Image by Maxim Mox from Unsplash There are many things that are a bit irritating about the internet (though none that outweigh its usefulness). But the one that arguably gets up my nose the most is when you fill in an online form and it insists that you enter your title. I don't want a title. If you are writing to me, address it to Brian Clegg. I'm happy for anyone to call me Brian (or Cleggy if you must). But more to the point, why on earth should I have to provide a title to, say, buy a bunch of flowers?  One of the reasons I really dislike titles is the way the media, particularly TV for the masses, make obsequious use of some titles. It really puts me in cringe mode when a grown adult refers to someone else as 'Doctor Phil' or 'Doctor Anita'. This reversion to childhood doesn't apply if you have a different title though. It's never 'Mister Brian.' (Of course someone called Ed* may be thankful for this.) For that matter, I have two Master of ...

I'm a huge fan of science fiction and regularly  review SF books on my popularscience.co.uk blog.  It seems a truism that science fiction should involve science and/or technology - but is it an essential? This is one the topics that is likely to be discussed when I meet up for an on-stage chat with bestselling French author Hervé Le Tellier, chaired by the translator of his remarkable novel Anomaly , Adriana Hunter. If you are in London on 22 May 2022 and fancy coming along, the event, part of the Beyond Words Festival, is on at the Institut Français at 5pm. Tickets are available here . What makes a book SF is always a subject of dispute, but for me it should reflect the human consequences of some kind science or technology. Sometimes the classification is straightforward - taking in the impact of, say, artificial intelligence or spaceflight. But science fiction also has certain standard concepts, such as faster than light travel or time travel that are not possible with ...

Something that never ceases to be a thrill is receiving my first copies of a new book - so I'm delighted to say that Game Theory , my latest entry in Icon Book's 'Hot Science' series (for which I am also series editor), is now on sale. For me, game theory, the topic of the book, has always been a fascinating one. Below is an extract from the introduction to show why this is the case and to give a little background on game theory in case it's unfamiliar as a concept. You can find out more about the book or buy a copy at my website . 1. Games and the real world When I first bought a textbook on game theory many years ago, never having come across the term before, I felt cheated. I was expecting something fun that would tell me the optimal strategies for winning at card games, backgammon and Monopoly. I wanted an interesting analysis of how the games worked mathematically under the hood. Ideally there would also be guidance on how to create your own interesting board g...

Science communication is a delicate balance - but there is always a danger of someone highly invested in a particular aspect of science indulging in hyperbole and causing the opposite reaction to the one they intend.  Arguably, the most dangerous topic for this is climate change. Getting our response to climate change right is crucially important - global warming and its consequences is something we have to take action on. But, as Al Gore demonstrated in the past, making overblown statements on the subject can have a negative impact on getting the message across. The latest indulgence in this line, which made the news on 15 April, was from palaeontologist Robert DePalma, who apparently said at a screening of a documentary he made with David Attenborough 'What's going on in the world today is terrifyingly close to the scale and timeframe of the end-Cretaceous extinction.' He was referring to the asteroid impact that wiped out most of the dinosaurs - in fact it did far more, ...

There is something beguiling about the concept of the polygraph - the proper name for what is usually known as a lie detector. Surely it makes sense, if technology exists that can tell if a statement is true or false, that lie detectors should provide an important adjunct to the legal system? Unfortunately, though, despite a public assumption that they are scientific, there is absolutely no evidence that lie detectors work - and plenty of evidence that they don't. What Amit Katwala does in this very readable account is give us an insight into the early development and deployment of the polygraph. In part this is the story of three key individuals - two behind the technology and one a police chief who instigated the polygraph's development, though the larger part of the book comprises a series of true crime stories, introducing in some depth a handful of early legal cases where the polygraph played a role. The two developers, John Larsen and Leonarde Keeler, both seem to have ha...

Probability is at the heart of much of life - yet it can seem counter-intuitive. One of the best-known aspects of this is the so-called gambler's fallacy (and its inverted equivalent, the hot hand fallacy).  Take a simple example of tossing a coin repeatedly. A head comes up ten times in a row. Now we all know that, on average and over time, a fair coin should give us the same percentage of heads and tails. So it can seem surprisingly reasonable that the next throw is more likely to be a tail.  That's the gambler's fallacy, because, of course, the coin has no memory. It has no way of telling what came before, so the next toss is still equally likely to be heads or tails. (Some argue that actually it's more likely to come up a head again - for a demonstration of why this can be the case, see the start of my video below.) At a simple level, it's quite easy to get your head around what's happening here, but some of the subtleties of the gambler's fallacy are st...

One of the less enjoyable aspects of having a blog is having to dismiss all the fake comments that are blatant attempts at getting advertising links posted onto a website for free. Traditionally, these fake comment adverts have been distinctly feeble. Some blatantly ignore the topic - so, for instance, a post about why I don't like opera might get links for the wonders of a brand of dog food. Others go for what they presumably hope is more subtlety. They start with a bland comment, something like 'Great post, I really agree with this! You should see this too'. But the lack of direct connection to the topic you are then directed to is a giveaway, as in  a post about the totally shocking contents list of something I bought at the supermarket being linked to a site selling garden lights. Today, though, and perhaps scarily, whatever algorithm is used to select a post to put a fake comment on has finally come up with something that appears to be directly relevant to the text o...

Image by Ben Collins from Unsplash I was reading for review a book called The Joy of Science by Jim Al-Khalili recently and was struck by what seemed to me an odd statement. Al-Khalili said 'A physicist like me tries to uncover ultimate truths...' Let that sink in for a moment while I tell you a story. Many years ago, a work colleague described being at a dinner party where he heard a remarkable tale. The storyteller had heard that someone was in the centre of the smallish town of Sunningdale and saw a man walking his dog. The town centre is unusual in that a railway line runs across the main road, so there's a level crossing there. The dog walker was picking up a takeaway from the tandoori restaurant right by the level crossing. He had clearly not thought this through before setting out. He couldn't take the dog into the restaurant while he collected his food. So he tied the dog's lead to the level crossing barrier and nipped inside. He was only going to be gone a...