I have recently broadcast a series of short reflections on BBC Radio Jersey. They have had a general theme of the interplay between scientific discovery and imagination.
The first audio piece is about Mars and why it moves backwards through the sky. Many elaborate theories were created to explain this until Copernicus proposed that Mars itself was not moving backwards at all, but that our observation of Mars is affected by the way the Earth and Mars are both moving around the Sun. Mars, in short, revealed the unimaginable - that the Earth is not the stable place we experience and that it is not the centre of the Solar System.
The second piece introduces KonstantinTsiolkovsky, one of the great dreamers of scientific history. Never heard of him? Most people haven't, but if you have ever watched a rocket launch or flown on a jet plane, you are in debt to his imaginings.
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