When the universe was born there was an equal amount of matter and antimatter. When matter and antimatter meet, as Trekkies will tell you, they annihilate to produce nothing. So why are we here? This profound question is at the heart of modern physics. What broke the symmetry of the early universe? And how has that led directly to us and our ability to ponder that very question?

James Watson discovered this week that being a distinguished Nobel prize winning scientist is no protection when you stray in to controversial territory. His claim that race and intelligence are linked provoked outraged condemnation. Lectures and speaking engagements were cancelled and the professor had to fly home to America, as he put it, to save his job.

The surgeon and writer Atul Gawande argues that better systems can transform global healthcare by radically reducing the chance of mistakes and increasing the chance of successful outcomes.

The nature of trust and its role in society, and is there real evidence of a crisis of trust?

The search for justice in conditions where the basis for trust is threatened by violence and intimidation.

Have the instruments for control, regulation, monitoring and enforcement worked?

Transparency may not improve trust, and may even add to the ways in which the public can be deceived.

How can we decide when to trust those who inform us about the wider world, and in particular media reporters?

Scientists need no longer be afraid to ask the big questions about what it means to be human with empirical evidence now answering ancient philosophical questions about meaning and existence

How does the activity of the 100 billion little wisps of protoplasm - the neurons in your brain - give rise to all the richness of our conscious experience, including the "redness" of red, the painfulness of pain or the exquisite flavour of Marmite or Vindaloo?

Professor Ramachandran draws on neurological case studies and work from ethology (animal behavior) to present a new framework for understanding how the brain creates and responds to art. He will use examples mainly from Indian art and Cubism to illustrate these ideas.

Professor Ramachandran demonstrates experimentally that the phenomenon of synesthaesia is a genuine sensory effect. For example, some subjects literally "see" red every time they see the number 5 or green when they see 2.

Professor Ramachandran argues that neuroscience, perhaps more than any other discipline, is capable of transforming man's understanding of himself and his place in the cosmos.

In his first lecture Wole Soyinka considers from his viewpoint as a poet and drawing on his personal experience as a political activist the changes since the Cold War in the nature of fear and its impact on individuals and society

This lecture examines how difficult it can be to tell friend from foe in a climate of fear. Organisations that are set up to overthrow dictatorships can themselves turn into tyrannical regimes. Liberation movements may be forced to seek help from dangerous quarters. And these days it is not just countries that control and direct the lives of their citizens. When the rule of law breaks down, shadowy forces set themselves up as "quasi-states" - and these, more than anything else, have produced today's climate of fear

Between God and Nation, and Sieg Heil, a complex set of social impulses and goals are reduced to mere sound, but a potent tool that moves to vibrate a collective chord and displace reason. A willed hypnosis substitutes for individual volition and, the ecstasy of losing oneself in a sound-cloned crowd drives the most ordinary being to jettison all moral code and undertake hitherto unthinkable acts. Its religious versions prove even more deadly. Is the language of Political Correctness aiding and abetting its proliferation?

Even in defeat, negotiating terms of surrender, a defeated nation pleads - 'Leave us something of our dignity'. Denied this little consideration, a doomed struggle is promptly resumed. So what exactly is this 'dignity' that even nations enshrine in their constitutions and Bills of Human Rights? A basic core of volition? A sense of freedom? Obviously human dignity involves both, and encompasses more. No matter the mask that is worn to hide the reality of fear, dignity remains incompatible with the entry of fear into the human psyche

When Osama bin Laden declares that the world is divided between believers and non-believers, it is easy to identify the menace of the fanatic mind but, in what other company can we place George Bush when we hear him declare that 'you are either with us or you are on the side of the terrorists'? We fail at our peril to recognize a twin strain of the same fanatic spore that threatens to consume the world in its messianic fires. What could be the role of the 'invisible' religions and world views in tempering the forces that seek to dichotomise the world?

When I returned to this Engineering Department from the USA in 1984 my wife and I bought an historic and wonderful house some ten miles south of Cambridge. It was built around 1520, a date that could be substantiated to within a decade by the form of the oak beams that comprised its floors and ceilings. These had been shaped by iron blades that only lasted about ten years. Being someone of the present rather than the past I had not previously been much preoccupied with history but living in the splendid oak structure - like a fine sailing vessel that had gone aground - inspired me to wonder what had preoccupied the technologists and scientists of that age...

Since time immemorial people have been entranced by structures of great size. From the Colossus of Rhodes and the Great Pyramid, themselves no mean technical achievements, to the mighty Cunard 'Queens' built here in Glasgow, and whichever is transiently the tallest building in the world, beholders have gaped at the gigantic. One simple attraction has been that of comparative scale, so many times the size of a man or a horse or of Nelson's column, as popular illustrations used to show. It was easy for the bystander immediately to apprehend the vast size of these objects...

Almost exactly 93 years ago tonight, on 15 April 1912, over two thousand terrified and bewildered people found themselves with little warning drifting or drowning in the ice-cold North Atlantic. Only 712 of them survived that night. They were, of course, the passengers, officers, and crew of the White Star steamship Titanic, and they were in a sense victims of 'failures' of technology…

Four thousand years ago, just 5 miles north of present day Thetford, our Neolithic ancestors began what may have been the largest early industrial process in these islands. This is the site that the Anglo-Saxons called 'Grimes Graves' and it contains nearly four hundred mine-shafts, built to extract high-quality flints, which could be chipped to produce sharp cutting edges. Using nothing but tools of bone and wood and presumably the flints themselves, these ancient people excavated to a depth of up to twelve metres, to reach the buried flints. It has been calculated that the miners needed to remove 1000 tonnes of waste to produce eight tonnes of flint. The site covers nearly 40 hectares and the whole project is astonishing...

When Ralph Waldo Emerson reputedly and memorably said that the world would beat a path to the door of a person who made a better mousetrap, he was perhaps being unduly optimistic, but at least he realised that the mousetrap had to be made and that it would not be sufficient merely to have an idea, or even a patent, for a better mouse trap. Ideas have to be proven to be useful, and the world told about them, before any paths are beaten. Profound changes have taken place in the development of ideas and their translation in to the market place and in my third Reith lecture I argue that this innovation revolution demands a new approach to research and product development...

St John said, "In the beginning was the word", while Goethe claimed that, "In the beginning was the deed". But in these lectures Daniel Barenboim's contention is that: In the beginning was sound

In Chicago Daniel Barenboim will be trying to rescue "the neglected sense" - the ear - and launch a campaign against muzak

In Berlin Daniel Barenboim argues that we have lost the ability to make value judgements about public standards - all because of political correctness and bad education

In the first of his lectures from Jerusalem Daniel Barenboim will talk about how music is the great equaliser as he discovered in his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra which brings together young Arab and Israeli musicians

Music has shown Barenboim that there is a fundamental difference between power and strength which could map a new journey for our politics

The 21st century will be marked by severe natural resource limits, the rise of new economic powers and the threats of failed states. These are tectonic changes with the potential to unleash global-scale upheavals. Global cooperation of an unprecedented depth and scale will be needed but we are not yet prepared for such cooperation

The biggest challenges that we face - climate change, alleviation of hunger, water stress, energy - are translated in the shadow of ignorance into "us versus them" problems, with only the weakest links to underlying scientific principles and technological options