The magic of science

Listening to all these scientists trying to explain how they spend their working days devising equations and then setting up experiments to see whether the equations can be proved was more than just illuminating, it was inspiring. Their work requires so much more imagination than mere novelists, looking beyond what we can see to discover what is going on underneath; never taking what they can merely see with the mind’s eye for granted. ‘The equations were telling him,’ explained Frank Close of Oxford University about the work of the physicist Paul Derac in the 1930s, ‘that the universe cannot just be the stuff that we know.’ Derac developed from them theories about anti-matter that were then given experimental proof 30 years later in the 1960s.

With impeccable timing, Radio Three’s late-night talks, The Essay, were devoted this week to The Rise of Retro Tech. The archaeologist Christine Finn used to spend her time digging in trenches but now she investigates the detritus of the digital era, flying to Silicon Valley to visit a computer museum in a former General Motors factory that houses 1,600 different models of computer. We’re living so fast these days that it only takes 30 years for objects to move from innovation to relegation. The first Apple computer, dating from 1976, is now valued, said Finn, as an ‘antique’, encased in perspex and sold at auction for a mere $25,000.

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Dodgy Geezer

September 12th, 2008 4:47pm Report this comment

Good god, Kate, can't you even spell 'Dirac' correctly? And has your sub-editor never heard of this great Nobel-prize winner?

Please, just stay away from commenting on science. Not only you, but all the rest of the 'liberal' arty journalists. You don't know what you are talking about, you make fatuous and incorrect statements, and you start up scares amongst the rest of the uneducated masses which cost proper scientists time and trouble to allay..

Pelasgos

September 16th, 2008 6:12pm Report this comment

Dodgy Geezer, why you scientists
have such an elevated opinion of
yourselves, do you think that
science moves the world? Money
does. Also, I don't think that people trust you that much.

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