I am (or should be, I have been ill) participating in the Edinburgh International Science Festival as part of the  Enlightenment Exchange on forecasting the future.  This is an outline of what I plan to talk about. Needham’s Question is why did the development technology in western European accelerate much faster than in China after 1600. The issue that Needham wanted to tackle was that China had the physical   and intellectual resources, mathematics, alchemy, astrology and magic, just as Renaissance Europe did, but it did not develop science as Europe did. One key...

 My undergraduate degree was in physics, then sixteen years working in oil exploration led me to doubt the certainties that I was taught at Imperial and I became a mathematician interested in uncertainty. The domain for mathematicians interested in uncertainty are the social sciences and I have the fervour of a convert in condemning my old faith and promoting my new faith. While you might not think my beliefs are particularly relevant, I do think a contributory factor in the credit crisis was the wholesale adoption of the culture of the physical sciences by modern finance. In December...

It seems, from the cheap seats at least, that the Eurozone crisis has abated, so now the media is filled with a food crisis. For anyone not following the story, despite food being an important issue of public discourse, following the emergence of BSE twenty years ago and the GMO debate, it turns out things are not as transparent as one would hope and when Europeans have been paying for processed beef they have ended up eating dead horses.  This is no great surprise to someone who has occasionally bought a burger for £1.50. I started thinking about the relationship between...