Spring Festivals
Monday 24 March 2008 22:15-23:00 (Radio 3)
Philip Dodd and guests discuss the key cultural issues of the week, and and to mark Radio 3's Rites of Spring season, there is the first of a series of Night Waves letters reporting from traditional spring festivals around the world.
Novelist Adhaf Soueif writes about the Egyptian Spring festival Sham El-Naseem, a celebration that has been going on since the time of the Pharaohs, in which the people of the Nile valley celebrate the arrival of new crops.
Physics of the Impossible
Physics of the Impossible ![News image]()
Playlist
Michio Kaku
Night Waves looks to the future. Just as Francis Fukuyama said we had reached the end of history, so the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku says we are approaching the end of physics. According to Kaku, there is nothing that exists which contradicts the known laws of physics and the only thing standing between us and the teleportation of human beings is the solution of an engineering problem.
Physics of the Impossible is published by Allen Lane
The Brother Gardeners
The design historian Andrea Wulf joins Philip Dodd to discuss the brother gardeners, a group of men who, she argues, wrought a revolution in eighteenth-century England, transforming us into the nation of passionate gardeners which we are today.
The Brother Gardeners is published by Random House
The Rites of Spring - Cairo
As part of Radio 3's Rites of Spring season, Night Waves will be revealing across the week how spring is celebrated in different parts of the world. We begin with the novelist Ahdaf Soueif and her memories of the spring festival in Cairo, where she grew up.
Simon Armitage
Philip talks to the poet Simon Armitage who confesses that at heart he's really a rock star.
Gig: The Life and Times of a Rock Star Fantasist is published by Viking
