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By Hamish Johnston
On Thursday mornings I drop my children off at school and walk to work listening to the BBC Radio 4 programme “In Our Time”, presented by Baron Bragg of Wigton — or Melvyn as he likes to be known.
Bragg is one of those rare intellectuals who seems completely at ease as a broadcaster and every week he somehow manages to get a panel of three academics into a lively discussion about just about anything from “St Hilda – the life and times of the Abbess of Whitby”, to “The Multiverse – the universe is not enough”.
This morning the subject was “The Physics of Time”, and the panel was Jim Al-Khalili, Professor of Theoretical Physics and Chair in the Public Engagement in Science at the University of Surrey; Monica Grady, Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences at the Open University; and Ian Stewart, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick.
You can listen to the programme here and you can find an archive of all programmes here.
This programme is usually interesting but I remember hearing one or two factual errors, such as Monica Grady (I think) saying that light from the sun took 8 seconds to reach the earth (it takes close to 8 minutes), which for me removes much of the value of it for informing the general public and makes me wonder how much else that I hear on this programme (on subjects I don’t know about) is incorrect.
In September’s Science and Public Affairs (published by the British Association) Bragg’s written a nice article about the sometimes rocky relationship between ‘science’ and ‘culture’. He talks about how In Our Time aims to return science + scientists to the same spectrum as art + artists.
If interested, it’s the cover story at:
http://www.the-ba.net/NR/rdonlyres/BDAB4DDA-DB1A-4DAA-AFD2-35920D29D16D/0/SPA_Sept.pdf