A passport is only worth the rights it confers. It means nothing inside ones own country. This passport is weaker than the one it replaces, symbolising the removal of our rights to move and operate freely across our own continent. It therefore represents abject political failure.

Sad to hear about Stephen Hawking. What a remarkable life. His contributions to science will be used as long as there are scientists, and there are many more scientists because of him. He spoke about the value and fragility of human life and civilisation and greatly enhanced both

As you watch the Aurora this evening, it’s worth reflecting that you’re getting a rare direct glimpse of the power of Nature. Those charged particles causing the atmosphere to glow came from a sunspot complex 17 times the diameter of Earth and traveled across 90 million miles at a million miles an hour. Without our magnetic field to protect us, our atmosphere would have been lost to space long ago. Those colours in the sky are Nature reminding us that we’re very lucky to be here amidst the violence. And perhaps therefore also reminding us not to shite it all up :-)

I keep being asked what I make of the UFO thing in Congress yesterday, so here it is: I watched a few clips and saw some people who seemed to believe stuff saying extraordinary things without presenting extraordinary evidence. Therefore I have nothing more to say, other than: It would be great if true - it would take a bit of the pressure off our civilisation if we weren’t the only means within the Milky Way by which the Universe understands itself. Sadly, as of today, I still feel that pressure, so can we perhaps focus on not messing our world up rather than hoping that, to paraphrase Sagan, someone will float down to save us from ourselves.

I've always suspected that an advanced alien civilisation with the technology to travel at close to light speed across interstellar distances would arrive in Earth orbit unobserved and proceed to dispatch a fleet of small, easily detectable balloons into our atmosphere.

Sorry to tweet about politics - I’m trying not to - but I look at the news in the morning and I’m sickened by what has happened to our country. It’s a great place, about to be ruined by absolute charlatans.

I’ve found someone to do all the long lens staring at the sky shots on top of mountains for the next series. Nobody will notice.

There is an anomaly in the spacetime continuum....

I’m so sick of this ‘The British People’ nonsense. It’s inflammatory and divisive and also errant vacuous nonsense with no meaning in a multi-party democracy. The phrase should be banned from political discourse.

The reason the UK will have the lowest growth in the G7 next year is Brexit. We're not going to reverse the decline until we begin to remove the barriers - economic, social, scientific - that we chose to erect with the rest of our continent. That's not rocket science. Just say it

You were lucky. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah. And you try and tell the young people of today that ... they won't believe you.

Brexit is now, in a majority of voters minds, linked with high interest rates, trade friction, travel friction and general incompetence. The reality may be more complex, but that doesn’t matter - it’s about perception, and the perception is that Brexit is not only a failure but a liability. And there is more pain to come. This is why in my view, coupled with demographic change, it is inevitable that we will soon begin the process of rejoining the single market and customs union no matter what Labour or the Conservatives say at the next election. This irresistible pressure will probably split the Conservative Party, which is ironic because Cameron’s only strategic aim in calling the referendum in the first place was to placate fringe elements of the Party. Thanks Dave! theguardian.com/politics/202…

What you’ve also done, @pritipatel , is to end freedom of movement for UK passport holders across our continent. The citizens of 27 other countries, the great majority of Europeans, still retain it. That’s not something to fly our flag over in my book.

I’ve signed this petition to revoke A50 and deal with the consequences afterwards - referendum, election, whatever. I have no idea whether these things do any good but after May’s astonishingly irresponsible speech this evening I’ll give anything a go. petition.parliament.uk/petit…

It is clear that the government must urgently request an extension to the transition period. Any other course of action would be utterly irresponsible; close to criminal negligence.

We are about to see the installation of a scoundrel as PM by a small cabal of ageing xenophobic golf club bores who will crash us out of the EU causing irreparable damage to our country and it can’t be stopped. Think about that. Voters cannot stop Johnson and cannot stop no deal.

I'll never understand why these people celebrate removing their own right to free movement. Everyone else in Europe still has an entire continent to call home.

Honestly - a few of the replies to this little tribute to engineering excellence exhibit a level of stupidity that suggests to me that it won’t be long before our spacecraft are the only thing that remains of our increasingly dim-witted civilisation. Until recently my guess has been that the answer to the Fermi Paradox might be found in biology - complex biological systems are rare. I’m increasingly of the view that the reason for The Great Silence is that civilisations are inevitably crushed by the weight of nobheads shortly after inventing the internet.

