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Good science fiction has no dealings with fairytale magic spells, but is premised on the world as an orderly place. There is mystery, but the universe is not frivolous nor light-fingered in its changeability. If you put a brick on a table it stays there unless something moves it, even if you have forgotten it is…
Newton's unweaving of the rainbow led on to spectroscopy, which has proved the key to much of what we know today about the cosmos. And the heart of any poet worthy of the title Romantic could not fail to leap up if he beheld the universe of Einstein, Hubble and Hawking. We read its nature through Fraunhofer lines…
WE HAVE, it seems, a fierce attraction for spirits: auras, angels, poltergeists, disembodied souls, out-of-body experiences. Mostly, I think, we are drawn to these things because we intuit—correctly, it turns out—that there must be more to the world than meets the eye. We inherit the spirit world from a time when our…