My latest book is out - Weather Science . We've had so many books on climate, but relatively few on weather. The distinction is often a puzzle, but it has been summarised in a neat little aphorism: 'climate is what you expect; weather is what you get'. If you look this up online it tends to be attributed to one of two US writers - Mark Twain and the twentieth century SF author, Robert Heinlein. Twain did write something a little similar 'Climate lasts all the time and weather only a few days' - but this lacks the effectiveness of the phrase above. Heinlein certainly used the wording in his treacly, 'wisdom'-laden, over-long late book Time Enough for Love, but this wasn't original. It's been suggested instead that it was first penned by Oxford geographer Andrew Herbertson in a 1901 textbook, though as is always the case with such sayings, it is entirely possible it was already in circulation well before that date. Weather Science , then, takes a look
REVISIT SERIES: A post from July 2013 - I've written two books about infinity, notably A Brief History of Infinity , and it's a subject I enjoy writing and thinking about. But for physicists, infinity often means a problem. While we can conceive that the universe might be infinite, because we only ever deal with a part of it, when infinity rears its head in calculations, it usually means trouble. This most famously arises in quantum electrodynamics, the science of the interaction of light and matter on the quantum scale. The solution there has been renormalisation - in effect, putting in the real observed values of some quantities to make the infinities go away. And this works, but it's a bit uncomfortable. Elsewhere, such as at the moment of the big bang or in the heart of a black hole, the infinities are taken to mean that our current theories break down at that point and we need to find new ways to look at what's happening. However, there is another class of infinit