Stephen Hawking is now 50 years old, and has lived 25 years longer than he once expected to live. As a scientist he long ago earned the respect of his colleagues; more recently, with the...
In the old days, when organic matter was supposed to be infused with some vital spirit that distinguished it from the cold clay of the material world, and the variety of human types and the...
‘I have very high confidence that those nuclear reactors have been thoroughly damaged and will not be effective for quite some number of years,’ General Norman Schwarzkopf said on US...
It was front-page news in the United States recently when George Bush brushed away a tear as he described how he had wept while deciding to unleash the air war in the Gulf last January....
Since the rebirth of the feminist movement in the Seventies, the theory and practice of medicine, and the role of women as patients and practitioners, have been strongly contested issues in...
I have complained a lot about men in my time. In fact, I do it more and more. But I have never been part of what used to be called the women’s movement and those who have or who are, or who...
Great ideas share skulls with foolish thoughts. Nonsense runs with greatness, like vermin in a zoo, and no intellectual pesticide can guarantee to kill it and leave truth alive. Common sense has...
James Clerk Maxwell, a Scotsman who lived from 1831 to 1879, was a scientist of outstanding stature. Bearing his name, apart from the famous ‘demon’, is the set of fundamental...
We are now within reach of being able to map all the genes on the human chromosomes, some hundred thousand of them maybe, and to decipher all the genetic information that defines a human being....
An Aids epidemic is coming to South Africa. The countries with the highest Aids incidence in the world are grouped in East-Central Africa – Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda and Malawi are probably...
In February 1812, Byron stood up to speak for the first time in the House of Lords. His speech was a passionate defence of the Nottingham weavers – followers of the mythical King Ludd...
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...
The serene face of Michael Faraday radiates from all directions: first in disguised profile on a postage stamp, then more handsomely on the £20 note. Illuminating the dark warrens of the...
Two of Britain’s largest remaining nationalised industries – the Church of England and the National Health Service – have recently acquired new bosses who have publicly declared...
‘I want to draw some connections between Samuel Johnson, the amateur doctor and enthusiast for medicine, and the Doctor Johnson who figures so largely in the cultural imagination ... If we...
The author of The Emergence of Probability (1975) has written another formidable book on the history of probability theory. The first described the development in the 17th and 18th centuries of a...
The inherited instructions by which a body is built are carried from parent to offspring in molecular form, in the DNA. The instructions come in units, called genes, and for most purposes the DNA...
‘What in its fullest sense is the idea conveyed in the respective words Paper, Pen and Ink?’ asked George Wilson, a future Regius Professor of Technology at Edinburgh University. The...