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 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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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