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Friday 9 January 2009

The magic of science

Big Bang Day (BBC Radio 4); The Essay (BBC Radio 3)

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.

More articles from: Kate Chisholm | this section

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