Science

A.J. Ayer and other thinkers linked to the Vienna Circle famously contradicted themselves. A claim such as ‘all truths are scientific truths’ cannot itself be verified scientifically. So whether the assertion is true or false, it follows that there is at least one fact which isn’t a physical fact. Thus metaphysics buries its own undertakers. Yet Ayer’s ideas survive today in mutated form and influence other subjects besides philosophy. Though partly infected by relativism, the humanities have witnessed a growing impulse to redescribe everything in material and supposedly objective terms. The move is reductive. It involves restricting us to a world of causes rather than reasons, sounds rather than music.

Is this what it felt like in the months before August 1914? Or during the years leading up to September 1939? The discussion around artificial intelligence produces a deep foreboding that we are in the grip of forces largely beyond our control. Are we sleepwalking towards disaster? That is the feeling I have after reading Genesis, a collaboration by Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, Craig Mundie, the former chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, and Henry Kissinger, who died, aged 100, soon after completing this book. They have crafted a holistic analysis of the social, political, psychological and even spiritual impacts that a superior machine intelligence would

In Paris in 1740 the hangman publicly burned his most famous book. In England some of the best and brightest – Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding, Bishop George Berkeley, Jonathan Swift and John Wesley – queued up to destroy his reputation. The book was The Fable of the Bees (1714) and the author was Bernard Mandeville, popularly known as the Man-Devil. After Mandeville’s death in 1733, Samuel Johnson, perhaps the wisest Englishman who ever drew breath, admitted that the book had ‘opened my views into real life very much’. And David Hume, the great British philosopher, said the Man-Devil was, in fact, one of the most important figures in the development

The Italian actuary Bruno de Finetti, writing in 1931, was explicit: ‘Probability does not exist.’ Probability, it’s true, is simply the measure of an observer’s uncertainty; and in The Art of Uncertainty, the British statistician David Spiegelhalter explains how this extraordinary and much-derided science has evolved to the point where it is even able to say useful things about why matters have turned out the way they have, based purely on present evidence. Spiegelhalter was a member of the Statistical Expert Group of the 2018 UK Infected Blood Inquiry, and you know his book’s a winner the moment he tells you that between 650 and 3,320 people nationwide died from

In 1993 Vernor Vinge popularised the notion of the Singularity – the point at which exponentially accelerating trends in multiple technologies move out of control in an endless positive feedback loop. Vinge was a science fiction writer; Ray Kurzweil is not. In 1993 he had already pioneered optical character recognition and synthesisers that could precisely mimic real instruments. His mission crystallised into making Vinge’s conceit a reality. He is principal researcher and ‘AI visionary’ at Google – and principal proselytiser, too, through any number of portentously titled books. The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) set out his stall; The Singularity is Near (2005) staked a claim for human-level intelligence in

Laughs are in short supply in the academic world unless that world is serving as the victim of satire. So full marks to the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom for loading Deep Utopia – his reflections on life in a ‘solved world’, perfected by technology and science – with self-mockery and slapstick. Bostrom isn’t the first to fret about the travails of extreme leisure. John Maynard Keynes feared that economic abundance would produce more disgusting aristo-like behaviour. It’s nice to see how mighty minds can be so wrong. Bostrom cites John Stuart Mill being seriously depressed by the prospect, as humanity solved its problems, of there not being enough music to

Where is science bred? Is it where the physical circumstances are right – clear skies for astronomy, for example? Where raw materials are abundant – coal for organic chemistry? Where minds freely meet? Where the enlightened patron rules? Violet Moller’s first book, The Map of Knowledge, examined the spread through the centuries of the ideas of Galen, Euclid and Ptolemy by focusing on seven, mainly Mediterranean cities, from Alexandria to Venice, where scientific knowledge was gathered, augmented and promulgated anew, ensuring the survival of classical learning into the modern period. But why these men and these cities? Are people or places the drivers? Is geography a reliable guide, a storytelling

Volcanoes, volcanoes, volcanoes. You wait years for a good book or a film about volcanoes to come along and then they blow up all at once. In 2022, Sara Dosa’s incredible, unmissable – incroyable! incontournable! – documentary about the eccentric French filmmakers and volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, Fire of Love, was nominated for an Oscar. It should have won. Then, last year, volcanology’s own Brian Cox, Clive Oppenheimer – professor of volcanology at the University of Cambridge and Werner Herzog’s companion and guide in his documentary film about volcanoes, Into the Inferno (2016) – published Mountains of Fire: The Secret Lives of Volcanoes. Now erupting on to the scene

In 1928, a young physicist and engineer named Karl Jansky began working at Bell Telephone Laboratories, tasked with investigating any sources of static that could interfere with long-distance radio communication. Cobbling together a system of antennae on a merry-go-round, he successfully found that thunderstorms were annoying in just this way. But there was a small bit of noise left over, and he kept scanning the sky to locate the culprit. To his surprise, he eventually found it was coming from Sagittarius in the centre of the Milky Way. He christened it ‘star-noise’. We now know that he had correctly identified the emanations from a supermassive black hole; and, quite by

Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon were both taxonomists, born in the same year (1707), but apart from that they had little in common and never met. Buffon was French, Linnaeus Swedish. Buffon was suave, elegant, tall and handsome (Voltaire said he had ‘the body of an athlete and the soul of a sage’), whereas Linnaeus was a bumptious little man (under 5ft), who was widely regarded as uncouth. Buffon’s funeral was attended by 20,000 mourners but Linnaeus died almost forgotten, after suffering from a brain disease for 15 years. Yet the Linnaean system of taxonomy has survived much better than Buffon’s, which was hardly a system at