Postings from the interface of science and culture
The podcast run by the computer company Oxide has hosted a discussion of my book How life Works. It’s deeply thoughtful, engaged, and also fun, and I’m very grateful for it. I’d recommend it to anyone as a fascinating listen for its own sake. I’m also particularly grateful to the biologist on the panel, Greg Cost, for such a considered appraisal. Greg doesn’t agree with everything in the book (and…
SFSU biologist Michael Goldman has written a generous and thoughtful review of How Life Works in Science . He raises some issues that I will respond to here. I figured it was always likely, indeed inevitable, that some would respond to my book by saying it creates straw men of one kind of another. (Goldman doesn’t exactly say this; although his comments could be read that way, he phrases them more…
My nephew Andrew, a chemistry postdoc at Oxford, has just published a paper in JACS on developing inhibitors of the protein HIF (hypoxia inhibitory factor) 1A. Hurrah for him! And this got me curious enough to delve into what this molecule does. Andrew had told me before that it’s a transcription factor, which naturally led me to guess it has a fair degree of intrinsic disorder – as is indeed the…
Climate-change denialists got all excited last week by an alleged revelation that the top science journals are bullying climate scientists into presenting the most alarmist versions of their research, and suppressing anything that doesn’t fit with a “climate catastrophe” narrative. The problem (this story went) has been exposed by a whistleblower named Patrick Brown, formerly an academic scientist…
Software engineer, astrophysicist and human spaceflight enthusiast Peter Hague has commented on Twitter about my Guardian “Big Idea” piece assessing the notion of colonising other worlds. I debated whether I should respond, given that Hague’s critique is steeped in the kind of vituperative ad hominem attacks that seem to characterize a lot of the discourse coming from advocates of space…
There is a review of The Book of Minds in The Spectator by philosopher Jane O’Grady. I have some thoughts about it. First, it is always nice to have a review that engages with the book rather than just describes it. And O’Grady says some nice things about it. So I’m not unhappy with the review. But it does, I must say, seem to me a little odd, and occasionally wrong or misleading. Odd primarily…
In commenting on the commonly voiced view that “science is political”, Stuart Ritchie makes an excellent point: we must ask “And then what?” Stuart lists some of the reasons why the claim is made, and agrees with all of them (as do I). Where he and I disagree is with “then what?” Stuart says “ I don’t think the people who always tell you that “science is political” are just idly chatting…
It’s no surprise that Sunetra Gupta “view[s] the legacy of coronavirus from a different perspective” to me, as she writes in her letter (see below) in the latest issue of Prospect in response to my article . But why is this so? Let’s see. She says that the effectiveness of lockdowns and mask-wearing is “very much a matter of debate (to put it mildly)”. In a sense that is true: she and others who…
Biomedical scientist Andreas Bikfalvi has responded to my own responses to Anna Krylov’s article in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters . So here is another round of the debate. Bikfalvi criticizes me mainly for “largely miss[ing] the points” of Krylov’s piece. He says “Nowhere in Krylov’s viewpoint is the issue of improving diversity in science discussed.” I find it hard to figure out if…
In her review of my book The Modern Myths in the New York Times Review of Books , Sophie Gee asks why “ post-Enlightenment Anglophone tales are so obsessed with themes of domination, self-reliance, privilege and supremacy.” Of the “myths of individual power and mastery” that I consider, and which “still exert a significant hold in the mainstream imagination and culture”, she asks: “whose voices…
What we have seen is that global calamity can come in a strange and perplexing form, at the same time apocalyptic and weirdly domestic. The numbers who have died from the coronavirus, the scenes and reports from hospitals, mass graves, overwhelmed and decimated communities, have the shape of eschatological science fiction. But for some of us – the lucky ones – this meant staying at home with the…
I’m sorry that I seem to have forced Jerry Coyne to write about a subject he is avowedly tired of, namely free will. But my piece in Physics World inspired him to do so, if only to suggest it is all wrong. Needless to say, I don’t agree. I’m happy to say why, although it must be at a regrettably even greater length, given that just about every paragraph in his comments is misconceived. But I’ll…
