Brian Switek – Four Way Interview

Brian Switek is a freelance science writer based out of Salt Lake City, Utah. In addition to writing about paleontology and natural history for publications such as Smithsonian, Scientific American, the Wall Street Journal, The Times, and others, he has published academic articles on fossils and has participated in fieldwork in Utah, Wyoming, and Montana. He also writes the blogs Laelaps for Wired Science and Dinosaur Tracking for Smithsonian. Written in Stone is his first book, and he is currently working on a follow-up titled A Date with a Dinosaur.

Why science?

Science is our ongoing effort to interrogate nature and understand the universe we inhabit. The more we discover, the more questions we have, and how we perceive ourselves is intimately wrapped up in our endeavour to understand reality. Science is not just the systematic accumulation of facts – it is an essential part of the human journey filled with poetry, serendipity, and surprises.

Why this book?

There’s no shortage of books about evolution, but I was frustrated by the short shrift the fossil record received in many of them. How can we understand evolution at all if we virtually ignore the deep history of life on earth? The patterns and processes of evolution in the deep past provide the essential context for life on earth today, and wanted to introduce readers to the intricate beauty of what prehistoric life can teach us about how familiar parts of the natural world came to be as they are.

What’s next?

I am currently working on my second book – A Date With a Dinosaur. I have been a dinosaur freak since I was knee-high to a Stegosaurus, so this is a dream come true for me. This summer I have been travelling around the west, searching for fossils with different field crews, and I hope that the stories I bring back with me will help my future readers understand why our image of dinosaurs has changed so drastically over the years. Why is the Tyrannosaurus of today not your daddy’s dinosaur? That’s what I’m setting out to explain.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

Paleontology is the most integrative of evolutionary sciences. It isn’t just the combination of geology and comparative anatomy – ideas and techniques from various disciplines, from biochemistry to evolutionary theory, have been brought into the science to better understand how the world was long before our species evolved. From the body temperatures of ichthyosaurs to the colours of dinosaurs, paleontologists are finally starting to approach questions we have always had but have previously been unable to answer. There has never been a more exciting time for paleontology than now.

Comments

The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life. To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...

The Giant Leap - Caleb Scharf ****

This is surely Caleb Scharf's most personal work - and certainly quite different from some of his earlier output, such as his excellent Gravity's Engines. In part this is a technological exploration of space travel, not unlike Final Frontier , but it is also about the future of humanity, more reminiscent of The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire , but with a more positive outlook. Overall, it was fascinating reading. Let's take those two aspects separately. As always, Scharf gives us plenty of meat in an approachable fashion, whether it's delving into the rocket equation, considering the pros and considerable limitations of Mars as a destination for humans (the chapter is pointedly called The Red Siren), or taking on the possibilities of asteroids. And even in the semi-technical aspect of the first Moon landing we get some more personal detail - I hadn't realised until reading this that Scharf was English by birth (being bathed in a sink at a key moment). Althou...

Search This Blog