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The Secrets of Darwin’s Greenhouse

Despite the controversy, evolution was widely accepted by many naturalists within a few years of the Origin’s appearance. An important reason for this rapid triumph was Darwin’s botanical works. Seen through evolutionary eyes, plants proved to be mobile, carnivorous, sensitive – even crafty.

Cosmic Vision: Unravelling Rainbows

When light is dispersed into its constituent colours, it can become possible to discern rich dynamical information about an evolving system in space, for example cosmic explosions, collisions or accelerations.

An Introduction to Programs

Niklaus Wirth said Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. But programs are more than that. They are ubiquitous in modern life, but only a tiny minority of the population know how to program.

Neutrino: The Particle that Shouldn’t Exist

In 1930, the great physicist Wolfgang Pauli invented a new particle to save the principle of energy conservation in certain radioactive decays he was studying.

Connected Knowledge

The interconnectivity of living organisms and the planet is brought to light through the development of digital intelligence of the planet.

Making a Monkey out of Darwin

When Darwin finally published the On the Origin of Species, he tried to avoid controversy by ignoring human origins. Yet evolution was soon being attacked as the godless ‘monkey theory’.

Data: The Past, the Present and the Future

Data structures are the critical ingredient of all good information systems. Poor data structures lead to horrendous problems of interoperability and nightmarish complexity; good ones can make the ‘uncomputable’ computable.

Understanding the Universe with AI

Over the last 30 years, digital technology produced an exponential increase in astronomical data. Within our lifetime, the entirety of the visible universe will have been mapped out: we will have seen everything there is to see. The question will then be: what does it all mean?

Fatal Months: Auschwitz and the End of the Second World War

The 2020 Alfred Wiener Holocaust Memorial Lecture Series - 2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the most lethal of all Nazi camps.

Cosmic Vision: Witnessing Fireworks

Accounts of occasional celestial spectacular events in past centuries have provided crucial information for modern-day astrophysicists. One such example is the so-called Great Eruption of Eta Carinae which was for a time in the mid 19th century the third brightest object in the night sky.

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