Catmachine

Not that long ago by the timescale of the universe there was no-one on Earth to observe anything. The solar system had been in existence for billions of years and the various bodies within it had long settled into their orbits with clockwork precision. Close in to the parent star smaller rocky bodies circled in the light, ring fenced by a zone in which gravitational perturbation had prevented any single body coalescing from the thousands that still swarmed within. Beyond that larger bodies formed chiefly of gas orbited in stately majesty, themselves circled by vast extended families of smaller bodies. And out on the fringes of the system lay further belts of small rocky and icy worlds some of which circled the star in a wildly eccentric manner. Occasionally one of these most distant of the star's children would fall inwards, jets of gas and vapour blown from their surfaces by the solar wind in tails millions of miles long. None of the bodies in the solar system or beyond ha...

The Science Museum was another matter altogether. Sometimes I entered it from the passage that led from the Natural History Museum and on other occasions I approached from the main entrance in Exhibition Road - at the far end of the " Foot Tunnel to Museums " that led from the tube station; a tunnel so long that the end appeared to disappear with the perspective and you wondered whether it had originality been designed to carry trains. The entrance to the Science Museum was deceptive - it was nothing like the grandiose frontage of the Natural History Museum but more like you imagined a Victorian office building or part of the Ministry of the Defence. However the interior took you by surprise - a cavernous hall filled with light and lined with machines in glass cases, brass mechanisms the purpose of which was often obscure. Off to one side a wide curved staircase surrounded a stairwell in which an enormous pendulum swung to demonstrate the rotation of the earth. It was...

As has been chronicled several times in the past I was a child obsessed with the space programme. And no wonder; those were exciting times what with the moon landings, Skylab and the Apollo Soyuz Test Project . What with the Space Shuttle on the horizon I was sure that my future lay off world. It was only a matter of time. One of the most exciting things I'd read about in the Brooke Bond Race Into Space picture card set and Reginald Turnill 's The Language of Space was the Manned Flight To Mars . This was likely to happen in the mid eighties. I imagined that by the time I was in my forties that it wasn't beyond the bounds of possibility that I'd have been to Mars once, the Moon two or three times and the various space stations more often than I could remember. Spaceflight would be commonplace in the 2010s. Civilization's failure of nerve and imagination since the 1970s has never failed to disappoint me. We are living in an age when even the prospect of re...

Exoplanets - planets circling other stars - are being discovered by the dozen these days. Back in the dark times of the eighties and earlier some scientists doubted whether any other stars were accompanied by planets at all. Now you begin to wonder whether there's even such thing as a planetless star. Since the discovery of the first one in 1988 the number of confirmed exoplanets now approaches 1,000 and given advances in observational technology can only grow at an ever increasing rate. As such the news of another discovery is hardly a matter for excitement any more. Except the latest one. They've found a planet in Alpha Centauri . Alpha Centauri! A system whose official stellar classification echoes down the annals of SF literature, film and TV like the name of an old friend. Everyone's heard of Alpha Centauri. It's not that remarkable a system in itself - just a bog standard double star each of which is approximately the same size and magnitude as our own sun,...

Life seemed bleak and I was feeling sorry for myself - there didn't really seem to be much point in anything I was involved in and I could see no hope for the future. Then scrolling past in the Twitter stream came the news that Neil Armstrong had died. The sad news instantly took me back to childhood where my heroes were all scientists and explorers rather than sporty types or warriors. Neil Armstrong was the first and the only one with whom I felt a real time connection. Along with most of the rest of the species who were alive at the time and had access to television receiver, I clearly remember watching Armstrong step onto the surface of the Moon. It was the middle of the night but my parents had the foresight to wake me up and plonk me in front of the set. Despite my young age I knew exactly what was going on. Back then the Space Race was everywhere and I knew in my bones that it was only a matter of time before we were all living out there. It is a shame that collectivel...

I am pleased to see that the Curiosity rover landed safely on Mars after such a long journey. And having seen simulations of the landing itself I'm impressed with the technology involved - the rover was winched down to the surface from a hovering descent section. That's a far more exciting and suitable example of unsupervised robotic drone technology than some I could mention. I hope we can look forward to at least five years of planetary trundling and would like to think that in my lifetime I'll see TV pictures of Curiosity being retrieved by the men and women of the first human mission. Of course every time something exciting happens in the space programme there is a backlash from people who think the money would be better spent curing disease and feeding the hungry. Whilst I  applaud and share the core sentiment - who doesn't wish the sick cured and the starving fed? - as soon as I start unpacking this assertion I find it's riddled with flaws. For a star...

When I was growing up it seemed to be a fairly common thing for children's heroes to be footballers. My friend Shamus expressed an admiration for Alan Ball although I suspected that this was just because his name was Ball. Shamus was obsessed with all things football related, so a footballer actually named Ball... well there was no choice really. It was lucky that the Arsenal centre forward Booty McGoalmouth was only a figment of my fevered imagination. I didn't have such heroes. Football didn't interest me and I had no idea who Cyril was nor what his nice one entailed. My heroes were Michael Faraday, Albert Einstein, Doctor Who, Charles Darwin and Mr Spock. This meant that had I ever fallen into a coma my parents would have had a bit of trouble getting one of them to come to my bedside and try and rouse me seeing as they were either dead or fictional (although I expect Tom Baker would have given it a go in character). However I did meet someone when I was twelve who,...

