Prof. Dawkins titled his talk as The Purpose of Purpose and began with an anecdote of Peter Atkins being asked by one of the Royal Family, But what about the why questions?, and Atkins replying, That is a silly question. Dawkins noted that asking why for inanimate
18,000 years ago there was a sudden change in climate which ends a global freeze which had lasted for several thousands of years. Melting ice caps drive up sea levels to create coastlines we recognize today and great glaciers thaw dramatically to re-sculpture the landscape. A mass
Prior to the day in 1947 when test pilot Charles E. Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier for the first time, people argued it wasn’t possible for a plane to fly that fast. So, perhaps we shouldn’t be deterred by the part of Einstein’s special theory of
With the help of massive machines called particle accelerators, scientists studied the subatomic realm and made discoveries about the forces that operate at that level. But the search for a comprehensive explanation still continues. In particular, physicists have sought to find a way to reconcile Einstein’s model
Imagine if one minute from now, every single person on Earth disappeared. All 6.6 billion of us. What would happen to the world without humans? How long would it be before our nuclear power plants erupted, skyscrapers crumbled and satellites dropped from the sky? What would become
Human evolution is believed to have begun some six million years ago. Despite the passage of so much time, the amount of diversity among the DNA of all humans is minuscule. Some 75,000 years ago, something apocalyptic occurred that left relative few humans alive to carry on
Since the ancient Greeks first speculated that everything they observed in reality was the result of the interaction of tiny particles they called atoms, great thinkers have tried to find a single mathematical formula that governs and explains the workings of the entire universe. So far, though,
Sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch are the tools most of us depend on to perceive the world. But some people say they also can perceive things that are outside the range of the conventional senses, through some other channel for which there is no anatomical or
It’s a voyage of exploration like no other – to Titan, Saturn’s largest moon and thought to resemble our own early Earth. For a small team of British scientists this would be the culmination of a lifetime’s endeavor – the flight alone, some 2 billion miles, would
When he has that fire in his belly, Richard Dawkins is arguably the greatest living popularizer of evolution. His foundational work, The Selfish Gene, inspired a generation of evolutionary biology students, while The God Delusion was a powerfully effective self-esteem booster for atheists in the closet. With