Professor Brian Cox is a particle physicist.
He has a tendency to emphasise the way in which everything adheres to the basic laws of physics.
In a new BBC documentary series that he has been hosting on BBC1, he has been leading viewers through an extraordinary perspective on the way in which life may have originated on this particular planet.
He is fascinated by chemistry, and the way it which chemicals work. And he has a facility to be able to explain complex chemical facts in a way that can be understood by the lay man.
You should try to see this series if you can, as it will be available on the BBC’s play again system for at least a couple of weeks. It is worth it.
Step by step, he explores the wondrous variety of life on Earth, and in the process he explains the circumstances required to enable chemical reactions to have taken place so that it happened almost spontaneously.
But this does not remove from the equation a sense of wonder at the circumstances in which so many things have conspired together to make life possible.
Constantly, he reaches the conclusion that this planet is quite possibly the only one that we will ever have knowledge of as having all of the factors necessary in which life became possible.
It is as if the crucible of the Earth were constructed uniquely to be a vehicle for life, in all of its variety and wonder.
He spends much time looking at the question of water, and exploring the nature of water as a compound. It seems to have been perhaps the single most important requirement for life to develop.
And in the context of this particular planet in this particular solar system, he talks about his theories as to how the circumstances in which life might have developed may have come about.
There is always a sense of awe involved, and quite a few shocks along the way.
Such as the idea that a most of the Earth’s water may have in fact arrived through a collision with a comet or an asteroid that was composed primarily of water.
So that at a time when the earth was sufficiently cool, water arrived in a sudden and extraordinary cosmic event.
It seems that planetary bodies have been observed that do emit the kind of tails that indicate the presence of water commonly enough for this theory to be a reality.
And he goes on to explain the detailed chemical properties of water that make it an ideal medium within which for certain long chain molecules to have been created.
It seems that all of the carbon required for such chemicals to be created must have come from stars, where carbon would have originated, in the fusion furnace of stars.
And so we have a vision of a chemistry set at a planetary scale, in which so many factors have to be present.
But once the complex double helix of DNA is created, it seems that there is no stopping life evolving into all of its diverse forms.
It is quite simply a self replicating chemical that can be affected by ultraviolet light so that it is vulnerable to change, or development, and of course because it is passed from generation to generation of whatever life it results in, then natural selection takes place, so that it is the successful alterations that survive.
What is extraordinary about the programme is that it encourages a sense of wonder at life in all of its diversity, whilst at the same time referring always back to the basic laws of physics to provide a reference from which everything must adhere.
It does not remove a sense of awe from the majesty of life, even though it makes it clear that in the right circumstances, which may indeed be unique on this one plant, it can come about almost spontaneously.
Given water and it few billion years of stability to process everything.
It makes it quite clear that sun has been a vital component in this mix, but also that it is a double edged sword.
Whilst it provides the essential energy for most of the chemical reactions needed, it is also capable of destruction through the dangerous ultraviolet emissions, particularly when it was young.
Strange concept that, that our Sun was once young, young and dangerous.
But then most of the concepts in this programme are complex and if not controversial, then certainly surprising.
Tuesday 26 February 2013
Friday 8 February 2013
Be Wary In The Information Age
I am embarrassed.
There is no other way of putting it, I have made an unfortunate blunder.
Hopefully, nobody has been hurt by my mistake, and I have certainly learned something from it.
Perhaps it is a common mistake when we are presented with so much information at our fingertips.
Put simply, we must learn to distinguish fact from that which we are seeking.
This phenomenon is not new. It has even been given, incorrectly I believe, a name in a recent Hollywood film.
The da Vinci Code, and it was used to describe the facility that we have to see what we wish to see. Or what we are looking for.
In that film it was called schotoma, which is more accurately defined as the capacity our eyes possess for seeing what we wish to see.
My understanding of it is that we have a blind spot at the back of each of our eyes, where the optic nerve goes from the eye to the brain.
But none of us has an obvious part of our vision that is simply blank, although it is possible to discover this blank spot by simply moving something visible across our eyes until it disappears briefly.
In other words, millions of years of evolution have made it helpful for the brain to be able to fill in this gap in our vision, so that we appear to be able to see continuously.
How this blind spot has recently confused me is in the creation of my most recent blog entry, when I mistakenly believed that I had discovered from an online newspaper story that there had been a recent earthquake in Italy, frankly because I didn’t read the information on my computer screen correctly.
What I had done is found the article published in 1997 about the earthquake that badly affected Assisi and northern Italy more generally, but I had failed to appreciate that this was in fact an article written in 1997, mainly because at the top of the page, quite naturally, the online newspaper published yesterday’s date.
