“How to make a Feynman”

. . . [Feynman's father's] approach was . . . intuitive and subtle. He never taught facts so much as questions. He encouraged young Richard to identify not what he knew, but rather what he did not know. This is the essence of Richard Feynman’s style of understanding. By absolutely asking [...]

Saturn’s 25,000km hexagon

This image (NASA/JPL/University of Arizona) from Cassini’s infrared camera shows a hexagonal formation close to Saturn’s North pole (see this post for a similarly stunning image of Saturn’s South pole). This pattern, so large that four Earths could fit inside, has endured for at least 26 years. It is so staggeringly beautiful and awesome that [...]

Scientific fraud

Another rare case of scientific fraud uncovered by New Scientist magazine.
Science is still the only way of understanding at the world which has robust self-checking and sceptical error-correcting practices. Scientists are human, and are sometimes weak in the face of today’s huge publish-or-perish pressures. (By contrast, even Feynman seems only to have published at a [...]

Pay attention

From a post in a Scientific American “seminar blog”:
Isaac Newton attributed his genius to his “patient attention,” and Yale economist Robert J. Shiller, seconding that thought 300 years later (in 2000), declared that “the ability to focus attention on important things is a defining characteristic of intelligence.” If attention accounts for much of what we [...]

Mapping E8

This is the structure which made it onto the Beeb. Pretty, isn’t it? The image was downloaded from a New Scientist article here (Image: John Stembridge, based on a drawing by Peter McMullen [I wonder if this is the McMullen who used to lecture me at UCL.])

Maths on Aunty

Math makes it onto the BBC!

Brights of many stripes

There are brights of many stripes, from the livid hues of vehement anti-religionists like Richard Dawkins, through the pale pastels of more moderate secularists, all the way out to the indistinct colourations of a few religious people who nevertheless welcome the secularization of society. I find myself more in the middle of this muddle, but [...]

Like noodles in soup - the universe

A recent New Scientist news piece, “The universe is a string-net liquid“, details how a new form of matter may have been predicted by refusing to accept the “fundamental” nature of basic particles. (Note that the strings in question have nothing to do with string theory, wonderfully summarised here.)

Sea squirts and embodied minds

A sea squirt can regenerate its entire body from a fragment of blood vessel. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see if the regenerated sea squirt had memories (i.e. learned behaviours) inherited from the old body?

Blogging the God particle

Blogs and blogging. If you weren’t interested, you wouldn’t be here.
Science and the communication of science. If you weren’t interested, you wouldn’t be here.
One of the most important discoveries of modern physics may be happening right now (these things take time), and the tantalising clues have been revealed in blogs. Read all about it.
(The Institute [...]