Start the Week

13/12/2010

Andrew Marr talks to the conductor Semyon Bychkov about Tannhauser, Wagner's tortured artist, out of place in conventional society. While the scientist Mark Miodownik takes a measure of the world, and asks 'Does size matter?' in this year's Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. Author Susan Hill ponders kindness, grief and miracles and the television screenwriter Tony Jordan forsakes EastEnders to take on 'the greatest story ever told', the Nativity. Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 43m
Broadcast on:: 13 Dec 2010
Audio Format:: other

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Hello, my name is Jorge Gaviria and I'm the founder of Masienda. We partner with farmers in Mexico to bring heirloom corn products to every kitchen. With my Spark Cash Plus card from Capital One, I earn unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase. And it has no preset spending limit, which means my purchasing power adapts to my business needs. My Spark card helps me fulfill my mission of bringing Masa to the masses. Capital One, what's in your wallet? Terms and conditions apply. Find out more at CapitalOne.com/Spark Cash Plus. Thank you for downloading the Start The Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information, go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Hello, sacred and profane love today appropriate for the time of year, as we contrast the gargantuan scale and emotional range of Wagner's great opera Tanhoyzer, conducted at London's Covent Garden just now by Simeon Bischoff, the Russian American conductor. With the precise, sharp etching of a short novel by Susan Hill, called simply A Kind Man. Both of these are works with a Christian background, but their Christian tone or atmosphere could hardly be more different. A little later on, we're going to pick up the theme of scale, but applied to science, rather than religion. The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures have become as much a seasonal staple as Panto. And this year, Mark Medonovich, a material scientist, is explaining the strange worlds of the very big and the very small in size matters. Why elephants can't dance, why hamsters can leap from planes, and why mountains melt. Let's start, however, with the very big Tanhoyzer. Simeon, this is an opera with a very, very simple plot, really. Tanh, it originates in, so far as we know, medieval German folk tales about a mountain, the Venusburg, in which all fleshly delights are on offer. And a German knight Tanhoyzer, who's been seduced by Venus, and is in the Venusburg, but gets out again. Well, it is a very simple subject, and yet it's a very complex matter of the man who somehow grows a little bit bored with his fiancé, the beautiful Elizabeth, and he searches in the kingdom of Venusburg. He searches the pleasures of the flesh, and after a while he becomes bored with that too, and realizes that he misses the human society, and he wants to go back to it, which he does. And there he is greeted by his form of friends who have no idea that he had been in Venusburg in the meantime. He's accepted again amongst them, and so he participates in the song contest, which is something which happened in that time, happened quite frequently. I mean, people who were doing something in their life in the evening would either make music on right poetry, right songs, etc. And so there was this competition of singing their own songs that they composed, in which it takes more. More and more elevated in the X Factor. We're talking here, we're talking great voices and self-made songs. Very spiritual and very much about beauty of spiritual existence, and beauty of spiritual love, and they're competing for the hand of Elizabeth. And then it turns out that Tanhoyza sings his song about the love of the flesh, and that is a forbidden subject, it's a real taboo. From there on, a great tragedy happens, he is being ostracized, he is nearly killed, and then he goes to Rome amongst the pilgrims to ask for the forgiveness from the Pope. He comes back, and what do we see? We see the man who tells us the story of his trip, how everyone received his forgiveness from the Pope, the murderers, the rapists, the worst criminals one could imagine, the only one who didn't give it, the only one who didn't get it is Tanhoyza. And I think here comes really a very huge subject of our today's existence, which is the intolerance, dogma, the fundamentalism. And basically, the difficulty that very often society has, not only in our time, this was certainly in the time of Wagner as well, and I think all times, the difficulty society has in accepting anyone who doesn't behave politically correct, even though the expression is a very contemporary one. Well actually, when I was watching this, I thought, not only does this opera provide possibly the most wonderful noises ever made by human hands and voices, I mean absolutely extraordinary music, but also it's a very morally strange proposition, because it seemed to me it was almost like the Moscow show trials that Tanhoyza was in the position of one of the former Stalinists or Stalin comrades, who is only acceptable once he