All language subtitles for BBC.The.Ascent.Of.Man.03.of.13.The.Grain.in.the.Stone.XviD.mp3.eBwoy

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MILTON: "In his hand he
took the golden compasses prepared

In God's eternal
stone to circmscribe

This niverse and
all created things

One foot he centered
and the other trned

Rond throgh the vast
profndity obscre

And said Ths far extend
ths far thy bonds

This be thy just
circumference, O World!"

(Thunderclap)

The earth has existed for
more than 4,000 million years.

Through all this time it has been shaped
and changed by two kinds of action.

The hidden forces within the
earth have buckled the strata

and lifted and shifted
the land masses.

And on the surface, the erosion
of snow and rain and storm,

of stream and ocean,

of sun and wind,

have carved out a
natural architecture.

~ MESSIAEN: Et Expecto
Resurrectionem Mortuorum

Man has also become an
architect of his environment,

but he does not command forces
as powerful as those of nature.

His method has been
selective and probing,

an intellectual approach in which
action depends on understanding.

I've come to trace its history
and the cultures of the New World,

which are younger
than Europe and Asia.

This is the Canyon
de Chelly in Arizona.

This breathless, secret valley has been
inhabited by one Indian tribe after another,

almost without a break, for 2,000
years since the birth of Christ,

longer than any other
place in North America.

Sir Thomas Browne has
a springing sentence -

"The huntsmen are up in America and they're
already past their first sleep in Persia."

At the birth of Christ, the huntsmen were settling
to agriculture here in the Canyon de Chelly

and starting along the same
steps in the ascent of man

that had first been
taken in the Middle East.

Why did civilisation begin so much
later in the New World than in the Old?

Evidently because man was a
latecomer to the New World.

He came before boats were invented,

which implies that he came dry
shod over the Bering Straits

when they formed a broad land
bridge during the last ice age.

That means that man came from Asia to
America not later than 10,000 years ago

and not earlier than
about 30,000 years ago.

And he didn 't come all at once.

There is subtle, but persuasive,
biological evidence...

...that I can only interpret to mean that
he came in two small successive migrations.

The evidence is that there is no
blood group B anywhere in America

as there is in most
other parts of the world.

In Central and South America,

all the original Indian
population is blood group O.

In North America, it is
the blood groups O and A.

I can see no sensible way
of interpreting that...

...but to believe that a first migration
of a small related kinship group,

all of blood group O,

came into America, multiplied and
spread right down to the south.

And then a second migration,
again of small groups,

this time containing both A and O,

followed them only so
far as North America.

The American Indians, then, certainly
contained some of this later migration

and are, comparatively
speaking, latecomers.

Agriculture in the Canyon de
Chelly reflects this lateness.

Although maize had long been
cultivated in Central and South America,

here it comes in only
about the time of Christ.

People are very simple. They have
no houses, they live in caves.

Pottery is introduced.

Pit houses are dug in the caves
themselves and covered with clay or adobe.

And at that stage the canyon is
really fixed until about the year 1000,

when the great Pueblo civilisation
comes in with stonemasonry.

That seems a very
simple distinction -

the mud house, the stonemasonry.

But, in fact, it represents a fundamental
intellectual difference, not just a technical one.

And I believe it to be one of the most
important steps that man has taken...

...wherever and whenever he did so.

The distinction between the
moulding action of the hand

and the splitting or
analytic action of the hand.

You see...

...it seems the most natural thing
in the world to take some clay

and mould it into a ball, a little
clay figure, a cup, a pit house.

At first, we feel that the shape
of nature's been given us by this.

But, of course, it's not.

This is the man -made shape.

What the pot does is to
reflect the cupped hand.

What the pit house does is to
reflect the shaping action of man.

And nothing has been discovered
about nature herself...

...when man imposes these warm, rounded,
feminine, artistic shapes on her.

The only thing that you reflect
is the shape of your own hand.

There is a great
intellectual step forward...

...when man splits a piece of
wood, or a piece of stone...

...and lays bare in that the print
that nature had put before he split it.

From an early time, man made
tools by working the stone.

Sometimes the stone
had a natural grain.

Sometimes the tool-maker created the lines of
cleavage by learning how to strike the stone.

It may be that the idea comes in
the first place from splitting wood

because wood is a material with a visible
structure which opens easily along the grain,

but which is hard to
shear across the grain.

The notion of discovering
an underlying order in matter

is man 's basic concept
for exploring nature.

