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

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...

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 ...

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...

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