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In Our Time

Science's Revelations

In Our Time

BBC

History

4.69.9K Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 1998

⏱️ 28 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss whether the mass of scientific understanding and knowledge we have accumulated has destroyed our sense of poetic wonder at the world. Has our sense of awe at how the world works obscured our desire to know why it works the way it does? With Richard Dawkins evolutionary biologist, reader in Zoology and Fellow of New College, Oxford, Charles Simonyi Chair of Public Understanding of Science, Oxford University and author of Unweaving The Rainbow: Science, Delusion and The Appetite For Wonder; Ian McEwan, novelist, and author of the Booker prize winning novel Amsterdam.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Thanks for learning the in our time podcast for more details about in our time and for our terms of use

0:05.4

Please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for I hope you enjoy the program

0:11.8

Hello, my guest today Richard Dawkins whose book Unweaving the Rainbow has just been published

0:16.7

And Ian McCuren whose novel Enduring love a tale of rationalism, romanticism and religion at odds with one another has recently been

0:23.4

Successfully launched in paperback his new novel is Amsterdam

0:26.8

Richard Dawkins Unweaving the Rainbow most people I think that comes it takes off from words with but in fact you take off from Keats

0:34.4

Keats complained that Newton had spoiled all the poetry of the rainbow by unweaving it by

0:39.6

Explaining it and I've just taken this as a sort of symbol for the

0:44.5

Reluctance that some poetic minds have to embrace science and I'm really trying to say the poetic mind should be

0:51.1

Embracing science as one of the most poetic things that they could possibly experience and

0:56.7

Inspiration for great poetry. So it's almost a sort of

1:00.6

Take Keats by the hand and say come on look at science again. You'd love it

1:04.4

A god and a Hayden's memo which you quote what Keats said was he destroyed the poetry of the rainbow

1:09.4

This is Newton he destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism now

1:14.3

You don't think a prism is a reduction at all do you well in one sense? It's reducing. It's taking white light

1:19.1

Which is a mixture of all lights and then reducing it to

1:22.8

The different colors that compose it, but that's not reducing in any kind of demeaning sense

1:27.9

I mean you you reduce the you reduce white light to its component colors

1:32.4

That's analysis. You're breaking it apart. You're dissecting it

1:35.4

But that's helping to understand and it's just a symbol for understanding the world in the universe as a whole

1:41.4

And then of course you come to get you come back and synthesize a picture of the world a world picture

1:47.6

Which is a beautiful and coherent entity in itself

...

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