Editorial Essay: Magic

Guest editorial essay

With the invention of the stereoscope, Charles Wheatstone transformed not only our vision of pictures, but also our understanding of some intricacies of spatial perception. In his obituary notice in Nature, the following comments were made by Signor Volpicelli of the Academia dei Lincei: ``Our countryman, Leonardo da Vinci, in 1500, or thereabouts, conceived and was the first to affirm, that fr...

Guest editorial essay

This year many meetings will celebrate the tercentenary of the birth of Thomas Reid (figure 1). One, organised by the British Society for the History of Philosophy, was suitably divided between Aberdeen and Glasgow. Reid was born in Strachan (in the north-east of Scotland) on 26 April 1710 and entered the ministry after studying at Marischal College, Aberdeen. In 1752 he became professor of phi...

Editorial: The Psychology of Magic and the Magic of Psychology

Climate models and modeling: an editorial essay

M is a central concept, a central tool in climate research. Models are telling us how the future may develop in the next 100 years, the public is told by some experts, while others insist that all such perspectives rest on shaky mathematical constructs with little connection to reality. This confusion has much to do with different epistemological cultures in different quarters of science and am...

GLOBAL COMPREHENSIVE MODELS IN POLITICS AND POLICYMAKING Editorial Essay

In this issue of Climatic Change, Ron Brunner argues that the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) has to its peril overemphasized the potential policy significance of comprehensive, predictive models [1 ]. Brunner thinks that although comprehensive models are properly a central goal of global change science, they cannot produce effective global change policy. He argues for a 'modest alte...