YouSaid · the spoken record

Jo Marchant

lines on the record: 55
first: 2020-09-18
most recent: 2020-09-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Its own kind of just shift something inside that you feel a connection to something bigger that I think is a really great thing to have.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Present moment, which is helpful in terms of not worrying about awful things that going on in the world. And I think if personally I would recommend, you know, it's everyone's personal choice, but for me, I've found that really useful and fulfilling kind of way of looking at how we live and the reality that we're in. And the other thing I would say is look up. Look at the stars, but actually you don't There's more that you can see even in London than you might realise, you know, you can follow the moon, Venus, Sirius, and all of those, you know, that gives you a connection with your celestial environment that I think lifts our awareness. And even if you're indoors and can't see any stars, just imagining us on the planet in the cosmos, again, kind of lifts your awareness in a way. Like if you're facing north, it's not just a compass direction. You're facing the pole, you know, the axis around which our planet is spinning in space. And I think that...”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has actually, I wasn't expecting it to, but it has really made me question that view of ourselves as these sort of passively observing this physical reality that's out there, where what's in your mind, your thoughts are kind of imaginary. They don't exist. But what really exists is the sort of the particles and forces out there. And it's made me, my view of reality now is much more that reality is in your experience of every moment. And we can use the science and the mathematical frameworks and the equations to predict with exquisite precision how the physical world is going to behave. But it's a mathematical model. It's not reality. So for me now, and everyone will have their own worldview, but for me, reality is our experience moment by moment. And I think that has changed. It's made me much more focused on the”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we're going to solve a lot of the problems that we're facing at the moment, the climate crisis, for example, clearly we need the science, we've got to understand what the situation is, we've got to come up with solutions. But I think we're also going to need that awe, that connection that gives us sort of the most motivation to shift out of our own sort of daily lives and realize how we're affecting the bigger picture. So the fact that we're losing the stars and also losing our connection to nature more generally, you know, you can get awe from all different kinds of nature is really worrying. And I think it is partly comes from the fact that we have consistently downgraded personal experience as an important source of information and knowledge about the world. So yeah, so perhaps it's not surprising that we don't value the stars. They're literally our view of the cosmos we're part of is literally being wiped away. And nobody, you know, there's a few dark sky campaigns, but mostly people aren't that worried. And I mean, I think it's...”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So people feel more connected to other people, to the planet, to bigger things. And I think that that's really important. So the researchers have warned of this ore deprivation in modern society where we're all sort of focused down on our screens and said that they think this could be something that's making us more selfish, more materialistic, more narcissistic. And so there's this idea of this kind of dial of different states of awareness, if you like, where you have sort of logical rational thought at one end, which is very efficient, helps us to engage with details and the physical world, but it's also quite narrow. It's limiting in some senses. You have to filter out a lot of the noise to be able to focus down. And then what all is giving us is that big picture perspective. So not the sort of logical thought, but just seeing the whole picture, feeling our connection to something. And I think.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they're more sort of interested in what's going on around them, they pay better attention, so memory is improved, they're happier and less stressed, even weeks later. But what I think is really interesting is it actually makes us nicer people. So after experiencing or people, they make more ethical decisions, they're more likely to sacrifice, make sacrifices to help others, they care less about money, more about the planet. They feel as if they have more time. And also, interestingly, they sign their names smaller and estimate their own physical size is smaller. And neuroscience studies have shown that activity in the default mode network in the brain, which is associated with our sense of self, is reduced. So it's led to this idea of awe inducing a small self, so it's shifting our perspective away from ourselves where we see our own self and our own concerns as all important and kind of everything and forcing your perspective to something much bigger.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, no, it's really gutting to think about that. So this is research on the emotion of awe, which is quite new probably the last decade or so. And psychologists define awe as the emotion we feel when we're confronted with something vast, so vast that it dwarfs us and that we sort of struggle to comprehend it. So it's that kind of thing we talked about at the beginning that stops your thought. And the vastness can be sort of physically large or it can be sort of conceptually vast. But the idea is it kind of blocks that rational thought and you're just left with that wow kind of feeling. And this is something that astronauts report when they've been on spacewalks and looked down on Earth, but also stargazing when we look up at the stars. That's something that we feel. And one of the most common ways that psychologists use to trigger awe in studies is to show people the stars. And it's showing that when we feel awe, people become more curious and more creative.