Lost Graves

      ...the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. 

So ends George Eliot's Middlemarch, one of the greatest of English novels. Eliot, whose real name was Mary Anne Evans, has a grave in Highgate's east cemetery that is well visited. Nearby lies a man she loved, Herbert Spencer, who coined the term "survival of the fittest", and who melded Darwinism with capitalism in an influential lecture tour of the USA. Coincidentally, lying almost opposite Spencer (politically and geographically) rests Karl Marx, probably London's most popular grave pilgrimage.

Having had a look around London's most famous cemeteries to see who is buried where, it's striking to realise how many grave locations have been forgotten. The only thing worse that an unvisited tomb is a lost one. Members of the nobility were usually buried on church land adjoining their estates and could afford elaborate tombs, but mere mortals' post-death fate was more precarious. The poor and outcast could be dumped into mass unmarked graves.

There are a number of reasons:

1. London is always short of space, and cemeteries can get converted to parks, gardens or handed over to property developers. City churches had their burial grounds paved over. Sometimes the bodies were reburied, often not. Graves that were leased, and had expired, could be dug open again and other bodies buried on top of the exiting coffins.

2. The building of the railways from the 1830s led to several cemeteries being closed or reduced in size. The widening of roads to accommodate motorised vehicles also reduced the size of existing burial grounds.

3. Britain's damp weather erodes tombstones. An half-inch deep engraved stone can't be expected to last much more than 150 years. Most older than 200 years become illegible if not re-engraved. Lichen and moss don't help either, especially if it's a flat tombstone. Graves can also subside underground with time. Tombstones can topple over. Outside of Westminster Abbey and the city churches, hardly any graves remain before the 18th century.

4. Amalgamation of parishes. As Britain becomes more secular, many churches (especially Victorian ones without Grade I or II heritage listings), are sold off to property developers.

5. Cremation. Around the turn of the 20th century, cremation became a common burial practice, especially for agnostics and atheists, and many requested that their ashes be scattered at sea or over beloved rural country. Alan Turing, Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell and HG Wells are examples.

6. Lost at sea. Often explorers died at sea and British practice was to bury them at sea (the exemption is Admiral Nelson). Examples of explorers who were either lost or buried at sea include Captain James Cook, Francis Drake, George Bass, John Cabot, and John Franklin.

Sometimes the location of a burial is known due to church records, but nothing remains to mark the spot. Either the descendants of the deceased or a learned society dedicated to preserving the memory is required to purchase a new tombstone. An example is William Hazlitt's grave at St Anne's in Soho.

Here's a list of a few lost graves...

St James Gardens beside Euston Station
where  Matthew Flinders was buried

1. Matthew Flinders... explorer who circumnavigated Australia in the early 19th century (then known as New Holland), gave Australia its name, and wrote up his epic voyage. He died in 1814 (like fellow explorer George Vancouver, he was just 40 when he died) and was buried at St James Churchyard, now next to Euston Station, but the ground was reduced in size and converted to a garden. There is nothing to see there related to Flinders. Perhaps on the bicentennial of his death in 2014 a memorial will be erected.

2. William Dampier... the first Englishman to visit Australia in 1688, the first to circumnavigate the world three times, and inextricably linked with Alexander Selkirk who became Defoe's inspiration for Robinson Crusoe, the first English novel. Like Flinders, he wrote a book on his voyages, and passed away into obscurity, dying in 1715. His grave's location has been unknown for centuries, and could even be outside London.

3. John Polidori... the Edinburgh-educated doctor that accompanied Byron to Switzerland. He was there at the famous June 1816 night by Lake Geneva, and expanded a fragment of a vampire story that Byron began into the best-selling gothic short story The Vampyre. He was the first to merge the eastern European myth of the undead with an aristocrat, which was later taken up by Bram Stoker in Dracula. Polidori committed suicide in 1821, aged 25 (most of the romantics died young), and was buried in St Pancras Old Church, just north of the British Library. The grave is now lost, most probably due to the narrowing of the burial ground  when the railway was constructed. Thomas Hardy was involved in repositioning a lot of the graves.

