Honey, the kids have attained Gigantick Dimensions

Last week The Royal Society put on display Robert Boyle's wish list of things that science might achieve in the future, written in the 1660s.

What did the acclaimed scientist want? "The Attaining Gigantick Dimensions." Blue sky thinking, far in advance of anything modern ideas people come up with. As the films would have it - "In an age before anesthesia, in a time of brutal civil war, when the black death stalked the land, one man had a dream - to be taller".

There's something about the spelling and the school-boy ambition of it which I love. When Gulliver's Travels was published 35 years after Boyle's death I hope the book was inspired by his desire for greater physical heft. Swift - pleasingly described by Will Self, who has himself toyed with scale in his stories, as satire's Shakespeare - and Boyle were fellow Anglo-Irish theologians.

But how big did Bobby Boyle want to be? Gigantick! Is that the size of a house? So big he had to be accommodated in a cathedral, as with Gulliver? Robert Hook, Boyle's scientific protege, was instrumental in the rebuilding of London after the great fire. Now we know why - he wanted St Paul's as a hanger for his newly upscaled friend to be birthed in.

Perhaps, again like the story, he wanted to be large enough to wade out into the sea and engage in naval warfare by overturning ships. After all, contemporaneously with the publication with the list many worried that the dutch were going to sail up the Thames and take tactical advantage of the recent fire.

I don't think pV = k, the gas law most school children know Boyle for, really does justice to his flights of imagination. Could we have a film from the "Honey I shrunk the kids" franchise to honor him? I think that more accurately reflects his spirit. It's what he would have wanted, when he wasn't pondering "The Emulating of Fish without Engines by Custome and Education". What a guy...