This is amongst the most illogical thing I’ve ever seen. In order to prevent the spread of a virus you cram thousands of people into a confined space for 7 hours?

Having to deal with multiple irritating issues today because of Brexit when I could be doing useful stuff. I suspect that's the case for a lot of people and businesses. Waste of time and money. Blue passports my arse.

You will find Jeremy that I and millions of others will never forgive THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY for this shit storm because it is your fault. The damage has been done. At least have the dignity to own your own mess. telegraph.co.uk/politics/201…

This is why all the bullshit about bringing the country together after no-deal won’t work: Nobody who actually loses their job or business is going to sit back and say ‘ah well, it was worth it to keep the Tory Party together and for my blue passport I can’t afford to use’.

The more I hear from the Covid enquiry, the more I think that the PM and the majority of ministers did not have the intellectual tools necessary to understand scientific advice and therefore to be able to weigh it successfully alongside economics, social science etc. In my view this can be traced to educational failure - they weren’t taught or didn’t learn the basics of science alongside their chosen disciplines. This also applies the other way round to scientists of course. Breadth of knowledge is key, as well as specialisation / expertise, and I don’t think our system delivered that in the 80s and 90s when I (and they) went to University - whether it does that today is an open question. I think we need to be producing more polymaths.

I'd like to see Stephen Hawking on the £50 note. He made invaluable contributions over half a century to our understanding of cosmology, the early universe and black holes. He also inspired thousands of scientists + millions of people, me included, through his books and lectures.

One of the problems with Johnson’s character in my view is he seems incapable of taking responsibility, either personally or as a leader, for anything. The casual shifting of blame seems second nature - he can’t stop himself. theguardian.com/society/2020…

I’ve been through about ten revisions of this tweet, trying to remain civil, but I am finding it hard to contain my anger at Theresa May. I’ll settle on near-criminally irresponsible. She is focused entirely on keeping her party together irrespective of the real-world damage.

Three squabbling boy-men who’ve dragged the whole country into their myopic vacuous petulant egocentric shitshow.

I’m often asked for evidence that Brexit was a mistake.

For me, this is the most important aspect of Brexit and why I cannot understand or support it. The EU is essentially a peace project aimed at removing barriers between people. It is far from perfect, but we have benefited hugely. Surely the UK should be working to strengthen it.

Watching the inauguration of Joe Biden, and I don’t know how to avoid cliche, but it really does feel as if civility and basic decency and perhaps even optimism has returned to Washington. Maybe things do sometimes get better :-)

This is the moment the government lost control of events. It is inconceivable to me that my government - a British government - would so blatantly devalue the concept of a rules-based international order. Churchill must be turning in his grave. MPs from across the house must act.

This has to be the future if we are to prosper. A million people marching in good humour but with a fierce commitment to our country and our continent, asking for tolerance, reason and compromise. There will be no winners if we continue on our current course.

It will be a sad day when we lose contact with the Voyagers - they’ve been communicating with us from deep space since I was 9 years old! I watched them launch, watched them arrive at Jupiter, Saturn and, in the case of Voyager 2, Uranus and Neptune. I remember when Voyager 1 returned the Pale Blue Dot photograph. They feel like old friends and I do occasionally think about them out there in the darkness. Contact with Voyager 1 was lost and then re-established earlier this week using the low power S-band transmitter on the spacecraft that had not been used since 1981! Astonishing. That’s before Duran Duran released the Rio album :-) !!

We are in control. We can revoke article 50 and retain control of our borders (we are not in schengen), our money (we are not in the Euro) and our laws (parliament is sovereign). This deal - the best deal of any EU member state by a mile - is available. Let’s put it to voters.

The most valuable feature of democracy is that it has built in error correction.

A turning point in The Telegraph? Project fear was right and ‘if anything have underestimated both the calamitous loss of international standing and the scale of the damage that six years of policy confusion and ineptitude has imposed on the country.’ telegraph.co.uk/business/202…

In Dundee this evening and the box office are concerned that a percentage of the audience will get something they weren’t expecting ….

My hope is that May wins her confidence vote 52:48 and concludes that the will of the Party must therefore be the absolute opposite of what the 48 wanted and withdraws A50, causing the ERG to retreat into a leathery private club to console themselves with a game of soggy biscuit.

Proof reading my book on black holes, I noticed that they have removed the word shit and replaced it with bad. I have changed it back. WTF?

