"Thousands of primary schoolchildren," according to your Irish Times last Wednesday, "will visit Carlow this month for an event which could help to re-establish the county as a centre of science. "The Magic of Science", which comprises over 40 science exhibitions and a light and sound show, is to be opened on Monday at the Carlow Institute of Technology by the Tanaiste, Ms Harney." And Chris Dooley in "From The South East" goes on to tell us: "Carlow has a tradition of contribution to the sciences going back to the 19th century when John Tyndall, one of the greatest scientists of his time, was born in Leighlinbridge".
Tyndall was born in 1820 of Anglo-Irish stock. He finished school in Carlow at the age of 17 and joined the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, working for it mainly in Co Cork. Then in the early 1850s, having spent some years studying in Germany, he was appointed a professor at London's prestigious Royal Institution.
One of Tyndall's many research interests was the way in which radiant heat is absorbed by gases like carbon dioxide and water vapour.
In 1863 he published a paper about the possible effects of these atmospheric gases on the world's climate, and suggested that ice ages must occur during periods when the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is significantly reduced, and what we now call the "greenhouse effect" thereby considerably weakened.
We now know that this is not a primary cause of ice ages, but later research has shown that a diminished greenhouse effect has indeed had a hand in prolonging some of them.
Tyndall was acknowledged as one of the foremost public speakers of his day. He had a talent for devising striking experimental demonstrations to illustrate his points, and his sense of showmanship enthralled the genteel audiences that thronged to hear his Friday evening lectures at the Royal Institution.
One of Tyndall's favourite demonstrations was to show that light passes invisibly through a clear liquid, but that the beam becomes visible when the liquid has tiny particles suspended in it, because then the light is scattered sideways. He inferred from this that dust suspended in the atmosphere must scatter the blue light from the setting sun, leaving only the red and orange light behind - and hence the red sunset.
John Tyndall from Co Carlow ranks with Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Lord Kelvin and a few others as one of a small band of scientific thinkers in the second half of the 19th century who changed entirely the way in which we look at the physical world around us.