Casablanca

Dark Matter is a proposed form of matter that does not absorb, reflect or emit light. It is known to make up 27% of our universe, while the matter that makes up stars and galaxies accounts for only 5%.

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the machines that are described as the world’s largest experiments: Particle Accelerators. A famous example of a Particle Accelerator is the Large Hadron Collider, a device which stretches for nearly 30km, deep beneath the ground in a tunnel between France and Switzerland. This enormous scale enables the particles within to be propelled to incredible speeds, reaching almost the speed of light before they smash together. The resulting debris offers insights into the fundamental building blocks of our universe, such as the Higgs Boson Particle. These Colliders are international scientific projects costing billions of pounds, but thousands of other particle accelerators exist around the world. The process has remarkable applications in medicine, archaeology and technology. With Harry Cliff, Particle Physicist at the University of Cambridge Victoria Martin Professor of Collider Physics at the University of Edinburgh Joseph Martin Professor of the History of Science and Technology at Durham University. Producer: Sam Peach Reading list: Jon Butterworth, A Map of the Invisible: Journeys into Particle Physics (William Heinemann Ltd, 2017) Jon Butterworth, Smashing Physics: Inside the World’s Biggest Experiment (John Murray, 2014) Brian Cathcart, The Fly in the Cathedral: How a Small Group of Cambridge Scientists Won the Race to Split the Atom (Viking, 2004) Panagiotis Charitos, Theodore Arabatzis, Harry Cliff, Günther Dissertori, Juliette Forneris, and Jason Li-Ying (eds.), Big Science in the 21st Century: Economic and Societal Impacts (IOP Publishing, 2023) Harry Cliff, Space Oddities: The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe (Picador, 2024) Harry Cliff, How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for Our Universe (Picador, 2021) Frank Close, Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass (Allen Lane, 2022) Allan Franklin, Shifting Standards: Experiments in Particle Physics in the Twentieth Century (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013) John L. Heilbron, Ernest Rutherford and the Explosion of Atoms (Oxford University Press, 2003) John L. Heilbron and Robert W. Seidel, Lawrence and His Laboratory: A History of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (University of California Press, 2023) Lillian Hoddeson, Adrienne W. Kolb, and Catherine Westfall, Fermilab: Physics, the Frontier, and Megascience (University of Chicago Press, 2011) Joseph D. Martin, Solid State Insurrection: How the Science of Substance Made American Physics Matter (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019) Michael Riordan, The Hunting of the Quark: A True Story of Modern Physics (Touchstone Books, 1987) Michael Riordan, Lillian Hoddeson, and Adrienne W. Kolb, Tunnel Visions: The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider (University of Chicago Press, 2018) Suzie Sheehy, The Matter of Everything: A History of Discovery (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023) Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists (Harvard University Press, 1992) A world-class seminar every week. Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time celebrates the pursuit of knowledge and the enduring power of ideas. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world. In Our Time is a BBC Studios production

One of the most celebrated thinkers of the Renaissance, Erasmus (c1466-1536) is best known for his works of classical and religious scholarship, and for his infamous theological dispute with Martin Luther (1483-1546) over free will and the Church.

In 1516, the publication of one small book would coin a new word and give rise to centuries of literature, theory, and thought. In his most influential work, the lawyer and Tudor politician Thomas More (1478-1535) described a seemingly perfect – but entirely fictional – island called Utopia. In 1535, less than two decades after writing the book, More was executed for refusing to accept King Henry VIII as supreme head of the church of England. Misha Glenny and his guests discuss why More’s exploration of service and the ideal state has been read as a blueprint for society, a scathing satire, and as a timeless warning. This In Our Time episode examines the 16th-century origin and legacy of one of most influential works of political philosophy. The discussion explores Utopia’s roots in Renaissance Humanism, what the book has to say about tyranny and governance, and why utopias can so often seem dystopian. With Laura Ashe Professor of English Literature at Worcester College, University of Oxford Cathy Shrank Professor of Tudor and Renaissance Literature at the University of Sheffield And Joanne Paul Honorary Associate Professor in Intellectual History at the University of Sussex Producer: Martha Owen Reading list: Terence Cave (ed.), Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’ in Early Modern Europe: Paratexts and Contexts (Manchester University Press, 2008) J. H. Hexter, More’s Utopia: The Biography of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 1952) Richard Marius, Thomas More: A Biography (Harvard University Press, 1999) Thomas More (ed. Joanne Paul), Utopia (Oxford University Press, 2025) Thomas More (ed. George M. Logan), Utopia (Cambridge University Press, 2016) Thomas More (ed. Gerard B. Wegemer and Stephen W. Smith), The Essential Works of Thomas More (Yale University Press, 2020) Joanne Paul, Thomas More: A Life and Death in Tudor England (Michael Joseph, 2025) Joanne Paul, Thomas More: Classic Thinkers (Polity, 2016) Howard P. Segal, Utopias: A Brief History from Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) Cathy Shrank and Phil Withington (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Thomas More's Utopia (Oxford University Press, 2023) Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1: The Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 1979) In Our Time is a BBC Studios production A world-class seminar every week. Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time celebrates the pursuit of knowledge and the enduring power of ideas. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Misha Glenny chooses the first of his archive picks - bringing back classic conversations from the In Our Time archive, every Monday. Humans have tried to calculate, regulate, and measure time for thousands of years: from systems based on tracking sunrise and sunset, to the invention of increasingly precise mechanical alarm clocks and astrolabes. In this archive episode, first released in March 2012, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the methods used to measure time throughout human history. Early civilisations used the movements of heavenly bodies to tell the time, but in the ancient world there were also sophisticated timekeeping devices such as water clocks. The development of mechanical clocks in Europe emerged in the medieval period, when monks used such devices to sound an alarm to signal it was the hour to pray, although these clocks did not tell them the time. For hundreds of years clocks were inaccurate and it proved hard to remedy the problems, let alone settle on a standard time that a whole country should follow. It was the advent of the railways that meant time finally became standardised in Britain during the mid-19th century, and in 1884 Greenwich became the prime meridian of the world. Atomic clocks now mark the passing of the days, hours, and minutes and they are capable of keeping time to a second in 15 million years.