has publicly renounced everything and groveled in front of the collective, and even then he is going to be punished to death. Yes, it is, it certainly reminds us very much of the history of 20th century, but what about the German history of the 20th century that we know so well, where one moment someone would be weeping because of the beauty of a lead of Schubert and five minutes later sending people to the gas chambers, and so it's not really so important, I think, to place it in the geographical context, because that's something we find everywhere over the planet. It's more about the human nature that is capable of this extraordinary extremes of expression, and it's not only human nature where someone is basically very, very bad and someone is basically very, very good, it's people who have enormous complexity in the way in which they express themselves as they go through life. And so the way that this particular version has been imagined on stage, it has elements of what look like the Chechni in war or something like that, lots of kind of guys with bandoliers and so on, and the Venusberg where all the sex and love takes place right at the beginning of the overture is a sort of grand, loosh nightclub almost with people leaping around. Yes, it could be anywhere, it could be anytime. It could be anywhere, anytime, and this, I suppose, is the best proof that the great works of art, which this undoubtedly is, are universal, I mean, it's almost tried to say that because we hear it all the time, the question is to ask why are they universal, it is because regardless where you come from, regardless of the station of life you're born into, you observe or experience personally the kind of themes that go on and on through throughout the history of humanity. And we have, as I say, a Christian background to this in the sense that the Pope's forgiveness is withheld and then his staff flowers or green shoots spring out from, there's a sign of God's forgiveness, and it's impossible to imagine this story without a Christian background, and yet it makes you wonder what kind of Christian, if any kind of Christian could Wagner have been? Well, I think Wagner basically, the way I understand him, is a very Shakespearean character himself. I mean, he had an extraordinary capacity to create through his works, to create a complete universe in practically all of its manifestations, and not only some of them, and he presents it to us, he doesn't really have to make a judgment, it's really for us to see just how full of contrasts and extremes our existence is. And Wagner, of course, himself was participating in the in the Dresden Revolution in the in the late 1840s of afterwards he had to be in exile because he was banned from Germany as a Christian. He was the young radical before he became the he held conservatives. Yes, he identified himself with a Russian anarchist Bakunin at the time. And so, and after that, he he was very much welcomed by the King of Saxony, and in fact, it's that man who really gave Wagner's works opportunity to become to find their place in a festival that we know today is festival of bioroid. I think you've said that there's elements of this opera and Wagner generally that you think of almost Buddhist as much as a Christian. I believe that it first of all, when I say that this opera is, I mean, Wagner in general, his music is Buddhist, it is the way in which he actually composes music, which consists of of musical themes, which we call light motifs, which come back again and again, and so we begin to identify with them because they're connected either to certain characters or to certain situations or to certain feelings of of those humans on stage or or gods for that manner. And they happen, they come back and again and again, but often in different orchestration, so different coloring, often in different tonality. So, it is in a way this permanent rejuvenation and cyclical development. So, Wagner's operas are usually pretty long, they could have been 10 times longer still. You could you could start Tannhui to write it, you could just rerun it again afterwards. Exactly, because basically it has no beginning and no end. And so, in that sense, I find it very much condensed to Buddhism. Before we open up this, I'm fascinated as a conductor and you've conducted operas of all shapes and sizes and legs, how you approach something on this scale. In front of you keeping the orchestra at that pitch for that length of time, four hours of really, really physically hard work. Well, Wagner's music in fact does not exist in the typical dimension that we in our life recognize where a minute will have 60 seconds and an hour will have 60 minutes, etc, etc. It leaves in its own timing. Once you enter that world, then it just has to be inevitable as life itself is. Wonderful. Susan Hill, we're going to come on to your novel in a little moment, but what do you make of Wagner's sort of religious aspect? This is a difficult question for me, Andrew. I really want Simeon to answer this, because he knows Wagner. Why is it that there are some people for whom Wagner is the peak of, certainly the peak of opera, possibly the peak of music? And there are