Great Debates

Eminent doctors and notorious charlatans vied for sick patients to treat in the cut-throat medical marketplace of Georgian England.

John Hutchinson and Isaac Newton were both devout scholars who believed that the natural world and God were inextricably linked. The similarities ended there.

The debate over whether nature or nurture guides who we are is as dependent on politics and ideology as it is on scientific research.

The Antikythera Mechanism is ingenious, intricate and highly sophisticated. But what is it?

Is lightning natural or divine? Opinion split royalists and republicans. 

The Water-Babies was a fairytale that straddled religion and science, railing against logical rationality in the face of nature’s mysteries. 

What does it take to establish a new scientific truth? In the case of Galileo and heliocentrism, the death of its sceptics. 

The railway revolutionised Victorian Britain, but were its trains on the right track? It was difficult to gauge.