Book and Media Review pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc
Review of Genius of Britain: The Scientists Who Changed the World Amy Charles* Iowa City, Iowa 52246, United States cozy, squabbling association of young radicalsnot yet authoritative, and without a clear program of their own, plainly not the scientists of today. Their experiments, devices, and ideas are put across as deftly as possible, perhaps, given the impossibility of talking at length about physics or math: the story of understanding what came to be known as Halley’s comet is the narrative thread on which these men’s work is hung. Episode Two arrives at the doorstep of a greatly enlarged Royal Society, already a self-conscious institution guarding its prestige. This is a different Britain, industrializing and imperial. In this episode we meet James Watt, and here we hit one of the high points of the series: one of James Dyson’s magical unfoldings of major British advances in engineering. Dyson’s a man afire not just with enthusiasm but with the utility of the modes of thought and the insight that yielded these inventions. We are also introduced to Joseph Priestley, Joseph Banks (on whose work Kew was built), Edward Jenner, and John Hunter, a surgeon whose work may be known to few, but who’s owed a debt of gratitude by anyone who’s gone under the knife and lived: he’s identified as the first genuinely scientific anatomist, haunting East End alleys for freshly dead human specimens to dissect. History speeds up in Episode Three, where a Britain just beyond the reach of living memory strings telegraph cables across the Atlantic: we meet Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, Lord Kelvin, James Clerk Maxwell (we’ve nearly 10 minutes on “the physicist’s physicist”), and the great shipbuilder I. K. Brunel. J. J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford get the briefest of look-ins here, a sentence apiece, and while the discussion of all these prodigies’ work is ridiculously truncated (and must be, given the time), the sense of heroism is infectious. It’s impossible to watch without wanting to run out and do some science and engineering right away. A theme that bubbles just below the surface throughout the serieswho may do science, the rich or the poor?surfaces in the story of Darwin and Wallace. Darwin, the rich boy, has it all handed to him in this telling, while the unfortunate Wallace is the hero of character: climbing out of an impoverished childhood, soldiering through the kind of serial defeat that would seem a pink slip from posterity, only to show his outsider’s pure heart and naiveté by sending his manuscript on natural selection to his hero Darwin, who opens the letter and finds, to his shock, his own private theories inside. “That wasn’t a good idea,” said my daughter, mid-video, and I asked why. “Because Darwin might steal the credit.” Just so. Darwin proved himself a gentleman, but it’s clear what a gamble this was.
Genius of Britain: The Scientists Who Changed the World, directed by Christopher Sykes, Tim Usborne, Robert Bee, Michael Waterhouse, and Jonathan Rudd. Production by IWC Media; North American distribution by Acorn Media Group, Silver Spring, Maryland, 2010. DVD, $51.99. ich as it is, Genius of Britain leaves the viewer feeling like an ingrate, wishing its producers had damned the costs and spent more money. A magnificent review of British science and engineering history, it’s presented by today’s science heroes with all the verve and impatience of people who know where they came from and can see far ahead. Hawking, Dawkins, Dyson, Attenboroughthe names are so well-known that media stars like Olivia Judson come in as junior partners. As the series rockets through 350 years’ work, telling the story of science in Britain as a single branching thing, and showing the scientists’ personal attachments and their indebtedness to each other across generations, there are long segments of great excitement. But as the pace of science picks up, so must the series, and by the end we have science history as seen from the Heathrow Express: fragmented, choppy, and regrettably partial. There’s only so much time, of course, and there are costs to be reckoned with. Even so, I wished the series had gone 10 or 15 episodes instead of five, and been willing to take its time as science grew.
R
Cover image provided by AthenaLearning.com and reproduced with permission.
I watched the series with my eight-year-old, an enthusiastic test subject and (thanks to Episode 1) fervent Newton groupie and admirer of Micrographia. The series is not aimed at viewers so young, but it’s often visually compelling. With frequent pause-and-explain sessions, science-inclined elementary school children should find many of the episodes fascinating. The story begins at the beginning, with Boyle, Hooke, Newton, Wren, and Halley. This first program is arguably the best, introducing personalities and places vividly and evoking a © 2012 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.
Published: September 28, 2012 1345
dx.doi.org/10.1021/ed300622f | J. Chem. Educ. 2012, 89, 1345−1346
Journal of Chemical Education
Book and Media Review
Episode Four brings us into the 20th century, and war is the story. Here are Alan Turing, Frank Whittle (the don’t-get-norespect inventor of the jet engine), Robert Watson-Watt and his radar defense, Paul Dirac, and Alexander Fleming. It’s a manful effort, but 45 minutes is hardly adequate to begin describing the lives and work of any of these people, let alone all of them. It’s in this second disc that the effort to tell the story begins to falter. The episode also assumes familiarity with the historical backdrop, WWII and the Blitz, which may puzzle young viewers whose wartime knowledge is thin. The breakneck wrap-up in Episode Five is heavy on Crickand-Watson DNA and the triplet code, with the Rosalind Franklin story glossed over and many of the key players left out; we also have a wonderful essay on Fred Hoyle (presented, oddly, as a lonely figure in astronomy) and Dyson popping back in to grow some carbon nanotubes, though he can’t hope to touch the chemistry involved; there isn’t time. We finish with an awkward tête-à-tête between Hawking and a Dawkins nearly tongue-tied with admiration, and a brief pass-through of Hawking’s work. A critical reader will have noted that many of the advances celebrated here were only partially British, and this is a criticism that grows stronger as we move through the series. It’s impossible to listen to Priestley’s special-air story without noting that Lavoisier and Scheele have been left out, and the discomfort grows deeper in later episodes. It’s difficult, maybe impossible, to speak of “American science” or “British science” now; the funding is national, and so are the defense projects and IP rights, but the work itself is so tangledly international and competitive−collaborative that I think it’s more than a little wishful to speak of national science. I know no group of people more at ease internationally than scientists. But this series is on a mission: to remind Britons and Parliament of the legacy of British science, and, implicitly, the importance of continuing to fund it. In that regard, it’s latter-day science communication done right. Fortunately, it’s also a genuine and compelling call to take up the mantle again, and know the universe. It even works on Americans, whoin the words of a troubled song, from another troubled timecome on the ship that sailed the moon.
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dx.doi.org/10.1021/ed300622f | J. Chem. Educ. 2012, 89, 1345−1346