other people who may love other operas, like me, Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Britain, Verdi, somebody, and cannot, cannot get to grips with Wagner. I have tried. It's not the stories because it's the music that I can't get past. I just find it a noise, and I say that to you, I mentioned the other composers to say, it's not that I don't like music. I cannot approach it at all. What is it? Well, Wagner is actually one of the most polarizing figures in the history of music. And what you say, I hear quite often from musicians themselves, I mean, a very dear friend, a great pianist, Radolupo, once was convinced to go to Biroi, at least to experience it in, let's say, in an authentic shape and form, and he couldn't stay until the end. It made him physically sick. Now, that is a mystery of music because the sounds of music affect our nervous system, and we don't know why and how. That is something that until today has not yet been discovered. And so someone cannot live without Mozart, and someone else prefers a Stravinsky, and someone else gets sick from Wagner, and the other person cannot get enough of his Wagner. That is part of that. The other part is the person of Wagner himself, who had been one of the most controversial figures in the history of art, and lots of people find it very difficult to separate the negative, let's say facets of the personality. Anti-semitism from his music. Well, I would say that if his music was not there, and of the quality that it is, and those dramas, just the fact that he was anti-Semitic would represent no special interest for us, because there are plenty of those. That would be, I mean, it's no less objectionable, but he would not be a famous person. I mean, you can change. I mean, it was a point of principle that I didn't like Wagner for most of my life. And over the last about five, six years, it's like a drug. You want to get more and more and more and more of it. Once you tune into it, it's addictive. But the question is physically addictive. But why is it addictive? Why is it addictive? That is a huge question, because he disturbs. Pick a phone. Find me a neuroscientist, I'll say, but we don't have a neuroscientist. We do have a physicist here. Mark, what do you make of these questions? Yeah, I mean, the opera in general, I think. Yes, I mean, that's the thing, isn't it? Opera is this thing about, I mean, it's the size of the performance, isn't it? And it's the size of the whole setting. And I'm always very impressed when it goes to the opera. And how it really does, this is the biggest you can get. I mean, these are the biggest emotions, these are the biggest, this is the biggest setting. And it often, often the biggest singers, I know. And I've wondered this over the years, whether you have to be big to be a great opera singer. I don't know how you feel about this, because the physics clearly says, well, I don't say it clearly says no, but it hints no. It hints that you don't need to be big to be a great singer. There are many very, very great singers in history, as well as today, who are great artists without, without being a very large size. In that sense, I would say that, you know, the size of a person that we observe, it's the very first impression we will get. But when they actually on stage, where on stage, first of all, we are separated by a certain distance, we as an audience. And also by the dimensions of the auditorium, which is, if it is enormous, I mean, a tiny person will also feel even more tiny on stage, where he's a very large person, will not feel oversize. But it's only a first impression. The real impression will come when that artist begins to perform. And at that point, genuinely great artist will be transformed through the character that he or she is portraying by becoming it, identifying with it. And then it will provoke our sympathy, compassion, revulsion, whatever, whatever it is that. This is interesting. I was talking to a friend of mine, who was a professional oboist about large singers, the traditional very, very large singers in this town halls are mostly fairly, fairly large, it has to be said. And he said, this is changing. The traditional image of the huge soprano, the huge man baritone, this is changing, and the way singing techniques change, and the way people produce music changes, that actually there are fewer of these huge people, singers now, is this true? It is true. It is caused very much by the demands of the stage directors to find artists who would field a certain physical characteristics of the concept that they developed for a particular production. And a lot of the time, large persons will find it difficult to find place in those concepts. And also, we'll find it difficult to work with stage directors who sometimes feel they're stuck with a person who can't do anything, and therefore, okay, sit in your chair and make you noises, which is very unfair. And I think today, in fact, it has to start changing again. And we have to look at it from a different perspective, because we are becoming more and more aware and frightened by the growth of obesity rates in our society, in the Western society, in many cases, which is genuinely