Episode #164- What Was The Galileo Affair? (P...

At the outbreak of First World War airplanes were still a novelty on the battlefield. Originally planes were used for reconnaissance and the pilots were usually unarmed. This quickly changed and soon airplanes were being outfitted with machine guns and tasked specifically with de ...  Show more

In this bonus episode Sebastian takes questions about episode 249, 250, and 251. First, he does his best to grapple with how morality should factor into history education. Then a listener provides an epic email about Orson Welles' legendary production of "Voodoo Macbeth" and curs ...  Show more

The philosophical issues at the heart of the notorious condemnation of Galileo and Copernican astronomy.

In the generation following Copernicus, the question of planetary motions was picked up by two remarkable astronomers: Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. Tycho was a Danish nobleman and brilliant astronomer and instrument builder whose high precision naked-eye measurements of the s ...  Show more

There was a time when science and religion worked in harmony, as two parts of a celestial design. Astrologer and philosopher Johannes Kepler oversaw this marriage of theory and belief when he proposed the revolutionary laws of planetary motion in the early 17th century. Amidst pe ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the pioneering Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546 – 1601) whose charts offered an unprecedented level of accuracy.In 1572 Brahe's observations of a new star challenged the idea, inherited from Aristotle, that the heavens were unchanging. He went o ...  Show more