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I tell you, no matter how much you may like to go Swiss air,
one thing you can't call the experience

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is a ‘flight of fancy’:
Nothing so irrational. But, efficient? Yes.

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You know their boast: if you want to the right time,
you set your watch by one of their touchdowns.

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Still, what would you expect from a nation of clockmakers?

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Even the trams run on time.
They are a tick-tock lot, the Swiss.

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I mean, look around, life here is logical, orderly, efficient.

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They obey the law, because the discipline it imposes
on the community makes it organised enough

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to achieve one of the highest standards of living in the entire world.

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All you need here is money.

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The view they take here, though,
is, if you think about it, the epitome

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of what the modern scientific world we live in is supposed to be about.

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Cool, rational, common sense.

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With science to explain everything because
ultimately everything is knowable,

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there is nowhere to go but onwards and upwards.

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It is an attitude we inherited and nobody took
to it more enthusiastically than the Swiss.

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About 300 years ago. From Newton. You know?
That the universe, and everything in,

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it runs like a giant clock.
With God, the great timekeeper in the sky.

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It is 1801,

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and in Geneva a visiting Italian is, although he doesn't know it,

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about to trigger the destruction of the universe.
With a box he is taking to a party.

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Being a Swiss party of course, it is a hair-raisingly serious affair.

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Today’s shocking display, ho, ho:
all you ever wanted to know about electricity.

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All they know about electricity, of course, is ‘not much’.

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A mystery force that goes through
people who hold hands and makes sparks.

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Electricity also attracts some things and repels others
and apparently the way electrically charged things

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do attract and repel each other happens in straight
lines and depends on how far apart they are,

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just like Newton said everything should.

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Good old Newton, always right.

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Meanwhile, enter our Italian Giuseppe Voltaire
with his pal Brugnatelli,

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on their way to see Napoleon after a brief stopover
to galvanise Genevan society with this.

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Voltaire’s pile of copper and wet pasteboard disks that,
would you believe it, makes non-stop electricity,

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as long as you keep it damp.

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And the destruction of the universe?  The pile would spark that off.

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Voltaire’s pile caused sparks in more ways than one,

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because it immediately set the public
and the scientists off in that direction.

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With the public heading for the wonder technology
it has mistakenly taken science to be ever since.

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Like arcing for instance. The same year as that demo back in Geneva,

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Humphrey Davy in England was sparking current between two carbon rods,

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producing a brilliant white flash and turning
the world on to the electric light.

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Military gents started exploding mines remotely,

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and medical quacks gave shock treatment for everything from infertility to drowning.

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Voltaire’s pal, Brugnatelli explored the mysteries of electrolysis.

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Put the leads from a pile into a solution,
say, of salt, sodium chloride,

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and it splits into sodium metal and chlorine gas:
great technique for extracting metals,

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or in Brugnatelli's case who was coining it depositing
gold from a solution onto medallions.

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‘Electroplating’, that: turned out great
for the table setting business.

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Meanwhile, the scientists were going off the rails.

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Mysterious things were happening because,
although chemistry could be caused by electricity:

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electrolysis, it could also happen the other way round.

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A solution, like lead acid, could produce a current.

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So, was there some connection
between electricity and chemistry?

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Interesting train of thought, that.

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And it fitted the romantic ideas of the time
with social misfits like Byron and Shelley

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fetching up here at the Castle of Chillon to write second-rate poems about the

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lonely grandeur of the Alps and all that back-to-nature stuff,
because the philosophy behind their efforts

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was called “nature philosophy”.

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It had to do with everything in existence
being the product of two conflicting forces

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that resolve themselves into a higher unity.
After conflicting first, you understand.

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All very mystic stuff,

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but you can see how that kind of thinking would
leap at any new example of a force like electricity,

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to see if it would conflict with anything else around.

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And one thing those loony Romantics had noticed
was how very easy it was to get lost in these parts,

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as lightning caused your compass needle to go
haywire while you wandered lonely as a cloud,

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getting totally sodden in Alpine storms.
Speaking of which…

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That's better.

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Speaking of which, as I said, in 1820,
an immensely boring Dane called Oersted,

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during a lecture in Copenhagen, applied the basic
nature philosophy idea of conflicting forces

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and decided that if he forced the force, electricity,
by shoving it down a high resistance wire,

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the wire, with all the effort, would go incandescent.
Like lightning was.

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And, since lightning made compass needles go funny,

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he thought if he brought

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a needle close to his wire, something philosophically
meaningful should happen. Shouldn’t it?

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Sure enough, something did.
The compass needle went, so to speak, wild.

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And it did it even when separated from the wire by wood, water, glass, metal,

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anything friend Oersted could think of.

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And it did it all round the wire in a uniform, circular manner.

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Even though Newton said everything acted in straight lines.

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The electricity in the wire was obviously giving off
something strange that affected the magnetic needle.

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Electricity was setting up some kind of magnetic field.
Now there was only one minor awkwardness about that.

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It was supposed to be impossible. For a start, “what was the field?”
And for a finish, “how did it work?”

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And for a second finish,
“in what?”

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One year later another intense nature
philosophy-person called Faraday

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was trying to answer the questions Oersted had left in the air.

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An electric wire would generate a magnetic force
that actually made a floating magnet circle it.

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So Faraday reckoned the opposite ought to happen.
Sure enough, it did.

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Faraday got turned on by the thought that if an
electric current made a magnetic field,

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maybe a magnetic field would make an electric current.

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He set up a compass needle to detect the current if it was there.

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It wasn't.

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Except when he switched the magnetic field on and off.

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So it was a changing field that did it.

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Well, there was an easier way to put a changing magnetic field near a wire.

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Push a magnet in and out of a coil, so that was it,
just moving the magnet made surges of current in the wire.

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You could see the current, the needle swung.
But why had moving a magnet made electricity?

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Then he got it, when you moved the magnet, the wire cut through its magnetic force lines.

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In 1831, Faraday was cutting magnetic
force lines with a spinning copper disk

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and making electricity happen in the disk
as long as you cared to turn the handle.

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Well, before the public could begin to ponder
the philosophic implications of Faraday's

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deeply meaningful discoveries, here in the United States,
they had once again been hijacked by the glitter

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of technology.

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As assorted American blacksmiths, travelling dentists,
civil servants, and other such riff-raff

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dazzled the eye and numbed the brain

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with the latest mechanical marvels.

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Basically, this avalanche of electromagnetic gizmos,
seen here in model form, came in two types.

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This lot used the ability to switch on and off the magnetic effect of a current,

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to attract a piece of metal up and down, or, back and forth.

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Most of them linked the movement to a flywheel.

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And this one drove machine belts in a factory.
And so on.

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The other wonder machine in this electromagnetic
extravaganza used the other effect.

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The way a moving magnet will make current in a wire.
Here is the moving magnet:

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here is the power.

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This beautiful looking thing would one day lead to electricity generators.

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And these little whizzers, as you will already have guessed,
did pave the way to real electric motors.

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All good knockout stuff.

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But for sending the public right off on the wrong track
about science, in 1844, nothing equalled this magic sound.

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The morse key interrupted a current going down a wire
and made a magnet turn on and off at the other end.

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Morse code united the United States.

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Meanwhile, back in Cambridge, the study of how
electromagneticism actually worked

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seemed to be leading scientists right up the creek.

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You see, for 200 years, Newton's version of the universe
had explained absolutely everything

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According to him, the universe was made up of bits
of matter surrounded by empty space.

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And force interacted between the bits, like gravity.

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And the force was supposed to go in straight lines, you remember,

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and act instantaneously through empty space from one bit to another.

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Well, electricity wasn't doing any of that, the force lines were curved.

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It was in space, and not in the wire or the magnets

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and, as for going instantaneously through empty space,
was it empty?

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Not according to a guy called Young, who had looked at light,
and found that it acted like this.

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Like ripples. Two sets of ripples moving outwards, here they are.
Meet and interact like this, don't they?

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Some waves meet and boost each other, the light bands,
others cancel each other out, the dark bands.

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So, did light act like ripples?

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If you try it with light going through two holes and then meeting and interacting,

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you get the same effect.

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You see those light and dark bands? Interfering waves of light.

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Now, the reason Young's idea was dynamite was if that light did travel in waves,

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it wasn't instantaneous, it took time.
And, it had to be waves in something.

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He called the something ‘ether’.

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Out there, in here, everywhere in the universe,
invisible stuff, making waves.

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And maybe, also carrying electricity and magnetism.

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It would certainly give Faraday's lines of force a place to be,
but it would also blow Newton's idea of ‘empty space’

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right out window.

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So, the fellow who did that, in 1861, a Scottish Faraday fan
called Maxwell, here in Trinity College Cambridge,

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began with caution.

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First, he made himself a mental model of these mysterious ether forces

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and imagined them to act like fluids,
because you could measure what fluids did.

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A cross-section of what was in Maxwell's mind,
might have looked something like this.

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The idea, and it was pretty weird, was,

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tubes of invisible magnetic force,
surrounded by spinning cylinders of ether.

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The faster the ether spins, the more intense the magnetism.
Well, I said it was weird.

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Electricity?

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He made that, little balls of ether,
a current would be moving balls.

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And magnetism could move balls and make electricity or vice versa.

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Typically complicated bit of Victoriana.

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Now, the figures Maxwell got from
his mental model, told him that if,

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when the lines of force first came into existence, say, in a live wire,

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and then radiated out to take up position around,
they should radiate at a certain speed.

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Almost exactly the speed of light.

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Although he had no proof, Maxwell jumped in with both feet.

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“You will see,” he said, “electricity, magnetism and light
are all one wave, moving through the ether”.

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Goodbye Newton?  Well, nobody could test Maxwell's theory,

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so now the scientists were going that way.

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To a public whose knowledge of science was rising to zero,

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one man, more than any other, was to stamp the image of the tireless

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scientific genius at work for the betterment
of mankind on their consciousness for ever.

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Because he made sure of his PR.
Thomas A. Edison, inventor extraordinaire.

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In this laboratory here,

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he filed no less than 1039 patents. You are looking
at the world's first inventions factory.

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Well, more of a shrine really.
Henry Ford was so taken with Edison,

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that he moved this lot lock, stock and the tree outside,
all the way from New Jersey to this museum here, outside Detroit.

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All to the memory of a man who must have been absolutely insufferable.

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Edison used to say, “I can never pick something up
without want wanting to improve it”.

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Except he didn't. Fifteen loyal and very unknown
specialists worked very behind the scenes

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to obey his pleasant little rule of life.
“If there's a better way, find it”

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He, himself, worked to a set of rules: One, get the money first,
two, find the market, three,

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(only after one and two), produce the goods.

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He reckoned to turn out a minor invention every ten days
and something big every six months.

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Modest, no?  But, the stuff in this hallowed spot did
somewhat knock the world for six, it must be said,

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like, the phonograph.

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Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow,
and everywhere that Mary went,

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the lamb was sure to go

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The repeating telegraph.

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00:20:05,614 --> 00:20:07,785
The electric sewing machine.

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The electric pen.

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And, perhaps the most illuminating example of why the public
was led by the nose into taking technology to be science,

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the light bulb.

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Bingo!

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00:20:27,517 --> 00:20:29,883
Well it would have been bingo if you had never seen it before, wouldn't it?

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It took him two years and 6000 tries to
get the right filament inside that bulb.

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00:20:35,281 --> 00:20:39,936
Well, it took his loyal sidekicks two years and 6000 tries etc.

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00:20:42,556 --> 00:20:46,702
Hello?  I would like to call England please.
Another one of his inventions.

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The year after Edison lit up, an American living
in London was to show an amazing discovery

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00:21:11,875 --> 00:21:15,746
concerning electromagnetic force
to local scientific big-wigs.

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00:21:15,921 --> 00:21:22,062
This clockwork bit automatically breaks an
electric circuit for a split second, at regular intervals.

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00:21:22,590 --> 00:21:28,633
Several hundred yards away from the clockwork, out in the garden,
the American: a music professor called Hughes.

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00:21:34,129 --> 00:21:36,671
This is Hughes, and this is his discovery.

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When the circuit back in the house gets broken,

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you can hear a noise in a telephone receiver,
if it is attached to a battery via a loose contact

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00:21:51,084 --> 00:21:54,076
because, Hughes reckons, the loose contact is being zapped

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by waves of electromagnetic energy,
coming from the short circuiting spark indoors.

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00:21:58,926 --> 00:22:04,128
But, the waves aren’t coming through a wire, they are wireless waves, get it?

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00:22:04,715 --> 00:22:07,375
Well the bumbling British boffin doesn't.

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00:22:19,950 --> 00:22:21,632
There they are, at the far side of the lake, Sir

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00:22:21,769 --> 00:22:23,060
Yes, I see

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00:22:26,013 --> 00:22:32,427
Alas, for poor old Hughes, the demonstration was a flop.
All the credit went to a German, seven years later.

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00:22:32,721 --> 00:22:35,361
The English just couldn't believe what they were hearing.

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00:22:35,655 --> 00:22:40,270
Mysterious air waves travelling hundreds of yards. Harrumph!

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00:22:42,597 --> 00:22:43,380
Induction

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Well, the technology freaks really had a field day a bit later on,

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when the transmission range went up to 4000 miles
because of a fellow called Marconi

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who also found a way to use the mysterious waves, called radio.

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00:23:17,843 --> 00:23:22,008
The trouble was, now everybody was happily
making waves the question still remained

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“what were the waves travelling in?”
“What was the, so called, ‘ether’?”

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00:23:27,073 --> 00:23:30,359
And why couldn't anybody ever find it,
to answer that question?

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Well, in 1887, a couple of people here in America
decided to have a crack at finding out,

215
00:23:38,789 --> 00:23:42,094
by shooting light beams through the ether in different directions.

