked them. Most producers had an aversion to letting people talk continuously for more than one minute (at most!), and if the programme was on TV, a good chunk of time would be spent on pretty but uninformative visuals. Panel discussions were more like confrontations, and often treated more as entertainment rather than anything else. I was skeptical that, when it came to learning about a new subject, it was possible for anything to beat reading a book.

In Our Time genuinely surprised me. The very simple idea of bringing in three guests to talk about a single subject for 40 minutes in a live recorded programme seems rife with danger. How do you keep the guests on topics? How do you make sure you cover everything in time? What if a guest turns out to be a lemon? And yet In Our Time managed, fairly consistently, to provide excellent introductions into subjects as varied as Merlin, Human Evolution and the History of Hell. I quickly became addicted to the show and would happily relate anecdotes and facts I’d heard to friends.

Over the past two years, I’ve concluded that there are three main reasons why In Our Time works so well. Firstly, the production team clearly works very hard to research each subject every week and work out the time course of each show; which areas to cover, which to avoid, and which guest is appropriate for each. The guests, of course, provide the meat of each edition, and it’s their expertise that makes them so informative and interesting. You would think that the notion of getting experts to explain their subjects in their own words wouldn’t be strange, but In Our Time is one of the few shows that lets them.

Finally, there’s Melvyn Bragg, the host of In Our Time. It’s safe to say that without Melvyn, the show would be very different, and probably the worse for it. Without his badgering and questions, programmes would rapidly spiral out of control or become bogged down in minutiae. Yes, he sometimes misunderstands what’s going on and gets strangely irritated when guests disagree with his notes, but equally, he manages to coax the best out of the guests who appear – even the incredibly shy ones.

Putting these three elements together – a thorough production team, expert guests and an experienced host – and you get an operation that is able to take on any subject and come out with a programme that’s both accessible and detailed, that explores fascinating digressions and opposing views, and do this every single week. For this reason, when In Our Time became one of the BBC’s first shows to be podcast, it rapidly became one of the most popular in the world.

It’s not perfect. Sometimes there are weeks that fall flat, where guests have a hard time explaining the subject, or where it doesn’t seem like there’s enough to talk about – or where there’s too much to cover. But I’ve felt that each week is always worth of comment. When I found my own personal weblog being taken over by thoughts and quotations from In Our Time, I decided to set up this website.

After Our Time has three parts. The first is the weblog, which you are reading now; this will cover each edition of In Our Time every week with links, commentary and eventually interviews. If you’re interested in contributing, please let me know!

The second part is the forum. Forums are one of the best things about the Internet when they work, and it’s always fascinating to see how a particular subject will attract a particular crowd. One of the most intelligent and amusing forums I take part in is about a computer game called Civilization. Civilization is a complex and thoughtful game that explores military, scientific, cultural and historical issues. Unsurprisingly, much of the discussion on the forum is about tips and strategies for playing the game. However, the majority of the discussion has absolutely nothing to do with the game whatsoever; it’s about politics, history, science and economics. When members of a community shares one interest, it should come as no surprise that they share others – and wants to talk about those as well.

In the same way, it strikes me people who share an interest in In Our Time will also be a generally smart, thoughtful and friendly bunch of people (no doubt very handsome, to boot). Hopefully you’ll be interested in talking about the subjects that the programme covers – as well as others that have nothing to do with In Our Time, but everything to do with the community that listens to it. So, I’m looking forward to seeing how the forum, both the on-topic and off-topic parts.

Finally, there’s the wiki. I’ve created a page for each of the 200+ editions of In Our Time, sorted into five broad categories. My hope is that these pages will be filled with additional resources and information relating to the editions. This is obviously hard work, and I suspect it’ll be the newer pages that get filled in first, but ultimately it’s the community that will set the direction for the wiki.

Right now, we’re in the summer break between series, which is a good time to start this site. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be makes posts about old editions of In Our Time from the archives, so that when the next new edition comes out on 27th September, there’ll be a decent amount of content here for newcomers to have a look at. So, have a look around the site, join the forum and introduce yourselves!