The discovery of the nucleus transformed the twentieth century and will revolutionize this one. Nuclear physics is one of the most exciting—and useful—branches of science. In medicine, it helps save lives through innovative medical technologies, such as the MRI, and in nuclear astrophysics, state-of-the-art theoretical and computer models account for how stars shine and describe how […]
Why is belief so hard to shake? Despite our best attempts to embrace rational thought and reject superstition, we often find ourselves appealing to unseen forces that guide our destiny, wondering who might be watching us as we go about our lives, and imagining what might come after death. In this lively and masterfully argued
The Belief Instinct by Jesse Bering Read More »
In 1974 Thomas Nagel (http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/object/thomasnagel and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nagel) published a highly influential philosophy paper entitled ‘What is it like to be a bat?‘ In it, he argues that materialist theories of mind omit the essential component of consciousness, namely that there is something that it feels like to be a particular conscious being. We are not constituted likes
The Higgs boson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson) is the particle that more than six thousand scientists have been looking for using the Large Hadron Collider (http://www.lhc.ac.uk/), the world’s largest energy particle accelerator, which lies in a tunnel 17 miles in circumference, as deep as 575 feet beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. It took ten years to build and this
The Particle at the End of the Universe Read More »
Plant biologist and President of the Genetics Society (http://www.genetics.org.uk/) Enrico Coen offers us a wonderful book in Cells to Civilizations. This is a unified account of how life transforms itself – from the production of bacteria to the emergence of complex civilizations. What are the connections between evolving microbes, an egg that develops into an infant, and a child who
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James Gleick (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gleick and http://around.com/) is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, writer and lecturer. He made his name in 1987 with Chaos. Chaos theory has made huge advances since that time but this is possibly still the best introduction on the subject for the layperson. It describes the Mandelbrot set, Julia sets, and Lorenz attractors without resorting to
Chaos by James Gleick Read More »
This is an elegant and wonderfully lucid introduction to the philosophy of science. 288 pages in Open University Press paperback edition. ISBN 978-0335201099
What is this thing called science? by Alan Chalmers Read More »
Consciousness, morality, creativity, language, and art: these are the some of the traits that combine to make us human. Scientists have have often explained these qualities as merely a side effect of surplus brain size, but Miller (http://psych.unm.edu/people/directory-profiles/geoffrey-miller.html, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Miller_(psychologist)) argues that they were sexual attractors, not side effects. The author bases his argument on Darwin’s
The Mating Mind by Geoffrey Miller Read More »
MANY people have argued that humans are naturally cooperative. Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, the Dalai Lama, Russian zoologist and anarchist Peter Kropotkin, neurobiologist James Rilling and psychologist Dacher Keltner, among many others have all made the case that our animal nature is characterised as much by kindness and collaboration as it is by
The Age of Empathy Read More »
