Skip to main content

Paul Parsons – Four Way Interview

Paul Parsons is a contributor to Nature, New Scientist and the Daily Telegraph. He has appeared on radio and TV and was formerly editor of the award-winning BBC science magazine Focus. His books include the Royal Society Prize nominated The Science of Doctor Who and his most recent title, covering all science: Science 1001.
Why science?
Well, what’s not to like? I’m often baffled when people say science is boring. Obviously I’m biased, as it’s my favourite subject, but science is the way to understand so much of how the world works. From the origin of the Universe to how life itself actually operates – science is our best tool for answering the fundamental questions about nature. And it’s increasingly becoming a part of everyday life. Not only are your TV, car, iPad, and all the other stuff, all ultimately products of scientific research, but medicine, dietary advice, managing your money, and lots of other workaday things, are all kinds of science as well, that ordinary people – that is people who aren’t necessarily professional scientists – can benefit from having an understanding of.
Why this book?
As I said, science affects all of us. So even if you’re not an enthusiast who enjoys reading about scientific discoveries for the sake of it – although there is plenty of that in here – a broad knowledge of what science is about, and what certain scientific words and discoveries all mean is becoming increasingly helpful in life – and, I dare say, in the not-too-distant future may even become essential. And that’s what I’ve tried to furnish people with in Science 1001 – a single reference volume to modern science that’s comprehensive yet concise, and written at a level that pretty much anyone can understand.
What’s next?
There are several other books in the pipeline, one at the editing stage and a couple that I’m close to signing contracts on. Not sure how much I’m allowed to say about those just yet but I can promise you they’re going to be good!
What’s exciting you at the moment?
In terms of science, there’s so much going on I’m not sure where to start. The Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border is soon to get into its stride and promises some incredible insights into subatomic particle physics, which will tell us how matter behaves on the tiniest scales and will play a major part in unpicking the story of the universe during the first moments after the Big Bang. Physicists are hoping the LHC will also finally show up the elusive Higgs boson – a particle of matter that’s thought to have given everything else in the cosmos its mass – and which is the only missing piece of the current ‘standard model’ of particle physics. Then there’s Craig Venter’s research on creating ‘synthetic life’ – lifeforms created in the lab from the ground up, completely new forms of life built from scratch. Which is just incredible. And there’s also a new wave of computing technology just bubbling up – quantum computers, machines that carry out computations in parallel universes and are many, many times faster than any kind of computer we can conceive of today – which could be replacing our desktop PCs in the decades to come. So, plenty to get excited about.
For me personally, the most exciting thing is fatherhood. My first child child was born just over 9 months ago. It’s an amazing and life-changing experience, and of course has got to be the ultimate experiment in applied genetics!

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...
Post a Comment
Read more

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...
Post a Comment
Read more