nature.net
June 2005
The Talking Web
By Robert Anderson
Recently I read aloud to my children from Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, recorded and edited by Ralph Leighton, a friend of the Nobel prize–winning physicist Richard P. Feynman. The kids’ favorite part (and, I suspect, everyone else’s, too) was Feynman’s retelling of his adventures as a safecracker. With a little math, a little psychology, and the persistence of, well, a scientist, Feynman managed to break into safes when he worked on the Manhattan Project, demonstrating that classified information about the atomic bomb was far from secure, after all.
A search of the Web for more stories about Feynman led me to the Vega Science Trust, a U.K.-based organization that broadcasts free, high-quality science programs over the Internet. There I found archival video recordings from a series of physics lectures Feynman gave in New Zealand at the University of Auckland in 1979.
But Feynman is just the beginning of what the Vega Trust has to offer. On the “Science Programmes” page, the “Face2Face” link takes you to an archive of recordings by famous scientists. In the gray menu box on the “Science Programmes” page, you’ll find a link to even more such recordings, listed “By Scientist” or “By Subject.” Many of the talks—such as “The Origin of Life,” by the recently deceased evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith—were delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London, where the tradition of making science accessible to the public goes back two centuries. Consult the “A–Z” link, in the gray menu box, to see the full catalog of downloadable science videos.
If, like me, you get hooked on watching scientists talk on video, there’s no end to the fascinating bounty on the Internet. At the site of The Royal Society in London, for instance, you can watch and listen as David R. Scott, the commander of the Apollo 15 mission to the Moon, explains the “Challenges facing the human exploration of Mars” (link opens Real Player). The Archive offers numerous other selections, among them an unusual discussion about “Beauty in science and literature,” by a poet and novelist, Ben Okri, and a neuroscientist, Nancy J. Rothwell (link opens Real Player)..
A number of other institutions make science lectures available to the public on the Web. One is Harvard University, at the “harvard@home” site. Click on “program list” in the red banner menu at the top, and scroll down to view the selections. I made a beeline for a talk by one of my favorite thinkers, the biologist Edward O. Wilson; he explains his ideas about the ways our genetic and cultural evolution are intertwined. At Cornell University, I found three lectures on quantum theory given in 1999 by the late Hans Bethe. What makes Bethe’s talks so special—and so accessible to the general public—is that he prepared them for a particular audience: his neighbors in a retirement community near the university campus, in Ithaca, New York.
True to its eclectic reputation, the Exploratorium in San Francisco offers a wide range of unusual topics in its audio and video lecture series. In the menu at the upper right of the home page, under “Webcasts,” click on “Archive” to access “Live@Exploratorium.” You’ll find nearly a decade’s worth of lectures. One segment I particularly enjoyed comes from a series of talks and panel discussions on memory, presented in 1998 (click on “1996–8” on the banner menu). Choose “Memory Lectures” from the scroll-down list, and then click on the selection by the neuroscientist Robert M. Sapolsky—his talk is called “Stress and Memory: Forget It!”
Robert Anderson is a freelance science writer living in Los Angeles.
Copyright © Natural History Magazine, Inc., 2005