HI all
I wonder what's got into Professor du Sautoy - particularly what's with the 'Beauty of Diagrams' series on BBC4.
I'm late to this particular table, and have only seen the episode broadcast last night (BBC4m 8:30 -9:00 pm) about Isaac Newton.
It was not very good, and contained a major mistake: about halfway through the programme the good professor says in a voice-over, while the camera lingers on and caresses a statue of Newton:
"...and, as Newton took up residence again at Trinity, over in Italy Galileo was busy working out the speed at which light reaches us from the Sun."
That's just not true. It can't possibly be because Galileo was born in 1564 and died in 1641, and Issac Newton was born in 1642. So by the time Newton returned to Trinity, the great Italian scientist had been mouldering in his grave for something over twenty years, a condition which normally precludes making further siginficant contributions to science.
There's no really polite way of putting this. To make such a elementary mistake, and especially to put it in the mouth of someone as well known as Prof du Sautoy is, well, inexcusable. There's no separate credit that I could see for writing the script, so I hope that it wasn't written by the Simoni Professor of the Public Understanding of Science himself. If these truly are du Sautoy's own words then maybe, just maybe , we should start to worry that he hasn't done his homework? What's perhaps even more worrying is that other passages in the programme suggest that whoever wrote the script had only a fairly hazy acquaintance with elementary optics, and really didn't understand things like chromatic aberration at all.
Somebody please tell me that du Sautoy was reading someone else's script. Does nobody in TV bother to check their facts at all these days?
Cheers
and happy viewing
Richard
Richard Ellam
L M Interactive
Science Shows and Hands-On Stuff
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