Last night the BBC showed a programme on the faster than light neutrino experiment which has made the physics world go into overdrive in the past few weeks. If you haven’t see the programme, it is available on iPlayer here. I don’t see any bits of it on YouTube yet, but keep a look out for it as, I realise, only people within the Disunited Kingdom can watch programmes via the iPlayer.
The programme was presented by the mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, whom I have seen present some excellent programmes on mathematics in the past. As a physicist/astrophysicst, I appreciate the fact that du Sautoy said right up front that he was not a physicist. I am curious why the BBC chose du Sautoy instead of e.g. the darling of the media at the moment Brian Cox, but then again maybe the BBC feel BC is suffering from over exposure.
I put a post on FaceBook alerting people to the programme going out at 9pm last night, and a colleague of mine commented “Gosh. So they can make science tv progs quick when they need to!” (I’ll excuse her poor grammar, this time 
). Indeed, it is amazing how quickly the BBC have put the programme together. And, considering how quickly it has been put together, I thought it was excellent. Maybe du Sautoy and the film crew were able to send their finished product from 2 years in the future back in time by using faster than light neutrinos to bring the video to October 2011!
I wanted to go into a lot more details about this programme, but I don’t have time today. I will be returning to the topic of relativity in the near future – I am in the process of writing some lectures on the whole historical development of relativity, from Galileo through to Einstein, so will post bits of that story on this blog over the next few weeks.
Tweeted.
Meanwhile, you’re having mentioned Galileo’s history. Have you read Stu Clark’s story of Kepler and Galileo? The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth. Gripping read, based on the real personal histories, beats any of that so-called Da Vinci nonsense hands down.
No, I haven’t read it. I have so many books I have bought over the years that I have not read, and one is a history of Kepler, and also “Galileo’s daughter” by Dava Sobel. But, I will add this to my whist list on amazon, so thanks for the recommendation. I probably own more books that I have not got around to reading than those that I have read….
I am putting together a blog about Galilean relativity, I was hoping to finish it by today but (a) the equations are all messed up (I inserted them using the latex command in WordPress, but they are not aligned properly with the text) and (b) I wanted to insert some diagrams from the 2nd year lectures I gave on this topic, so need to hunt those down. Next week….
[...] Times, Science Blogs 24., PressePortal 23., Science 2.0, Spiegel 21., Science Insider, Nature News, Curious Astronomer [...]