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Browse through my articles on What is Science About?
Scientific Pioneers
Times Higher Education Supplement, October 2004
For scientific pioneers, ridicule is an occupational hazard. The early aviation pioneers were ridiculed by the then President of the Royal Society, Lord Kelvin, who declared in 1895 that ‘Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.' British proponents of space travel suffered similarly at the hands of the Astronomer Royal, Sir Harold Spencer Jones, who famously announced that ‘space travel is bunk' – two weeks before the launch of Sputnik...
The Image of Science
New Statesman, November 2002
I recently walked into my village post office carrying a copy of "New Scientist". Our village postmaster took one look at the magazine and burst out " ‘New Scientist!' Making atom bombs in your bathroom, har, har!"...
Blind Plateau
New Scientist, October 2001
Your correspondent Cindee Bulthaupt asks whether there have been any successful blind scientists. There certainly have. One of the most famous was the Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau (1801 – 1883), inventor of the stroboscope. At the age of 28 he gazed at the midday sun for 20 seconds, with a view to studying the after effects. These turned out to be temporary blindness for several days, followed by a gradual deterioration of vision and permanent blindness at the age of 42. Despite this calamity, he continued his researches on subjective visual phenomena (!) for the next forty years. His wife and son (and later his son-in-law G.L. van der Mensbrugghe) performed the experiments, which he devised and interpreted...
The Hard Problems
Annals of Improbable Research, Special Physics Issue, June (?) 2001
Question: Produce your favorite short list of seemingly mundane physics questions that seem, so far, too hard for anyone to have solved. These should be about phenomena that ANYONE can see in everyday life...
Scientific Spectacles
Times Higher Education Supplement, October 1999
This article, published in the Times Higher Education Supplement in October 1999, was one of my first in which I advanced the proposition that science belongs along with literature, philosophy and art in our culture as a way of understanding how the world works. I still hold by most of what I said then...
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