Throughout history, people have sought the secret of the universe,
you know, the final explanation:
"Where does it all come from?
What keeps it all going?"
That stuff.
And sometimes, back in history, they contributed
a great deal more than they thought they were doing at the time.
For instance, how did the ancient medieval Zen Buddhist tea ceremony
and the obsession Renaissance architects
in 15th century Florence have with magic numbers?
Both come together in the modern world
to help us crack open the secrets of the cosmos
and make it possible for us to hear...
"echoes of the past. "
In the 17th century, when the first Dutch traders arrived out here,
they found all the locals, everybody from the emperor down,
sitting around drinking tea.
Well, not just drinking tea,
drinking tea and at the same time asking questions like,
"What is the sound of one hand clapping?"
The Zen Buddhist tea ceremony was supposed to help you
find infinite oneness and universal understanding.
And how you drank the tea was supposed to get you
in the right frame of mind.
So it was a ritual act whose every single detail
was exactly prescribed.
You had to place the cup so,
hold and turn it so,
drink with calm appreciation sipping twice so.
After a number of ritual movements and phrases,
the ceremony ended as formally as it had begun.
The final placement of the cup was exact.
Then with your hands placed just so,
time to express final awareness
with a long look and a gentle hiss so.
I hope that shorthand version
of the medieval Buddhist tea ceremony will do,
'cause the real thing takes more than four hours.
So, anyway, those seagoing Dutch characters
I referred to earlier came here,
contemplated all that harmony, purity, reverence, and tranquility
and realized that what they were looking at
was lots of profit.
Because while out here in the Far East
tea was taken as medicine for every known ailment,
back home in Holland
it was just what the new Dutch middle class needed
to fill its afternoons.
So, you see, it's a myth about us English
starting the tea drinking thing.
The Dutch were doing it 50 years before us.
But for all European tea importers
throughout the rest of the 17th century,
wherever they were in Europe,
what turned out to be absolutely their customers' cup of tea
wasn't the tea.
It was the cup: porcelain.
People went potty about it.
Kings and princes built special rooms to house their collections;
pirates knocked off trading ships to get at their porcelain collections.
So you can guess what it was worth.
As for how porcelain was actually made,
its Chinese inventors remained, to say the least, inscrutable...
all of which, I suppose helped to make the fortunes
of this little Dutch town,
home of one of history's most famous fakes.
It's called Delft, and it's really very nice.
Delft was one of the ports
the 17th century Dutch traders out in the Far East came from,
which is why a lot of those valuable porcelain cargos
ended up on sale in the shops back here...
not enough porcelain, however, as I mentioned,
to satisfy the instant craze for it.
And that's where the famous fake comes in.
You probably own some.
It was called Delftware.
Because the price of the real stuff went so high,
the Delft potters came up with an imitation so good
only a Chinese could have told the difference,
and there weren't many of them around.
By the 18th century, Delft had pretty much
cornered the whole European pottery market
Some of the Delft fakes were so valuable
that if you dropped a bit you had it very expensively repaired,
which is how an English potter called Wedgwood
got his start in life,
until he'd made enough money from repairing Delftware
to set up on his own.
And when he did, his stuff looked like this:
Queensware, he called it.
He had an eye for publicity.
So in 1765, he sent a tea set to the royal family.
They liked it, so all his ads said,
"If the queen uses it, so should you. "
Made him rich, that trick.
But compared with the Delft,
look how different the Wedgwood style is:
simple.
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 elegance of ancient Greece or Rome.
Because by this time,
everybody'd gone right off things Chinese
and were deeply into a new fashion craze
called neoclassical.
And when I say deeply,
as usual, I mean it in more senses than one.
See, the Italians had just discovered
the buried Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum
to general stupefied amazement.
So by the 1730s, it had become part
of every well-heeled young aristocrat's education
to do ancient Rome and classical ruins in general
on a kind of culture vulture trip
around the sites called the Grand Tour.
And, of course, as tourists will,
these aristos picked up the odd souvenir
and knickknack along the way:
statues, columns, temples, monumental vases,
friezes, basilicas, you know, souvenir knickknacks.
Collections were collected in ways that today
would get you put in jail,
collections so big we had to invent museums to put them in.
That's how the British Museum started.
The best known collection at the time was Sir William Hamilton's,
the fellow whose wife, Emma, ran away with Lord Nelson.
He had dozens of priceless ancient vases that he had acquired.
And that's where Wedgwood got his design ideas from,
Hamilton's vases.
But what really got the tourists flocking into Italy was that...
well, not actually that: this.
See?
A Venetian artist called Piranesi did these.
He got so turned on by the new archaeology
and the general classical crumble
that he churned out views of Rome by the dozen.
These inspired a visiting architect
called Robert Adam, who promptly took neoclassicism
back to Britain and churned out country houses
more suited to Olympus than Oxfordshire.
But in among all this Greek and Roman decoration,
all over Adams' ceilings, walls, fireplaces...
and anywhere else he could put it...
was something else he copied from Piranesi,
something else Piranesi had seen in Rome:
Egyptian symbols adopted by the Freemasons
and turned into the next rave from the grave.
But the whole Egypto-craze thing got a real leg up
when the best known Freemason in France...
name of Napoleon... decided to invade Egypt
and, by the way, remove large lumps of it
thanks in particular to the team of scientists
he sent to choose exactly which bits to loot,
because they, then, wrote a giant book about it
which everybody read, thus kicking off Egyptology
and all this stuff...
and something that brings us closer
to the secret of the universe, remember?
Because one of Napoleon's scientists,
called Fourier, missed Egyptian weather so much
when he got home, he became the expert on heat?
"How did heat flow, for instance?
"How did things warm up?
