Science of Scale - Lecture 1

This lecture, the first in a six-part series of the 1968 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, features physicist Philip Morrison exploring the geometry of size and scale through the lens of Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels." Examine the world from different perspectives, comparing the tiniest objects to the largest creations both in nature and human engineering. Learn about the arithmetic of large and small numbers, the geometry of size itself, and the fundamental concepts of length, area, and volume. Discover how scale is often decisive in science and how the size of objects—from ants to whales, mountains to atoms—explains much about their nature, as the basic particles of physics establish a size inherently built into all material things.