Jaime Green - Five Way Interview

Jaime Green is a science writer, essayist, editor, and teacher, and she is series editor of The Best American Science and Nature Writing. She received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia, and her writing has appeared in Slate, Popular Science, The New York Times Book Review, American Theatre, Catapult, Astrobites, and elsewhere. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and son. Her new book is The Possibility of Life.

Why science?

On the one hand, a love for it was instilled in me from a young age, by my dad who loves space, and by my maternal grandfather, an engineer who loved gardening. But it really stuck with me. I think it's the mix of mystery and wonder, the amazing invisible things that are all around us—cells and atoms and fossils—and the sense of interconnectedness that comes from scientific understanding.

Why this book?

Astronomy has always been my favorite science, and when I read Carl Sagan in my teens, both Contact and Cosmos, he had a huge impact on me, that romantic but scientifically serious approach. But for a long time, I thought there wasn't room for my version of this book. There are so many books about the scientific search for alien life, and they're all written by professors of astronomy and astrophysics! But when I started writing about the science and sci-fi together, it all opened up, and I realized that looking at this as a question of imagination was so fascinating to me, and so exciting to write about. It doesn't diminish the science but recognizes that it's about more than finding answers, but looking for meaning, too.

Why do you think the idea of alien life we will probably never encounter excites people?

Well first of all, imagining the possibilities is a fascinating endeavour—they don't have to be real to be powerful. But whether or not there's life on other worlds, and what that life is like, has a huge impact on how we understand our place in the cosmos. Just knowing that they're out there would change so much.

What’s next?

I'm still figuring that out. I feel like I've said everything I ever wanted to say about astronomy and aliens, but writing this book led me to new interests in chemistry and biology, a topic that was pretty new to me in my writing. So I'm excited to see what new directions that might lead in.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

Resting? Publishing a book is far more overwhelming than I could have imagined. It was a life-long dream, and now the book is in the world, it's almost too much to process. But I'm excited for spring, for some long walks in nature, for seeing what comes up in my garden despite my neglect.

Image by Sylvie Rosokoff

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

Comments

The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life. To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...

The War on Science - Lawrence Krauss (Ed.) ****

At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier. It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the same ground, so there is a lot of repetition. Even so, it's an important book. There are a few well-known names here - editor Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - but also a range of scientists (with a few philosophers) explaining how science is being damaged in academia by unscientific ideas. Many of the issues apply to other disciplines as well, but this is specifically about the impact on science, and particularly important there because of the damage it has been doing...

Search This Blog