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

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...

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...

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...

Search This Blog