About

The Candle Archive is a personal site for long-form essays on science, written by Rami Husein.

The name is a reference to Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995). The book's central image — science as a candle held up against the dark of unreason — captures what this archive is for.

What this site is

• A place to publish careful, source-led essays on scientific topics.
• A place to examine pseudoscientific claims on their own terms, and to show where and why they fail.
• A public notebook, written in the open, with corrections welcome.

What this site is not

• A breaking-news feed. Essays are written slowly.
• A comprehensive encyclopedia. Coverage is idiosyncratic, reflecting what the author finds interesting or worth clarifying.
• A debate platform. Disagreement is welcome in the form of evidence and argument; polemic is not.

Corrections

If you find an error — factual, mathematical, or typographic — please open an issue or pull request on the GitHub repository. Significant corrections will be noted in the essay itself.

Colophon

This site is built with MkDocs and the Material for MkDocs theme. The source is open and available on GitHub.