- 2 days ago
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00Oh
00:49Throughout history, people have sought the secret of the universe.
00:53You know, the final explanation, where does it all come from, what keeps it all going, that stuff.
00:59And sometimes, back in history, they contributed a great deal more than they thought they were doing at the time.
01:05For instance, how did the ancient medieval Zen Buddhist tea ceremony
01:10and the obsession Renaissance architects in 15th century Florence have with magic numbers
01:16both come together in the modern world to help us crack open the secrets of the cosmos
01:21and make it possible for us to hear?
01:28Echoes of the past.
01:50In the 17th century, when the first Dutch traders arrived out here, they found all the locals, everybody from the
01:57Emperor down, sitting around drinking tea.
02:04Well, not just drinking tea.
02:07Drinking tea.
02:08And at the same time, asking questions like, what is the sound of one hand clapping?
02:21The Zen Buddhist tea ceremony was supposed to help you find infinite oneness and universal understanding.
02:29And how you drank the tea was supposed to get you in the right frame of mind.
02:34So it was a ritual act whose every single detail was exactly prescribed.
02:39You had to place the cup.
02:41So.
02:43Hold and turn it.
02:45So.
02:47Drink with calm appreciation, sipping twice.
02:51So.
02:55After a number of ritual movements and phrases, the ceremony ended as formally as it had begun.
03:02The final placement of the cup was exact.
03:06Then, with your hands placed just so, time to express final awareness with a long look and a gentle hiss.
03:14So.
03:21I hope that shorthand version of the medieval Buddhist tea ceremony will do, because the real thing takes more than
03:27four hours.
03:28So anyway, those seagoing Dutch characters I referred to earlier came here, contemplated all that harmony, purity, reference and tranquility.
03:38And realized that what they were looking at was lots of profit.
03:42Because while out here in the Far East, tea was taken as medicine for every known ailment.
03:47Back home in Holland, it was just what the new Dutch middle class needed to fill its afternoons.
03:59So you see, it's a myth about us English starting a tea drinking thing.
04:03The Dutch were doing it 50 years before us.
04:05But for all European tea importers, throughout the rest of the 17th century, wherever they were in Europe,
04:11what turned out to be absolutely their customers' cup of tea, wasn't the tea.
04:16It was the cup.
04:18Porcelain.
04:19People went potty about it.
04:21Kings and princes built special rooms to house their collections.
04:24Pirates knocked off trading ships to get at their porcelain collections.
04:27So you can guess what it was worth.
04:36As for how porcelain was actually made, its Chinese inventors remained, to say the least, inscrutable.
04:49All of which, I suppose, helped to make the fortunes of this little Dutch town.
04:54Home of one of history's most famous fakes.
04:58It's called Delft.
04:59And it's really very nice.
05:15Delft was one of the ports the 17th century Dutch traders out in the Far East came from.
05:22Which is why a lot of those valuable porcelain cargoes ended up on sale in the shops back here.
05:29Not enough porcelain, however, as I mentioned, to satisfy the instant craze for it.
05:34And that's where the famous fake comes in.
05:36You probably own some.
05:38It was called Delftware.
05:44Because the price of the real stuff went so high, the Delft potters came up with an imitation so good,
05:51only a Chinese could have told the difference.
05:53And there weren't many of them around.
06:09By the 18th century, Delft had pretty much cornered the whole European pottery market.
06:15Some of the Delft fakes were so valuable that if you dropped a bit, you had it very expensively repaired.
06:21Which is how an English potter called Wedgwood got his start in life.
06:25Until he'd made enough money from repairing Delftware to set up on his own.
06:30And when he did, his stuff looked like this.
06:34Queensware, he called it.
06:35He had an eye for publicity, so in 1765 he sent a tea set to the royal family.
06:41They liked it.
06:42So all his ads said,
06:44If the Queen uses it, so should you.
06:47Made him rich, that trick.
06:48But compared with the Delft, look how different the Wedgwood style is.
06:54Simple.
06:56This, and the more expensive stuff he turned out, was about as far from Chinese as you can get.
07:02You were supposed to say Wedgwood's work reminded you of the elegance of ancient Greece or Rome.
07:07Because by this time, everybody had gone right off things Chinese and were deeply into a new fashion craze called
07:14neoclassical.
07:16And when I say deeply, as usual, I mean it in more senses than one.
07:34See, the Italians had just discovered the buried Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum to general stupefied amazement.
07:42So by the 1730s, it had become part of every well-heeled young aristocrat's education to do ancient Rome, and
07:50classical ruins in general,
07:52on a kind of culture vulture trip around the sites called the Grand Tour.
08:12And of course, as tourists will, these aristos picked up the odd souvenir knick-knack along the way.
08:18Statues, columns, temples, monumental vases, friezes, basilicas, you know, souvenir knick-knacks.