This is the simplest and most lucid explanation I’ve heard from any politician from any party of what trading with the world on WTO terms actually means. Intellectual clarity is a rare commodity amongst the current crop of politicians.

My timeline is full of bile again because of Brexit. Utterly polarised. Damn that bloody referendum and damn the bloody Conservative Party for what they’ve done. Totally irresponsible. I can’t see how this damage can be repaired.

In my opinion all government policy stretching back up to five years has been a bag of shite. That's one less talk to give ....

This is the way to deal with a bullshitter. If more TV and radio interviewers did this, we'd be in a lot less trouble now. nitter.app/breznican/status/89858…

Rees-Mogg wishes to vote again (for a third time) because the information he has access to and the circumstances have changed and he’s changed his mind. Why is this not an arguement for also putting the final deal to a public vote to assess if they agree with his change of mind?

I haven’t got the heart to tell him it was my Scottish namesake who appeared on Question Time this week. Might tip him over the edge :-)

If you missed the Aurora last night and / or would like another go, then it looks like there is a good chance we’ll have another display this evening.

More from Surrey

Things Can Only Get Better is of course the most appropriate song for today, but let me throw another one into the ring to add a little variety…

Nothing here is in the long term interests of the UK and its people. It is indefensible beyond the only justification you can give - a slim majority in 2016. It is permanently damaging and you know it. Your only aim now is to seek a slim majority of MPs. I will never support it.

The origin of our current malaise was the Brexit referendum. Charitably, it was a risky bet on a radical shift in our long-established and reasonably successful economic and geopolitical model and the bet has been lost. What we are seeing now is government by sunk-cost fallacy.

A few more thoughts on the possibility of life beyond Earth. All these thoughts are guesses. The lack of firm evidence for alien intelligence (so far) is sometimes called the Fermi Paradox, and it is a paradox. Put simply, there has been over 10 billion years and there are many millions of worlds in the Milky Way on which a civilisation could have arisen as far as we know. At first sight, one might therefore expect that there should be many civilisations in the galaxy far in advance of us, and we might have expected to see them. Why don’t we (or, let’s be careful, why is the evidence not bloody obvious!)? One answer might be that civilisations never develop interstellar travel. I don’t see any reason why interstellar travel is impossible, and I think we’ll develop it if we survive into the 22nd century. Related - perhaps civilisations don’t ever solve the problems posed by industrialisation and the discovery of nuclear weapons and never make it to the stars. Topical - see Oppenheimer!Maybe just ‘getting along’ as a global civilisation is harder than science. Maybe (see UFO hearings) they are here but we haven’t discovered them or somebody knows but has managed to keep it a secret? Maybe. But if this is the case then at least I can say that the alien civilisations aren’t making their presence very obvious, otherwise my Astronomy colleagues who spend their time gazing at the sky and listening for signals would surely have spotted them! But let’s not rule out the possibility that we just haven’t detected them (or there is evidence but only a few people know about it) but they are indeed here. My guess is that the average number of civilisations in a typical galaxy is low - perhaps less than 1. That’s a guess, based on what we know about the evolution of complex life on Earth. Put simply, it took the best part of 4 billion years here to go from cell to civilisation, and that’s a third of the age of the Universe. I think this MAY imply that, if this is typical (lots of ifs) then the Milky Way may be filled with microbes but not complex living things at our level of intelligence. This would be my guess. BUT make no mistake, I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if a UFO landed in Oldham town centre tomorrow morning and the captain said ‘Take me to the leader of Oldham Metropolitan Borough Council’. In that case the Fermi Paradox would no longer be a paradox, I’d have learnt a lot about biology and I could get back to tweeting about other interesting stuff. I’d also ask them why gravity is so weak relative to the other forces of Nature.

Tragic news about Michael Mosley. He was such an important figure both on and off screen in the BBC science unit, and as a mentor to many of us when we started out in science presenting. And, as many of our colleagues have already said on here, he was a genuinely lovely man. So sorry for his family. RIP Michael.

Johnson and his coterie have never met people like this. I’m sure they thought they could wind them up a bit to borrow their votes in order to become PM / get brexit done / whatever / and then put them back in their box. I suspect he now knows it’s not that simple.

I do not want to keep banging on about brexit, but I just get exasperated. Look at the tweet below - this overgrown schoolboy (surely whichever side of the debate you are on you’d agree this is nothing more than a tantrum) is a potential prime minister. Where are the grown-ups?

