A Point of View

What is the difference between magic and science? What is the difference between Galileo and his contemporary, the famous Elizabethan astrologer and alchemist John Dee? According to Adam Gopnik it's the experimental method - the looking and seeing and testing that goes with true science. But when he wrote about this recently he found that fervent members of the John Dee fan club disagreed.

Every nation has a core irrationality - a belief about itself which no amount of contrary evidence can shift - says Adam Gopnik. Adam tries to uncover the core irrationality of the four nations he knows best: the United States, France, Canada and the UK.

Adam Gopnik reflects on what makes a happy marriage. Darwin, Gopnik writes, when first thinking about marriage, made a list of pros and cons. Cons included the expense and anxiety of children and the odd truth that a married man could never go up in a balloon. On the plus side, he noted, marriage provided a constant companion and friend in old age and, memorably, that a wife would be better than a dog.Gopnik's own formula for a happy marriage is lust, laughter and loyalty.Via Samuel Beckett, Monty Python and The Big Lebowski, Gopnik concludes that loyalty is a much-underrated quality. Loyalty is not, he argues, a passive state that holds two people together when all else has failed.Rather, he explains, loyalty is a wholly active state, as a new family dog has demonstrated. Dogs are there, he writes, "to remind us that loyalty is a jumpy, fizzy emotion - loyalty leaps up at the door and barks with joy at your return, and then immediately goes back to sleep at your side".Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"Lately I've been thinking a lot about the Turk", writes Adam Gopnik. He's talking - not of the Ottomans - but the famous chess playing machine constructed in the late 18th century.A mechanical figure of a bearded man, dressed in Turkish clothing, appeared to be able to play a strong game of chess against a human opponent. It was - in fact - a mechanical illusion that allowed a human chess master hiding inside to operate the machine.It was a sensation. But the players inside were nothing more than good chess players."We always over estimate the space between the uniquely good and the very good", Gopnik writes. "We worship one tennis player as uniquely gifted, failing to see that the runners-up, who we scoff at as perpetual losers, are themselves fantastically gifted and accomplished, that the inept footballer we whistle at in despair is a better football player than we have ever seen or ever will meet".As some of the world's top chess players battle it out in London in the Candidates Tournament for the World Chess Championship, Adam Gopnik reflects on why we overrate masters and underrate mastery.

When two spectacular comets appeared in the night sky in 1664 and 1665, many feared they were harbingers of doom. Not long afterwards, the Great Plague and the Great Fire were visited on London.Lisa Jardine has been looking upwards this week in an attempt to catch sight of the Pan-Starrs comet, which is thought to have been hurtling towards the sun for millions of years. Later this year, another comet is expected to grace our skies.Her concern is not that they might bring with them a modern day plague, but whether we have learned the lessons early astronomers taught us about sharing scientific information.

Lisa Jardine celebrates the achievements of the mathematician Dame Mary Cartwright, the first woman mathematician to be elected to the Royal Society.During World War Two, she responded to a request from the British government to address an issue with early and still-secret radar systems. Together with her colleague Professor J. E. Littlewood, they were able to help war-time radar engineers circumvent a problem that was making radar unreliable.Her findings were not fully understood by her peers at first. It would take a generation before mathematicians realised that her discoveries were the foundation of what became a new field of science: chaos theory.Dame Mary Cartwright was very modest and did not want eulogies at her funeral, but Lisa Jardine takes the opportunity of International Woman's Day to blow Dame Mary's trumpet on her behalf.

Lisa Jardine celebrates the influence of art connoisseur Sir Denis Mahon and reflects on the impact of wealthy art collectors on public taste and government policy. "Art collectors with a fortune to spend inevitably exert an influence on artistic taste and on the art market. The question is: Is a collector who wins public praise for having a "good eye" or "flawless taste" being celebrated for their critical astuteness in identifying a neglected work's lasting aesthetic value and its importance within the artistic tradition? Or are they simply establishing a high competitive price for that artist or artistic school?" Producer: Sheila Cook.

Lisa Jardine celebrates the achievements of Elizabeth of Bohemia, the "Winter Queen", and sees her relegation to the margins of history, "despite the pivotal role she played in international politics throughout much of the seventeenth century", as a reflection of our failure to recognise and value powerful women. Producer: Sheila Cook.

David Cannadine defends his home city of Birmingham against a slur in Jane Austen's "Emma" as, "not a place to promise much", by celebrating its heritage and its current cultural renaissance. Producer: Sheila Cook.

David Cannadine celebrates the saving of New York's now century old Grand Central Terminal and regrets the destruction of the city's other great beaux-arts station. "Many New Yorkers... had initially opposed, and subsequently regretted, the wanton destruction of Penn station as a deplorable act of civic irresponsibility and cultural philistinism." Producer: Sheila Cook.