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Nature vs. the Laboratory (1957)
About this film
In the forest, wind brushes a leaf. It breaks from the branch, spirals to earth. Within the four walls of his laboratory, remote from the trees and wind and the leaf, a man rolls a bronze ball he has carefully polished down a smooth wooden trough. He times its descent by counting this pulse beats. Does he believe the result will ultimately tell him how the leaf falls? In the laboratory, everything is artificial, rigidly controlled. Out-of-doors, things seem to go their own casual, haphazard, free way. Is there not a conflict between nature and the laboratory? If there is, then the scientist cannot claim that he knows what nature is really like. Gerald Holton (Associate Professor of the History of Science and of General Education, Harvard University) and Philippe Le Corbeiller take you from the world of nature to the world of the laboratory. Using a leaf, a stone, a steel ball and a crumpled sheet of paper, they explore effects which help explain whether the laboratory is in conflict with nature. They reveal a new landscape, a new nature, to which we are usually blind. (Description adapted from documents in the NET Microfiche)
Directors & creators
WGBH Educational Foundation
Subjects
public broadcasting, AAPB, Science, Laboratory, Nature, Physics, Scientific method, Experimentation, Motion, Electricity, Lightning, Electric eels, Falling objects, Gravity, Scientific instruments, Measurement, Observation, Reproducibility, Philosophy of science, Mechanics, Simplification, Modeling, Natural world, Empirical evidence
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