Thanks to Ian Bald for pointing out the impressive headline 'The Death of Relativity Lurks in a Black Hole's Shadow' in Wired . What's so impressive here is just how much it's possible to get wrong in a single headline. Black holes, of course, don't have 'shadows.' I think what they mean is its event horizon, though the article is so fuzzy it's difficult to be sure. However, the real shocker is the apparent claim that general relativity is dead. Here's the thing. No it isn't. What the article actually says is that if a black hole's 'shadow' (event horizon?) isn't perfectly spherical or isn't just the right size for it's mass, then general relativity's predictions would be wrong. Well, duh. This would also be true if it were pink or singing the Stars and Stripes. Note however, that no one has discovered that its shape or size is different from prediction. (Or that it's pink.) They're just saying that ...

I've just re-read a science fiction book I quite liked as a teenager. Called Prisoner of Fire , it's by the now largely forgotten British science fiction author Edmund Cooper. Back in the 70s he was quite popular and wrote a whole string of SF novels, but, to be honest, I can see why he's largely forgotten. The writing style seems from a different era, mannered and dated. However, Cooper's ideas are still interesting. The topic of the book is the common enough SF trope of paranormals - it features a number of children with mental abilities, able to read minds, to block other telepaths, or to kill remotely. The reason it's interesting is that Cooper examines what such a capability would mean for governments, both in terms of protecting themselves and espionage, and how it could lead to an 'end justifies the means' attitude to the young telepaths as weapons. That's not why I bring the book up now, though, so forgive the long introduction. Prisoner of...

I have just read an article (don't ask me why - this is the wonder of Facebook) which tried to defend Mormonism from the worrying details of its origins. The piece included this: Many intellectuals argue that “negative evidence” is supreme. To understand what they mean by this, consider the hypothesis that “all swans are white.” According to these intellectuals, it doesn’t matter how many white swans you find, you never really prove that “all” swans are white. However, as soon as you find one black swan, you have disproved the theory that “all swans are white.” They conclude that positive evidence doesn’t ever really prove anything, but negative evidence can. And it’s easy to see why they think that way.   This is the approach that ex-Mormons have taken to their faith. In the face of unsettling information, they disregard all of the positive evidence because they think that a few points of negative evidence is sufficient to end the discussion. And given how logical the...

Written by stand-up comedian Dave Thompson, The Sex Life of a Comedian  delivers some home truths about the life on the road. It's hard not to believe that the main character Doug Tucker's last minute arrivals at venues, or the way he spends hours crossing the country for underpaid gigs in unpleasant dives, don't have some inspiration in reality. As, I suspect, do the way that the various comedians who come into Tucker's life become huge successes or fail in ways that are little connected to their talent. However, this is a novel, not a memoir, for which we can assume Thompson is thankful, because Doug Tucker's life is no bed of roses. Admittedly Doug seems to enjoy (with occasional regret and shame) the huge amount of (explicit) sex and drug taking he encounters, but there is a murky unpleasantness to his existence that shades into outright gangland violence. And Doug's luck rarely stays positive for long, while the car crash events that pull his life apart...

I've just read  The End of Average for review, and I couldn't help letting out a little whoop of joy when it totally trashed psychometric testing. I am talking about mechanisms like the Myers Briggs type profile, along with a whole host of rivals, all used by businesses in recruiting and team building to analyse a personality and assess how an individual will work with others.  The problems I have always had with the approach are several-fold. It's based primarily on Jungian theory which has little scientific basis. Your personality type is self-determined, so, while it's not surprising it often feels right, that doesn't make it accurate. And I was always doubtful about the cultural norms of the mostly US-devised tests being applied worldwide. Infamously there used to be a question about whether you preferred a gun or something constructive (I can't remember what) - which clearly would have different resonance in the US and Europe.  Now, though, the...

When I wrote T he God Effect about entanglement around 10 years ago it seemed that many of the remarkable possibilities that emerged from this strangest effect of quantum physics were close to practical applications. As it happens, there's nothing in the book that's gone out of date - but we do keep getting incremental announcements in the field. Most recently we had the more over-the-top media sites telling us 'Scientists teleport bacteria' while the more careful phys.org came up with the confusing sounding 'Physicists propose the first scheme to teleport the memory of an organism.' I'd need a whole book to go into quantum entanglement (:-)), but the summary version is that quantum physics predicts that, for instance, you can get a pair of quantum particles into an entangled state where making a measurement of a property of one (its spin, for instance) will instantly influence the other particle, however far apart they are. And this has been experiment...

