This post is about Dr Samuel Brown. He was born in Haddington in 1817 and died in Edinburgh in 1856.
This film explains how I was mesmerised by the portrait of Dr Samuel Brown in the National Gallery of Scotland:
To play this short film please click here or on the image above.
Samuel Brown studied medicine but chose not to follow this as a career. Instead he chose to be: a chemist, a physicist, a poet, a writer, an artist and a philosopher.
In the early 1840s he delivered lectures on the Atomic Theory where he claimed that he could transmute Carbon into Silicon. Thereafter his life changed. This film tells the story:
The catalytic action of his mere presence:
To play this short film please click here or on the image above.
A century before C.P Snow and the “two culture debate”, Dr Samuel Brown demonstrated that the cultures of science and arts do indeed complement one another. In this film we hear the words of Dr Samuel Brown, a scientist interested in poetry; and Edwin Morgan, a poet interested in science:
To play this short film please click here or on the image above.
Dr Samuel Brown’s father, also Samuel, was an Ironmonger in Haddington. Samuel Brown Senior was the pioneer of public libraries. This film will hopefully illuminate:
To play this short film please click here or on the image above.
The National Gallery portrait of Dr Samuel Brown was painted by his friend, David Scott, RSA. David Scott grew up in the Edinburgh House known as Hermits and Termits:
To play this short film please click here or on the image above.
Stars have shone
and gradually increasing in brilliancy
they have promised to equal
the brightest of astral orbs
when suddenly
they have disappeared forever.