The date of the article, written in 1997, was in smaller type further down the page.
Because I had been undertaking research for my current writing project, sacred places, I had failed to appreciate this fact, and I believed briefly, that in fact there had been an earthquake in northern Italy on 7 February.
In some respects, this was entirely because if there had been such an event, it would have suited the purposes of my story perfectly.
It was a case of seeing what I wanted to see, because I had not checked carefully what precisely the article in fact reported.
Fortunately, I did that this morning, and so I can publish my sense of embarrassment, and talk about what I have learned from my failure to read fully and properly what I had taken for granted when my Internet search revealed something useful for me.
This is a useful lesson for anyone using the Internet regularly for research, and I am sure that everybody can give examples of where they have read something that they have interpreted as fact without questioning whether it is in fact fact at all.
There is no doubt that the Internet and the information age is a great boon to all of us that have access to it, but it is important to realise that it is easy to be misled, and not only by the actual content of an article, but by failing to appreciate its true context.
Hopefully I will not make the same mistake again. In terms of my characters about to visit the town of Assisi in Umbria, I may well use this experience creatively, perhaps making my central character experience a realistic dream that matches with what I briefly thought was the case.
Who knows. This is the nature of creative writing, it is up to the reader to be careful to always judge whether they are reading something that is truthful or indeed designed to mislead.
The only positive thing that I can rescue from my embarrassment he is what I have learned about how gullible I can be, and I will certainly be more alert to the genuine context of what I am reading in future.
Perhaps my last words in this article should be an apology to anyone that has read my previous blog article, and even for a moment, believed that it may have been true.
It wasn’t, it was my mistake. I was wrong. And I am embarrassed by it, even though it may well serve a useful creative purpose in the end.
There is no other way of putting it, I have made an unfortunate blunder.
Hopefully, nobody has been hurt by my mistake, and I have certainly learned something from it.
Perhaps it is a common mistake when we are presented with so much information at our fingertips.
Put simply, we must learn to distinguish fact from that which we are seeking.
This phenomenon is not new. It has even been given, incorrectly I believe, a name in a recent Hollywood film.
The da Vinci Code, and it was used to describe the facility that we have to see what we wish to see. Or what we are looking for.
In that film it was called schotoma, which is more accurately defined as the capacity our eyes possess for seeing what we wish to see.
My understanding of it is that we have a blind spot at the back of each of our eyes, where the optic nerve goes from the eye to the brain.
But none of us has an obvious part of our vision that is simply blank, although it is possible to discover this blank spot by simply moving something visible across our eyes until it disappears briefly.
In other words, millions of years of evolution have made it helpful for the brain to be able to fill in this gap in our vision, so that we appear to be able to see continuously.
How this blind spot has recently confused me is in the creation of my most recent blog entry, when I mistakenly believed that I had discovered from an online newspaper story that there had been a recent earthquake in Italy, frankly because I didn’t read the information on my computer screen correctly.
What I had done is found the article published in 1997 about the earthquake that badly affected Assisi and northern Italy more generally, but I had failed to appreciate that this was in fact an article written in 1997, mainly because at the top of the page, quite naturally, the online newspaper published yesterday’s date.
The date of the article, written in 1997, was in smaller type further down the page.
Because I had been undertaking research for my current writing project, sacred places, I had failed to appreciate this fact, and I believed briefly, that in fact there had been an earthquake in northern Italy on 7 February.
In some respects, this was entirely because if there had been such an event, it would have suited the purposes of my story perfectly.
It was a case of seeing what I wanted to see, because I had not checked carefully what precisely the article in fact reported.
Fortunately, I did that this morning, and so I can publish my sense of embarrassment, and talk about what I have learned from my failure to read fully and properly what I had taken for granted when my Internet search revealed something useful for me.
This is a useful lesson for anyone using the Internet regularly for research, and I am sure that everybody can give examples of where they have read something that they have interpreted as fact without questioning whether it is in fact fact at all.
There is no doubt that the Internet and the information age is a great boon to all of us that have access to it, but it is important to realise that it is easy to be misled, and not only by the actual content of an article, but by failing to appreciate its true context.
Hopefully I will not make the same mistake again. In terms of my characters about to visit the town of Assisi in Umbria, I may well use this experience creatively, perhaps making my central character experience a realistic dream that matches with what I briefly thought was the case.
Who knows. This is the nature of creative writing, it is up to the reader to be careful to always judge whether they are reading something that is truthful or indeed designed to mislead.
The only positive thing that I can rescue from my embarrassment he is what I have learned about how gullible I can be, and I will certainly be more alert to the genuine context of what I am reading in future.
Perhaps my last words in this article should be an apology to anyone that has read my previous blog article, and even for a moment, believed that it may have been true.
