Author: frances

In 1927 the Belgian Catholic priest and former engineer Georges Lemaître was the first person to propose that the universe was expanding (1, 2) rather than being in a steady state.  This was grounded in his own mathematical reasoning, derived from Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.  Einstein was initially highly dismissive, reportedly saying “Your calculations are correct, but your physics is atrocious.”  Nevertheless Lemaître’s idea was indeed confirmed experimentally just two years later by Edwin Hubble through observations made with […]

And the mechanics of Information Theory. Research suggests that the first single-celled organisms formed around 3.8 billion years ago but it was not until about 600 million years ago that, quite suddenly in evolutionary time, the Cambrian explosion occurred, giving rise to multicellular life, diversification and biological complexity1.  And you and me.  So what is a complex system? A simple definition is that it is a system with agent-like objectives and action properties that cannot be predicted from its parts […]

In 1911 the New Zealand Physicist Ernest Rutherford fired a stream of particles (1) at a gold leaf foil with the aim of better understanding the nature and structure of the atomic nucleus (Figure 1).  The details are unimportant in this context, but one can think of it in abstract terms as kicking a football at a goal with a net full of holes in front of a layer of invisible concrete bollards (2).  To his surprise or maybe not […]