Category: Environment
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Offensive Realism?
John Mearsheimer, a Professor at Chicago University, is a political scientist and international relations scholar who has developed a theory of “offensive realism”. The suggestion is that interaction between the world’s great powers is basically governed by a determination, in an unstable international system, to gain and maintain the security provided by regional dominance. It…
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A Juxtaposition
The Wordsworth poem reminds me that we are all made of ‘star dust’. We’re made of exactly the same atoms as everything else in the universe. These atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, phosphorus, sulphur, potassium, sodium, chlorine and magnesium were created millions and billions of years ago in the nuclear furnaces of massive,…
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Voices in the Wilderness of Time and Space?
“Welcome to planet Earth – a place of blue nitrogen skies, oceans of liquid water, cool forests and soft meadows, a world positively rippling with life. In the cosmic perspective it is poignantly beautiful and rare; but it is also, for the moment, unique. In all our journeying through space and time, it is, so…
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The ‘Sober’ Truth about the Solstice
The English word ‘solstice’ comes from the Latin ‘solstitium’, meaning the ‘Sun standing still’. Around the 20th/21st December, the Sun slumps down to lie at its lowest point above the horizon. It needs a few days to ‘chill out’ before beginning, so slowly at first, to clamber its long way back to higher things, with…
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A Hand Shake across Thousands of Years
When caves are mentioned, some of us may still imagine unwashed, unshaven, grunting brutes lumbering about, dragging women behind them by the hair. These hand prints from the Cave of El Castillo, made at least 37 centuries ago, tell a different story. Let’s think about how movingly astounding they are. Early humans worshipped the Earth…
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“Here comes the Sun”
WE’RE inclined to forget that the Sun, which we so enjoy when it’s shining on us (but not too fiercely), and which we so much miss when the days are short-lived and freezing, is a furiously raging nuclear furnace. It’s turning hydrogen into helium, and releasing the resultant energy in everything from blistering surface bubbles…
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My Little Wise Guy
I keep my little wise guy on my desk – to remind me never to take myself (or anyone else) too seriously ….. you could say that he’s the Apple of my eye ! “Too bad all your blogs aren’t as short as this one”, he’s telling me. You’re probably right, little fella …..
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The ‘Final’ Reality
For the final time (for now), let’s think again about the fascinating fact of a different level of ‘reality’. Let’s consider a picture that should make immediate sense to us. Wherever we are right now, passing through us, are radio, television, and internet ‘waves’. They are real, but we can’t see them. Common sense would…
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What is (or are) Real?
Since this is so counter-intuitive, and goes against ‘common-sense’, let’s have another go at asking the question, what is real at the most fundamental level? What can we say about the most basic building blocks of all that exists? This doesn’t seem like an unimportant question, because I’m part of whatever it is that’s real.…
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