Tiny technology - Philip Morrison's 1968 Christmas Lectures 4/6

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Philip Morrison asks what our technology would look like if we were the size of men in Gulliver's voyages, in one of the earliest filmed Christmas Lectures. Watch all the lectures in this series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbnrZHfNEDZyVSqUGRrZh05w7JYj77-m6 Watch our newest Christmas lectures here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbnrZHfNEDZyQJZLPMjwEoOLdkFBLU2m1 This was recorded on 4 December 1968. -- In 2025 we’re celebrating 200 years of the CHRISTMAS LECTURES, and to mark the occasion we're uploading all our archive lectures to YouTube, with a new series every other week. Find out more here: https://www.rigb.org/discover200-ri -- The lands Gulliver visited were technologically underdeveloped. He saw no steam engine nor even gunpowder. What does scale mean for the engineer, for all the man-made things of our modern world? We will look at ships and guns and chemical plants, at transformer sub-stations and computers, and try to see what our technology would have been like had we, humans, been the size of the men of Gulliver's voyages. For example, Brobdingnag turns out to be a very peaceable land, until lately at least, for its big cannon would have impractically small range; Lilliput, on the other hand, was at once horribly affected by the introduction of gunpowder. Each development has its proper size. Model makers will recognize some of these results out of their own experience. Large-scale engineering is still undeveloped among us for such

Published 2025-04-04 · Watch on YouTube ↗
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