Here’s a great DNA-detective story. It involves gene surgery in plants that will soon be saving lives. And it has a surprise ending. Many people owe their lives to the humble Himalayan mayapple. Its leaves contain a substance (podophyllotoxin) that inhibits cell growth. Would be great for stopping cancer but it is too toxic. However, […]
Back to the writing of Time One. The book’s narrator is mentoring a hack detective who’s supposed to figure how the universe began like it’s a crime scene. The detective knows from nothing. He says his name is Frank. (The narrator disbelieves him.) The narrator is a beach-bum with a philosophic education. His job is […]
Arthur (latterly Sir Arthur) Conan Doyle, a practising physician, surgeon and ophthalmologist is well known for his fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes. I, too, am a fan. Doyle is less known for the sharp eye that he kept on physics. It shows up in the way his fiction promotes then-new physics-based ideas. Through the 1900s these […]
If it weren’t so serious it could be quite a lark. I am setting out to tell the true tale of the universe’s birth and will need some research to fill in the story. There is this narrator who is somehow writing for me. He’s an aging beach bum, a rootless hacker from the first days of […]
Man in motion (myself, not the Night Ranger album), I could get conflicted (once again): The universe moves on, I see this, yet I know it never moves. It has no way to move. It has no time. At any given now it simply is; so now is all it ever has. It is a […]