Did the Earth Move for Galileo?
New books on the great Italian reveal him to have been wiser than many modern scientists
Politics, Ideas and the Arts
Do the Times Require a Conyers Middleton?
He is an 18th-century deist with a message for today's aggressive atheists: religion has a social value, and saves us from the return to a Hobbesian state of nature
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
The Bletchley Park cryptographers were a rum bunch. Their successors are keeping up the good work
It’s Not God Who Needs Saving – It’s Us
Instead of embarking on the project of "saving God" by replacing him with the natural and human shaped world, it is perhaps time to acknowledge that it is we ourselves that need
Life, Synthia, But Not as we Know It
The latest work on synthetic cell creation by Craig Venter raises serious questions about bioethics
Evolution can be Religion’s Friend
Science and faith need not contradict each other because they concern different matters
The Ascent of Man
Are humans just the most complex of molecular machines or something qualitatively different?
Desperately Needing Susan
The Royal Institution has made a huge mistake by sacking its media-friendly director
A Brain of Two Halves
The Master and his Emissary — The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist
Powerful Attraction
A new British-pioneered nuclear reactor can help cut our reliance on fossil fuels
Experts and Axioms
When politics has entered the scientific debate over climate change, how can we trust the experts? Is the world getting hotter, and are humans responsible? Two questions there, and I don’t know
Maths Moves in Mysterious Ways
The shapes and patterns of Nature have some surprising explanations