A night spent gripping the edge of your chair

Subject: A night spent gripping the edge of your chair.

The essence of learning about theoretical physics for me was Jacob Bronowski a Polish - British mathematician and philosopher famous for his programs on television in the 1950s setting out for the layman an understanding of physics and the world around us. His series of programs entitled “The Assent of Man” were groundbreaking in their attempt to reveal to the non university trained individual the magnificence of physics and what it revealed about the universe. Much as Kenneth Clark in his epic series “Civilisation” in which he traced the birth of man’s evolution through his development as a species and his glories through architecture and art gave birth to an audience who were gripped by the story, so Bronowski laid bare the the improbability of science.

I have just been watching Jim Al-Khalili’s ‘The Secrets of Quantum Physics’, todays equivalent of those 1950s ground breaking programs and just as then I was gripped in a gosh moment. He leads you through the scientific journey from Aristotle’s concepts of geometrical space up to Einstein’s concept of curved time and space. Just as you think you’ve arrived at your destination there’s another station up ahead with an ever stranger world of the quantum and the mind boggling assumptions made by Heisenberg regarding the space around nothing and the creation of matter and antimatter which traces its history back to the pre Big Bang moment. Paul Dirac‘s linking of Einstein non quantum world with the Neils Bohr/Heisenberg quantum world, of expanding universes to electrons being measured for their wobble as they are peppered by this matter/antimatter. Magnificent and elaborate measurement of things which until now were only on the mathematicians theoretical drawing board, brought to life and measured to be what had been predicted.

The mentally crippling world of politics, the salacious world of sex, the inflammatory world of finance, worlds which confront us daily each made emotionally corrupt by the purity of theoretical science.