Human Engineering

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Research in human engineering affects many operations of everyday life. Experimentation with sizes and shapes of numbers, knobs, and traffic signs can make driving safer and machines easier to operate. The first eight or nine minutes are missing from the videorecording of this program.

Is there science in art?

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Preservation, cleaning, and restoration of art objects are presented as scientific processes. Careful use of solvents and tools can restore paintings and sculptures to their original brilliance. Using ultraviolet light and x-rays original paintings can be discovered beneath layers of paint.

The humane future

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Dr. Loren C. Eiseley, Provost of the University of Pennsylvania, lectures from material in his 1958 prize-winning book, "Darwin's Century." He explains why he teaches and how man's brain receives impressions and profits from experiences. He reads from Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species" as well as from Alfred Russel Wallace's work that recognizes man's brain as the totally new factor in the history of life. Man has the ability to invent, progress, and make changes in his surroundings; and man's ethics, arts, and religions determine his cruelty or humaneness. Dr. Eiseley notes that man is relatively young in the total history of life, but with his mechanical inventions and implements of war and power of choice for good or evil, man and his science have made humanity's extinction possible. Showing a chart of anthropoidal skulls of man's ancestors, Dr. Eiseley says the potential destiny of man is unknown. Because of the Cold War, we need to take responsibility now for spiritual greatness. He warns that man should not abandon or forget how he has always tried to transcend himself spiritually, and he quotes C. S. Lewis on the rationality of man.

Unheard melodies

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This program is the first public showing of a film (whose title is from a line in Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn") made by Donald H. Andrews and funded by Mrs. William Hale Harkness. Dr. Andrews hypothesizes that all matter is music since all matter in the universe vibrates, and tones and harmonies are made by vibrations. The motion of a plucked violin string and its adjacent string (sympathetic resonance) are shown in slow motion and on an oscilloscope. Dr. Andrews discusses one dimensional harmony, as described by Pythagoras. Two dimensional harmonies are indicated by the fractional overtones of a drum head membrane, which is shown in slow motion and heard electronically enhanced. Three dimensional harmonies result from the contraction and expansion of a sphere; however, differently shaped solids, such as statues, have fractional resonances that produce unique chords or harmonic patterns when vibrating. Four dimensional harmonies come from atom vibration, a wave whose harmonic pattern is displayed by a vibrating sphere. Thus, Dr. Andrews concludes that since an atom is not a particle that vibrates in space, but rather the vibration itself, all matter is in dynamic form or all matter is music. He continues by playing on a piano the chords of tones of atoms produced by different chemical compounds. He also shows and discusses the pattern of Bach's music on an oscilloscope and music composed by Rebekah West Harkness. In conclusion, Dr. Andrews discusses the dynamic form of the human body's symphony and its small chords in the larger universe.