The Atom Explodes

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 387, 22 November 1946, Page 10

The Atom Explodes

‘, HE other night from 2YA I heard the BBC feature "The Atom Explodes," by Nesta Pain, and speaking as one of those average non-scientific listeners at whom Miss Pain is said to direct her projectiles €we are eagerly awaiting bombardment by The Tsetse Fly and Sleeping Sickness) I feel that Miss Pain’s talents as a script-writer have not been over-rated. Few programmes attempt to hold their audience for more than 30 minutes. "The Atom Explodes" held me for 45 minutes which seemed like a mere half-hour. The fact that a scientific programme can be

easily transmuted into good entertainment is not in itself surprising. The public has always been prone to see Romance in various aspects of scientific enquiry, the Romance of Medicine, the Romance of Discovery, even the Romance of Reason (Biology is said to be the only unromantic science). And what is romantic is saleable, as writers of medical memoirs and producers of psychopathic films well know. But Miss Pain is too much aware of the immediacy and the awesomeness of atomic research to take the romantic shortcut to listener interest-nowhere does she suggest the word "quest," or, pause to point out how hot the scent and how exciting the chase. She deals in turn with Becquerel, the Curies, Rutherford, (Rutherford’s remark "In scientific work you don’t know what’s going to turn out important" lingers in the memory). She has the good taste to end her programme before Hiroshima, and leaves her audience to answer the question, "How ere we going to adjust ourselves to this?"