Michael Brooks

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MundoAmérica,

Before my Jamaican-born grandfather, Egan “Teddy” Brooks, left Harlem for Scotland in 1935, he was on the track team at George Washington high school in New York. Somebody wrote on his yearbook photo: “Can he run!”

This week’s Commonwealth Games will provide a further demonstration of the Jamaican flair for sprinting. The fact that my grandfather, Usain Bolt and many other Jamaican-born athletes are so fast is, in scientific terms, an anomaly. Anomalies are often the harbingers of a profound scientific insight. So what might we learn from this one? The answer has nothing to do with reinforcing prejudices about the sporting abilities of black people.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia

Many scientists seem to suffer from an inferiority complex. They often feel they are objects of suspicion, or under-appreciated. As a result, some have taken to declaring that the benefits of modern living, brought to you by science, show the discipline is all-powerful, an inside track on the truth about everything in the universe.

This always seemed a foolish path. Now evidence has emerged that it could be dangerous, too. A week ago, a team of physicists produced research that suggests we might have underestimated the lifetime of any black holes produced at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. Previous calculations had suggested the LHC might produce microscopic black holes, but that they would last just fractions of a second.…  Seguir leyendo »