I was going to call this post ‘lovin’ a good boffin’, but it felt too much like a double entendre.  The term 'boffin' is an outdated British term for a scientist, which now only crops up in tabloid newspapers. It's an affectionate term, but with an element of mad scientist about it. For some time now, the Institute of Physics has been running a campaign to 'bin the boffin'. In a Physics World article , Rachel Youngman puts the case for binning the boffin: 'We believe that boffin is a lousy way to talk about scientists. The term has negative impacts – it is poorly understood, strongly associated with the male gender and is confusing. When we surveyed our members last year, they told us that the term was unhelpful and inaccurate, with younger members stating it actively puts them off science.' You might wonder, if they were put off science what they're doing being members of the Institute of Physics, but that's a different story. I love the Institute o

The premise of this novel is excellent - it's a cross between House of Cards and The Circle . A tech company is attempting to get its flying cars off the ground (both literally and metaphorically). The company's erratic CEO has brought in a political lobbying company, because it's no easy job to get permission for flying cars in the skies of a city (their initial targets are New York, Los Angeles and Austin). Meanwhile it's also no easy job to get the car to fly safely at all. Bradley Tusk - who has been both a political operator and a venture capitalist, so has an ideal background - brings to the fore the two people at the top of the lobbyists - the ruthless Nick and his number two, Lisa (arguably the main protagonist), Susan the CEO, and her chief engineer, Yevgeny. They join a large cast of characters from FBI agents to corrupt city mayors and union bosses. Tusk also gives a very cynical (but probably accurate) picture of the totally self-serving nature of US politi

My favourite comic strip of all time is The Perishers . Published in the Daily Mirror from the late 50s until 2006 it could be taken at first glance as something of a Peanuts rip-off. After all, it features only children and animals - and the central characters are a boy and his dog (whose thoughts are revealed to be very human-like). However, in reality the feel and the humour is totally different and entirely British. At its best, The Perishers  is a total delight. One of the strip's features is a series of running jokes, some of which carried on for decades. For example, on summer holiday excursions, the characters regularly take a look in a rock pool, where the crabs believe they are being visited by their equivalent of UFOs which they refer to as 'the eyes in the sky', often having failed protests or attempts to take on the invaders. Other continuing jokes are just small features that bring on a smile, one being the teddy belonging to Baby Grumpling, a cynical toddler

I'm delighted to say that I'll be giving my talk based on my new book Interstellar Tours at the Royal Institution in London on 16 March 2024 (see the Ri website for details/booking). Speaking at the Royal Institution is always something of a thrill. When I first gave a talk there, they had a terrifying introduction. It went something like this. 'Welcome to the Royal Institution, where lectures to improve the public understanding of science have been given since 1800. Ten of the chemical elements were either discovered or first isolated here. Michael Faraday lectured many times from this very desk. Now Brian Clegg is going to talk to you...' For the pedants amongst you, it's now reasonably widely known that the desk was reconstructed - nonetheless it was certainly the same space with a very similar desk. It was a distinct challenge to follow that. Now they're a little less scary to their speakers, but even so there's a certain necessity to perform well that

I was wandering around a bookshop the other day (after the obligatory check to see if they had my latest in stock), and was struck by a significant difference between the general fiction books and the science fiction section*. In the general fiction, there were plenty of classics. Books that we may now feel are a little dated in some ways, but nonetheless are great works of fiction and deserve to be read still. But amongst the science fiction, apart from a few Asimovs and the inevitable Dune (for obvious movie reasons), most of the great names of the past were simply missing. This feels wrong. I don't think my reaction is pure nostalgia. Admittedly, not every past SF title has aged well. But, for instance, the last two SF books I've read were by Pohl & Kornbluth and Bester respectively, and both were still far more engaging than whatever this week's Brandon Sanderson title is. For that matter, many of the classics aren't good pieces of writing when measured by some

In their 2010 book The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow told us that there was no longer any need for philosophy because science was ready to answer all the big questions. I thought they were wrong at the time, and reading the book Why? by Philip Goff underlines how valuable good philosophy (I am the first to admit that the field contains plenty of hot air - I'm not talking about all philosophy) can be. I'll be reviewing the book on the Popular Science website, but I wanted to pick out one example of where taking what you might call a mathematically philosophical view neatly disposes of a piece of cosmological sophistry that has always got on my nerves. I have often seen the fine tuning of the universe used an argument for the multiverse existing. Many variables of nature have to have values very close to the ones we observe if life is to exist. It's not generally considered scientific to attribute this fine tuning to some sort of divine or panpsychic c