The drama behind the discovery of black holes by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, with commentary by myself and Priyamvada Natarajan. Listen below: Read more: Cosmic Journey I: “Stellar Buffoonery”

Richard Bright: The February issue aims to explore what it means (and will mean) to be human in the age of Artificial Intelligence. It would be good to start with how we define intelligence, both in terms of human intelligence and our growing understanding of animal intelligence. It is obviously a complex, multi-faceted entity, (and maybe … Read more

Pauli’s Dreams Composed by Patrick Liddell who writes: Eight transcendental works of eclectic and fantastic design, a smorgasbord of sonic delights, Pauli’s Dreams delves into the world of the subconscious, where our thoughts and hopes and dreams and fears mingle. Each song looks at dreams and reason at a different angle; the whole object being … Read more

An episode of discovery perhaps, like Albert Einstein’s discovery of relativity theory as told in the recent television series, Genius; merging politics, science and world events, as in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen; or using science as the backdrop to the plot, which is the case in Lucy Kirkwood’s Mosquitoes. What is paramount to such projects is to avoid bombarding … Read more

Trafficking in big ideas A recent book review of mine of a biography of John Horton Conway, creator of the Game of Life, discoverer of much more. Some minds never cease to fascinate. They soar over difficulties and spot connections between fields that are invisible to others. They traffic in the big ideas. The mind … Read more

The lecture from the event at Gresham College on 24 October 2013 is now available to view.  

Sciences and the arts are re-entering each other’s orbits in a burst of boundary-blurring creativity, Arthur I. Miller observes Sciart – science-inspired art – still retains something of the cachet of the underground, but it now seems poised to emerge into the light of day. Take, for example, this year’s Ars Electronica, the leading annual … Read more

Today, 17 July 2012, is the centenary of the death of the great French polymath Henri Poincaré, once described as the “last of the universalists”. His achievements span mathematics (he set the basis for chaos theory), physics (his mathematical methods are still used in studying elementary particles), philosophy (his framework for exploring scientific theories is … Read more