This edited article about life originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 686 published on 8 March 1975.

A robot helps to save life by Wilf Hardy

What is life? Most scientists today admit that they do not know the answer to this question, although they know a great deal about the way in which plants, animals and human beings behave.

If a drop of pond water is examined through a microscope, we see things which move around and things which do not move at all. Many of us might assume that the moving things we can see are alive.

For a very long time, the words animate and inanimate were used to distinguish things that were alive from the things that were not. These words come from the Latin verb animare which means “to set into motion” or accelerate. In fact, the word animal has similar origins. Even in the times of the Romans, there was quite a natural association between life and motion.

Yet few of us today would say that things which move must be alive. Things which seem to move of their own accord, like the modern electronic robots which can fly a plane, or the guided missiles which can “home” on to their target, are not alive.

For anything to be alive, it obviously must have other properties beyond the ability to move around.

Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about Edinburgh originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 635 published on 16 March 1974.

James Craig’s New Town in Edinburgh with its neo-classical architecture and axial grid

High upon a hill in Scotland can be seen one of the finest panoramas in Europe. The view extends northward over the Firth of Forth, while in the foreground below is Auld Reekie (“Old Smoky”), as the local people affectionately call their city.

The hill, as every Scotsman knows from that description, is Castle Rock, which dominates Edinburgh, the capital city of Scotland. Up there is Edinburgh Castle, built into the rock as if its foundations went into the very core of the earth. For centuries the fierce, cold wind of the north has blown around its corners, and it still looks the most unassailable fortress in the world.

Castle Rock, 437 ft. high, crowns Edinburgh as the Acropolis crowns Athens. This, together with the city’s intellectual and political dominance, has led people to compare it with the Greek capital, so that, besides Auld Reekie, Edinburgh is sometimes called “The Athens of the North.”

Some of the public buildings down in the New Town, where Princes Street, one of Europe’s most famous thoroughfares, is a tourists’ magnet, self-consciously echo the Athenian theme. They have been built in the classical Greek style, thus proving that classical Greek architecture was best done by the Classical Greeks.

No visitor could spend even an hour in Edinburgh without looking up in awe at the colossus which is Castle Rock. It looms like a grey sentinel over the city, as timeless as the pyramids of Egypt.

Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about Hinduism originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 606 published on 25 August 1973.

The Fakir of the immovable foot

Solemnly an old man lay full-length on sun-baked dusty ground and stared for a while at the sky. He gave no indication of his intentions to the few bystanders, but they remained there patiently, waiting to see what he might do.

At last their curiosity was rewarded. Deliberately he reached out for a handful of earth, moistened it and placed it on his lower lip. Once more his hand reached out, to his other, from which he took a few mustard seeds. And these he planted in the thin strip of earth.

Four days passed before anything else happened to arouse attention. For those four days the man lay absolutely motionless, burned by the fierce sun and chilled by the night cold, taking neither food nor drink – until at last he achieved his wish. A tiny plant sprang from his lower lip.

Yet among the people who witnessed the fulfilment of this remarkable feat, few showed much surprise, To them such acts of self control, although admirable, were fairly commonplace.

What they had seen was another unusual exercise of penance by a Hindu Fakir – a holy man who chooses to perform the seemingly impossible.

Such bizarre sights astonish Western people, but they are part and parcel of life in India; even today, when this land is making gallant efforts to adjust to the 20th century. Though admittedly there are not fakirs to be found on every street corner, if you ask and search long enough, you will still find them.

Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about the Renaissance originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 605 published on 18 August 1973.

Francis Bacon stuffed a dead chicken with snow to see if this experiment proved that ice preserved meat, by Angus McBride

At the age of 12 Francis Bacon was a bright lad. That was the age when he entered Trinity College, Cambridge. Three years later, when he was only 15, Bacon left the university with his studies still unfinished. He was disillusioned and disappointed, for, said he, “The whole plan of education is radically wrong!”

Bacon – he was no relation to that other great Renaissance man who was his namesake and whom we met in this series last week, the thirteenth century scientist Roger Bacon – had thus identified while still a teenager the sterility of medieval thinking and education as practised by the “schoolmen” as he called them.

