In spite of the appearances, this program is not about fruit.

“ Coffee, please.”

Did you know that over 150 years ago when one of the greatest scientific institutions in our modern world was set up with money from illegitimate son of Duke Nosenbland, a guy whose scientific qualification included the discovery of a better way to make a cup of coffee. Strange? But true.

But that’s the way was back then, anybody could be a scientist, like this guy was, name of Simthson, who gave America 2 billion, in today’s money, because he reckoned the country needed to spread that kind of knowledge. Ironic, since the program will end with the knowledge of light.

Oh, there is the place I was talking about, named after James Smithson. This is Smithsonian.

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140 million things in the museum collections, over 25 million visitors a year, all getting lit by knowledge. Smithson would have been proud. And research project all over the world, including this archaeological dig in Middle East, picking up treasures and suntan. Speaking of which, apart from coffee, Smithson also did a lot for sunburn, and poison ivy, and cosmetics, and diabetic rash(尿布疹),  and Xerox photo copies, tyres, and ceramics, which has lots of gum in this bottle get used.

Smithson disvovered it when it was the crystal hunting in England came across the stuff like this. It is called calamine(炉甘石) as in calamine lotion，which is made of one form of crystal. Ok, no big deal unless you suffer from sunburn, or poison ivy or diabetic rash, but there is something very strange about calamine. So for a few moments, here comes brief dissertation on every thing that you ever want to know about crystal. Don’t worry. It’s electrifying stuff. In 1880, a couple of French physicist brothers discovered amazing secret of crystals like this. If you slice a bit out, and then squeeze it, put pressure on it, the crystal changes shape slightly. When it does that, it gives off an electric charge. And the more pressure you put on it, the more electric charge it makes. And it does the opposite; zap it with an electric charge, and it changes shape. And the bigger the electric charge, the more it changes the shape. Ok, now for what you can do with all these. Put two crystal slices up against each other and hit one with electricity. It changes shape; squeezes the other one, and it makes electricity. Same charge that affects the first one, so if the first crystal is affected by the electric field, the 2^nd crystal will react. The whole thing is a tiny electricity gage.

Now , don’t nod off, because I think you will see this turns out to be a tale of genius and the dark passion and behavior that perhaps can be best described as Bohemian, in more ways than one, because, one of the French brothers working on crystal, so called Pierre, marries a girl called Marie,  who comes from Poland, and recently both of them care about deeply what I am now, down in one of the mines in the Czech Republic, together with this very slightly radioactive water, because this is they could get raw material on which they will use in their electricity gage and change the entire world.

Here is where the raw material comes from, the northern mountains of Czech Republic in Bohemia, and it comes out of the mountains by the ton. Here is a bit. It is called pitch blend (沥青铀矿)。And before our curious couple got interest in it, it was used in coloring ceramics. And it is mined here, just outside a little town, Yachimov(亚基莫夫)，down there. Oh, by the way, that use of the pitch blend to color ceramics was something to do with glazing pottery and nothing to do with my story. So I won’t go on about it.

Ok, in 1896, a German called Roetgen伦琴, totally blows away what of science with one of his most amazing discovery that anybody hasn’t ever seen. Well, I suppose I mean, “seen through.” This……. X rays.

So everybody immediately jumps on the bannered wagon, looking for more mysterious rays, and what you might to do with them.

It only takes a few weeks, and bingo some Frenchman repeats the trick. Only he came with a even more stupid find, because when he does, he is fixed around some that stuff from around that I we have showed you before, pitch blend, one of the things you get from pitch blend is uranium. And it turns out, if you put an object between the Uranium and photograph plate, and leave the whole thing in darkness. The next time you look, there is a shadow of object on the plate, as if the uranium had been giving out some mysterious, invisible light. The other thing, uranium does, our Frenchman discovers, is to a very slightly charge of the air around it. But it is whole long stuff, and has nothing at all to do the exciting mysterious rays, so our Frenchman can ignore them a bit. But not that Franco-Polish couple I mentioned, Marie and Pierre, family name Currie, who you will recall are using that a little crystal electricity gage, right? In 1898, the Curries are getting concentrated of various materials by boiling and steaming them, and one of the things they do that to is the Pitch blend, and their crystal electricity gage. It identifies an amazingly powerful electrical charge in the air or around the stuff. One night, there probably happened that their sample glowing in the dark. The world gets radioactivity and they get the Nobel Prize.

