If the gunpowder is confined into a tiny place, the gas that’s released provides thrust that pushes the bamboo shoots in this case in the opposite direction. And this is the principle of the rocket: a force in one direction producing a force in the other direction. ibid.
His name Jules Verne, and his stories the grandest adventures imaginable. ibid.
A way to turn fiction into fact, and his name was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky … A young man with the time and the ability to carefully work through the possibility of space flight using first principles and the laws of physics. ibid.
That speed turns out to be very large indeed:7.8 kilometres per second or 17,210 miles per hour. ibid.
His passion for building rockets was ignited: he would become America’s greatest rocket pioneer and his name was Robert Goddard. ibid.
March 16 1926: Humanity’s [Goddard’s] first liquid-fuelled rocket makes it from the Earth into the sky. ibid.
In 1930 a young engineer joins a Berlin science club – the Society for Space Travel – His name is Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun. ibid.
1944: A pump that can make the magic twenty-five tons of thrust possible for the rocket now called the V-2. ibid.
Each superpower soon realised the potential for rockets to deliver their new weapons of mass destruction. ibid.
Sergei Korolev got a remarkable promotion: from political prisoner to Colonel in the Red Army. The reason is simple: Korolev is a brilliant rocket scientist. ibid.
Korolev drew up plans for a massive new rocket known as the R7. It will be the world’s first multi-stage design. ibid.
A new surge in rocket development: no expense was too great. ibid.
This idea – to use hydrogen to power rockets – was as profound a breakthrough – as a discovery of other worlds beyond Earth. ibid.
Rockets need a new revolution. ibid.
Today nearly two-thirds of humanity use a smartphone. It connects billions of people in a way that’s not been possible before. I always say that the smartphone is one of the most transformative technologies ever invented and we’ve only just got going. Jim Al-Khalili, Revolutions: The Ideas that Changed the World IV: Smartphone
The telephone’s invention was one of the great milestones in the history of technology. ibid.
It would take Marconi to see what use these waves could be put to. ibid.
SIGSALY was the world’s first encrypted wireless telephone … SIGSALY was never cracked. ibid.
‘[Jack] Kilby’s innovated [integrated circuit] really changed the world.’ ibid. scientist
Since the dawn of humankind we’ve looked to the stars and wondered, what’s up there? What lies beyond this small blue planet we call home? If only, our ancestors thought, there was a way to bring the night sky closer, to really see the stars. Just how humanity managed to do that is quite a tale. It would take crystals forged inside the Earth, a plant that grows by the sea, a chance alignment of two small pieces of glass, a property boom in New York, and an accident of chemistry and light, to create the device that would reveal the heavens in all their glory: the telescope. Jim Al-Khalili, Revolutions: The Ideas that Changed the World V: Telescope
Giant telescopes are being built all over the world which scientists hope will answer some of the oldest and most profound questions humans have ever asked. ibid.
Baghdad (9th century) in this period was like Florence during the Renaissance or Silicon Valley in the age of the Internet. ibid.
The secrets of the spy-glass was unleashed. ibid.
Galileo’s most powerful telescope pushed the limits of our seeing to the moon of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, and ultimately to far beyond what had ever been seen with the naked eye. ibid.
Lenses grew bigger and more powerful. ibid.
A new artificial species might challenge our superiority. Mechanical beings have the potential to change everything. And how we got them is a story of astonishing twists and amazing turns. Jim Al-Khalili, Revolutions: The Ideas that Changed the World VI: Robots
A new breed of robot is taking shape in laboratories all over the world. A kind of robot that can do more than just make things or perform repetitive tasks. These are the robots that will interact with us. Become our friends. Or perhaps our enemies. Robots will usher in a new era of humanity’s relationship with technology. ibid.
The runner’s name was Alan Turing, at the time a fellow of Cambridge University. The problem he was wondering about concerned the limits of mathematics itself. He imagined a machine that carried a program in its memory, a device that could solve any problem that could be described mathematically. The idea became known as a Universal Turing Machine, or universal computer. ibid.
You may think our modern world was born yesterday. But it wasn’t, not even the day before yesterday. Democracy in the streets and the rise of people power. The raw passion of national belonging. Good and bad. Our obsession with the self and our own psychology and the dark recesses of the human mind. Even our love of nature, our concern for the future of the planet, all of this was the creation of the romantics: a generation of artists living and working two hundred years ago around the time of the French revolution. Their art was created over nearly a century of upheaval and change. And it speaks to us now with as much ferocious power as it did then. The Romantics & Us With Simon Schama, BBC 2020
The Romantics lived hard, worked feverishly, and many of them died young. ibid.
If you’ve ever been on a march for whatever cause, you’ve experienced one of the great inventions of the Romantics brought into the modern world … A new religion of insurrection and agitation in which everyone can take to the streets to fight for freedom, equality and justice. ibid.
Liberty Leading the People (1830) by Delacroix: It’s been a focal point of intoxicated devotion ever since … Delacroix was born into an age of revolutions in which the monarchy and aristocracy was under siege from the ideals of liberty, equality and the rights of man. ibid.
Delacroix’s image had its most famous resurrection during the Paris Uprisings of 1968 when students and workers came together on the barricades to break apart the rigid conservatism of French society under [Charles] de Gaulle. ibid.
The students took over the most prestigious art school and covered Paris in revolutionary slogans, poetry and street art. ibid.
William Blake: His head swam with visions. As he walked through the streets of his city he saw angels in the trees and amongst the haymakers in the fields. He was always reaching for that bit of heaven and he sees everyone as potentially wonderful. ibid.
Perhaps the most surprising or at least the bravest was the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. In 1792, fired up by the revolution, Mary had written A Vindication of the Rights of Women … And so she arrived in Paris. ibid.
Over the next two years Mary witnessed the worst excesses of the Jacobean government. ibid.
You could see how the will of the people and the language of liberty became increasingly debased into the propaganda slogans of unlimited state power. ibid.
In 1811 while he was a student at Oxford, Shelley wrote and published a series of anonymous texts in defence of atheism and the freedom of the press. ibid.
He gets thrown out of Oxford and elopes with a 16-year-old. ibid.
Shelley: The Masque of Anarchy (1819): ‘As I lay asleep in Italy, There came a voice from over the Sea, And with great power it forth led me, To walk in the visions of Poesy.’ ibid.
Romanticism was born looking for trouble. Some airy change in taste: what many of the Romantics wanted was to change the world by revolution if it came to it. But what happened … when the romance of revolution ended in political failure and bloody disenchantment? The Romantics & Us With Simon Schama II: The Chambers of the Mind
Long before the invention of psychology, it was the Romantics who became the first explorers of the darker deeper regions of the human mind. ibid.
We go with Coleridge into this deeply penetrating world of the creative mind … Coleridge believed that it was in our dreams assisted by opium that our true self was revealed to us. ibid.
It gets you every time doesn’t it … It was the Romantics who gave us this intense passion for the nation. Who in their poetry, music and art transformed the sentimental fondness we all feel for our place of birth into something bigger and deeper – the secular devotion of national belonging. Simon Schama, The Romantics & Us III: Tribes
Nationalism is above all the emotion of longing to go back or stay where you came from. ibid.