One of the dangers of being a science writer is that I'm not a working scientist in the fields I write about, and though I try to make sure my facts are up to scratch, there will always be errors that slip through the net. Luckily, readers are good at spotting these, and email me to point them out. I've had an email from a reader who say that he enjoyed reading my book on quantum physics and its applications, The Quantum Age , but identified an error when I was talking about the use of electric motors in ships. In the book, I said existing electric motors simply can’t be scaled up to the size required to power a full-sized ocean-going ship . I had misread an Institute of Physics report, saying that its not possible to have low transmission loss motors at this scale, not that it’s not possible to have them at all. As my correspondent pointed out: Electric motors have been used for ship propulsion since the 19th century. In 1987 the QE2 was fitted with 2 x 44MW electric ...

One of the best things about speaking at the recent Manx Litfest (of which more soon) was attending some of the other author events, including one by Joanne Harris, talking about her new book The Gospel of Loki . This is a beautifully conceived bit of fantasy writing. The idea is that we already have the 'authorised version' of the history of the Norse gods, as provided primarily by Odin in the form of the familiar Norse myths, but inevitably they are biased to Odin's viewpoint. This book is the version according to Loki, traditionally the bad guy in the myths. Of course, Loki is an inveterate liar and trickster, so it's essential to take his words with a pinch of salt, but they are all the more entertaining because of this. Harris sets out to get under the skin of this archetypal villain, to see why he might have acted the way the myths have him behave. Apparently some fans (particularly US fans of the comic book version) have complained because it's ...

The Bayesian approach to statistics is a fascinating subject, which I cover at some length in my book Dice World . What Bayes theorem enables you to do is to improve an estimate of the chances of something happening when you have additional information, and to use one set of probabilities to calculate another linked one. This can be extremely useful and powerful when, for instance, calculating the effectiveness of disease screening tests, which can be very confusing due to wildly varying conditional probabilities. It's worth getting your head around a bit of probability symbology to get on top of this. In these simple formulae, the '|' sign is read as 'given'. So, for instance if I have a test that will flag up the presence of a disease 90% of the time, which isn't too bad, I can write that as P (Positive result | Disease ) = 90% - the probability of a positive result in the test, given the person has the disease, is 90%. The problem comes, and sadly th...

Two news stories have really irritated me this weekend, and since one is anti-Labour and one is anti-Tory, we even have a good, BBC-style, political balance. The first was the press outrage that the Leader of the Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, was not going to attend a rugby match. I'm sorry, it's a game. Get over it. I don't give a stuff. I want my politicians sorting out important political stuff, not acting as celebrities by turning up at some event that has no significance whatsoever. The second is that the Prime Minister, David Cameron, may have done something stupid as a young man involving a dead pig. (If you want to see some magnificent, but sometimes amusing over-reaction, take a look at the hashtag #piggate on Twitter.) This is doubly crass. First, once again, I want a senior politician focussed on the serious problems that the country and the world face, not on a silly story. But also how many of us can honestly say 'I never did something stupid between the...

In the book I'm writing at the moment I'm considering the relationship of the arrow of time to entropy, the measure of the disorder in a system that comes out of the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy can be calculated by looking at the number of different ways to arrange the components that make up a system. The more ways there are to arrange them, the greater the entropy. As an example of why this is the case, I was talking about the letters that go together to make up that book, and the very specific arrangement of them required to be that actual book. Assuming that there will be about 500,000 characters including spaces in the book by the time it's finished, then there are 500,000! ways of arranging those characters. That's 500,000 factorial, which is 500,000x499,999x499,998x499,997... - rather a big number. It's not practical to calculate the number exactly, but there are approximation techniques, and if the large factorial online calculator I found ...

It doesn't matter how many books you have published, there's still something special about getting your hands on the first copy of the finished product - and never more so than my new book, How Many Moons Does the Earth Have? , as the publisher, Icon Books, has done a great job, giving it a really impressive textured cover. Sadly, you can't buy a copy yet - not til November - but you can already preorder it on Amazon and elsewhere , and I think it will make an ideal gift for hard-to-buy-for people (and something of a bargain at £6.99). In fact there may be one exception to this wait - I'm doing an event at Lichfield Literary Festival on October 8 when we hope there will be early copies available on sale: see the festival's website for details . It's a science quiz book, in part because if you like attending quizzes, it can be frustrating that they don't have enough/good enough quality science questions. But you don't need to be running a quiz to us...

Image © EPFL 2015 We have a report from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) of 'a photograph of light as both a particle and a wave.' HT to Ian Bald for pointing this out - the paper dates back to March, but I didn't spot it at the time. It's interesting to dig in a bit and see a) is this true and b) is it the end of Bohr's assertion as part of his concept of complementarity that light could act like a wave or a particle but never both at the same time? The experiment is complex enough that it's a little fuzzy when it comes to the interpretation. What the experimenters did was reported by the EPFL's press people as follows. The experimenters fired a laser at a metallic nanowire. Some of the energy from the photons in the light stimulated electrons in the wire, which meant that 'light' travelled along the wire in two directions. When these waves met they formed a standing wave which generated emitted light. They then shot elec...

Roger Bacon is a misty figure in the history of science. Over the years, this thirteenth century friar has been portrayed as a mystic, magician, scientist ahead of his time and second rate collector of other people's ideas. It doesn't help that he often gets confused with his unrelated (as far as we are aware) Elizabethan namesake Francis Bacon. But it is in part because of the messy way that Roger has been reported over the years (even starring in a play by one of Shakespeare's contemporaries) that he is a fascinating subject. My book on Bacon and his science has an intentionally provocative subtitle. I ought to make it clear that in many ways he clearly wasn't the first scientist. Apart from the impossibility of coming up with a 'first' and the argument that you couldn't have a scientist before the word was coined (a terrible argument to my mind - you might as well say there weren't dinosaurs before the word was coined), Bacon was pretty bad on mo...