The Hardy Tree, where many graves at St Pancras Old Church
 were moved to make way for the railway

4. Robert Boyle... chemist, experimenter (with Robert Hooke) on the properties of gas using the air-pump. Once one of the wealthiest men in England, we know he was buried at St Martins in the Fields (next to Trafalgar Square) in 1692. The crypt is now a cafeteria, and the exact grave location has been lost. Interestingly his famous collaborator, Robert Hooke, has also had his grave lost. Originally he was buried at St Helens Bishopgate (next to the Gherkin in the City). However all the graves were dug up and reburied out at the City of London cemetery in the north-east of London. There is a memorial to St Helens Bishopsgate, but not to Robert Hooke. Westminster Abbey and St Pauls have only recently installed memorials to Hooke.

5. Daniel Solander... was the main (Linnaen-trained) naturalist on Captain Cook's famous Endeavour (1768-71) voyage, being employed by Joseph Banks. He was organising the collections in Soho Square when he suddenly died of a stroke in 1782, aged 49.

6. Joseph Banks... longest ever serving President of the Royal Society. He ran a virtual government ministry of science out of his home in Soho Square. He died in 1820 and did not want his tomb to be visited, requesting a private burial. in St Leonard's Church, Heston (near Heathrow airport). The exact location of the grave is unknown. There is now a memorial plaque on the inside church wall, but the church is rarely open to visitors.

The far eastern end of Westminster Abbey

7. Oliver Cromwell... was buried at the very end of the Henry VII Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey but Charles II had the corpse dug up in 1661, hanged and his head displayed on a pole for almost 25 years. His head is reputed to be in Cambridge. The whereabouts of the body is unknown.

Other once-famous people who have had the exact locations of their graves lost: Emma Hamilton, William Hamilton, Arthur Philip, Archibald Menzies, Thomas Newcomen, Samuel Wallis, and William Blake

The rectangle is purported to be the location of the grave of William Blake at Bunhill Fields, close to Daniel Defoe's grave

The faded, fallen tombstone of naturalist Archibald Menzies at Kensal Green

The St Helens Bishopsgate memorial in the City of London cemetery where Robert Hooke's body was placed in the 19th century

The Really Big Questions

Why blog about the universe, instead of some other topic?

It's quite simple. There is no other topic.

Galaxies like grains of sand in this Hubble Ultra Deep Field image

The big questions left for science to answer can be counted on one hand. Once these five questions have been answered, those proposing that science has come to an end will have a strong case. It may be just that the rate of discovery is slowing. The five questions are:

1. What is the origin of the universe? It's probable that this question isn't even stated correctly. We're always told 'what came before the Big Bang' is a meaningless question due to the elastic and contingent nature of time. It is also possible that the 'why' in 'why is there something rather than nothing' and 'what is the meaning of the universe' are also meaningless, two of the many examples in philosophy where questions can be stated that are grammatically and logically correct, but irrational nonetheless e.g. what is the meaning of a cloud?

When formulating these fundamental questions, one should be careful in expunging all presuppositions. 'What is the meaning of life' presupposes that there is a meaning to know. 'Why is there something rather than nothing' presupposes that something needs a greater degree of explanation than nothing. Why should this be the case when there are mathematical or logical truths that exist independently of the universe? Isn't nothing more improbable than something? Peter Atkins, in his new book On Being, has playfully speculated that the universe arose ex nihilo out of some Platonic or Euclidean mathematical axioms. Any universe that is logically possible will exist by necessity. The use of the term universe can be sufficiently broad to include multiverses that vary in their physical constants and laws.
In any case, one thing we can be sure of is that we're unlikely to resolve this in our lifetimes, possibly ever.
That was the hard one. Now lets move on to the 'easy' questions.

2. How can the subjective experience of consciousness arise from inanimate matter? Our brains are just specific combinations of protons arranged in C, O, H, N, Ca, K, etc configurations. Is consciousness simply some emergent function of specific complexity? Any materialist has to agree. Will a sufficiently complex computer be self-aware? Is agency an illusion i.e. an afterglow our brains give us just to delude us into thinking we're calling the shots? We don't even know how to formulate the question correctly or even have a consensus on how to tackle this issue e.g. mapping the neural correlates of consciousness or AI research or studying stroke victims or genetic differences between primates and humans?

3. How did life get started? We think we know what the answer looks like: some auto-catalysing molecule that existed in some deep-sea vent environment (white smoker, black smoker) that was subject to high pH gradients, high temperature gradients, high pressure gradients, and lots of trace elements passing through concentrating microtubules and mixing over hundreds of millions of years sometime about 3.5 - 4 billion years ago.

