Down a roadside divided by a canal in the Dutch town of Franeker, you come across a smart museum frontage close to to a traditional Dutch brick building bearing the word ‘Planetarium’. Having purchased your ticket, you pass down narrow corridors built long before domestic spaces were designed to host public attractions. You enter anRead More
Somewhere in the stars beyond, quite a few milliennia from now, long after our civilisation will have pushed its self-destruct button, one or other of the Voyager spacecraft will be detected by some advanced species. That species won’t be so advanced as to have developed its own self-destruct button, but it will be smart enoughRead More
Space … is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space. Listen… Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Amid all the reports of tumultuous things thatRead More
Some thirty years ago, when I had little money but a great urge to discover all the writers not then known to me, I would scour the second-hand bookshops and would hope to pay 20p for some battered paperback, 40p if it looked to be of special interest. One day, while browsing through the fewRead More