What.is.the.World.Made.of？.doc

What is the world made of? There are some great questions that have intrigued and haunted us since the dawn of humanity. What is out there? How did we get here? What is the world made of? The story of our search to answer those questions is the story of science. Of all human endeavours, science has had the greatest impact on our lives - on how we see the world, on how we see ourselves. Its ideas, its achievements, its results are all around us. So how did we arrive at the modern world? Well, that is more surprising and more human than you might think. The history of science is often told as a series of eureka moments, the ultimate triumph of the rational mind. But the truth is that power and passion, rivalry and sheer blind chance have played equally significant parts. In this series, Ill be offering a different view of how science happens. Its been shaped as much by whats outside the laboratory as inside. Whoa! Whoa! This is the story of how history made science and science made history. And how the ideas that were generated changed our world. It is a tale of power, proof and passion. This time, delving deep to find order and beauty. What is the world made of? Appearances deceive. Beneath the surface, our world is stranger than we can possibly imagine. Standing here, it certainly feels as if I am standing on a solid surface. But this is an illusion, however convincing. Nothing is really solid. And you and I? Well, we consist almost entirely of empty space. If you took the entire population of the world, all six billion of us, and removed that empty space, then we could be squeezed into a cube smaller than that. And it gets stranger. Mobile phones and other electronic devices which we rely on. Well, they rely on particles that, by any normal definition, simply dont exist. These insights all come from our attempts to find out what the world is made of. Over the millennia, our understanding has moved ever deeper, revealing new layers that make up the material world.