People of Science with Brian Cox - Dame Julia Higgins on Michael Faraday
Transcript
- Julia: People of Science, take one.
- Brian: Julia, who've you chosen as your person of science.
- Julia: Michael Faraday.
- My research all my life has been to do with polymers, long molecules
- and why they have the sort of behaviour they have
- and I gave a lecture at The Royal Institution
- and the people in charge there said, "Did I know
- that one of the very first Royal Institution discourses
- that Faraday gave was about India rubber?"
- It fascinated me that somebody as great as Faraday
- had also been curious about something like polymer molecules, rubber molecules.
- To me it just resonated absolutely.
- Brian: So this is a new material. When was that discourse?
- Julia: 1826.
- He actually says it's elastic, it’s flexible, it’s impermeable
- and actually those are the properties that we look for in modern-day plastic
- so there he was all that time ago
- already picking up the key properties of these materials.
- Brian: I was going to ask you to describe his legacy, but it’s almost…
- Julia: It’s all around us.
- I mean, we are surrounded by electric light, we’ve got cameras, we’ve got fans.
- None of them would be possible unless he had discovered how to first generate electricity
- how to transmit it along cables and how to store it in condensers
- all of those things Faraday had a finger in.
- Brian: And he came to science through an unusual route, didn’t he?
- He wasn’t the son of rich parents who went to
- Cambridge or something like that, he didn’t do that, did he?
- Julia: No, he was actually apprenticed to a book-maker, a book-binder
- when he was 14, so he had very little formal education
- but he was effectively in a library, which is wonderful for someone who is curious
- and he read everything he could lay his hands on.
- And then when Humphry Davy started giving lecture series
- Faraday went along to those lectures and became fascinated by them.
- He wrote to Humphry Davy and asked for a job
- and once he was a scientist in position
- he was given a lot of freedom to do experimental work.
- Certainly he was recognised
- and he was elected to be a fellow of the Royal Society
- when he was very young.
- We’ve got some of the Royal Society artefacts here.
- I like this photograph because he’s obviously explaining something
- and one can imagine him standing there in the lecture.
- And that’s the election certificate for Michael Faraday into the Royal Society.
- Brian: 1823, yeah there it is.
- Julia: Yeah, that’s it. So he was 32 years old so a very young fellow of the Royal Society.
- When you lecture in the evening discourses at the Royal Institution
- you’re in the lecture theatre where Faraday worked
- and not only can you go and sit where Faraday lectured
- but you can also visit the laboratories.
- It’s absolutely wonderful to stand there and think Faraday stood here and here am I
- and I’m trying to do what he did which is communicate as best I can
- to people who don’t have any specialist knowledge why it’s exciting, why it’s interesting.
- Brian: Do you think that’s an important part of his scientific legacy
- public engagement as we call it today, his lectures?
- Julia: Oh, I think it’s hugely important.
- I and many other people were influenced in the idea
- that communicating science was a terrific thing.
- We’ve been trying to recapture that in the current climate
- with schools and lectures and so forth
- and we’ve never quite managed to do it as well as he did.
- Brian: Why do you think Faraday is such an important and relevant figure today?
- Julia: Everybody knows somewhere in their understanding
- that curiosity is what makes us human.
- Learning more about why we’re here, what we do here
- why things around us work as they do
- and Faraday had the curiosity
- and he had the determination to understand the answers
- and he didn’t always know where it was going to lead him
- but he strongly believed
- there were important applications coming along and they were going to change things.
- How they changed the world is phenomenal.
President of the Institute of Physics Professor Julia Higgins joins Professor Brian Cox to explore the life and work of Michael Faraday and how his curiosity and passion for communicating science inspires her.
Explore our Google Arts and Culture collection on Michael Faraday's life -
See our collected archive papers of Michael Faraday's work -
With special thanks to the Royal Institution Museum & Archives
About the Royal Society
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