Sam Kean – Four Way Interview

Sam Kean spent years collecting mercury from broken thermometers as a child and now he is a writer in Washington D.C. He studied physics and English and his work has appeared in the New York Times magazine, Slate and New Scientist. His first book is The Disappearing Spoon.

Why Science?

I love literature and have grown more and more interested in politics since moving to Washington, D.C. But in those fields you’re dealing with the same themes and problems as people hundreds and even thousands of years ago. Science excites me because it’s one of the few things that’s truly new and that has truly changed across the millennia. We’re no smarter than the ancient Greeks or Egyptians or Chinese in the arts but we know immeasurably more science, and it’s fun being a part of that, however modestly, through writing.

Why this book?

I’d always gravitated in school toward teachers who neglected the lesson plans in favor of telling us stories, and I finally wanted to collect all the fabulous tales about elements into one place. Plus, we talked about so few of the 118 elements in school and I just knew there had to funny, unusual, and spooky stories about elements most people have never ever heard of, too.

What’s next?

I’m working on a new book about genetics – fun, peculiar, and strange stories from the long history of human evolution. Most of them would have been lost forever if they weren’t etched (or rather encoded, waiting to be read) into our DNA.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

Astrobiology – hunting for life on other planets. It’s such a great blend of so many different fields (physics, geology, astronomy, biology, atmospheric chemistry, virology, etc., etc.) And if we do find life somewhere else in the universe I think that will be the most important discovery we could ever make.

Photo (c) Voss Studios, Austinville, Iowa, US – reproduced with permission

Comments

The Genetic Book of the Dead: Richard Dawkins ****

When someone came up with the title for this book they were probably thinking deep cultural echoes - I suspect I'm not the only Robert Rankin fan in whom it raised a smile instead, thinking of The Suburban Book of the Dead . That aside, this is a glossy and engaging book showing how physical makeup (phenotype), behaviour and more tell us about the past, with the messenger being (inevitably, this being Richard Dawkins) the genes. Worthy of comment straight away are the illustrations - this is one of the best illustrated science books I've ever come across. Generally illustrations are either an afterthought, or the book is heavily illustrated and the text is really just an accompaniment to the pictures. Here the full colour images tie in directly to the text. They are not asides, but are 'read' with the text by placing them strategically so the picture is directly with the text that refers to it. Many are photographs, though some are effective paintings by Jana Lenzová. T

David Spiegelhalter Five Way interview

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and has presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance, the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics , was published in March 2019. He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017-2018), and became a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority in 2020. His latest book is The Art of Uncertainty . Why probability? because I have been fascinated by the idea of probability, and what it might be, for over 50 years. Why is the ‘P’ word missing from the title? That's a good question. Partly so as not to make it sound like a technical book, but also because I did not want to give the impression that it was yet another book

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on

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