Blog Post Index

How To Win an Ig Nobel Prize

A talk for the Bristol Scientific Club. a venerable institution founded 135 years ago by Lord Rayleigh. Great fun among some great scientists, one of whom (Sir Michael Berry) is a fellow Ig Nobel laureate! I'll put a link up for the talk after I have delivered it....

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So You Want To Be A Writer?

This piece that I wrote some time ago for Psychology Today bears repeating, especially given the number of questions (usually the same ones) that I get from aspiring writers. I sympathise; I was in the same position myself once. An article like this would have helped...

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Virtual food

The Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery is my favourite indulgence - old friends, good wine, great food. But this year it has to be virtual, and here I will keep a running diary of events to share. Enjoy! The header picture is from last year. That's me holding the...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Life, REF, and the half-loaf principle

One of my favourite writers is the Russian-born Englishman S.J. "Skid" Simon. Unless you are a bridge player, you have probably never heard of him, although he wrote many murder mysteries in the period before the Second World War, the best-known being "A Bullet in the...

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A scientist looks at philosophy

My first (and only) genuine philosophy article published in a genuine philosophy journal. Twenty-five years on, I am still quite proud of it! All about models and what they really mean (and don't mean). A scientist looks at philosophy IMAGE: Wikimedia Commons

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The logical way to cut a round Christmas cake

Sir Francis Galton was a Victorian explorer, statistician, student of intelligence and heredity, and all round polymath. In his role as a statistician he came up with a way to analyze the power of prayer by arguing that royalty, being prayed for so frequently in the...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Units of measurement

The calving of a huge iceberg from Antarctica is a serious issue in the context of global warming, but has also sparked an ongoing debate on the best unit of measurement to describe its size. "The size of Delaware" screamed the initial, U.S.-based news sources. "Well,...

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What is a jerk?

Even some physicists are surprised to learn that "jerk" is a scientific measure. That's right! A "jerk" is the time rate of change of acceleration, or (equivalently) the third derivative of distance with respect to time. Which reminds me of a nice story by my friend...

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My recent radio broadcasts

I live a divided life, spending half the year in Australia and the other half in the UK. While in Australia, I recorded several programmes for ABC Radio National on various aspects of the science in our lives. They are now all available on podcast. Enjoy! 1. Science...

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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...

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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...

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18. The UNscientific method. Part 1.

(Feb 3, 2017) I temporarily removed this early post because it seemed to be attracting spambots. Now re-posting. Enjoy! I am often asked the question “Is there a scientific method?” If the question means “Is there just one method that all scientists accept and use by...

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My career in poetry

I am stimulated to write this post by the news that the “celebrated American poet Joseph Charles McKenzie” has composed a poem to celebrate Donald Trump’s inauguration. The poem contains the immortal lines “With purpose and strength he came down from his tower To...

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Awkward Objects

If ever I had combined my interest in science with that in mediaeval history, this wonderful-sounding conference, taking place in Helsinki this April, would have provided the ideal vehicle. Its topic is “awkward objects” associated with the body; “including, but not...

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Vale Leonard Cohen: that’s how it goes.

Leonard Cohen has died. Perhaps he should have received a Nobel Prize, or shared one with Bob Dylan, because he certainly produced some of the most memorable descriptions of the human condition to be found anywhere. The one that sticks in my mind is this: Everybody...

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122. Are there ghosts?

In an earlier post (https://lenfisherscience.com/98-necessary-mysteries/) I wrote about necessary mysteries – concepts and ideas that are beyond our direct experience, but which scientists have been forced to accept in order to make sense of that experience. Note that...

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Are you over-exerting your brain?

In the days when I was an enthusiast for competition bridge, I read a book by the British writer Victor Mollo which featured a character called The Hideous Hog. One sentence from that book, describing the Hog’s excuse for making a mistake, has always stuck in my mind...

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Rabelais in the modern world

Rabelais's rumbustious romp with the brief title  The Heroic Deeds of Gargantua and Pantagruel was written in the sixteenth century, with the first part being written in 1532. I am lucky enough to own a limited edition illustrated by the Australia artist Francis J....

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118. Gassing on about neon

A recent article provides an exciting glimpse into one way that scientists think, although you might not think it is so exciting at first glimpse. Let the scientists speak for themselves: Neon is an abundant element in the atmosphere, but it is much scarcer on Earth...

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Brain cutlets, anyone?

In celebration of the “offal” theme at the 2016 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, here is the wonderful brain cutlet story from Lawrence Durrell’s Prospero’s Cell, a semi-fictional diary of his time on Corfu. The Count is “Count D” (probably an invented character,...

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115. A New Theory of Vacuum Cleaning

It is said that Pierre Curie could never enter his own laboratory while an experiment was in progress, because his body had become so radioactive that his mere presence discharged the sensitive electrometers. It was while pondering this story that I came up with my...

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Food and Desire

Here are the talk notes and accompanying Powerpoint Slides for the keynote talk that I gave on "Food and Desire" at the second Biennial Dublin Gastronomy Symposium (DGS) that (3-4 June 2014, Dublin Institute of Technology). It was a wonderful meeting, full of food and...

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111. Let’s dance – nano style

How can we better integrate science and the arts? Drama seems a fairly obvious medium for integration, and Michael Frayn used it effectively with his play “Copenhagen,” which dramatized the 1941 meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Dance is a lot less...

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The real dangers of Australia

Many of our European friends have expressed apprehension at the idea of visiting Australia on account of the ferocious sharks, poisonous snakes, spiders and jellyfish, etc. But the real problems lie elsewhere: Some birds laugh at you: Others look sideways...

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Will Turnbull reverse the cuts?

Nov 4, 2015  Here is the text of an open letter (submitted to Sydney Morning Herald but unpublished) to Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, drafted by me on behalf of the Royal Society of New South Wales. In a recent speech, Turnbull promised to “invest in...

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How quickly can Zombies spread?

Here's how quickly zombies could spread across the United States (http://mattbierbaum.github.io/zombies-usa/). It's just a quirky model for the spreading of different types of infection, and you can run the simulation for yourself. Think how good it would be if...

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