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Boeing Announces Space-Tourism Business Boeing’s move could bolster the Obama administration’s efforts to point NASA’s focus more to commercial space. feeds.nytimes.com |
Ancient Italian Town Has Wind at Its Back Faced with high electricity rates, small communities across Italy are making renewable energy. feeds.nytimes.com |
Green: Our Growing Ecological Footprint From greenhouse gas emissions to overgrazing to overfishing, humanity risks bankrupting the global environment, a biennial report states. feeds.nytimes.com |
Sue Arnold's audiobook choice: science books - review The appliance of scienceBefore the Fall-out: Marie Curie to Hiroshima, by Diana Preston, read by Michael Tudor Barnes (17½hrs unabridged, Soundings, £33.99)This is my kind of science – short on mathematical formulae, long on the lives and personalities of the scientists, mainly Nobel prize-winning physicists, whose collective research into nuclear fission culminated in the bomb that finally brought the second world war to an end. When Marie Curie won the Nobel prize in 1903, theoretical physics was in its infancy. The 1910 Encyclopaedia Britannica had 50 pages on chemistry and nothing on physics. Thirty years on, with plans for the first atomic bomb on the drawing board at Los Alamos, physicists – theoretical, experimental, molecular, particle, etc – had become the scientific elite. "All science is either physics or stamp-collecting," reckoned Ernest Rutherford. It was also a strictly male preserve, making Curie's achievement the more remarkable. One professor banned women from his laboratory because they were dangerous – the bunsen burners might set fire to their hair. When Lise Meitner, whom Einstein called the German Marie Curie, delivered her inaugural university lecture in 1922 on the significance of radioactivity for cosmic processes, it was reported in the academic press as a talk about the significance of radioactivity for cosmetic processes.Up to 1930 science was an international fraternity whose members shared their research but, as increasing numbers of Jewish refugees, including many leading scientists, fled the Nazi persecution, the picture changed. Politics and ethics had become part of the equation. You're always aware of the story's inevitable tragic end, but mercifully there is light relief: Polish refugee Joseph Rotblat, for instance, whose picture of England was based on PG Wodehouse, being totally bewildered by the slums he passed en route to his new lecturing job at Liverpool University in 1939. Everyone knows about Werner Heisenberg meeting Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, but how many know that, when Bohr fled from Nazi-occupied Denmark to Sweden, he persuaded King Gustav to call for a Dunkirk-style evacuation of 6,000 Jews from Denmark? Or that the 30 drums of heavy water smuggled by Marie Curie's daughter Irene from Paris in 1941 after the fall of France were stored first in Wandsworth prison and then in Windsor Castle? This is definitely not textbook science.Why Does E=mc2? And Why Should We Care?, by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, read by Jeff Forshaw (7hrs unabridged, Whole Story Audio, £17.99)If I'd had a science teacher who sounded as patient and friendly as Jeff Forshaw, I might have scraped through O-level biology. This is the book for everyone who has never understood why astronauts returning from Mars would discover that they're 20 years younger than when they set out. Or is it 100 years older? I promise I got it when they explained about energy being equal to mass times the speed of light squared. All you have to do is imagine a man sitting on a moving train beside a clock made of two mirrors placed 1m apart, between which a light beam bounces, taking 6.67 nanoseconds per round trip, if you calculate the speed of light at 299,792,458 metres per second, or 670,000,000 mph in old money. As the train goes through the station (it's a fast train), a man on the platform glances up at the clock only to discover that the light beam . . . It's all to do with relativity, of course. That the speed of light is absolute makes it a tad tricky, but Einstein sorted it and so will you when you've listened to this. How long you'll remember it is something else, but it's well worth the ride.Albert Einstein: Historic Recordings 1930-47 (British Library, 68mins, £9.95)The man himself – you have to hear him. If Moses had been a German schoolteacher, I bet he'd have sounded like this.AudiobooksScience and natureAlbert EinsteinSue Arnoldguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |