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These Lectures will trace a hundred years of dicovery and invention,
culminating with a look into the Crystal Ball towards the next century.
The developing story begins in 1813, when the Royal Institution lecturer
inhabits a world ignorant of radioactivity, electrons and the working
atoms, knowing nothing of how stars shine, nor of galaxies, let alone
that they are rushing outward from a primeval Big Bang. Even so,
scientist were confident that they were on the brink of describing all
basic phenomena. Fundamental discoveries at the turn of the century
changed all that. Hints that "all was not well" turned out to be true
and revolutionary - rather than merely requiring tinkering with a few
ideas. A century later, in 1993, one hears talk of "Theory of Everything" and there is debate as to whether we can "know the mind of God". Yet even now there are hints that "all is not well". These lectures will bring us to the current frontier and help us learn from the experiences of the past century of discovery and controversy. The theme of these lectures is to show hpw discoveries of natural phenomena provide new tools that, in turn, open up new areas of research leading to further insights, innovations and technologies. Such developments feed back, creating new opportunities which often are far removed form the original discovery. The net result is that we are continually extending and deepening our experiences of Nature beyond those accessible to our five senses. Our five senses reveal the beauty of the everyday world, enabling us to look out to the nearbey stars, to focus on objects as samll as the width of a human hair and to react to events as brief as 1/25th of a second. Many other animals have sharper senses than ours but our ingenuity and inventiveness have allowed us to extendour senses with telescopes, microscopes and other sophisticated tools. Thus is it our "sixth sense" that expands our watch on the universe , reveal images deep within our own individual atoms and discovers Nature at work in timescales of less than a microsecond. Telescopes on sattelites high above the atmosphere capture light that was born when the galaxies first formed. Experiments in high energy particles accelerators on Earth teach us how to decode these messages that reveal our origins in those messages we are looking back almost at the Big Bang. At the other extreme we can photograph and display the entire life of a single subatomic particle lasting a mere thousand millionth of a second - an essential part of Nature's scheme but hidden from our five senses. As hieroglyphics from CERN begin to reveal the story of creation, not only can we see how the stuff of our present Universe was formed, we also find clues to its possible fate. |
