Monthly Archives: January 2009

Maya Hawes: a 12 year-old's answer

Maya Hawes is a Year 7 student at a comprehensive school in north London. She wrote this soon after starting secondary school in September 2008, before this project was launched, so she did not have access to any of the... Read More »

Sandeep Gautam: Asato Ma Sadgamay (lead me from Falsity to Truth)

Sandeep Gautam has a background in Computer Science and Engineering. He is passionate about psychology and has educated himself in the field using a combination of the internet, text and popular science books and open access journals. He is an... Read More »

David Perks: "confused notions of what science is about"

David Perks is Head of Physics at Graveney School in London. He is a passionate defender of academic science education, co-founder of the Physics Factory and author of “What is science education for?”... Read More »

Chris Langley: do we need more mp3 players?

Chris Langley trained as a neurobiologist and now works as a freelance consultant and writer. He operates ScienceSources, an independent consultancy, facilitating access to science, technology and medicine, and thereby creating a more publicly accountable and open science. He is... Read More »

Peter Tallack: an intrinsic part of culture

Peter Tallack has worked as an editor on Nature and a book publisher at Weidenfeld & Nicolson. He currently runs the Science Factory, a literary agency specializing in popular science. Science is important because it’s an intrinsic part of culture... Read More »

Adam Hart-Davis: to cope with our environment

Adam Hart-Davis is a freelance writer, photographer, and broadcaster on radio and television. Science matters because we live in an increasingly technological age and we need an understanding of science in order to cope with our environment. We need to... Read More »

David M. Howard: Science underpins music making

David Howard is a Professor of Music Technology at the University of York, UK. His teaching and research are concerned with the analysis and synthesis of sounds, especially singing, speech and music. He is author with Jamie Angus of “Acoustics... Read More »

Ann Lingard: important to writers too

Ann Lingard, novelist and former scientist, is the founder of SciTalk, the free resource that helps writers to meet and talk to scientists. Her latest novel, The Embalmer’s Book of Recipes has just been published. There is nothing especially different... Read More »

Michael de Podesta: Humanity's Greatest Achievement

Michael is 49 years old and lives in Teddington with his wife and two children. He works at the National Physical Laboratory and is currently constructing the most accurate thermometer ever made with a view to re-defining the unit of... Read More »

"Science is everywhere" and other disappointing answers science teachers give to their students

The question posed by this project is not necessarily an easy one to answer. For a start, we could get into all sorts of complicated philosophical discussions about what “important” means. Or what “science” means. However, I’m always disappointed when... Read More »

Marcus Chown: Previous generations would have killed to have this picture

Marcus Chown is a science writer and cosmology consultant of “New Scientist. His latest books are Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You and Felicity Frobisher and the Three-Headed Aldebaran Dust Devil, of which “The Sunday Times” said: “One of the books... Read More »

Helene Guldberg: important insights into what drives children's development

Dr Helene Guldberg is author of Reclaiming Childhood: Freedom and Play in an Age of Fear. She is co-founder and director of spiked, the first custom-built online current affairs publication in the UK. After working as a primary school teacher,... Read More »

Roger Highfield: crucial for democracy to work

Roger Highfield is Editor of New Scientist. He has “written half a dozen books, sat on a few committees and was the science editor of The Daily Telegraph for two decades”.... Read More »

Jon Butterworth: our best chance for tomorrow

Jon Butterworth is Professor of Physics at UCL and is currently head of the UK part of the ATLAS collaboration; ATLAS is one of the four detectors at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. Human beings are strongly influenced by their... Read More »

Kat Arney: from the fire drill to snake oil

Dr Kat Arney is an ex-scientist and works as a Science Information Officer at Cancer Research UK , writing about the charity’s work and often appearing in the media. She writes for their Science Update blog, and produces and presents... Read More »

Mark Lewney: lost and scared without science

Dr Mark Lewney is a musician and science presenter, winner of the first NESTA FameLab competition in 2005 and presenter of the 2008 Schools Lecture Tour for the Institute of Physics, entitled “Rock Guitar in 11 Dimensions”. Without science, we’re... Read More »

Lorne Charles: why teaching science is important

Lorne Charles is a teacher of Religious Studies... Read More »

Robin Bell: crucial to the long-term survival of our species

Robin Bell is at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory where she studies large subglacial lakes, hidden mountains and ice sheet stability. She is passionate about understanding how our planet works and engaging a new generation of scientists to work on... Read More »