BBC Science Rocks!

This design idea arose when I was trying to think of something to pay my own small tribute to the great science programmes being put out by the BBC. Series after series of amazing stuff; Frozen Planet, Wonders of the Universe, Cell, The Story of Electricity, The Human Body, Are We Still Evolving?, The Story of Maths and of course The Sky At Night (and that's just to name a few). There are many other BBC science presenters I couldn't fit it also. You can buy the t-shirt here. Let's go to work ;)

Galileo 'SCOPE t-shirt design

Thought this was a bit of fun - another geek t-shirt to add to the list! Galileo 'SCOPE t-shirt

New t-shirt design 'Four Horsemen 2012'

Available to buy right here: Four Horsemen 2012

Philip Stein watches and Christopher Hitchens

Like many other people may have done, I spent a fair amount of time last Friday reading tributes and listening to the words of Christopher Hitchens after learning of his death. There are so many of his debates on YouTube, you can easily spend hours enjoying his uncompromising style of argument in his distinctive voice. A personal favourite speech of mine is this remarkable one he gave on free speech for example. I also watched a debate I hadn't seen before; this one with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach (it is a pretty terrible recording though).

I'd seen Hitch debate with Boteach a couple of times before, and this one seemed a little more friendly and less combative than others. Even so, Hitch is forced at one point to deliver what I am contractually obliged to call a Hitch-slap to Boteach when the Rabbi attempts to blame Hitler and the Nazi's on atheism (around 50 mins into the video). We've all heard that one before of course, but I was amused a couple of days later to read in Daniel Dennett's tribute piece to Hitch: A lesson from Hitch: When rudeness is called for of an earlier occasion of Hitch performing a similar rebuke to the same Rabbi, this time on the very similar and just as wrong claim that Hitler was inspired by Darwin. I don't know if on that occasion Boteach conceded the point, but he did in the video above. It will be interesting to see if he uses the argument in debate again.

To get to the point though: at the end of the debate, Boteach presents Hitch with a Philip Stein watch which was apparently a special watch made for a family-oriented campaign the Rabbi is involved with (and he asks Hitch to also become a patron). I like looking at watches and so I looked up Philip Stein to see what their watches were like (they are beautiful), there are some on Amazon and if I were not cursed with stupid skinny girl wrists and lack a spare £1000+ I would love to get one. So then I went to Philip Stein's website to see what else they had. Unfortunately the catalogue section seems to be broken so I couldn't browse the range, but I did then click on the Frequency Technology section to see what that was all about.

As a skeptic, this section has many claims that sound very familiar, especially if you know about things such as magnetic healing bracelets, Power Balance bands etc and it also has bits reminiscent of Qi, acupuncture etc. For example:

Natural Frequency Technology in Philip Stein watches is based on key frequencies beneficial to life and health, which are embedded on a metal disk found in every Philip Stein watch.

Initially though, it claims to have scientific legitimacy because of a published paper. I haven't read that, nor do I have the scientific credentials to give an opinion (there are plenty of skeptics out there who do of course) but I am certainly very skeptical of the claims being made on that page as they sound very much like nonsense woo-woo I've seen from many other products. Interesting that a high-end (I assume) watch maker would choose to use such techniques to sell four-figure value watches.

What really did irk me though was looking at the Who Wears It section, and finding a photograph of Christopher Hitchens and Shmuley Boteach, obviously taken at the debate described above. Whether or not Hitch agreed to his photo being used to promote the watch brand I do not know, but I doubt very much he would have done so if he were aware of the highly unscientific nature of the claims being made to sell the watches. Oprah Winfrey appears twice on the same page, which probably tells you all you need to know.

RIP Christopher Hitchens

The Eureka moment

This is another of those random brain fart posts where something is rattling around in my head and writing it down helps get rid of it :)

My question is this: has there been a major scientific theory that arose from what is commonly known as a 'eureka moment' that the scientist responsible has then claimed to have been divine revelation? I honestly don't know the answer, but I can't think of any.

I'm assuming that Archimedes (responsible for the original 'eureka') didn't do so as I guess the concept of divine revelation wouldn't have been around in the current form, but there have certainly been plenty of phenomenal scientists that were deeply religious - Isaac Newton is the most obvious probably. Whether or not his famous gravity-inspiring apple/head moment is apocryphal I'm not sure but that would qualify as an extraordinary moment of inspiration, so did he consider it to be divine revelation? What if Einstein had been a devout Christian - would he have claimed one of his famous relativity thought experiments to have been a revealed truth in the religious sense? Today there are proportionately few strongly religious scientists (in comparison the the proportion of the general public), but of those that are have any discovered something revolutionary and claimed it was religiously revealed to them?


So broadly what I want to know is, has there been any significant increase in the knowledge base of humankind that has been claimed to have come from divine revelation? If not (and I would guess not) - why not?

Prof. Richard Wiseman for The Skeptic Magazine

Finally I can show you this cover illustration for the new issue of The Skeptic Magazine! It's Richard Wiseman who is Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, and famous for many TV appearances and books about the mad things our squishy brains get up to.

The interview in the magazine partly promotes his recent book Paranormality (which is great), so the idea to put him in a Ghostbusters outfit came pretty quickly. I must thank Crispian Jago for his great idea for the actual pose. Really pleased with how this turned out, hope you like it!

I'm offering prints of this illustration for sale, they will be A3 size and cost £15 inc p&p. Click below to buy through PayPal: