An article in the Independent newspaper was boldly headlined with the news that 'the three most desirable jobs in Britain are author, librarian and academic.' The article begins 'Forget dreams of a glittering career in Premier League football...' Now as an author myself, I feel really thrilled that I've got the country's dream job. But as an author who likes to look at the numbers behind the headlines, I'm a little doubtful about the validity of this story. The article was based on a YouGov survey of an impressively large 14,294 British adults, and the chart to the left was the combined outcome. Well, author is certainly up top. But when you look through that list, there are (at least) two strange additions, which I was very surprised about. No footballers and no pop stars. Isn't that strange? So it's important to know exactly what YouGov asked - and being a responsible polling organization they give us all the information we need here . Th...

The British physicist/astronomer, Arthur Eddington was a great science populariser who came up with a lovely comment when writing about quantum mechanics in the late 1920s. He wrote that rather than cover the theory as it stood, he really ought to 'nail up over the door of the new quantum theory a notice "Structural alterations in progress - No admittance except on business". And particularly to warn the doorkeeper to keep out prying philosophers.' I don't think I've seen such a brilliant summary of the way quantum physics went through a transformation from its early implementation, and brought what many physicists would continue to consider far too much agonising over interpretation and philosophy into the field. I think it's fair to say that the notice has come down, but whether those philosophers should have been allowed in is a different matter.

Like many authors I have a toe in social media - not just this blog (and the associated Google+), but Twitter and Facebook (and LinkedIn) too. I do have some useful social interaction on Facebook, but my Facebook page is dedicated to business - in my case, letting people know about science, writing and my books. Fair enough, and Facebook positively encourages this, providing opportunities to advertise both your page and specific posts to interested parties. I've never bothered with this - I do a bit of Google advertising in the vain hope that it will push up visibility in the search listings, but Facebook advertising seems like money down the drain. However, the other day I had a post I thought would be benefit from a wider audience so I thought I'd invest the price of a cup of coffee in a couple of days promotion. Off it duly went to the Facebook censors... only to be rejected fairly smartly because it 'breached guidelines'. Apparently, the image in my 'adve...

One of the fun things (well, it's sometimes fun) about my job is that I get sent interesting books to review, which I sometimes do for magazines and newspapers, but most of my reviews either appear here on my blog (if it's not a science book) or on my www.popularscience.co.uk website. When a book arrives from a publisher, it is accompanied by an information sheet/ press release. The bright-eyed and bushy tailed view of these is that they provide useful information for the editor or review writer. (The cynical view is that they provide nice words about the book that some lazy hacks will just reproduce, in classic press release journalism. But I'm not cynical.) I must confess, I rarely give these more than a quick glance before reading the book. Yes, I do read every book I review, almost always cover to cover, with the exception of books where I decide that my review would be so nasty that I really shouldn't do it - and usually the publisher agrees this is a good mov...

Quantum physics is famous for its strangeness. As the great Richard Feynman once said about the part of quantum theory that deals with the interactions of light and matter particles, quantum electrodynamics: I’m going to describe to you how Nature is – and if you don’t like it, that’s going to get in the way of your understanding it… The theory of quantum electrodynamics describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it agrees fully with experiment. So I hope you can accept Nature as she is – absurd. It's interesting to compare two of the strangest concepts to be associated with quantum physics - Dirac's negative energy sea and the 'many worlds' interpretation. Each strains our acceptance, but both have had their ardent supporters. Dirac's 'sea' emerges from his equation which describes the behaviour of the electron as a quantum particle that is subject to relativistic effects. The English physicist Paul Dirac discovered that his...

On Top Gear  last weekend, Jeremy Clarkson drove the rather lovely looking BMW i8 hybrid, and decided he'd rather drive it than the sporty BMW M3, as the i8 has great performance and the manufacturer claims you can get over 100 miles to the gallon - truly a win-win for greenness and petrolheads simultaneously. However, in his excitement at driving the thing, Clarkson forgot the number one rule of hybrids, established, in part, by Top Gear . This is that hybrids are only more fuel efficient than ordinary cars in urban driving. They use more fuel than an equivalent petrol car (let alone a diesel) on motorways and country driving. Both Top Gear and rather more reliable testers have shown in the past that a BMW 3 series (sorry it's so BMW weighted - I have no affection for the things) uses less fuel than a Toyota Prius when driving outside towns. But here's the green rub (my Grandma used to have some of that) - short drives in town are exactly the conditions when a pure ele...

