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Programme 10: 2nd June 2008

Dr. Garret Fitzgerald of the University of Pennsylvania and winner of the Boyle Medal for Science. He was the scientist who exposed the dangers of the drug Vioxx.

Programme 9: 26th May 2008

Dr. Peter Butler, a pioneer in the field of plastic surgery.
Presenter: Pauric Dempsey of the Royal Irish Academy

Produced by Peter Mooney

Programme 8: 19th May 2008

Professor Patrick Cunningham developed the first test for CJD and it is now used worldwide. He is chief scientific advisor to the government

Presenter: Pauric Dempsey of the Royal Irish Academy
Produced by Peter Mooney

Programme 7: 12th May 2008
Jocelyn Bell Burnell, born in Belfast in 1943. She detected the first pulsar, a rapidly rotating and strongly magnetised neutron star, emitting regular pulses of radio waves. Accurate measurements of pulsars have confirmed Einstein's theory of general relativity

Presenter: Pauric Dempsey of the Royal Irish Academy
Produced by Peter Mooney

Programme 6: 5th May 2008
George Stokes (1819-1903) laid the foundation of the modern engineering science of fluid mechanics, was a pioneer in the science of geodesy, the study of the size and shape of the earth and its gravitational field and gave fluorescence its name.

Presenter by Pauric Dempsey of The Royal Irish Academy
Producer:  Peter Mooney

Programme 5: 28th April 2008
Nicholas Joseph Callan (1799-1864), Irish priest, scientist and inventor, was a pioneer in the development of electrical science;  inventor of the induction coil used in every motor car, which led to the modern transformer.

Presenter:  Pauric Dempsey of The Royal Irish Academy
Producer:  Peter Mooney

Programme 4: 21st April 2008
George Boole (1815-64) was the first professor of Mathematics at University College, Cork. He invented a revolutionary way of translating abstract ideas into algebraic equations, which
could be processed by a machine.  Web search engines rely on Boolean algebra. Einstein used Boole's invariant theory when developing his theory of relativity. Bertrand Russell describe Boole's book, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, as the book where pure mathematics was discovered. In 1855 he married Mary Everest, niece of the man after whom the mountain is named.

Presented by Pauric Dempsey of The Royal Irish Academy
Producer:  Peter Mooney

Programme 3: 14th April 2008
Charles Parsons (1854-1931) invented the steam turbine, which revolutionised marine transport and electricity generation.  Today every power station in the world uses turbine generations based on Parsons'  idea.

Presented by Pauric Dempsey of the Royal Irish Academy
Produced by Peter Mooney

Programme 2: 7th April 2008
Ernest Walton (1903 -95) won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1951 for his part In splitting the atom.  Watson and his collaborator John Cockcroft had converted matter into energy as predicted by Einstein's famous equation E=mc2.  This was the beginning of particle physics, pursued today in the giant accelerators of CERN.

Presented by Pauric Dempsey of the Royal Irish Academy.
Produced by Peter Mooney

Programme 1: 31 March 2008

William Rowan Hamilton is Ireland's most world-renowned scientist.  He contributed to the development of optics and algebra, in particular, discovering the algebra of quaternion.
His work proved significant for the development of quantum mechanics Hamiltonian mechanics is used commercially today to determine orbital trajectories of satellites and was used for the recent Mars Mission.  His friend, the poet, William Wordsworth, convinced him to devote his energies to science rather than poetry.

Presenter:  Pauric Dempsey of the Royal Irish Academy
Produced by Peter Mooney