TOOLS OF SCIENCE

A series of meetings hosted by The Physics Museum,
The University of Queensland

For students, scientists, engineers, historians of science and technology, teachers,
collectors, and all those fascinated by old scientific instruments

 

July 25
John Mainstone		 Sights, Sounds & Spaces

7 December 1941 is undoubtedly a date that is firmly etched into the minds of many people, especially the Americans - "Remember Pearl Harbor". Not so, however, a date just seven months earlier, 7 May 1941, when Benjamin Franklin’s famous assertion 'Man is a tool-making animal’, and Thomas Carlyle’s 'Man is a tool-using animal’, coalesced. The 136 US scientists, and sundry engineers, present during the final session of the Acoustical Society of America meeting at Rochester NY were utterly confounded. Though they are most probably totally unaware of the connection, our friends and acquaintances more than 60 years later are being persuaded to "Add to Shopping Cart" or "Save 30% on superb HT package" as a result of what happened that evening in the Eastman Theater at the University of Rochester.

Our eyes, ears and brains are not products of our technological ability, yet they qualify - just like the laser - as important Tools of Science. In our great quest for scientific understanding, however, they can occasionally lead us astray. The tools that we make and use for the pursuit of Science generally echo Plato’s "Necessity is the Mother of invention", but sometimes it’s really a matter of serendipity (e.g. X-ray tubes, transistors). Whichever the mode may be, one thing is certain - there will always be a good story to tell about a Tool of Science!

Presenter
Professor John Mainstone is a former Head of the Department of Physics at The University of Queensland. He began his professional life as a radio-astronomer, then migrated to the ionosphere and magnetosphere, and finally came down to Earth again in the form of a physical oceanographer. In the first 8 years of his retirement he was (unpaid) Director of CASRAC, the highly successful Centre for Astronomy, Solar Radiation & Climate at USQ, Toowoomba. Having an historical bent, he has for many years been the custodian of the famous Pitch Drop Experiment at UQ Physics, declared by Guinness World Records in 2002 to be the 'longest-running laboratory experiment’. In October 2005 he was awarded Harvard’s 2005 Ig Nobel Prize for Physics, an honour which he requested should be shared with the late Professor Thomas Parnell, in recognition of the latter’s initiation of the famous experiment in 1927.