James Vincent - Five Way Interview

James Vincent is a senior reporter from the Verge, the Vox Media site devoted to technology and society. He has also written for the London Review of Books, Financial Times, and Wired. He lives in London. His new book is Beyond Measure on the hidden history of measurement.

Why science?

I don't really think I write 'science.' Rather, I hope what I do is an amalgamation of science, history, sociology, and any other narrative or factual ingredients I feel like tossing into the pot. I say this not with the intention of giving myself any special precedence either, it's just that I think it's impossible to write about science without straying into these other categories. The world is an amalgamation: horrifically tangled, dense, and interconnected. Science is the name we give to one of many methods of unpicking the whole.

Why this book?

Because I have that childish instinct to look for the category above the category, like hands grasping a pole, one on top the other, top the other, top the other, until you're grabbing air. Measurement is just one of those meta-categories that defines and shapes a whole lot of intellectual effort and so I found myself drawn. And, more importantly I guess, I knew I'd enjoy writing it — and I did.

How do you feel about random journalistic metrics such as ’three Empire State Buildings’, ’six London buses’ or ‘a Manhattan/Wales in area’?

I love them. They're imaginative and pragmatic: a beautiful combination. I remember reading an article about a satellite being launched on some exploratory mission into the depths of the solar system and the journalist described the probe as 'about the size of a washing machine.' Isn't that perfect? Isn't it beautiful? To imagine your washing machine drifting into space — a little domestic voyager, far from home, working its way through a final spin cycle perhaps. To me, these sorts of random metrics are best enjoyed as unintentional metaphors: transferring the property of one entity onto another. And that means there's poetry in them.

What’s next?

Another book and — I hope — a better one. I always hope to improve. It'll be similarly meta and likely a little more mad.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

This morning I've been listening to Charly Antolini, a Swiss jazz drummer, particularly his album Super Knock Out. The first track, which you can listen to on YouTube here gives you a flavour. I don't know much about jazz, but I love the intensity of focus that listening to Antolini's drumming creates.

Image © Lynn Rothwell

Interview by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a digest free here

Comments

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...

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). ...

Govert Schilling - Five Way Interview

Govert Schilling is an acclaimed and prize-winning freelance astronomy writer and broadcaster in the Netherlands. His articles appear in Dutch newspapers and magazines, but he also has written for New Scientist, Science and BBC Sky at Night Magazine, and he is a contributing editor of Sky & Telescope. He wrote dozens of books (including a couple of children’s books) on a wide variety of astronomical topics, many of which have been translated into English, German, Italian, and Chinese, among other languages. In 2007, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) named asteroid 10986 Govert after him, and in 2014, he received the David N. Schramm Award for high-energy astrophysics science journalism from the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society.His latest book is Target Earth . Why science? We live in troubling times. Fake news and conspiracy theories abound, and trust in science is diminishing. Many adults don't seem to realize that almost everythi...

Search This Blog