SPIKE MAGAZINE

This dialogue between Matthew Ritchie and Thyrza Nichols Goodeve first appeared in the catalogue for the artist’s exhibition Proposition Player, organized by Lynn M. Herbert, December 12, 2003-March 14, 2004, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in association

Pedro Blas Gonzalez Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track – Richard Feynman See all books by Richard Feynman at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com Winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics, Richard Feynman (1918 -1988) is also regarded

Ian Hocking Rocks of Ages – Stephen Jay Gould See all books by Stephen Jay Gould at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com In his book Rocks of Ages, the late Stephen Jay Gould, who had Harvard professorships in both zoology and geology, presents

Ian Hocking Of A Fire On The Moon – Norman Mailer See all books by Norman Mailer at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com Here is Norman Mailer, born eighty-one years ago, married six times, the great egotist and American literary lion.

Jonathan Kiefer talks to Simon Garfield about the secret history of chemistry revealed in his book Mauve: How One Man Invented a Colour that Changed the World For the subject of his most recent and most popular book, Simon Garfield chose a man whose

Jonathan Kiefer Time Lord – Clark Blaise See all books by Clark Blaise at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com For the chief engineer of a national railroad company, especially one so industrious as Sandford Fleming in 1876, misreading

Robin Askew Mendel’s Dwarf – Simon Mawer See all books by Simon Mawer at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com Nature has played a cruel trick on Dr. Benedict Lambert, the great-great-great nephew of Gregor Mendel, father

Robin Askew When We Die – Cedric Mims See all books by Cedric Mims at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com The first thing to happen is regurgitation of the stomach contents into the mouth or air passages. At the same time, urine is passed and semen

Robin Askew The Joy of Pi – David Blatner See all books by David Blatner at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com Ever since Longitude and Fermat’s Last Theorem leapt off the shelves in quantities so-called bestselling novelists can only dream

Björn Wiman “I am Human”, cries the protagonist in Will Self’s novel Great Apes. A phrase that may sound like a sturdy truism, in Self’s novel rings heavily: the protagonist has waken one morning only

Gary Marshall It’s tempting to see Richard Dawkins as the Jeremy Clarkson of Darwinism, chainsmoking Marlboros and cackling as he writes in his diary: “To-do on Monday: wind up Creationists”. Although the image is perhaps a little

Chris Mitchell Cyberspace is perhaps the last place you’d look for some sort of spiritual revival at the end of the twentieth century. But Margaret Wertheim believes that cyberspace is indeed a contemporary secular version of the medieval conception

Chris Mitchell Throughout 1997, the Russian space station Mir made international headlines as it lurched from one near disaster to another. Populated by Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts, Mir became a symbol of the two countries’ collaboration

Chris Mitchell When world chess champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue II last year, it provoked a renewed popular interest in the possibilities of artificial intelligence. Kasparov commented that he felt he was playing “an