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

Six Maths Essentials - Terence Tao *****

This is a book in the 'compact collection of science/maths essays' category beloved of publishers because they can charge hardback prices for fewer than 80 pages of text - but don't let that put you off, because it's excellent. Terence Tao introduces six areas of mathematics: numbers, algebra, geometry, probability, analysis and dynamics. Each of these is descriptive rather than practical (there are only a couple of school-level equations in sight), done in a way that gets to the heart of 'what's the point of this subject' with precision and a good level of storytelling. It's a shame in a way that analysis and dynamics form the final third of the book (apart from a short epilogue), because they don't work as well as the other sections. For the first four, practically everyone will have a vague idea of what they are and what they do - but Tao is then able to open our eyes to their wonders and power. Because Tao has to stay away from any detail of what...
Post a Comment
Read more

Clearing the Air - Hannah Ritchie *****

As deputy editor of Our World in Data and senior researcher in the Programme for Global Development at the University of Oxford, Hannah Ritchie is ideally placed to get a balanced view of the state of the climate, what we're doing to and how we can try to fix it. And, perhaps surprisingly after reading the doom-laden The Fate of the World by Bill McGuire, it's a reasonably positive read. Ritchie does not set out to sugar coat things, and is no kind of climate change denier. But in answering 50 key questions about our climate and its future she is often able to provide a nuanced response. She assures us that it really isn't too late to take action and that all contributions are helpful (even if, admittedly, we need the big players to do more). So, for instance, in answering 'My country only emits 1% of the world's emissions; surely it's too small to make a difference', she points out that 36% of emissions come from countries whose emissions are 'too smal...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Canticle for Leibowitz (SF) - Walter Miller ****

There are a few SF titles that have cut through to be regarded modernish classics in the more general literature sense. One example would be Flowers for Algernon (which I read in English class at school). Another, surely, is the 1959  A Canticle for Leibowicz . There are parallels with Pavane , in presenting a 'modern day' setting with medieval living standards where the Catholic Church remains a major power, yet technology is gradually breaking through. But this is not an alternative history: it's a post-apocalyptic future where civilisation was destroyed by nuclear war, with tiny embers of knowledge kept alive by a monastery dedicated to a twentieth century electrical engineer turned priest called Leibowitz. Divided into three sections, each taking place six centuries apart, we first get a totally medieval view of the discovery of circuitry on a blueprint and more from pre-apocalyptic times. Then we see the gradual re-emergence of electrical technology in the abbey. And ...
Post a Comment
Read more