"And when things cooled 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 tropically hot all over the ancient earth.
Somebody dug down.
Sure enough, there were fossil palm trees
under places like Paris.
So the earth, like everything, did cool down.
Well, by 1851, people knew that heat was made by moving molecules.
And in Scotland, a fellow called Kelvin
decided to take a look at the cooling-down process.
According to Kelvin, the coolest anything could ever get...
on a temperature scale he invented called the Kelvin scale...
would be when it got so cold all its molecules stopped moving.
That, Kelvin reckoned, would be at -273 degrees Celsius.
So he made that zero on his scale,
the coldest there is: zero degrees Kelvin.
Basically, Kelvin wrote
the second law of thermodynamics,
according to which anything left alone
with no further heat input goes cold and stays cold,
like that tunnel under the ice...
or the universe...
or tea.
Okay, keep cold tea in mind, because I'll be coming back to it.
Meanwhile, let's go somewhere warmer, shall we,
to that other place I mentioned at the beginning of the program:
Florence.
You'll remember I said at the beginning
that universal harmony was sought by medieval eastern tea drinkers
and Renaissance Florentine architects?
You know what form the Florentine search for harmony took?
You're looking at it.
The harmony of nature as reproduced
in 15th-century Florentine architecture:
the Church of Santa Maria Novella
done by a fellow called Alberti with mathematical exactitude.
The facade is an exact square.
This bit here is precisely equal to exactly one half of this bit here.
Each half of this bit is a quarter of this bit.
The front door height is 11/2 times its width.
And that's only the half of it.
As you can probably guess, Alberti and most Renaissance eggheads
were nuts about numbers.
They thought there were special magic numbers
that would give them the secret of the universe and all that.
So it's not surprising that Alberti also 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 people, all of them saying, "Who, me?
I'm just a commercial attache"...
and all of them writing secret reports
in invisible ink and code for your eyes only.
By 1585, a French cryptographer called Vigenère,
who was also a fan of Alberti's,
had produced a code that he said nobody could crack,
a code no spy should be without...
or, as it was to turn out 300 years later, no army.
Nearly 300 years later, the Vigenère code was still in use
by the Confederate side in the American Civil War.
Here's how it worked.
First you draw lots of squares, like this,
with the letters of the alphabet along the top and down the side.
Then fill in like this:
second row, " B" to "Z," then "A";
third row, "C" to "Z," then "A-B";
and so on till the whole thing's filled.
Then you and your spies agree on a special encoding keyword.
Let's say Booth.
Now for the message.
Say it starts Lincoln,
which you write underneath the keyword Booth,
which you repeat as necessary.
To encode the message,
you start by going to the first message letter,
"L," along the top, then go down the side
to the first keyword letter, " B."
Where the two intersect, "M," is the first code letter.
Okay, do that again.
The next message letter, "I," keyword letter, "O,"
Code letter, "W."
Okay, here's a Vigenère message in code.
And now to decode it.
You know the keyword is Booth.
So along the top, to find first keyword letter, " B,"
down to first code word letter, "M,"
and back to decode "L,"
second keyword letter "O," down to secret code letter "W,"
and back to decode "I"
and so on through the full secret message.
You've now decoded "L-I-N-C-O-L-N-D-E-A-D."
"Lincoln Dead. "
If John Wilkes Booth had got away
after he assassinated Abraham Lincoln,
that's likely the message he would have sent
using the Vigenère code they found in his hotel room
when they searched it after they caught him.
Booth's southern spymasters used the Vigenère code
all through the Civil War, which they lost
partly because the North cracked the code...
and partly because, with or without a code,
they couldn't feed their armies the way the North could.
These northern troops had all the bread they could eat,
because the federal government was giving out free farmland
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 world's biggest grain producer,
all the bread an army could possibly ever want to eat.
So in 1865 when the war ended,
what were they going to do
with all that excess grain production?
Well, fortunately there was Europe to feed.
So in the end, that's where most of it ended up going,
which brings my story one step closer
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 possible bigger and bigger ships
that culminated in the giant transatlantic liners of the 1920s
equipped with every known luxury
and the latest high-tech ship-to-shore line:
a radio telephone.
A transatlantic call lasting three minutes
cost virtually nothing... a few thousand dollars.
So now the super rich could stay in touch
with their financial advisers...
well, maybe.
Because the only trouble with this was the hiss.
In 1930, the Bell Telephone people
put an engineer called Jansky onto the problem.
Turned out to be static.
You usually get it from thunderstorms
and cars and such.
But in this case, there was more to it than that.
The static was pretty constant.
Well, it didn't take Jansky long 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 exactly the same track at exactly the same rate every day.
And it did so four minutes later 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 later every day.
Good heavens.
This was extraterrestrial static.
Jansky published;
got one letter from an amateur sky watcher called Reber in Illinois
who slung together an antenna made from chicken wire and got this:
the source of the hiss, the entire Milky Way galaxy.
That first ever radio picture of the sky
produced by somebody in his backyard
kicked off the whole of modern radio astronomy.
In 1965, two American scientists pulled everything together
when they found static coming from all over the universe.
Now, heat gives off static,
so they analyzed the heat level of the static
and found it was an extraordinary echo
from the ancient past,
because it showed that today's universe
had an overall temperature of only three degrees Kelvin.
Remember the Kelvin scale?
In other words, the cosmos
was only three degrees above absolute zero.
That's the temperature
the whole universe should have come down to
if it had started cooling down after a hot big bang
15 billion years ago.
So there you have it, the secret of the universe.
Not bad for Zen Buddhist tea drinkers
and Florentine numbers freaks, eh?
Which leaves only one question:
"What is the sound of one hand clapping?"