Marginalia from the worlds of science
How much more black could this be? That’s what you’ll find yourself asking if you visit the latest exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery by British-Indian artist Anish Kapoor. And you might find yourself intoning the immortal answer of Nigel Tufnel, Spinal Tap’s guitarist, as he stared into the sleeve of their “black album”: None. None [ ]
It’s a sobering thought that the term “evidence-based medicine” was only coined in 1991 – and that until the 1990s the whole idea was something of a niche pursuit. As science writer Helen Pearson shows in her new book Beyond Belief, the notion that it is worth finding out systematically if an intervention in health [ ]
Historically speaking, Hungarian science has punched above its weight – but often, tellingly, from outside the country. The nuclear physicist Edward Teller, a key architect of the hydrogen bomb, ended up in the US as an exile from the quasi-fascist and antisemitic Horthy regime. The legendary mathematician and physicist John von Neumann had already left [ ]
I’m reading The Paradox of the Organism, a set of collected essays on this notion edited by Arvid Ågren and Manus M. Patten. It’s tremendously enlightening. It is also pretty consistent with the story I’d anticipated. I have some sprawling thoughts about the issue and the wider considerations it touches on, and if this were [ ]
This is an extract from the original draft of my forthcoming book The Man Who Broke Reality, a biography of Niels Bohr. Here I explain how Max Planck came up with his quanta. I m putting it up here because I am tired of hearing physicists and others giving a false account of this story. I [ ]
I just saw the production of Copenhagen at the Hampstead Theatre in London. I haven’t seen it performed since I went to the initial run at the National in 1998, when I believe I reviewed it for Nature (but if so, I can’t find it now). The play is about the meeting between Danish physicist [ ]
[Again, very much after the event and written before Trump proposed slashing the NASA budget even more ] The Artemis II moon mission launched by Nasa on April 1 wasn’t without controversy. Few people in the US consider human spaceflight a priority for Nasa, and some scientists feel it distracts (and steals funding) from space science [ ]
[I wrote and published this before Karp came out with his technofascist manifesto. It s almost as if he wanted to prove my point.] “Technology is inherently neutral – it’s just a matter of what we do with it.” That sentiment remains disturbingly resilient in the face of many decades of research by historians and social [ ]
[Yes, it s very late to the show, but there s always a delay in reposting my columns in The New World ] Meningitis is, among other things, a reminder that many diseases are examples of what the biologist Conrad Waddington called canalisation: the way in which diverse biological causes can produce much the same physiological result. Disease [ ]
The pharmaceutical giant Novartis has reached a legal settlement with the family of Henrietta Lacks, the woman whose cells, taken from the tumour from which she died in 1951 in a Baltimore hospital, have been widely used for biomedical research and drug development. Lacks’ family has been seeking recompense for the uses made of her [ ]