Horizon - Man and Science Today

Most great scientific discoveries of the past have been made by someone having the luck to observe some process in nature and then realising its wider implications. Newton and Watt are obvious examples. Today the starting point of any discovery remains the observation of nature to see how It works, and with sophisticated instruments volumes are added daily to our store of knowledge. This sort of work, pure science, is engaging thousands of scientists in this country, and the observations they are making today dictate the technological changes of the future.
Tonight's programme reviews progress being made in just a few of the laboratories where work has been going on during 1969 in astronomy, biology, botany, and meteorology. It looks at some of the men whose fundamental experiments might today be only part completed or improperly understood but which in the future we might choose to call significant 'discoveries.'
(Colour)