dangerous. And as we come in contact with people who have certain handicaps, certain disabilities, we become more and more aware that this is only the outside form. But on the inside, what they feel, what they go through, what they live through is exactly the same as anybody else. And so, we become more sensitive to it. And I think this somewhere is the subject which should not be the determining one in deciding who are the artists that will be on stage. Absolutely. Well, let's move from the big scale to the smaller scale. Susan Hill's novel, A Kind Man, is a novella, really, isn't it? It's a short novel. We have to be careful here, because we want to explain enough about it so that people understand the conversation without giving everything away about it. But it's the story of a couple who lose a child. And then it becomes the story of somebody who seems to have the gift for healing. And one of the interesting things about it is clearly has a sort of quite a strong religious tone underneath it. And yet you've been very careful not to give away anything about it being set in a particular place or even at a particular time. I presume a deliberately unsettling neutrality, if I can put it that way, about the setting. Yes, I've done this quite often. I did it quite early on with a novel called In the Springtime of the Year, and I did it two or three years ago with another called The Beacon. I rather like the indeterminate time, particularly, not the setting. But I like to feel that there is a period between X and Y when this might be set, but I never haven't specified. My editor calls it Hill time. I think this particular book is probably, it's during the Depression. I mean, this was what late 20s, early 30s. Place, which is much more important than time. Place, I haven't named it, and I haven't got a particular place in mind. But it's one of those industrial cities in the north, which were large towns, small cities, in the 20s and 30s, where the country was bangslap on the edge, the real country, bangslap on the edge of the town, which it isn't now. You've got all these yards of industrial warehouses and so on. But that's what it is. But I don't want to pin it down. Not pinning it down and using it with your relatively spare prose style gives you the effect of a fable or a parable, almost, it seems to me. And there's something you say it's set between the wars, and that was clear to me. There was something that made me feel very much, there was a sort of spare tone that you get in artists like Eric Ravelius. You get in the music of Benjamin Britain at the time, you get in the poetry of Orton, in some respects also from the north and those great big Yorkshire screes and so on. It's, as it were, etched or lino-type world. I think this is the sort of thing that you discover after you've written it. I'm never conscious of those things, but of course that period of music, Britain, Ravelius, I'm a huge fan of. I'm very, very devoted to wood engraving, and you write all of this comes out. But at the time of writing, it's completely unconscious. I mean, I did Orton for A-level. I'd never heard of WH Orton. And then suddenly there was this amazing poetry, which I learned masses of it by heart. I still remember it. And I think all those things are there somewhere, floating around the unconscious or the subconscious, whatever it's called. And when you start writing, they bubble up, and I think it is an unconscious process. It's also not quite a conscious decision to make it short, although I think there is a bit of a conscious decision not to make it long. It sounds ridiculous. I like writing at this length, which is about 45,000 words, I think. I'm not sure what the definition of a novella is, but I've never written poetry and I never could. I'm not a poet at all, but I think it's the economy of words. There's no hiding place at this length. You cannot pad it out with anything. Every word has to count. And I love writing like that. It really tests you. Yes. And what about the difficulty of persuading? This is the story of a miracle. A miracle of healing, which is given and taken away. And therefore, it's about an otherworldly experience to most people. And it's something that challenges people about what is realism and what is faith and what is spirit and what is material. How do you hold? Do you conscious think I'm going to hold the reader and persuade the reader of something the reader is going to find very, very hard to accept? And I'm going to do that because I've used so few words and I'm going to keep the narrative. I don't do that consciously, but I hope that's what will happen. I think with this particular, sometimes I just simply do not know where things come from. And that always sounds like a cop out. Everybody imagines that you plan consciously and that you plan your intention is this and your method is that and you hope the outcome will be so and so. This is not science. This is very much not. When I'd finished it, I didn't really know what it was about, except that one of my favorite New Testament parables has always been the parable of the talents. We're all given a talent. I mean, Simeon's is for music, Marx is for science, mine