[Scale Book draft text]

Date:
[1976]
Reference:
PP/CRI/H/6/3/1
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: [Scale Book draft text]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    10/144
    Hito; îmw JywL jw, I Mm , l^ìA t (tâb «Wtf CwAÁS 1 • I ioiUïA s^o^Tgoiàir UAc. f6fláriYKiM The naturai world we see around us is full of familiar ob. behaving in their expected ways - tfye bird flies through the air, the apple falls to ground - yet beneath its mask of familiarity it is almost unbelievably complex and mysterious. Even at this eryday level there is much more going on than would strike a casual observer. Shakespeare knew the charm of the robin's song but he did not know why it sang. He knew that birds had sex but not that a male bird might defend territory. And when we ask quite simple questions such as 'what is sound?' or 'what makes the robin's breast red?' we can only provide interesting answers if we plunge into worlds far too small for us to see. Worlds teeming with unfamiliar molecules and assemblies of molecules, in almost unending variety, and beyond that even more minute worlds populated by just a few types of particles, but particles so bizarre in their behaviour, so rapid, so difficult to pin down and subject to such strange rules that we are astonished that, we can even begin to understand them. At this level of the atom, and the interior of the atom, our common sense ideas are of little help to us. These worlds are the worlds revealed by modern science yet they are not the only ones, for science has also opened up the worlds of the immense. Queen Victoria, like primitive man, was conscious that the sun shone in the sky but she never lived to learn what made it shine. Nor did the Victorians have any idea of the true size of the world. During my own life -time the volume of the universe has grown by a factor of more than a billion. There has been a parallel expansion of cur knowledge of time. The age of the earth, which is now known I r MJL Mlfc otje|VI fxAc ^ [^4 (MJL with fair precision, is ne estimate of Bishop Ussher rly a million times greater than the confident n the 17th century. And this new universe,