The Social Nestwork

In the realm of public opinion, climate change isn’t a scientific issue, it’s a political one. Climate change science is relatively new and technically...

The health secretary, Matt Hancock, supported by Downing Street, has persistently denied that attaining herd immunity, by allowing the disease to infect most people, was ever a policy, goal, strategy or even “part of the plan”.

Mimosa pudica. Image via Wikimedia Commons From Lapham’s Quarterly: Sometime around the late eighteenth century, the French botanist René-Louiche Desfontaines took a plant on an outing around Paris in a horse-drawn carriage. At the time, botany was just emerging as an independent science separate from medicine and herbalism. Desfontaines, who’d...

The title of Lee Smolin’s new book may seem a little puzzling, given that Albert Einstein notoriously chose to disregard quantum mechanics rather than suggesting an alternative to it.

‘The theory produces a good deal but hardly brings us closer to the secret of the Old One,’ wrote Albert Einstein in December 1926. ‘I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice.’ 

Albert Einstein said that the ‘most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it is comprehensible’. He was right to be astonished.

As the gigantic ants—mutations born of the first nuclear weapon test in New Mexico—are exterminated by US army flame-throwers in the climactic scene of 1954’s Them!, Dr. Harold Medford reflects: “When man entered the atomic age, he opened the door to a new world.

The notion that your doctor knows best, and will make decisions about your treatment with little attention to your desires, has been out of fashion for decades.

In 1815, 15 years before he made his most famous print, The Great Wave, Hokusai published three volumes of erotic art. In one of them there is a woodcut print known in English as ‘The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife’...

Inflationary cosmology is the clever idea that the early universe underwent a brief period of accelerated expansion at an enormously high energy density, before that energy converted in a flash into ordinary hot matter and radiation.