Brian Clegg - Four Way Interview

Brian Clegg is a science writer with over 30 books published on topics ranging from infinity and the big bang to relativity and quantum physics. His A Brief History of Infinity and Dice World were longlisted for the Royal Society Book Prize. Brian has spoken at the Royal Institution, British Library and Science Museum in London, and regularly appears at book and science festivals. His work has appeared in publications from Nature and Physics World to the Observer, the Wall Street Journal and Playboy. The editor of popularscience.co.uk, Brian's most recent titles are The Reality Frame and Big Data.

Why science?

The way the world works has always fascinated me, and I grew up influenced by both science in the news - the Apollo missions, for example - and science fiction, from Star Trek to Isaac Asimov. I thought initially that chemistry would interest me most, but at university, physics took over. I realised when I nearly burned a lab down that I probably wouldn't make a working scientist, but when it finally hit home that I could combine science with my enthusiasm for writing, I never looked back.

Why this book?

The Reality Frame was partly inspired by searching through a GCSE physics curriculum and not finding the words 'quantum' or 'relativity' once. I'd recently written about the quantum world, but I felt that there really wasn't a good book exploring the importance of relativity in a wider context than just Einstein (though, of course, he comes into it) - and once I'd got into relativity I realised I also wanted to include our place in the universe... so it seemed a good idea to write the book by constructing a model universe including life and creativity. As for Big Data, I worked in operational research and IT for 17 years between leaving university and becoming a full-time writer, and it seemed important to get a good view on a topic that is so influential on our everyday lives. It was also an ideal book to be one of the launch titles for Icon Books' new Hot Science series, for which I'm acting as series editor.

What's next?

There's always something on the go - I've recently completed another book for the Hot Science series on gravitational waves, and at the moment I working on a book with Maxwell's demon at its heart (who couldn't love a science book with a demon?)... while putting together a proposal I can't talk about much, but which should involve some hard core puzzling.

What's exciting you at the moment?

What I love about my job is the variety of what I get to do. Last week I was on the radio, talking about Joseph Priestley, Yesterday I wrote an article about my experience of living for a year with smart home technology and, most fun of all, I've just published my fifth murder mystery featuring a vicar called Stephen Capel - An End to Innocence was huge fun to write and I hope that my fiction books will get a wider audience.

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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