The architecture of things reveals
a structure below the surface,

a hidden grain which,
when it's laid bare,

makes it possible to take
natural formations apart

and assemble them
in new arrangements.

For me, this is the step in the ascent of
man with which theoretical science begins

and it's as native to the way man conceives
his own communities as well as nature.

We human beings are
joined in families,

the families are joined
in kinship groups,

the kinship groups in clans, the
clans in tribes, the tribes in nations.

And that sense of hierarchy, of a pyramid,
in which layer is imposed on layer,

runs through all the ways
that we look at nature.

The fundamental
particles make nuclei,

the nuclei join in atoms,

the atoms join in molecules,
the molecules join in bases,

the bases join in amino acids.

We find again in nature something
which seems profoundly to correspond

to the way in which our own
social relations join us.

The Canyon de Chelly is a kind
of microcosm of the cultures.

But its high point was reached when the
Pueblo people built these great structures

just after 1000 AD.

They represent not only an understanding of
nature in the stonework, but of human relations,

because the Pueblo people formed here
and elsewhere a kind of miniature city.

Stones make a wall, walls make a house,
houses make streets and streets make a city.

A city is stones
and a city is people.

But it's not a heap of stones and
it's not just a jostle of people.

In the step from the village to the city,
a new community organisation is built,

based on the division of
labour and on chains of command.

The way to recapture that is to walk into
the streets of a city that none of us has seen

in a culture that has vanished.

This is Machu Picchu in the high
Andes, 8,000ft up, in South America.

It was built by the Incas at
the height of their empire,

round about 1500 AD,
or a little earlier,

when the planning of a city
was their greatest achievement.

When the Spaniards conquered
and plundered Peru in 1532,

they somehow overlooked Machu
Picchu and its sister cities.

After that, it was
forgotten for 400 years

until, one winter's day in 1911,
Hiram Bingham of Yale stumbled on it.

By then it had been abandoned for
centuries and was picked bare as a bone.

But in that skeleton of a city lies the
structure of every city civilisation,

in every age,
everywhere in the world.

A city must live on a base, a hinterland,
of a rich agricultural surplus.

And the visible base for the Inca
civilisation was the cultivation of terraces.

Of course, now the bare
terraces grow nothing but grass.

But once the potato
was cultivated here -

it's the native product of Peru.

Maize, which was long native
and had come from the north.

And since this was a
ceremonial city of some kind,

when the Inca came to visit, no doubt there were
grown for him tropical luxuries of this climate,

like the coca, which is an intoxicating herb that
only the Inca aristocracy was allowed to chew.

At the heart of the terrace
culture is the system of irrigation.

This is what the pre-lnca
empire and the Inca empire made.

It runs through these terraces through canals
and aqueducts, through the great ravines,

down into the desert
towards the Pacific,

and makes it flower.

Exactly as in the Fertile Crescent,
it's the control of the water,

and so here in Peru, the Inca civilisation
was built on the control of irrigation.

A large system of irrigation,
extending over an empire,

requires a strong central authority.

It was so in Mesopotamia,
it was so in Egypt,

it was so in the
empire of the Incas.

And that means that this
city, and all the cities here,

rested on an invisible
base of communication -

the roads,

the bridges in a wild
country like this,

the messages.

They came here, they
went out of here.

They are the three links by which
every city is held to every other,

and which, we suddenly realise,
are different in this city.

Roads, bridges, messages.

Yet on the roads
there were no wheels.

Under the bridges
there were no arches.

The messages were not in writing.

The culture of the Incas had not made
these inventions by the year 1500 AD.

That's because civilisation in America
started several thousand years late

and was conquered before it had time to
make all the inventions of the Old World.

It was a remarkably
tight social structure.

Everyone had a place,
everyone was provided for...

...and everyone - peasant, craftsman, soldier
- worked for one man, the supreme Inca.

The artisans who lovingly carved this
stone to represent the symbol of the link

between the sun and its god and
king, the Inca, worked for the Inca.

So, of course, it was an
extraordinarily brittle empire.

In less than a hundred
years, from 1438 onwards,

the Incas had conquered
3,000 miles of coastline.

Almost everything between
the Andes and the Pacific.

And yet, and yet...

In 1532, a Spanish adventurer,
almost illiterate, Francisco Pizarro,

rode into Peru with no more than 62
terrible horses and 106 foot soldiers.

And overnight he
conquered the great empire.

How? By cutting the top of the
pyramid. By capturing the Inca.

And from that moment,
the empire sagged...