One of the best things about being a child is that time lasts so long and that there is so much to do that one soon forgets about things. As described in the last entry , my parents entered a competition on my behalf, the first prize of which was a flight to America to see the launch of the next Apollo mission. Whilst it was true it was always at the back of my mind that I might win, in the meantime I just got on with other things. We didn't win of course but I don't recall not winning. The possibility just faded from sight. This didn't affect my obsession with space flight in the least. I was still hooked and for someone with such interests it was an exciting time to be alive. The odd thing is that I don't remember whether my interest in space travel was sparked off by my parents waking me up in the middle of the night to watch Apollo 11 land on the moon or whether the only reason they bothered to wake me up in the middle of the night in the first place was that...

I just entered a competition the first prize of which is a journey into space. I am under no illusions about winning, but it is nice to have these little possibilities hanging there in the back brain giving us cause to imagine just how wonderful would it be if only...  Millions of people do the National Lottery every week for instance and the chances of winning that are far less likely. So you never know, I might win. And of all the things I really want to do, number one by a long way has always been leaving the planet, if only temporarily. I dream about space travel on a regular basis and am eternally disappointed in the non-arrival of the future that was promised us in our childhood. OK so we have a different future, an amazing one that we could never have imagined back in the seventies. The internet, a whole extra dimension, has been added to human experience in the most significant technological development since Gutenberg and yet... It's not as good as space travel, is...

I am currently confined to my bed by a particularly annoying cold. It seems somewhat unfair that I am suffering at all; as far as flu jabs were concerned, I've had both the Swine and the Regular. Surely that should be the medical equivalent of a Get Out Of Jail Free card? There's nothing that common about the cold. Sure, it's widespread, but there are so many different varieties that it should surely be considered as a family of diseases rather than just one. It may feel as if I've got yet another cold , but this is the first (and only) time I've ever come across this variety, hence it's virulence. Good word that, Virulence . From the same root as Virus of course, the Latin for poison. It's quite a perfect description for them really; in many ways they are more akin to a poison than a parasitic organism. Should they even be considered alive? I've always thought not. There's certainly no method to their mechanism, they just bumble about until b...

I started writing when I was a kid. Aside from short pieces of creative writing, my childhood magna opera were comics drawn in biro. The first was about a giant called Bigfoot who was "twenty five miles high" and arrived on Earth and proceded to get into a rage. I'm not quite sure how I managed to sustain this wafer thin premise for as long as I did; perhaps by being derivative. In the Bigfoot in Space sequence he did meet Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, K9 and the crew of the Liberator... I moved on to a series of comics about the exploration of the Solar System starring Captain Dawswell. For some reason this one astronaut was involved in the first mission to every single planet. Apart from Pluto, which wasn't a planet at all (was I a bit ahead of my time there?) but which turned out to be a massive space station built by dolphins. Furthermore, flying in the face of the best evidence of the time, every single planet in the Solar System seemed to harbour some kind of li...

Copernicus could have got in a lot of trouble when he suggested that the Earth was not the centre of the universe. Somehow he managed to avoid getting embroiled in controversy (perhaps by dedicating his book to the Pope - what a creep) and it was poor old Galileo that took the heat the following century and was the focus of the church's wrath and ended up spending the last ten years of his life under house arrest like a seventeenth century Salman Rushdie. The church's reaction to the geocentric scientific beliefs of the day being challenged seems a bit over the top. What had it got to do with them anyway? It seems that they were getting ideas above their station, interfering in scientific circles, but of course back then you couldn't get a higher station than the church, and what's more they had the might to back it up. But, putting the church poking their oar in aside for the moment, you can understand why the old Ptolemaic system, whereby the Earth is immobile and...

If you enjoy this entry or find it interesting do please leave a comment or follow me on Twitter . This entry has received a lot of traffic recently and I would be very interested to hear from where it is linked. "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." Douglas Adams The beginning of another week, once more we continue marching inexorably forward towards the end. Or do we? Well, obviously we do, or at least it feels like we do. But during my rambling investigations into the nature of consciousness I began to question the nature of time or at least the nature of our perception of it. Are we really moving forwards at an accelerating rate or is that just what it feels like? The acceleration of time as we get older is obviously an illusion as I've discussed before , so might its steady passage in one direction also be imaginary? We need to think about how we actually experience time. What is the present? I'd say the present corresponds to our short ter...

It's been a while since I've been anywhere with really dark skies. There's too much light pollution around. Sometimes when I've been up in Scotland the skies have been moderately impressive, but I haven't seen terrifying numbers of stars since being somewhere on the Norfolk Broads in the mid-nineties. Do you know what I mean by terrifying stars? Too many to count in a pitch black sky; the Milky Way as plain as a pikestaff. It's deep space and it's right there. It makes me want to rush inside to hide and yet at the same time it's strangely compelling - I want to lie flat stare up into the sky and go mad. It's almost like Asimov's Nightfall . I am not sure why such a sight should be so alarming; perhaps it's the vast numbers and distances involved. Our minds are not accustomed to dealing with such things and now we no longer have the gods to blame everything on, there's no one in charge. Just like the very small, the arena of the very...

We've been living in the future now for almost twenty years, and I have to say it's been a big disappointment. Some people might say that the rise of the internet is something that we didn't predict and which has gone very well thank you and which has led to all those people walking around with iPhones - a mobile, portable entertainment and communications centre in their pocket. Isn't that futuristic enough for me? Frankly, no. Whilst I did make myself what I now realise was a toy laptop out of an old box file in 1973, drew a picture of a mobile phone ( see above ) in 1974 and always had a hankering for a wrist TV, to me the future was defined by one thing and one thing alone. Space. It's not surprising - one of my early coherent memories is being woken up in the middle of the night to watch Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, and I'm sure I got through more than one Airfix kit of the Saturn V and Eagle etc. Back then it was not unreasonable to assume that things wou...