 I like to ring the changes with my phone cases, so I was pleased to have the chance to review the Cover-Up Woodback iPhone 6 case. In principle, a phone case can do three things for a phone - make it look better, protect it and make it feel better to hold - and how well the Cover-Up case comes across depends on how you react to each of these three criteria. In this case, the appearance can split the jury. I rather like the real wood finish, with one proviso. Some younger observers have not been so impressed, preferring being able to see the attractive back of the iPhone and not entirely sure about the merits of wood on hi-tech equipment. The wooden back to the case gives it a genuinely interesting and different look - in my case it was a red wood called Purpleheart, which was an attractive shade. The only proviso is that, like most people my age, I remember the horrendous plastic wood-effect finish that manufacturers (particularly US manufacturers) used to splash everywhere....

For a good number of years I was employed in Operational Research (OR).  There was a running joke among those involved in the discipline at British Airways featuring a conversation at a party. Someone asks you what you do and, after about five hilarious attempts to explain it, the person in the joke says 'I work with computers.' These days my attempt at a short explanation is something like 'it was developed during the Second World War as a way of using maths to do things like calculate the most effective pattern to drop depth charges. But now it's used by organisations to solve business problems.' The little squeezy plane above is from an anniversary get-together  which I'm shocked to realise was three years ago. But I've had more recent OR action from a connection with Lancaster University, where I took my MA in OR many moons ago. I visited the university a year or so ago as part of its 50th anniversary celebrations and was delighted to meet up with...

A lot of companies now offer quick and easy customer service response via Twitter. If in doubt these days, if I'm moaning about a company (or praising one for that matter) I will include their Twitter address in my tweet, and many will respond within minutes or hours. I think this is a good thing - as long as it's done well. I've had some really zippy and helpful responses. But sometimes a company is far too slow in responding. At other times, even if the company responds quickly, it doesn't exactly do itself any favours. I used Twitter to bring the above moan to the attention of my bank. Lloyds makes it clear just how much it regards Twitter as a way to ask it questions from the name 'AskLloydsBank.' It seemed a reasonable question - I've a relatively new business debit card, yet when I buy stamps or travel by tube, for instance, I can't use my card to pay contactless. Back came the reply within an hour or so: Well, I suppose it was nice to...

I've come back to this book after a couple of decades and it still holds up well as one of the two great alternative history books where there is no Reformation in Europe, leaving the Catholic church with a  stranglehold that limits the development of science, technology and society (the other, of course, is Keith Roberts' lyrical Pavane ). The central theme to The Alteration is whether a ten-year-old boy with a superb singing voice should be turned into a castrato to preserve that voice for life at significant cost for the boy - but Kingsley Amis has immense fun with many references to familiar people, books and events, seen in the different light of the tightly Catholic Europe. The strange mix of Tudor and 1970s is done beautifully and atmospherically, as are the many differences between their world and ours (though it's never properly explained why Cowley, now known as Coverley, is the capital, rather than London). There are Protestants in this world - but they are ...

There has been considerable negative reaction to an article by someone I've never heard of called Jonathan Jones in The Guardian who tells us to 'Get real,' because 'Terry Pratchett is not a literary genius.' Jones goes on to say 'I have never read a single one of his books and I never plan to.' Why? Because 'life is too short to waste on ordinary potboilers - and our obsession with mediocre writers is a very disturbing cultural phenomenon.' Some have suggested that Jones is indulging in the popular Katie Hopkins method of trying to become famous by irritating people. (If so, it hasn't really worked as it's just his bile and not his person that has reached public awareness.) But I don't think they are right. Instead what we have here is classic literary fiction jealousy of popular fiction. The attitude is wondrously condescending and amounts to 'Only the fiction I like is worth reading, because it changes lives and enriches th...

In my latest podcast for the RSC's Chemistry in its Element series I take a look at the assorted oxides of vanadium. Vanadium, the transition metal at number 23 on the periodic table, is one of those elements that sounds more like something out of a superhero movie than a real substance. You might expect that vanadium oxide would be of vanishingly small interest, but the reality is different. I should really have said the vanadium oxides, because thanks to vanadium’s five valence electrons there are enough oxides to sound like a successful Hollywood franchise – vanadium (II) oxide, VO, vanadium (III) oxide, V 2 O 3 , vanadium (IV) oxide, VO 2 and vanadium (V) oxide, V 2 O 5 , without going into extra intermediate phases that can produce entertaining combos like V 6 O 13 and V 8 O 15 . Also like those Hollywood franchises, some instalments are more interesting than others, as you'll discover by taking a listen ...

There's nothing like politics to bring out lies, damned lies and statistics, and we have to be particularly careful when throwing around percentage figures when commenting on political figures, their supporters and their views. Recently published YouGov data compares the views of the supporters of different contenders in the Labour leadership election, and it is ripe with possibilities for statistical misrepresentation, if those reporting it aren't careful and have trouble with numbers. I was brought to this observation by the blaring headline above from that intellectual powerhouse, Shortlist magazine . (Sorry, the snide factor just slipped up accidentally there.) The reason the headline made me want to dig deeper into the numbers were that, of itself, this headline doesn't tell us anything, because there's nothing to compare with. Is that a lot? Perhaps 50 per cent of the British people believe the world is run by a secret elite and the Corbynites are unusually ...