...and the cities, the beautiful cities, laid
bare for the gold plunderer and the vultures.

But, of course, a city is
more than a central authority.

A city is people, a city is alive.

What is a city?

It is a community which lives on a base of
agriculture so much richer than the village

that it can afford to sustain
every kind of craftsman

and make him a
specialist for a lifetime.

The specialists are gone.

Their work has been destroyed.

The men who made this city -

the goldsmith, the coppersmith,
the weaver, the potter -

their work has been robbed.

The woven fabric has decayed,

the bronze has perished,

the gold has been stolen.

All that remains is
the work of the mason.

The beautiful craftsmanship
of the men who made this city.

Not the Incas, but the craftsmen.

But, of course, if you work for
an Inca, if you work for one man...

...his tastes rule you
and you make no invention.

These men... still worked to the
end of the empire with the beam.

They never invented the arch.

Here is a measure of the time lag
between the New World and the Old.

Because this is exactly the point which
the Greeks had reached 2,000 years earlier

and at which they also stopped.

This is Paestum in southern Italy.

A Greek colony, whose temples
are older than the Parthenon,

they date from about 500 BC.

Paestum is contemporary with the
beginning of Greek mathematics.

Pythagoras taught in exile in another
Greek colony not far from here.

Like the mathematics of
Peru 2,000 years later,

the Greek temples were bounded by
the straight edge and the set square.

The Greeks did not
invent the arch either

and therefore their temples
are crowded avenues of pillars.

They seem open when
we see them as ruins,

but in fact they are
monuments without spaces.

That's because they had to
be spanned by single beams

and the span that can be sustained by a flat
beam is limited by the strength of the beam.

On a computer, we can see the stresses in
the beam as we move the columns further apart.

The longer the beam, the greater the
compression that its weight produces in the top

and the greater the tension
it produces in the bottom.

And stone is weak in tension.

It will fail at the bottom.

Unless the columns are
kept close together.

The Greeks could be ingenious
in making the structure light.

For example, by using
two tiers of columns.

But in the end, the physical
limitations of the material

could not be overcome
without a new invention.

Since the Greeks were
fascinated by geometry,

it's puzzling that they did not make
the beautiful invention of the arch.

(Drumming)

But the fact is that the arch
is an engineering invention.

This is the aqueduct
at Segovia in Spain,

which the Romans built about 100 AD.

The structure seems to us splendid, out of
proportion to its function of carrying water.

But that's because we
get water by turning a tap

and we lightly forget the universal
problems of city civilisation.

Every advanced culture that
concentrates its skilled men in cities,

depends on the kind of
invention and organisation

that the Roman aqueduct
at Segovia expresses.

The Romans did not invent the
arch in the first place in stone.

The arch is simply a
method of spanning space,

which doesn 't load the
centre more than the rest.

The stress flows outward
fairly equally throughout.

But for this reason the
arch can be made of parts,

of separate blocks of stone,
which the load compresses.

In this sense, the arch is the
triumph of the intellectual method

which takes nature apart
and puts the pieces together

in new and more
powerful combinations.

The Romans always made
the arch as a semicircle.

They had a mathematical form that worked
well and they were not inclined to experiment.

The circle remained the
basis of the arch, too,

when it went into mass
production in Arab countries.

This is the great mosque at Cordoba in Spain,
built in 785 AD after the Arab conquest.

It's a more spacious structure
than the Greek temple at Paestum

and yet it's visibly run
into similar difficulties.

It's filled with masonry which can 't
be got rid of without a new invention.

The invention is a new form of the arch
based not on the circle, but on the oval.

That doesn 't seem a great change

and yet its effect on the articulation
of buildings is spectacular.

~ BENJAMIN BRITTEN: A War Requiem

Of course, a pointed arch is higher and
therefore opens more space and light.

But, much more radically,
the thrust of the Gothic arch

makes it possible to hold the space in a new way
- as here at Reims.

The load is taken off the walls, which
can therefore be pierced with glass

And the total effect is to hang the
building like a cage from the arched roof.

The inside of the building is open
because the skeleton is outside.

Of all the monuments
to human effrontery...

...there is none to match these
towers of tracery and glass

that burst into the light of
northern Europe about the year 1200.

They were built by the common consent of
townspeople and for them by common masons.

They bear almost no relation to the
everyday useful architecture of the time

and in them improvisation
becomes invention at every moment.

They turned the semicircular Roman arch
into the high, pointed Gothic arch...

...in such a way that the stress flows through
the arch to the outside of the building.

