You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and trust me you'll get there in a moment but if you're a comedy fan

I'd really like to tell you a bit about what we do. I'm Julie Mackenzie and I commission comedy

podcast at the BBC. It's a bit of a dream job really. Comedy is a bit of a dream job really.

Comedy is a fantastic joyous thing to do because really you're making people laugh,

making people's days a bit better, helping them process, all manner of things.

But you know, I also know that comedy is really

subjective and everyone has different tastes. So we've got a huge range of comedy on offer from

satire to silly, shocking to soothing, profound to just general pratting about.

So if you fancy a laugh, find your next comedy at BBC Sounds.

I'm Philip Ball and today on Discovery from the BBC I'm here with another story from the history of science

today the visionary Raman Lull

Imagine Raman Lull. Imagine you had a theory that allowed you to deduce every true thing about the world. Automatically, as if churned out by a mechanical device. A sort of science of all sciences,

a key to the way all knowledge is rationally ordered. What would you do with

it? Well, you'd best be careful. Around the end of the 13th century, a European called Ramon Lull believed

that he had worked out such a theory, and it didn't do him much good.

Because of it, he was lynched,

thrown into prison, and threatened with execution.

That's because, for Lull, the proper use of a theory like this was to do God's work.

To prove to everyone using pure logic alone that the Christian God was the only true God.

Lull can easily sound like a fanatical medieval crackpot, a man who during the time of the Crusades

had an almost suicidal determination to convert the Islamic world in North Africa to Christianity by means not of

longbow and broadsword nor even a fire and brimstone preaching but of mathematical charts and tables.

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