Justin Pollard – Four Way Interview

Justin Pollard is a historical writer/consultant in film and TV. He is a researcher for the TV show QI and the author of five books. His most recent title is Boffinology – the real stories behind our greatest scientific discoveries.

Why Science?

When I was a child there always seemed something perfect about science. It was carried out by brilliant people in immaculate white coats who would invent audacious experiments leading, inevitably, to stunning results. In this way science would take another giant step forward, the scientists would congratulate one another, then clear their benches and start all over again, on a new and even harder problem. So I wanted to become one of those scientists but somehow ended up an historian.

Why this book?

As a historian I get to spend a lot of time with dead scientists. There are thousands of them in history books and reading the stories of their lives taught me something about science itself. Real science is not done by the perfect white-coated men and women I imagined as a child. It does have it heroes, of course, but it also has its villains, its disasters, its brilliant ideas that turn suddenly to dust and those handfuls of dust that, quite unexpectedly, lead to moments of genius. There is just more chaos in science than I ever imagined in my youth. It is a field populated by humans, together with all their triumphs and failings, their valiant strivings, their dogged determination, their indomitable spirit and their bitter rivalries, prejudices and tempers. That is what this book is about.

What’s next?

I’ve just finished work as historical advisor on the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie (POTC 4 – ‘On Stranger Tides’) and I’m moving on to work with Sir David Hare advising on a modern-day spy thriller about MI5 called ‘Page Eight’. Then in January research for the new series of QI should kick off.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

Currently I’m most excited by the inside of my head. Having had a MRI scan (which turned out to be fine) I persuaded the very lovely radiographers at give me a copy of the dataset, so I’ve been exploring my brain, such as it is. Another advantage is that on Facebook I can have a profile picture of the inside of my head rather than all those normal, boring shots of the outside of people’s heads.

Comments

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

Govert Schilling - Five Way Interview

Govert Schilling is an acclaimed and prize-winning freelance astronomy writer and broadcaster in the Netherlands. His articles appear in Dutch newspapers and magazines, but he also has written for New Scientist, Science and BBC Sky at Night Magazine, and he is a contributing editor of Sky & Telescope. He wrote dozens of books (including a couple of children’s books) on a wide variety of astronomical topics, many of which have been translated into English, German, Italian, and Chinese, among other languages. In 2007, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) named asteroid 10986 Govert after him, and in 2014, he received the David N. Schramm Award for high-energy astrophysics science journalism from the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society.His latest book is Target Earth . Why science? We live in troubling times. Fake news and conspiracy theories abound, and trust in science is diminishing. Many adults don't seem to realize that almost everythi...

Search This Blog