Helen Scales

speaker

228 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 30 Jul

Helen Scales’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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In Our Time · Seashells · 30 Jul 2026 podcast

A lot of shells have this white skeleton, and that is a colour that's very representative of both of those things.

Also, I think because they come from this hidden part of our planet, they come from down beneath the waves, which is full of myths and monsters and creatures and things we're imagining, and possibly they come with those stories too.

So we see them woven into human history.

as grave goods.

We see them buried with people going back, again, millennia.

They're used as currency.

They're used as the oldest forms of jewellery we've found.

And we keep finding older and older ones and pushing that date back more than up to, I think at the moment, about 150,000 years as the oldest shell jewellery.

So they've been with us, you know, and they've shown us now about what humanity has been like for, you know, for countless generations.

They've always been with us and we've always been imagining things that they symbolise and that they, you know, they tell us.

It's a lovely shape, isn't it?

I did bring some shells with me.

I've got a moon shell here.

But if you look at a garden snail or find a shell in your house somewhere, and if you look at it from the top, you can often see that a snail shell has got this lovely spiral.

And mathematically, it's what we call a logarithmic spiral.

And all that is really, if you imagine drawing that spiral shape in a two-dimensional plane, start with your pen in the middle and sort of spin it outwards around that central axis.

A log spiral is getting bigger each time you spin around one time.

So it's getting bigger at a constant rate.

And that's really just, I guess, a phenomenon of how...

Many things in nature are built, things that are spinning around a spot but getting bigger at the same time.

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