Every year for the past few years I meet up with some friends, some that I grew up with and have known all of my life, and play in a veterans 6-a-side football tournament. It is a family day out and a bit of fun for our team. Rarely have we ever threatened to win the tournament but we usually hold our own. This Saturday, in searing heat we entered feeling that we could do quite well. We lost a close run first game, 3-2, to the eventual winners of the tournament. During this game I covered plenty of ground, made plenty of challenges and even scored a penalty. The past 3 competitive penalties that I had taken were missed. That was over 10 years ago. When I stepped forward and put the ball in the net I exorcised a few skeletons and felt goo...

Occasionally I have one or both of my nephews around to stay with me at the weekend, they are currently aged 5 and 7. This usually gives me the opportunity to regress a bit and have a lot of fun.I get to play games and eat unhealthily for a day or two whilst they get the freedom to do pretty much what they like. As they are not ready to own the merits of eating healthily I have adopted their mentality whilst they are staying. Meanwhile, I get to pick their brains for the pearls of wisdom that they occasionally present. I have a habit of asking them questions that I have yet to find an answer to and indeed probably never will. "What is the key to the universe?" and "What is the secret to life?" are things I have pondered for many...

Science is generated by and devoted to free enquiry: The idea that any hypothesis, no matter how strange, deserves to be considered on its own merits. The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the endeavour of science. We do not know in advance who will discover fundamental new insights. Carl Sagan, Cosmos, 1981 Carl Munson recently questioned the worth of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project at CERN in a CopperStrings journal. That post got me thinking about science, particularly the esoteric fringes of science, and its worth. One of the most valuable aspects of our intellectual culture, embodied in science, is the freedom to expl...