is for words, yours is for all sorts of things. He said, she said horribly. No. Something a rubber. And I think all we're required to do is use it to the best of our ability and not to use it is a crime. I won't say a sin. I don't like the word, but it's wrong not to use it. But I wasn't conscious of that until my husband read the book when it was finished and said, which really a parable, isn't it? And I thought, yes, I suppose it is. It is a parable about a gift, which is freely given and accepted by the young man Tommy. And then it's taken away for a reason which, as you say, we won't disclose, but not taken away vindictively. I was slightly appalled by the Tanhui as a story, because this is the image of Christianity, the image of this vindictive God, you know, giving and taking away forgiveness and popes, giving and taking away forgiveness. I mean, I'm not a Catholic, but this is not what it's about. It's about love, quite simply. It's a human story. It's a spiritual story. There's not a ghost story, but there is an element of sort of seasonal chill, if I can put it that way. I'm trying to get away from those. I know, but I just want to ask you, I mean, given that Christmas is coming up about the importance of ghosts. Yeah, I mean, ghosts, to me, I've been asked this a lot lately, as you may imagine, because of the ghost, my latest ghost story, but ghosts are nothing to do with Christianity. I think my ghost stories are entertainment. They may have a moral point, but a ghost is nothing to do. I mean, it's a completely separate sort of thing, and fun, and I don't want to be dismissive about it. What did the rest of us make of this, Samuel? Well, I'm actually thinking on what Susan just mentioned about being appalled by the steam in Tanhui's aware God, Pope, denies someone a forgiveness, and it's all about love. Well, it isn't God who denied Tanhui's forgiveness. They should be very clear. It is the Pope in the name of God, and this is where the serious questions begin, because today it's a Pope, and tomorrow it's an Ayatollah, and the day after it's someone else, and it is not really the problem so much for me, not the problem of faith. It is not the problem, it's not the problem of absolute love, or existence of God. It's one of them. It's jumped up authority, exactly. And that is what makes the world so intolerant when someone decrees perfectly innocent ways of behavior as being criminal or unacceptable. And this is what I find also very beautiful in the book that this question of gift that you raise, because the gift which is given, I mean, gift of talent, which is given to practically everyone, and that if only everyone were able to identify what their talent is for what, and devote one's life to developing the talent, I think the world would be infinitely happier place. Mark Middovnik, as a scientist, do you have a perspective on the ghost elements of Christmas and where this comes from? Yeah, I mean, I'm fascinated by ghosts myself, and it's partly, it's partly this feeling that ghosts used to be a big part of our lives. I have this feeling, and as modernity has kind of, it has impinged on them and got rid of them one by one, and I feel it's in a sense, it's a strange time to live, because I think in the future there will be more ghosts. My feeling is that this isn't a one-way street with ghosts, and that actually, the disembodied power of someone to live beyond their life, or something to influence your life, is only going to be on the increase, as the internet essentially kind of allows, I mean, the internet is a disembodied, it sort of allows disembodiment, doesn't it? It's the medium for disembodiment, which then allows another life, and I don't know if any of you ever had a kind of email from someone who you've not met for like 20 years, and it suddenly pings up on your email. There's something very strange about it, and I feel that these machines that we've created are going to create new lives, which will have much longer influences, and clearly disembodied influences. Because in many ways, just going back to Susan's book, that is also still the world before lots of street lighting, somehow. It's still a darker, more natural world, with fewer people where you're slapped against the moorland, and you're slapped against the great outside, and darkness, and mystery, more than most of us are today. I think this is the big difference between not entirely, because where I live, you still get the most amazing night sky. It was only Gloucestershire, but we don't have any street lights around us, and we're slightly in the middle of nowhere, and we could be at this time, or we could be in Thomas Hardy's time, especially at night. And it's this feeling that you're touching, this sounds very pretentious, but living like that, as this couple do in the country, no street lighting, no contact with anybody outside, you're living in a strange way, if you're always touching the earth, you're always touching the universe, it's so close. When you look up at the night sky from my house, it is so close sometimes, you can reach up and touch it, and it's very difficult to get that sense once you're away, once you're into the street