In Outer Space

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 370, 26 July 1946, Page 14

In Outer Space

HAVE heard only one of the Science at Your Service series, "Beyond the Stratosphere" from 4YA, and found its

15 minutes too brief. In this short time Dr. Guy Harris, of Sydney, endeavoured to take the listener on an imaginary journey into the solar system, naming the planets, devastating several popular but apparently invalid theories about their origin, and leaving the layman whirling in space with nothing to support him but a few astronomical calculations, Fifteen minutes is too short a time for a speaker to get down to very detailed facts and just long enough to

: whet the listener’s appetite for more. Dr. Harris took us in an imaginary spaceship, propelled by atomic power, and our presumed speed was exactly that of light-a highly uncomfortable vehicle in which to travel, other than mentally, but one which is rapidly coming to sound less fantastic than it was to readers of Jules Verne. Indeed, in another talk on the same evening, Dr. C. M. Focken, of Dunedin, suggested casually enough that, thanks to"the discovery of atomic power, inter-planetary travel is no longer beyond the bounds of present possibility. The difference in the presentation of these two talks was interesting. In each case there was-a scientist, and a questioner (a layman, apparently). Dr. Harris; seemed to address the less-than-average intelligence and told us little that we didn’t already know, or couldn’t have found out by consulting any book on popular astronomy. Dr. Focken, on the other hand, gave the listener abundant information which he couldn’t have acquired without expert help in searching for it and analysing it, and at the same time contrived to suggest that the Average Listener must be equipped with a brain capable of receiving and tabulating the proffered information for future reference. Dr. Focken’s talk was therefore a greater success, from the listener’s point of view, than Dr. Harris’s. Nobody likes to be talked down to.