homunculus

One of the easiest ways to bring humour to music is with timbre. It’s cheap (literally) but still funny to play Led Zeppelin’s “ Whole Lotta...

Here's my column for the March issue of Nature Materials . _________________________________________________________ Recycling of m...

I’ve been rereading Max Tegmark’s 1997 paper on the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, written in response to an informal pol...

Here's my music psychology column from the latest issue of Sapere magazine. ______________________________________________ Does Ale...

Never read the comments, they say, and indeed it’s often a depressing experience. But it can be instructive too. I’m a little astonished, bu...

Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene was a landmark book in many ways: the first to lay out for a general audience the gene-centred view of ev...

Here’s my review of Frank Wilczek’s book A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design , which appeared in Physics World last year. ...

Shawn Burdette’s blog post on element-naming has some nice things in it, but I wonder if he appreciates that the entire discussion around t...

I always enjoy Roger Scruton’s writing on music, even when I disagree with him vehemently. That holds true for his piece on the role of phi...

I can fully understand that Eric Scerri, who has done so much to explain, popularize and clarify the periodic table, would object to my sug...

To cite Kant in defence of the “Enlightement values” of freedom of speech, democratic representation, universal equality and so forth, as Ni...

David Wootton has sent me some responses to the accusations made by some of the reviewers of his book The Invention of Science , including ...

Here is a longer version of the leader that I wrote for Nature this week. ______________________________________________________________...

There’s a very interesting post (if you’re a science writer) on journalistic ethics from Erik Vance here . I confess that I’ve been blissful...

This summer I went to one of the most extraordinary scientific gatherings I’ve ever attended. Where else would you find Martin Rees, Rolf Ha...