In an interview on Books That Have Helped Shape His Novels

Your final book is Walter Isaacson’s biography of Einstein. You’ve chosen it, I presume, with Solar in mind.

It had a direct influence on Solar, yes, but this is a biography that happens to be a treatise on creativity. I was about to say scientific creativity, but I think I mean creativity itself. It shows us the creative exuberance of a man with an extraordinary visual imagination, able to recast certain problems in surprising ways. During two particular episodes in his life he fundamentally rewrote our understanding of the physical world. During four months in 1905, his annus mirabilis, Einstein wrote four papers – on light quanta, size of molecules, Brownian motion and special relativity, and started a revolution in physics. Again, in 1915, in a matter of weeks, he formulated in his general theory of relativity what Max Born called ‘the greatest human thinking about nature’. Paul Dirac said it was the greatest discovery ever made.

If Einstein is a creative genius, then Michael Beard in Solar is a creative parasite. His Nobel was for a conflation with Einstein’s work, and his crowning achievements in solar energy were nicked off a young prodigy.

Yes, Beard was a flea hitching a ride on the juggernaut of Einstein’s thinking. But whether quantum mechanics describes the physical world, or whether it’s simply a system that helps us make useful predictions about it, that is something Einstein spent the next 50 years grappling with. He couldn’t cross to the wilder shores of quantum mechanics, even though he himself had laid its foundation with his 1905 paper on the particulate nature of light. Some of that finds its way into Solar.

Also interwoven with Einstein’s creative fury is the story of a man with two children, going through a difficult divorce. Then there’s his long journey with the possibilities, then the reality and finally the consequences of nuclear weapons. On top of all this, the rise and rise of Einstein as a super-celebrity, a cultural icon. In his Andy Warhol moment he becomes the eternal face of genius.

One astute comment in Isaacson’s book is that a contributing factor to Einstein’s fame – besides his science, or for that matter his hair – was the fact that the world, at the end of World War I, was looking for an international celebrity who would transcend politics. And here was this German, pacifist, Jewish scientist who turned physics on its head.

All that. He was always resolutely anti-nationalist. He fell out with fellow scientists like Fritz Haber, who helped develop poisonous gases for use in trench warfare. Einstein was deeply distrustful of Prussian nationalist sentiment. Whatever the world happened to be looking for, he was his own man, a true internationalist. And also a very gifted musician.

What’s impressive about this biography is that Isaacson – who is not himself a scientist, he’s a biographer and journalist – does a very good job of setting out for the layman the central ideas in Einstein’s work, and without resorting to mathematics. That’s an achievement, to help the reader get his mind around ideas which are now taken for granted in physics, like the fact that gravity is explained by the curvature of spacetime.

This theory, I take it, was dramatically proved correct when scientists observed the movement of stars behind the sun, during the solar eclipse of 1919?

Interestingly, a sequence of solar eclipses never quite proved as much as was claimed at the time. There was a troublesome margin of observational error. We didn’t have conclusive proof until after the war, with radio-telescopy. It’s possible that the beauty and elegance of Einstein’s equations forced the pace – that an aesthetic element accelerated their acceptance. Too beautiful not to be true, as Watson said that Rosalind Franklin said, when she saw their model of DNA in Cambridge.

I included this book in my list because I think it’s a knowing exposition of the nature of human ingenuity. It’s the kind of book that makes me feel – to come back to our starting point – that there could exist a mental realm in which we could blend sciences and the humanities in the joys of creativity.

I have one last question, in coda. We’ve talked about books that have influenced your novels. So what books are you reading now, to spin our readers a clue about your next one?

I’m reading a short book by Simon Baron-Cohen, Zero Degrees of Empathy, on the nature of evil, arguing that many of the terrible things that people do to each other are a consequence of a failure of empathy. The word ‘evil’ is unhelpful. It stops us thinking too closely. And I’m re-reading To the End of the Land, by David Grossman. I’m deeply touched by that novel, which was inspired, if that’s the word, by the death of his son in 2006 during the incursion into Lebanon. I’ve just finished David Lodge’s superb novel about H G Wells. I’m also reading Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden – a thinking man’s Bond, set during the First World War.

As for my next book, I’ve started a novel, I’m about 20,000 words in, but it’s far too fragile to discuss.