Skip to main content

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!



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