Soon everybody decided that slight radioactive water is good for your health. Speaking of health, unfortunately, Marie’s husband, Pierre, is killed by a truck, not long after this.

5 years later, the widow Currie is sending out loneliness signal to the guy who has been their lab assistant for years, a fellow called Paul Langevin, who gets her message and in no time at all, the two of them become a bit of nightmare, and a national scandal, because back then, widows are not supposed to send our that kind of signal to unattached men. Of course, given what Langevin is about to do with Currie’s little crystal gizmo ?(测电器), receiving signal is right a piece of cake.

You are watching Langevin’s use of crystal right now, because that is how the submarine hunter know when to fire her depth charges to best effect. Because thanks to Langevin, and what’s called the “Langevin sandwich”, the ship knows she is sailing over the top of enemy’s sub. Here is how? Attached to hollowed ship is a small kind of dome structure and inside that “ Langevin Sandwich”, are mentioned, a slice of crystal sandwich between two plates of steel. Ok, you’ll recall the crystal reacts to electricity by changing its shape each time you zap it. When that happens the vibrations caused by the changing crystal shape makes the steel plates vibrate too. And then, that happens, the vibrations are really powerful and send out waves into the water surrounding the dome, like this. The waves go out in all the directions and when they hit something like a sub, they bounce back, put pressure on the crystal and makes electricity and that what generate the pinning noise that tell the sub-hunter where the sub is, and what to do about it.

The Langevin Sandwich becomes known as Sonar. And early in World War II, it makes life very uncomfortable for German U-boat wolf packs lurking under surface and help the alliance win the battle of Atlantic.

By the end of the war, thanks to Sonar, the alliance has sunk 782 U-boats or forced them to surface to surrender. My view, in spite of that, the wolf packs take their grand toe. Over 23,300 merchant ships get sunk between 1939 and 1945.

……

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It is acetylene(乙炔)that leads to this funny object, which is something that changes the light of theater, and something that puts the phrase, “ bright light” into you r vocabulary, because this funny-looking object is the arc light.

Ok, now for a quick burst of the mysterious 19^th century chemistry, you’ll get settling a gas by slowly dripping water onto calcium-carbide (碳化钙)，which some guys discovers you can make, by banging high voltage-electric current into a mixture of lime and cock. You deliver the current through a pair of carbon rods and to whole thing, and something called, an electric arc furnace（电弧炉）. This works on the same principle. Look……

You run the electricity through the each of the two carbon rods, and then you slightly separate them, and when you do, you put on your sunglasses.

This is the brightest light in history so far, caused by electricity arching across between these two carbon rods and causes them to burn incandescence(白热光). Keeping the rods in right distant apart as they are burning away is something a French called Fourcroy thinks out. He called it a regulator, and basically it uses a tiny variation in current as the rods burnt away, to run a clock work mechanism that moves the rods around keeping them close together. In the theater, the arc light is an art to every actor’s prayer. In the meanwhile, Fourcroy has other more heavenly ideas.

The other thing Fourcroy does can only be described as cosmic. The first proper experimental version of it happens here in the Pampelune(巴黎的伟人祠)in the center of Paris. And it is one of those scientist discoveries that gives you goose bumps. Fourcroy takes a heavy ball and attached it to a great long wire and make sure the wire isn’t twisted. Then he put it off to one side and fixed it to the wall with a piece of string. And then to make sure nothing will influence to the swing of the ball in a slightest way. He burnt the string. The string burnt through, snaps and the ball started to swing.

