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Someday this crazy world will have to end
The editor of 3 Quarks Daily, S. Abbas Raza, has kindly invited me to write a regular Monday Column for his excellent site. My first one is available here and on 3QD. The other day I had an email from...
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Science and the cinema
This week's issue of the Times Literary Supplement contains my review of two intriguing but rather different books: H.G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies, by Keith Williams (Liverpool UP, 2007), and...
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Utopia on the sidewalk
I write a Monday Column every couple of months for 3 Quarks Daily. This is the latest one. For a time, in the summer of 1933, the scientist who invented the first weapon of mass destruction – poison...
View ArticleFaust, the Physicists & the Atomic Bomb
The Publications of the English Goethe Society (vol 77, no 2, 2008, 101-12) has just published my paper "Faust, the Physicists and the Atomic Bomb", based on a lecture I gave to the Society in 2006....
View ArticleThe gifts that destroy #2
I've just found out that the quotation is from RS Thomas' poem The Hearth. It's beautiful, well worth reading. These are the final lines: "...and outside Us is time and the victims Of time, travellers...
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Faust and the physicists
I write a Monday Column every couple of months for 3 Quarks Daily. Previous posts are collected here. This is the latest one. “the point is…this is exactly what happened in Vietnam…a technological...
View ArticleSaving mankind from war
Christopher Hirst at The Independent has reviewed the paperback of Doomsday Men: "Humane and highly readable, this book concerns a black subject: the destruction of humanity (or a good chunk of it)."...
View ArticleSaviours and villains
The leading historian of science fiction Professor David Seed, author of American Science Fiction and the Cold War (1999) among other titles, has written a nice review of Doomsday Men for the Modern...
View ArticleTwo legs good, four legs better, six legs brilliant
The Guardian has just printed my review of three books on the way science has used and sometimes misused animals and insects: Pavlov's Dogs and Schrödinger's Cat: Scenes from the Living Laboratory, by...
View ArticleSurvival of the swiftest
"In his dystopian novel The Sleeper Awakes, begun in 1899, HG Wells portrayed a future world in which vast machine-like cities were linked by air travel. Since then, no vision of the urban future has...
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