Human Intelligence

Aristotle was a philosopher, teacher, collector and all-round polymath. He was also, importantly, a traveller, who allowed new places, especially the rich biodiversity he encountered on the island of Lesbos, to shape his thinking profoundly.

Aristotle’s observations about the natural world were remarkably accurate. Many were proved correct by modern science thousands of years later. He dissected animals, not as his contemporaries did, to understand the will of the gods, but to understand animals for their own sakes. He believed – and encouraged us to consider – that everyone has an innate curiosity about the world, that everyone can try to understand its wonder.

Special thanks to  Sophia Connell, Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London.

Produced by BBC Studios Audio in partnership with The Open University.

Presenter: Naomi Alderman Executive editor: Philip Sellars Series producer: Sarah Goodman Script editor: Sara Joyner Researchers: Harry Burton and Miriam O'Byrne Production coordinator: Amelia Paul

Naomi Alderman looks at the mindset and legacy of Ida Pfeiffer, a woman who changed the very idea of travel, who is allowed to do it and why.

Traditionally, travelling had always had a purpose – conquering, discovering, negotiating, pilgrimaging. Women were always accompanied by men – husbands, fathers, brothers, guardians. But in the mid-nineteenth century, a separated mother of two upped sticks and travelled twice around the world, all because she wanted to.

Ida Pfeiffer went on bush expeditions with tiger hunters in India and had dinner with Queen Pomare IV of Tahiti. She spent her fiftieth birthday riding camels through Iran. So many people must have yearned for this kind of adventure, thought about it, but never turned the idea into reality. Pfeiffer made it happen. But what was so different about her thinking?

Special thanks to John van Wyhe, historian of science at the National University of Singapore and author of Wanderlust: The Amazing Ida Pfeiffer, the First Female Tourist (National University of Singapore Press, 2020).

Produced by BBC Studios Audio in partnership with The Open University.

Sir Patrick Manson shook the medical world when he first understood the infection route for vector-borne diseases like malaria. Naomi Alderman dissects the thinking of a scientific pioneer.

In the late 1800s, no one knew how this kind of illness was spread. Manson, a Scottish physician working in China and later in a home laboratory in London, doggedly pursued the answer. Known as the father of tropical medicine, his understanding has undoubtedly saved lives, although he hoped it would also further the Empire. Where might his discovery take us in future?

Special thanks to Kristen Hussey, Lecturer in Environmental History at Newcastle University and author of Imperial Bodies in London (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021).

Produced by BBC Studios Audio in partnership with The Open University.

Jean Rhys' sequel to Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, changed the way we think about stories forever. Naomi Alderman meets a fellow novelist who put a marginalised character at the centre of the action.

Rhys left Dominica to go to school in cold, grey England, but she had always felt out of place. A perfectionist who needed every word in just the right place, she took decades to publish her masterpiece. She was a thinker ahead of her time, who crammed the whole world and its injustices into her writing.

Special thanks to Sophie Oliver, Senior Lecturer in Modernism at the University of Liverpool.

Produced by BBC Studios Audio in partnership with The Open University.

Naomi Alderman explores the thinking of the Buddha, who, as a young prince, ventured outside the palace walls and began his journey towards enlightenment.

Siddhartha Gautama lived in a life of rarefied luxury until an encounter with suffering changed everything for him. He became the Buddha, the awakened one, urged self-transformation and profoundly shaped the world we live in. But did his many insights come from thinking, as such, or something else altogether?

Special thanks to Kate Crosby, Numata Professor of Buddhist studies at the University of Oxford.

Produced by BBC Studios Audio in partnership with The Open University.

Albert Einstein was an international pop star of science who urged the US government to build an atom bomb. Naomi Alderman gets into one of the most famous brains of all time.

Einstein rewrote our understanding of universe. He imagined hitching a ride on a light beam and pursued his famous 'thought experiments' to remarkable ends. He was a man who never swam with the tide. Despite a lifelong commitment to pacifism, in 1939, Einstein signed a letter urging the US government to speed up work on the development of a nuclear bomb. Naomi finds out why.

Special thanks to Janna Levin, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University.

Produced by BBC Studios Audio in partnership with The Open University.

Presenter: Naomi Alderman Executive editor: Philip Sellars Series producer: Sarah Goodman Script editor: Sara Joyner Researchers: Harry Burton and Miriam O'Byrne Production coordinator: Amelia Paul

Lise Meitner was a world-class physicist, who saw what others could not. She recognised nuclear fission – the splitting of the atom, the powerful energy released – before anyone else. Naomi Alderman finds out how.