And it was this sterility that Bacon set out to lambast and attack; the sterility that came from bland acceptance of statements that had been written a thousand years ago, even though the evidence before the reader’s own eyes told him that such statements were false.

To understand the problem that Bacon was up against, consider this imaginary dialogue between a schoolmaster and his pupil. The scene is any modern school classroom; the time, this week.

Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about Einstein originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 895 published on 17 March 1979.

Albert Einstein

If the car you are travelling in overtakes another, it seems as if the other is actually going backwards. In fact, relative to your car, the other vehicle is going backwards.

This is simple enough. But it took one of the world’s greatest thinkers to build this every-day observation, and others like it, into one of the most important theories in the history of science. According to this theory, all motion is only relative.

The thinker was Albert Einstein, born in Germany just 100 years ago, on 14th March, 1879. His General Theory Of Relativity was published in 1916. Some of the ideas embodied in it even undermined beliefs based on the classic teachings of Isaac Newton, especially in the field of astronomy.

One of these new ideas was that gravitational force could bend light – a theory at first scoffed at, but later triumphantly confirmed by experiment.

As a young man, Einstein had become a Swiss citizen, but he had returned to Berlin to take up a professorship. A passionate opponent of war and tyranny, he was away from Germany when the Nazis seized power. Einstein refused to work for the regime which was cruelly oppressing his fellow Jews.

Soon afterwards he became a citizen of the USA, where he continued his work. He was now endeavouring to formulate a single theory to account for all physical forces, including gravity, magnetism and electricity. His knowledge of natural forces, and of the advances being made in nuclear science, imbued him with a fear that atomic power might soon be harnessed for military purposes.

In 1939, urged on by other scientists, he wrote a historic letter to President Roosevelt, underlining his fears. It was this which induced the Americans and British to combine resources to ensure that they would produce an atomic bomb before their enemies could do so.

When Einstein died in 1955, the scientific world lost one of its greatest figures. He had set a new course for investigation into the workings of the Universe.

This edited article about lLeo Tolstoy originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 848 published on 15 April 1978.

A scene from Tolstoy’s War and Peace by Ron Embleton

“Tell her to go away.” The old man, clothed in the garb of a simple peasant, who lay dying of pneumonia on a bench in the waiting room of the railway station of Astapovo, looked at the tearful face of his wife at the window, and then turned his head away. “I do not wish to see her.”

Outside, the reporters and photographers jostled with each other to obtain a glimpse through the window of the last hours of Leo Tolstoy, whose novel, War and Peace, is recognised today as one of the greatest novels ever written.

The story of Leo Tolstoy, the Russian count who renounced everything he once held dear, is the story of a man who tried to achieve the impossible. He had come to believe in voluntary poverty and wished to give his lands to the poor, but the Russian law forbade him to disinherit his children. In the end, in the pursuit of his ideal, he destroyed his marriage.

Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about Roger Bacon originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 1047 published on 3 April 1982.

Roger Bacon in his observatory in Oxford by R Pulgari

No one is quite certain about the lifespan of Roger Bacon. He was born in Ilchester, Somerset, in 1220 or thereabouts, and lived until about 1292. Although he is perhaps best remembered as the man who invented magnifying lenses, he was in fact a scientist and a philosopher, living in an age when most scientific ideas were taken from the writings of the ancients, many of which were based on pure superstition.

This remarkable man is thought to have studied both in Oxford and in Paris. His earlier career was as a lecturer in the faculty of arts in Paris. But in 1247, he returned to Oxford where he studied what were then considered “new” subjects, namely languages, mathematics, optics, alchemy, and astronomy.

After 10 years of experimental research, he became disillusioned with his work and the apathy of those around him, and in 1257 became a Franciscan friar.

In a scientific paper written in 1260, he made an incredibly prophetic statement. Bacon said that the magnifying power of lenses could be used in an instrument we now know as a telescope, and he described what might be seen through one. “A small army may appear a very great one,” he wrote, “and Man will be able to study the Moon and the stars in great detail.” It was not until 1608, however, that a Dutchman, Hans Lippershey, produced the first efficient telescope.

Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about Socrates originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 989 published on 21 February 1981.

