homunculus

This graphic from New Scientist , and conversations last night at the Science Museum, got me thinking. Using Schrödinger’s cat as a way t...

It was fun to write this piece for Nautilus on who would have made some of the great discoveries in science if their actual discoverers ha...

These were my comments on Hisham Matar’s book The Return for the Baillie Gifford Prize award event on 15 November. The prize, for which ...

Did the First Emperor of China import sculptors from classical Greece to help build the Terracotta Army? That’s the intriguing hypothesis ...

This is the catalogue essay to accompany the exhibition Metachromes by Brazilian artist Vik Muniz at Ben Brown Fine Arts in London, 6 Oc...

In the wake of the most ugly nationalism we have seen from a British government for some decades, here’s my oh-so-topical column on music ...

This is a longer version of a comment in the latest issue of Research Fortnight . It took a while, and inevitably events have somewhat moved...

Is anyone any longer in any serious doubt that the leaders of the Brexit campaign feel they can just come out with whatever fact-free, delir...

Here's an expanded version of my news story for Nature on Google's new quantum computer. It's a somewhat complicated story, so...

The latest issue of the Italian science magazine Sapere is all about food. So this seemed a fitting theme for my column on music cognition....

The 40th anniversary of the publication of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene is a cause for celebration, as I’ve said . This anniversary h...

How’s your classical mechanics? Mine’s a bit crap. That’s why I’m having trouble working out the following question. You have a cylinder t...

I worry much more than I should about whether embryos have souls. That’s to say, I worry about how those folks who believe that at some stag...

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...