4. Is there life elsewhere in the universe? Sending probes to detect bacterial life below the Martian regolith or beneath the Europan ice sheath will be the most likely opportunity for discovering ET life in our own solar system. We may also detect free oxygen in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets within a few decades, a strong indicator of life, but not conclusive. The present consensus seems to be that the universe is teeming with bacterial life (as bacteria is hardy and got started on Earth relatively quickly) while intelligent life may be rare (because it only happened once on Earth and very late in the game, and because SETI haven't detected any signals yet). It all depends how rare the Earth and our solar system are (e.g. stability of the sun, planetary configuration, presence of the Moon, tectonics, size & composition of the Earth, galactic habitable zone, etc). The SETI Institute figure that once a proper 20 year broadband survey is complete (2030s), we'll have a better idea of how to constrain the many probabilities of the Drake equation.

5. What is the nature of dark matter and dark energy? Even though we embarrassingly don't know what 96% of the universe is made of, it's still only two mysteries. Dark matter will probably be solved first in the next few decades e.g. probably just some form of ghostly neutrino-like sub-atomic or super-symmetric particle.

Questions 2-5 may be possible in principle. In practice, perhaps we can only hope for partial, inconclusive, and unsatisfactory answers to questions 3-5 in our lifetimes. Some may take centuries to resolve. If that's so, we'll just have to get used to living with uncertainty with no foreseeable prospect of resolution to these questions. There will still be relatively minor problems to address: can we cure ageing, can we get off this planet once the sun gets too hot, and can we solve our energy needs?

How has the internet changed your thinking?

EDGE Annual Question 2010 – How has the internet changed your thinking?

John Brockman presiding over an EDGE event at the Serpentine Gallery, London, in 2007

In January 2010,  über-impresario John Brockman posted the above question on his World Question Centre part of his Edge site. As usual, dozens of his regular respondents (Dawkins, Pinker, Eno, etc) answered with paragraph-length answers. It's a worthwhile browse....

Generally, opinions are divided between those who praise the internet because:

·         Web 2.0 interactivity: comments, feedback, dialogue not monologue

·         Knowledge to all, democratic, power to the people

·         Ideas spread fast

·         Instant access to vast amount of information (ultimate library)

·         Instant communication

·         Wiki collaborations

·      Luddites who reject the internet are frozen in time (intellectually speaking), perpetually before 1995 unless they read a lot of books, while the internet-savy accelerate

And those that suggest caution with regards to the internet

·         Wastes a lot of time (ephemeral news, distractions, digital deluge)

·         Need to unplug to have deep thoughts

·         Social inclusiveness can give a voice to all the crackpots, trolls & other scum

·         No substitute for face-to-face interactions

·         Anonymity breeds hate

·         Big Brother – government/corporations reading emails

·        No permanent record (emails deleted, online photographs only exist in a virtual intangible world).

·         Can’t outsource all your memory. Still need to know what to look up to get precise details on, in the same way that you roughly need to know how a word is spelt before trying to look up precisely how it’s spelt in the dictionary.

A book was published with all the responses for people who don't want to read long text on screen nor print out hundreds of pages.

Last year, I summarised some of the respondents' points in a WORD document which I'll copy-and-paste below. Some of the points may not make sense, as they are a summary-of-a-summary. With time, I'll tidy this up.

Read more »

The Shelley Gang

In light of the 'Frankenfestival' centred on the National Theatre's Frankenstein play there are a number of sites around London significant to Percy and Mary Shelley. The connections among the Shelley - Godwin - Wollstonecraft - Clairmont - Byron circle are dizzying, so strap yourself in. These are only a few. One could  expand these links further to include Thomas Paine, Leigh Hunt, Joseph Johnson, John Murray, and Samuel Coleridge.

Firstly, there's an English Heritage blue plaque memorialising Percy Shelley on the corner of Poland Street and Noel Street in Soho, where he lived in 1811 before he met Mary Godwin.


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The Marchmont Association has also installed one of its blue plaques on north Marchmont Street in Bloomsbury (near the corner of Tavistock Place) where both Percy and Mary lived in early 1816 before they left for Lake Geneva with Lord Byron. It was Mary Godwin's step-sister, Claire Clairmont (then pregnant to Byron) who had the idea to move to Switzerland.


