Category Archives: Science
Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction
Where are we?!? Why deep South but far North? Why do some maps orient East or South, but never West? When did direction change from being where things came from to where we were going? Is the North Pole a real place? Who gave the cardinal directions their familiar one-syllable names? (It was Charlemagne – it’s always Charlemagne.) How do we know which way is which? Jerry Brotton’s delightful new book asks and answers such questions on every page. Jerry is a Professor at Queen Mary University in London, so Tim went to compare notes on what it means to be a northerner living in the south. Jerry Brotton – … Continue reading
Posted in Cultural History, History, Philosophy, Politics, Science
Tagged Books, Hiagh, Podcast, science, Tim
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Robin Choudhury – The Beating Heart: The Art and Science of Our Most Vital Organ
What lies within? Every culture places the heart at the centre of personhood. It beats independently of our volition and when it stops we are dead. But if it were no more than a muscular pump it would hardly feature so widely in our visual imagery and iconography. The human heart, Robin Choudhury tells us, has been “…the dwelling place of the soul, the source of life, a furnace or fermentor providing the heat of living bodies, the source of semen and a repository of deeds. It has become the seat of love and desire.” It has fascinated the greatest minds in history and exercised the genius of the finest … Continue reading
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Tagged Books, Heart, Hiagh, Medicine, Podcast, science, Tim
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Marcus Chown – A Crack In Everything: How Black Holes Came in from the Cold and Took Cosmic Centre Stage
Black holes aren’t black! If there is one thing everybody knows about black holes it is that they are so dense that even light can’t escape. And yet, as Marcus Chown explains, black holes are some of the most prodigiously luminous objects in space. So they’re not holes. And they’re not black. But they are among the most fascinating and counter-intuitive objects in the universe. Not to mention that they are, in Marcus’s phrase, “the stuff of physicists’ nightmares.” Why? Because the maths tells us that any star a little bigger than the sun will eventually collapse into a singularity – a point of infinite density and infinite temperature. … Continue reading
Death and the Victorians – Adrian Mackinder
The origins of modern death Let’s face it – nobody did death like the Victorians. From Highgate Cemetery to the high drama of seances, from Jack the Ripper to Madame Blavatsky, from Waterloo Station to Brookwood Cemetery (there was an actual train!) the Victorians invented our modern response to death, its iconography and its – yes – romance. The advent of industrialisation and the explosive expansion of the great cities had created an unprecedented problem – too many corpses, with all the squalor and disease that came with them. But alongside the practical requirements of disposal there was an increasingly sentimental attitude to the dear departed. For the Victorians, the … Continue reading
Mike Jay – Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind
Don’t knock it ’till you’ve tried it! 😉 We are familiar with some of the names: William Burroughs in the 1950’s. Timothy Leary in the ‘60’s, Hunter S Thompson in the ‘70’s, those two guys who started the craze for smoking cane-toad venom in ‘90’s. Investigators who became their own guinea pigs. But “the heroic tradition of discovery”, as Mike Jay puts it, has a much longer and more interesting history. The second half of the Nineteenth Century in particular saw the introduction of most of the substances discussed in this book, and was perhaps the golden age of getting stoned for science. The problem, of course, is that there … Continue reading
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Lawrence Krauss – The Known Unknowns: The Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos
Lawrence Krauss – Head Of Zeus – £20.00 Professor Lawrence Krauss has made major contributions to the field of theoretical physics and is one of the world’s great scientific communicators with a gift for illuminating complex ideas. His new book, The Known Unknowns makes a tour d’horizon of the frontiers of current knowledge, touching on such questions as: Is infinity real? Does the multiverse actually exist? Is quantum mechanics true? Can we create consciousness? And lots more. It is an exhilarating read, and as he writes, “Focusing on the edge of knowledge provides an opportunity to explain how far we have come…” He is also, incidentally, a dazzling close-up magician … Continue reading
Posted in Philosophy, Science
Tagged big bang, cosmos, einstein, infinity, quantam science, Schrodiger, science, time
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Rachel Gross – Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage
Rachel Gross – W W Norton – £19.99 There comes a time in every woman’s life when her body bumps up against the limits of human knowledge. In that moment, she sees herself as medicine has seen her: a mystery. An enigma. A black box that, for some reason, no-one has managed to get inside.” This was the experience of Rachel Gross, who found that the standard treatment for her own (very common) condition was practically medieval. As a science journalist her response was to research the present state of knowledge, and investigate in detail the biology and background of the female reproductive system. Vagina Obscura explores the structures, purposes … Continue reading
Dr Thomas Halliday – Otherlands: A World in the Making
Dr Thomas Halliday – Allen Lane – £20 Otherlands is a kind of travel book, traveling in time and across the globe, pushing back through the last half-billion years, showing you ever stranger beasts and more and more unfamiliar landscapes. Each chapter takes us to a location in the world that exemplifies a nexus of evolutionary change. Odd details capture your imagination and answer questions you never knew you had: In the Jurassic period, in the absence of wood-boring predators, logs lasted rather longer than they do now; Who knew? You wouldn’t have seen flowers until the Cretaceous either, a mere 145 million years ago, not to mention a world … Continue reading