I’ve had some stimulating further discussion with Philip Goff and Kevin Mitchell on whether quantum mechanics can illuminate the free-will problem. Kevin has responded to our comments here ; Philip’s have been on Twitter. Here’s where it all leaves me at this point. First, here’s where I think we all agree: (1) Events at the quantum scale can be adequately described by quantum mechanics – for our…
Philip Goff has challenged Kevin Mitchell’s interesting supposition that the indeterminacy of quantum physics creates some “causal slack” within which free will can operate. In essence, Kevin suggests (as I understand it) that quantum effects create a huge number of possible outcomes of any sufficiently complex scenario (like human decision-making), among which higher-level mechanisms of…
To prepare my article for The Guardian on whether the UK is prepared for a Covid winter, I spoke to many experts who gave a great deal of helpful information and advice. Only a small part of that could be fitted into the article, and I thought it would be helpful to put some more of it out there. So here is the longer version of that article.…
The images of people in Italian cities singing to one another from their balconies during the lockdowns to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic seem to come now from another, kinder era: before the enormity of the international crisis was fully apparent, before the death toll approached a quarter of a million and the sense of social unity had begun to fragment as politicians and others used the…
Jan van Huysum’s Flowers in a Terracotta Vase (1736) is a riot of floral colour, the equal of anything else by the Dutch flower painters of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. But some of it looks decidedly odd. The leaves spilling out from among the bright blooms don’t look at all healthy, or indeed natural: they are more blue than green. Jan van Huysum, Flowers in a Terracotta Vase…
This is the second of theree essays on colour commissioned for the catalogue of a now-cancelled exhibition on colour at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. _____________________________________________ In 1954, French artist Yves Klein said that “I believe that in future, people will start painting pictures in one single colour, and nothing else but colour.” Klein did not wait for the future – he began…
This is the first of three essays on colours that were to be included in the catalogue for an exhibition at the Musé d'Orsay in Paris this year, which has been cancelled. So I'm putting them here for your delectation. Each essay focuses on the pigments developed and used through time for one of the primary colours. _________________________________________________________________ One hundred…
This is my latest column for the Italian science magazine Sapere . ________________________________________________________________ The distinctions between song and spoken word have always been fuzzy. There’s musicality of rhythm and rhyme in poetry, and some researchers think the origins of song merge with those of verse in oral traditions for passing on stories and knowledge. Many musical…
The mostly rather splendid adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula just screened by the BBC prompts me to post here this short edited extract from my forthcoming book The Modern Myths: Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination . The BBC Dracula excited much comment, some of it affronted and outraged, in its portrayal of the Count as bisexual. I thought it might be useful to explain, then,…
Sorry folks, I had to take the full story down - it violates New Scientist's rights agreement, which was entirely my oversight. The published version of the article is available to NS subscribers here .
My brief from the wonderfully named Dream Adoption Society of the Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute in Warsaw – for their 2019 exhibition The City is the City (the allusion to China Miéville is intended) – was to express a dream of the utopian city of the future. I’m not sure I did that, but here is what I gave them. ________________________________________________________________________ When…
An exchange of messages with Sabine Hossenfelder about the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics has helped me sharpen my view of the arguments around it. (Sabine and I are both sceptics of the MWI.) The case for Many Worlds is well rehearsed: it relates to the “measurement problem” and the idea that if you take the “traditional Copenhagen” view of quantum mechanics then you need…
This essay appears in Entangle: Physics and the Artistic Imagination , a book edited by Ariane Koek and produced for an exhibition of the same name in Umea, Sweden. ______________________________________________________________________ It would seem perverse, almost rude, not to begin a discussion of imagination in physics with Einstein’s famous quote on the topic, voiced during a newspaper…