In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/copernicus/) publicly defended the hypothesis that the Earth is a planet and the sun a body resting near the centre of a finite universe. Copernicus’s reordering of the universe mattered because it was the first in a string of new and daring scientific claims at odds with traditional representations of […]
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Jesmyn Ward (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesmyn_Ward) won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction for her 2011 book ‘Salvage the Bones’. Her 2017 novel is Sing, Unburied, Sing describes a black woman and her two children driving to a prison to pick up their white father. We are introduced to the convict’s son, Jojo, who has been forced to shoulder
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William J Broad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Broad) offers this fascinating history of oceanography. He points out the roll of the military in developing new technologies within that field. By 1957, the US Navy was searching for new weaponry to use in undersea warfare; a decade later, it had established a global network of deep microphones that spied on
The Universe Below Read More »
The way we see the world is radically different from our medieval forebears. How was this transition made? How did we exchange organised superstition for a science of the world based on evidence, experimentation, prediction and control? Jonathan Israel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Israel) here offers a magisterial study of what became known as ‘The Enlightenment’ (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/enlightenment/). Israel lauds
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Demographers have long predicted that our society is going to have to cope with an ageing population. In recent years the reality has hit home with The National Health Service and Social Care services under immense pressure. Along with this, dementia has risen to epidemic proportions (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-25213162) Helen Small (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Small) takes as her topic here
This book argues that the universe is fundamentally hostile to complex life and that while microbial life may be common across the galaxies, complex intelligent life requires an exceptionally unlikely set of circumstances, and must be extremely rare. The book argues that among the essential criteria for life are a terrestrial planet with plate tectonics
Much of what’s going on in human life is the exercise of power. Individuals struggle to assert power over one another, and groups of individuals (up to the scale of nations) collaborate to do likewise. Fig leaf labels are pasted over the nasty business as camouflage such as ‘communism’, ‘christianity’, ‘islam’, ‘national socialism’, ‘the british
Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris describe an aspect of human perception known as ‘inattentional blindness’. In the best known version of the experiment, volunteers were told to keep track carefully of how many times basketball players tossed the ball. While they did this, someone in a gorilla suit walked across the court in plain view,
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First published in 1939 this classic study of the end of the Roman Republic still contains a wealth of scholarship for contemporary readers. The central thesis is that a political revolution occurred which transformed the Roman city state into a Imperial power, capable of fully developing its Empire and utilising the resources of the subjugated
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