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This lecture from The Royal Institution's 1968 Christmas Lectures series features physicist Philip Morrison exploring how technology would function at different scales, using Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" as a framework. Discover what our engineering capabilities would look like if humans were the size of Lilliputians or Brobdingnagians. Morrison examines how scale fundamentally affects everything from ships and weapons to chemical plants and computers, revealing that each technological development has its optimal size. Learn why Brobdingnag would likely be peaceful due to the impractically short range of its large cannons, while Lilliput would be devastated by the introduction of gunpowder. This 58-minute presentation, recorded on December 4, 1968, offers fascinating insights into the science of scale and how the fundamental building blocks of our physical world determine the possibilities and limitations of technology at different sizes.
