Mini Stories from Science
Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks: Sex, scandals and science
My home village of Blackheath in Australia's beautiful Blue Mountains boasts many beautiful gardens, none more beautiful than the fifty year-old rhododendron gardens, maintained by an enthusiastic group of volunteers who are mostly older than the gardens themselves....
Casimir and me
This mini story is about me and my last (maybe really my last) scientific paper. It is also a story of how science really works - through people, rather than structures or organizations or committees. It started with Twitter, which is a major way that I keep in touch...
143. Mercury, Shakespeare and me
Very proud to have been awarded a prize in the Royal Australian Chemical Institute's competition for Stories from the Periodic Table. Here is my winning entry: Mercury, Shakespeare and me Mercury is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature, and it exerts an...
142. A mad magnet tale
This story of the generation of an ultra-strong magnetic field (https://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/nanotechnology/magnetic-field-record-set-with-a-bang-1200-tesla) and the subsequent disaster reminds me of a story that I was told by a very prominent...
141. A world made of blueberries
My good friend and cooleague (cool colleague) Anders Sandberg has calculated what would happen if the world suddenly turned into blueberries. I offer it as an example of how scientists think; one that might be used to help schoolchildren, and even beginning university...
140. The power of curiosity: burning down houses and blowing up schools.
Polymathic scientist George Whitesides, consultant to many commercial ventures, has written a beautiful essay on the power of curiosity: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/anie.201800684 It begins with the story of how, as a child, he had heard that...
139. Why are the wealthy so wealthy and the poor so poor?
The increasing disparity of wealth in the world is a huge concern to all of us who believe in fairness and equitability. But why does it happen, and what can we do about it? In my latest broadcast for the Australian ABC Radio National Science Show, I reveal how the...
138. What is a Geiger?
Today, September 30th, is the anniversary of Hans Geiger's birth. Geiger was a student of Ernest Marsden at the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge, Shortly after he had joined, Marsden decided that it was time for him to get his hands dirty and try a "little...
137. Creepy objects
After my radio broadcast on the relics of scientists in museums around the world (http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/ockhamsrazor/preserved-scientists/8624266), I received a number of suggestions for creepy additions. So I'm starting a blog here on creepy...
136. Brilliant bacteria
Sometimes a scientific paper comes out that generates a gasp of admiration at first sight. That is true of a paper just out in Physical Review Letters “Nonlinear self-action of light through biological suspensions" (Anna Bezryadina, Zhigang Chen (San Francisco State...
135. Why is science communication failing?
Monday, July 10, 2017: Today professional science communicators are meeting in Sheffield to share experiences and develop their craft. My good friend Peter Broks has set the cat among the pigeons by posing the question "Has science communication failed?" I would put...
134. Flying Blind Into the Future
Dramatic, unforeseen change is an increasing feature of our interconnected world. But how can we prepare for it? This is a blog summary of a feature article due to appear in "The Actuary" (July edition), and on which I will be expanding in a keynote talk to the 2017...
133. How Linneaus came to London
May 23rd was Carl Linnaeus’s 320th birthday. When he died in 1778, his effects were put up for sale. Joseph Banks, then head of the Linnean Society, promptly bought his notebooks and specimens on behalf of the society.
132. A great loo story
(If any readers can tell me the origin of this, I would love to know!) Academics, and especially critics, have long been associated with “high” culture. It is only within my lifetime that their attention has increasingly been drawn towards “low” culture, with Clive...
131. The rewards of science communication
Long-time readers of these annals may recall that, when I first used the physics of biscuit dunking as a way to show how scientists think about problems. I received the following letter from a 12-year-old schoolboy: The boy's name was Chao Quan. I wrote back to him,...
130. Marching for science and marching for tax
Saturday, April 22nd saw scientists marching in the streets in over 500 cities around the world. Just the week before, another march took place in Washington; a march to decry Donald Trump's failure to release his tax returns as promised. My op-ed submitted to the...
129. On prosopagnosia and apophenia: recognizing patterns in faces and society
My latest Ockham's Razor talk for Australian ABC Radio National. How some of us can't recognize facial patterns, but how most of us fall for imaginary patterns in the real world, and what we can do about it. Here is the link to the podcast:...
128. Penile frostbite: an unexpected hazard of jogging.
The following wonderful letter appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine forty years ago. If the IgNobel Prizes had existed then, it would surely have been a leading candidate for the medicine prize. Who says that scientists don't have a sense of humor?! Penis...