Anatomical cabinets, displaying bodies bottled whole or in segments, are gripping artists’ and writers’ imaginations: the Enlightenment’s relish for physical data banks excites...
Being affectionate with numbers, endlessly wondering about them, loving them, is, though impersonal and bloodless, no more strange perhaps than being possessed by the endless ramifications of...
Taken alone, the basic laws of physics suggest a bleak universe, a thin, cold soup of atoms in motion. From this point of view, the complex dynamic structures we actually find, animate and...
Last week I walked home from Shepherd’s Bush Green. It isn’t far – people who come to visit say it takes them about ten minutes – but it felt like a considerable...
Joined for all time on the title-page of the Book that Made the Modern World are Isaac Newton (who wrote the Principia Mathematica) and Samuel Pepys (who, as President of the Royal Society,...
‘If you saw him naked, you would forget about his face,’ Chaerephon mutters in Socrates’ ear. His cousin Charmides had entered the gymnasium, his beauty causing turmoil and...
In 1616, the year in which Shakespeare died, Ben Jonson became the first English dramatist to publish a collected edition of his own plays. No doubt The Workes of Beniamin Jonson, a folio volume...
The doctrine of preformation, which dominated the theory of generation for most of the 18th century, asserted a single divine act of creation for all plant and animal life. The original ancestor...
The history of publishing records no unlikelier-looking candidate for bestsellerdom. Written by a professor of zoology at the University of Indiana, it appeared in 1948 under the imprint of a...
From the late seventies to the mid-Nineties, biological orthodoxy insisted that the artificial production of animals with an identical complement of nuclear genes – clones, in the...
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. When you light the blue touchpaper on Guy Fawkes night, the force goes downwards and the rocket goes upwards. But gravity tugs rockets, apples...
If nothing had ever existed, that might have been true because it was the simplest way for reality to be. And if reality is maximal, because all possible local worlds exist, this may be true because it...
It belongs to the millennial mood to want to sum things up and see where we have gotten and point in the direction that further progress lies. Cognitive science has not been spared this impulse,...
The universe is widely expected to collapse eventually, but might first dilate by a factor of one followed by a million zeroes. Its expansion is possible even if it has always been infinitely large. Infinitely...
Einstein’s life story is almost as well known as his science. He was born in 1879 into a middle-class Jewish family in southern Germany, and went to school in Munich, where he is supposed...
During the second half of the 18th century, the great enterprise of sorting out the biological world was at its most dynamic and magnificent. Empire-builders were sending home animals, indeed...
She was exhibited as Miss Crachami, the Sicilian Fairy, or Sicilian Dwarf. Not much is known about her; what there is comes from a pamphlet written to accompany the original exhibition, three reports in...
What happened to Rosa Travers, after she’d been skinned (carbolic acid and phenol), had her nose snipped, received paraffin injections in her breasts and was irradiated to remove...