If the Royal Observatory at Greenwich has a royal star, it has to be Gamma Draconis, also known as Eltanin, “the dragon’s head.” Eltanin is not an especially bright star, in a constellation, Draco, the Dragon, without any bright stars. But it does have a claim to local fame: It passes directly overhead London once each day.
Articles from January 2023
19th-century star atlas illustration of the constellation Draco
Photo by Marc Schulte on Unsplash
In search of the soul
The philosopher René Descartes insisted that body and soul are separate things. “I think, therefore I am,” he famously said. His “am” was not flesh and bone.
"Strata of Tilgate Forest" from "Illustrations of the Geology of Sussex" (1827)
The mind being but too apt…
In the fall of 2003 I walked the prime meridian, the line of zero longitude, across southeastern England, visiting many sites important to the history of science.
Photo by Caleb Miller on Unsplash
Pontifical science
A little over a week ago [July 7, 2005], an op-ed essay appeared in The New York Times by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, archbishop of Vienna, purporting to clarify the position of the Roman Catholic Church on evolution.
Samuel Beckett Bridge, Dublin • Photo by Saad Chaudhry on Unsplash
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
A little over a week ago [in 2005], Thomas Friedman had two op-ed columns in The New York Times about the Irish economic miracle, sometimes called “the Celtic Tiger.”
Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash
Into the night
I first became intimate with the night sky on the sleeping porch of my grandmother’s house on Ninth Street in Chattanooga, Tennessee, during the early 1940s.
A fossilized trilobite preserved in Burgess Shale • Photo by Smith609 (CC BY 2.5)
Accident or destiny?
For the first four billion years of Earth history, life was amebic and microscopic. Then, about 600 million years ago, with surprising swiftness, a myriad of multicellular organisms appear in the fossil record, in what has been called the Cambrian Explosion.
Photo by Charlotte Harrison on Unsplash
Mr. Blue Redux
Sometime during my sophomore year at the University of Notre Dame, in 1955 – 56, my girl friend (now my wife) gave me a copy of Myles Connolly’s novella, “Mr. Blue.”
Photo by Jackson David on Unsplash
An itch for God
More than a century ago the American psychologist William James set out to account for the universality of religious faith in “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” a book that maintains a lively presence on college reading lists.
Ramblers on a public footpath • Photo by Andrew Bowden (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Town and country
In the fall of 2003, I walked across southeastern England along the Prime Meridian, the line of zero longitude. I started at the English Channel, near Brighton, then trekked north until I hit the North Sea, about 185 miles as the crow flies.