2 November 2008
In Conversation - Simon Winchester
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Also on Big Ideas during the Boyer series, ace science broadcaster Robyn Williams presents some of his best one-on-one interviews, drawn from his weekly program In Conversation. This week, Robyn catches up with Simon Winchester to talk about Joseph Needham who was a scientist, polyglot, traveller, diplomat, a socialist and a Christian, an exponent of free love, a nudist, a morris dancer and most of all he was passionate about China. As editor and co-author of Science and Civilisation in China, a massive, multi-volume study, Joseph Needham spent more than half a century collecting and compiling evidence that China was the birthplace of everything from chess to cartography, from the stirrup to the suspension bridge.
Publications
Title: Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China
Author: Simon Winchester
Publisher: Viking
ISBN: 13 9780 6709 1379 4
Title: Science and Civilisation in China
Author: Joseph Needham, edited by Kenneth Girdwood Robinson, contributions by Ray Huang
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 13 9780 5210 8732 2
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