Tag: Jules Verne
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Let there be light!
We recently visited Derby and, for the first time in forty years, I actually went into the Cathedral. It doesn’t look very prepossessing from the outside, but boy the inside is great. It is full of light. It was built in 1725 and reflects and interacts with the ideas and values of the Enlightenment era. I…
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Making mineralogy public: George Sand and Jules Verne
On 14 January, Richard Fallon, an expert on 19th/20th-century literature and science, posted on Bluesky: “More people ought to read George Sand’s 1864 romance Laura, Voyage dans le cristal: a delirious, phantasmagoric, mineralogical story that includes a trip to a prehistoric lost world at the North Pole”. I had read some stories by George Sand…
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The mystery of the missing Martians
When the present is depressing and the future uncertain, it is sometimes nice to retreat to the past, especially to past futures. I recently tried to distract myself from the present by staring at Venus, Moon and Mars illuminating the evening sky. I then led my eyes wander around the internet and I inadvertently came…
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Snapshots of the unknown – some holiday souvenirs
On holiday at the English seaside I read two very different books: a popular science book on Aristotle’s biology by Armand Marie Leroi (The Lagoon, 2014) and a novel by Jules Verne about a sea voyage to the North pole (Les Aventures du Capitaine Hatteras, 1864). While reading these books, I also came across an…
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Nanoscience, images and technologies of visualisation: A space odyssey
This blog post is a story about an intellectual and collaborative adventure that should be all too familiar to academics. However, opportunities for such adventures may sadly be disappearing in an era of impact driven research. It is a story of how enthusiasm, curiosity, serendipity and collaboration can lead to unexpected and joyous outcomes. At…
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Jules Verne: Making science visual
On Christmas Eve I had a chance encounter on twitter and the result is this blog post, or rather: essay. Richard Ashcroft had retweeted a tweet about a book by Adam Roberts. The tweet by Adam Roberts said: “Finished copies came by this morning’s post. Very lovely piece of book making!” The book retells Jules…
Making Science Public 