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

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). ...

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...

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...

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