Paul Sen - Four Way Interview

Paul Sen first encountered thermodynamics while studying engineering at the University of Cambridge. He became a documentary filmmaker who brought a love of storytelling to the worlds of science and technology. Paul’s award-winning TV company Furnace, where he is creative director, has made many BBC science series such as Everything and Nothing, Order and Disorder, The Secrets of Quantum Physics, and films such as Gravity and Me: The Force That Shapes Our Lives and Oak Tree: Nature’s Greatest Survivor. This won the prestigious Royal Television Society Award for best science and natural history program and the Grierson Award for best science documentary in 2016. His first book is Einstein's Fridge.

Why science?

I love the characters and the stories behind scientific discoveries. To find out what drives people to puzzle out how our universe works is to celebrate the best of us as a species. I am also fascinated by the relationship between science and society—why do certain scientific problems become urgent and important at a given time and place? Answering this helps us understand how science works and how it will develop in the future.

Why this book?

I have long felt that thermodynamics is the Cinderella of the sciences. Unlike quantum theory and relativity, there are few books describing how its laws were discovered and how people realised its universal applicability. Yet thermodynamics is vitally important, underpinning everything from the behaviour of living cells to that of black holes. It explains why we must eat and breathe, how the lights come on, and provides a clue as to how the universe will end. Einstein described thermodynamics as 'the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced will never be overthrown.' I hope my book helps more people become aware of this fundamental branch of science.

What's Next?

I'm very excited to be working again with Professor Jim Al-Khalili on a two-part TV show about the latest breakthroughs in fundamental physics. The films will appear initially on a subscription channel called Magellan TV.

What's exciting you at the moment?

I've been improving my knowledge of Bengali, a language I learned as a child. It's wonderful, finally, to read poetry by great writers like Rabindranath Tagore and Sunil Gangopodhyay in the original!

Comments

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...

Search This Blog