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Percy Shelley used to visit Mary in early 1814 at William Godwin's house in Skinner Street in east London. There is nothing to see there now. The Somers Town house where Mary Shelley was born in 1797 has been demolished and Oakshott Court estate is built upon the location of the 18th century housing village called The Polygon. There is a brown plaque on the Werrington Street side of Oakshott Court estate (near Polygon Road) to Mary Wollestonecraft who lived with William Godwin in 1797 for a few short months before dying in childbirth.


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There is also a blue plaque at 24 Chester Square Belgravia where Mary Shelley died in 1851. It was here that her son, Percy Florence Shelley, met Jane St John, who became the fierce guardian of the Shelley legacy.


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Perhaps the most significant London site to the entire Shelley - Godwin - Wollstonecraft - Clairmont circle is the graveyard at St Pancras Old Church just north of the Eurostar terminal. William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft were married here in early 1797. It was also here that Percy first courted Mary with young Claire as chaperone, beside the grave of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, in 1814. William Godwin was here buried in 1836. His second wife, Mary Jane Clairemont (nee Vial), mother of Claire Clairmont, is still buried there in the same grave.


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Jane St John (later Lady Shelley) had the remains of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft exhumed and reburied at St Peters Church, Bournemouth. Later Mary Shelley and her son Percy Florence Shelley were also buried in Bournemouth.


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An interesting footnote to St Pancras Old Church is that Dr John Polidori, who was Byron's doctor and present at the famous mid-June 1816 ghost-writing competition at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, committed suicide in 1821, aged just 25 and is be is buried at St Pancras Old Church. The grave is now lost, probably due to the laying down of railway tracks later in the 19th century. It was Polidori that took Byron's fragment of a Gothic proto-vampire story and published as The Vampyre, the first time that the east European myth had been fused with a seductive aristocrat (modelled on Byron). This was taken up by Bram Stoker in 1897 in Dracula. Thus the June 1816 ghost writing competition was the originator of two of the most pervasive gothic archetypes, Frankenstein and the modern aristocratic vampire.

The old tombstone of Mary Wollstonecraft, is also where William Godwin is buried, as well as second wife Mary Jane Claremont. The writing has faded significantly. Godwin and Wollstonecraft were later reburied in Bournemouth.

Marchmont Street, just north of Tavistock Place

Poland Street, Soho

Old to the West Wind mural in Soho

Map of St Pancras Old Church

Where Mary Wollstonecraft died giving birth to her daughter Mary Godwin (later Mary Shelley), author of Frankenstein.

Brain 2.0 - a cognitive upgrade

Evolutionary psychologists have long lamented our Pleistocene brains, developed over millennia hunting on the east African savannah. They delight in explaining its shortcomings and revel in highlighting its incompatibility with modern civilisation, thus explaining much of today's existential malaise. Light is shed on all manner of social ills: why are uncomfortable in crowded urban areas, why we play office politics, how confirmation bias leads to bad decision-making, how status anxiety drives much of our behaviour including conspicuous consumption, why men and women have different strategies of sexual opportunism, why we crave fat & sugar even in sedentary lifestyles, why we delight in gossip, why we're superstitious, why we have trouble learning maths and statistics, why can't grasp the quantum world, why our number of Facebook friends are typically in the 100-150 range, and why we possess an innate tribalism that divides the world into in-group and out-groups. There are many more, summarised in various new titles.

This year, John Brockman's EDGE website invites public intellectuals from around the world an opportunity to respond to this dysfunction. It poses a question: 'what scientific concept would improve everyone's cognitive tooklit?'

An annual question is posited every January on the site, and then a book is published later with all the responses. All of John Brockman's regulars are there: Dawkins, Pinker, Ramachandran, Harris, etc.

If there's a general take-home message, it's that the scientific method should be applied to all decision-making, particularly in politics. Science waits for evidence, theories are subject to falsification, and the scientific method is the antithesis to ideology. At present, the way the mainstream media and the two-party political system operate, any indecisiveness is interpreted as 'lacking conviction' or 'flip-flopping'. Leaders must gaze thoughtfully and have an unswerving vision. He must be a statesman, stand tall, and lead from the front. The very idea that a political party can have its doctrine determined a priori e.g. social democrat or free market, rather than as a result of experiment, observation and experiment reveals a fundamental contradiction between our political system and the scientific method. Conviction is deemed a positive political trait, but in the sciences, it is the start of a slippery slope into dogma and closed-mindedness.