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it's an interplay. So with the effects of this, the sun on our clocks and the moon, it's an interplay between these molecular clocks in our cells that are encoded in our DNA, interacting with those external cues from the sun and the moon. And so when you think about it, any clock has to work in that way. You need a mechanism, but then you need something to set it so that it's running in time with your environment. And so a lot of the research focus has been on the sun, because that's more obvious and a lot of the mechanisms have been worked out. But researchers are now starting to see with a new generation of molecular studies looking particularly at aquatic species, that there are hundreds of genes also that vary with lunar phases. So it's really the combination of the sun and the moon that's being tracked. And I think I was just going to”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the position of the sun and the moon can also create these sort of daily ripples in the magnetic field. And so the mechanism isn't known, but there is quite a lot of work showing that there's a whole lot of different species are sensitive to very tiny changes in the Earth's magnetic field. They use it for navigation. So everything from butterflies to turtles and hints at least that humans do have a magnetic sense.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that is really early days. It's kind of at the sort of, oh, this is really intriguing. But people are taking it seriously. So, yeah, so a lot of the effects I mentioned are probably to do with varying levels of moonlight or in the ocean. You've got water currents from the tides that are then caused by the moon. But there was a really interesting study a couple of years ago in patients with bipolar disorder. And so they have these sudden switches in mood that are known to be triggered by changing patterns of sleep. And so these patients tracked the timing of their mood switches and their sleep waking patterns over years. And what came out was that those sleeping patterns were being driven by lunar cycles. So the interesting thing is it was nothing to do with the phase of the moon. So light couldn't have anything to do with it. It was the tidal cycles, the position of the moon. So that's hinting at either gravitational effects or perhaps effects on the Earth's magnetic”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“flowering of the Peruvian apple cactus, the conception in Serengeti Wilde in all different niches of life that the moon is turning out to be important. And in particular, it seems to be that animals are using it when either in different individuals of the same species or different species need to coordinate activities in time. And so those monthly phases of the moon are actually giving a very useful time cue for species to be able to coordinate.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so they switch and they start to follow the lunar day, so they rise and fall every not every twenty four hours but every 24.8 hours with the moon and there's actually a variation in the strength of it as well with the phase of the moon so you see the maximum at full moon and you know I just love that because that's this you know this huge movement this entire ecosystem and when the sun goes down everything starts to follow the moon and we're seeing effects of the moon in aquatic species which perhaps isn't so surprising because you've got the influence of the tide you've got animals with external fertilization such as corals they're using the phase of the moon to time sort of their spawning to a very tight window so you get these dramatic mass spawnings and so they're using the sun and the moon together in a really clever way to give you these very specific sort of moments in time but even on land as well from the hatching of whipplewheeled chicks to the”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We look. So there are all these different perspectives that reality could be sort of different to what we thought of this just, there's this physical reality out there and we're just kind of observers of it and that our experience isn't really part of that reality. And I think that's a really good thing. Like I think we should be questioning this and thinking about where we fit. We're not just In science, we have this method where you pretend that the observer doesn't exist really. You're just some, I don't know, some floating thing measuring physical reality. And that's a really useful approach for understanding that reality. But ultimately, we've got to work out how to put ourselves back in.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How we approach that, and that we might need new approaches and new attitudes. So panpsychism is becoming more popular, this idea that actually consciousness isn't either something that doesn't actually exist, so we don't need to explain it, which is one view or that it just sort of popped into existence when humans evolved, but that actually it's a fundamental part of physical matter, that it was everywhere, after all, not sort of maybe thinking brains, but some form of rudimentary awareness. There's also schools of thought in quantum physics that actually sort of time and the universe isn't quite what we thought. It's a bit naive to think about a big bang that happened and then billions of years passing and then life evolving and then we evolved and then we become conscious, but that actually John Wheeler, for example, physicist John Wheeler described the universe as a participatory universe rather than one big bang. Billions of tiny flashes of creation that sort of coming into the universe coming into being as”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can use the maths and the physics and the equations and we will be able to break it down and understand it. And it's, I think, just recently in the last few years that there is increasing sort of questions that people aren't 100% happy with that and maybe with science we need to be a bit more open-minded about”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether you can trust what we perceive, if you like. And even the role our own consciousness might play in that. But once you get up to the sort of Second World War and after that, I think it's really swung back the other way. And we've gone back much more to, at least in the sort of obviously not everyone agrees, you know, you've got lots of different worldviews, but at least that sort of dominant scientific view is ultimately our scientific approach of measuring and observing will explain everything. And there are lots of people like Daniel Dennett, Sean Carroll, Brian Green, who would say that we might not understand even consciousness yet, but ultimately it will be explainable, reducible to principle.