So says an article in the Sunday Telegraph, following the death of Oliver Postgate, creator and writer of some of Britain’s most popular children’s television programmes, namely Pingwings, Pogles’ Wood, Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, Clangers and Bagpuss, of which the last was voted in a 1999 poll to be the most popular children’s television programme of all time.

Recently News Account have published an item The Meaning Of Milton 400 Years Later. This has led me to some thoughts.

It was only when I was into my forties that I got around to reading Paradise Lost. To start with, there are some bits that really stick in my scientific mind. Take this bit where Satan gets ejected from Heaven:

Him the Almighty Power
hurled headlong flaming from th' eternal sky
with hideous ruin and combustion down
to bottomless perdition, there to dwell
in adamantine chains and penal fire,
who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms.

I gets weary, and sick of trying … the words almost taken from Ol' Man River.  But weary of what?  Trying to persuade the physics world from harping too much on about celebrity physicists.  This they do (at least in my reading) to an extent grossly exceeding that of mathematicians and chemists.  “How will we discover the African Einstein?” they ask, to which I reply that a wilderness of Einsteins would do Africa no good at all, whereas a widespread knowledge of basic physics might help the continent somewhat.  Even if Mariah Carey’s new album E=MC² inspires some to take up physics, most will fall exhausted before reaching such high levels.