Skip to main content

Joshua Howgego - Five Way Interview

Joshua Howgego is currently the Acting Head of Features at New Scientist magazine. He’s been on staff at the magazine for nine years and before that completed a PhD in chemistry. His first book is The Meteorite Hunters. 

Why meteorites?

Years ago I was at a scientific conference and I heard meteorites described as time capsules from the birth of the solar system. I realised that, although we usually use telescopes to study space, these extraterrestrial stones provide another unique way of doing so. I found that prompted a lot of questions for me, including 'how on Earth do you find a meteorite?' and 'how do you read the secrets inside them?' It was these questions that led me to write my book.

Why this book?

As a magazine feature editor, I’m interested in how stories are told and how a good narrative is structured. What appealed to me about hunting meteorites is that presents a ready-made narrative: you have a person setting out on a quest to find incredible treasure! I thought I could see a way to tell these adventure stories, weave in some science, and so produce a book the like of which no one else had quite done before.

Are meteorite hunters the Indiana Joneses of the science world?

Definitely – forget archaeologists, it’s all about meteorite hunters! I mean, I am being facetious here. But there are certainly some incredible escapades in the book, with people hunting the lost meteorites of Antarctica, searching for stardust across the rooftops of Oslo, scouring remote deserts. I didn’t meet anyone that carries a whip – but a magnetic walking stick is the next best thing, right?

What’s next?

The last chapter of my book is all about sample-return missions, in other words, space missions that visit asteroids, burgle a sample, and bring it back to Earth. There has been a handful of these over the past decade or so and they give us another unique window on the early solar system. One thing that would be a next step would be a sample-return mission that would bring back a piece of the frozen core of a comet. We’ve never done this before and it would require us to build a sort of bullet proof solar-powered space freezer to bring the sample back. Noone knows how to do that yet, but scientists are looking into it now.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

This year is, by one reasonable estimation, the 100th anniversary of the birth of quantum mechanics, so I’m looking forward to editing some stories for New Scientist exploring that. I am fascinated by what quantum mechanics is trying to tell us about the deep workings of reality. When it comes to meteorites, though, I am excited to see how one particular adventure pans out: the quest to find the legendary Chinguetti meteorite. It was supposedly found by a French army captain more than a century ago in the desert of Mauritania and it was vast: 40 metres wide by 100 long. This would make it easily the largest known meteorite – but it has never been found again. I wrote in the book about a new effort to find it, and if that is successful (a big if) it will be thrilling.

These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership:
Interview by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more