Skip to main content

Jim Al-Khalili - Four Way Interview

Photo by Nick Smith
Jim Al-Khalili hosts The Life Scientific on BBC Radio 4 and has presented numerous BBC television documentaries. He is Professor of Theoretical Physics and Chair in the Public Engagement in Science at the University of Surrey, a New York Times bestselling author, and a fellow of the Royal Society. He is the author of numerous books, including Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed; The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance; and Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology. The paperback of his novel Sunfall is published in March 2020 by Transworld. His latest book is The World According to Physics.


 Why physics?

I fell in love with physics when I was 13 or 14, when I realised not only that I was pretty good at it at school – basically common sense and puzzle solving – but because it was the subject that answered the big questions I had started contemplating, like whether the stars in the night sky went on for ever, what they were made of, how and why did the universe start, was there ultimate stuff everything was made of and even what was the nature of time. Now over four decades later, I have a lot of answers to these questions, others I am still grappling with. But my love and obsession with physics has never wained. I simply cannot understand why everyone isn’t as in love with the subject as me and so as well as trying to understand the world of physics myself I have been on a mission to try and infect everyone with my enthusiasm.

 Why this book?

I think there are very many quite excellent popular science books around now, which that cover some of the most deepest and most profound topics in physics, from cosmology to string theory to the nature of reality. But I wanted to se if I could get across the essence of what we know about the physical universe in a compact, pocket-sized book, which explores the limits of what we currently understand, how we know what we know and what there is left to discover. This is a state-of-the-nation of modern physics. It is also my own personal ode to physics. 

 What’s next?

Goodness, give me a chance! But well, OK, my next project is to expand on some of the ideas in this book in another even more compact format – but it won’t be the physics itself, but rather how we come to do physics: what does the scientific method actually mean? And whether some of the features of the way we do science, such as valuing doubt over certainty, not being afraid to admit mistakes of our theory is falsified by new observations of experimental results, and whether some of these habits might be exported to wider public discourse in an increasingly polarised and opinionated world.

 What’s exciting you at the moment?

I would say my research into the foundations of quantum mechanics. Together with my colleagues at the University of Surrey, such as Andrea Rocco, and a group of very smart and enthusiastic grad students, I am look at whether we can advance our understanding of the quantum world, by folding ideas from a different area of physics: thermodynamics. Along with a number of researchers around the world, we are coming round to the idea that we are not going to reach a theory of quantum gravity by only combining quantum field theory and Einstein’s relativity, but we will increasing be talking about the connection between concepts such as quantum entanglement, decoherence and entropy. 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Infinite Book – John D. Barrow ****

Authors are often asked to review books on a topic they’ve written on themselves. The reasoning is sensible – they ought to know something about the subject – but there’s always that uneasy suspicion that there’s going to be a bit of bias creeping in. So I think it’s only fair to admit up front that I have written a book on infinity (of which more later). Infinity is a wonderful subject, because it’s intimately mind-bending (if the combination sounds paradoxical, that’s what infinity is all about) and gives you the chance to pull in all sorts of different concepts and assocations along the way, something Barrow does with great gusto. There’s a surprisingly large amount of coverage here for God, and for the universe, and the book jumps around from Aristotle to Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel (explained at great length), from the paradoxes of infinite sets to the paradoxes of time travel. Overall it’s an enjoyable journey that gives plenty of opportunity to be amazed and surprised. The...
Post a Comment
Read more

Adventures of a Computational Explorer - Stephen Wolfram ***

Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the scientist's mathematical tool of choice, Mathematica, plus a whole host of other software products, including the uncanny Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, is undoubtedly a genius of the first order. In this book, we get an uncensored excursion into the mind of genius - which is, without doubt, a fascinating prospect. The book consists of a collection of essays and speeches that Wolfram has produced over the last ten to fifteen years, covering an eclectic range of topics. Like all such collections, the result is something that lacks the coherence of a book with a narrative that runs through it, inevitably introducing a degree of repetition and a mix of interesting and not-so-interesting topics - but there's likely to be something to catch the attention anyone who is into computing or mathematics. One of the most interesting pieces is the opening one, where Wolfram describes being a consultant on the SF movie Arrival. He seems to hav...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Random Universe - Andrew Jaffe *****

This is an absolutely fascinating book for anyone interested in the way that science really works, bearing in mind the difficulties of having to base our models and theories on induction. Andrew Jaffe introduces the difficulties we face when trying to take a scientific view because largely we are dependent on induction: predicting the future from what has previously been observed. He explores what probability is, the two key ways of looking at it (frequentist and Bayesian) and how scientists use (or misuse it) to work out the implications of their experiments for hypotheses. This is then expanded into looking at the nature of scientific models and the philosophy of science before heading out to entropy, quantum randomness and attempting to achieve meaningful cosmology with its potential dearth of evidence.  The topic might sound a little dry, but in fact Jaffe does it with good humour and a very readable style. For example, he uses measuring his daughter's height by making marks on...
Post a Comment
Read more