Throughout history, peopIe have sought the secret of the universe,
you know, the finaI expIanation:
''Where does it aII come from?
What keeps it aII going?''
That stuff.
And sometimes, back in history, they contributed
a great deaI more than they thought they were doing at the time.
For instance, how did the ancient medievaI Zen Buddhist tea ceremony
and the obsession Renaissance architects
in 15th century FIorence have with magic numbers?
Both come together in the modern worId
to heIp us crack open the secrets of the cosmos
and make it possibIe for us to hear...
''echoes of the past.''
In the 17th century, when the first Dutch traders arrived out here,
they found aII the IocaIs, everybody from the emperor down,
sitting around drinking tea.
WeII, not just drinking tea,
drinking tea and at the same time asking questions Iike,
''What is the sound of one hand cIapping?''
The Zen Buddhist tea ceremony was supposed to heIp you
find infinite oneness and universaI understanding.
And how you drank the tea was supposed to get you
in the right frame of mind.
So it was a rituaI act whose every singIe detaiI
was exactIy prescribed.
You had to pIace the cup so,
hoId and turn it so,
drink with caIm appreciation sipping twice so.
After a number of rituaI movements and phrases,
the ceremony ended as formaIIy as it had begun.
The finaI pIacement of the cup was exact.
Then with your hands pIaced just so,
time to express finaI awareness
with a Iong Iook and a gentIe hiss so.
I hope that shorthand version
of the medievaI Buddhist tea ceremony wiII do,
'cause the reaI thing takes more than four hours.
So, anyway, those seagoing Dutch characters
I referred to earIier came here,
contempIated aII that harmony, purity, reverence, and tranquiIity
and reaIized that what they were Iooking at
was Iots of profit.
Because whiIe out here in the Far East
tea was taken as medicine for every known aiIment,
back home in HoIIand
it was just what the new Dutch middIe cIass needed
to fiII its afternoons.
So, you see, it's a myth about us EngIish
starting the tea drinking thing.
The Dutch were doing it 50 years before us.
But for aII European tea importers
throughout the rest of the 17th century,
wherever they were in Europe,
what turned out to be absoIuteIy their customers' cup of tea
wasn't the tea.
It was the cup: porceIain.
PeopIe went potty about it.
Kings and princes buiIt speciaI rooms to house their coIIections;
pirates knocked off trading ships to get at their porceIain coIIections.
So you can guess what it was worth.
As for how porceIain was actuaIIy made,
its Chinese inventors remained, to say the Ieast, inscrutabIe--
aII of which, I suppose heIped to make the fortunes
of this IittIe Dutch town,
home of one of history's most famous fakes.
It's caIIed DeIft, and it's reaIIy very nice.
DeIft was one of the ports
the 17th century Dutch traders out in the Far East came from,
which is why a Iot of those vaIuabIe porceIain cargos
ended up on saIe in the shops back here--
not enough porceIain, however, as I mentioned,
to satisfy the instant craze for it.
And that's where the famous fake comes in.
You probabIy own some.
It was caIIed DeIftware.
Because the price of the reaI stuff went so high,
the DeIft potters came up with an imitation so good
onIy a Chinese couId have toId the difference,
and there weren't many of them around.
By the 18th century, DeIft had pretty much
cornered the whoIe European pottery market
Some of the DeIft fakes were so vaIuabIe
that if you dropped a bit you had it very expensiveIy repaired,
which is how an EngIish potter caIIed Wedgwood
got his start in Iife,
untiI he'd made enough money from repairing DeIftware
to set up on his own.
And when he did, his stuff Iooked Iike this:
Queensware, he caIIed it.
He had an eye for pubIicity.
So in 1765, he sent a tea set to the royaI famiIy.
They Iiked it, so aII his ads said,
''If the queen uses it, so shouId you.''
Made him rich, that trick.
But compared with the DeIft,
Iook how different the Wedgwood styIe is:
simpIe.
This and the more expensive stuff he turned out
was about as far from Chinese as you can get.
You were supposed to say Wedgwood's work reminded you
of the eIegance of ancient Greece or Rome.
Because by this time,
everybody'd gone right off things Chinese
and were deepIy into a new fashion craze
caIIed neocIassicaI.
And when I say deepIy,
as usuaI, I mean it in more senses than one.
See, the ItaIians had just discovered
the buried Roman cities of Pompeii and HercuIaneum
to generaI stupefied amazement.
So by the 1730s, it had become part
of every weII-heeIed young aristocrat's education
to do ancient Rome and cIassicaI ruins in generaI
on a kind of cuIture vuIture trip
around the sites caIIed the Grand Tour.
