Pascal

In Our Time: Culture

BBC

History

4.6 • 978 Ratings

🗓️ 19 September 2013

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and his guests begin a new series of the programme with a discussion of the French polymath Blaise Pascal. Born in 1623, Pascal was a brilliant mathematician and scientist, inventing one of the first mechanical calculators and making important discoveries about fluids and vacuums while still a young man. In his thirties he experienced a religious conversion, after which he devoted most of his attention to philosophy and theology. Although he died in his late thirties, Pascal left a formidable legacy as a scientist and pioneer of probability theory, and as one of seventeenth century Europe's greatest writers.

With:

David Wootton Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York

Michael Moriarty Drapers Professor of French at the University of Cambridge

Michela Massimi Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy of Science at the University of Edinburgh.

Producer: Thomas Morris.

Transcript

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0:44.0	Hello, the first practical calculating machine was invented in 1642
0:49.0	by the 19 year old son of a tax inspector who wanted to find a way to make his father's job
0:53.8	easier. His name was Bla Pascal and although he's credited one of the
0:58.3	major inventions of the 17th century it's not his most celebrated achievement.
1:02.4	Pascal was one of history's great
1:04.3	polymaths, a scholar who made significant contributions to mathematics, physics,
1:09.1	philosophy and religious thought. Today scientists measure pressure in Pascal's, a unit named after him in honor of his work on gases.
1:16.5	He is also remembered for Pascal's triangle and for Pascal's wager, an argument for the existence of
1:22.1	God which brings together religion and probability
	...

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