Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
We were originally going to just talk about astronomy, but you chose the theme “astronomy, physics and people” – why is that?
I am an astronomer and I love astronomy and looking at what is in the universe. But I don’t read much popular astronomy myself, so I don’t feel very qualified to tell other people what to read who aren’t professional astronomers. But what I love and think that others may appreciate is the cultural embedding of science.
Astronomy is a branch of physics and I would like to talk about physics in general and not just astronomy, but I also want to look at the social process and what happened in history. I think what is reflected in my book choices is the idea that although science is an objective process, how we get there can often be very subjective because, after all, scientists are human beings. People go down wrong trails and so finding the objective truth about the world only happens slowly and in a messy way. There is a lot of fashion involved in what is pursued and what people think they know. Even to understand the technical side of the subject, I often find it very helpful to know about the different personalities involved and a bit about the history – why they use some bizarre term or why they have always assumed that something is true as opposed to something else. If you trace the history and know the people it can make more sense.
Now if you are not careful it sounds a bit like saying that science is subjective – but it isn’t, because out of that very human process and bias and fashion and error, the scientific process itself does eventually work. All those biases and history gradually fall away and you arrive at what really is the truth. But getting there is achieved by people in social circumstances, which I find very interesting.
Let’s look at some of your choices, which reflect this idea. First up is Bang! The Complete History of the Universe, by Brian May, Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott. As well as having a PhD in astrophysics, Brian May wrote “We Will Rock You” for Queen. Is this book as catchy?
Yes, it is, and I will come on to Brian May in a moment. This is actually the book which least demonstrates the starting speech I just gave. It is a straightforward astronomy book which is really good. Mostly I choose it because I thought I have to have something by Patrick Moore for myself and for all the other working astronomers who started life as kids reading his books. Somewhere in the 1960s I had The Observer’s Book of Astronomy by Patrick Moore. He really is an institution – a national treasure.
What do you think it is about him that makes him stand out as this iconic figure for so many budding astronomers?
I don’t know! He is a fairly weird guy. I wouldn’t go with his politics, but he is very colourful. He is very straightforward. He knows the science but he is really an amateur astronomer. So he has always presented astronomy in a very concrete way to the public. It is about saying, anybody can look at the sky and here it is. He did it in this eccentric British way, which is very captivating. Also, he has always felt to the public like one of them. There are hundreds of books by him, but I went for this one because it is so good and colourful. It has a mixture of history and science and maps of the sky and all sorts of things.
What about Brian May?
Brian is a lovely success story because he started doing a PhD in astronomy at Imperial College back in the 1970s but then he had this other life with the pop group Queen and eventually when Queen took off he gave up his PhD.
And then he came back to it.
Yes, and he actually finished his PhD after all that time, which is unprecedented. He was supervised by an old friend of mine, Michael Rowan-Robinson, and it was a very good piece of work. Chris Lintott, the third of the three authors of Bang! is different again. He is a professional astronomer who works a lot with Patrick. They are three very different people – a colourful 80s rock star, an eccentric British amateur astronomer and a regular working astronomer – so they are a bit of a dream team.
It sounds like it. Before we move on to your next choice I just wanted to touch on what the authors say about the end of time, which they discuss as well as the Big Bang.
This is a much more controversial subject than the Big Bang. It has not been clear for many years whether the universe keeps expanding and getting bigger and bigger and will endure a slow cold death over an infinite period of time or whether the universe will stop expanding and collapse, so that you get a big crunch and then it all starts again. This has been a controversy throughout my whole career.
Your next choice, Norton’s Star Atlas, sounds like the perfect book for anyone wanting to explore the night skies.
I thought it would be nice to have something that isn’t just grand theories and armchair stuff, but something that is really helpful.
Andy Lawrence is Regius Professor of Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh, where he works at the Institute for Astronomy. The Institute is part of the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, along with the UK Astronomy Technology Centre and the ROE Visitor Centre. Andy is an expert on quasars – supermassive black holes accreting matter in the centres of galaxies. He is leading an international effort to map the Northern sky in infrared light. He writes the blog The e-Astronomer
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