Now here is a bit above all mind , if we move our camera, so it stays in line with this ball, and we used a time-line photography and I stay as still as I can, you will see what Fourcroy saw. The ball goes on swing in the same place in a natural space, independent of the earth. What you are seeing now is extraordinary. It is what you see if you are watching the earth from somewhere in outer space. In 1851, when Fourcroy does this, he finally proves that Copernicus was right. The earth does rotate. Watch it again, you what the meaning about goose bumps. It is the earth turning. I said it was a cosmic idea, because if we put Fourcroy’s clock work arc light regulator together with his inertial pendulum(惯性摆锤), this only is one thing you can use them for , to save scientists from eye strain.

Put yourself in an astronomer’s place, staring up at a nightly show, within by, because thanks to the fact the earth spin a thousands miles an hour, you will have to move in a fair leg, and the stars aren’t. Look at the stars through a fixed telescope. And what you see is, there it was gone. Fourcroy is doing that inertial pendulum as here is and realizes the trick to the star-gazing is to use a clock-work regulator, remember the arc light to turn the telescope the opposite way to the earth. So heavenly bodies staying in the frame, just long enough for Fourcroy to do what he does next, take photograph. In 1845 he gets the 1st clear shot of the sun, and then, 6 years later, this, the solar corona, these things here, called prominence(日珥)which people always thought are optical illusions. Fourcroy’s photo shows that they are real and then the 1^st clear detail of these, sun spots, which turned out not to be mountains.

En, where are we? I mean the story. Electric crystals help Pierre and Marie Currie discover what they called radium(镭), and then Langevin used the crystal to develop sonar that helped save Liberty ships, put together with welding techniques, using a settling mate of carbon rods, also working in arch lights, with clock regulator built by Fourcroy, whose inertial pendulum helps to take photo of solar eclipse. And astronomy really takes off. Look, with tracking telescope you take precise in our photographs to spot about the smallest changes between one photograph and the other, you overlaid the pictures and it is easy to see what you just missed. Watch this spot again, see? And then you can overexpose this photograph and even the very faint stars became visible and you can really start to enjoy the wonderful nightly show up there.

And speaking of shows, that’s where Fourcroy gets his photography from in the 1^st place. Ok, this is 1822 version of visual reality, called a “ diorama”, and the excitement of Paris literati. Now bottom left is the view of the audience gets. It was brought to scene behind a closet setting, we know, as a giant gauze panel, and lit it to put a phony effect on everything. Put a light on scene itself and off the phony gauze and the scene clears. Take light off the spring scene, and onto the snow scene behind, and that what you will see, a painted gauze scene, and show it up because it is lit, or doesn’t, because it’s not. Boring, right? Wrong. Back then for the locals, this is buffer crazy extravagant Hollywood stuff.

All thanks to this French frenetic for visual reality, called Dageurre. That rings the bell?

By 1840, Dageurre’s next version of visual reality, which Fourcroy will use in his astronomy, is something that gives people grampus ?

Well, they will have to keep them still for so long if they want to enjoy the latest thrill experience, which is to have their dageur-reo-type taken. Dageurre’s new amazing invention become an instant world-wide craze. You take a silvered copper plate out of its case, in darkness of course, expose it to the scene, and then utter those immortal photographic words, “ Stay very still, please.” And then start counting, “ one, two, three……”

Developing a picture goes like this: put the exposed plate in iodine vapor to get it form a silver-iodine on the plate. Now put it in mercury vapor that only takes to a bit sticky by bright light. Dipping the plate in sulphurous acid salt, washing off a bit not mercurized, wash every thing with distilled water, and you will get the world’s first photograph. And it costs so much, it comes in a frame.

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……And you see humanity has gone through three historical stages.

    “To start with, we all go through the theological stage, with these kinds of stuff, gods and spirits and other such supernatural mongol jumble(胡言乱语),” says Conde. That is the first of the three stages of development. The second is what he called the metaphysical stage, the half-theological stage, when people discovered how to harness the basis of nature, like steam power, for instance, or gravity, electricity, or magnetism, with some form of God, kindly putting the levers behind the scenes.

And finally, says Conde, we get into scientific stage, no “ mongol jumbles, no hop goblins, no deity who is writing the law of nature, just rational, scientific observation of how all bits of our world fixed together.”

