YouSaid · the spoken record

Frank Close

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54

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2025-08-05

most recent

2025-08-05

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1

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Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

1. “Where they came from, again, totally by accident, in France, Henry Becquerel, he heard about X-rays. He mistakenly thought that they might have something to do with fluorescence, which is the property of some minerals that when you energize them in sunlight and then take them away into a dark room, they will glow. They've stored up the sunlight. And so Becquerel wondered if that was the key here. And so he had some uranium salts, and he energized them, put them in a...”

   2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

2. “People were very mystical. They went to seances and so forth and one person even thought that he was creating ectoplasm in the tube. So it was very, very weird. And this led in 1895 to Willam Rontgen in Germany by accident discovering x-rays. He was doing experiments with these tubes. In the dark, it was November. And he noticed that on the far side of his laboratory, something was sort of flashing, showing that some invisible rays were reaching it. And as he went to investigate, he found that when his hand was between the screen and the source of these rays, he could see the bones in his hand. And that was the astonishing discovery of x-rays, which of course immediately fascinated everybody because their ability to cast shadows are broken. Bones was immediately put to use. But the question of what x-rays were and”

   2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

3. “And that left a puzzle, which was what actually is electricity. How does it work? And this is what eventually the attempts to answer that by accident led to the third revolution, which is the atomic and nuclear revolution. What happened in the latter half of the 19th century was in trying to find out how electric current works, they had the idea of Well, they knew that electric currents flow through wires. And if you could remove the wire like looking in gases, you might be able to see the electric current, if you like, out in the raw. And so they had tubes with gas inside. The electric current go through, and they saw some very weird sort of illumination and mysterious lights. Now, in the late Victorian era,”

   2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

4. “Well, I said that the first industrial revolution was the one of steam power and mechanics back in the 18th century. And the Second Industrial Revolution in the 19th century was the one associated with Michael Faraday, the discovery of electricity and magnetism and dynamos and so forth.”

   2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT