Skip to main content

Sönke Johnsen - Five Way Interview

Originally trained in maths and art, Sönke Johnsen has studied optics in biology for the last 35 years, the last 24 of which have been at Duke University. He is particularly interested in vision and light in the open ocean, but has also worked on coastal, freshwater, and terrestrial species, animal navigation, vision at night, and human cataracts.  His field work mostly involves open-ocean research cruises that use SCUBA and deep-sea manned or robotic submersibles.  In addition to exploring the optical and visual tricks that animals perform, Johnsen is interested in improving communication between biologists and physicists, and scientists and artists. Johnsen’s research has been featured in many traditional media outlets, but also in Finding Nemo, The Magic Treehouse book series, NPR’s Radiolab, the poetry of John Updike, the humor of Dave Barry, and most recently in Ed Yong’s An Immense World. Johnsen has written or co-written five books, The Optics of Life, Visual Ecology, Into the Great Wide Ocean, Color in Nature, and The Radiant Sea. 

Why marine biology? 

Mostly because the North Carolina beach was my yearly escape into nature from highly industrial Pittsburgh. I became devoted to the ocean at a very early age. 

Why this book? 

A few reasons. First, I wanted to show people the open ocean world that I loved and that was so unfamiliar to most. Second, I wanted to give people an idea of what ocean research is actually like. Finally, I wanted people to understand how scientists think and see that they’re not so different from everyone else. 

Why do you think this is the least known habitat on earth?

Mostly because it is so hard to get to! To get out of sight of shore for days or weeks at a time, you need a large ship. And to do anything beyond looking over the side, you need a ship that allows you to explore the ocean via scuba diving, collecting animals with nets, or using small submarines. Very few people have ever done something like this. Even those that go on cruise ships for vacations are usually many dozens of feet above the water and can’t tell what’s going on underneath the surface.

What’s next?

My next research expedition will be on the RV Atlantis, which houses and operates the Alvin submersible. We will be going to the deep-sea hydrothermal vents off the Azores to study light and vision about a mile below the surface. 

What’s exciting you at the moment? 

So many things. The natural world is beautiful, fascinating, and often very funny. I suppose it’s odd for an author to say this, but I follow what I once saw written on the wall of the library in Woods Hole, Massachusetts –  'Study nature, not books'. 

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:


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