What a marvelous series...

And by that I don’t mean another Marvel Comics film franchise. No, this one leant on the title of an entirely different film genre and film: “A Beautiful Mind”.  For those of you who have not seen this film, it is about a brilliant Mathematician who becomes delusional. Not perhaps the most inspiring premise for a film but it claimed 4 Oscars and it’s a film I’ve watched more than once with satisfaction and enjoyment. On each occasion the depth, colour and acting was rich enough to keep me there till the end.

This “Beautiful Minds” is a recently completed series on the Beeb, still available on iPlayer. This captivating run (hopefully to be repeated) took 3 living and award winning scientists and interviewed them, their co-workers and families about their achievements and philosophy. The programmes not so much delved into their work (indeed this was broadly glossed over) but entertainingly examined their mind set and the views of them held by their colleagues, friends and family. It also examined some of the mirad the factors that lead up to their most prominent work. The scientists were:

Jocelyn Bell Burnell who briefly at the time made the news as a foot note when astoundly regular pulses (once again for the period) were discovered using the then new Cambridge Radio Telescope.  All the attention (and subsequent Nobel prize) was focused on her boss: the team leader Antony Hewish. The phrase ‘for every great leader there is a greater woman behind him’ sprung to mind. The currently accepted theory explaining Pulsars and subsequently Black Holes has lead to some of the most exacting tests of and successful predictions by Einstein's general theory of relativity. At the same time it has lead to the deepest unanswered questions about our known universe.  Yes that’s the same theory that played a part in Stephen Hawking appearing on the Simpsons.   

James Lovelock who for a period definitely would have been described as “a bit of a nutter” for his obsevations on what would become know as the Gaia hypothesis . This was until after over a year of continued pillory and ostracisation by his peers, he proposed a very elegant refutation of the general criticism that his proposal required a controlling mind. This senario is know as Daisy world. 

Sir Tim Hunt who won the Nobel prize for Medicine in 2001 together with Sir Paul Nurse and  Leland H. Hartwell. This was for fundamental work describing some of the controling mechanism of cell division. In other word why we are not still Amoebas. The really nice thought is that with Britain having one of the highest populations of Nobel Prize winner we may hopefully look forward to more new episodes in the future... 

Links:
Einstein on U-Tube: perhaps that should be more correctly U-Tube on Einstein.  Actually there are an entire series of videos here.