Skip to main content

John Gribbin - Four Way Interview

John Gribbin was described as 'one of the finest and most prolific writers of popular science around' by the Spectator. John gained a PhD from the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge (then under the leadership of Fred Hoyle) before working as a science journalist for Nature and later New Scientist. He is the author of a number of bestselling popular science books, including In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat, In Search of the Multiverse, Science: A History and Computing with Quantum Cats. He is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Sussex. His latest title is Six Impossible Things.

Why science?

 I grew up wanting to be a science fiction writer, inspired by Astounding magazine and the works of Arthur Clarke and Isaac Asimov.  When I realised there was no chance of making a living this way, I turned to science fact.  But I have always been especially interested in science fact that sounds like science fiction.

 Why this book?

 This book (Six Impossible Things) is to some extent the culmination of my fascination with non-common-sensical science fact.  Nothing is more non-common-sensical than quantum physics, and my aim is to highlight the ludicrous nature of the 'explanations' put forward to account for the way the quantum world works.  If you are baffled by the book, I have succeeded.

 What's next?

 Next book is a collaboration with my wife, Mary, on the historical development of the idea of evolution.  Interpreting history is easier than interpreting quantum mechanics.

 What's exciting you at the moment?

 Apart from my own writing, the science which I am most excited about now is gravitational wave astronomy, which is opening up our understanding of the Universe the way X-ray astronomy did when I was a student.  I did make a modest attempt to fill in the background, but the field is developing much too fast for me to contemplate a full-length book on the subject.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

  1. Dr. William Jolley15 April 2019 at 10:10

    Dr. Gribbin is the absolute best writer I know. I look forward to his next project!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Asmodelle15 April 2019 at 21:39

    John Gribbin gets his facts right in his work, which is the most important thing when you are writing a popular science book! His work is exceptional and inspiring.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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). ...
Post a Comment
Read more