Reading through the paragraph-long responses of Edge's annual question is a superb way to be introduced to a variety of interesting ideas from some of the sharpest minds in a short time. Too often an interesting idea is padded into any entire book. In a way, Edge's annual question is a summary of over 100 books in the space of just one. I've done my own summary-of-a-summary below, copied in from a WORD document, so the formatting may not be 100% compatible.

Overall summary:

Scientific reasoning should be applied to everything (evidence, replicability, seeking out falsifiability, etc) including politics, religion, philosophy, sociology, etc.
Scientism: everything is ultimately a scientific question. The downside is that we'd be living in an 'autistic world' with no art, fiction, fantasy, or religion as they're all frivolous without any underlying evidence and liable to muddy our thinking.
Decisions: difficult to make decisions as each choice has to be run through a whole lot of new filters to ensure it’s untainted by bias, cognitive dissonance, inconsistency, political & economic ideology, religion, groupthink, etc. Be careful to neutralise arguments from authority and tradition, and other residual cognitive dysfunctions of our Pleistocene brains.
Politics: inconsistency with the media image (deemed necessary) of having vision, decisiveness, leadership, values, etc. Incompatible with ‘wait & see where the evidence takes us'.
Statistical illiteracy: one of the problems undermining decision-making
Other cognitive tools: don’t just describe what something is, also be clear what it is not. Otherwise the description is too foggy, vague, obscure

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The Grant Museum - new location for old-style displays

UCL’s Grant Museum of Zoology is once again open to the public, after moving across the street to more spacious premises at the corner of Gower and University Street in Bloomsbury, London.

Its new home is an old library, and a variety of animal and hominid skeletons grin widely as they preside over visitors from the balcony – not unlike a scene from a Hammer Horror movie, or perhaps the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Anatomical curiosities on display include an eyebrow-raising walrus penis bone, a narwhal tusk, Tasmanian tiger and devil skeletons, dodo remains, a large jar of preserved baby moles, and a hefty brain coral reassuringly labelled, “This is not a brain”.

The room is dominated by its largest displays – a quagga, a giant deer skull with suitably enormous antlers, a mammoth tusk, a dugong, a tiger, an Asian elephant skull and a one-horned rhino.

Despite some new features such as a series of interactive iPad displays that invite visitors to comment on topics such as animal conservation and the role of science in society, it still has a 19th century feel to it. There are no plasma displays, cartoons for visiting school groups, or animatronic dinosaurs. 























The new space allows the Grant Museum to hold regular movie screenings, lectures and events aimed at all age groups. The event listing can be found here. Museum staff are also engaged in research, and you can follow some of their activities on the Grant Museum blog.
Click below to see the Grant Museum’s relocation.
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Peter Atkins rocks the RI

Peter Atkins answers questions after his talk on the limits of science at the Royal Institution on Tuesday 22nd March 2011

The famous horseshoe-shaped lecture theatre of the Royal Institution was almost full for Oxford Chemist Peter Atkins to address the issue of the limits of science. But instead of giving a talk, he simply read passages from his new book, On Being, including most the prologue and selections from various chapters.

Atkins, whose ex-wife is ex-director of the RI, was introduced by Ian Douglas from The Telegraph. The take-home message was that there are no limits to science. In principle, science can address all the 'big questions' once ring-fenced by religion i.e. the origin of the universe, of life, of morality, of consciousness, and of spiritual experience. He then faced some hostile questions from a philosopher, a creationist, a Christian Scientist, etc and others who are skeptical about Atkins' hard-core scientism stance. Each brief exchange brought a muttering or approval or disapproval from the audience depending on their allegiances. Atkins is known as a brave straight-talking atheist that doesn't disguise his sentiments in politically-correct language, flowery sophistry, or accommodationalist qualifications. It's not just religious thinking that Atkins has no patience for, it's all the hand-waving in academic philosophy which he believes has an intrinsic pessimism that undermines the case for science.


As an audience event, however, it was a somewhat disappointing evening. No matter what one's opinions on the content, sixty minutes of reading from a book is inexcusable in this age of modern science communication. There is a world of difference in the quality of engagement between written prose and speaking to an audience. 