I was in Waterstones, Piccadilly in London yesterday and rather pleased to see that I was allocated my own mini-section (see photo), but also that they had the new version of my book Light Years on one of the tables used to grab people's attention. Light was one of the first topics I wrote about, and it has always fascinated me. A key characteristic of light is its dramatic speed - the universal speed limit when in a vacuum and not cheating by warping space or similar - but something I cover is the experiments Lene Hau did a few years ago, bringing light to a walking pace. I just wanted to share an extract here. Nearly 80 years after the theory [of Bose-Einstein condensates] was developed, a Danish scientist has used a Bose–Einstein condensate to drag the speed of light back to a crawl. Her name is Lene Vestergaard Hau. In 1998, Hau’s team set up an experiment where two lasers were blasted through the centre of a vessel containing sodium atoms that had been cooled to form a...

Reading Steve Caplan's interesting piece on cheating I was reminded of two very different types of exam I've done in my youth. (Thankfully I haven't done an exam in over 30 years and have no intention to start now.) The first are the traditional horror exams where you might be tested on your expertise, but you only got a chance to use it if you could remember a whole pile of facts. And I still occasionally get nightmares where I am in exams and can't remember this or that formula.  The other type was pretty much the last exam I ever took, on my OR course at Lancaster. Called a 'jumbo' it was a 6ish hour exam with a single question. (Though admittedly that question was a good few pages long). You could take in whatever books you wanted - and go out and get more if you wanted. Not only was it far more interesting to do than a traditional exam, I believe it told you far more about the candidate than any ordinary test.  I really can't see any reason...

Actually Lancaster University one Rag Week (infra-red shot) According to Monty Python's Philosophers' Song,  sung by the Bruces at the the University of Wallamaloo* (see below for the real thing) : Rene Descartes was a drunken fart: 'I drink, therefore I am' However, Descartes tends to be held up as a scientist just as much as a philosopher. In Steven Weinberg's book To Explain the World which I've just reviewed , the author points out that while we owe a lot to Descartes' maths for providing the mapping between geometry and algebra, his thinking on the philosophy of science was more than a little shaky. Specifically, Weinberg shows how Descartes, in his best bit of pure science, explaining how rainbows are seen at the angle they are, totally ignores his own method for 'Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences.' According to this, Descartes says we should be highly doubtful about information that is derived f...

Despite its theoretical veneer of objectivity, science - and even more so, writing about science - is subject to the cultural mores of the day. I discovered this recently when I had to modify a piece of text because what I wrote was seen as perpetuating a stereotype. I'll come back to the specifics, but this does raise a rather more important question than the issue at stake, which is whether it is acceptable to perpetuate a stereotype if it's true? I suppose the classic example from the history of science is the way that people with different ethnic backgrounds scored in relatively predictable ways in an IQ test. Here the stereotype, which definitely isn't true, was that people of a particular ethnic background were more intelligent than others. However, this wasn't what the test actually showed. What it showed was that people of a particular ethnic background were better at doing IQ tests than others. This definitely was true, but some still considered that unac...

For hundreds of years it has been the norm to give names a tweak if they sounded odd in the language being used - particular names of people and places. So for a long time, when Latin was the go-to language of Europe, it was the norm to Latinise people's names. We now find a lot of these fiddly and they have been discarded, but some still remain - Jesus and Copernicus, to name but two. Medieval scholars also struggled with Arabic names, which became essentials when Europe was regaining its interest in science, largely spurred on by the writings of Arabic scientists and their translations of Greek books. So, for instance, Abū l-Walīd Muḥammad Ibn ʾAḥmad Ibn Rušd, or Ibn Rušd for short (whose name inspired Salman Rushdie's surname) somehow became Averroës, while Abu Mūsā Jābir ibn Hayyān became Gerber. However, the most lasting and interestingly nuanced is our current approach to place names. Traditionally we gave a name to a place, and that was its English name, even i...

As someone brought up in one of the pennine towns, I know Huddersfield reasonably well and have always thought of it as, frankly, a bit of dump. So I was pleasantly surprised a couple of years ago when I accompanied one of my daughters on a visit as a potential student at the University of Huddersfield . Its compact campus is a really well designed, pleasant environment. And, I mean, it has Patrick Stewart as Chancellor! However I am decidedly concerned about a press release I received from them. It tells us 'Following a pilot study in Huddersfield, researchers feel that Reiki, as a complementary therapy, should be available to cancer sufferers on the NHS.' Hmm. Here's what I say about reiki (I can't see why it deserves a capital letter) in Science for Life : Like acupuncture, reiki claims to use energies unknown and unde- tectable to science in its cures, but where acupuncture depends on the inner human energy of ch’i, reiki, which was devised in Japan in the ea...