I've just read Snow Crash , which features a virtual environment, the Metaverse, so like a super-version of Second Life that I'm almost certain the designers of SL must have been inspired by the book. And reading about it reminded me just how seriously people were taking this online virtual reality environment a few years ago - yet now Second Life appears to have dropped off the radar. When I first started blogging in the Nature Network , that august publication was arranging seminars in Second Life, companies were holding meetings in it, and people were making fortunes selling Second Life wares. I thought the whole concept of meeting up in a tacky virtual environment was crazy - surely video was far better - yet the media and many big companies were convinced that the hip audience would flock to this kind of thing. But now it's all gone rather quiet. I've never bothered with Second Life myself, and a straw poll on Facebook got me no response from anyone who uses...

I've enjoyed several of Neal Stephenson's books, but find many of them far too long, suffering from bestselling author bloatitis, so I thought it would be interesting to get hold of a copy of his classic, Snow Crash - and I'm very glad I did. Although not a pastiche, it depends heavily on four classics of science fiction. The obvious one is William Gibson's Neuromancer , because of the net-based cyberpunk aspects that are central to Snow Crash . (The snow crash of the title is nothing to do with skiing and everything to do with computers crashing.) However, the pace and glitteriness owes a huge amount to Alfred Bester's Tiger Tiger (that's the UK title - it was originally The Stars my Destination ), while the corporate-run world has a distinct feel of Pohl and Kornbluth's Gladiator at Law,  though interestingly here it's a world without any laws whatsoever. And finally there's a touch of Samuel Delaney's Babel-17 , where a language is capab...

I'm the first to admit that, if you can make a living doing it*, being a writer is not a bad gig. You don't have to set the alarm in the morning. It's part of your job to read interesting stuff and mooch about being creative. Admittedly the writing part is a bit of a faff, but, hey, everyone has downsides to their job. But there is one aspect of it that can be particularly pleasant - when someone says one of your books has inspired them. According to the incomparable Cumbria Crack (I never get my news anywhere else**) Keswick student James Firth, who has won a science bursary, wants to study astrophysics and has a long term aim of following Tim Peake into space. And, it seems, 'James has a fascination in astrophysics having poured through books by Stephen Hawking and Brian Clegg. He now aims to study astrophysics at university.' I wish James every success and am genuinely delighted to have played a small part in helping inspire his fascination with science. ...

This morning I spotted an email from my local theatre that was too good not to share, as it appeared to be selling off a comedian. As you do, when I tweeted about this I included the Twitter address (handle? ID? none of them work well) of the comedian in question, Ross Noble, and I noticed that, like a fair number of famousish people,  (presumably the ones that aren't rich enough to buy the person who already has, in this case, @rossnoble) he has resorted to putting 'real' in front of his name, making him @realrossnoble. There are plenty of others - David Mitchell (the comedian, not the novelist) is @RealDMitchell, for instance. I assume this has happened because someone else called Ross Noble, David Mitchell (still not the novelist) etc. has already snapped up the simple form, like my @brianclegg. It's fine, obviously, to modify your name to be both memorable and still clearly like to your name - much better, certainly than @rossnoble99 or @nobleross. But...

Another group I enjoyed singling with in my youth - Nonessence (clearly hip and fashion-conscious) It may be a matter of having slightly different mental structures or something, but I struggle to understand the importance most people seem to place on music. This might seem odd, as I've always loved performing with smallish groups of singers, mostly notably Selwyn College Chapel Choir , and I often play music when doing admin tasks (I can never write with music on). I've even enjoyed a few of the concerts I've attended, though if I'm honest, by about 2/3 of the way through a gig I've usually had enough and am getting a bit bored. But what I can't understand, as evidenced by the outpouring after the death of David Bowie, is the way so many people say that music changed their life or was central to it. I'm not doing down Bowie - I think he was brilliant, creative and a one-off. But I don't understand how music can do anything to your life, or how ...

