Valladare$': Weird science

Weird science

"Professor in special electric mask surrounded by school children, 1930"

Demonstrating the electrification of hair in 1930

Explosions. Bunsen burners. Adoring crowds in evening dress - or school uniform - eyes wide with wonderment. Can we recapture the excitement of science, asks historian Lisa Jardine. Inside many of our historic buildings, spaces survive which seem to hold particularly strong memories of events that took place within them. One of my favorites is the Faraday Lecture Theatre at the Royal Institution in London, one of our oldest establishments dedicated to the promotion of science. "Faraday Lecture Theatre" The refurbished lecture hall. Since shortly after the Institution's foundation in 1799, the world's greatest scientific communicators have stood in front of its baize-covered desk, at the centre of the steeply-raked 300-seat theatre to enthral the general public with their ideas and experiments. What a contrast with today. Last week,Ofsted reported that at both primary and secondary school level, science lessons were dull and there were not enough practical experiments. Teachers no longer entertain classes with explosions of powdered magnesium; gone are the bunsen burners for heating noxious mixtures in fragile test-tubes. Science is a fascinating and exciting subject," said Chief inspector Christine Gilbert. "Yet for many pupils, it lacks appeal because of the way that it is taught."Crowd pleasers. It was in the Faraday Lecture Theatre, in June 1903, that French scientist Pierre Curie and his Polish wife Marie Sklodowska Curie demonstrated the remarkable properties of their newly discovered element, radium. The Curies in the lab"Marie and Pierre in 1903. The occasion was one of the Institution's celebrated Friday evening discourses, a fashionable event for which those who attended were expected to don full evening dress, and which caused such congestion on Piccadilly that Albemarle Street, on which the Institution stands, had to be designated the first one-way street in London, to cope with the crush of carriages. The Curies were the scientific stars of the moment: everyone in London wanted to meet them. In the packed theatre, eminent scientists rubbed shoulders with leading members of London's high society, craning their necks in anticipation. Actually, it was Pierre Curie who conducted the radium experiments, since propriety and the rules of the Royal Institution prevented a woman from participating in a Royal Institution discourse. Most of those present, however, understood that this research had been carried out by a perfectly-matched scientific partnership, whose complementary abilities were clearly evidenced by their many published papers. By 1903, the Curies had produced an impressive sequence of joint papers on the two new radioactive elements they had discovered - polonium and radium - but both Marie and Pierre had also published key results on both the physics and chemistry of radioactivity independently. At the end of that year, indeed, they were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, "in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel". Own lab rat As a sign of the high regard in which she was held, Marie sat in the front row of the Faraday lecture theatre, alongside the most senior scientist present at that occasion, the former President of the Royal Society and towering figure in the investigation of electricity, Lord Kelvin. "Lisa Jardine" The lecture theatre had to be decontaminated, because of the dangerous level of radiatio In a partially darkened room, Pierre showed how radium emitted a ghostly light. He placed a piece of radium on a photographic plate which had been wrapped in thick layers of newspaper. Removing the paper, Pierre Curie revealed how the clear image of the radium had been transmitted through its wrappings, on to the plate.Finally, rolling up his sleeve, he showed a livid red area of damaged skin, where he had bound a sample of radium wrapped in a thin layer of rubber to his arm for 10 hours. Marie, he explained, had suggested that this property of burning the skin might make radium a useful treatment for cancer.As he moved his precious radium samples around, Pierre Curie's fingers fumbled badly. So incapacitated was he by his badly scarred hands and a general feeling of fatigue and debilitation, that he had not been able to tie his dress tie before the lecture. Neither he nor his wife was aware of the lasting damage being caused to their health by repeated handling of radioactive substances. Neither took any precautions when working at close quarters with radium.So in this case, one of the lasting memories I began with was a real one: years after Pierre's Royal Institution performance, it was found that the effects of his mishandling of his material still lingered on the premises - the lecture theatre had to be decontaminated, because of the dangerous level of radiation.It is hard today to decide which attitude on that celebrated occasion was the more blinkered: the absolute inability publicly to recognise a great woman's scientific achievement, or the assembled company's unreserved celebration of radioactivity. For now, I'll stay with the former."Bunsen burner"Tools of the tradeAmong those in the admiring audience at the Curies' lecture was another distinguished woman scientist, the physicist Hertha Ayrton. A year earlier she had been the first woman proposed for candidature as a Fellow of the even more prestigious Royal Society, for her "long series of experiments on direct [electrical] current arc, leading to many new facts and explanations".After a flurry of activity on the part of the existing Fellows it was agreed that Hertha Ayrton's candidature was ineligible, because she was a married woman. Even had she been single, it was decided that "the Statutes of the Society are framed on the footing that only men can be elected, and we think that no woman can be properly elected as a Fellow, without some alteration in the Statutes".Hertha Ayrton and Marie Curie - encouraged by the statutes of the Royal Institution to attend its lectures, but not allowed to take part in its serious business - became close friends. When, in 1909, the Westminster Gazette attributed the discovery of radium to Pierre Curie, it was Hertha who protested in a letter to the editor."Errors are notoriously hard to kill," she wrote. "But an error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat."But let's go back, to all that messing about with dangerous substances - substances we now know could kill - for the entertainment of the public in the Faraday lecture theatre in the 1900s.Pupils want practical science lessons to make the subject more funFrom the beginning, the Royal Institution was a place where science was both useful and fun. Its mission was declared to be: "Teaching the application of Science to the common Purposes of Life". And the public flocked to its scientific demonstrations throughout the 19th Century.So why are so many people today happy to admit that they find science difficult and dull? Some of the blame may be laid at the doors of our education system, as the Ofsted report suggested. But there must be more to the flight from science.People who would never admit to a lack of understanding of art or literature are happy to confess to total incomprehension where science is concerned. Yet our lives today depend as never before upon the outcomes of innovative science and technology. Without medical science, our lives would be shorter and more painful; without physics and chemistry, domestic conveniences that ease our everyday lives could never have been developed.If, however, the reason for the general public's disenchantment with science is to be laid at the door of scientists unable or unprepared to communicate their subject so as to engage the interest and enthusiasm of non-specialists, then the Royal Institution is continuing a long tradition actively to counter such a trend.You should be able to say 'where shall we go tonight? I know, let's go to the Royal Institution'Susan GreenfieldIt has just reopened after a major refurbishment of its original Albemarle Street premises by architect Terry Farrell - a refurbishment which thankfully leaves the Faraday lecture theatre improved but fundamentally unchanged, while transforming the rest of the buildings into an Aladdin's cave of enticing spaces fostering science education and communication.In her address to the distinguished audience of scientists and friends gathered at the official reopening, director Susan Greenfield expressed the hope that evenings at the RI might once again be considered as thrilling a prospect as going to the cinema or out to dinner. "You should be able to say 'where shall we go tonight? I know, let's go to the Royal Institution'."And if you do decide to attend one of those captivating, cutting-edge Friday evening discourses, you can still enjoy arriving in evening dress, as you might for a night out at the opera. That is no longer mandatory - but it means that memories of the glory days of science still seem to hover over the Faraday lecture theatre.

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