Skip to main content

Marcus Chown – Four Way Interview

Marcus Chown has recently published Afterglow of Creation, a radical update of a book he wrote in the 1990s about the relic heat of the big bang fireball, which incredibly still permeates the Universe 13.7 billion years after the event.
Why science?
It blows my mind. I’m constantly amazed by how much stranger it is than anything we could have made up.
Why this book?
It was my first popular science book and all sorts of wonderful thing happened when it was first published. It was runner-up for the Science Book Prize and the magazine Focus bought about 200,000 copies to give away to its readers as a subscription promotion. The book is about the heat afterglow of the big bang fireball, which, incredibly, still permeates all of space 13.7 billion years after the event, accounting for 99.9 per cent of all the photons in the Universe. For the book, I drove around America, talking to all the people who had been involved in the discovery. Many of them are now dead so the book, I think, is a unique account of a key chapter in the history of science. Why update it? Well, since it was first published, our knowledge of the Universe has been revolutionised by the discovery of the mysterious “dark energy”, the major mass component of the Universe, and by the findings of NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy probe, whose space-based observations of the afterglow of creation are the source of all of our super-precise statements such as “The Universe is 13.7 billion years old”. I am so pleased to see the book out again. I especially like the Faber “retro” cover. And, on the 10th anniversary of his death, I got to write a Foreword about my dad, who had a quite ridiculous amount of faith in me, once insisting I should have won a particular book prize even though I had not entered a book for the prize – in fact, hadn’t even written a book that year! The Foreword meant a lot to me so I was very pleased when Scott Pack, former chief buyer of Waterstone’s said of the book: ‘The wonderful intro alone is worth the cover price. Witty and accessible science.’
What’s next?
The paperback of my book, We Need to Talk About Kelvin: What everyday things tell us about the Universe will be out in September 2010. I am currently writing a sequel to my children’s story, Felicity Frobisher and the Three-Headed Aldebaran Dust Devil, which I enjoyed writing more than anything else I have written, possibly because it was totally silly. My publisher is wanting me to write a new non-fiction book. I can’t say more about it, not because there’s any mystery but because I haven’t yet figured out how to do it!
What’s exciting you at the moment?
The thought that there is some very big idea missing in physics. I mean, we currently have no idea what 96% of the mass of the universe is. What’s more, the main component – the dark energy – has an energy which is 1 followed by 120 zeroes smaller than our best theory of physics predicts. This is the biggest discrepancy between a prediction and an observation in the history of science. I can’t help thinking that all accepted ideas about our universe and our place in it are on the brink of being blown out of the water.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Roger Highfield - Stephen Hawking: genius at work interview

Roger Highfield OBE is the Science Director of the Science Museum Group. Roger has visiting professorships at the Department of Chemistry, UCL, and at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a member of the Medical Research Council and Longitude Committee. He has written or co-authored ten popular science books, including two bestsellers. His latest title is Stephen Hawking: genius at work . Why science? There are three answers to this question, depending on context: Apollo; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, along with the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl; and, finally, Nullius in verba . Growing up I enjoyed the sciencey side of TV programmes like Thunderbirds and The Avengers but became completely besotted when, in short trousers, I gazed up at the moon knowing that two astronauts had paid it a visit. As the Apollo programme unfolded, I became utterly obsessed. Today, more than half a century later, the moon landings are
Post a Comment
Read more

Space Oddities - Harry Cliff *****

In this delightfully readable book, Harry Cliff takes us into the anomalies that are starting to make areas of physics seems to be nearing a paradigm shift, just as occurred in the past with relativity and quantum theory. We start with, we are introduced to some past anomalies linked to changes in viewpoint, such as the precession of Mercury (explained by general relativity, though originally blamed on an undiscovered planet near the Sun), and then move on to a few examples of apparent discoveries being wrong: the BICEP2 evidence for inflation (where the result was caused by dust, not the polarisation being studied),  the disappearance of an interesting blip in LHC results, and an apparent mistake in the manipulation of numbers that resulted in alleged discovery of dark matter particles. These are used to explain how statistics plays a part, and the significance of sigmas . We go on to explore a range of anomalies in particle physics and cosmology that may indicate either a breakdown i
Post a Comment
Read more

Splinters of Infinity - Mark Wolverton ****

Many of us who read popular science regularly will be aware of the 'great debate' between American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920 over whether the universe was a single galaxy or many. Less familiar is the clash in the 1930s between American Nobel Prize winners Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton over the nature of cosmic rays. This not a book about the nature of cosmic rays as we now understand them, but rather explores this confrontation between heavyweight scientists. Millikan was the first in the fray, and often wrongly named in the press as discoverer of cosmic rays. He believed that this high energy radiation from above was made up of photons that ionised atoms in the atmosphere. One of the reasons he was determined that they should be photons was that this fitted with his thesis that the universe was in a constant state of creation: these photons, he thought, were produced in the birth of new atoms. This view seems to have been primarily driven by re
Post a Comment
Read more