And then, in the 12th century, the sudden
revolutionary turning of that into the half arch.

The flying buttress.

The stress runs in the
buttress as it runs in my arm

and there is no masonry
where there's no stress.

No basic principle in architecture
was added to that really

until the invention of
steel and concrete buildings.

The masons carried in their heads a
stock not so much of patterns as of ideas,

that grew by experience as they
went from one site to the next.

They also carried with
them a kit of light tools.

They marked out with compasses
the ovals for the pointed vaults

and the circles for
the rose windows.

They defined their
intersections with callipers

to line them up and fit them
into repeatable patterns.

Vertical and horizontal
were related by the T-square,

as they had been in
Greek mathematics.

That is, the vertical was
fixed with the plumb line...

...and the horizontal was
fixed not with a spirit level,

but with a plumb line
joined to a right angle.

The wandering builders were
an intellectual aristocracy

and they called themselves freemasons
as early as the 14th century.

One has the sense that the men
who conceived these buildings

were intoxicated by their new-found
command of the force in the stone.

How else could they have proposed
to build vaults of 125 and 150ft

at a time when they could not
calculate any of the stresses?

Well, the vault of 150ft at Beauvais,
less than 100 miles from here, collapsed.

~ VERDl: Requiem
- Dies Irae, Part 1

When the roof of Beauvais collapsed in
1284, some years after it was finished,

it sobered the high
Gothic adventure.

No structure as tall as
this was attempted again.

Yet the empirical design
may have been sound.

Probably the ground at Beauvais was simply not
solid enough and shifted under the building.

But the vault of 125ft
here at Reims held.

And from 1250 onwards,

Reims became a centre
for the arts of Europe.

You see, here I am, roaming around
all these beautiful architectural sites

sitting now on the roof
of the cathedral at Reims.

Why? What does it have
to do with science?

Particularly, what does
it have to do with science

the way we used to understand it
at the beginning of this century

when science was all numbers?

The co-efficient of expansion
of this, the frequency of that.

The fact of the matter is that
our conception of science now,

towards the end of the 20th century,

has changed radically.

We see science as a
description and explanation

of the underlying
structures in nature.

And words like structure, pattern,
plan, arrangement, architecture

constantly occur in every
description that we try to make.

I have, of course, lived with this all my
life and it gives me a special pleasure.

The kind of mathematics that I have
done since childhood is geometrical.

But now that is the everyday
language of scientific explanation.

We talk about the way
crystals are put together,

the way atoms are
made of their parts.

Above all, we talk about the way that
living molecules are made of their parts.

The spiral structure of DNA has become the most
vivid imagery for science in the last years.

And that imagery lives here.
It lives in these arches.

What did the people do who made
this building and others like it?

They took a dead heap of
stones which is not a cathedral

and they turned it into a cathedral by
exploiting the natural forces of gravity,

the way the stone had lain, the brilliant
invention of flying buttress and arch and so on.

And they created a structure out of the
analysis of nature into this superb synthesis.

The kind of man who is interested in
the architecture of nature today...

...is the kind of man who made this
architecture nearly 800 years ago.

There is one gift above all others
that makes man unique among the animals

and it's the gift
displayed everywhere here.

His immense pleasure in exercising
and pushing forward his own skill.

~ MACHAUT: Notre Dame Mass

A popular cliche in philosophy says that
science is pure analysis or reductionism,

like taking the rainbow to pieces,

and art is pure synthesis
- putting the rainbow together.

This is not so.

All imagination begins
by analysing nature.

Michelangelo said that:

"When that which is divine in
s does try to shape a face

both brain and
hand nite to give

from a mere model
frail and slight

life to the stone by
art's free energy"

BRONOWSKl: The material
asserts itself through the hand

and thereby prefigures the
shape of the work for the brain.

The sculptor, as much as the mason,
feels for the form within nature.

"The best of artists
hath no thoght to show

what

what the rough stone in its
superflous shell doth not terrrible.

To break the marble spell is all
the hand that serves the brain can do"

BRONOWSKl: By the time Michelangelo
carved the head of Brutus,

other men quarried
the marble for him.

But Michelangelo had begun
as a quarryman in Carrara

and he still felt that the
hammer in their hands, and in his,

was groping in the stone for
a shape that was already there.

~ ROBERTO GERHARD: Collages

The quarrymen work in Carrara now for
the modern sculptors who come here -

Marino Marini, Lipschitz
and Henry Moore.

Their descriptions of their work
are not as poetic as Michelangelo's,

but they carry the same feeling.