Women weren't even allowed to attend lectures at the University of Berlin, when Meitner moved there in 1907. She began her career in a basement workshop, kept away from male students, and went on to build an unimpeachable reputation for scientific precision and brilliance. Her discovery of fission made the atom bomb possible, but she refused to have anything to do with the Manhattan Project.

Special thanks to Frank Close, Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford and author of Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age: 1895-1965 (Allen Lane, 2025).

Thanks also to Alex Wellerstein, historian of science at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Produced by BBC Studios Audio in partnership with The Open University.

Naomi Alderman dives into the amazing intellect of John von Neumann, physicist, mathematician, economist, computer scientist – a visionary who predicted the rise of artificial intelligence decades ahead of time.

As a child, von Neumann could recite the telephone directory and crack jokes in Ancient Greek. He waltzed into the Manhattan Project and solved a problem that had frustrated other top scientists for months. His work on game theory underpins the modern world, from defence strategies to dating apps. But, for all his serious intellectual contributions, von Neumann was a party animal, who did his best thinking surrounded by people and noise.

Special thanks to Ananyo Bhattacharya, chief science writer at the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences and author of The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann (Allen Lane, 2021).

Produced by BBC Studios Audio in partnership with The Open University.

Niels Bohr said, 'Anyone who is not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.' Naomi Alderman investigates the remarkable insights of a scientific genius.

Bohr is the man who figured out the structure of the nucleus at the centre of the atom, recognising that the quantum world of tiny particles behaves very differently to the tangible, everyday world around us. He built a scientific family around him, mentoring some of the greatest theoretical physicists of the twentieth century.

Special thanks to Jim Al-Khalili, Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Surrey.

Produced by BBC Studios Audio in partnership with The Open University.

Naomi Alderman explores the multifaceted mind of J Robert Oppenheimer, scientific lead on the Manhattan Project, a vast, top secret scheme to build the world's first atomic bombs in World War II.

The Project was a remarkable feat of human intellect with a real, devastating human cost. It required close cooperation between the US military and a group of world-leading scientists. In many ways, Oppenheimer was a puzzling candidate for the job. He was brilliant, but fuelled by self-loathing. A physicist, he was also a student of philosophy and mysticism, interested in left-wing radical politics. Oppenheimer built the bomb, but later called the weapon's industry "the devil's work". His legacy, like the Manhattan Project itself, is infinitely complex.

Special thanks to Alex Wellerstein, historian of science at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, and author of The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age (HarperCollins, 2025).

Produced by BBC Studios Audio in partnership with The Open University.

Darwin asked big questions. His theory of evolution transformed our understanding of life on Earth. But Naomi Alderman discovers that he did it by looking at small things and tiny changes that other people had overlooked. From earliest childhood, he’d been a collector – pocketing shells, coins, minerals, bits of pottery and rooftiles – and his travels on HMS Beagle allowed him to amass a vast collection of specimens and observations that he and others would puzzle over for decades.

Special thanks to Dr John van Wyhe, historian of science at the National University of Singapore and the Director of The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online.

Produced by BBC Studios Audio in partnership with The Open University.

Presenter: Naomi Alderman Executive editor: James Cook Assistant producer: Sarah Goodman Researcher: Harry Burton Production coordinator: Amelia Paul Script consultant: Sara Joyner

Samuel Johnson was living proof that a person can be extremely messy and disorganised but still do work of great worth. He compiled and almost single-handedly wrote an English dictionary that changed the language for good. ‘Dictionary Johnson’ established the spelling and meaning of many words; he looked at etymology; he poked fun and cracked jokes. He lived hand to mouth, writing for money, and helped establish the modern literary world.

Special thanks to Judith Hawley, Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Produced by BBC Studios Audio in partnership with The Open University.

Naomi Alderman examines the intelligence and sharp humour of an ancient Greek historian known as Pamphila of Epidaurus. She was a female historian working in a society that believed women were constitutionally unsuited to the rational and peculiarly masculine task of recording facts for posterity. She wrote thirty-three volumes of her famed Historical Commentaries from her home. She wrote for fun, organising her material in a free and easy mix, like ‘embroidery’. We have none of her original writings, just reported fragments, but she gave us cultural history as we know it today, centuries ahead of time.