See Peter Atkins discuss his book On Being here

Haunting dead scientists

  There are more big names in the history of science at Westminster Abbey than any other place in the world (Paris' Pantheon and Göttingen's cemeteries would be distant second and third). Within a few metres of each other in the north-east corner of the nave lie Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Ernest Rutherford, Lord Kelvin, JJ Thomson, John Herschel, John Hunter, and Charles Lyell. There are also memorials to Howard Florey, William Herschel, Michael Faraday, Paul Dirac, James Clark Maxwell, James Joule, Joseph Lister, Joseph Hooker, Robert Hooke, Edmund Halley, Alfred Russell Wallace, Humphrey Davy, and Lord Rayleigh.

Once you enter via the Great North Door, the first memorial you encounter is Robert Hooke's diamond-shaped floor stone in front of the Sacrarium's stairs (left, or north, of centre). It's easy to miss and is not on the audioguide. The stone is next to his old Westminster schoolmaster Richard Busby. There is also a 2009 memorial to Hooke in the crypt of St Pauls. Hooke was originally buried at St Helens Bishopsgate (opposite the Gherkin) but all the graves there were moved to the City of London cemetery (Manor Park) in 1892. There is a memorial to St Helens Bishopsgate there, but no mention of Robert Hooke. Another memorial exists on The Monument near London Bridge.

Before you leave the North Transept, one memorial and grave of tangential note to the history of science is that of Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh. This was the statesman uncle of Robert FitzRoy, Captain of the Beagle on its famous circumnavigation with Charles Darwin in the 1830s. Castlereagh represented Britain at the Congress of Vienna after the fall of Napoleon and infamously committed suicide, instilling in Fitzroy a fear that he would do the same, which he did after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. The memorial to Castlereagh is prominent on the west side of the North Transept near the information desk, but the gravestone itself has faded. It's right in the middle of the main thoroughfare adjacent to William Wilberforce. To the left of Wilberforce is his friend, Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger (also faded), and underneath William Pitt is Castlereagh's gravestone. Robert FitzRoy himself is buried at All Saints Church in Upper Norwood in south London.

Next, if you follow the main tourist route of the Abbey east towards the Henry VII Lady Chapel and immediately turn left and enter the Chapel of St John the Evangelist and pass through St Michaels Chapel (marked 4 on the audioguide) and walk to the far north wall (known as the St Andrews Chapel you'll see wall memorials to Lord Rayleigh (buried on his family plot) and Humphrey Davy. Lord Rayleigh, who's name was John Strutt, was responsible for the discovery of argon and the reason for why the sky is blue (Rayleigh scattering). He's buried in the family church plot at Terling Place, Witham in Essex. Below Rayleigh's wall memorial plaque is one to Humphrey Davy, who is buried in Geneva. On the way out of these three small chapels in North Transept, take note of the wall memorial plaque of John Franklin on the west wall near the entrance.


There's more monarchs than scientists in the east of the Abbey as you follow the tourist route. There are two kings who are especially famous for fostering science, Charles II and George III. Unfortunately there are no tombs to any of Stuart monarchs, and the best you can find is that of a tiny diamond-shaped floor stone memorial to Charles II at the end of the section that houses Mary Queen of Scots (south Henry VII Lady Chapel). Under his patronage, the Royal Society was established in the 1660s. George III is buried in the crypt of St Georges Chapel at Windsor Castle and can not be visited by the public.


Once you loop around to Poets Corner, have a look for the white plaque to John Pringle, President of the Royal Society, high on the west wall. He was a regular travelling companion of Benjamin Franklin. Exit the Abbey via the Cloisters where you'll find two gleaming new memorial plaques to Edmund Halley and Captain Cook on the south wall. Halley is buried at St Margarets at Blackheath in the same tomb as fellow Astronomer Royal John Pond. The original tombstone of Halley is now displayed near the entrance to Flamsteed's House at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. There is no grave of Captain Cook, his body having been hacked to pieces and eaten in Hawaii in 1779. Some recovered remains were buried at sea.


Re-enter the nave of the Abbey and walk around to the northern wall and turn right towards the North Choir Aisle. At the end are the biggest names: Charles Darwin is under a very plain grey gravestone next to his friend John Herschel (son of William Herschel). Near the centre lies Isaac Newton below one of the most ornate memorials in the abbeys. Note the scientific motifs. Have a good look around here and see how many names you can identify. As a general rule, the rectangular gravestone indicate a burial and a diamond-shaped stone represents a memorial, although this practice is not always followed. Paul Dirac is buried in Florida, James Clerk Maxwell is on his family plot in Scotland, and Michael Faraday is in Highgate's west cemetery (special permission needs to be sought to visit it). Hooker is at Kew together with his father. Joseph Lister and John Harrison (H4 clock) are in Hampstead and Alfred Russell Wallace is in Broadstone, Dorset.

