Matt Wilkinson - Four Way Interview

Matt Wilkinson is a zoologist and science communicator at the University of Cambridge. His work has been covered in the Telegraph, Metro, New Scientist and Nature. In 2007 he attended drama school and wrote a play about T.H. Huxley that premiered at the 2009 Darwin Festival. Restless Creatures is his first book.

Why science?

Like most scientists and science enthusiasts, I just love finding out how the world works, and uncovering its secrets! And I've found that the deeper you look, the more beautiful it becomes. It's a fascination that can never run out, because answering one question invariably leads to many more.

Why this book?

I studied pterodactyl flight in my PhD years, which opened my eyes to the all-pervading influence of physics - particularly the physics of locomotion - on the evolution of life. Once I had become familiar with the basic principles of movement, many fundamental aspects of living things and their evolution seemed to fall into place. It was and continues to be immensely satisfying - even exhilarating at times - to 'get' life in this way, and Restless Creatures is my attempt to share that satisfaction with others.

What’s next?

There are a few potential sophomore avenues I might explore - among them the evolution of chemical communication in all its guises, or of the voice. I'm also thinking of putting my playwright hat on again!

What’s exciting you at the moment?

My current bee in bonnet is the evolution of the idea of evolution, and why it was only when Darwin weighed in that the idea - with a long pre-Darwinian heritage - achieved widespread acceptance. The political and social currency of evolution fascinates me.

Comments

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...

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...

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). ...

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