Christmas At The Royal Institution: An Anthology of Lectures by M. Faraday, J. Tyndall, R. S. Ball, S. P. Thompson, E. R. Lankester, W. H. Bragg, W. L. Bragg, R. L. Gregory, and I. Stewart PDF
Preview Christmas At The Royal Institution: An Anthology of Lectures by M. Faraday, J. Tyndall, R. S. Ball, S. P. Thompson, E. R. Lankester, W. H. Bragg, W. L. Bragg, R. L. Gregory, and I. Stewart
at the Royal Institution 6583 tp.indd 1 10/10/07 3:30:07 PM B527-FM.qxd 10/17/2007 10:13 AM Page viii TThhiiss ppaaggee iinntteennttiioonnaallllyy lleefftt bbllaannkk at the Royal Institution Editor Frank A J L James The Royal Institution of Great Britain, London World Scientific NEW JERSEY • LONDON • SINGAPORE • BEIJING • SHANGHAI • HONG KONG • TAIPEI • CHENNAI 6583 tp.indd 2 10/10/07 3:30:08 PM Published by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. 5 Toh Tuck Link, Singapore 596224 USA office: 27 Warren Street, Suite 401-402, Hackensack, NJ 07601 UK office: 57 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9HE British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Christmas at the Royal Institution: An Anthology of Lectures by M Faraday, J Tyndall, R S Ball, S P Thompson, E R Lankester, W H Bragg, W L Bragg, R L Gregory, and I Stewart Copyright © 2007 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission from the Publisher. For photocopying of material in this volume, please pay a copying fee through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. In this case permission to photocopy is not required from the publisher. ISBN-13 978-981-277-108-7 ISBN-10 981-277-108-5 ISBN-13 978-981-277-109-4 (pbk) ISBN-10 981-277-109-3 (pbk) Typeset by Stallion Press Email: [email protected] Printed in Singapore. Wanda - Christmas at the Royal.pmd 1 10/2/2007, 4:56 PM B527-FM.qxd 10/17/2007 10:13 AM Page v Preface I am delighted to write this preface to this collection of Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, edited by Professor James. As Director of The Royal Institution (Ri), I am very proud that our annual flagship event is being commemorated in this way. The Christmas Lectures represent the core of what The Ri stands for: the engagement of young people through experiment-driven exploration. The lectures are unique in engaging the audience in both the design and interpretation of experiments — an approach all too sadly neglected these days in the dash to meet the targets of a dense scientific curriculum. For the last 50 years, the Christmas Lectures have reached out to an ever-wider audience comprising a large majority of adults through the now well-known broadcast over the Christmas period. These broadcasts have been, for some time, a familiar part of the traditional landscape of the British Christmas holidays. As such, they empower the general public to appreciate not just cutting- edge scientific discoveries, but also the joy and excitement of ask- ing a question that can be tested empirically. Anyone who has watched these broadcasts will know how different they are from the standard scientific programmes: far from relying on extensive emphasis on outside broadcasting, the Christmas Lectures instead adopt a much more modest yet realistic approach, often using v B527-FM.qxd 10/17/2007 10:13 AM Page vi vi Preface everyday objects and situations familiar to young people. As the youngest ever Nobel Prize winner and Director of The Ri, Lawrence Bragg, remarked, “Never talk about science, show it to them”. If anything, this is the mission statement of The Royal Institution in general and the Christmas Lectures in particular. As Professor James shows in the forthcoming pages, this tradition has been seamless since Faraday’s time until the present day. I myself was privileged to give the 1994 series; I therefore feel partic- ularly familiar with the thrills and spills that inevitably occur. I can quite honestly claim that just before the beginning of the first lecture was one of the most frightening times of my life. Imagine standing in front of closed doors behind which waited some 400 children, sev- eral live animals, and five television cameras. As the monitor screen counted down the last minute, I finally understood the term “legs turning to jelly”. Anyone who has watched the Christmas Lectures will know that invariably so many things can go wrong — after all, this is real science. In my own experience, a cockerel did not crow when it was supposed to, but did give full voice offstage 20 minutes later during a completely different demonstration. However, it is the ability of the lecturer to improvise with appropriate explanations when the results are unexpected that gives adults and children alike a true insight into scientific methods. The Christmas Lectures then are unique and represent the very special agenda of The Royal Instruction: to diffuse science for the common purposes of life. In the spirit of Faraday, the blacksmith’s son who went on to discover electromagnetic induction, the Christmas Lectures are truly democratising and have never been needed as much as they are today. This anthology stands testament not just to the narrative of the science of the past, but also to the importance of this approach for the science of the future. Susan Greenfield Director of the Royal Institution Fullerian Professor of Physiology and Comparative Anatomy B527-FM.qxd 10/17/2007 10:13 AM Page vii Acknowledgements The idea for this anthology of Christmas Lectures at The Royal Institution arose out of a conversation that I had with Dr Sonia Ojo, acquisitions editor at Imperial College Press and formerly a col- league of mine at The Royal Institution, at the Imperial College launch of The Life and Scientific Legacy of George Porter. I am thus enormously grateful to Dr Ojo for passing on the idea to World Scientific Publishing, the partners of Imperial College Press. At World Scientific in Singapore, Ms Wanda Tan has been the most efficient of editors and I gratefully acknowledge all of her support. World Scientific and I wish to thank Professor Richard Gregory and Professor Ian Stewart for their permission to republish their lectures, as well as the Orion Publishing Group who originally published both lectures. We also thank The Royal Institution for permission to publish Figures 1 to 5 of the introduction, as well as, acting on behalf of the Bragg family, for permission to republish the lectures of William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg. Finally, I thank my colleague at The Royal Institution, Ms Jane Harrison, for scanning all of the images from all 11 lectures published here. Frank A. J. L. James vii B527-FM.qxd 10/17/2007 10:13 AM Page viii TThhiiss ppaaggee iinntteennttiioonnaallllyy lleefftt bbllaannkk B527-FM.qxd 10/17/2007 10:13 AM Page ix Contents Preface v Susan Greenfield Acknowledgements vii Introduction xi Frank A. J. L. James Biographical Notes on Lecturers xxvii The Correlation of the Physical Forces 1 Michael Faraday Carbon or Charcoal—Coal Gas—Respiration and Its Analogy to the Burning of a Candle—Conclusion 17 Michael Faraday The Forms of Water in Clouds and Rivers, Ice and Glaciers 35 John Tyndall Lessons in Electricity 61 John Tyndall Stars 75 Robert Stawell Ball ix
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