We all know how it happens. One day, without warning, you feel oddly removed from things and people, as if an invisible wall of glass were separating you from them. They go about their business...
At school, I was taught by a married couple of maths teachers called Mr and Mrs Deas. Little imagination was called for from Mrs Deas. She taught what the Scottish curriculum of the day called...
Under the gutter of our house are many cobwebs, each attached at a slightly different angle to the wall. It’s an east-facing wall, so on sunny mornings the cobwebs are alight. A whole...
August 1974. Compared to the Cortinas and Maxis in the carpark, the prototype Concorde taxiing onto the runway at RAF Fairford looked astonishingly modern: but then, it always would.
The old notions of space and time are currently being turned upside down by theoretical physicists in their attempt to reconcile the two great pillars of 20th-century physics: quantum theory and...
A recent Radio Four programme had a distinguished retired geneticist, who is also a devout Christian, pondering the virgin birth. Jesus, it turned out, is something of a biological conundrum. As...
For nearly a decade, heated debates about science have split academia and sometimes spilled onto the pages of newspapers. Although the ‘science wars’ were well underway by 1996, they...
Descartes’s Meditations tells the story of six days in the life of a rather self-important, busy young man who has granted himself a short sabbatical. Quite a few years have passed, he...
The risk of being blinded was thought to be very real, so the witnesses to the first atomic explosion at Alamogordo, New Mexico in July 1945 were given strict instructions to turn their backs on...
First the rainbow brought messages, later it demanded explanations. In the story of Noah it is God’s promise of an end to floods; in Greek mythology, Iris was both goddess of the rainbow and the messenger...
William Fiennes has a deep-seated sense of home and what it means to be distant from it. Birth-house, parents, migrant birds: these fuse in his passage on swifts, for example, which ‘come...
In 1870, the Imperial authorities in London ordered a heraldic designer to come up with a flag and crest for a part of the British Empire called Turks and Caicos. The designer had never heard of...
In London Labour and the London Poor (1861), Henry Mayhew recorded seeing a watercress girl who, eight years old and ‘dressed only in a thin cotton gown and a threadbare shawl wrapped round...
Scientific discovery, as any PhD student halfway through their project will tell you, is hard work: progress is step-wise, and the steps are small. Not surprisingly, however, the popular view of...
In James Bamford’s first book on the National Security Agency, The Puzzle Palace, published soon after Reagan became President, Frank Raven, an NSA official, is asked what happens when...
In winter there is only one road open to traffic in Yellowstone Park. As it moves east to west through the wide valleys of the Park’s northern range, it crosses the territories of a...
As a role model, Methuselah is not ideal. Apart from his 969-year lifespan, almost all we know about him is that his first child, a son, was born when he was 187, and that he subsequently...
Monday. A pre-recorded announcement, a few words of welcome in Gaelic then the safety stuff in English, hangs in the air behind the departing ferry. Little else is moving but the clouds, and...