216
00:23:42,289 --> 00:23:45,633
Let me give you their reasoning: Suppose this boat I’m on is the Earth,

217
00:23:45,848 --> 00:23:49,055
travelling through the ether of space, say, at 5 miles an hour.

218
00:23:49,447 --> 00:23:55,001
If I shoot a light beam ahead at 6 miles an hour,
let's say the beam is that boat there,

219
00:23:56,350 --> 00:24:00,985
it will creep ahead and leave me behind at 1 mile an hour,
the difference in our speeds.

220
00:24:00,986 --> 00:24:03,606
So, it will take quite a while to get, say, half a mile ahead.

221
00:24:03,723 --> 00:24:08,710
At that point when it turns round, of course,
our combined speeds will bring us back together again fast.

222
00:24:11,135 --> 00:24:14,655
But, if at the same time I send another light beam, that boat,

223
00:24:14,831 --> 00:24:19,975
at the same speed as the other one, 6 miles an hour,
sideways to me, the same distance out and back,

224
00:24:20,190 --> 00:24:24,043
he will get back sooner.
Look. Go.

225
00:24:28,874 --> 00:24:35,210
See how the sideways beam is moving off quite fast
relative to me?  Getting to the half-mile point quickly?

226
00:24:35,602 --> 00:24:39,728
And the beam pushing out ahead is going
to take longer because, relative to me,

227
00:24:39,963 --> 00:24:42,310
it is only doing 1 mile an hour.

228
00:24:43,972 --> 00:24:46,221
The sideways beam is already turning back.

229
00:24:48,392 --> 00:24:52,871
Now, if real light beams did that,
it would be proof that the ether existed.

230
00:24:53,164 --> 00:24:56,762
And you could measure the ether through
what it was doing to the light beams.

231
00:24:58,288 --> 00:25:03,177
Those two Americans I was talking about,
Michelson and Morley, did this great experiment here,

232
00:25:03,178 --> 00:25:07,675
Cleveland, at the University. Do you remember Young
and the light waves and stuff and those

233
00:25:07,676 --> 00:25:11,138
interference patterns you get when light waves mix when they are out of phase?

234
00:25:11,548 --> 00:25:15,186
These light and dark bands, here?  This is the trick they used

235
00:25:15,499 --> 00:25:18,550
to see one light beam returning sooner than the other.

236
00:25:19,195 --> 00:25:20,701
Come on, I will show you.

237
00:25:27,330 --> 00:25:33,158
Okay, let's take it that this lecture hall and the Earth are
going through space, well they had better be,

238
00:25:33,334 --> 00:25:38,556
that way. So that is straight ahead.
Here is the light source.

239
00:25:39,162 --> 00:25:42,096
Send the beam out and split it with this half-mirror.

240
00:25:42,624 --> 00:25:45,929
One half of the beam goes that way,
you remember that is the straight-ahead direction,

241
00:25:46,242 --> 00:25:48,804
and the other half of the beam goes this way, out to the side.

242
00:25:49,390 --> 00:25:55,198
Now, you give the beams a nice long trip by bouncing
them back and forward between these mirrors for one beam,

243
00:25:55,589 --> 00:25:58,816
and these mirrors for another beam.
And when they have finished the trip,

244
00:25:59,090 --> 00:26:01,867
you recombine them here and bring them back out here.

245
00:26:03,939 --> 00:26:07,205
I will show you better with a laser beam.
And, better still, with some smoke.

246
00:26:07,929 --> 00:26:12,524
Now, since the straight ahead beam will be slowed down
more than the sideways beam,

247
00:26:12,896 --> 00:26:18,665
the two beams will recombine here out of phase.
With the straight ahead beam lagging behind, right?

248
00:26:19,467 --> 00:26:24,219
All mixing light beams make interference patterns.
So that's what you get to start with, here.

249
00:26:24,317 --> 00:26:28,032
I will show you,
on this card, see?

250
00:26:28,639 --> 00:26:31,240
Michelson and Morley reckoned that if the ether existed,

251
00:26:31,690 --> 00:26:36,110
this pattern should be altered when you change
the angle the beams were being shot through it.

252
00:26:36,793 --> 00:26:40,509
So, to do that, they rotated the entire experiment

253
00:26:40,822 --> 00:26:46,650
and took 16 readings on no less than 36 rotations.

254
00:26:51,031 --> 00:26:53,534
Just to be sure they were seeing what they were seeing.

255
00:26:53,906 --> 00:26:55,138
Which was:

256
00:26:56,370 --> 00:26:59,910
no change in the interference fringe, at all.