There's something rather appealing about the concept of pilgrimage, whether or not you have a religious faith. It's a bit like a combination of the pleasures of walking and trainspotting (and I don't mean that as an insult) - there's both the exertion that is usually involved and the feeling of ticking off achievements, a medieval equivalent of a bucket list. In The Extra Mile , Peter Stanford sets out to take in a number of centres of pilgrimage in the UK, without indulging in the actual act of being a pilgrim himself. Even though several times he is drawn into the experience, he undertakes this as an observer rather than a participant. These are mostly Christian sites, but he also takes in the pagan/Druidic possibilities of Stonehenge and Glastonbury. I came on this book by accident - I think it was an Amazon recommendation when I was looking at something else - and I am pleased that I did. Stanford gives accounts of what he experiences, from the lively celebrat...

I'm sure I'm not alone in finding that I'm increasingly doing stuff on mobile devices - in my case iPhone and iPad - that I used to do on a desktop computer. If, for instance, I just want to make a quick entry on a simple spreadsheet, it can often be easier to pull it up on a mobile device. And as long the document is one where the screen size isn't too much of an issue, it generally works very well - unless I want to print something. Of course, you can print from iPhones and iPads if your printers support their AirPrint standard - but, inevitably, neither of mine do. (Printer aficionados might spot that my laser printer is around 15 years old.) However, I can now merrily print from the iPhone and iPad anywhere in the house, thanks to a nifty little package called Printopia . This isn't an app - I use the standard 'send to printer' option from the mobile device. But Printopia is a cunning little add-on that sits on my Mac, which brings up my printe...

I was recently doing an interview about science and science fiction to support my recent book Ten Billion Tomorrows and along the way I had to explain that it's not surprising that fiction (science or otherwise) usually has bad things happening in it, because without problems and challenges, there's not much of a story. This is something that is well-known in writing circles. Almost all fiction can be summarised as 'Obstacle arises or something terrible happens. Protagonist tries to deal with it.' He or she may, or may not succeed, but without those problems, there really isn't a story. 'People have a nice time,' simply doesn't work. But what I haven't seen discussed before is what effect this constant need to make characters suffer has on the writer. As writers, we either want to, or have to, write. (For many writers it seems to be the latter. We don't seem to have much choice in the matter.) And to write fiction we have to put our char...

It's all too easy to take a widely accepted statement as a universal truth. But if we are to be thinking people, rather than knee-jerk puppets, we should always question anything presented as such a truth. So, for instance, we all know it's wrong to objectify people. But is it really? Is there any scientific basis for this assumption, or is it based on 'common sense' that objectification is inherently a bad thing? The reason I bring it up is two recent discussions on Facebook. One was on the matter of Poldark , the BBC TV series. As usually seems to be the case with this programme, the main topic was the body of the actor playing the eponymous Mr P. This is surely just as much objectification as the old, thankfully departed Page 3 girls in the Sun, and my immediate reaction was to condemn it. But I really couldn't, because it was hard to see what harm was being done. If the women involved had been making the remarks directly to the actor, then it certainly would h...

It used to be ever so middle class to deny watching much television. About the only things it was acceptable to say that you viewed were the news, plays and documentaries. It was almost a mark of being educated that you liked documentaries. But, personally speaking, I have real problems with them. In general, documentaries bore me. This can be a bit embarrassing when someone says 'Did you see Horizon on quantum physics?' or 'Did you see that latest David Attenborough?' Because I won't have done. I've never successfully watched a full episode of a David Attenborough documentary. Admittedly it's partly because wildlife films are rarely about science, but I think the main problem is that I'm too word-oriented. I enjoy good story-telling TV, but I find that factual programmes manage to take about two pages of text and stretch it into an hour's worth of documentary. I'd much rather read the two pages. (This is also why I can't be bothered with ...

I'm not a great fan of the dominant 'swords and sorcery' arm of fantasy (think Game of Thrones), but I love real world fantasies, where a fantasy element creeps into an otherwise ordinary world - the kind of thing authors like Ray Bradbury, Gene Wolfe and Neil Gaiman excel at. The Watchmaker of Filigree Street promised to be just such a book, and I was not disappointed. Set in Victorian England against a backdrop of terrorist activities by Irish nationalists, the book (presumably due to author Natasha Pulley's personal experience) unusually mixes English and Japanese cultures of the time. What is striking about the book, reminiscent of one of my favourite books, The Night Circus , is a sense of the fantastical and magic in the air. The very solid and steam-driven world of Victorian England is set against both the Japanese village (where Sullivan conducts the first performance of the Mikado) and the exotic clockwork creations of the eponymous watchmaker. It's ...