Your choice of Empire of the Stars seems to offer a gentle way in to popular science. A story of scientific rivalry around the discovery of white dwarfs, it’s seen entirely through a biographical lens and a single relationship: that of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Sir Arthur Eddington. So why is Chandrasekhar’s life such an interesting one to look at in terms of understanding science through biography?

I think there are three things about this book that make it particularly interesting. First of all there’s the iconic event in Chandrasekhar’s early life which we’d all like to emulate as theoretical physicists. It happened when he was only 19 and on the boat from India to England, and this was around the beginning of quantum mechanics. Using some paper that he had to hand, he tried to work out what would happen at the centre of stars and arrived at this idea called the Chandrasekhar mass, which is: if a star is heavier than the Chandrasekhar mass then it may collapse into a black hole.

Now he had had some pretty good formal training in India, but no high-level training. To me that is sheer brilliance: to get hold of simple concepts and come out with something groundbreaking. That’s the first reason I think he’s interesting. Secondly, the context of the story is Empire and colonialism. The relationship is between this guy who comes from India to Cambridge and the grand figure of Eddington, and the denouement – why Chandrasekhar is not taken seriously – is completely tainted by colonial strategies. I think that’s interesting as a picture of the world at the time. And the third thing is, I’ve just spent the last year pretty obsessed with Eddington, who went to an island in West Africa to test Einstein’s theory. While I was there for the 90th anniversary of this event I ended up reading quite a lot about Eddington, who seemed like a pretty awful character but did quite brilliant things.

So at its heart the book addresses the issue of how difficult it is to break through received wisdom in science, not least if you’re subject to all the prejudices against an outsider?

Yes. Chandrasekhar’s ideas about the formation of black holes were absolutely right but he was crushed by Eddington. Completely stamped on. 

Moving on to the Electric Universe. This appears to be a rather different kind of book: more light-hearted, more obviously popular in its approach. So starting with the basics, why electric and why universe?

Well, again, this is basically a book about scientific discovery. The field of electricity and magnetism now seems kind of banal: it is one of the more banal aspects of what we do. Yet if you look back 50 years, it’s clear that how the fundamental rules of electricity and magnetism came about is a pinnacle of theoretical physics. It’s genius and it’s beautiful – and I use that word advisedly. They’re very clever and very rich; they explain a host of phenomena, from radio to light. Many things. So it’s a book about a banal topic that is also a pretty important one. Also, Bodanis is an interesting writer because he too pins it on character and is very good at ferreting out the dysfunctionality of his subjects and the relationships between them. It actually reads very much like a selection of short stories which are interwoven, which I think is a brilliant technique. I think a lot of popular science writers try to do that but they’re not as successful as he is. I mean it really is very plot driven, in some sense, with these characters.

So once again science taught through character. Is it that you see that as a particularly effective way of communicating science to a wider audience? Or does it have a more personal appeal? As a scientist, does it ever feel that while your ideas are your currency, as individuals you and your colleagues can be underappreciated by the wider world?

To be honest, I do feel that the joy of writing science is often taken away from the people actually doing the science. The argument is usually that she or he is not very good at explaining what she or he does, but I think there is a real risk of handing all the communication of science to non-scientists or non-active scientists. They either don’t know or forget the thrill of doing science, which I think fuels good exposition, and have to convey it second-hand.

This is not to say that, as a scientist, one is naturally better at communicating science. I wrote a book on cosmology called The State of the Universe in which I tried to construct a narrative just in terms of the science. It can be done but it doesn’t read as well as these books, it reads differently. I’ve become more and more convinced that people are led along more easily if there’s a narrative arc involving character. 

In the case of The Strangest Man, the biography of Paul Dirac, its subject is an extraordinarily difficult and impenetrable character: one who in some sense seems to represent the stereotype of the introverted scientist. Does that in itself make it intriguing for you?

It’s certainly striking how little material the author of this book had to work with, regarding Dirac. I mean Farmelo didn’t have a lot of personal information or insight from the man himself – maybe he had some letters but he didn’t have diaries – so it was very difficult for him to know what Dirac was thinking at any moment.