Four Way Interview - Ben Ambridge

Ben Ambridge is Reader in Psychology at the University of Liverpool and the ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (LuCiD). He is a recipient of the Guardian-Wellcome Science Writing Prize and his first book Psy-Q: A Mind-Bending Miscellany of Everyday Psychology was a Sunday Times Book of the Year and has been translated into a dozen languages. He lives in Sale, Greater Manchester. His latest title is Are You Smarter than a Chimpanzee?

Why science?

If you want to figure out how something works, you’ve got two options. You can collect the best possible evidence, look at it even handedly, and do your best to come up with a theory that explains this evidence and predicts what will happen in similar scenarios in the future. Or you can just make shit up.

Why this book?

We humans like to think that we’re not only much more intelligent than other animals - which we clearly are - but a whole different type of creature altogether; that we’re unique in having logical thought, reasoning, consciousness, even an immortal soul. So what I wanted to do is debunk that myth: All our patterns of thinking and behaving have their roots in our evolutionary origins. Or, as I put it in the book, when it comes to our abilities and those of other animals, everything is relative, and everything is a relative.

What’s next?

I don’t have any definite plans, but I’d like to come back to my own area of research - children’s language development - and write a popular book on that.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

I haven’t tried it myself yet, but I’m excited to see what the emerging virtual reality technology is going to bring us. Will it change the world like the iPhone, or will it just be a gimmicky flash-in-the-pan like 3D TV?

Comments

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

Govert Schilling - Five Way Interview

Govert Schilling is an acclaimed and prize-winning freelance astronomy writer and broadcaster in the Netherlands. His articles appear in Dutch newspapers and magazines, but he also has written for New Scientist, Science and BBC Sky at Night Magazine, and he is a contributing editor of Sky & Telescope. He wrote dozens of books (including a couple of children’s books) on a wide variety of astronomical topics, many of which have been translated into English, German, Italian, and Chinese, among other languages. In 2007, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) named asteroid 10986 Govert after him, and in 2014, he received the David N. Schramm Award for high-energy astrophysics science journalism from the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society.His latest book is Target Earth . Why science? We live in troubling times. Fake news and conspiracy theories abound, and trust in science is diminishing. Many adults don't seem to realize that almost everythi...

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