08:26Collections were collected in ways that today would get you put in jail.
08:30Collections so big, we had to invent museums to put them in.
08:33That's how the British Museum started.
08:35The best known collection at the time was Sir William Hamilton's,
08:39the fellow whose wife Emma ran away with Lord Nelson.
08:42He had dozens of priceless ancient vases that he had acquired.
08:46And that's where Wedgwood got his design ideas from, Hamilton's vases.
08:54But what really got the tourists flocking into Italy was that.
08:58Well, not actually that.
09:01This.
09:04See?
09:09A Venetian artist called Piranesi did these.
09:12He got so turned on by the new archaeology and the general classical crumble that he churned out views of
09:18Rome by the dozen.
09:20These inspired a visiting architect called Robert Adam, who promptly took neoclassicism back to Britain and churned out country houses
09:27more suited to Olympus than Oxfordshire.
09:33But in among all this Greek and Roman decoration, all over Adams, ceilings, walls, fireplaces, and anywhere else he could
09:41put it, was something else he copied from Piranesi.
09:44Something else Piranesi had seen in Rome.
09:47Egyptian symbols.
09:48It was adopted by the Freemasons and turned into the next rave from the grave.
09:55But the whole Egypto craze thing got a real leg up when the best known Freemason in France, name of
10:02Napoleon, decided to invade Egypt and, by the way, remove large lumps of it.
10:08Thanks in particular to the team of scientists he sent to choose exactly which bits to loot.
10:13Because they then wrote a giant book about it which everybody read.
10:17Thus kicking off Egyptology and all this stuff.
10:25And something that brings us closer to the secret of the universe, remember?
10:29Because one of Napoleon's scientists called Fourier missed Egyptian weather so much when he got home, he became the expert
10:36on heat.
10:37How did heat flow, for instance?
10:39How did things warm up?
10:41And when things cooled down, where did heat go?
10:44And why was it hotter the deeper you dug?
10:48He reckoned on his figures that eons ago it had to have been tropically hot all over the ancient earth.
10:56Somebody dug down.
11:01Sure enough, there were fossil palm trees under places like Paris.
11:05So the earth, like everything, did cool down.
11:09Well, by 1851 people knew that heat was made by moving molecules.
11:13And in Scotland, a fellow called Kelvin decided to take a look at the cooling down process.
11:23According to Kelvin, the coolest anything could ever get, on a temperature scale he invented called the Kelvin scale, would
11:30be when it got so cold, all its molecules stopped moving.
11:38That, Kelvin reckoned, would be at minus 273 degrees Celsius.
11:44So he made that zero on his scale.
11:47The coldest there is.
11:49Zero degrees Kelvin.
12:01Basically, Kelvin wrote the second law of thermodynamics, according to which anything left alone with no further heat input goes
12:08cold and stays cold.
12:11Like that tunnel under the ice.
12:13Or the universe.
12:16Or tea.
12:19Okay, keep cold tea in mind because I'll be coming back to it.
12:22Meanwhile, let's go somewhere warmer, shall we?
12:25To that other place I mentioned at the beginning of the programme.
12:29Florence.
12:30You remember I said at the beginning that universal harmony was sought by medieval eastern tea drinkers and Renaissance Florentine
12:36architects?
12:37You know what form the Florentine search for harmony took?
12:41You're looking at it.
12:42Gloria!
12:43Gloria!
12:46Gloria!
12:47Gloria!
12:48Gloria!
12:48The harmony of nature, as reproduced in 15th century Florentine architecture.
12:53The church of Santa Maria Novella, done by a fellow called Alberti, with mathematical exactitude.
13:00The facade is an exact square.
13:03This bit here is precisely equal to exactly one half of this bit here.
13:10Each half of this bit is a quarter of this bit.
13:13The front door height is one and a half times its width.
13:20And that's only the half of it.
13:28As you can probably guess, Alberti and most Renaissance eggheads were nuts about numbers.
13:33They thought there were special magic numbers that would give them the secret of the universe and all that.
13:38So it's not surprising that Alberti also wrote the book on codes for the growth industry of the time.
13:47Spying.
13:48With new nations setting up every day, 16th and 17th century Europe was jammed with embassies, jammed with people, all
13:55of them saying,
13:56Who me? I'm just a commercial attache.
13:59And all of them writing secret reports in invisible Lincoln code for your eyes only.
14:04By 1585, a French cryptographer called Visionaire, who was also a fan of Alberti's, had produced a code that he
14:11said nobody could crack.
14:12A code no spy should be without, or as it was to turn out 300 years later, no army.
14:41Nearly 300 years later, the Visionaire code was still in use, by the Confederate side in the American Civil War.
14:49Here's how it worked.
14:50First, you draw lots of squares, like this, with the letters of the alphabet along the top and down the
14:57side.
