Skip to main content

As Far as We Know – Paul Callaghan & Kim Hill ****

We don’t often associate science with conversations. Science interviews are usually short media exercises, and science seems too serious and rigorous to be approached by unstructured dialogue. “As Far as We Know”, a series of radio discussions about science between a distinguished broadcaster (Kim Hill) and equally distinguished scientist (Paul Callaghan), is not a work of science. But it does have a serious aim: to answer the question “What is science?” It may not answer the question to everyone’s satisfaction. But it does show the power of conversation to illuminate – and lighten up – science.
So what is science, according to this book? It is, says Callaghan, a “means of looking at the world to try to understand natural phenomena and their causes in a way that is self-consistent and corresponds to reality.” Callaghan sees a sharp line between what is science and what is not, and doesn’t miss many opportunities to draw it. In this book, creationism, homeopathy, and phone cancer all get a dose of Popperian medicine. Some of Callaghan’s prescriptions have a dogmatic odour. “Doubt is at the very heart of science,” he says. Granted, scientists are trained to doubt. But surely they are also trained to find the most rigorous demonstrations possible for any given claim? “[Scientists] never hold on to some cherished belief in the face of evidence to the contrary.” As Callaghan must know, scientists do this often – and often with good reason. But to his credit, Callaghan readily admits that science means not having all the answers – not yet, anyway – and that scientists are no better than non-scientists when it comes to sorting through the ethical implications of science.
So far, so many platitudes. But the stand-out feature of this book is not what Callaghan and Kim Hill say about science but what they do with it, their patient question-and-answer probing at some basic puzzles of science. After decades of live interviews, Hill can be puzzled and probing with equal success, sometimes pulling Callaghan back to the level of the lay listener (“Hang on, you’re losing me”; “Is heat a synonym for energy?”) and sometimes pushing him into a more exact or convincing account of one or other area of science (“Have you already answered my question then?”; “For example?”; “How do you know that?”; “Is that a metaphor?”; “Is that what he [Newton] intended to do?”). She has clearly done her homework: she knows about Dirac’s coincidence, the medieval warming period, and the difference between chaos and complexity; and she has read Simon Singh, Matt Ridley, and Martin Rees, and is not afraid to quote them.
For his part, Callaghan “wears his learning lightly,” as Martin Rees puts it in his glowing preface. He covers Archimedes, William Gilbert, Karl Popper, J.J. Thompson, and the impact of refrigeration on New Zealand real estate, as easily as he covers thermodynamics, sexual selection, and the physics of colour. His explications a clear and crisp, and he laces the science with stories, histories, and popular references – like his experience with colour therapy, a Dire Straights CD, and the story of the man who ate polonium-210. He likes the poetry of science, its “beautiful words” and “lovely thoughts.” One can imagine Professor Callaghan lecturing to a large audience. But one can also imagine calling him “Paul” (as Hill does) and inviting him round for dinner (as Hill would like to, judging by her happy banter in these conversations).
The conversation is worthy of the conversationalists. The topics are the ingenious designs of nature and the ingenious attempts by scientists to find and exploit them, and both speakers have a real fascination for their subject matter. Why are there two human genders and why is there a 50/50 split between them? Why are there two human genders at all? Why is the ratio of smallest things to the largest things the same as the ratio of the smallest forces to the largest forces? Why is a digital signal more reliable than an analogue signal? Why is the shape of a protein so important and how does it take on that shape? What evidence do we have for the Big Bang, evolution, and the existence of atoms? These questions are primarily chosen not for their sex appeal, God appeal, or news value, but for their scientific interest. Questions like these, and speakers like Hill and Callaghan, make for a fine popular conversation about science: spontaneous, topical, relaxed, witty, and penetrating.

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you  
Review by Michael Bycroft
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more