Sir Isaac Newton

"Britain’s Greatest ever Scientist", Newton was actually a disagreeable man, but our lecturer is energetic, humourous and very popular. He dismisses "apples falling on heads" as "a story for idiots", and uses instead, his actual theory that a thrown stone falls to earth, but if you could throw it hard enough, it would stay parallel with the earth's surface and go right round the earth and hit you in the back of the head; and that is what the Moon is doing - falling to Earth but getting no closer because of it's speed.

He explains how he discovered Gravity, by standing on the shoulders of giants, like Galileo who explained how everything falls, rolls or flies through the air on earth and Kepler who laid down the laws whereby the planets revolve around the Sun. Newton realized these two seperate concepts are governed by the same simple mathematics, so he combined them and called the whole thing "Gravity".

He talks of rainbows (and sometimes mentioned that Descartes got there before him) and reflecting telescopes, as well as falling objects, how cannon balls fly and planets revolve, all governed by the laws of Gravity. He magically explains what calculus does (to any audience from 9 years upwards) with complete clarity and demonstrates with fun and energy, his three laws of motion which make modern machines as well as we ourselves, move about.

Undoubtedly the most popular of all our lectures - Newton, as portrayed by David Hall - is a certain success for any event.