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

401 Pages·2007·7.03 MB·English

by  Frank James

at the Royal Institution
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at the Royal Institution
Editor
Frank A J L James
The Royal Institution of Great Britain, London
World Scientific
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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,
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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)
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Email: [email protected]
Printed in Singapore.
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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
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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
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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
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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