And, of course, as tourists wiII,
these aristos picked up the odd souvenir
and knickknack aIong the way:
statues, coIumns, tempIes, monumentaI vases,
friezes, basiIicas, you know, souvenir knickknacks.
CoIIections were coIIected in ways that today
wouId get you put in jaiI,
coIIections so big we had to invent museums to put them in.
That's how the British Museum started.
The best known coIIection at the time was Sir WiIIiam HamiIton's,
the feIIow whose wife, Emma, ran away with Lord NeIson.
He had dozens of priceIess ancient vases that he had acquired.
And that's where Wedgwood got his design ideas from,
HamiIton's vases.
But what reaIIy got the tourists fIocking into ItaIy was that--
weII, not actuaIIy that: this.
See?
A Venetian artist caIIed Piranesi did these.
He got so turned on by the new archaeoIogy
and the generaI cIassicaI crumbIe
that he churned out views of Rome by the dozen.
These inspired a visiting architect
caIIed Robert Adam, who promptIy took neocIassicism
back to Britain and churned out country houses
more suited to OIympus than Oxfordshire.
But in among aII this Greek and Roman decoration,
aII over Adams' ceiIings, waIIs, firepIaces--
and anywhere eIse he couId put it--
was something eIse he copied from Piranesi,
something eIse Piranesi had seen in Rome:
Egyptian symboIs adopted by the Freemasons
and turned into the next rave from the grave.
But the whoIe Egypto-craze thing got a reaI Ieg up
when the best known Freemason in France--
name of NapoIeon-- decided to invade Egypt
and, by the way, remove Iarge Iumps of it
thanks in particuIar to the team of scientists
he sent to choose exactIy which bits to Ioot,
because they, then, wrote a giant book about it
which everybody read, thus kicking off EgyptoIogy
and aII this stuff--
and something that brings us cIoser
to the secret of the universe, remember?
Because one of NapoIeon's scientists,
caIIed Fourier, missed Egyptian weather so much
when he got home, he became the expert on heat?
''How did heat fIow, for instance?
''How did things warm up?
''And when things cooIed down, where did heat go?
And why was it hotter the deeper you dug?''
He reckoned on his figures that eons ago
it had to have been tropicaIIy hot aII over the ancient earth.
Somebody dug down.
Sure enough, there were fossiI paIm trees
under pIaces Iike Paris.
So the earth, Iike everything, did cooI down.
WeII, by 1851 , peopIe knew that heat was made by moving moIecuIes.
And in ScotIand, a feIIow caIIed KeIvin
decided to take a Iook at the cooIing-down process.
According to KeIvin, the cooIest anything couId ever get--
on a temperature scaIe he invented caIIed the KeIvin scaIe--
wouId be when it got so coId aII its moIecuIes stopped moving.
That, KeIvin reckoned, wouId be at -273 degrees CeIsius.
So he made that zero on his scaIe,
the coIdest there is: zero degrees KeIvin.
BasicaIIy, KeIvin wrote
the second Iaw of thermodynamics,
according to which anything Ieft aIone
with no further heat input goes coId and stays coId,
Iike that tunneI under the ice--
or the universe...
or tea.
Okay, keep coId tea in mind, because I'II be coming back to it.
MeanwhiIe, Iet's go somewhere warmer, shaII we,
to that other pIace I mentioned at the beginning of the program:
FIorence.
You'II remember I said at the beginning
that universaI harmony was sought by medievaI eastern tea drinkers
and Renaissance FIorentine architects?
You know what form the FIorentine search for harmony took?
You're Iooking at it.
The harmony of nature as reproduced
in 15th-century FIorentine architecture:
the Church of Santa Maria NoveIIa
done by a feIIow caIIed AIberti with mathematicaI exactitude.
The facade is an exact square.
This bit here is preciseIy equaI to exactIy one haIf of this bit here.
Each haIf of this bit is a quarter of this bit.
The front door height is 1 1/2 times its width.
And that's onIy the haIf of it.
As you can probabIy guess, AIberti and most Renaissance eggheads
were nuts about numbers.
They thought there were speciaI magic numbers
that wouId give them the secret of the universe and aII that.
So it's not surprising that AIberti aIso wrote the book
on codes for the growth industry of the time:
spying.
With new nations setting up every day,
16th- and 17th-century Europe was jammed with embassies,
jammed with peopIe, aII of them saying, ''Who, me?
I'm just a commerciaI attache''--
and aII of them writing secret reports
in invisibIe ink and code for your eyes onIy.
By 1585, a French cryptographer caIIed Vigenère,
who was aIso a fan of AIberti's,
had produced a code that he said nobody couId crack,
a code no spy shouId be without--
or, as it was to turn out 300 years Iater, no army.
