This is a bit late ‘cos I had a series of screw-ups and various posts here either didn’t go out or went out prematurely. I’ll try to catch up.
A couple of years ago I pitched a project called “A Complete History of Almost Nothing” to Radio 4 and elsewhere – it was going to be story of how the concept of vacuum had echoed through time shaping out ideas of how the world works, from the Democritean atoms sitting in empty space, to Aristotle’s veto on discontinuous matter and its continuation in the Thomist taboo, Viviani and Torricelli’s heretical discoveries, Pascal climbing the Puy du Dome, and onwards and upwards to Dirac’s sparkling sea of particles and antiparticles, and ending with the Casimir force.
As usual, I drew a blank.
But I was later invited to be a consultant and contributor to a two parter with Jim Al-Khalili in the chair, directed by Nic Stacey (the director of Secret Life of Chaos). It went out the last two Mondays: Everything and Nothing.
Anyway, both programmes look gorgeous and the second is a nice preview to Wellcome Elements where I’m going to focus more on Torricelli going head to head against the Church.
You’re expecting a review? Ha. You’ll have to watch them for yourselves.
