The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics
September 4, 2019
Time and time again mathematics has demonstrated that that it is the unique language of the universe. Among its spectacular successes have been the predictions of the existence of radio waves, black holes, antimatter, the Higgs boson and gravitational …
10 Things You May Not Know About the Moon
August 28, 2019
“This year marks the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing. When Neil Armstrong climbed down the ladder from the Apollo 11 lunar module and became the first person to step onto another world, it was arguably the most significant moment in the hist …
Ghost cosmos
June 4, 2019
“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is,” wrote Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. “I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.” …
Our incredible shrinking brains
March 8, 2019
In his 1991 book Consciousness Explained, the cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett describes the juvenile sea squirt, which wanders through the sea looking for a rock to cling to. On finding one, it no longer needs its brain. So it . . . eats it. Dennett …
In the beginning…
December 17, 2018
The greatest discovery in the history of science is that there was a day without a yesterday. The universe has not existed for ever but was born. Almost 14bn years ago, all matter, energy, space — and even time — burst into being in a titanic fireball …
Superflares
October 25, 2018
The energy of the Sun powers all living things on Earth, alongside all the advances in human technological civilisation. But what the Sun has so generously given us it could take away in an instant. According to two astronomers in the US, a ‘superflare …
The central magic of science
August 23, 2018
“Le Verrier, in deducing the location and properties of an unseen planet, had revealed the the central magic of science: its ability to predict things never before suspected, which then turn out to actually exist in the real universe. As the biologist …
G-waves: What’s all the fuss about?
June 28, 2018
My article on the discovery of gravitational waves. It was commissioned by The Sunday Times but did not find a slot. So here it is.
Neutrinos: the key to the Universe
May 21, 2018
Hold up your thumb. A hundred billion neutrinos are flying through your thumbnail every second. Eight and a half minutes ago they were in the heart of the Sun… Read more (New Humanist Subscribe)
We love you, Dick
May 11, 2018
“The day Richard Feynman died, students at the California Institute of Technology hung a banner across the face of the institute’s nine-story Millikan library. The banner read simply: ‘We love you, Dick.'” Today, on the 100th anniversary of the birth o …