Skip to main content

Peter Atkins - Four Way Interview

Peter Atkins is a fellow of Lincoln College, University of Oxford and the author of about 70 books for students and a general audience. His texts are market leaders around the globe. A frequent lecturer in the United States and throughout the world, he has held visiting professorships in France, Israel, Japan, China, and New Zealand. His latest title is Conjuring the Universe.

Why science?

Science is the only reliable way of acquiring knowledge, especially when it is supported by the austere language of mathematics. Science depends on publicly shareable knowledge, and is gradually building an interconnected reticulation of concepts and theories, which show how the very large illuminates the very small, and vice versa, and how aspects from different disciplines augment each other rather than conflict.

Why this book?

 It deals with a question that lurks inside everyone and, in my view, provides a framework for understanding. Deep questions often have simple answers: I wanted to share that attitude.

 As science progresses, so it is becoming prepared to tackle the great questions that have puzzled philosophers and the general public: what is the origin of the laws of nature? Were the laws imposed on the universe at its creation, could they be different? I like to think of science as being on the track of simplicity, avoiding the intellectual feather bed of postulating external clause, which is in fact even greater complexity than what it purports to explain. So, I set out to explore whether the laws of nature have an extraordinarily simple origin, which I believe is a combination of indolence, anarchy, and ignorance. These principles turn out to be extraordinarily powerful, for I argue that they imply the conservation laws (especially the all-important conservation of energy, the basis of causality), the foundation of quantum mechanics (and by extension, all classical mechanics), the laws of electromagnetism, and all thermodynamics. 

 What more is there? Well, there are two other major questions. One is why the fundamental constants have their special values. That I answer by dividing the constants into two classes, the structural constants (like the speed of light and Planck’s constant) and the coupling constants (like the fundamental charge). The values of the former are easy to explain; on the latter I have nothing to say. The other deep question is why mathematics works as a reliable language for describing Nature: here I hazard a guess or two.  Overall, in this equation-free account (the supporting equations are in the safe space of the Notes), I seek to answer what puzzle many and what should interest everyone.

 What’s next?

 I am gradually forming a view, but it is too early to share.

 What’s exciting you at the moment?

The ceaseless, but sometimes slow, advance of understanding that science provides. Every day, wonder becomes more reliable.

 Photo credit: Aria Photography, Oxford

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...
Post a Comment
Read more

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...
Post a Comment
Read more