J B S Haldane on Pitara Kids Network

The Snake with the Golden Teeth

Tue, 12 Dec 2000 06:38:56 +0000

There was once a man called Paolo Maria Encarnacao Esplendido. He lived at Manaos in Brazil. He was a very rich man. He owned two gold mines and a silver mine. You might think one got more money from a gold mine than a silver mine because gold is worth more than silver. But, as a matter of face, more money goes down gold mines than comes out of them, because people are always digging mines for gold in places where there isn’t enough to make it worth their while.

A Day in the Life of a Magician

Thu, 13 Sep 2001 13:31:25 +0000

Excerpts from ‘A Day in the Life of a Magician’. First published by Vigyan Prasar, India

Years ago I gave up hanging up a stocking on Christmas Eve. One reason is that I have no stockings to hang, because I almost always wear trousers, and even when I wear shorts I wear socks with them so as to make my calves brown. And I don’t think Father Christmas would find room in a sock for all the things I want. So when I woke up on Christmas morning I was rather surprised to see one of my socks hanging on the bottom of the bed, and much more so when it got up and walked along the counterpane towards me.

Excerpts from 'Everything has a History'

Thu, 26 Mar 1998 02:26:14 +0000

Haldane’s books are the best for communicating science to a layperson. He wrote almost 300 brilliant articles on popular science for ordinary workers, many of which were later collated into books such as ‘Everything has a History’, ‘Science in Everyday Life’ and ‘On Being the Right Size’. Here are two chapters from ‘Everything has a History’.

How Bees Communicate:

Eight years ago, I gave an account in ‘The Daily Worker’ of the early work of Von Frisch and others on the language of bees. In July 1947, I was at the London Zoo with Professor Hadorn of Zurich. We watched bees coming into the glass-fronted hive laden with pollen of different colours in the bags on their legs. He was able, by watching them, to tell me from what direction they had come, and roughly from what distance. So will you be, after reading this article.

My Magic Collar Stud

Sat, 02 Dec 2000 17:43:28 +0000

I suppose you think there aren’t any more fairies nowadays, or witches or wizards or goblins. Well, of course they don’t go about dressed up like the ones in picture books. You don’t see little fairies with butterfly wings perching on the chimneys at Hendon, or old ladies in pointed hats riding down Oxford Street on broomsticks and waiting for the green lights to go on. But they’re doing other things. The good magicians are still doing magic things like radio and chemistry. When you’re ill the doctor comes and writes a prescription on a bit of paper, and then the chemist gives you something in a bottle. If it does you good, that means that the bit of paper was really a spell, and the medicine a potion. And you meet fairies in all sorts of places, looking like quite ordinary people.

Rats

Sun, 15 Jul 2001 03:08:12 +0000

Excerpts from ‘Rats’. First published by Vigyan Prasar, India

Now at this time there was a great plague of rats in the London Docks. They were specially fierce rats, whose ancestors had come on steamers from Hong Kong along with tea and ginger and silk and rice. These rats ate all sorts of food which are brought to London in ships because we cannot grow enough food in England to feed all the people here. They are wheat from Canada and cheese from Holland, and mutton from New Zealand and beef from Argentina. They bit out pieces from the middle of Persian carpets to line their nests, and wiped their feet on silk coats from China.