Michael Brooks – Four Way Interview

Michael Brooks, who holds a PhD in quantum physics, is an author, journalist and broadcaster. He is a consultant at New Scientist, and the author of 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense and The Big Questions: Physics.

Why science?

Science is simply the best way we have of understanding the world. It’s not perfect – far from it – but it has made an enormous difference: the world is a better place for its existence. You only have to look at what vaccine science has achieved to see why science is such a force for good.

Why this book?

It was a great chance to sit down and think about what really matters: why do physicists do what they do, what questions they are trying to answer and what we have learned so far. It turns out that we’ve learned an awful lot over the centuries. I also loved harnessing the idea that such huge issues – Big Questions – can actually be boiled down to questions that children could ask (and they do, in my experience!)

What’s next?

I’m working on a book provisionally titled Standing on the shoulders of anarchists. It’s about how science really works. People think that scientists are cool, rational and logical – always making progress, and objectively assessing each others’ work in a tidy, well-disciplined way. The reality is very different. This book explores the intrigues, the moments of dubious behaviour, the wacky inspirations behind some of our greatest breakthroughs – dreams, drug-taking, hallucinations – the triumph of personality over evidence… All of this lies behind work that has won Nobel Prizes. In a way the book is highlighting science’s rock ‘n’ roll side: science is anything but boring.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

Lots of things! It’s great to see the Large Hadron Collider up and running now, and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out of that in particular. But I’m pretty much always excited. Almost every week science seems to spit out a surprising result or discovery that makes you stop and question everything you were thinking the week before!

Comments

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, ...

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 ...

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms. On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...

Search This Blog