Skip to main content

Roberto Trotta - Four Way Interview

Roberto Trotta is a theoretical cosmologist and senior lecturer at Imperial College London, where his research focuses on dark matter and dark energy. He is one of the world’s leading figures in the new discipline of astrostatistics – the development and application of advanced statistical tools to problems in cosmology and astrophysics. He has published more than fifty scientific papers and received numerous awards for his research and outreach work. He’s also worked with museums, writers, filmmakers and artists as a scientific consultant, helping to make their artistic creations scientifically sound. A passionate communicator of science, he has recently been awarded an STFC Public Engagement Fellowship to carry out an innovative public outreach programme, which aims at developing and delivering new interactive ways of bringing the excitement of cosmology to the general public. His first book is The Edge of the Sky.  www.robertotrotta.com. 
Why science?
To think that we can find out answers to hard questions about the nature of the Universe, where it comes from and what will happen to it in the future still excites me and fills me with wonder. For example, we have now learnt that the Universe is 13 billion 798 million years old (give or take 37 million years) -- an amazing achievement! This is what science at its best does: it gives us new eyes to look at the cosmos and understand it in a deeper way. But as I say in The Edge of the Sky, "perhaps the most amazing thing about the All-There-Is is that we can understand it at all."
Why this book?
For over a decade I've been looking for ways of better engaging the public with cosmology, the science of the cosmos. When I came across the XKCD cartoon of the Up-Goer-Five (the Saturn V moon rocket, all labeled using only the most common 1,000 words in English), I thought that perhaps this new language could be used to talk about the entire All-There-Is (that's to say, the Universe), in a simple, straight-forward way that everybody could understand. Limiting my lexicon to the 1,000 most common words in English would not only do away with jargon -- it would force me to think about my subject anew, and express it in a novel, fresh and hopefully surprising way. The Edge of the Sky is the result of that small Eureka! moment. 
What’s next?
I have some ideas for a book that will try to take public engagement and literary experiment where no one has gone before - but it's too early to talk about that! For the moment, I am thoroughly enjoying seeing The Edge of the Sky reach a wide, new audience of readers, and hearing back from them about how they relate and connect with the book. It's been a wonderful journey! 
What’s exciting you at the moment?
Scientifically, the hunt for dark matter is reaching a critical point. We might be on the verge of discovering the dark matter drop (ahem, particle) in a laboratory experiment, which would be one of the greatest scientific breakthrough of all times. I'm very excited to be giving my small contribution to that quest. 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more