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For example, the idea that you could send invisible messages through the air. So there were lots of discoveries that came at the beginning of the 20th century or around the turn of the century that were questioning this idea of a solid reality out there. And that's what a lot of artists were responding to. And then you had the birth of quantum physics as well and all the uncertainty that that brought in about, you know, is there an objective reality out there? So there was a moment up until the sort of 1920s where people were questioning sort of the nature of”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that's a really complicated question. There's definitely been the pendulum has swung in different directions and you also have different perspectives in different cultures as well. And in the book, I very much tried to follow the sort of Western scientific worldview because that pretty much dominates now. So I was interested in how have we got to where we are now. But there are Eastern perspectives, for example, that would be different. I think after the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, you had this very kind of gung-ho positivist outlook and then there was kind of a religious sort of backlash and a romantic backlash of expressionism and our emotional response to things being important. And then in the beginning of the 20th century as well, there was, it was actually scientific discoveries. There were things like discovery of radioactivity or realizing that atoms were actually made of even smaller particles or radio transmission.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was behind it, if that makes sense. He spent his whole career really investigating the nature of reality, the nature of cosmos, the cosmos, but he rejected the idea that it is purely this mathematical framework that the scientists had built up, but that there was far more to it than that and that our experience is key as well. He talked about sort of the cosmos inside the human skull.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Logic kind of forces your thinking in very specific ways. You know, you can only go down the sort of logical, mathematical route and that human creativity is capable of so much more than that. So the sun was like the symbol of reason, if you like. So this whole thing was, they were trying to stop logical thought. So the whole thing made absolutely no sense. So there was like clashing tones on these chords on this old piano and there was these crazy costumes and it was this weird sort of dialect where the words didn't make any sense and there was like just I'm trying to remember now there was an aeroplane crashed into the stage and there's talking about a fish pond of Turkish or thankful carpour I can't remember all of the details now but it basically was just this crazy thing that just left everybody just going what was that which was the point because it was trying to stop that logical thought and to see what else”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so there was kind of a backlash against this positivist view that knowledge is all out there waiting to be discovered and we just have to use our intellect and our reason and we will discover it and that will be the end. We'll know everything. And this is the beginning of the 20th century, 1913, victory over the sun. It's described as the world's first Cubo futurist opera. And one of the people behind it was an artist called Kazimir Malivich. So this is in Russia and he's famous for a painting called The Black Square, which was literally just a black square. But where he started was with victory over the sun. And it really was a sort of a cry out against reason. And it sort of seems hard to think, well, what's wrong with reason, right? You know, it's very reasonable. But they really felt that it was kind of leading us, first of all, to a view that there is only physical reality out there and also that”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What had previously been thought of as these sort of divine celestial beings were obeying physical laws of motion. And now we know that they're also sort of obeying chemistry and they're made of the same things as on earth. So yeah, for me, that was probably just as much of a revolution as Newton's ideas.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“a spectrum so that you can look at the different frequencies so rather than just seeing that one star might look a bit reddish and one star might look a bit bluish you've got all the bands of light in the spectrum and the discovery that actually certain frequencies or wavelengths of light are missing from that spectrum and these patterns correlating with different elements so you can decode the messages hidden in the light if you like to work out what different elements are present in stars or any object that's emitting light to us and that was the change that you know we don't have to have a physical bit of that stuff on earth to work out what it is we can use the light and these stars it turned out were made up of exactly the same elements that are on earth and that was the beginning of astrophysics really so newton kind of showed that these”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so after the American and French revolutions, there was this really sort of positivist view that, you know, science and reason were going to be the way that we were going to understand everything. And August Comte was one of the sort of people really driving this. And he wrote a lot about knowledge and where knowledge could come from. And he thought it had to come from these scientific methods. And he wrote in great detail what knowledge was sort of possible or acceptable and what knowledge wasn't. And one of the things he said we could never know was the chemical composition of stars because they were so distant. You know, he said, we can look at their motion and their behavior, but we'll never know what they're actually made of. And it was literally a matter of a few years before chemists and physicists proved him wrong. And this was through spectroscopy. So the idea of splitting the light that comes from stars into”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think some ideas are just so powerful and it must have to do with the timing right as well. But if you look at ideas of evolution as well, there are just certain scientific ideas that are so powerful that they do end up informing and shaping so many other aspects of society, which is a really good thing in one way.