Tag 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
Posted in Cultural History, History, Philosophy, Religion, Science
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
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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