Skip to main content

Simon Flynn – Four Way Interview

Simon Flynn has degrees in chemistry and philosophy and worked at publisher Icon Books for fifteen years, becoming managing director. Always driven by an urge to communicate science, he has recently left the publishing world to train to be a science teacher. His book The Science Magpie is an entertaining cornucopia of science trivia and history.
Why science?
I love nearly everything about it. Obviously this includes the archetypes of science such as laws, processes, theories etc. But I also really enjoy those things that extend beyond science as just a body of knowledge – the personalities, the stories, its relationship with society, and so on.
Why this book?
Following on from the above, The Science Magpie is the sort of book I’d enjoy reading and it allowed me to explore further some of the great variety of science mentioned in the previous answer. But as well as those lofty themes, it also gave me the opportunity to demonstrate science’s more humorous side (in my opinion at least).
What’s next?
Learning, teaching, learning, teaching… I’ve just begun a PGCE in Science, specialising in Chemistry, and am about to start my first school experience. This year is a really important one for me.
What’s exciting you at the moment?
Getting the richer and deeper understanding of science that becoming a teacher of it will entail. On a more specific level, I find epigenetics absolutely fascinating and it is an area that genuinely matters to everyone, which can’t be said of all scientific research.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Philip Ball - How Life Works Interview

Philip Ball is one of the most versatile science writers operating today, covering topics from colour and music to modern myths and the new biology. He is also a broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Modern Myths. He lives in London. His latest title is How Life Works . Your book is about the ’new biology’ - how new is ’new’? Great question – because there might be some dispute about that! Many

Stephen Hawking: Genius at Work - Roger Highfield ****

It is easy to suspect that a biographical book from highly-illustrated publisher Dorling Kindersley would be mostly high level fluff, so I was pleasantly surprised at the depth Roger Highfield has worked into this large-format title. Yes, we get some of the ephemera so beloved of such books, such as a whole page dedicated to Hawking's coxing blazer - but there is plenty on Hawking's scientific life and particularly on his many scientific ideas. I've read a couple of biographies of Hawking, but I still came across aspects of his lesser fields here that I didn't remember, as well as the inevitable topics, ranging from Hawking radiation to his attempts to quell the out-of-control nature of the possible string theory universes. We also get plenty of coverage of what could be classified as Hawking the celebrity, whether it be a photograph with the Obamas in the White House, his appearances on Star Trek TNG and The Big Bang Theory or representations of him in the Simpsons. Ha

The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson ****

This is a curate's egg - sections are gripping, others rather dull. Overall the writing could be better... but the central message is fascinating and the book gets four stars despite everything because of this. That central message is that, as the subtitle says, science can't ignore human experience. This is not a cry for 'my truth'. The concept comes from scientists and philosophers of science. Instead it refers to the way that it is very easy to make a handful of mistakes about what we are doing with science, as a result of which most people (including many scientists) totally misunderstand the process and the implications. At the heart of this is confusing mathematical models with reality. It's all too easy when a mathematical model matches observation well to think of that model and its related concepts as factual. What the authors describe as 'the blind spot' is a combination of a number of such errors. These include what the authors call 'the bifur