257
00:27:00,986 --> 00:27:07,224
And you know what that meant?
No shift, no ether. No ether, no anything!

258
00:27:15,643 --> 00:27:20,532
The Viennese genius who turned everything
upside down was called Ernst Mach.

259
00:27:39,405 --> 00:27:43,082
Mach turned everything upside down because that's what he spent his time doing,

260
00:27:43,180 --> 00:27:46,621
turning people upside down, or sideways, or round and round.

261
00:27:54,288 --> 00:27:59,021
By 1895, Mach had spent years investigating
what happened to peoples’ senses

262
00:27:59,022 --> 00:28:03,931
when they were put into every position he could conceive of.
He would blindfold them, for instance,

263
00:28:03,932 --> 00:28:09,661
and then tilt them in an environment that was also moving,
and test their sense of direction.

264
00:28:13,417 --> 00:28:17,289
Mach came up with some of the basic ideas of modern perceptual science.

265
00:28:17,524 --> 00:28:21,944
He was really trying to find out how much
of what you observed was affected by your senses.

266
00:28:22,022 --> 00:28:27,127
The way, for example, you could be in something
that was moving up or down, and yet feel as if you weren't.

267
00:28:27,514 --> 00:28:31,285
Mach became convinced that much of what you
sensed about the world was in your mind,

268
00:28:31,472 --> 00:28:34,445
and that everything you could ever say about reality was subjective,

269
00:28:34,668 --> 00:28:39,675
altered by conditions like temperature or sound,
acceleration, pressure, even mood.

270
00:28:40,081 --> 00:28:45,557
There was nothing out there that you could be certain of,
unless you were in direct contact with it.

271
00:28:49,953 --> 00:28:52,910
Were you going down here?
Or was Vienna going up?

272
00:29:05,598 --> 00:29:08,461
But it was how Mach used his work on perception,

273
00:29:08,601 --> 00:29:11,652
that made him such a big wheel among the scientific thinkers of the time.

274
00:29:11,965 --> 00:29:15,282
Because, he argued, that it showed all a scientist could be sure of,

275
00:29:15,563 --> 00:29:19,099
was what his own personal experiences,
five senses, showed him.

276
00:29:21,477 --> 00:29:26,406
Take movement for instance, forces on you
acting up or down or from side to side.

277
00:29:26,672 --> 00:29:29,988
You might invent some scientific law to explain those forces,

278
00:29:30,082 --> 00:29:32,930
but you should also remember that it was you that invented the law.

279
00:29:33,258 --> 00:29:38,124
For Mach, there was no reason why the rest of the cosmos
should be doing what your little bit was doing.

280
00:29:38,406 --> 00:29:42,615
So, science should only describe, not try to explain.

281
00:29:44,320 --> 00:29:48,591
And, even description is relative, I mean, am I moving,
or is the background moving?

282
00:29:49,014 --> 00:29:52,644
Or take the position of a star. It depends on where you see it from,

283
00:29:52,800 --> 00:29:57,353
which depends on the date and time,
which depends on the position of the Earth in solar orbit,

284
00:29:57,541 --> 00:30:00,498
in a solar system moving round and round at the edge of the galaxy.

285
00:30:00,592 --> 00:30:04,284
Which, itself, might be drifting away from some
other galaxy and so on and so on.

286
00:30:04,784 --> 00:30:08,210
So, say you have decided that I am moving
and the background is standing still.

287
00:30:08,617 --> 00:30:11,825
How do you know that the background isn't
moving relative to something else?  Hmm?

288
00:30:17,269 --> 00:30:20,648
That's why there was no point in playing around
with light beams to try and find some

289
00:30:20,649 --> 00:30:22,510
theoretical universal absolute.

290
00:30:22,604 --> 00:30:27,079
There were no absolutes you could ever know anything about.
“They couldn't find the ether,” said Mach,

291
00:30:27,189 --> 00:30:31,162
“because there was no ether to find”.
Well, you can guess what that did to Newton.

292
00:30:35,136 --> 00:30:38,813
Quite. And there was worse to come,
from people working on these things.

293
00:30:38,814 --> 00:30:42,552
Well, these things. Cathode ray tubes.

294
00:30:57,785 --> 00:31:01,775
Another mystery force, cathode rays. Anything they hit, glowed.

295
00:31:01,900 --> 00:31:06,359
And you could make the glow move with a magnet.
Electricity was affected by magnetism.

296
00:31:06,562 --> 00:31:09,628
So, were the cathode rays electric?

297
00:31:12,491 --> 00:31:18,092
Well, if you took some cathode rays and used a magnet
to aim them at two little gold foil leaves,

298
00:31:18,202 --> 00:31:22,144
the leaves separated, which they only
did if they were getting electrified.