lights and the people. This is not a good band. The swaddle of the city, yes. But it is very easy to completely lose touch with that feeling of the still point of the turning world, as Elliot said. Well, let's move on and discuss size and scale in a different context, the scientific one. Mark Miedovnik, you are what's called a physics, a materials physicist, sorry, a materials physicist, and you have this rather awesome job of presenting the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, which comes around every year, and I gather that scientists who get the job, who get the gig, which is always a scientist, compare notes, and it's regarded not as a poison chalice, but as a pretty tough gig. Well, I mean, it's the best gig in town, really. I mean, that's the amazing, amazing thing. I mean, 180 years ago, Michael Faraday decided that, you know, there was this the first ever lab, sort of public lab was in London doing science, and really kind of inventing a lot of the stuff we take for granted, electricity, and all these kind of gadgets. And he said, well, look, hold on a minute, children need to know about this stuff. We need to talk to them now, because they're going to be the future scientists. And so he did something very revolutionary, he said, well, I'm going to, although this is the most erudite, crazy new stuff, I'm going to, I'm going to dedicate a whole series of lectures to kids. And it's been going on ever since for 180 years. And if you talk to any scientist now, it's very rare that they'll not say, oh, I saw the Christmas lectures, and they'll reel off some moment, that really, and it's very hard to work out whether that's obviously what influences your life and how you end up being a scientist. But it's part of being a scientist is sort of going to the Christmas lectures and listening to the Christmas lectures. So it's an incredible honour for me. I mean, it's an amazing honour. And the job you have is to explain, to find ways of explaining to children why the physical properties of things depend on their scale as much as anything, and our perception of them, of course. Yeah, I mean, as a material scientist, I mean, no one knows what material scientists do. They'll tell you what he's saying. And material scientists, if you'll just go, oh my God, does he design genes or something? You know, is that textile? I mean, and the thing is, yes, and no, you know, this is the thing, you have to start a long story. And it turns out that you have these things, you know, you have physicists and you know, I work in the physics department, and you have chemists and everyone sort of knows what those things are. They're an approach to the real world, aren't they? What's the material scientists? Well, it turns out, material scientists spend the whole time sort of making things like jet engines and silicon chips for these gadgets we have. But what's their approach? What's their methodology? And it turns out to do all about scale. But all this magic that we use every day is it's all down on the tiny scales. And if you can understand those tiny scales, you can do magic. You can talk to someone the other. Because the laws of the very small are very different from the laws of ordinary physics. Well, it turns out that, well, we think that the laws of physics are the same everywhere, right, at all scales. But the thing is that they dominate at different scales in the same way that, so when you shrink things down, some laws become very important, like surface tension. You and I, if we step in a puddle, it's inconvenient, but it's not going to slow us down. And the ant, stepping in a puddle, is trapped by the surface tension. On the other hand, we are dominated by gravity. And gravity is an enormous force in our life. It completely confines us to this surface of the earth. And we've been longing to escape from it. And a lot of our kind of culture is around escaping gravity. So, so. Whereas, for instance, I can't help myself. Hamster, you can fling from the plane. Don't try this to turn children. This is weird, isn't it? I mean, is anyone ever kind of experienced this moment where you're having breakfast outside on the first sunny day of spring? And suddenly you find this ant has kind of emerged and it's also trying to have breakfast with you. And so you flick it off the table. And it's a moment of cruelty and annoyance, perhaps. And then you notice that it landed over there. You know, it's fine. You know, and so you think, my goodness, is how can it survive such a large fall? And when you do the physics, you realize that the smaller you are, the less the stronger you are, that's the weird thing. So as you get smaller, you get relatively stronger, which is so weird. And gravity affects you less. So this is the thing about hamsters. I mean, as you get bigger and bigger and bigger, gravity has a bigger force on you. So hamsters about the threshold of survivability. You get larger than that, a cat, a dog, and you're going to die, although they do sometimes survive. Yeah. I mean, there are often these new stories about hats. If you think somebody must have tested all of this at some point. Well, I've done a lot of research about this. And I'm