The most common line of reasoning about extra-terrestrial life says it has to be there because there's so much universe - however low you calculate the probabilities of intelligent life arising, it's still a virtual certainty. However, this leads to the Fermi Paradox: If the universe must be teeming with intelligent life, Where is everyone?...   (read more)

So on the very long list of reasons why London rules is the fact that you can just turn up for things, as I did recently, like the annual Faraday Prize & Lecture at the Royal Society. Feeling very jaunty, I guess, I made so bold as to ask a question – and, worse! a metaphysical one. It made it into the video....   (read more)

In part because I'm struggling to keep my mind wrapped around the Edge books, and in part just to preserve the sense of wonder these engender (and perhaps also as antidote to the logic of human self-destruction in my latest book), I've decided to publish some excerpts. Because it's Christmas, I'm starting with a nice happy one....   (read more)

Cancer is on the verge of overtaking heart disease as our number one killer. Cancer is also primarily an environmental disease - with 80-95% of cases due to environmental factors which can be controlled....   (read more)

Following our theme of reasons for optimism, here's the estimable Robert Wright with 19 outstanding minutes on "non-zero-sumness" - a concept that may explain all of our human accomplishments to date; and which gives us very good reasons to hope that things will continue to get better....   (read more)

So I recently had occasion to re-read Steve Pinker's How the Mind Works. It is, I genuinely believe, the most important book of the 20th century....   (read more)

"How small a fraction of all the measureless infinity of time is allotted to each one of us; an instant, and it vanishes into eternity. How puny, too, is your portion of all the world's substance; how insignificant your share of all the world's soul; on how minute a speck of the whole earth do you creep." ...   (read more)

It's occurred to me maybe I should be doing more mini-book reviews. So this is the first instalment of Book Clubbing: either as in my clubbing you over the head with books (ones I've read recently and find really worthy), or as in boogying all night to the swinging sounds of really good books. Take your pick....   (read more)

Since the periodicity of my long-running quotations series has been getting asymptotic with infinity, here are the quotes that have been piling up since the last edition...   (read more)

And so in a recent correspondence with my editor, I laid out in some detail the particulars of my literary mission as I conceive it - an amplification of the ideas I put forward some time ago on my words page....   (read more)

Michael Crichton can discourse on global climate change - all kinds of people do - but you might want to consider leavening your reading of him with some scientists, or science writers, who also discourse on the subject....   (read more)

Specifically, what I mean to ponder is: Has all our scientific and technological progress - in particular, the foundation-rocking understanding of the universe and ourselves that's been granted us by cosmology, astrophysics, geology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience, etc. - has all of that grand accumulated wisdom left us without a psychic pot to piss in?...   (read more)