Science

Made me buzz like an electron: Science – Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda reviewed

Given my affection for M*A*S*H, I can’t think why I haven’t listened to Alan Alda’s podcasts before now, besides the fact that they look quite uninviting. There is Clear+Vivid, on the power of communication, and Science: Clear+Vivid, on the power of scientific research. As someone who used to fall asleep listening to cassettes for A-Level physics, I am not easily excited by protons, and was prepared to give the latter particularly short shrift. Five hours on, however, Alda is still in my ears, and I am buzzing like an electron. Unlike many presenters, Alda, 85, doesn’t pretend not to know something just so that his interviewee will explain it to

Fact check: what caused the German floods?

As a study in how hysteria develops, the reporting of World Weather Attribution study into last month’s floods in the Rhineland could hardly be bettered. You will no doubt have heard or seen headlines over the past couple of days claiming that climate change made the floods ‘up to nine times’ more likely. Some even ran without the ‘up to’ — such as the Times, which reported with apparent confidence: ‘Deadly floods nine times likelier in warmer climate’. What ordinary readers are less likely to have done is to have read the study itself. Needless to say, it paints a very different picture of the event and any causal link

How the Lancet lost our trust

Right from its first issue in 1823, the Lancet was more than just an ordinary medical journal. Its founding editor, the dyspeptic surgeon and coroner Thomas Wakley, purposefully gave the journal the name of a sharp scalpel that could cut away useless, diseased tissue: he used it as a campaigning organ, to push back against injustice, bad ideas and bad practice. What bothered Wakley most was the establishment. Not only did the Royal College of Surgeons care little about quacks and snake-oil salesmen, but its members were also engaged in corruption and nepotism, ensuring that their cronies got the best positions and filling their pockets with lecture fees. Wakley wrote

An orange or an egg? Determining the shape of the world

Thirty-two years ago the young Nicholas Crane, who would go on to become one of England’s most esteemed television geographers, set out to woo a young woman by spiriting her off to the unfailingly romantic landscape of Chimborazo and Cotopaxi. The couple spent their high-altitude idyll walking the hills in hobnail boots, making river passage in dugout canoes and boarding a Quito-bound steam train through the Andes, run by the estimable Empresa de Ferrocarriles Ecuatorianos. Their journey had its moments: at one stage both parties were to be found at 13,000 feet, crusted with ice and huddled overnight from the gales inside a pair of plastic rubbish bags; they then

Stephen Hawking: the myth and the reality

I could never muster much enthusiasm for the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. His work, on the early universe and the nature of spacetime, was Nobel-worthy, but those of us outside his narrow community were horribly short-changed. His 1988 global bestseller A Brief History of Time was incomprehensible, not because it was difficult but because it was bad. Nobody, naturally, wanted to ascribe Hawking’s popular success to his rare form of motor neurone disease, Hawking least of all. He afforded us no room for horror or, God forbid, pity. In 1990, asked a dumb question about how his condition might have shaped his work (because people who suffer ruinous, debilitating illnesses

If you want a play that brings girls into science, commission a man: Jina and the STEM Sisters reviewed

Jina and the STEM Sisters is a blatant act of propaganda. And its intentions are excellent. This is a musical puppet show that sets out to encourage girls of eight and older to take up careers in science where women remain under-represented. The heroine, Jina, is a schoolgirl who embarks on a hike through a dark forest haunted by ghosts and demons. It’s not clear to the viewer why she’s there or where she’s going. And she hasn’t a clue either. Perhaps the forest represents the world of intellectual repression she inhabits. ‘I ask a lot of questions,’ Jina tells us. ‘They say, “too many questions”.’ That’s an odd start.

Letters: What really irritates Meghan’s critics

Meghan’s adroitness Sir: Tanya Gold suggests that people criticise Meghan Markle because she is mixed race and a woman, and states it is because she has dared to attack the royal family (‘In defence of Meghan’, 13 March). I think that misses the point. For a great number of people, her narrative simply does not ring true. Over the past few decades, thousands of media articles have accused the royal household of being claustrophobic, pedantic and antiquated. But unlike the young and naive Diana, Meghan was a thirtysomething TV star with agents and PR people when she met Prince Harry. It’s hard to believe she didn’t know what she was

What does science say about souls?

