A Step Too Bold?

Is there life on Mars? Or Rosetta, Europa, or even Pluto?  A dilettante hand-waving exercise follows. Once upon a time, most of the material that made all of our solar system was gathered from a cloud of gas and dust by gravitational effects, to form our sun and its extensive system of planets, asteroids, comets, fragments […]

What is Out There and the Cosmic Teapot

I haven’t quite  given up on my childhood dream of meeting an alien. The nice sort, a Vulcan like Mr Spock, from Star Trek  – not the nasty kind that Scully and Mulder always encountered in the X-Files, or those featured in lurid accounts of UFO abduction stories that I read as a wide-eyed adolescent. I […]

By the Skin of an Apple

Recently,  I read that even thinking about science can make us more ‘moral’, by regulating our thinking to more rational modes.   To define  ‘moral’ and ‘rational’ needs context, but that can be as slippery as any  self-referencing, self-righteous argument we hear from ‘authorities’ on these subjects. In studying science, one gains a sense of scale of our place in […]