Don't forget to look in the North Choir Aisle where the composers Purcell and Ralph Vaughan Williams are buried as there are several scientists' memorials on the inner wall.


Unlike the other great cathedrals of Europe, photography is not allowed in Westminster Abbey. This seems mean-spirited seeing as so many tourists would like to and are constantly told 'No Photography' by some of attendants who seem to have infinite energy for this game all day long. Other attendants don't seem to mind if you sneak a quick discreet shot of your favourite scientist, especially possible if you hang an SLR around your next and it's a bright day so you don't need to use a flash. :)

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Frankenfestival

In March 2011, London was host to a festival of Frankenstein, centred on Nick Dear and Danny Boyle's adaptation of Mary Shelley's famous novel at the National Theatre, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller. Considered the first science fiction novel, its many film adaptations, spin-offs and variations have provided endless fascination for the public. Many subsidiary events tied in with the play, including interviews with writers and academics shedding light on the turbulent times during which the novel was written. Gothic fiction expert Christopher Frayling interviewed writer Nick Dear and director Danny Boyle about the the process of adapting the text and staging the work, in particular trying to avoid being influenced by Kenneth Branagh's 1994 film version (starring Robert deNiro as the Creature) by returning to the novel.

In another tie-in event, Richard Kelley interviewed Claire Tomalin, the biographer of Mary Shelley's renowned mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as Young Romantics author Daisy Hay. In another event, popular science presenter Brian Cox was in conversation with Richard Holmes (author of the prize-winning Age of Wonder).

The British Library, which normally hosts Josephine Hart's poetry hour, also contributed to the 'Frankenfestival' where actors read works by Percy Shelley (Mary's husband) and Lord Byron. Finally, Bodleian Library in Oxford, in conjunction with the New York Public Library, hosted an extensive exhibition on Percy and Mary Shelley's manuscripts, including pages from the original draft of Frankenstein. This follows up on their publication of the original and more radical 1818 version of the novel in 2008. Most readers are familiar with the watered-down 1831 third-edition.

Claire Tomalin is author of The Life & Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (1974)

Claire Tomalin and Daisy Hay at the National Theatre

Danny Boyle director of the science fiction film Sunshine, which had Brian Cox as a science adviser, was director of the National Theatre's 2011 production of Frankenstein

Brian Cox (centre) and Richard Holmes (right) discuss the science behind the play

Christopher Frayling (left), Nick Dear (centre) and Danny Boyle (right) discuss the challenges of adapting the novel for the stage

James Cameron, Über-Director

I've just finished reading Rebecca Keegan's updated biography of James Cameron called The Futurist. It's a easy-to-read breezy sweep of his impressive career, following his rise from janitor and driver to 'king of the world' after writing and directing the top two grossing movies of all time. At the same time, he's been responsible for developing and implementing some of the most innovative changes in the industry just as CG and 3D.

Pros: Well-written, short (the book is just 265 pages), so can be read in a day or two. It's up-to-date as of the final box office of Avatar in late 2010. It doesn't dwell too much on Cameron's personal life and five marriages. Readers get a good sense of James Cameron, the multi-faceted alpha-male director that can command gargantuan productions. 

Cons: There are no pictures of any kind. Some behind-the-scenes production photographs would have been nice (as in Paula Parisi's Titanic and the Making of James Cameron). Despite assurances in the acknowledgements that Keegan had access to many of the main players, including Cameron himself, it seems half the information is gleaned off DVD commentaries and production featurettes. Unfortunately James Cameron has not fully embraced DVD & Blu-Ray extras the way that Peter Jackson, Ridley Scott or David Fincher have, so the level of detail available in the accompanying documentaries on the making of Terminator 2 or Titanic is sparse. To this day, Titanic, True Lies and The Abyss still aren't available on Blu-Ray. It seems Cameron just likes to move on, rather than revisiting old material (think of Lucas' continual Star Wars tweaks).

