Dr Mark Miodownik takes us on a journey from the microscopic to the massive as he investigates the fascinating properties of the materials all around us, and addresses a very fundamental question: Does size matter?
The 2010 Christmas Lectures explore the properties of different materials, and how they are governed by rules that change as size changes. Lecture one demonstrates the importance of size by investigating the materials science of animals from fleas to elephants. Lecture two takes us into the microscopic world where we discover that a different set of rules make weird and wonderful things possible. In the third and final lecture, we think big, and explore the forces that shape big things.
This lecture investigates the effects of size on the animal kingdom. We explore fascinating phenomena such as how hamsters survive falling from great heights, how geckos wall up walls, how elephants support their immense weight, and why ants are super-strong. Mark’s experiments uncover the physical rules that govern the strength, life span and even movement of animals.
We discover that although gravity governs our own existence, it is far less important for small animals, who instead are subject to surface forces, allowing them to achieve feats we can only dream of such as jumping out of a plane without a parachute. But we also find out that the trade off for small animals is a short life span, so we can conclude that size definitely matters!
What physics dominates in the world beneath our finger nails and how can we manipulate the rules to achieve incredible things? This lecture investigates the microscopically small world that we have created inside mobile phones, jet planes and chocolate. We demonstrate that as things are shrunk down they behave differently because the physics acting on them is different. By zooming into the micro level we discover that all things are made of crystals.
To demonstrate the importance of crystal structure, Mark will compare the melt in the mouth properties of chocolate, one of the most sophisticated man-made materials; with the jet engine, an incredible engineering feat, that wouldn’t have been possible without computer modeling of crystal structures. The lecture culminates with a look at the atomic scale and the emerging science of quantum physics.
What forces shape the big things in our world and can we overcome them to build big enough to reach space? In the final lecture, we zoom out to investigate the rules governing the size and behaviour of big things and discover that they are very different from the electrostatic forces governing atoms. To explain what’s going on at this macro scale, Mark asks some big questions like why aren’t mountains bigger and why are planets round?
So to build really big we need to escape the clutches of gravity but how do we do that? To find the answer, we explore the fundamental properties of matter that enable it to resist the force of gravity: strength, hardness and density. The lecture concludes by demonstrating that our mastery of these properties could indeed make it possible to achieve incredible things such as building space elevators.
| Executive Producer | David Dugan |
| Series Producer | Dan Kendall |
| Director | David Coleman |
| Producer | Anna Evans-Freke |
| Production Manager | Sarah Holt |
| Production Coordinator | Michelle Cullen |