Some Anniversaries in 2025

 There are doubtless many more occasions to celebrate, but these caught the eye of the Trees...

350 years   Royal Observatory Founded (and Flamsteed as first Astronomer Royal)

            Cassini division discovered (by Cassini), in Saturn's rings.

250 years   Jane Austen's Birth

            JMW Turner's Birth

                     

200 years   Royal Institution Christmas Lectures Began

            First Passenger Train Ran

100 years   First TV transmission

On Size and the RI Christmas Lecture

This year's RI Christmas Lecture was given by Mark Miodownik, Head of the Materials Research Group in the Natural and Mathematical Sciences School at King's College London.  Appropriately approachable in suit and trainers and a slightly hesitant speaking style, he did rather well I thought.  His topic was 'Size Matters' and he covered a lot of ground.

For example, he discussed the old question of why small animals can survive long falls and large ones can't (using crash test pets).  He did this quite well - but I wish he'd mentioned J.B.S Haldane's famous 1928 essay (On Being the Right Size):

You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by the air is proportional to the surface of the moving object. Divide an animal's length, breadth, and height each by ten; its weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of the small animal is relatively ten times greater than the driving force.

OK, I suppose perhaps not quite right for his young audience - commendably brief but the Christmas Lecture requires more spectacle (the crash test pet dog did splash...). 

Anyway, Miodownik covered this, why larger animals are cumbersome (can't dance), the relative strengths of creatures (against there body weight), and so forth, before he moved on to strange materials and then to very large scale structures.  He gave three lectures (I seem to remember recent speakers giving four?  maybe that is a false memory).   The last lecture took us from how high a building might we be able to build one day, given the limitations of the Earth's surface as a base to start from, to the space elevator, by way of carbon nanotubes.  It ended with him on wires, high above his audience and a model of the earth, paying out model nanotube cable to get the elevator going.

There is a kind of convention whereby the Christmas Lecturer ends by exhorting the younger generation to discover new things and follow in the scientific and/or technological footsteps of their parents and predecessors... He did this bit especially well, I thought - moving from the moon landings of the 60s and 70s to the possibilities of the space elevator - if they can do it.

His delivery was hesitant, as I said, and there seemed to be a large number of strange diversions into different types of new material which at the time I thought didn't really aid his argument much, but in retrospect that was too critical of me.  The whole piece came together very well, and worked.  I ended up feeling quite inspired by the dangling man.

And it was back on the BBC where it belongs.

At the Royal Institution

Yesterday we (the boys and I) went to one of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. This year's lecture series is by Professor Sue Hartley. Called the 300 Million War, it is about the battle between the plants (who don't want to be eaten) and the animals (who want to eat them).

I first went to one of these talks back in the 70s - I must have been between 14 and 17; I can remember it was about heat and thermodynamics. (Actually, looking at the record it was probably George Porter on 'The Natural History of a Sunbeam' so that gives you an insight into just how poor my memory is). Then in 2003 I took the eldest to see Monica Grady (who I used to know at college), talking about geology and space (to put it very simplistically).

But actually the Christmas Lectures have been going for far longer than that. The first was in 1825; Michael Faraday gave many of the earlier ones himself. So allowing for the WWII years (when the lectures were cancelled), this year's lectures are something like the 180th in the series.

I was also interested in trying to meet up with an ex-colleague of mine who has recently become something very senior there. So we went early.

However, yesterday was also the day that the Guardian ran a full page article on the internal politics at the RI, its funding and the position of the Director, Susan Greenfield (actually Baroness Greenfield), who has been leading the organisation since 1998. So I guessed that he might be a just a little busy - and so it proved.

Well, we got there early and the events team did seem very busy, so we went to the cafe for drinks. I didn't recall this, nor the glass elevator and roof - it all seemed brand new; the Guardian article had highlighted the new building works, and from here they were both very obvious and very impressive - very well done indeed. While we were sitting there, gangs of teenagers were wandering around (in a nice way) waiting for the Lecture.

And then someone led a Shetland pony past us. We were surprised, to say the least, and several of the teenage girls nearby started cooing over it.

My ex-colleague did join us for 10 minutes, which was good of him, as he seemed to have had an incredibly busy day. He recommended the Faraday museum downstairs, and when we mentioned the pony he just replied laconically 'That means they were late.'

So anyway, he left us and we tried the Museum in the basement. It was small but excellent - very well done, and with absolutely unique content. Faraday's original lab, a display of the first Dewar flask, the first electrical transformer, Faraday's egg, and the TEN elements all discovered at the Royal Institution. Brilliant.

And then to the lecture, (in the original lecture theatre of course, also recently refurbished and looking very spick and span). This had the requisite number of explosions, displays, messy experiments, animals (as well as the pony there were aphids, a huge St Bernard dog and a two-toed sloth). and so forth. It was fun - and then we went home.

The RI is strongly, strongly recommended. I can't believe it is sensible of me only to go there on odd Christmasses. It is a one-of-a-kind organisation, and just wonderful.

You should go there too. Go at once.