New Thinking: From life on Mars to space junk
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 9 March 2021
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mars is the focus of current space exploration but how far back does this interest go? Dr Joshua Nall tells Seb Falk about the Mars globe held at the Whipple Science Museum in Cambridge. Hannah Smithson explains her research into the way we see colour and explains the different perceptions of that blue/black/gold/white dress. Timothy Peacock has been studying the fears about Skylab falling to earth, looking at government files and the media reporting of the 1979 re-entry and distintegration of the first United States space station.
Dr Joshua Nall is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker and the Curator of Modern Sciences at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in Cambridge. His book News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860–1910 was awarded the Philip Pauly Prize by the History of Science society. Hannah Smithson is Professor of Experimental Psychology and a fellow of Pembroke College at the University of Oxford Dr Timothy Peacock is a lecturer in Modern History at the University of Glasgow and co-director of the University's Games and Gaming Lab (GGLab)
Seb Falk is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and Arts and Humanities Research Council to put research on the radio. He is the author of the book The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science. You can hear more from him in a Free Thinking episode called Ancient Wisdom and Remote Living https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000q3by and his short feature for BBC Radio 3 about why we shouldn't compare Covid to the Black Death https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000nkzr
You can find a playlist exploring New Research on the Free Thinking website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90
This episode was made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI.
Producer: Torquil MacLeod
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music |
| 0:27.0 | when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.3 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:37.1 | Hello, I'm Seb Fork, a historian of science at the University of Cambridge. |
| 0:42.1 | My guest today, on this episode of New Thinking, are all academics whose work crosses scientific |
| 0:47.4 | boundaries. |
| 0:48.7 | As NASA's Perseverance Rover begins its exploration of the red planet, searching for signs |
| 0:53.2 | of microbes, we're |
| 0:54.4 | looking at the history of such searches. |
| 0:57.2 | We'll ask how the possibility of life on Mars tantalized Victorian astronomers and captured |
| 1:02.2 | 19th century imaginations. |
| 1:04.9 | We'll also be turning our attention to an earlier NASA project. |
| 1:07.8 | To begin with, when I switch to the two positions called H-alpha, we can see sunspots, we can |
| 1:15.6 | see network, we can see filaments, all of these things on the side in great detail. |
| 1:21.6 | Observations of the Sun made from Skylab in 1973. We'll be hearing about the space station's rise and its rather alarming fall. |
| 1:30.3 | And whether we're gazing out into space or simply browsing round the room we're sitting in, |
| 1:34.3 | how do our brains process different wavelengths of light and make sense of them as colours? |
| 1:39.3 | First up, we have historian of science Dr Joshua Nal. |
| 1:43.3 | His first book, News from Mars, Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy 1860 to 1910 |
| 1:50.0 | was awarded the Philip Pauli Prize by the History of Science Society. |
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