Skip to main content

Kathryn Harkup - Four Way Interview

Kathryn Harkup is a chemist and author. Kathryn  completed  a doctorate on her favourite chemicals,  phosphines, and went  on to further postdoctoral research before realising that talking,  writing and demonstrating  science appealed a bit more than hours  slaving over a hot fume-hood. For  six years she ran the outreach in  engineering, computing, physics  and maths at the University of Surrey,  which involved writing talks on  science topics that would appeal to  bored teenagers (anything disgusting  or dangerous was usually the most  popular). Kathryn is now a freelance  science communicator delivering  talks and workshops on the quirky side  of science. Her new book is Making the Monster: the science behind Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Why science?

I know I'm biased but science really is the best. It is an incredibly powerful tool for trying to make sense of the universe around us. The more time I spend learning about science and reading about it, the more amazing it becomes. Writing books is a great excuse for reading books about brilliant science and scientists.

 Reading about scientific discoveries from two hundred years ago made me realise not just how far we have come but just how brilliant previous experimenters were. The acheivements they made, with relatively simple equipment and no concept of things like energy or atoms, is staggering. 

 Why this book?

Although the scientific aspects of Frankenstein only make up a small proportion of the whole novel, it's the bit that got me thinking. The book is credited as being the first science fiction novel and much science fiction has an unnerving scientific credibility to it. I wondered how close the science in Frankenstein came to the science, and scientific expectations, of the time it was written. I was also fascinated how a nineteen-year-old woman came up with such a concept. Mary Shelley had no formal education and was living in time when women were almost completely barred from participating in practical science (there were a few notable exceptions). I wanted to know just how well informed she was and where she could have got her inspiration from. 

 What's next?

Now I am researching another book. There will be plenty more science, and it's still a macabre topic, but it's even further back in history than Frankenstein. This time I'm going to be looking into the science of all the different ways to die in Shakespeare's plays. It's going to be lots of gory fun.

 Not only do I get to investigate new (to me)  areas of science but I get to find out a lot more about British history, a subject I gave up very early on in my school career. I love the crossover between science and other subjects, for me it makes it all the more interesting.

 What's exciting you at the moment?

It's great to see so much in the news about Frankenstein and Mary Shelley. She was an extraordinary woman living at an extraordinary time. I'm looking forward to talking about her life and work while I promote the book. 

 I am also relishing taking on a new challenge and immersing myself in researching the Plantagenets and the plague. I am loving watching Shakespeare's plays and calling it 'work'.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...
Post a Comment
Read more

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life.  To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

The War on Science - Lawrence Krauss (Ed.) ****

At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier.   It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the same ground, so there is a lot of repetition. Even so, it's an important book. There are a few well-known names here - editor Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - but also a range of scientists (with a few philosophers) explaining how science is being damaged in academia by unscientific ideas. Many of the issues apply to other disciplines as well, but this is specifically about the impact on science, and particularly important there because of the damage it has been doing...
Post a Comment
Read more