A problem with May’s article in today’s Telegraph is she assumes the country will ‘come back together’ if her deal passes. This is nonsense. One obvious point: the causes of brexit were not in general anything to do with the EU, therefore leaving it will solve nothing.

It’s almost as if he didn’t understand what he was voting for …..

The PM really does need to understand that he is now further damaging U.K. science by not immediately rejoining Horizon, presumably to placate some know-nothing fringe bloviators who know nothing about science, its value or how it’s conducted. As Lord Rees says below, it is baffling. Get on with it.

This is so strange because I was led to believe that all these families would now be going to countries surrounding the Pacific Ocean for the school holidays. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-65143093.a…

If you haven’t got the grades you needed today it’s disappointing, stressful and maybe unfair. I didn’t get the grades I needed. I re-applied at 23 and Manchester let me in. I know all Universities will try to help you, but if it doesn’t work out there will be other chances.

They’ve given up now. It seems to me that the Conservative Party’s strategy is to bury their heads in the sand until after the election, at which point they will blame the in-coming Labour government for the (escalating) consequences of Brexit and claim that it would have been fine if only we had a Conservative government.

Disgraceful. Disrespectful. Genuinely doesn’t give a shit.

This statement - that the government may decide not to obey the law - confirms that the current minority government is dangerous. Every MP with integrity from any party must stop them this coming week. This is no longer about Brexit - that can be dealt with afterwards.

The speed of development of vaccines has been breathtaking - and whilst it shouldn’t really need saying, demonstrates the almost incalculable value of a strong University sector and wider science base. Thank you to the researchers from post docs to Profs who did this work.

In general, but especially during a pandemic, anybody with an IQ above that of a fence post would try to arrange things so they don’t have to stand for hours in a long queue. We are indeed, to quote from Withnail, drifting into the arena of the unwell.

My thought for the day. Single Market. Customs Union. More money for defence. Strengthen Europe. Place us firmly back at the heart of our continent economically, militarily and geopolitically.

Some good news. By the way, this is one of the many reasons why we fund research institutes and universities and PhD’s etc etc. as a society. It may all seem a bit of a luxury to some until we actually HAVE to find something out about Nature very quickly.

‘You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the Universe.’ On these two narrow points I agree.

German is a wonderfully precise language. This, from The Times: ‘’Mrs Merkel has dismissed what she called Öffnungsdiskussionsorgien, loosely meaning “orgies of debate about opening things up”.

My timeline is currently populated by people who believe that God is Flat, that Darwin supported brexit and that Jesus is not a greenhouse gas. Or something like that.

The idiocy of the position we’ve got ourselves into is that we - that is U.K. citizens - will be the only citizens on our continent (28 countries!) who will NOT have the right to travel freely or to work on our continent. That’s a total failure. We are second class Europeans.

Wait until he hears that the second is defined as the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom!

I don’t think I’ve seen a Prime Minister lose their cool quite so spectacularly at PMQs. Reminded me of Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men. Extraordinary scenes.

The thing I don’t understand about these Conservative MPs is that they are such angry people. They haven’t done badly out of Britain - they aren’t on the receiving end of their own policies. And yet they want to smash everything up. The EU, The Union and now their own party.

I’m not impressed with government’s handling of Brexit, but Labour are no better. How can you have the ‘exact same benefits’ as being in the EU without being in? I can’t have the exact same benefits of flying across the Atlantic in a plane without actually being in the plane.

The frustrating thing to me about the quote from this article is that the columnist knows, and the Conservatives know, and Labour knows, that Brexit was an awful economic and geopolitical error. This was obvious in my view in 2016 and it’s ten times more obvious now, for the reasons outlined in the article. The issue is that none of the above have yet summoned up the courage to explain to the electorate that we really have no option but to rejoin the single market and customs union as soon as possible. Europe has to strengthen and work together in an increasingly uncertain world, and the U.K. is a vital part of Europe. Everyone in any sort of position of responsibility or power knows it. Basically our political class is bullshitting the electorate. And as I’ve said before, you can convince people to vote to abolish gravity but they will be very annoyed when they hit the ground.

Brexit is a self-indulgence from another age. It should be shelved for an indefinite period until we have dealt with the long-term economic and social fall out of COVID-19. There can be no justification for imposing a second, voluntary shock on the country in early 2021.

I’ve found my spiritual home

This is drivel. The only way life will continue as it was before brexit in the event of a no deal brexit is not to brexit. You can’t pull out of hundreds of international treaties and then carry on as if those treaties were sill in force. Forget politics. This is just logic.

