Eco-activist Mark Lynas, has won the Royal Society's prize for popular science writing, for his book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. Except that it isn't science, it's fiction. Science fiction; it takes a vaguely plausible scientific possibility,...
Is Atheism Just Another Fundamentalism?
That's the title of a debate on 22 August at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Climate-Resistace editor Stuart was one of the speakers, with John Gray, Mark Vernon and Ron Ferguson. His talk went a bit like this...Just so you know… I don’t believe in God. And...
Third time lucky?
A while ago now, we mentioned that the Royal Society had dropped from its website all reference to 'on the word of no one', the traditional translation of its motto Nullius in Verba, and that its former president, Bob May, had re-translated it as 'respect the facts'....
Spaghetti Carbondrama
This post doesn't deserve a title as good as that. And it's not even a very good title. Where does carbon come into it? Maybe we're just hungry.Apologies. We have each been otherwise engaged to the extent that we don't appear to have posted very much. And even now,...
CR in TLS
We have a letter in this week's Times Literary Supplement on Bob May's translation of Nullius in Verba. It's not much different from our original post on the subject, except all the commas are in exactly the right place.Sir, – “Nullius in Verba”, the motto of the...
On the Word of No One… Except Us
Nullius in Verba, the motto of the UK's Royal Society, usually gets translated as 'on the word of no one'. That's a pretty good motto for a scientific body, the message being that knowledge about the material universe should be based on appeals to experimental...