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http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b06nrc0g/imagine-autumn-2015-2-anto... Like Antony Gormley, best known for Angel of the North, I can imagine being human. I can imagine lots of things. As a wee boy I imagined what it would be like to live in a sweet shop, to slay a dragon, or right every wrong. There were lots of things I wouldn’t admit to imagining. Like Antony Gormley I came from a big Catholic family, big on Catholicism, five kids and a...

In which your forgiveness and understanding is sought

There's one reading slot left. First-come, first-served. Following on from the roaring success in Nottingham (tha nks, VeraClark) the next ABCtales R eading E vent has been organised. Here are the details: Date: Wednesday 11th November, 2015 Venue: The Wheatsheaf Address: 25, Rathbone Place, Fitzrovia, London, W1T 1JB Time: 18:30 for a 19:00 start Nearest tube: Tottenham Court Road Link to the venue: The Wheatsheaf, 25 Rathbone Place, Fitzrovia...

ABCtales editor, Mark Say contacted me earlier in the day to pass on some much anticipated news about who and what has been awarded the story and poem of the month for October. Here's what he had to say. Story of the Month Remembering Molly by Michael SR Valentine http://www.abctales.com/story/michael-s-r-valentine/remembering-molly An evocation of two people making an emotional connection amid desperate lives in a shabby world. It provides the...

The responses to last week's inspiration point have been absolutely superb. The weekly inspiration point feature seems to be going from strength to strength which is thrilling. Please do join in with it if you haven't done so already, it really can be an awful lot of fun and definitely frees the muse. If you have any suggestions of your own for a possible IP please don't be shy and let us know what you have in mind. More on the coming week's...

Do human’s consist only of quanta and particles? asks Rovelli. We know that he is going to answer yes and no. It’s not that simple he says. Well, he should try being me for a while, and trying to read a roadmap then he’d understand how complex it is. We humans, he tells us, are subjects that observe the world. But we know what’s coming next if we’ve been paying attention. We are also part of the world. A very small part of the world. A very,...

The problem of heat was one that perplexed mid-nineteenth century physicists. One way of understanding it was to think of it as a kind of fluid, ‘caloric’ fluid. I guess that’s where we get the term calorific value. Food equals a certain amount of energy. But in the mid-nineteenth century there was thought to be two kinds of heat: hot and cold. Wrong, of course, but not for the reason we think. James Maxwell and the Austrian physicist Ludwig...

It seems unutterably silly that it has been 10 years since this little book first saw the light of day, originally as a consequence of a Daily Mail 'Print Your Own Book' offer. Since then it has been self-published locally and, with the advent of e-publishing, let loose upon a wider world. It seems even sillier that over 6,000 people have read about my attempts at growing up in Burton upon Trent in the 1950s and 1960s. I suspect that the...

Twentieth-century physics has given us two lodestars: general relativity and quantum mechanics. Some of the fruits of these are the study of cosmology, astrophysics and at more microscopic level, gravitational waves and black holes. Yet the two theories cannot both be correct, because they are, in essence, contradictory. The paradox is both also work in their domains remarkably well. Einstein’s Theory of All Things was a search for that...

Atoms are the smallest things we can see. Each atom consists of a nucleus orbited by electrons. We’re looking more closely at the nucleus here. Each nucleus consists of protons and neutrons. If we go even smaller protons and neutrons are made up of even smaller units given the name quarks by the American physicist Murray Gell-man. The force that ‘glues’ quarks together inside protons and neutrons is called gluons. In medieval philosophy an...