2013 lectures online

The end of the Cold War was widely hailed as a triumph of liberalism and an opportunity to remake the world in a liberal image. Foreign policies during the 1990s pursued the promotion of democracy, humanitarian intervention, liberal peace building and the liberalization of the world economy. With reference to classical liberal theory and its fragmentation, this lecture will explore why, barely a decade later, such policies were either abandoned or expectations radically curtailed.

We live in a world contaminated by man-made chemicals, yet only now are we beginning to understand the subtle changes to health that exposure to low levels of chemicals can cause. This lecture will describe how the latest chemical profiling approaches have identified key contaminants that are changing the sex of fish and discuss concerns that exposure to complex mixtures of chemicals can disrupt hormonal systems in humans and wildlife.

Approximately one percent of new enterprises have sales of more than £1 million six years after they start. More typically, the median sales of a six year old firm is less than £23,000. This lecture will consider and attempt to assess why so many people believe enterprise and entrepreneurship is vital to pulling Britain out of a recession.

The dominance of democracy is a recent phenomenon. Historically, it was associated with war, civil unrest and rule by the poor and ignorant. Even philosophers sympathetic to the idea described it as a government for gods rather than men. Large democracies were seen as anti-commercial, extremist and unstable. The challenge for advocates of democracy has been to make the theory compatible with larger forms of state. This lecture will consider how this led to the first descriptions of democracy and how we continue to define what it means today.

The Big Bang was like an enormous particle physics experiment conducted 13.7 billion years ago - except someone forgot to build the detectors. This lecture will take a tour through particle cosmology, showing how the wreckage from the Big Bang experiment is pieced together into a picture extending back to the first picoseconds and show how results from the Large Hadron Collider, Planck satellite and future experiments will help us towards the ultimate goal of a complete history of the Universe.

As we embark on the 21st century, the world has appeared to confront an epidemic of epidemics. From HIV/AIDS and SARS through to avian and swine flu, the threat of infectious diseases has led governments to routinely identify pandemics as major security threats. But to what extent do infectious diseases threaten security? What are the political implications of framing health issues as security threats? Drawing on prominent examples, this lecture will consider the implications of this 'medicalization' of security for us all.