Some of James Cameron's achievements:

• Some humble beginnings working on model building and set design on Roger Corman's B-movies to three of the most expensive and successful movies of all time
• Titanic won a record number of Academy Awards (11) and had rare cross-demographic appeal, earning almost twice it's nearest competitor. This is even more impressive considering nearly all of the top grossing movies are franchises.
• After taking a decade off to pursue interests in deep sea diving, Cameron returned to Hollywood with another original non-franchise concept, Avatar, which earned a billion more than even Titanic did.
• Unlike other über-directors (Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, David Fincher), James Cameron is also the main writer of his movies. Think of the many memorable catch-phrases: Come with me if you want to live, I'll be back, Game over man, I'm king of the world, Get away from her you bitch, I see you.
• Cameron also regularly edits, produces, and is not afraid to touch the camera. In fact, in any behind-the-scenes footage, you'll see him handling the camera more than the DP.
• Cameron gave 3D mainstream appeal, showed what is possible with CG (think of T2's liquid metal man), was the first to farm out effects to various effects houses, and developed a new production pipeline in adding a VR camera to a pre-viz landscapes. The Queen Alien puppet in Aliens was also the most elaborate of its kind. Titanic was the first movie to feature CG people.
• Despite being an effects maestro, Cameron doesn't ignore character development. Titanic famously had two hours of Jack & Rose on the ship before the ship struck the iceberg and the action begun. Sigourney Weaver got a nomination for Aliens, a rarity for the genre. The revival scene in The Abyss is one of the brilliant intensity. Other directors (famously Michael Bay and George Lucas) can get carried away with the effects at the expense of character and story.
• Science is not ignored nor ill-treated. Cameron took great pains to consult scientists in the creation of Pandora, and the portrayal of scientists in Avatar is sympathetic. Also, contrast Ian Holm's science officer in Alien to Lance Henrikson's equivalent in Aliens. Even the scientist in T2 is humanised and redeemed. In 2005 Cameron even made a documentary called Aliens of the Deep, about the exotic life that clusters around deep ocean volcanic vents. Despite this sympathy towards science, Cameron was not confident enough in the commercial appeal of a scientist-protagonist, so in The Abyss, Ed Harris and his team were cast as blue-collar oil-rig workers, and in Avatar, a marine grunt had to work with the science team.

What's you favourite Cameron movie? Mine would have to be Aliens, for its superb balancing of action, humour, suspense, shocks, horror, character development and effects. While not as cinematographically arresting as Ridley Scott's opener or even David Fincher's sequel, Cameron's instalment is a thrillingly paced roller-coaster, that builds to three successive heart-pounding climaxes. In a genre that is often riddled with forgettable summer schlockbusters, Aliens has achieved classic status, affirmed by its rare 100% Rotten Tomato score. Above all, it's a lot of fun.

James Cameron at BAFTA in 2009

Watch James Cameron at Bafta, London discuss his career here

Ideas - A History

Peter Watson's Ideas - A History from Fire to Freud, may be one of the greatest history books ever written. Five years in the researching, compiling hundreds of books, it offers a 1000 page sweep over all of humanity's great ideas. This isn't a conventional political history (e.g. which king won which battle), but a history of how we think about ourselves, each other, and our relation to the earth and the cosmos.
It provides the scaffolding in which other histories can slot into. How often have you read a biography or seen a documentary about an episode from the past, but can't connect it to the broader context?

Unlike most history books which are written by academics with a humanities education, Peter Watson does not avoid scientific developments. In fact, he emphasises them prominently as one of the main drivers of change. The book ends at the turn of the 20th century, the birth of modernism. Don't be fooled by Freud in the title; Watson is no admirer of Freud, claiming that he made up all his theories. For an equally insightful overview of the 20th century, Peter Watson has written A Terrible Beauty or the Modern Mind, published in 2000. Together, they took about a decade to write!

Peter Watson, is based in the United Kingdom and France, and keeps a low profile, out of the lecture/media circuit. In 2010 he released his third successive one-thousand page book, The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century, an encyclopaedic overview of Germany's contribution to intellectual history beginning with Immanuel Kant in the 18th century.
His next book, The Great Divide: History and Human Nature in the Old World and the New explores what we can learn about human nature given the independent development of Eurasia and the Americas, separated for 14,000 years and and yet still converging on several important ideas and technologies.

For those that are interested, here's a 50-page summary of the introduction and Part 1 of Peter Watson's book. It was written over the winter of 2007/08 in Word, so the formatting may not be quite compatible with this blog. I tried to copy the entire 340 page summary but that exceeded Blogger's word/byte/size limit.

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