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Marcus Chown - Five Way Interview

Marcus Chown graduated from the University of London in 1980 with a first class degree in physics. He also earned a Master of Science in astrophysics from the California Institute of Technology. With much experience writing for magazines such as New Scientist, Chown has written a string of successful popular science books. His latest title is The One Thing You Need to Know.

Why science?

Science is stranger than science fiction. We live in a universe far stranger than anything we could possibly have invented. I get a buzz out of learning new things about it. And they are coming thick and fast. Previous generations would have killed for what we know. We are at a stage when we can ask truly fundamental questions – What is the universe? Why is there a universe? What is space? What is time? Are we alone? – and have a good chances of answering them in the next decade or so.

Why this book?

Recently, I asked to give a talk to a law firm about quantum computers. Warned that I could not assume any scientific knowledge in my audience, I thought: 'What is the one thing you need to know to understand quantum computers – the one thing from which everything else follows?' As I put together my presentation, it occurred to me that I could do the exactly same for a myriad other scientific concepts and that, in a world most people are time poor, telling them the one thing the need to know to understand a topic and showing how everything else follows as a logical consequence, might be a novel and fun way to communicate a lot of deep stuff in a compact and digestible form.

Inevitably, making complex science approachable requires considerable simplification. Can this be dangerous?

As Einstein is often reported as saying: 'Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.' And I think that is true. The perfect description of the universe, the perfect metaphor, is of course a mathematical one. We don’t know why that is. Descriptions in words are also metaphors but not as sharp. Like looking through a frosted window that blurs the view of the world rather than through clear glass. The challenge for a popular science writer is to describe the blurry world in a way that transmits the truth that survives at that blurry level. Does that make sense?

What’s next?

I’m interested in black holes. It’s an incredibly exciting time with the Event Horizon Telescope obtaining the first-ever images of black holes – the supermassive black holes at the heart of our Milky Way and the nearby galaxy, M87, which has a 6.5 billion solar mass black hole. And gravitational wave astronomy is going from strength to strength, with LIGO/Virgo having detected almost 100 black holes mergers. Then surprise is that many of the black holes are a lot more massive than expected, indicating that each had already formed from an earlier merger or there is another route to making black holes other than the gravitational collapse of a massive stars at the end of their lives. Gravitation waves are the voice of space. It’s like we’ve suddenly gained a new sense and, in addition to seeing the universe, we can now also hear it.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is pretty exciting. I interviewed its project scientist, John Mather, the other day, and he said: 'I never expected to see individual stars in the dawn of time. The telescope has far exceeded our expectations and we are beyond ecstatic.' So I am excited about the prospects of seeing the first stars to switch on after the big bang – more likely clusters of stars. I am also excited about the prospect of detecting water on the surface of planets around nearby stars, which will at least show they are potentially habitable. Even more excitingly, Avi Loeb at Harvard says the JWST could detect the signature of industrial chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbons in exoplanet atmospheres. So, there is a remote chance of us finding an ET technological civilisation!



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