Beamlines

Recently on Real Clear Science, Ross Pomeroy published an article Why Nothing Can Be Truly ‘Unnatural’, in which he denounces attempts to oppose homosexuality on scientific grounds.  However, after reading it, I am left with the feeling that he is not simply reporting science, but perhaps being a little bit like an old-fashioned nanny telling her charges what is or is not proper.  If so, he will be firing a shot in

Are ancient remedies any good?  In scholarly circles the middle of the 20th Century, they didn’t seem to think so.  For example:‘Survey the mass of folly and credulity that makes up Anglo-Saxon leechdoms, it may be asked: “Is there any rational element here? Is the material based on anything that we may reasonably describe as experience?” The answer to both questions must be “Very little”.’ [1]But in the last few days we have been reading

News that will disappoint loads of children:

Will the medicines you take make their way back into your food?  They might, especially of you take your cue from an old Yorkshire song which deals with human recycling in the food chain, via worms and ducks.  Now, research [1] from the university of York (where else?) has studied one step of this process in detail.

was the title of a history book I had as a boy.  Good things, in their way — without them, I wouldn’t be able to sit here talking to you all and meeting some very interesting people online.  But some decidedly unpleasant customers do all too often hitch a ride.

I’ve often wondered about the Scopes trial, and wanted to read a good account of it.  I was recommended the account by Edward J. Larson in When Science and Christianity Meet, edited by DC Lindberg and RL Numbers (ISBN 0226482162).  .  It’s a very informative book, and wide-ranging too: out of 12 chapters, only one on Galileo and one on Darwin.

Recently this headline on Real Clear Science caught my eye: Carbon-12 Nucleus Shaped Like Equilateral Triangle.  It led to an article in Physics World, entitled

I have seen creeping into recent discussions of the TV show ‘Cosmos’ the idea that we scientists, because of our greater knowledge and understanding of how the natural world works, will somehow be intrinsically better when it comes to dealing with matters of ethics, politics or religion.  I beg to differ.

A Star that seems Brighter when EclipsedThis paradoxical phenomenon was brought to my attention by a recent article in Physics World.  Quite an informative article, but like some bard of old, with legendary tales of kings and heroes, I would like to tell it as a story, in three episodes.    1: Variable Star

Germans:
‘We’ve found second solar system’
This sounds like something from a
science fiction comic when I was young, back in the days when Dan Dare was with
Spacefleet, which was effectively the RAF in Space before the Russians and
Americans took over.However, this bit of news is quite contemporary. 
According to one of my favourite online newspapers*, a team of German scientists
claim to have discovered a “second solar system” made up of seven planets
orbiting a star similar to our own.

Since I retired three years ago, I have been becoming almost as sessile as a sea squirt, sitting in front of my computer, reading not just news but comment and what people are thinking about things.  Among the ‘things’, women’s equality is very much to the front these days.

In the 19th century,
following the Enlightenment, the process of secularization seemed to be on a
slow but unstoppable roll.  One consequence of this was the development of a
view of history, whereby religion in general, Christianity in particular, and
above all the Roman Catholic church, assumed the rôle of the enemy of all
progress, and progress was by definition good.  Clerics were pictured as Asuras
(in Hindu epic titanic beings perpetually at war with the Devas or gods) always
opposing the scientists with their own Clerisy.