Gresham College Lectures
Gresham College Lectures
Latest Episodes
AI as Therapist? Intimacy Without Understanding - Matt Jones
AI systems are increasingly positioned as supports for anxiety, loneliness, and distress. This lecture examines large language models trained to simulate therapeutic dialogue alongside biofeedback systems that modulate physiological states. We ...
Where is Queer Love in the Shoah History? - Anna Hájková
Where are the stories of great queer love in the Shoah? There are almost none. Anna Hájková explains why the history of same-sex desire in the Shoah, that is, queerness among Jews persecuted by the Nazis for their race, has been excluded and ma...
Carbon: Our Flexible Friend that Built the Natural World - Helen Czerski
Carbon used to be something that was only mentioned in school chemistry classes, but now it seems to be everywhere: on the news, in political debate, in discussions on health, and as a framework for thinking about our civilisation’s future. But...
Cosmology’s Mad Idea: Inflation & the Creation of Our Universe - Chris Lintott
Our expanding Universe only makes sense if, early on, it expanded rapidly in a period of cosmic inflation. In this lecture, we consider the evidence for this apparently arbitrary idea, and asks whether we are on the brink of finding inflation’s...