The terms ‘gene’, ‘genetics’, ‘genetic engineering’, ‘gene therapy’, ‘GM crops’ etc. have been current in the media and everyday conversation for a good while now. They are bandied around more than the science behind them is understood. Fortunately, there is a good crop of books for the general reader to gain some understanding. Examples are Matt […]
Have you ever been baffled or intimidated by what physicists tell us about the fundamental structures of the universe? Well, snap. Without a very sophisticated understanding of mathematics most of it is over our heads. Some leading physicists have tried to offer books for the general reader. One was Richard Feynman with his celebrated best-seller Six
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics Read More »
All human cultures that we know of, literate and non-literate, have constructed stories about their own origins. It’s a perfectly natural thing to do. At an individual level the child asks ‘Where did I come from, Mummy?’ So, it’s equally compelling for a tribe or civilisation to ask ‘Where did we come from? The answers,
Origins by Jim Baggott Read More »
Ever wonder what happens to your mortal remains after your spirit has taken the celestial elevator? Journalist and author Mary Roach (http://www.maryroach.net/) offers us this informative and humorous study of the human corpse. Human beings continue to die with alarming frequency: about 6,350 every hour at the last estimate (http://www.ecology.com/birth-death-rates/). That’s an awful lot of solid
In Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28) the eponymous anti-hero is informed of the death of his wife. Shakespeare then gives him one of the classic soliloquiys in all literature. It is a despairing reflection on the brevity and futility of human life. ‘She should have died hereafter; There would have been a time for such
Brief Candle in the Dark by Richard Dawkins Read More »
Sy Montgomery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sy_Montgomery) is a naturalist, author of 15 books, who specialises in conveying the wonder of the natural world to a wide audience. Since the first dawning realisation with Darwin in 1859 that humans are co-terminus with the natural world, every advance in our understanding of other creatures underscores the fact there is no
The Soul of an Octopus Read More »
Steven Weinberg (born May 3, 1933, https://web2.ph.utexas.edu/~weintech/weinberg.html and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_weinberg) is an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles. He holds the Josey Regental Chair in Science at the University of Texas at Austin,
Dreams of a Final Theory Read More »
David Deutsch (http://www.daviddeutsch.org.uk/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch) is Visiting Professor in the Department of Atomic and Laser Physics at the Centre for Quantum Computation (CQC) in the Clarendon Laboratory of the University of Oxford. He pioneered the field of quantum computation by formulating a description for a quantum Turing machine, as well as specifying an algorithm designed to
The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch Read More »
Before retirement Richard Fortey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Fortey) was Professor of Palaeontology at the Natural History Museum. He is a world expert on the trilobites, a group of ancient marine arthropods resembling woodlice which roamed the oceans for almost 300 million years. That’s three thousand times longer than Homo Sapiens have so far been on the planet. The study of these creatures has contributed hugely
