HMS Captain, which sank on its first night out with the fleet
because it was too heavy and weird-looking (image source).
At the 3:26 mark of the latest Ships, Sea and the Stars from the Royal Museums Greenwich I read Lawrence Beesley's astonishing eye-witness account of the sinking of the Titanic. The subject of the show is marine archeology and the guests are Andrew Choong, who loves boats, and Helen Farr, who loves time, which is handy. Helen Czerski's the host, and I feel she would have described the Titanic sinking in a very similar manner to Beesley; both share an attention to not just detail but exactly the right detail, and a clarity of insight into just what it is about that detail which makes the processing of it so unforgettable. Catching up with a Science Shambles from a couple of weeks ago, in addition to some excellent talk about astronomy for the blind, what the big bang looked like, and why candles don't work in zero gravity, eleven minutes in I heard Helen offer this great vignette: "I remember the biggest thing I've ever seen - and it wasn't the biggest thing I'd ever seen, but my brain thought it was - and it was a tornado. And the thing about a tornado is that clouds are normally there, but you don't normally see them connected to the ground. The cloud base was probably three kilometeres. So I was looking at something three kilometers big."
I've no idea what the actual biggest thing Helen's seen is.
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