Special thanks to Edith Hall, Professor of Classics at Durham University.

Produced by BBC Studios Audio in partnership with The Open University.

Naomi Alderman looks at the remarkable way Denis Diderot connected ideas and people. In 18th-century Paris, he edited one of the very first encyclopaedias: twenty-eight volumes with tens of thousands of articles on everything from the concept of liberty to cutting-edge medical research, the manufacture of silk stockings and a recipe for apricot jam. Diderot was the perfect man for the job – energised by veering from one subject to the next and undeterred by fierce opposition from the Church or even a government ban on the entire project.

Special thanks to Kate Tunstall, Professor of French and Sir Lindsay Owen-Jones Fellow in Modern Languages at Worcester College, University of Oxford.

Produced by BBC Studios Audio in partnership with The Open University.

Naomi Alderman wonders at lady-in-waiting, writer and all-round entertainer Sei Shōnagon, who wrote The Pillow Book over a thousand years ago in the Japanese imperial court.

The Empress and her entourage lived in a closed world, glimpsed through half-shut blinds, while political machinations went on all around them. Poetry and wit were highly prized; and Sei Shōnagon was unmatched. In dark times, she picked out the beauty and absurdity in everyday life; and pulled together poetry, anecdote, essays and lists to create a whole new genre in Japanese – miscellany.

Special thanks to Naomi Fukumori, Associate Professor and Director of The Institute for Japanese Studies at The Ohio State University.

Excerpts from The Pillow Book translated by Meredith McKinney (Penguin Classics 2006).

Produced by BBC Studios Audio in partnership with The Open University.

Naomi Alderman investigates the eccentric brilliance of Diogenes. He was a ‘cynic’ philosopher, which originally meant ‘dog-like’, and wanted to teach us that humans could learn from dogs and the simple authentic manner in which they went about their lives. Diogenes was sharp, hilarious, downright rude and a menace in the market place.

Special thanks to Dr Robert Cromarty, Classics Master at Wellington College.

Produced by BBC Studios Audio in partnership with The Open University.

Presenter: Naomi Alderman Executive editor: James Cook Assistant producer: Sarah Goodman Researcher: Harry Burton Production coordinator: Amelia Paul Script consultant: Sara Joyner

Naomi Alderman meets Peter Ramus – a teacher determined to simplify and systematise the teaching of difficult things. He spoke his mind and thrived on stirring up trouble.

Ramus was behind one of the most important learning devices in history. A system of organising knowledge that helped overthrow the primacy of Aristotle in medieval universities and allowed everyone to access ideas, regardless of birth or status. He was a fighter (literally on some occasions), a brilliant speaker and devoted to the idea that knowledge deserved to spread far beyond the cloistered walls of higher education.

Special thanks to Robert Goulding, Associate Professor in the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Produced by BBC Studios Audio in partnership with The Open University.

Mary Somerville was a brilliant polymath who found time to correct the work of Isaac Newton whilst looking after her infant children. Naomi Alderman investigates her extraordinary work ethic and expansive interests.

Somerville's writings, across a range of disciplines – maths, astronomy, botany, geography – became essential reading for those learning science, and helped to define what a scientist was in the early 19th century.

Special thanks to Dr Brigitte Stenhouse, Lecturer in the History of Mathematics at The Open University.

Produced by BBC Studios Audio in partnership with The Open University.

Naomi Alderman explores one of the greatest minds of the medieval world and in the history of Jewish thought. His work, The Guide for the Perplexed, is among the most influential works of medieval philosophy. In his efforts to reconcile faith and reason, Maimonides was having parts of the Enlightenment in his head 600 years early.

Special thanks to Rabbi Dr Raphael Zarum, Dean of the London School of Jewish Studies and the Rabbi Sacks Chair of Modern Jewish Thought.

Produced by BBC Studios Audio in partnership with The Open University.

The modern world is inconceivable without this son of a blacksmith and his meticulous, relentless brain. Naomi Alderman meets the mind behind huge scientific advances – who made breakthroughs in the understanding of electricity, changed the technology by which we live and contributed to our theoretical understanding of the forces underpinning the universe. Faraday also devoted his life to spreading the understanding of science into public life via his lectures at the Royal Institution.

Special thanks to Frank James, Professor of the History of Science at University College London.

Produced by BBC Studios Audio in partnership with The Open University.