299
00:31:22,911 --> 00:31:29,263
A positively charged rod would cancel that effect, so that meant
that the cathode rays were making negative electricity.

300
00:31:30,024 --> 00:31:35,171
In 1897, an Englishman called Thompson,
who thought cathode rays were really particles,

301
00:31:35,312 --> 00:31:37,455
worked out a technique for weighing them.

302
00:31:38,932 --> 00:31:42,687
He changed the direction of the stream
of particles with a magnetic field,

303
00:31:42,843 --> 00:31:46,551
and then saw how much of an electrical field
was needed to straighten it out again.

304
00:31:52,794 --> 00:31:57,472
Sure enough, they turned out to be particles
of negative electricity, we call them ‘electrons’,

305
00:31:57,706 --> 00:32:00,804
that were 1000 times smaller than the smallest atom.

306
00:32:01,243 --> 00:32:05,921
Thompson reckoned he had the basic unit of electricity,
there in his measuring tube.

307
00:32:06,468 --> 00:32:08,298
But the big shock was this:

308
00:32:08,955 --> 00:32:12,444
ultra violet light waves would knock negative electrons out of metal.

309
00:32:12,773 --> 00:32:14,963
Look:  the gold leaves collapse.

310
00:32:23,740 --> 00:32:25,789
By the turn of the century,

311
00:32:26,071 --> 00:32:31,124
what with waves of the mysterious force
rippling out through ether nobody could find,

312
00:32:31,828 --> 00:32:36,741
and incredible shrinking Irish instruments
and Mach saying it was all meaningless anyway,

313
00:32:36,992 --> 00:32:41,325
and Thompson's light rays knocking subatomic
particles account of metal, well,

314
00:32:41,591 --> 00:32:44,861
poor old Newton's universe had more
holes in it than this bit of Gruyere.

315
00:32:45,081 --> 00:32:49,696
And the physicists were, to put it mildly,
cheesed-off with the whole affair.

316
00:32:52,293 --> 00:32:58,192
Until, fittingly, a Swiss government bureaucrat,
called Einstein, simply invented a new universe.

317
00:32:58,536 --> 00:33:04,591
And the reason I am telling you this onboard a Concorde
flight is because Concorde goes at over Mach two.

318
00:33:04,716 --> 00:33:07,877
That's the Mach you know and who gave Einstein the idea.

319
00:33:08,283 --> 00:33:11,850
Two stands for twice the speed of sound, which Mach identified.

320
00:33:12,101 --> 00:33:15,527
Which means that I'm going at quite a lick,
which makes my point for me.

321
00:33:15,965 --> 00:33:21,816
Because, Einstein's cosmic rewrite of the laws of nature
just said that everything in the universe was relative.

322
00:33:22,051 --> 00:33:26,697
And everything you observed about it, depended
on the frame of reference you were in at the time.

323
00:33:26,885 --> 00:33:30,906
Like this Concorde cabin where I am standing still,
dropping my pen in comfort.

324
00:33:31,078 --> 00:33:34,817
In this cabin. I am not going at 1400 miles an hour, am I?

325
00:33:40,465 --> 00:33:43,594
And everything works like that,
conditioned by its frame of reference.

326
00:33:44,125 --> 00:33:47,192
All the electrics in all the instruments on board this plane

327
00:33:48,068 --> 00:33:53,043
obey the same laws they would if they were standing still.
Because, inside this frame, like me,

328
00:33:53,168 --> 00:33:57,706
they are not going at Mach two. And all the laws
of nature behave in the same way.

329
00:34:05,279 --> 00:34:10,661
This beam of light is going out in all directions at 186,000 miles second

330
00:34:10,879 --> 00:34:16,417
and being on Concorde makes no difference to
its speed forwards, backwards, or sideways.

331
00:34:16,698 --> 00:34:20,985
That's why the way the Earth was moving made no
difference to the Michelson and Morley light beams.

332
00:34:21,173 --> 00:34:26,696
It never could have, you could never measure the speed
of light except relative to your frame of reference.

333
00:34:26,914 --> 00:34:30,763
And like Mach said, you can never measure it
against anything outside your frame of reference

334
00:34:30,764 --> 00:34:33,986
because you would never know what it was doing,
relative to you.

335
00:34:34,377 --> 00:34:39,133
There was no absolute, because you could never know anything was absolute.

336
00:34:41,589 --> 00:34:44,327
So, that sorted out the light beam and the ether business.

337
00:34:44,484 --> 00:34:51,117
As for Thompson's light knocking electrons out of metal,
well Einstein said, “obviously, light came in bits,

338
00:34:51,243 --> 00:34:56,281
and knocked bits out of the metal. And the more
intense the light, the more bits it knocked out.