Prof Francesca Stavrakopoulou – God An Anatomy
Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou – Picador – £25 “Once upon a time, in the book of Genesis, humans were made in the visual image and likeness of God. It was a social, as well as a corporeal correspondence, celebrating both the fleshly wonders of the human body and the personable presence of the deity.” So says Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou. She has written a fascinating volume, scholarly and hugely entertaining, exploring the ancient conception of the god of the bible, focussing on his corporeality and presence in his followers’ lives. Professor Stavrakopoulou is, herself, also entertaining and engaging and we have a high old time discussing her book, which illuminates our understanding … Continue reading
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Liz Williams – Miracles of Our Own Making: A History of Paganism
Liz Williams – Reaktion Books – £15.95 In her discussion of Stonehenge, Liz Williams writes: “There is a legend that Merlin simply flew the entire circle from Ireland, which I think we can rule out.” This is typical of her approach. She is not embarrassed by the unprovable, but has a robust attitude to the wilder flights of fancy. Thus, she makes judicious assessments of, for instance, claims that present magic accesses ancient knowledge (weak), and considers what we can actually know about druidic practices (not much for sure), but she does find the roots and traces of pre-christian spirituality in a culture which didn’t take notes. We are on … Continue reading
Posted in Cultural History, History, Humour, Philosophy, Religion, Science
Tagged Aleister, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Club, coven, Crowley, druid, druids, Harry Potter, Hellfire, Liz, Madame Blavatsky, magic, occult, Pagan, Paganism, potions, religion, sourcery, spells, The Golden Dawn, warlock, wika, Williams, Witch, witchcraft, wizad
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Chris Kirkham – Decoherence: A Quantum Whodunnit
Chris Kirkham – Wallace Publishing – £8.99 You have to salute a debut novel that swaggers its ambition. Boasting the subtitle “A quantum whodunnit”, Decoherence duly boasts chapters called ‘Entanglement’, ‘Wave Function’, ‘Entropy’ and so on. Our hero, Sirius Peabody, is a theoretical physicist, and his way of seeing the world is very much the substrate of this cheerful murder mystery. Chris Kirkham has great fun with this: “The whole police approach defied the laws of physics”, says Sirius at one point. And since the police are notoriously Newtonian in their approach to crime, Peabody and his new best friend, the lovely Annabelle Bronte (yes, she has a sister) feel … Continue reading
Ross Barnett – The Missing Lynx – The Past And Future Of Britain’s Lost Mammals
Ross Barnett – Bloomsbury £16.99 15,000 years ago, Britain was a very different place. The ice age was ending, and the country was lush and untamed. Sea level was then so low that Dogger Bank, in the North Sea, was then Doggerland, and our ancestors lived there, sharing the land with a dazzling variety of megafauna – big animals to you and me. And what a cast list – lions, wolves, woolly mammoths and rhinos, bears and bison and many more. For palaeontologist, Dr Ross Barnett, this was barely yesterday. Unlike the dinosaurs, people exactly like us met these animals and knew them. They have only just disappeared. By turns … Continue reading
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Robert Elliott Smith – Rage Inside The Machine – The Prejudice of Algorithms and How to Stop The Internet Making Bigots of us All
Robert Elliott Smith – Bloomsbury £20.00 In the privacy of my complacency, I am pleased to count myself moderately bright – not Stephen Fry clever but, you know, able to tie my own shoelaces and read without moving my lips. So it is bracing for me to venture from time to time into areas of learning where I find myself very much the pedestrian, and the reason I do here is because I am very interested in the matter of how algorithms impact upon our lives and in the relation between artificial intelligence and human consciousness. Rob Smith is a bona fide expert in evolutionary algorithms. He has helped create … Continue reading
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Robert Newman – Neuropolis: A Brain Science Survival Guide
Since his Entirely Accurate Encyclopaedia of Evolution, Robert Newman’s entirely iconoclastic re-examination of the evidence has excited readers and listeners with its unashamed linking of the science with wider issues, specifically socio-political ones. In his latest book, Neuropolis – a brain science survival guide, Newman targets a sub-species of pop-neuroscience that he dubs bro-science – a pessimistic, denigrating take on the brain that is based more on macho posing than on research. He sets out to destroy it using proper science. http://media.blubrry.com/timhaighreadsbooks/www.bookspodcast.com/MP3s/green-shoot_thebookspodcast_robertnewman-neuropolis.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | Embed
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Mike Jay – High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture
Our noble species has a fraught relationship with intoxicants, narcotics, stimulants and hallucinogens. We crave their mind-altering powers, but once they become woven into the fabric of our cultures, we have to either come to terms with them, or make generally futile attempts to shun them. The range of substances is breathtaking, from the completely natural – peyote, alcohol, tobacco – to the explicitly synthetic – LSD, Ecstasy and the dazzling variety of contemporary designer drugs – but what is most striking is the ubiquity of the human embrace of the possibilities of getting out of our heads. We are a junkie species. Books about drugs are catnip to Tim, … Continue reading
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