In Our Time
Melvyn Bragg and scholars on the history of ideas and science, open to challenge by historians
44:27Without Plate Tectonics There Is No Life: Earth Is the Lucky Planet
Plate tectonics remakes the Earth's surface at the speed a fingernail grows, creating and destroying roughly 3 square kilometres of ocean crust every year. It shifts climate, isolates species, and even determines whether life exists at all — without it, there is none.
47:58Ancient Egypt had no queens: she could only be king, and was erased 20 years after her death
Hatshepsut took power gradually from the position of regent, building royal authority through temples, trade and oracles; about 20 years after her death Thutmose III erased her on a large scale.
56:52Coffee doesn't get you drunk, and that is exactly why it produced the modern commercial intelligence network
Coffee first supplied wakefulness for Sufi prayer; because it left drinkers sober rather than drunk, it left them talking, and the coffeehouse became an exchange for commercial intelligence, then reshaped the global economy through slave plantations and branding. Today's arguments about the latte are still written into these five hundred years of history.