This week we finally got to find out why scientists have failed to make major progress recently in solving some of the many challenges facing the world, such as finding a cure for Alzheimer's, producing cleaner sources of energy, and perfecting a safe medical procedure which can be used - once the US elections draw to a close in November - for surgically extricating Hillary Clinton from her pastel-coloured trouser suits. You know what the reason was? It turns out scientists have been too busy building Panasonic's new 150in plasma screen television.

At 6ft tall and 11ft wide (I'll pause here for a second to allow you to reread those implausible, but genuine, dimensions before you rush to write to the Editor to complain about typograffical errurs in your newspaper), it is the world's biggest TV set. Fittingly, it was unveiled at a consumer electronics trade show in Las Vegas, a city already so teeming with improbably grandiose architectural confections that a TV set on which Mike Tyson's thigh appears the same size as an actual cruise liner strikes the natives as really not so very remarkable.

Now, in order both to view your picture in crisp focus and also to avoid having to swivel your head violently from side to side to follow the action in an episode of EastEnders - just as if you were following a tennis match at Wimbledon while seated in the front row of Centre Court right in line with the net - the general rule for watching TV, according to industry experts, is that you should sit at a distance from the screen equating to roughly two and a half times the size of the screen. So, let's do our sums. Say you're returning at the end of a day's work to your average-sized sitting room in Birmingham: in order to view Panasonic's new 150in TV to its best advantage, then the optimal place to position your sofa would be in Wyoming.

Unlike women, most of whom can see the point of sharing their home with a TV screen the size of two king-size beds about as much as they can see the point of drilling their own cheeks with a staplegun, many men will already be saving up the £50,000 that it will cost to buy one of these new TVs. To these men, owning a TV set that allows them to see a football match in which the players are life-size is the home-entertainment equivalent of being able to use a military assault vehicle as their daily runaround for dropping the children off at school and doing the weekly supermarket shop. That's why so many men are baffled by how their wives respond to their high-tech acquisitions.

HUSBAND: “Guess what, honey. I've bought us a 150in TV set! We'll be able to watch Didier Drogba dribbling - in full size! - right here in our living room. What's more, from now on Mike Tyson's thigh will appear on our TV screen the same size as an actual cruise liner!”

WIFE: “Oh my God! I've married a moron!”

But women had better drop this churlish attitude to technological gigantism, because life-size screens are the future. On Monday night ITV's flagship evening bulletin, News at Ten, returns with its old presenter, Sir Trevor McDonald, seated in front of a studio-wide, interactive, touch-sensitive video screen. It displays a nightscape of London, when it is not showing life-size images of personalities in the headlines. To reap the full effect of watching a news bulletin featuring a huge high-tech video screen that conveys human beings in life-size it obviously makes sense to have a TV set at home that allows you to watch News at Ten's life-size images in full life-size, too.

Lewis Carroll explored a similar avenue in his late novel, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, when the character called Mein Herr, a distant traveller visiting Earth, relates how his own planet quickly realised that a map drawn to a scale of a mere six inches to the mile - which was as much as any cartographer then thought useful - was hopelessly inadequate:

“‘Only six inches!' exclaimed Mein Herr. ‘We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all. We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!' ”

It's so obvious when you think about it, isn't it? A map that reproduces the country in full size - what could be more usefully realistic and more accurate? - just like a TV that transmits the world right into your living room in full size.

Hang on a second. It turns out there was one small hitch with that mile-to-the-mile map. Asked if the new map had been used much, Mein Herr replied: “It has never been spread out yet...the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”

I think there's a message in there for those of you pining for a 150in TV in your sitting room. I think the message is; if you want to see life in life-size, try getting out more.

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