happy to say that no one's done any of those really cool experiments that you might expect to someone who have done somewhere. But we're actually going to be testing it in the lectures. Okay, so I don't want to going to give the game away. But we're going to be doing a series of experiments, which is not cool. We drop some of the children of different size children. You drop them from the roof and see what happens. If you've ever wondered, really, what this is all about, then the lectures are worth tuning into. And just one of the lectures is called Why Elephants Can't Dance? Elephants can't dance because they're too big and there's too much gravity. Well, yes, gravity definitely is the big factor for elephant. And it turns out, actually, that it's no coincidence that there aren't very many bigger animals than elephants on land. You know, we think of the dinosaurs as being much bigger and they were. But having an animal any bigger than that turns out to be physically impossible. And this is all to do this weird thing about dimensions and scale and to do with what's called your size, your area to volume ratio. How do you bring up the area into volume ratio? Well, we were talking about being singers, but there we are. And it's all to do with area to volume ratio, which is that, and this is the such bizarre thing that, and I'm kind of giving an example in the lectures of spheres, because they are the simplest object you can think about. But you take a small sphere, right, and then you take a big sphere and you think they're the same object, right? One is just bigger than the other. They're not the same object. That's the weird thing. They have fundamental different properties. And so if you scale animals up, like you scale spheres up, they actually have a different set of forces that dominate their lives. And so it turns out you actually collapse on your own weight as you get bigger and bigger and bigger. And so the biggest animals are whales and they live in the sea and they can float. And moving from animals to physical object, that's why mountains, in fact, very, very slowly, they've collapsed under their own weight. Yeah, I mean, the amazing thing is you look at the solar system and you look at the planets and they're all spherical and you're like, well, is that an accident? I mean, why is everything spherical? I mean, can't we have a cuboidal planet for once? You know, let's look in the universe and see if we can find none. You find none, nowhere, none. Why? Why is that? And it turns out at the scale of a planet, gravity is so large that even rocks, even mountains, right, over long periods of time behave almost like a liquid. I mean, that's extraordinary, isn't it? We don't experience that in our lifetimes because our lives are short. This leads me to something that I was wondering about when I was reading about your lectures, which is the extent to which our perception, our understanding of the world is limited by our own size. And I mean, for instance, we can't see mountains melting under their own weight any more than we can see clouds moving at great speeds if we fast forward them. We can't see the vibrating strings that this table is made up of because we're too much too big. So are we, in a sense, trapped, limited, um, cabin, cribbed and confined by the scale that we happen to have evolved at? I mean, are we the right size? I mean, I think that's what it comes down to. And Erwin Schrodinger asked this question that he was the kind of one of the fathers of quantum mechanics. And he realized very soon on that, you know, why are atoms so small? He asked that question, you know, what, why do these things, these atoms that everything's made of? You look at everything around you, it's all made of these tidal vibrating atoms. Why are they so small? Why can't they be bigger? And he came to the conclusion that they have to be that small for us to be our size, for us to kind of have the complex lives we have. And there's a big debate in biology as to how big you have to be to be compass mentors, if you like, to have a culture. And I think the girl of us travels, obviously, you know, although it's a political book, or started out as a political book, you know, sort of addresses these in a very colorful way, right? And we all have this fantasy of shrinking down and seeing what life would be like. And I often think that the answer to London transports problems is not actually more trains, cars, buses, but just a genetically engineer. Yes, it solves Liverpool. Yes. And the question is, how small could we be and still be human or still have the culture we would be happy with? And of course, our culture would completely change. That's the answer. There's a couple of things. I mean, I could listen to Mark now all day. And it's just a point that I wanted to make. It's not a question. When I was at university and I was at the same college at Marcus at King's, we had to go to lectures. It was a bit sort of three-line whip in those days. So we all got rather tired of going to lectures. And there was an inter-university series of lectures, every term, which we had to go to at Senate House. So we all trailed along with distinct lack of