A Prodigious Leap - Christmas Lectures on the Science of Scale - Lecture 3

This lecture from The Royal Institution's 1968 Christmas Lectures series explores the fascinating science of scale in movement across different organisms. In this 55-minute presentation, physicist Philip Morrison examines how size affects the physics of motion, demonstrating that a flea, hare, man, and horse can all jump approximately the same height when measured proportionally to their size. Discover how time scales change with physical dimensions and how this affects various forms of locomotion including walking, running, floating, and swimming in both animals and man-made vehicles. The lecture draws inspiration from Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" to illustrate how the fundamental building blocks of matter establish size relationships that govern everything in our physical world. Learn why micro-organisms move differently than larger creatures and how our human-scale perspective limits our intuitive understanding of movement at different scales.