by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw A Review 'Black holes are perfect for learning about physics because understanding them requires pretty much all of it.' 'What happens at the singularity of a black hole is beyond current understanding.' Sometimes you think you know quite a lot about a subject, only to find, after reading another …
Category: Science
Science and Humanity
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli 'There are absolute masterpieces which move us imtensely: Mozart's Requiem; Homer's Odyssey; tha Sistine Chapel; King Lear.... Einstein's jewel, the general theory of relativity, is a masterpiece of this order.' Published around the same time as his book Reality is not what it seems, Seven Brief Lessons …
Helgoland
by Carlo Rovelli translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell 'In my own attempts to make sense of quanta for myself, I have wandered among the texts of philosophers in search of a conceptual basis with which to understand the strange picture of the world provided by this incredible theory. In doing so, I have …
A Life on Our Planet
by David Attenborough A Review There can be few people around the world who have not heard of David Attenborough. He has been involved in nature broadcasting for around seventy of his ninety-four* years. During this time, he has probably seen more of the planet than anyone else alive today. This book, A Life on …
Project Hail Mary
by Andy Weir 'I think my job is to solve the Petrova problem . . . . in a small lab, wearing a bedsheet toga, with no idea who I am, and no help other than a mindless computer and two mummified roommates.' In Project Hail Mary, Dr Ryland Grace is a thirty-something high school …
In Black and White
The Joys of the Grand Piano [Perfection of Art and Science] by Andrew G. Lockhart I have two confessions to make: I love pianos, most pianos; I hate digital keyboards. When mankind has spent three centuries designing and building a product that is, at once, delightful to look at, a joy to play and …
The Order of Time
by Carlo Rovelli A Review 'Things are transformed one into another according to necessity, and render justice to one another according to the order of time.' [Anaximander c. 570 BCE] This delightful little book makes us look again at many of the concepts we take for granted. In childhood, we learn to think of reality …
Brave New World
Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan A Review 'We create a machine with intelligence and self-awareness and push it out into our imperfect world ..... such a mind soon finds itself in a hurricane of contradiction. We may be confronting a boundary condition.' I was delighted to learn in yesterday's news that a portrait of …
Conscious!
Emily Eternal by MG Wheaton 'I sweep across the world like the break of dawn.' Emily Eternal combines cutting edge technology, speculative science and scientific fantasy in a racy thriller that doubles as a crazy love story. At the same time, it digs into the human psyche searching for answers to age-old questions. Does free …
And the Lesson for Today is ….
‘The bitter truth is that the world has simply become too complicated for our hunter-gatherer brains.’ 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari Disillusionment; Work; Liberty; Equality; Community; Civilisation; Nationalism; Religion; Immigration; Terrorism; War; Humility; God; Secularism; Ignorance; Justice; Post-Truth; Science Fiction; Education; Meaning; Meditation: What meaning do the words in this …
Bookheathen Scribblings 