339
00:34:57,063 --> 00:35:01,553
However, this moving moment in the study
of light went almost entirely unnoticed

340
00:35:01,741 --> 00:35:06,529
in the light of another moving moment in the study of light.

341
00:35:06,576 --> 00:35:11,536
The movies. Another great example of the triumph of technology.

342
00:35:19,921 --> 00:35:24,677
It was probably the movies, above all, that convinced
the millions that, in this new 20th-century,

343
00:35:25,006 --> 00:35:29,465
fortune and success would come only to
the kind of fellow who kept up with science.

344
00:35:50,383 --> 00:35:53,496
The modern hero would be the man who could change with the times.

345
00:35:53,778 --> 00:35:57,470
Taking advantage of the latest technology
was going to be the way to get ahead.

346
00:36:18,045 --> 00:36:22,003
The movies showed that, without science, life was no fun at all.

347
00:36:27,574 --> 00:36:32,330
The music, of course, wasn't really there. It still had to be
played by somebody in the movie theatre,

348
00:36:32,361 --> 00:36:33,597
watching the film.

349
00:36:39,998 --> 00:36:45,849
Until somebody used the light going through the film
to hit metal, to produce electrons, to make electricity

350
00:36:46,178 --> 00:36:47,195
for a loudspeaker.

351
00:36:47,523 --> 00:36:52,216
And the public's love of technology
really took off. With the talkies.

352
00:36:54,547 --> 00:36:57,660
Georgie Porgy is a guy who is very bashful and so shy.

353
00:36:57,661 --> 00:37:00,351
The ladies prize him, they idolize him.

354
00:37:01,166 --> 00:37:04,498
Let's not knock it. I would be out of work without it.

355
00:37:04,593 --> 00:37:09,380
But, it did all ignore the awful implications
of what Einstein had said.

356
00:37:13,557 --> 00:37:16,686
If the more intense the light was,
the more electrons is knocked out of the wall,

357
00:37:16,999 --> 00:37:21,019
that sounded as if light wasn't a wave at all,
more like a stream of particles.

358
00:37:21,270 --> 00:37:24,806
Einstein said “sure,” and called them photons.

359
00:37:25,166 --> 00:37:30,611
That's how something like this works. When I remove the card,
the stream of light particles can hit a metal target.

360
00:37:31,674 --> 00:37:36,806
That gives off electrons, that makes electricity,
and that closes the door.

361
00:37:41,390 --> 00:37:46,194
Well, if light wasn't a wave, that blew the
last 100 years’ work right away, didn't it?

362
00:37:46,725 --> 00:37:50,762
But then, what about Young?
And the way light interfered with itself

363
00:37:50,763 --> 00:37:54,704
to produce those light and dark ripples
the way only waves can, what about that?

364
00:37:55,549 --> 00:37:58,381
In 1923, the same year as that movie you saw.

365
00:37:58,615 --> 00:38:03,262
A French man called de Brolie muddied the waters
by coming at it the other way round.

366
00:38:03,513 --> 00:38:07,361
If waves could be particles, could particles be waves?
Because if they could,

367
00:38:07,533 --> 00:38:09,489
they would make patterns like waves, wouldn’t they?

368
00:38:10,241 --> 00:38:14,841
Now this was getting out of hand. A wave is a wave,
and a particle is a particle.

369
00:38:15,060 --> 00:38:20,551
Right?  Wrong. And in 1927,
an accident proved it.

370
00:38:22,225 --> 00:38:27,310
Two Americans called Davison and Germer, were
quietly shooting electrons from an electron gun

371
00:38:27,513 --> 00:38:30,564
at a nickel target to see how the electrons bounced off,

372
00:38:30,892 --> 00:38:35,210
when the vacuum tube in which their whole
gizmo worked, cracked. Disaster.

373
00:38:35,774 --> 00:38:40,405
The air coming in had contaminated the target.
Having heated it up, and so on, to clean it,

374
00:38:40,656 --> 00:38:46,257
back to work. Only this time, when they moved their little
electron collector around the target to catch the electrons,

375
00:38:46,539 --> 00:38:52,046
no electrons. Then lots. Then none.
Then lots. And so on.

376
00:38:52,484 --> 00:38:58,304
Big investigation: turned out, the reheat on the target
had produced big crystals on its surface.

377
00:38:58,445 --> 00:39:03,091
Now, in crystals, atoms are neatly spaced like that.

378
00:39:03,294 --> 00:39:10,413
So now the electrons were coming in and
bouncing off, but in a series, like that.

379
00:39:10,719 --> 00:39:14,771
Now, just supposing those electrons were waves,
they would do this, would they?

