This dialogue between Matthew Ritchie and Thyrza Nichols Goodeve first appeared in the catalogue for the artist’s exhibition Proposition Player, organized by Lynn M. Herbert, December 12, 2003-March 14, 2004, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in association with Hatje Cantz Publications Many thanks to Thyrza Nichols Goodeve for permission to republish I always thought the best […]
Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman
Winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics, the bongo-playing physicist Richard Feynman practiced a self-deprecating sense of humor that spoke volumes of the importance of humility…
Steven Jay Gould: Rocks Of Ages
Ian Hocking In his book Rocks of Ages, the late Stephen Jay Gould, who had Harvard professorships in both zoology and geology, presents a philosophical thesis on the relationship between science and religion. Chestnuts don’t come much older. Some background on Gould first. He wrote much on the influence of geological events on the evolution […]
Norman Mailer – Of A Fire On The Moon
Ian Hocking Here is Norman Mailer, born eighty-one years ago, married six times, the great egotist and American literary lion. In 1968, Mailer was jailed for his part in the Washington peace rallies. Soon after, he ran against five others for the Mayor of New York. He attracted five per cent of the vote. In […]
Simon Garfield : Mauve: How One Man Invented A Colour That Changed The World : Colour Theory
Jonathan Kiefer talks to Simon Garfield about the secret history of chemistry revealed in his book Mauve: How One Man Invented a Colour that Changed the World For the subject of his most recent and most popular book, Simon Garfield chose a man whose funeral was fastidiously reported in the periodical “Gas World,” and whose […]
Clark Blaise: Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming And The Creation Of Standard Time
Jonathan Kiefer For the chief engineer of a national railroad company, especially one so industrious as Sandford Fleming in 1876, misreading a timetable – and thereby missing a train – was especially irksome. Fleming redressed this embarrassment with the most enduring achievement of the Victorian era. He invented Standard Time. We of the Information Age […]
Simon Mawer: Mendel’s Dwarf
Robin Askew Nature has played a cruel trick on Dr. Benedict Lambert, the great-great-great nephew of Gregor Mendel, father of modern genetics. He’s achondroplastic, phenotypically abnormal, macrocephalic with pronounced lumbar lordosis: a dwarf. A brilliant geneticist himself, Ben has devoted his life to isolating the gene that made him the way he is. There’s not […]
Cedric Mims: When We Die
Robin Askew The first thing to happen is regurgitation of the stomach contents into the mouth or air passages. At the same time, urine is passed and semen emitted. The skin gets purple on the underside of the body where the blood accumulates, rigor mortis sets in, and the intestinal microbes gobble up the gut […]
David Blatner: The Joy Of Pi
Robin Askew Ever since Longitude and Fermat’s Last Theorem leapt off the shelves in quantities so-called bestselling novelists can only dream about, publishers have been falling over themselves in the scramble to find the next slim tome that humanises some arcane corner of scientific research while flattering its readership into believing that they’ve acquired a […]
N. Katherine Hayles: How We Became Posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics
Björn Wiman “I am Human”, cries the protagonist in Will Self’s novel Great Apes. A phrase that may sound like a sturdy truism, in Self’s novel rings heavily: the protagonist has waken one morning only to find all human beings transmogrified into chimpanzees. The reader and the protagonist are both kept in the same suspense: […]
Richard Dawkins: Climbing Mount Improbable
Gary Marshall It’s tempting to see Richard Dawkins as the Jeremy Clarkson of Darwinism, chainsmoking Marlboros and cackling as he writes in his diary: “To-do on Monday: wind up Creationists”. Although the image is perhaps a little far-fetched, it’s safe to say that Climbing Mount Improbable is unlikely to top the recommended reading lists of […]
Margaret Wertheim: The Pearly Gates Of Cyberspace
Chris Mitchell Cyberspace is perhaps the last place you’d look for some sort of spiritual revival at the end of the twentieth century. But Margaret Wertheim believes that cyberspace is indeed a contemporary secular version of the medieval conception of Heaven – that is, a space which exists somewhere beyond or outside our everyday world. […]
Bryan Burrough: Dragonfly: NASA And The Crisis Aboard Mir
Chris Mitchell Throughout 1997, the Russian space station Mir made international headlines as it lurched from one near disaster to another. Populated by Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts, Mir became a symbol of the two countries’ collaboration in the post-Soviet age. But even with the financing and expertise of NASA injected into the ailing Russian […]
John L. Casti: The Cambridge Quintet
Chris Mitchell When world chess champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue II last year, it provoked a renewed popular interest in the possibilities of artificial intelligence. Kasparov commented that he felt he was playing “an alien intelligence”. But was Deep Blue really thinking or simply number-crunching at a incredible speed to produce […]