14:58Then fill in, like this.
15:01Second row, B to Z, then A.
15:03Third row, C to Z, then AB.
15:06And so on, till the whole thing's filled.
15:09Then you and your spies agree on a special encoding keyword.
15:13Let's say, booth.
15:16Now for the message.
15:18Say it starts, Lincoln, which you write underneath the keyword booth, which you repeat as necessary.
15:25To encode the message, you start by going to the first message letter, L, along the top.
15:30Then go down the side to the first keyword letter, B, where the two intersect, M, is the first code
15:38letter.
15:38Okay, do that again.
15:40The next message letter, I.
15:43Keyword letter, O, code letter, W.
15:48Okay, here's a Visionaire message in code.
15:53And now to decode it.
15:56You know the keyword is booth.
15:59So, along the top to find first keyword letter, B, down to first code word letter, M, and back to
16:07decode, L.
16:09Second keyword letter, O, down to secret code letter, W, and back to decode, I.
16:16And so on through the full secret message.
16:19You've now decoded, L, I, N, C, O, L, N, D, E, A, D.
16:30Lincoln dead.
16:32If John Wilkes Booth had got away after he assassinated Abraham Lincoln, that's likely the message he would have sent,
16:39using the Visionaire code they found in his hotel room when they searched it after they caught him.
16:45Booth's southern spymasters used the Visionaire code all through the Civil War,
16:49which they lost partly because the North cracked the code.
17:00And partly because, with or without a code, they couldn't feed their armies the way the North could.
17:07These northern troops had all the bread they could eat because the federal government was giving out free farmland
17:13so as to encourage European immigrants to get straight off the boat, move to the Midwest, and grow corn.
17:21So they did, and turned America into the world's biggest grain producer.
17:26All the bread an army could possibly ever want to eat.
17:29So in 1865, when the war ended, what were they going to do with all that excess grain production?
17:36Well, fortunately, there was Europe to feed, so in the end, that's where most of it ended up going.
17:43Which brings my story one step closer to the secret of the universe, which is where we're heading, remember?
17:48Thanks, this time, to shipping.
17:51It was the engineering for American grain carriers that made possible bigger and bigger ships
17:55that culminated in the giant transatlantic liners of the 1920s,
18:00equipped with every known luxury and the latest high-tech ship to shoreline.
18:05A radio telephone.
18:07A transatlantic call lasting three minutes cost virtually nothing, a few thousand dollars.
18:12So now the super-rich could stay in touch with their financial advisors.
18:17Well, maybe.
18:27Because the only trouble with this was the hiss.
18:32In 1930, the Bell telephone people put an engineer called Jansky onto the problem.
18:37Turned out to be static.
18:39You usually get it from thunderstorms and cars and such.
18:43But in this case, there was more to it than that.
18:49The static was pretty constant.
18:54Well, it didn't take Jansky long to put up an antenna and find out where the hiss was coming from.
18:59Not storms or cars. Up there.
19:03And the weirdest thing was, the source of the static drifted across the sky
19:08on exactly the same track at exactly the same rate every day.
19:12And it did so four minutes later every day.
19:17Jansky's assistant was an astronomer.
19:20And he said, that's what stars do.
19:22Because of the Earth's orbit, stars appeared to drift across the sky
19:26four minutes later every day.
19:28Good heavens, this was extraterrestrial static.
19:31Jansky published.
19:33Got one letter.
19:34From an amateur sky watcher called Raber in Illinois,
19:37who slung together an antenna made from chicken wire,
19:41and got this.
19:45The source of the hiss.
19:47The entire Milky Way galaxy.
19:50That first ever radio picture of the sky,
19:53produced by somebody in his backyard,
19:55kicked off the whole of modern radio astronomy.
20:08In 1965, two American scientists pulled everything together
20:13when they found static coming from all over the universe.
20:18Now, heat gives off static.
20:21So they analysed the heat level of the static
20:23and found it was an extraordinary echo from the ancient past.
20:27Because it showed that today's universe had an overall temperature
20:32of only three degrees Kelvin.
20:35Remember the Kelvin scale?
20:38In other words, the cosmos was only three degrees above absolute zero.
20:47That's the temperature the whole universe should have come down to
20:49if it had started cooling down after a hot Big Bang 15 billion years ago.
20:55So there you have it.
20:56The secret of the universe.
20:58Not bad for Zane Buddhist tea drinkers and Florentine numbers freaks, eh?
21:03Which leaves only one question.
21:09What is the sound of one hand clapping?
21:50Why is it here?
21:51sound of one hand clapping as much as often.
21:53No power shadow over super stary kids and Lillian thought often before people
21:54We have many pictures.
21:54and friends and friends here.
21:54And we are all planning on places.
21:56Which I can see.
21:58That's superterm sunny metro history.
Comments