Harry Kroto and Michael Reiss (Part 3)

(This is Post 3 in a series of 3. See also the first post and second post.).
In response to the Michael Reiss affair, Harold Kroto has claimed that his sacking was necessary since Reiss (along with all religious people) show their lack of intellectual honesty by claiming religious knowledge.
Is religious knowledge possible? Surely, it is [...]

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Harry Kroto and Michael Reiss (Part 2)

(This is Post 2 in a series of 3. The first post can be found here.).
In response to the Michael Reiss affair, Harold Kroto has claimed that his sacking was necessary since Reiss (along with all religious people) show their lack of intellectual honesty by claiming to know anything that cannot be subjected to scientific [...]

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Harry Kroto and Michael Reiss (Part 1)

(This is Post 1 in a series of 3).
It’s been a while since I posted about the Michael Reiss affair, but I only just found a response to the controversy in the Guardian by Sir Harold Kroto. He is a Nobel Laureate in chemistry for discovering new kinds of carbon. I’ll respond to Kroto in [...]

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When is science valid?

John Quiggin links to a veritable open sandwich of reports and articles on scientific methodology, particularly in the context of climate change. One document in particular, by Ken Baldwin and entitled When is science valid?, is very much worth reading (it’s only three pages; as they say in the ads in Britain: go on, you [...]

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Spreading wings

A quick post to celebrate Duncan’s forging outward: his new blog is Well-bred Insolence, covering extrasolar planets, astrobiology and I expect some politics too, because frankly you can’t keep the Scots out of it. The amusing byline is ‘Forming Planets… and Opinions,’ and the blog is sure to attract a good readership before long—so get [...]

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Against impact

Because I spend insufficiently little time feeling as though I’m still an undergraduate, may I politely agitate for others to follow the advice of Chris Bertram:

Those of you working in higher education in the UK already know about the barbarous proposal to make future support for research depend on a government assessment of its “impact” [...]

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Some Memes are more Virulent than Others…

I promised in my first post to talk about my experiences with the press (and I now promise to talk about something non-aliens related in my next post!).  The controversial nature of the work in question (and the mention of aliens) attracts the media with ease. So here it is, a retrospective on a rather [...]

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Guest Post: Numerical Astrobiology – surprisingly, not an oxymoron…

Firstly, a thank you to Berian for graciously allowing me to post here.  Secondly, an apology: this first post is a shocking six months late.  This was going to be an exclusive scoop for an exciting, current science item that was making waves in the blogosphere, and sparking passionate responses of every shape and hue.  [...]

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Dark Matter

On the arXiv yesterday was a twenty-five page review of the topic of dark matter by Jaan Einasto*, at a good level for suggesting to interested non-experts. It covers briskly the historical progress of ideas, but with some weight put on the period of activity in the 1970s that focussed on the aggregate dynamics of [...]

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Great Ball Contraption Trio

Via a gmail status message of O. X. Dive, a modular implementation of those Himalayas of engineering, the Great Ball Contraption:

There is (a non-lego) one in the Questacon at the Parliamentary Triangle and it was definitely one of my favourite exhibits as a young enthusiast of science and symmetry, along with [...]

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