It wasn’t, it was my mistake. I was wrong. And I am embarrassed by it, even though it may well serve a useful creative purpose in the end.
Wednesday 6 February 2013
Art Reflects Life......
It’s not my fault. Honest.
This morning is 7 February, and I have been awake since just after 4 AM, engaged in my latest writing project.
It’s just a couple of weeks since I decided I would complete my novel, Sacred Places, which I began a couple of years ago. Since more recently completing my first novel, Bela, which had lain 95% complete for almost 20 years, I had finally recently got down to the work of finishing it. It is just at this moment with one of my carers, an inveterate reader, for final corrections and proofing.
And so I have decided recently that I want to be a novelist.
Everybody, so they say, has a book in them. Few have the time needed to write it.
When I wrote my first novel, I was single and able to be sufficiently selfish so that I could get up at six every morning, write for a couple of hours, before going to work and then editing what I had written that morning in the evening.
I did this six days a week for the best part of a year.
For my second novel, I have set myself the task of writing 500 words a day six days a week, so that my average should be about 3000 words a week.
By my reckoning, this should mean about 150,000 words in the course of a year.
That is the kind of selfishness that novel writing requires.
Although of course you can do university writing courses and so forth, I don’t believe there is any magical formula for writing a novel. It just requires the kind of obsessiveness I have described above.
My opening denial stems from the fact that this morning, from about 4 AM, I have been writing about my character Tom visiting Assisi with his girlfriend Kitty, as part of a tour of Umbria, in a sideways connected section of my novel. Assisi, of course, is an important sacred place, and I had known about the earthquake of 1997, which had prompted me to take my characters there.
Imagine my chagrin when this morning, having completed my daily regimen of words, I thought to check on the earlier earthquake by a simple Google search.
Straightaway to discover that this morning’s Independent newspaper front page has the news of a more recent earthquake, from yesterday morning. Six on the Richter scale.
And the entire basilica of St Francis, with its important Giotto frescoes, has been destroyed.
Needless to say, I feel responsible. Who wouldn’t.
But of course it’s only a coincidence, I tell myself. But what a coincidence. I am beginning to wonder if I should be much more careful about the subjects for my future chapters, and I will certainly keep an eye on the press, just in case I seem suddenly to have become the cause of what I write about actually happening.
Now there is a story for a Hollywood movie, but one of course that nobody would believe.
Have sympathy for me, please, as I feel so responsible for the destruction of those magnificent frescoes.
This morning is 7 February, and I have been awake since just after 4 AM, engaged in my latest writing project.
It’s just a couple of weeks since I decided I would complete my novel, Sacred Places, which I began a couple of years ago. Since more recently completing my first novel, Bela, which had lain 95% complete for almost 20 years, I had finally recently got down to the work of finishing it. It is just at this moment with one of my carers, an inveterate reader, for final corrections and proofing.
And so I have decided recently that I want to be a novelist.
Everybody, so they say, has a book in them. Few have the time needed to write it.
When I wrote my first novel, I was single and able to be sufficiently selfish so that I could get up at six every morning, write for a couple of hours, before going to work and then editing what I had written that morning in the evening.
I did this six days a week for the best part of a year.
For my second novel, I have set myself the task of writing 500 words a day six days a week, so that my average should be about 3000 words a week.
By my reckoning, this should mean about 150,000 words in the course of a year.
That is the kind of selfishness that novel writing requires.
Although of course you can do university writing courses and so forth, I don’t believe there is any magical formula for writing a novel. It just requires the kind of obsessiveness I have described above.
My opening denial stems from the fact that this morning, from about 4 AM, I have been writing about my character Tom visiting Assisi with his girlfriend Kitty, as part of a tour of Umbria, in a sideways connected section of my novel. Assisi, of course, is an important sacred place, and I had known about the earthquake of 1997, which had prompted me to take my characters there.
Imagine my chagrin when this morning, having completed my daily regimen of words, I thought to check on the earlier earthquake by a simple Google search.
Straightaway to discover that this morning’s Independent newspaper front page has the news of a more recent earthquake, from yesterday morning. Six on the Richter scale.
And the entire basilica of St Francis, with its important Giotto frescoes, has been destroyed.
Needless to say, I feel responsible. Who wouldn’t.
But of course it’s only a coincidence, I tell myself. But what a coincidence. I am beginning to wonder if I should be much more careful about the subjects for my future chapters, and I will certainly keep an eye on the press, just in case I seem suddenly to have become the cause of what I write about actually happening.
Now there is a story for a Hollywood movie, but one of course that nobody would believe.
Have sympathy for me, please, as I feel so responsible for the destruction of those magnificent frescoes.
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