In the Cathedral at Christ Church in Oxford, between the recumbent knight with the false nose and the tomb of Saint Frideswide, who eluded her too amorous suitor by hiding among pigs, stands the...
In the last few years of the 19th century the world of the physicist began to undergo a revolution that ultimately affected much else beside physics. The discovery of the electron by Thomson, and...
Why does every home not have a whole wall of encyclopedias, now that we supposedly live in the Information Age? Why have they failed to establish themselves as indispensable items of furniture,...
Apart from me and the man who talked about elves, everyone on the bus to Cheesefoot Head seemed pretty sensible. There was the London stringer for the big provincial daily; the girl from the local...
Each of these polemical books considers health and illness in recent Western history. Each moves in to large areas of disputation and advertisement, involving sections of the medical and...
Suddenly, everyone seems to be writing about the body, and eyebrows are being raised. ‘What sort of history is the history of the body?’ asks Peter Biller in a recent review, voicing...
In 1944, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who had earned a Nobel Prize for his contributions to the invention of quantum mechanics, published What is life?, a remarkable book in which he...
What was for traditional astronomy planetary ‘appearances’ explained by complex models, became for Copernicus a direct consequence of the relative speeds of the Earth and the other planets....
Are you ready for digital physics? Physics that says that the universe is a huge computer? For those of us who never quite mastered the old physics, the idea of tackling a new version may not be...
From the peacock’s tail to the quiet of an English rose garden, the dominant message of the natural world is that of sexual reproduction. We are so used to its omnipresence that we seldom...
The first report of ‘test-tube fusion’ came on the morning news. We debated the plausibilities energetically over the breakfast table. Relative roles were quickly established....
Big issues and little issues: among established working philosophers there is none more gifted at making us think anew about both than Hilary Putnam. His latest book is motivated by large...
When it was first published in Ireland in 1986, Stones of Aran won a literary prize and a great deal of praise. It is a strange book, at once a meditation on and a journey around the island of...
The more people feel that modern medicine has let them down, or at least has failed to live up to its own exalted expectations, the more alluring the prospect of looking to China as an...
Professor Hawking’s Brief History of Time thoroughly deserves the praise with which it has been widely received.* With only one formula, Einstein’s celebrated E = mc2, which he could...
Evolution does a wonderful job on eyes. In the matter of seeing in dim light, for example, we are not just supplied with a good tool, but with the very best the system – the rest of the...
For nearly two centuries now, the treatment of the mad in Georgian England has been almost uniformly portrayed in the darkest hues. Nineteenth-century lunacy reformers pictured the preceding age...
When something awful or unexpected happens in public affairs, we are usually referred to the ‘cock-up theory of history’. This is preferred by realists to the ‘conspiracy theory...