Until the mid 19th Century, most of us believed that we had a soul. It was what separated us from the animals. This belief could be modified to accommodate slavery, Malthusian economics and to allow dogs into Heaven, but the principle was pretty stable. A hundred years later, thanks largely to Darwin, and innovations such as quantum mechanics and Auschwitz, such a view seemed childlike, romantic, or in the case of the Clergy, downright dogged. The ‘soul’ became just another invention of the under-informed, over-excited primitive imagination, like faeries, Valhalla and insidious whispering serpents. We have Science now. Yet ask a scientist to explain consciousness, the thing it feels like to be,

Science is not an instrument of patriarchal oppression

Safe spaces, diversity quotas, gender-neutral pronouns, culturally relative facts, heteronormative hegemony. Are my right-on credentials right on enough? Am I sufficiently penitent for being white, cis and male? Will I be cancelled or de-platformed by the Pronoun Police? What is my woke-quotient? At least as far as science is concerned, it’s a satisfactory zero. Science is not a patriarchal instrument of colonial oppression. Nor is it a social construct. It’s simply true. Or at least truth is real and science is the best way we have of finding it. ‘Alternative ways of knowing’ may be consoling, they may be sincere, they may be quaint, they may have a poetic or

Lloyd Evans

Grotesquely plodding: Late Night Staring At High Res Pixels reviewed

The Finborough’s new show is a love story with the male partner absent. Two women, one Irish and one American, explain their feelings for a London businessman, aged 45, who seems to be connected with the fashion trade. The women, known as ‘I’ and ‘A’, have different functions. ‘I’ is a young Irish model and ‘A’ is the absent man’s co-worker. Both are besotted with him for obscure reasons. We know nothing about him except that he visits east London every Sunday to devour his parents’ roast dinner. ‘A’ attends these meals but ‘I’ is excluded so she texts him snaps of her boobs instead. The women aren’t remotely troubled

The Egyptians knew the value of accidental discoveries

The government has plans to fund a new research agency to back ‘cutting-edge science’. Ptolemaios (Ptolemy) I (367-282 bc), the first Greek king of Egypt, had a similar idea. When Alexander the Great died in 323 bc, his ramshackle ‘empire’ fell apart, and the generals he had left in charge of each region promptly turned themselves into autonomous kings. Egypt’s new king Ptolemy I decided to make Egypt’s ‘capital’ Alexandria the greatest cultural and scientific centre in the world, and the resultant ‘Museum’ became the world’s first scientific research institute. Wielding their cheque-books, the Ptolemies persuaded the finest minds of the day to sign up. These included Euclid, who invented

Memory – and the stuff of dreams

Can you remember when you heard about 9/11? Chances are you’ll be flooded instantly with memories — not only where you were, but what you were doing, who you were with, what you could smell and see at the time as well as how you felt. How does that happen? In the first half of this fascinating book, Dr Veronica O’Keane explains the neurological pathways and processes involved in memory. We are constantly receiving stimuli from our environment via the five senses of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. These sensations travel via cells called neurons which are electrically activated and release various transmitters into the spaces between them and

Letters: Is cycling really conservative?

