Simon Flynn – Four Way Interview

Simon Flynn has degrees in chemistry and philosophy and worked at publisher Icon Books for fifteen years, becoming managing director. Always driven by an urge to communicate science, he has recently left the publishing world to train to be a science teacher. His book The Science Magpie is an entertaining cornucopia of science trivia and history.

Why science?
I love nearly everything about it. Obviously this includes the archetypes of science such as laws, processes, theories etc. But I also really enjoy those things that extend beyond science as just a body of knowledge – the personalities, the stories, its relationship with society, and so on.

Why this book?
Following on from the above, The Science Magpie is the sort of book I’d enjoy reading and it allowed me to explore further some of the great variety of science mentioned in the previous answer. But as well as those lofty themes, it also gave me the opportunity to demonstrate science’s more humorous side (in my opinion at least).

What’s next?
Learning, teaching, learning, teaching… I’ve just begun a PGCE in Science, specialising in Chemistry, and am about to start my first school experience. This year is a really important one for me.

What’s exciting you at the moment?
Getting the richer and deeper understanding of science that becoming a teacher of it will entail. On a more specific level, I find epigenetics absolutely fascinating and it is an area that genuinely matters to everyone, which can’t be said of all scientific research.

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, ...

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here. We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...

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 ...

Search This Blog