Atomic

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 394, 10 January 1947, Page 10

Atomic

"T HERE are two schools of thought regarding broadcasts on scientific subjects. The first maintains that they should stick to science, cut out all elaboration, and give listeners a closelypacked, scientific lecture, crammed with facts. The second likes the talk to be a conversation, to include music and other et ceteras, and the facts to be sparse and unobvious. The BBC, in producing a session "The Atom Explodes," perilously walked the tightrope between these two styles of presentation. The story of the atom was told briefly enough but fairly fully, and although it was not vulgarly popularised it was presented only partly as a talk or lecture. Various characters appeared, re-appeared, and vanished (including of course the Curies and the great Rutherford) and in between the explanations and the facts we even had one or two BBC-type jokes. "Are you ever’ going to grow up?" someone asks Lord Rutherford, who replies, "Some day, I dare-say-I haven’t time just now." Another Rutherford conversation went like this: "Do you mean you've split the atom, sir?" "I believe I’ve chipped a bit off it!’ Later, when it is explained that alchemy, the transmutation of elements, has: long been established as a dead sober fact, and that a minute quantity of gold has actually been ’made from platinum, the BBC bystander asks, "From platinum? There’s no money in that, old boy!" All in all, you couldn’t help enjoying this session, but it makes you wonder why listeners aren’t considered intelligent enough to accept their information without an accompaniment of vaudevillian cross-talk.