GNC
King-Sized Canary
- Joined
- Aug 25, 2001
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True, but that wasn't the wider scientific community that did that to him. It was mostly the BBC.
Bellamy's Bugle was on ITV. Think Botanic Man was too.
True, but that wasn't the wider scientific community that did that to him. It was mostly the BBC.
Well this is a bit of a rum do - I looked at the list of episodes of The Heretics of Science and don't recognise any of them. What I remember was a series of programmes that were definitely on the BBC, because a third of the prog was devoted to the 'heretic' and his proposal and rest was spent trying to discredit it. Main argument seemed to be that somebody can't be right when they're obviously wrong.The Heretics of Science originally broadcast in 1994.
https://www.tvtime.com/en/show/257843
There’s this episode of Horizon from BBC 2 on the 26th Jan 1981Well this is a bit of a rum do - I looked at the list of episodes of The Heretics of Science and don't recognise any of them. What I remember was a series of programmes that were definitely on the BBC, because a third of the prog was devoted to the 'heretic' and his proposal and rest was spent trying to discredit it. Main argument seemed to be that somebody can't be right when they're obviously wrong.
First heard of Nelson-Rees there - he purchased a kidney cell-line from Russia and having time to spare, did a DNA profile of it and discovered it was of non-caucasian origin. Thinking this was unusual he probed deeper and discovered the cell line characteristics were completely dominated by the HeLa tumour cells used to immortalise the kidney cell culture. This possibly had major implications on all research involving cell lines (mainly cancer Research) from past 25 years as regardless of the origin of the cells, it was the HeLa cells that were being characterised. As Nelson-Rees could not be easily dismissed, the emphasis moved to his (admittedly irritating) tactic of attending a lecture, waiting for it to end and then tear into the Presenters.
Couple of weeks later I saw another prog where some-one had the temerity to question the validity of electron microscopy. He claimed that slicing a specimen on a microtome so finely that the sample has to fall on water and cast a shadow in order to see it, then freeze-drying the slice, coating it with gold atoms, placing it in a vacuum and bombard it with electrons and feed the back-scatter through interpretative software to obtain an image, contained a large collection of artifacts.
Laithwaite and his anti-mass propoal was dismissed without an alternative explanation being offered.
I've tried looking up 'Heretics' but cannot find any such series of programmes that matches what I remember.
Confabulation possibly, but I suspect not Mandela Effect so much a Bigfoot in the Botanical Gardens.
Laithwaite's complete gyroscopes lecture (from 1974) is available on the Royal Institute's website:
The Jabberwock | The Royal Institution: Science Lives Here (rigb.org)