Veritas vincit Sir: Professor Dawkins eloquently and engagingly defines true truth for us (‘Matters of fact’, 19 December). It seems to me that ‘true’ is a poor little four-letter word with a heavier workload than is reasonable. Historic truth may include ascertainable facts, which I suppose he would pass, but combined with conclusions based on available evidence or ‘true-to-life’ conjecture. Theological truth combines historic fact with unassailable moral principle and a journey of imagination beyond the reach of experience. It cannot be called untrue — only unproven. Perhaps we need to find a word with more gravitas than ‘truth’ for the scientists. I suggest ‘veritas’ — as found in vino.Charles

A singular mind: Roger Penrose on his Nobel Prize

Sir Roger Penrose was at school when he realised that his mind worked in an unusual way. ‘I thought, maybe when I go to university, I’ll find people who think like me,’ he tells me, at the beginning of what was to be a fascinating conversation, stretching long into the afternoon. ‘But it wasn’t like that at all. When I would talk to someone about an idea, I found myself not understanding a word they were saying.’ Just after we spoke, in early December, Penrose received the Nobel Prize in Physics, so perhaps it’s no surprise that he should think a little differently. But, as he explained it to me,

The insidious attacks on scientific truth

What is truth? You can speak of moral truths and aesthetic truths but I’m not concerned with those here, important as they may be. By truth I shall mean the kind of truth that a commission of inquiry or a jury trial is designed to establish. I hold the view that scientific truth is of this commonsense kind, although the methods of science may depart from common sense and its truths may even offend it. Commissions of inquiry may fail, but we assume a truth lurking there even if we don’t have enough evidence. Juries sometimes get it wrong and falsehoods are often sincerely believed. Scientists too can make mistakes

Christiaan Huygens – hero of time and space

This book, soaked like the Dutch Republic itself ‘in ink and paint’, is enchanting to the point of escapism. The author calls it ‘an interior journey into a world of luxury and leisure’. It is more than that. What he writes of Christiaan Huygens’s milieu is true also of his book: ‘Like a Dutch interior painting, it turns out to contain everything.’ Hugh Aldersey-Williams says that Huygens was the first modern scientist. This is a delicate argument to make: the word ‘scientist’ didn’t enter the English language before 1834. And he’s right to be sparing with such rhetoric, since a little of it goes a very long way. What inadvertent

Unpleasant smells can actually enhance pleasure

Harold McGee’s Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells is an ambitious and enormous work. Indeed it’s so large, at 654 pages and weighing nearly a kilo, that I could only manage to read it at the kitchen table — which made me appreciate its wipe-clean binding. Its distinctive new-book smell (there is such a thing) contrasts mightily with the musty, familiar old-book scent of my study. As I walk through the house, I detect the not entirely agreeable whiff of last night’s wood fire in the sitting-room, but this gives way to the snap-to-attention aroma of just-made coffee, the fragrance of the sliced banana and apple in

The solving of a biological mystery

DNA is the blueprint that encodes the instructions to make proteins. Proteins are the building blocks and the machines that power life. And proteins make up the tissue that in turn comprise the organs and muscles that make up us. Considering how crucial proteins are to life itself, there is still so much we do not know about them. But Google’s AI firm Deepmind may just have helped us make a giant leap forward. When a protein is first made inside a living cell, it is merely a chain of connected amino acids — like beads on a string. Yet, it instantaneously folds into unique three-dimensional, beautiful shapes, which enable

The dangers of unconscious bias training

To read the press releases, you would think we’ve found the panacea to racism in the form of unconscious bias training. Numerous organisations, including the Labour party, have announced they would be putting their staff through such programmes. This follows in the footsteps of the civil service, which has required all civil servants to undertake unconscious bias training since 2018, magistrates, for whom the training is compulsory, and the Met police, where it forms part of ongoing officer training. Google, Facebook, the FTSE 100, government departments — including the Ministry of Defence and Ministry of Justice — and non-profits proudly advertise the programmes they put their staff through. But the

Why I will wear a face mask

We are enjoined by certain experts to wear face masks while having sexual intercourse. No change there, then, for me. It’s the only way I’m allowed it. I don’t even get to choose my own mask. My wife keeps several in a cupboard under the stairs. If, when I retire to bed, I see the face of Benito Mussolini or Douglas Murray neatly laid out on my pillow — or, for more exotic excursions, the late President Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Ceylon — I know that fun times are ahead. This usually happens twice a year — on my birthday and on Walpurgisnacht. I don’t know if these largely latex creations