380
00:39:15,929 --> 00:39:20,701
And those waves would interact like waves do, building up or cancelling out,

381
00:39:20,747 --> 00:39:29,853
so you would get lots, none, lots, none, lots, none.
Interference ripples. Don't believe me?

382
00:39:32,215 --> 00:39:37,347
Modern equipment, vacuum tube inside
electron gun and target, the electrons scatter out here.

383
00:39:37,863 --> 00:39:38,927
I will fire the gun.

384
00:39:42,839 --> 00:39:49,019
See?  Interference ripples.
Particles are waves.

385
00:39:51,882 --> 00:39:55,152
Now, if you are getting a bit worried about
how things could be two things at once,

386
00:39:55,527 --> 00:40:00,127
hold on to your subatomic hat, because
the bottom is about to drop out of everything.

387
00:40:00,502 --> 00:40:03,084
I will go slow because I won't understand it if I don't.

388
00:40:03,850 --> 00:40:09,013
In 1927, a fellow called Heisenberg decided to
take a look at what these particle electrons,

389
00:40:09,014 --> 00:40:11,391
and the waves they seemed to go with, were up to.

390
00:40:11,673 --> 00:40:16,116
And he announced that you could either say where an electron was,

391
00:40:16,179 --> 00:40:20,732
by examining an individual intense wave crest
(the electron would be in there somewhere)

392
00:40:20,920 --> 00:40:26,192
or how fast it was going, by looking at a whole group
of waves moving, getting the general speed,

393
00:40:26,472 --> 00:40:28,825
but then you wouldn't know which wave crest had the electron.

394
00:40:29,245 --> 00:40:32,630
So, position or speed, but not both.

395
00:40:34,252 --> 00:40:37,987
And worse, to look, you had to shine a light to see, no?

396
00:40:38,267 --> 00:40:41,331
And the light particles would hit the electrons.

397
00:40:41,701 --> 00:40:46,247
So you could never be sure that the electrons
were where they were, doing what they were doing,

398
00:40:46,378 --> 00:40:49,802
naturally or because you had hit them, get it?

399
00:40:51,164 --> 00:40:55,550
Heisenberg called this drain down which
everything went, ‘The Uncertainty Principle’.

400
00:40:56,010 --> 00:40:58,853
“Now we know,” he said, “that we shall never know”.

401
00:40:59,373 --> 00:41:02,718
He said that because you can't know if it's a particle or a wave.

402
00:41:03,079 --> 00:41:07,465
There is nothing at the fundamental level of existence that you can see as it is,

403
00:41:07,639 --> 00:41:11,031
because in seeing it, you do something to it.

404
00:41:11,182 --> 00:41:16,201
There is no true basic reality to find.
Beyond the one you, yourself, make

405
00:41:16,476 --> 00:41:23,147
by looking, if there is any reality at all.
And, in that case, which way is up, for God’s sake?

406
00:41:39,243 --> 00:41:42,448
Here at the high energy physics laboratory outside Geneva,

407
00:41:42,498 --> 00:41:47,342
for scientists, the truth is you can only talk about
the universe in terms of probabilities,

408
00:41:47,505 --> 00:41:51,009
you can never, by definition, be certain about it.

409
00:42:00,309 --> 00:42:05,128
You see what that implies?  The comfortable
certainty science is supposed to provide,

410
00:42:05,278 --> 00:42:09,596
isn't there anymore. But we ignore that fact,
we only see the technology.

411
00:42:10,022 --> 00:42:13,865
The electron that caused all the trouble, makes a digital watch work

412
00:42:14,479 --> 00:42:17,220
and all that electronics, and that is good enough.

413
00:42:17,820 --> 00:42:22,164
As far as we are concerned, the world is still the same
as it was at the beginning of this programme.

414
00:42:22,365 --> 00:42:28,686
Newton's world. When there was a true reality,
final certainty, order, with everything knowable,

415
00:42:29,337 --> 00:42:35,307
a Swiss clockwork type world. But as you have seen,
in science, that world is long gone.

416
00:42:36,934 --> 00:42:42,278
We talk about living with uncertainty but it is
this kind of uncertainty. War, crime, disaster famine:

417
00:42:42,479 --> 00:42:44,883
uncertainty about how tomorrow will turn out.

418
00:42:46,435 --> 00:42:49,601
But, in some form or other, it will turn out.

419
00:42:56,861 --> 00:43:00,891
So, is there any direction to our journey into knowledge?

420
00:43:01,404 --> 00:43:07,437
Or do we make up the route as we go along?
And if that is the case, what is knowledge?

421
00:43:08,501 --> 00:43:13,332
The next, and final, programme will see where that question leads.