AS THE winter weather does its worst, the thought of
electrically heated pants seems enticing. But you have to be an
élite cyclist to justify ownership of such a luxury: they are
designed to keep the muscles warm before a race, and are just one
of the armoury of gadgets that helped Team GB top the Olympic
cycling-medals table.
It was with these hot pants that Tim Harford began his new
series Pop-Up Economics (Radio 4, Wednesday of last week)
- an example of the kind of marginal gain which is part of a
successful economy's innovation and enterprise culture. Harford has
made his statistics programme for Radio 4, More or Less,
into cult listening; so it is perhaps not surprising that this new
show should come with a live audience of whooping supporters, and a
more off-the-cuff approach.
But Harford's lecture had none of the sceptical fizz or focus of
his other show, and, while the rags-to-riches story of the Nobel
Prizewinner Mario Capecchi is inspiring, the main point of the
disquisition was ultimately banal: that an economy needs to
encourage "long-shot" innovation as well as incremental
improvement. Still, the audience seemed to love it - or maybe their
hot pants were turned up to max.
The subjects of last week's series of The Essay:
Five portraits of science (Radio 3, weekdays) knew a thing
or two about innovation. It looked at five great scientists, from
the Elizabethan alchemist and astrologer John Dee to Albert
Einstein. So wildly different in their methods and ambitions, these
two contribute to the aggregate image of the scientist as
eccentric, ludic, and potentially deviant. Certainly, interest in
Dee has been revived because of his apparently transgressive
behaviour - a reputation created for him largely by William Godwin,
in The Lives of the Necromancers. Jonathan Sawday's essay
took us through this transformation, while Richard Hamblyn, on
Einstein, dealt in some useful myth-busting: Einstein was top of
his class at maths, and was a right-handed omnivore.
Andrew Brown's contribution on Galileo set about with a
revisionist's scalpel. Galileo was a "cantankerous old sod" whose
insistence on the veracity of Copernicus's view of the universe
would, at the time, understandably have been regarded as a leap of
intuition too far. All the evidence available at the time supported
the theory of Tycho Brahe - one that, with hindsight only, can be
seen as a botched attempt to patch up the old astronomical order.
And, what is more, Galileo was a heretic for his belief in atomism,
a kind of materialism which made the doctrine of transubstantiation
implausible. Even if you could escape the Inquisition, you cannot
escape the scrutiny of future historians.
In From Fact to Fiction (Radio 4, Saturday), in which
playwrights respond in mini-drama form to a topical issue, Louise
Ironside tackled Lance Armstrong's confession, tax avoidance, the
weather, and the burger scandal. In Snow and Mirrors, a
professional psychic attempted to fiddle her tax return and cheat
her clients by using a more readily accessible source of
information than "the other side". "Sometimes I need a little
Google to help me through," she admitted. Don't we all?