Seeing is Believing: the importance of experimental observation in scientific understanding

Dame Julia Higgins takes us on a journey to explain how modern techniques can give us a fascinating insight into hidden worlds. As scientific understanding of our world developed from the Middle Ages onwards, it became increasingly important to verify theoretical ideas through experiments. The development of microscopes and telescopes allowed observation of the very small or the very far away but until the end of the nineteenth century, what could be observed was still limited by the properties of light. However, the discovery of other forms of radiation opened new opportunities. William Henry Bragg and his son William Lawrence Bragg showed how X-rays could be produced and exploited to “see” inside solid objects down to the scale of atoms. Dame Julia Higgins is a polymer scientist, whose research includes the behaviour of complex materials, and particularly polymers, in terms of their molecular structure, organisation and motion. After many years as a pioneering researcher, Julia’s activi