This article first appeared in the 17 April edition of The Big Issue  under the title The Whole Truth. We live in a world of alternative facts. Paradoxically, these arise because political and religious leaders, driven by belief systems, base their actions on what they believe to be 'truths'. By contrast, science, shockingly to some, is not concerned with absolute truth. Scientists establish the best current theory, given the available evidence. These results are subject to revision as new evidence comes to light. Science is always provisional. This is why scientists often struggle when pulled into political debates. A good scientist avoids the absolute certainties politicians want to hear, and this is interpreted as weakness. The reason scientists do this is that are aware of their frames of reference. A ‘frame of reference’ is a physics concept - it's at the heart, for example, of relativity, and is about establishing the position from which we look at the world. ...

I rarely see the Daily Telegraph , but at the weekend I was at the house of someone who takes it. I couldn't help become a little incensed at an opinion piece by someone called Christopher Booker, bemoaning the 'dumbing up' of University Challenge. Given the proximity to the world marches for science, I couldn't help comment on the piece. Famously, C. P. Snow once made a big thing of the 'two cultures' of the arts and sciences, pointing out that people from the arts side expected a well-educated person to have a good knowledge of the arts, but themselves expressed a kind of smug satisfaction in their ignorance of the sciences. I could be wrong, but it's difficult not to read Booker's use of 'particularly' as essentially saying 'I expect everyone to have a good knowledge of the arts, but having a good knowledge of the sciences is for specialist weirdos.' The reality is that the science questions are no more specialist than the arts on...

My quiz books How Many Moons Does the Earth Have? and What Colour is the Sun? are all about asking science questions with interesting or intriguing answers, so I was delighted when a reader, Simon Bartlett, asked about how realistic one of my answers was. The question here (from How Many Moons ) was 'What is the furthest you can see with the naked eye?' The traditional answer to this is to point out that you can see at least 21 miles (33 kilometres) across the English channel, and it's said that you can see a candle on a truly dark night about 10 miles (16 kilometres) away. However, I wanted to challenge this by pointing out that you can see the Andromeda galaxy with the naked eye (assuming a dark night and good eyesight), and that's around 2.5 million light years. So, bearing in mind this is usually the standard marker for maximum distance naked eye astronomy, I plumped for that. However, Simon felt this should be considered a bit further: In answering the ques...

According to news reports , the bank HSBC will allow customers to choose from a whole range of gender neutral titles such as Mx, Ind, M, Mre, and Misc. Some may moan about political correctness gone mad - I would argue it doesn't go any where near far enough. Why do we need to give organisations our 'title' at all? As far as I can see the only point of using a title is to establish your place in a feudal society - they really should have no place today. Whenever I fill in an online form I leave the title box untouched - yet all too often, the organisation makes it a non-optional selection. I don't want them to label me. It really irritates me, for example, when the programme for an event calls me Mr Brian Clegg. I'm not Mr Brian Clegg. I am Brian Clegg. And why someone who is, say, having a one-off online relationship with me should need a title is baffling. Some of you may be thinking, 'Ah, but if you don't give a title, they can't write to you fo...

I'm delighted to say that my latest book, The Reality Frame is now available as a truly lovely hardback and ebook - the cover picture really doesn't do it justice. I suppose the obvious question is 'What Reality Frame?' The book is about relativity and frames of reference - effectively the way we look at things/the position we look at them from. It looks at how we've moved from very absolutist views to making much more use of relativity in science, and to do this, I use what I hope is a fun and novel approach of building a toy universe from scratch, adding in various properties to see what part relativity has to play. Unlike your standard physics book, I don't stop with an inanimate universe, but go on to add life and creativity. This is partly because frames of reference are hugely important in these cases too. But also because, in the process, I wanted to help establish humanity's place in the universe. We have a tendency to do ourselves down, p...

The term 'avant garde' (literally something like 'vanguard' or 'advanced guard', implying being ahead of the pack and outside of the usual boundaries) is one that is proudly adopted by some art. And I think that's fine - but I also think that the artists in question need to expect that their audiences may abandon the reverence that is usually adopted by the audience for traditional art. Image from Wikipedia This occurred to me when a friend was describing attending a play at Bristol's fairly avant garde Old Vic Theatre. Apparently the performance was of a Samuel Beckett radio play, and as Beckett had specified it should never be staged, they told the audience that they had to wear blindfolds. Thinking about this, I realised that my immediate reaction, had I been in the audience, would have been to have cheated and taken the blindfold off once they got started. Because once you break the rules as an artist, why should your audience be forced to stic...

Last Saturday saw the usual spate of 'April fool' spoof news stories - but I think it's time this practice stopped. In the early days, these stories were delightful. I remember seeing a re-run of the Panorama spaghetti harvest film as a child (probably on its 10th anniversary) and loved it. At university, I read with glee the Guardian's superb San Seriffe feature with all the wonderful detail of this supposed travelling island nation. However, I'd say the news reporting world has changed in two ways that make the whole business not so funny - and when we get flooded with these stories, many of them lack the originality and sheer madness of these early attempts. The first change is the rise of comedy news sources like The Onion and The Daily Mash. They churn out several such stories a day - we really don't need extra ones on April 1. And then there's the rise of post-truth, fake news reporting. And that brings it home that it's not acceptable for a p...

For several months now I have had Amazon's Echo devices, with the Alexa voice-operated assistant in the house. To test their effectiveness, I have the two main Echo variants - Echo and Echo Dot, plus a small Phillips Hue smart lighting system to see how the Echoes interact with home automation. I'll take each separately, starting with the full size Echo. Amazon Echo The Echo looks like a wireless speaker until you use the trigger word 'Alexa', at which point a funky blue glowing ring appears on top to indicate it is listening (the glow even attempts to point towards your voice). The Echo can cope with a vast number of 'skills' - responses to voice commands - from playing music to ordering an Uber taxi. Some of the skills are excellent, though I think it's fair to say that 95% of them are either too local to somewhere in America or too pointless to be of any use. Our most frequent use of the full-size Echo is playing music and radio. We opted for access...