The Mace

The Royal Society's Mace is a special object.

It was donated to the society by its first patron, King Charles II, in 1663. Since then the mace has been in the room for almost every important meeting and moment in the society's history.

Even today it sits on a central table at every society meeting, as you'll see in our latest Objectivity video.

It was a great honour to hold the mace myself.

It was also fun to snap some "behind the scenes pictures" during our shoot, with Keith and James.

Objectivity camera/edit man James Hennessy captures the mace.

James and Keith awaiting a chance to film the council meeting.

Love this one... Society executive director Julie Maxted comes to retrieve the mace from Keith. Meanwhile former president Joseph Banks (in portrait) looks on. The mace is in the painting too (see below).

And here is the mace through the ages (reproduced with permission of the Royal Society)...

Ada Lovelace Day

To mark Ada Lovelace Day, we made this video at the church where she is interred.

And to further mark the day, I thought I'd share just a handful of the videos I've made with some talented women in science and mathematics...

Nobel Prizes 2015

In-keeping with tradition, this year we did fast-turnaround videos on the Nobel Prizes for Physics and Chemistry.

But as a bonus, we also did the Medicine Prize this year (because it had a lot of chemistry).

We've been doing videos like this since 2008, along with other videos about Nobel Prizes.

See the chemistry playlist here.

And the physics playlist here.

Numberphile's First T-Shirt

A bit of background to Numberphile's first T-Shirt.

It features the first two "Brady Numbers" - 2308 and 4261.

I chose these numbers randomly at the request of Matt Parker. (see at 2'10" into video)

Matt wanted to demonstrate the Fibonnacci Sequence's link to the "Golden Ratio" is not unique.

Starting with ANY two numbers and applying the same process will also tend towards the ratio.

Following the video, the idea of Brady Numbers and a Brady Sequence captured the imagination of a few people.

It even made it onto the brilliant OEIS archive of sequences!

I have dug out the original brown paper from that video to make the new T-Shirt.

The numbers were scanned from Matt's original writing to make the design.

You can buy a T-Shirt at this link (for $23.08 of course). It should take you to the cheapest shipping option.

Or use this link for American fans and this link for Europe/International.

James Cuffey and M26

The latest Deep Sky Videos instalment is a great example of why I love the series.

One of the project's main goals is making a video about every video in the Messier Catalog - 110 objects in space listed by comet hunter Charles Messier.

We are meandering through the catalog in no particular order, making other space-related videos along the way.

The latest video deals with a seemingly innocuous open cluster of stars that Messier listed at number 26.

M26 (also known as NGC 6694 in the New General Catalog) is pretty uninteresting.

Or at least as uninteresting as you can get for a collection of hundreds of stars in deep space!

Professor Mike Merrifield, an astronomer at the University of Nottingham, tasked himself with finding something to say about M26.

Exploring the literature, he found a paper from 1940 by an astronomer called James Cuffey.

Cuffey retired in 1976 and died in 1999.

Yet his 1940 paper - which is quite readable for an academic paper (!) - explored a strange ring in M26.

What caused the absence (or apparent absence) of stars?

Now the conclusions are not, well, conclusive. But it added much to our knowledge of the cluster.

But for me it was great fun to be raking over the old research, 75 years after it was published.

And it was exciting to have a brief connection with a scientist from the past, sharing his fascination and exploration of a distant object in space that will outlive us both. 

Calculating Pi

Watch four different ways to calculate Pi with Numberphile.

Starting with the most recent video, Holly Krieger uses the Mandelbrot Set.

Matt Parker uses meat pies!

Tony Padilla uses matches (instead of needles).

Ed Copeland uses bouncing balls.

Want more Pi videos? We have you covered.

Face to Face

The latest Objectivity video deals with two "death masks" stored at the Royal Society.

They are casts of the faces of two great men in the fields of maths, astronomy and physics.

Isaac Newton died in 1727 and James Jeans in 1946.

Newton's death mask is well-known - in fact I've filmed it before.

Newton's face was cast at time when such things were common.

For example, they were useful tools for sculptors making posthumous statues.

The James Jeans mask is unusual because it is more modern.

Its creation was discussed between Jeans' wife, Susi, and family friend Joy Adamson.

The pair were present when Jeans died and wanted to capture the "spiritual radiance" of his face.

The mask spent many years in the Jeans home, but has now been entrusted to the Royal Society.

You can read more about it on the society blog.