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which I think is lovely. And so there you have the stars on the flag. That's why they represented the states as stars. Those Newtonian ideals, that idea about this is how the universe works, it's a mechanical system that is balanced and follows these laws, these predictable explainable laws. That's at the heart of the democracies that we live in now. So we're just as much a cosmic state, if you like.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Idea between centrifugal and centredal forces that you didn't want too much gravitational pull like pulling everything into the central sun, but then you didn't want if the ties were too loose, you know, everything would hurtle away into anarchy and people were really interested in how could you design governments to have that right balance of forces. And this, you know, these Newtonian principles, they absolutely weren't the only, there were lots of other factors that were going on as well, but it is a very strong one that I think often isn't recognized. And what I found the most interesting was in the American Revolution, so they had very much been seen as a, you know, a colony, a planet orbiting sort of English king and government. And then once they formed their sort of new democracy of the United States, they needed new cosmic metaphor, if you like. There couldn't be a planet orbiting anymore. So they came up with that idea of a constellation of equal stars.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Radiant sun with their subjects orbiting around them. And then Newton sort of revolutionized physics with this idea that you have these sort of physical mathematical laws that define the motion of everything in the universe from a particle to a planet. So celestial bodies aren't these sort of divine beings that can kind of do whatever they like. They've got to obey the same rules. And so that led to the idea, well, if that's true for the universe, shouldn't the same laws also apply to people from commoners to kings? And those ideas were really influential during the Enlightenment and the revolutionaries that were kind of behind the American Revolution, the French Revolution. And you can see that at the time with the imagery that people were using in their language. There was a lot of astronomical and mechanical imagery and people were very concerned about balance of power and this.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I love this too because the way in which we see the universe, the way we think the cosmos works has always defined how we live on Earth, political structures and elites on Earth. And you look to ancient civilizations, whether it's the Romans, the Mayans, the Babylonians, the Chinese, rulers are taking their authority from the heavens. They're modelling themselves on sort of divine celestial beings. And it's very hard to question authority if it's being drawn from, well, this is how the universe works. But we kind of think that, well, that's not really where we are now. We have as much more rational approach to things. But actually, you can see how as ideas about the universe change, that fed through into political structures. So initially you've got Copernicus putting the sun at the center of the solar system with the planets orbiting around. And immediately kings in Europe started modelling themselves on the sun and this idea that they were the”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and that's underlying so many aspects of our lives and our technology now, you know, our communications. So yeah, it's just another example, yeah, a little bit like the maps of where we used to see time as we did with space as a property of the universe that we experienced. And now it's a mathematical abstract thing that we calculate, which is very, very useful, but you've left something behind.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the universe is wrong. Time is no longer our experience of the sky, what we experience around us. It is held in these machines, essentially. And that's been an incredibly powerful approach. We can now say the fraction. I don't think I can remember it. The accuracy of clocks now that are based on sort of vibrations of the cesium atom, it's just minding these things.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, when it actually starts with the ringing of a bell because the theory is that it's the same mechanism that they used, so initially they had the water clock that would ring a bell to wake them up to then go and pray. And it's that same sort of hammer mechanism that was then adapted. Somebody thought, oh, we could use this to sort of regulate the falling of the chain. So the ringing of the bell became the ticking of the clock. And that was the moment that sort of time became out of the universe, if you like. And initially the clocks weren't very accurate and they had to be corrected to match the position of the sun in the sky. But as clocks became more accurate, they became more accurate than the sun because the sun's speed varies as we see it in the sky. And so then the clocks are more accurate and it's the sundials that need correcting to match the clocks. And so that was the kind of tipping point.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm a bit of a geek when it comes to the invention of clocks. I think from the antikithra mechanism, I just find just that invention of clockwork is so fascinating. But yeah, so initially, time was defined by the cosmos, by the movements of the sun and the moon and the stars that we see above us. There wasn't anything else, you know, the sun's moving, and that is the day and the night and the seasons. When you start to have clocks, and this was initially a big part of the motivation for this was sort of medieval monks who wanted to be able to time their prayers more accurately. So there was a spiritual motivation behind this. And up until that point, all”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, he's a really interesting guy. He made himself part of that group, if you like. Here were these people that had turned up on this big ship and started building a camp and they had all these instruments and he was just hanging around because he asking questions he wanted to know what they were doing. And I'm not sure that Cook and Joseph Banks, who was traveling with him, were quite as interested in return. I wish they had been, and then we would know more about Tupi's view of the world.