TOP 100 SCIENCE SITES
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| In praise of … God | Editorial The universe just ramped itself up. Simple. And yet doubts remain - spontaneous creation is, for most folk, just a contradiction in terms"Dear Sir: Your astonishment's odd; / I am always about in the quad." This was the divine response, as imagined by Ronald Knox, to the inquisitive undergraduate who, following Bishop Berkeley's line of thought, wondered whether a tree in the college quadrangle would still exist if God was not there to sustain it. Now someone rather higher in the academic hierarchy has raised the question in a different form. Professor Stephen Hawking says in his new book that there is no place for God in theories about how the universe got started: "Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something." Anyone who has ever watched in amazement as a piece of domestic equipment, say a washing machine, suddenly swings into action, even though no human hand has touched any buttons, will be able to grasp something of what Hawking is hinting at here. The universe just ramped itself up. Simple. And yet doubts remain. One accepts that if God were to choose one day to explain the universe to Hawking, the professor would be one of the few people on the planet with any serious chance of understanding the conversation. But spontaneous creation is, for most folk, just a contradiction in terms. God may or may not find all this amusing. The thing is – how to put this gently to Professor Hawking? – that God does not necessarily follow the ins and outs of our many arguments about His existence. Who could blame Him if, after all this time, He has become tired of them? Meanwhile, there is still a tree in the quad.ReligionStephen Hawkingguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Podcast: What the brain can and can't do Professor Barry Smith, director of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London explores what happens inside our heads when we recognise a friend or reach for a cup of coffee.Professor Smith has just made a series of programmes for the BBC World Service called The Mysteries of the Brain, which starts today. So that's what the brain can do. We also look at what it can't do ... We dial up Professor Russell Stannard, emeritus professor of physics at the Open University. He thinks humans are fast approaching the end of what it is possible for us to know and understand. Caspar Llewellyn-Smith asks him about some of the themes in his new book, The End of Discovery. Check out our shiny new science front page and meet our crack team of science bloggers:The Lay Scientist by Martin RobbinsLife and Physics by Jon ButterworthPunctuated Equilibrium by GrrlScientistPolitical Science by Evan Harris Follow the podcast on our Science Weekly Twitter feed and receive updates on all breaking science news stories from Guardian Science. Email scienceweeklypodcast@gmail.com. Join our Facebook group. Listen back through our archive.Subscribe free via iTunes to ensure every episode gets delivered. (Here is the non-iTunes URL feed).Caspar Llewellyn SmithAlok JhaAndy Duckworth guardian.co.uk |
Video | British IVF pioneer wins Nobel prize for medicine Physiologist Robert Edwards, the British scientist who pioneered in-vitro fertilisation, which has helped in the conception and birth of 4 million people around the world, is honoured in Stockholm guardian.co.uk |
Psychoanalysis: The Unconscious in Everyday Life at the Science Museum | Maev Kennedy Ancient statuettes and images once owned by Sigmund Freud and contemporary art by Grayson Perry feature in the first exhibition of psychoanalysis at London's Science MuseumA necklace by the artist Mona Hatoum, woven from human hair and eerie enough to trouble anyone's unconscious mind, is among the contemporary and ancient objects in the first exhibition devoted to psychoanalysis at the Science Museum in London, which opened this week.The exhibition includes contemporary installations by artists including Grayson Perry, whose ceramics often deal with dark subjects under seductively beautiful glaze, and Webster and Noble whose art literally deals with shadows, cast by banal objects to create startlingly different images. Their work will be displayed alongside body casts of feet, eyes and phalluses normally hidden in the Science Museum stores.Ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman statuettes and images are on loan from the Freud Museum London – objects once owned by Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, who was also intensly interested in archaeology and kept a small museum's worth on his desk in his consulting rooms.One of his pieces was a fragment of a Roman wall painting showing Leda – the nymph seduced by Zeus in the form of a swan – and a Greek image of the sphinx, who revealed to Oedipus that his fate was to marry his own mother, giving his name forever to the most famous complex in psychoanalysis.Also on display for the first time will be drawings by children, including scenes of ships being sunk by German submarines, who came through the second world war. The drawings helped them express their fears to Melanie Klein, the Austrian-born British psychoanalyst who was the first to apply the therapy to troubled children.Pysychoanalysis: The Unconscious in Everyday Life is at the Science Museum in London from 13 October to 2 AprilPsychologyMental healthHealthExhibitionsGrayson PerryMaev Kennedyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Space station shifts orbit to dodge junk Russia's space command has ordered the International Space Station to change its orbit slightly to avoid a collision with a piece of floating debris that could cause serious damage. abc.net.au |