Skip to main content

Tom Jackson - Four Way Interview

Tom Jackson is a science writer based in Bristol, UK. Tom specialises in recasting science and technology into lively historical narratives. After almost 20 years of writing, Tom has uncovered a wealth of stories that help to bring technical content alive and create new ways of enjoying learning about science. In his time, Tom has been a zoo keeper, travel writer, buffalo catcher and filing clerk, but he now writes for adults and children, for books, magazines and TV. His latest title is Chilled: how refrigeration changed the world and might do it again.

 Why science?

 The obvious answer is that it is the best way of finding out about how stuff works. Some of my most wondrous and satisfying moments have come when I've learned something that gave me a bit more of the 'big picture'. Things that spring to mind are the Bohr atomic model, the rock cycle, natural and sexual selection, nucleosynthesis. I’m probably too impatient to be a real scientist though—at least I was when that was an option for me. I like the stories as much as the results, following the way knowledge changes, and continues to change, and seeing the many links between it all.

 Why this book?

 While I was writing Chilled I would often find myself saying something like, 'I’m working on a book about fridges, but it’s not really about fridges.' Cue quizzical looks. What interested me is what the kitchen refrigerator represents. It is the fruit of a long line of discoveries that involve many of the great names of physics and chemistry plus many awesome stories of unusual goings on. The fridge has obviously altered the way we produce, purchase, and consume food, and it was fun to illustrate just how it is utterly integrated into our day to day—just imagine life without one. But I wanted to extend that further by showing that the kind of thing that a fridge does also pops up in many applications far removed from food—eg you need refrigeration to make steel cheaply and make a strong concrete dam, and the Higgs boson was found using the world’s largest refrigerator. Absolute zero had to make an appearance, of course, but what interested me most about that was the strange behaviour of materials at temperatures close to 0 K, and how that might lead to technologies of the future. So, now you can see; it’s not really about fridges!

 What’s next?

 Well, I work on all kinds of non-fiction projects, some for kids, some for YA or family readerships, as well as adult non-fiction titles like Chilled. My top pick for a future project would be the story of standard candles. Again, it’s not really about candles, but the objects that tell us how big the Universe is.

 What’s exciting you at the moment?

 The Pluto flyby just happened, so I’m excited to see the up close images that will be with us come the autumn, I think. The snapshot from the approach has certainly put the dwarf planet debate back on the table. I just think the generation brought up with Pluto as a full planet don’t like the thought of its demotion. Perhaps a better solution is the one from Alan Stern, the New Horizon chief: Pluto and Eris et al are all planets, but the eight big ones are überplanets. Does that sound better? On another vein, my friend Hamish Johnston from Physics World has been telling me about quark novae of late. I’m interested to see where that might lead.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...
Post a Comment
Read more

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). ...
Post a Comment
Read more