The thing is, back to the theological stage of development, there is no way people can be scientific, no instruments that you will call instruments, and since nobody believes in the stuff like natural laws can be investigated, they won’t, and they don’t.

At the metaphysical stage of steam power and such, they just don’t have a science to find what the mystery force of nature actually are, so they leave that inside things to God.

“ On humanity’s greatest journey from the past,” says Conde, “ all you can ever say is people at different times see things differently.”

And the clincher of the argument is like this: “The ultimate science has to be a science that looks at the individual view that each individual has. And how all individual views add up to have our society worked at any one time. So the ultimate science has to be the science of human behavior, which Conde invent, called “ sociology”. And he says when you look in how a person functions, where you can go on, is their view of the world and that depend on their point of view. There are no absolutes.”

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On the subject of absolute, Buddhism knows about that, you know, “ no absolutes”, “ no center of the universe”, “ nothing but nothingness.” Buddhism is attractive to the guy who takes over from Conde. Because Buddhism represents the point of view, the kind, says, “ There is no point of views.” The fellow, who turns it into a science, is a professor of physics at the university of Vienna in 1895. Ernst Mach, famous for his popular science lectures.

What of which is not a million miles from what he shows all about, “ the accidental nature of discovery.” Anyway, Mach takes Conde’s ideas to their logical conclusion.

First of all, Mach looked at how to review the world from a sensitive point of view, by wailing people around with blind folded and seeing what that does to them. Then Mach decided to think take on bigger things, like how you view entire universe.

Take Newton’s apple for instance, say, if you drop the apple. Ok, no problem, here it is, falling. Except, due to the fact that the earth spins as it is traveling in the space, the apple goes in this way, unless, that is, the solar system happens to be turning like this, as it travels through space, so this apple is doing this. Mind you, if our galaxy is turning, then our apple is really turning, unless our local section of cosmos is going this way, in which case, that’s will the apple doing, unless the universe is expanding and contracting. So, unless you know your frame of reference, you can’t say the apple is falling, or say anything. You see the Buddhist connection, without a frame of reference, all you get is a local effect, which is no use to anybody. Certainly not the hard-head in science. So Mach comes up a view of how to view that somebody else calls Mach’s principle. And it says, everything in the cosmos is effected by anything else, which means that everything you ever experience is going to be “ strictly relative”. You have already guessed, I am sure, who the somebody else is, the most famous scientist ever, who writes Mach’s obituary, and who says all physicists get Mach in his mother’s mike, and who turns all philosophy and scientific, history I have been known about, into an idea that you could say, puts all the totality of only everything, everywhere, into a time of new light, Albert Einstein is the name; relativity is the game. See, Einstein reckons that everything in the cosmos is affected by everything else that naturally including everything, including light, which Einstein reckons is affected by gravity. Now is there anyone ready to check that? So, on May 29, 1919, they do, with this--- an eclipse.

Here is a partial eclipse track, and here is a total eclipse track. So here on Princes Island, they photograph the moment of total eclipse. When because of the darkness, the stars are visible in the sky. Now early around, they have taken a shot of the same stars, when the sun wasn’t in the sky. Look, here is a couple. See? Printed black on white to make them easier to make out. Now here comes the incredible minute a bit of details that so often changes the course of history. They come back from the Princes Island with this photograph. Remember, it is all black on white. There is the eclipsed sun, and there are those two same stars. Now because everything is so incredible small, you blow this picture of 300 times, and you will get this: Here is one of the star when the sun was not in that bit of sky; and here is the same star and the sun was there. See that tiny shift? That’s because in that eclipsed photos, the light from the star is coming past the sun and being bent by the sun’s gravity, so the star position seems to change. Thanks to that minute displacement , everything in existence has changed.

Well, that’s it. Thanks to Smithsonian, and sonar, welding, ash from sea, interchangeable parts of clocks, the world opera, gurus and Einstein’s theory of gravity effects, we’ve come from the light of the knowledge to the knowledge of light. Because of which, it’s Einstein’s universe now, not Newton’s any more. Say, you can drop the apple.