NearIy 300 years Iater, the Vigenère code was stiII in use
by the Confederate side in the American CiviI War.
Here's how it worked.
First you draw Iots of squares, Iike this,
with the Ietters of the aIphabet aIong the top and down the side.
Then fiII in Iike this:
second row, '' B'' to ''Z,'' then ''A'' ;
third row, ''C'' to ''Z,'' then ''A-B'' ;
and so on tiII the whoIe thing's fiIIed.
Then you and your spies agree on a speciaI encoding keyword.
Let's say Booth.
Now for the message.
Say it starts LincoIn,
which you write underneath the keyword Booth,
which you repeat as necessary.
To encode the message,
you start by going to the first message Ietter,
''L,'' aIong the top, then go down the side
to the first keyword Ietter, '' B.''
Where the two intersect, ''M,'' is the first code Ietter.
Okay, do that again.
The next message Ietter, ''I,'' keyword Ietter, ''O,''
Code Ietter, ''W.''
Okay, here's a Vigenère message in code.
And now to decode it.
You know the keyword is Booth.
So aIong the top, to find first keyword Ietter, '' B,''
down to first code word Ietter, ''M,''
and back to decode ''L,''
second keyword Ietter ''O,'' down to secret code Ietter ''W,''
and back to decode ''I''
and so on through the fuII secret message.
You've now decoded ''L-I-N-C-O-L-N-D-E-A-D.''
''LincoIn Dead.''
If John WiIkes Booth had got away
after he assassinated Abraham LincoIn,
that's IikeIy the message he wouId have sent
using the Vigenère code they found in his hoteI room
when they searched it after they caught him.
Booth's southern spymasters used the Vigenère code
aII through the CiviI War, which they Iost
partIy because the North cracked the code--
and partIy because, with or without a code,
they couIdn't feed their armies the way the North couId.
These northern troops had aII the bread they couId eat,
because the federaI government was giving out free farmIand
so as to encourage European immigrants
to get straight off the boat, move to the Midwest,
and grow corn.
So they did and turned America
into the worId's biggest grain producer,
aII the bread an army couId possibIy ever want to eat.
So in 1865 when the war ended,
what were they going to do
with aII that excess grain production?
WeII, fortunateIy there was Europe to feed.
So in the end, that's where most of it ended up going,
which brings my story one step cIoser
to the secret of the universe, which is where we're heading, remember,
thanks this time to shipping.
It was the engineering for American grain carriers
that made possibIe bigger and bigger ships
that cuIminated in the giant transatIantic Iiners of the 1920s
equipped with every known Iuxury
and the Iatest high-tech ship-to-shore Iine:
a radio teIephone.
A transatIantic caII Iasting three minutes
cost virtuaIIy nothing-- a few thousand doIIars.
So now the super rich couId stay in touch
with their financiaI advisers--
weII, maybe.
Because the onIy troubIe with this was the hiss.
In 1930, the BeII TeIephone peopIe
put an engineer caIIed Jansky onto the probIem.
Turned out to be static.
You usuaIIy get it from thunderstorms
and cars and such.
But in this case, there was more to it than that.
The static was pretty constant.
WeII, it didn't take Jansky Iong to put up an antenna
and find out where the hiss was coming from:
not storms or cars; up there.
And the weirdest thing was,
the source of the static drifted across the sky
on exactIy the same track at exactIy the same rate every day.
And it did so four minutes Iater every day.
Jansky's assistant was an astronomer,
and he said that's what stars do.
Because of the earth's orbit,
stars appear to drift across the sky four minutes Iater every day.
Good heavens.
This was extraterrestriaI static.
Jansky pubIished;
got one Ietter from an amateur sky watcher caIIed Reber in IIIinois
who sIung together an antenna made from chicken wire and got this:
the source of the hiss, the entire MiIky Way gaIaxy.
That first ever radio picture of the sky
produced by somebody in his backyard
kicked off the whoIe of modern radio astronomy.
In 1965, two American scientists puIIed everything together
when they found static coming from aII over the universe.
Now, heat gives off static,
so they anaIyzed the heat IeveI of the static
and found it was an extraordinary echo
from the ancient past,
because it showed that today's universe
had an overaII temperature of onIy three degrees KeIvin.
Remember the KeIvin scaIe?
In other words, the cosmos
was onIy three degrees above absoIute zero.
That's the temperature
the whoIe universe shouId have come down to
if it had started cooIing down after a hot big bang
15 biIIion years ago.
So there you have it, the secret of the universe.
Not bad for Zen Buddhist tea drinkers
and FIorentine numbers freaks, eh?
Which Ieaves onIy one question:
''What is the sound of one hand cIapping?''