Forces of Nature

by Brian Cox

In his essay ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’, George Orwell reflects on the simple and available delight of noticing things like the passage of the seasons, and that is really what this book is about: ‘The point is that the pleasures of spring are available to everyone and cost nothing’, he writes. ‘How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can’t. Humans wouldn’t be here without the Moon; at the very least, evolution would have taken a different path, and it is a major understatement to say that the road to humanity was convoluted. ‘The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the Earth is still going around the Sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.’