Surrounded by his sorrowing friends, Socrates calmly drank the cup of poison, by Roger Payne

Fear stalked the streets of Athens and the byeways of the Attic countryside. The Spartan conquerors, whose garrison occupied the Acropolis, had called back to Athens the exiled aristocrats, and established an oligarchy, or “rule of the few”.

Government was in the hands of a Board of Thirty. Those democratic leaders who had not fled the country were seized and executed without trial; so, too, were the private enemies or rivals of the Thirty. This was a black time for Athens.

Salvation, however, was on its way. One of the exiled democrats, Thrasybulus, returned with a small band of followers, and many of the citizens rose in their support. The intervention of the Spartans averted a civil war. Surprisingly, they thought it wise to allow the democratic system to be restored – and it was now the turn of the hated Thirty to suffer the fate of their many victims.

The people, as they had often shown, could be as ruthless as any tyrant or oligarch. In 399 BC, five years after the restoration of democracy, they committed what posterity has condemned as their most shameful act.

At a time when the city’s fortunes had fallen so low, many were looking for the causes of failure – and for people to blame. There was a feeling that the old virtues had been undermined, and religious beliefs weakened, by teachers of new ideas. One such teacher, it was said, was a former sculptor named Socrates.

This remarkable man left no writings of his own, but we have a fairly clear notion of his thinking from the works of Plato, the famous philosopher who was one of Socrates’ followers. Socrates was in the habit of roaming the streets of Athens, engaging people in conversation, and seeking by question and answer to persuade them to look for true knowledge and virtue. In doing so, he called in question many accepted ideas – and managed to offend a number of people.

He was charged with religious heresy and with corrupting the youth of the city, and was brought to trial. He refused to recant his views, and was condemned to die by drinking hemlock. When the time came for him to take the draught, he was completely calm – unlike the weeping friends who surrounded him as the drug took its gradual paralysing effect.

Read the rest of this article »

John Locke (1632 – 1704) was one of the leading figures in the early period of the Enlightenment and is regarded as the Father of Liberalism.

John Locke

He was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he displeased the Dean by his pursuit of continental learning, especially Descartes and experimental philosophy, and neglect of his tedious classical studies. At this time he became interested in medicine, and later entered the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury’s household as physician to Lord Ashley himself, whom he would later cure of a serious liver infection by overseeing a dangerous operation.His personal life was characterised by a few close friendships, but he remained unmarried and had no children. Born of Puritan stock he was a fierce critic of absolute monarchy, and during the years preceding the Glorious Revolution fled to Holland, only returning with the Queen when the accession was assured. His closeness to Shaftesbury encouraged his political thought, since the Earl founded the Whig party, and the system of beliefs to which it aspired was in part shaped by the two of them. A Fellow of  the Royal Society, this quiet genius worked tirelessly on several important treatises on government as well as being Secretary of  the Board of Trade and Plantations and later holding a similar post responsible for the Carolinas, which experience informed his considerable analysis of economics and trade. But his life’s achievement was undoubtedly An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), which established the concept of the mind as tabula rasa, and of experiences through our senses as the determining teachers of what we come to know and understand. He influenced Voltaire enormously and had a profound effect on the authors of America’s Declaration of Independence, especially in his separation of church and state and  his notions of the liberty of the individual. His fundamental significance lay in his insistence on the autonomy and supremacy of the human self, a concept which lies at the heart of much modern philosophy and psychology. Locke died at his old friend Lady Masham’s house, where he had lived since 1691, and is buried in the nearby village churchyard.

Many more pictures relating to thinkers and philosophers can be found at the Look and Learn picture library.

This edited article about fallacies originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 979 published on 13 December 1980.

Diogenes

Anyone who has heard of Diogenes, the Greek philosopher, knows at least one other fact about him – that he lived in a tub.

Well – he may have lived in a tub, but we have no reason to believe that he did. His main principles were that happiness is attained by the simple satisfaction of simple needs: what is natural must be honourable: conventions contrary to these basic ideas are unnatural.

When Seneca came to write the biography of Diogenes, some three hundred years after the subject’s death, he observed that “a man so crabbed ought to have lived in a tub like a dog.” This opinion found its way into Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable as fact: “Diogenes. A noted Greek cynic philosopher (about 412-323 BC) who, according to Seneca, lived in a tub” – a classic piece of fallacy-making.