Frank Close, who teaches at Exeter College, Oxford, is the author of The Void.
When yachts set sail with the tide, or people gather to witness a total eclipse of the Sun, they are trusting in Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity. For more than three hundred years his theory has proved so accurate in describing the universe that it has enabled us not only to predict tides and eclipses, but even to send spaceships to Jupiter, Saturn and beyond. One of Newton’s...
‘There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now,’ William Thomson, Lord Kelvin asserted at the British Association meeting in 1900. ‘All that remains is more and more precise measurement.’ Not to be outdone, the American scientist Albert Michelson said: ‘The grand underlying principles have been firmly established; further truths of physics are to be looked...
In the last few years the University of Utah has bestowed on the world two much-trumpeted scientific achievements, the artificial heart and cold fusion. That two such seriously cracked ideas...
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