The simplest and cheapest of all reforms within institutional science is to switch from the passive to the active voice in writing about science. Many people have already made this change, but some teachers in schools and universities do not realise that they and their students are free to write...

Physics is based on the assumption that certain fundamental features of nature are constant. Some constants are considered to be more fundamental than others, including the velocity of light c and the Universal Gravitational Constant, known to physicists as Big G. Unlike the constants of mathematics, such as π, the...

Before 2012 slips away it's worth remembering that this is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Thomas Kuhn's hugely influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which was itself revolutionary and has sold more than a million copies worldwide. Almost every time you hear the word "paradigm," Kuhn's book...

The "scientific worldview" is immensely influential because the sciences have been so successful. Their achievements touch all our lives through technologies and through modern medicine. Our intellectual world has been transformed through an immense expansion of our knowledge, down into the most microscopic particles of matter and out into the...