Quentin Blake must surely be one of the UK’s best loved illustrators and he is most famous for his drawings that appeared in the stories of Roald Dahl. Blake has just produced a new set of artwork for the Science Museum in London. Gracing the walls outside the museum’s family-friendly Wonderlab, the illustrations depict 20 figures from the history of science and technology including the software pioneer Ada Lovelace and the polymath Jagadis Chandra Bose.
Fresh from his role in Mama Mia: Here We Go Again the Irish actor Pierce Brosnan will be hosting the Breakthrough Prize ceremony on 4 November. It will be televised live on the National Geographic channel, but I’m not sure what the attraction will be because the winners have already been announced.
The 2019 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics has been awarded to Charles Kane and Eugene Mele. Both are at the University of Pennsylvania and will share $3m for their ground-breaking work on the topological states of matter. Let’s hope they are so delighted on the evening that they belt out a version of ABBA’s “The winner takes it all” with Brosnan – or maybe “Take a charge on me”.
This year’s prize has not been without controversy. The awards’ backers – which include the billionaires Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg and Yuri Milner – have been criticized for creating what must be the mother of all (or perhaps father of all) all-male selection committees for the physics prizes. It has 26 members, but not a woman in sight.