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To mentally place yourself on a particular island, and then his chart was showing the sailing direction from that island to get to the neighbouring islands, and then you'd have to put yourself on the next island to interpret the bearings for the next set of islands. And when researchers kind of analysed it in that way, they found that actually it correlated with very distant islands and that he had known about places that were hundreds of miles away. So it's just this nice demonstration, I think, of how we can sort of be quite, you know, think that our sort of scientific mathematical approach is superior and sometimes not appreciate what other approaches can achieve. And actually, when you put yourself into Pyre's shoes and see the world in the way that he was seeing it, you start to realize that they could also achieve these incredible feats of navigation.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Combining that with observations of the weather, of wildlife. So very sort of subjective, holistic approach. And then in the West, everything was very sort of sceptical. There was this idea that these islands didn't really seem to kind of match where they were supposed to be and clearly the whole thing was just didn't really mean very much. But more recently, there's been a realization that Tupaya wasn't drawing a map in the same way that we would think about it. We have this sort of mathematical idea of maps. We measure longitude and latitude and we mark the sort of objective position of a location on the map. And then when we're following the map, we imagine ourselves as moving across that mathematical space, if you like. And the realization was that for Tupaya, he wouldn't have thought about it that way. In fact, what he had drawn was a mosaic of different bearings or sailing directions with several different centers.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then Captain Cook meets Tupaya, who was a priest and a skilled celestial navigator, and ended up inviting him to come and sail on the Endeavour with him. And unfortunately, Tupaya didn't survive the trip back to England. But there are stories of how the crew were impressed by how well he could navigate. He could always point in the direction of home, apparently. He told the crew about including Captain Cook about lots of different islands that were really distant, and he drew a chart showing where some of these islands were that is still in the British Library. And that's been really interesting through history, the sort of attitudes to that, because initially there was this sort of excitement of, well, what the Polynesians could do. And they didn't have any of these instruments or charts. It was all done just through their senses and, you know, observing star compasses, memorizing star paths and”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, I love this story because it really is two world views colliding. So Cook, it's his first mission to the Pacific and he goes to Tahiti and his mission is to observe the transit of Venus across the Sun. And there are teams being sent out by different nations all around the globe to observe this. This is a matter of great national security because by doing this you can work out through the method of parallax how far it is to Venus and thus work out the size of the solar system which they needed for accurate celestial navigation to work out longitude and this was really important for the European powers that were trying to sort of explore and colonize and dominate the planet. And so that worldview is all about making accurate observations, developing better measuring instruments, translating that onto charts complicated mathematical calculations to work out where they were.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At this time it seems that that moment of the winter solstice when the sort of the sun is receding and then at the solstice it sort of pauses and then the days kind of come back to getting longer again. So it's kind of that journey into darkness and then coming back into light towards the summer that was a really crucial moment and something that they clearly were trying to capture in these monuments, these sort of these beams of light framed in stone and went to huge efforts to sort of align these monuments accurately. It was clearly really important to them and it seems to be very much tied up with the fate of souls after death and so there's an idea that the rays of light would sort of shine into the tomb and then perhaps would be imagined to come back up through the tomb and sort of carrying the souls of the dead back up into the sky. Great attention to detail and understanding of what was happening but as you say a completely”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so this is moving on to the Neolithic now. So when we've got the birth of agriculture and people are starting to build with stone. So this is passage tombs in Ireland, stone circles like Stonehenge. And you've got a lot of these monuments showing alignments with the sun. So there are small stone tombs all across Europe which are aligned to sunrise, probably on the day that they were built but then you've also got these much more sort of spectacular examples. So you've got Newgrange Tomb in Ireland.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, basically, yes. So when the cave paintings, for example, they're painting animals, but they're not just painting animals, they're painting the creatures in the stars, if you like, and it's all entwined.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Together to, and I think for me, I feel that it is actually quite plausible that this could be a representation of the Pleiades in the sky. And what it does all add up to is a very holistic view of the cosmos. So events in the sky and events on Earth were seen as completely entwined. You know, one was causing the other. There wasn't any particular distinction either between Earth and sky, between people and nature. It was between objective and subjective reality. It was just one kind of holistic experience, if you like. So I think that's the best guess we can come up with as to what kind of universe”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they can sort of survive in some form until now. There's also work looking at hunter-gatherer communities sort of recent and traditional communities now, how do they live, what do the stars mean to them. And the pleades are actually important to traditional communities all around the planet, the rising and setting of the Pleiades is used in a lot of traditional calendars. And it's often tied in with events in the natural world that are important to people. In Native America, it's very much linked to the life cycle of the bison, for example. So when the Pleiades set, it's time to hunt. So we're seeing that link between the bison and the cycle of the Pleiades. And so there's an idea that actually the Pleiades would have defined the mating season of the Oryx bull. So it could have been that there's a link made between what's happening in the sky and what's happening with the Oryx on the ground. And so I won't go through all of the different lines of evidence now, but you can put that.