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 reviewed the book Why? 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 cause,...

Every morning I listen to a podcast on my walk, and more often than not it's a UK political podcast. Where once they were sparse, there are now huge numbers of middle of the road podcasts to suit my taste - but I have found that some old favourites have become less appetising, displaced by newcomers. The first to drop off its perch was the BBC's Newscast . I'm generally a supporter of the BBC, if not the licence fee (or some of its recent news reporting), but the whole point of a news podcast is to be able to be more informal and get away from the restraints of conventional media. The presenters of Newscast are certainly informal, but they dance around issues because of the BBC's efforts to keep to its sometimes strange ideas of what being impartial is. Also they rarely dig into anything with the depth that a podcast can offer - they cover too many topics, as they aren't pure politics. The second that I'm losing patience with is The News Agents . I always reall...

It's hard to find anyone who says we should trash the environment. But there is a real problem underlying many environmental issues that both individuals and environmental pressure groups seem to miss: there is often a trade-off involved.  It's not enough to say 'we will do this because it's good for the environment' in a blanket way, because many actions taken for environmental reasons will benefit one aspect of the environment but will be a negative for another. The only honest environmentalism is one where you acknowledge both the positives and negatives - and are prepared to say that one environmental goal is more important than another. For me, there is a very clear priority: climate change. It trumps all other environmental concerns. This doesn't mean we can't be nice to whales or whatever - often actions can be totally positive. But where something is beneficial in terms of reducing climate change, it may need to be adopted even if it raises some nega...

Each Christmas, the TV show University Challenge has a 'celebrity' special. More often than not, the members of the team will never meet again after making the show, but I'm delighted to say that the Lancaster team, of which I was part, have managed to have regular reunion lunches. We've got our latest this week, and are somewhat shocked to discover that it's ten years this November since we took part.  Going down the line, after me comes the youngster of the bunch,  Ranvir Singh  then   Roger Ashton-Griffiths  and last but certainly not least  Matthew Fort . What's delightful about the group is that we are from very different aspects of what you might broadly call the communication business - yet we find we've plenty to chat about with others quite different from those we might encounter in our everyday lives. You can see us introduce ourselves below: See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

Although it's rare, it can be interesting when the arts are stimulated by popular science or popular maths. A while ago, a sculptor exhibited a series of pieces based on the cover art of my book A Brief History of Infinity , and I am delighted to recently discover that writer Mary Soon Lee has included a poem in her collection How to Navigate Our Universe inspired by something I wrote in my book Dark Matter and Dark Energy . I don't know for certain, but I'm guessing the text was this: 'Without any idea what could be causing this, astrophysicists, taking the term from American cosmologist Michael Turner, termed the phenomenon dark energy. The name tells us nothing about what is involved. It might just as well have been called factor X or unizap.' Here is the poem (reproduced with permission) - I so wish the astrophysicists had gone with Mister Floofy*: How to Brand Dark Energy --after a remark by Brian Clegg One can hardly be expected to refer to it as that ineffab...