enthusiasm. And one time there was a professor lecturing on the Shakespearean tragedies, which held us so spellbound that I think it in that room changed everybody. And at the end of the last lecture on King Lear, the professor got a standing ovation, which I think is probably unheard of. And it makes me realise that we were just talking about the internet. There is nothing. Is there like a real person like you standing up at these lectures to these young people, these children, and enthusing as you have been and answering these wonderful questions that they all have. I mean, you're every small boy's dream. You know, why can't elephants dance? There's a kind of questions they drive you mad with as a parent. And I just think it's so important not to forget this. The human lecturer still can do so much more. You can get all the information if you want to from the net, but it's not the same. Semion is nodding. Well, I'm nodding in bewilderment because both of you, Susan and Mark, you are both creators, but in a different way. And I'm just always wondering, how is it possible that the stuff comes into your brains? From where does it come? Why? And from what? Because it's the nature of creative process. Is it really completely understood? Well, it remains a mystery. Well, I mean, I can link those two comments, really, which is that the lecture theatre, I mean, you know, in the university, there's still this thing called the lecture theatre and the lecture still go on. And clearly in science, they're not really about communicating information because if you want to, the information is too complex, really, to be well communicated that way, right? And there's textbooks, millions of textbooks, and there's loads of stuff on the internet. So what I think what your job as a lecturer is, is to inspire someone to go and read it, and to make the connections. And I have to say that that's a two-way process, just like any other performance, and it is a performance lecturing. It is about the audience, it's about the students, and they teach you, they ask the questions that you haven't asked, and it's their creativity, really, or at least both of you being in that moment. There is a direct connection what's going on politically at the moment in all of this, which is that as students are asked to pay more and more and more for their tuition fees, they know that they've actually paid 50 quid or whatever it is for a lecture, and they now want value for money. When I went to university, some of the lectures were just dreadful, people just came and read out a chapter of their book and then ambled off again, and people sort of put up with it, but I think they wouldn't now. And you mentioned also the internet, this phenomenon of TED talks where you've got lectures on very serious subjects, enormously popular, millions of people logging on to watch them. Yes, and in fact, I think that that is only going to enhance universities, I think. I'm quite surprised that universities haven't got more on to the ball with having more lectures on YouTube and on the internet, and not to replace the lecture, not to in the sense make a sort of digital version of the university, because I think learning is all about people, I think it is all about that human contact and communication with people, and always will be. But what the internet allows you to do is get inspiration from many sources. A university has a faculty, you know, department has a faculty of 20, 30 people, maybe 50 people, suddenly you have a faculty of the whole world. That means you've got to get better, doesn't it? I mean, that means lecturers have got to be better performers, more engaging still than they used to be. I think that's real competition. There's just one thing I was going to throw out that I think Mark and I are much more closely related in what we do. I was going to throw out some names, the borrowers, Alice in Wonderland, you mentioned Swift. I just long now to write something about people changing size, and does it have to be about for children? Yes, and I think there's a rich vein that hasn't actually been kind of mined as much as it could be. I mean, my particular angle on that would be that as you shrink things down in Gullaby's travels, they have all the technology that we have, we had at the time, machines and things, but of course they wouldn't work at that scale. You know, a combustion engine will not work at a tiny scale. Well, we have shrunk things down so far that we've ended the program. I'm afraid we're run out of time. So thank you to all of my guests today. Semyon Bischkoff is conducting Tanhoyzer at the Royal Opera House in London. You might not be able to get there, but you can hear the opera on Radio 3 at 6 p.m. on Christmas Day, and I tell you what, turn on, I would say. You can see Mark Miedonovitch's Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on BBC Four, and you can buy Susan Hill's A Kind Man from January when it's published in the book book shops there. Next week we have sculpture with Sir Anthony Carrow, culture and craft with the outgoing head of the V&A, Sir Mark Jones, and we have Justine Pikadee about whether fashion is art, but for now, thank you and goodbye.