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So they evolve over time and different people, I mean, sometimes it might be just mistakes and misrememberings. It's also that different people were, you know, the star would change depending on which constellation was important to those people in that, you know, that was visible in that part of the world, or the animal would change, whether it's a bear or an elk, depending on which animals were important. So they're changing over time. And so they divided the myths up into little sort of components, you know, what was the animal? Was it one hunter or many, you know? And basically encoded that into a sequence of ones and zeros depending on the presence or absence of these different myth components essentially, and then ran the phylogenetic software just as you would for DNA to come up with the family tree. So it's a really fascinating approach. So that's kind of some additional circumstantial evidence that you like that there were stories being told about the star.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“hunted and goes up into the sky and turns into a constellation and you find versions of that in ancient Greek myths in America, in Africa. And researchers have made these almost like a phylogenetic family tree of these different myths of what components are sort of present or missing in the different myths and concluded that that story actually goes back to northern Eurasia in Paleolithic times. So that's a piece of evidence telling us that actually it's plausible that story is about the stars could have survived that long.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Car manufacturer Subaru, and they all represent the star cluster to the Pleiades. The one in Lasco is so similar. And what kind of really makes it interesting is that it's above the shoulder of this bull. And the Pleiades star cluster is in our modern constellation, Taurus, just at the bull's shoulder. And in the cave painting, it's also got a very prominent eye. You know, you can put the bull next to a drawing of Taurus and you've got the sort of the horns that are defined by stars, you've got the prominent eye, which is the star Aldebaran, you've got the sort of speckles on the face for the Hyadi. So it's led to this idea, you know, is this a star map? Were the people of the Paleolithic basically painting the stars when they were painting these animals? And there's some really interesting research looking at analysis of myths where you can take a myth where there's different versions of the story appear all around the planet. One example is the cosmic hunt where an animal is”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I should say, first of all, it's really difficult to say anything for sure about what people of the Paleolithic 20,000 years ago were thinking and believing when they made cave paintings. But what we can do is look at lots of different lines of evidence and see kind of where they're converging, what kind of picture is that building. So I was really interested as a starting point in Lasco Cave, which has got these incredible paintings of animals, sort of Oryx bulls, stags, horses, covering its walls. And there's one in particular that the biggest Oryx bull in the cave called Bull No. 18, and it has these six dots in a sort of curious pattern, a line of four and a line of two just above its shoulder. And that same pattern of dots appears in lots of other art sort of around the planet and through history from sort of Native American people to Siberia to a very similar pattern is in the logo of the Japanese.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“feeling that the meaning we find in the stars, the way we feel when we experience the stars and the way that it makes us feel connected and pushes us to a sort of more... It's something that, yeah, something that I think we forgotten. So I think it is a wonderful achievement, but I think we also need to pay attention to the things that we've sort of thrown out along the way.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. And I didn't plan this when I started writing the book, but what came out of it as I sort of was tracing that story from the Paleolithic times and cave paintings through the sort of birth of science and the understanding we have now. Like at every step of the way, you could see our own experience being taken out and we're sort of abstracting our understanding of time and space. And we've built this sort of physical understanding of the universe as sort of made up of particles and forces that follow mathematical rules. And that is an incredible achievement. We understand so much because we've done that. We have this objective framework that we can agree on and build on and that's a really wonderful thing. But we've kind of forgotten about the other half of the picture. It seems to me, at least. I don't think all scientists would agree with that. But I was left.”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very stressful and slightly dangerous journey, shall we say, to get there? And then this huge rainstorm when we arrived, there was a power car was in this tiny little one-person tent thinking I was going to get washed away and then woke up in the middle of the night when the rain had stopped and came outside and looked up. And it was just that wow feeling that total awe because we forget, you know, you go to the countryside maybe and you look up and you see the stars that we can't see in London and you're like, oh, look, kids, there's the stars, but it's not the same as when you just see that full kind of dome above you. I just couldn't believe, you know, there wasn't any dark. It was just all silver. It was just all of those stars. And that feeling we get when we look at the stars that it's so rare now. And part of what I'm also looking at in the book is what does that do to us? How does that view change us?”
2020-09-18 · Intelligence Squared · A Secret History of Stars, with Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source