HENRY MOORE: To begin with, as a young
sculptor, I couldn 't afford expensive stone...

...and I got my stone by
going round the stone yards

and finding what they
would call a random block.

Then I had to think in the same way
that Michelangelo might have done.

So that one had to wait until an idea
came that fitted the shape of the stone

and that was seeing
the idea in that block.

~ ELIZABETH LUTYENS: Quincunx

BRONOWSKl: Of course, it
can 't be literally true

that what the sculptor imagines and carves
out is already there, hidden in the block.

And yet the metaphor tells the
truth about the relation of discovery

that exists between man and nature.

In one sense, everything that
we discover is already there.

A sculptured figure and the law of nature
are both concealed in the raw material.

And in another sense, what a man
discovers is discovered by him.

It would not take exactly the same
form in the hands of someone else.

Neither the sculptured figure nor the law
of nature would come out in identical copies

when produced by two different
minds in two different ages.

Discovery is a double relation of
analysis and synthesis together.

As an analysis it
probes for what is there.

But then, as a synthesis, it
puts the parts together in a form

in which the creative mind transcends the bare
limits, the bare skeleton that nature provides.

Sculpture is a sensuous art.

The Eskimos make small sculptures that are
not even meant to be seen, only handled.

So it must seem strange that I choose as my
model for science sculpture and architecture.

And yet it's right.

We have to understand that the world can only
be grasped by action, not by contemplation.

The hand is more
important than the eye.

We are not one of those contemplative
civilisations of the Far East or the Middle Ages

that believed that the world has
only to be seen and thought about

and who practised no science.

We are active, and indeed we
know in the evolution of man,

that it is the hand that drives the
subsequent evolution of the brain.

We find tools made by
man before he became man.

Benjamin Franklin called
man the "tool-making animal".

And that's right.

And the most exciting thing about
that is that even in prehistory,

man already made tools that have
an edge finer than they need have.

Henry Moore calls this
sculpture "The Knife Edge".

The hand is the cutting
edge of the mind.

Civilisation is not a
collection of finished artefacts.

It is the elaboration of processes.

In the end, the march of man is the
refinement of the hand in action.

~ BEETHOVEN: Ninth Symphony

The arch, the buttress, the dome -

which is a sort of
arch in rotation -

are not the last steps in bending
the grain in nature to our own use.

But what lies beyond
must have a finer grain.

We have to look for the
limits in the material itself.

It's as if architecture shifts its
focus at the same time as physics does,

to the microscopic level of matter.

In effect, the modern problem is no longer
to design a structure from the materials,

but to design the
materials for a structure.

The most powerful drive in the ascent
of man is his pleasure in his own skill.

He loves to do what he does well and, having
done it well, he loves to do it better.

You see it in his science.

You see it in the magnificence
with which he carves and builds.

The loving care, the
gaiety, the effrontery.

The monuments are supposed to commemorate
kings and religions, heroes, dogmas,

but in the end, the man they
commemorate is the builder.

I could not end this essay without
taking you to my favourite monument.

Built by a man who had no more scientific
equipment than the Gothic mason.

These are the Watts
Towers in Los Angeles,

built by an Italian
called Simon Rodia.

He came from Italy to the
United States at the age of 12

and then at the age of 42, having worked
as a tile setter and general repairman,

he suddenly decided, in his back garden,
to build these tremendous structures...

...out of chicken wire, bits of railway
tie, steel rods, cement, seashells,

bits of broken tile
and glass, of course -

anything that he could find or that the
neighbourhood children could bring him.

~ GERSHWIN: American Piano Music

It took him 33 years to build them.

He never had anyone to help him because he
said, "I never knew what to do next myself."

He finished them in 1954.

He was 75 by then.

He gave the house, the garden and the
towers to a neighbour and simply walked out.

"I had in mind to do something big,"
Simon Rodia had said, "and I did.

You have to be good, good or
bad, bad to be remembered."

He'd learnt his engineering skill
as he went along, by doing it,

and by taking pleasure in the doing.

Of course, the city building department
decided that the towers were unsafe

and in 1959, they
ran a test on them.

This is the tower that
they tried to pull down.

I'm happy to say that they failed.

The tool that extends the human
hand is also an instrument of vision.

It reveals the structure of things

and makes it possible to put them
together in new, imaginative combinations.

But, of course, the visible is not
the only structure in the world.

There is a fine structure below it
and the next step in the ascent of man

is to discover a tool to open up
the invisible structure of matter.

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