Jim Al-Khalili – Four Way Interview

Jim Al-Khalili is a theoretical physicist based at the University of Surrey, where he teaches and carries out research in quantum mechanics. He presents the Radio 4 series The Life Scientific and has presented TV and radio documentaries. His latest book is Paradox.

Why Science?

Science is, for me, the only rational and reliable way of making sense of the world. Striving to understand why and how the universe is the way it is and our place in it is, I believe, what makes us human.

Why this book?

Asking and seeking answers to some of the most profound questions of existence don’t have to be obscure and complicated. They can be fun, challenging and mind-blowing. So what better way than to tackle them than through setting them up as paradoxes and puzzles that stretch the old grey matter?

What’s next?

Having written an accessible popular science book that I hope everyone can enjoy, I now embark on another book that is far more challenging. While still popular science, this book (working title: Quantum Life) will, I hope become the definitive one on the emerging and tremendously exciting field of research I am involved in, called quantum biology. I have the rest of this year and the next to carry out the research for the book and to write. I am getting excited just thinking about the prospect.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

Ah, well, there you go. I have sort of just answered that: what excites me is my current research into possible quantum mechanical mechanisms in microbiology. For instance, what is the extent to which quantum tunnelling (a process I am familiar with from nuclear physics) is required to explain genetic mutations? Or, how does quantum entanglement explain bird migration and our sense of smell? And, can we only really understand the process of photosynthesis by appealing to the notion that subatomic particles can be in two places at once?

Picture (c) Furnace Ltd – reproduced with permission

Comments

We Are Eating the Earth - Michael Grunwald *****

If I'm honest, I assumed this would be another 'oh dear, we're horrible people who are terrible to the environment', worthily dull title - so I was surprised to be gripped from early on. The subject of the first chunk of the book is one man, Tim Searchinger's fight to take on the bizarrely unscientific assumption that held sway that making ethanol from corn, or burning wood chips instead of coal, was good for the environment. The problem with this fallacy, which seemed to have taken in the US governments, the EU, the UK and more was the assumption that (apart from carbon emitted in production) using these 'grown' fuels was carbon neutral, because the carbon came out of the air. The trouble is, this totally ignores that using land to grow fuel means either displacing land used to grow food, or displacing land that had trees, grass or other growing stuff on it. The outcome is that when we use 'E10' petrol (with 10% ethanol), or electricity produced by ...

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). ...

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...

Search This Blog