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David Kirby’s ‘Lab Coats in Hollywood’
Dinosaur model from the 19thC, still on display in a South London park. Verisimilitude. Good word, isn’t it? It’s one of my favourites. It means ‘the appearance of being true or real’. It’s not just a...
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Book Review: Free Radicals
With his new book, Free Radicals, Michael Brooks has done something which surprised me: he’s produced a popular science version of Against Method. Against Method, if you don’t know it, is a philosophy...
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William Crookes
A picture of some shop fronts on the Caledonian Road, a little to the north of Kings Cross station. At the forefront is a slightly grubby blue sign: the Sir William Crookes charity shop. A lot of...
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Happy birthday Frank Oppenheimer!
The conservation of angular momentum being demonstrated at the Deutsches Museum, 1926. I’ve written about Frank Oppenheimer before, but as today marks the 100th anniversary of his birth, I thought he...
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Science and the greens
I’ve written a piece with Adam Corner about science and the green movement. It’s a complex issue with many components, characters, ideas and histories to weave through. Although I have a lot of...
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JD Bernal: the communist crystallographer
A small sign of political protest at the University of Sussex this morning. I was supposed to go to the JD Bernal Lecture at Birkbeck College a few weeks back; given this year by David Willetts. Except...
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Should scientists be bolder in public?
I spoke at the London Climate Forum this weekend. This is a rough sketch of what I said. Jeremy Grantham is the investor behind the “Grantham Institute” centres for climate change research at Imperial...
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John Hayes MP and the bourgeois
Gove-themed streetart, Brighton. Our energy minister John Hayes seems to enjoy the word “bourgeois”. I don’t blame him, it’s a fun word to say. Back in October, he described the idea of onshore wind...
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Troll Below? Science policy below the line.
Some streetart on a bridge in Dublin I have an essay in James Wilsdon and Rob Doubleday’s collection: “Future directions for scientific advice in Whitehall” (downloadable for free). It’s an invitation...
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The incredible adventures of Professor Branestawm
This is an edited version of a paper just published in Knowledges in Publics, edited by Lorraine and Simone Locke. Professor Branestawm meets his childhood self, W Heath Robinson, 1933 The incredible...
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