Listening to the News, I can’t help coming to the tentative conclusion that J. Corbyn and T. May might not be the party leaders one would choose in order to resolve the current impasse in Parliament. Just a feeling.

To all the idiots with opinions replying to this article about science post Brexit - the article quotes two U.K.-based Nobel Prize winners and two Presidents of the Royal Society. How about you shut up and listen, just for once, to people who know more than you about something.

Here is the image of the black hole in M87, and at the press conference the Event Horizon team just said it is precisely as predicted by General Relativity. Einstein right again - wouldn’t he have loved to see this!

I took a photo of the Moon last night with my phone through telescope eyepiece whilst waiting for Jupiter to appear. I quite like it :-)

This is a senior cabinet minister literally laughing at himself, so absurd are the intellectual contortions he’s been required to perform by the Prime Minister in defence of a political advisor. I conclude there is something not quite right at the heart of government.

I’ve seen many cabinets come and go since I began paying attention to politics in the 1980s - some I liked more than others, some I voted for, some I didn’t - but Johnson’s cabinet has demonstrated to me, in hindsight, just how relatively competent they all were.

This is the first time in my life I’ve wanted the laws of physics to be violated.

This’ll confuse the Flat Earthers ….

We’re going to spend decades negotiating to help tackle the impact of Brexit on everything from the music industry and the City of London to car manufacturing and tourism. Instead, why can’t politicians explain to voters why it’s in the U.K’s interest to be inside the single market and customs union. There is no country in Western Europe that isn’t in some combination of these, or is applying to join. How are we the only one whose national interest is to be entirely separate from the continent’s market structures? I honestly think politicians underestimate the intelligence of voters. Nobody has really bothered to explain to people what the single market and customs union actually do.

Interesting situation - if the probability remains this high then we will have to make a decision on preparing a deflection mission - which would be a good investment even if (as is most likely) we don’t need to use it this time. It’s as if the Universe has decided to do an experiment to see if Planet Earth is still capable of taking rational decisions!

An appreciable number of people would panic buy toilet roll.

We could all agree to turn our passports blue by running towards them, thus saving a lot of hassle. Assuming the wavelength of a blue passport is 470nm, and red is 670 nm, I calculate a speed of 0.34c would do it.

A previous version of that Widdecombe speech has been uncovered .....

And she’s donated all the money to support and encourage physics students from under-represented groups. Jocelyn Bell Burnell is a towering scientist and a remarkable person.

It never ceases to amaze me that a spacecraft launched in 1977 can be fixed remotely from Earth.

We are seeing the long overdue shattering and reshaping of UK politics. Both major parties have failed the country absolutely when we needed them most. They have no answer to the crisis Cameron created having exposed the rest of us to the Tory civil war. They are beneath contempt

Is there anyone who will defend the ludicrous notion that MPs should be whipped on the indicative votes? What’s the point of them? I’m beginning to think that electoral reform is the only way forward. The Party system is a large part of our current problem.

Whether or not you think Brexit will be good for the UK in the long term (I do not), I think it’s now beyond doubt that it was the proximate cause of the dumbing down of the Conservative Party which in turn contributed to the disasterous health and economic outcomes of Covid-19.

I’m not buying this line of argument. Johnson knew, as everybody in the Conservative Party knew, that the Brexit referendum was about heading off the (over-stated) electoral threat from UKIP and simultaneously dealing with a fringe group of MPs in the party who were a distraction and wouldn’t shut up. Nobody, Johnson included, thought the country would actually vote for it. There was never going to be a White Paper because nobody sensible could think of anything to put in it. The expectation was that the electorate would sort the Conservative Party’s internal squabbles out for them by decisively rejecting it and all would be well. As an aside, we have the choice of continuing with this failed non-policy or not, and the current government have chosen to continue with it. I would love to see a White Paper laying out the case for staying out of the single market and customs union.

Absolutely superb news. Wonderful. Thanks to all the researchers and indeed everyone involved in the testing and approval process who’ve moved so quickly and efficiently to get this first vaccine ready for use. Finally, light at the end of the tunnel. bbc.com/news/health-55145696

The reason we knew there would be an eclipse today, @realDonaldTrump, is that science works.

For the final time: You haven't removed freedom of movement across our continent from anyone other than poorer UK citizens. Every citizen of the 31 EU, EEA and EFTA countries, everyone born in NI (if they choose) and in practice every UK citizen who has enough dosh still has it.