I've just read for review Amir Aczel's book Finding Zero . A lot of the book is concerned with his challenging attempt to track down a Cambodian inscribed stone that bears what is thought to be the oldest zero so far discovered. But along the way, he speculates on the differences between Western and Eastern approaches to thought that could have led to the invention of the mathematical zero. Specifically he points out that traditional Western logic is very much binary - something is either true or it isn't. There are two options. But the Eastern equivalent, he suggests, which sometimes goes by the name of the quadrilemma, has four options: true, false, both and neither. Now, on shallow observation, the 'both' and 'neither' options might seem like wishy-washy useless philosophical musings. And in some cases they are. But in fact they do sometimes make sense and are, in fact, also present in Western thinking - we just don't emphasise them as much as t...

I was a little bit wary of this collection of short stories, as it has the look of being self-published even though it isn't (specifically the paragraphs have gaps between them, like this blog, rather than the indented start you always see in a 'real' book) - but I needn't have worried because this isn't reflected in the content. My suspicion is that these are Marmite stories - you'll love them if you like period writing. The first, for instance, is (intentionally) in the style of the wonderful M. R. James' Victorian ghost/horror stories, and several others adopt a Victorian style. I can't say every story worked for me - but that's true of pretty much every short story collection I've read, even those by masters of the art like Ray Bradbury, Gene Wolfe and Neil Gaiman. The ones that did work, were genuinely engaging and intriguing. Andrew May gives us a mix of science fiction, fantasy and mild horror. I think this is a collection that works...

I recently posted this piece of text on Facebook and asked who remembered it. YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING. AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLEY. Given I have pretty geeky friends on FB, I expected most would spot it immediately, but many didn't. Which gives me the opportunity to pop in a little extract from my upcoming book, Ten Billion Tomorrows , which looks at how science and science fiction have influenced each other (and how science fiction really isn't about predicting the future, yet manages to shape it). I had great fun writing it. If you think it'll float your boat, it's out in December and you can already pre-order it on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com . So here we go with the extract: By coincidence, 1976 was also the year when a true computer-based virtual world came to life. It was then that American computer engineer Will Crowther, who was working on ARPANET at the ...

I type this warily, with 'Tread softly because you tread on my dreams,' in mind. And I ought to say straight up that I am enjoying the BBC's adaptation of Wolf Hall . But. I can only assume that the fervent praise for it I see on social media is from people who have read and loved the books, and who are delighted to see what I gather is generally a very good adaptation on the screen. As someone who hasn't read anything by Hilary Mantel (in fact I've hardly read anything by any Booker Prize winner, because with a few exceptions like William Golding, I really don't get anything from reading literary fiction except a sense of worthiness), I do think that the glowing praise needs to be balanced by a little negative criticism. Before I do, I'll get some praise in. It's very well acted, the locations are excellent, and as someone who is fascinated by Tudorbethan times (mostly because it's my favourite period for music), there's a distinct thrill ...

All together now: 'Maybe it's because he's not a Londoner, that he's a physics great...' While walking the dog yesterday I got to thinking about Isaac Newton (the way you do) and from him, of the other great physicists in British history. And it started me thinking that London and the South East is rather under-represented. As a little experiment, I've listed all British Nobel Prize in Physics winners, plus the obvious individuals who would have won a Nobel if it had been around in their day. I came up with: Isaac Newton (NE) Michael Faraday (born in London, but his family had just moved from NW) James Clerk Maxwell (Scot) 1904 Lord Rayleigh (SE) 1906 J J Thomson (NW) 1915 WH and WL Bragg (NW) 1927 Charles Wilson (Scot) 1928 Owen Richardson (NW) 1933 Paul Dirac (SW) 1934 James Chadwick (NW) 1937 George Thomson (East Anglia) 1947 Edward Appleton (NE) 1948 Patrick Blackett (London) 1950 Cecil Powell  (SE) 1952 John Cockroft (NW) 1973 Bri...

I was fascinated to discover that my old book Armageddon Science has become the subject of a masters thesis. To be more precise, the experience of of translating two chapters of it into Chinese has been documented. All I know about the exercise is that it is the work of one M X Xi and was finished by May 2013. I haven't seen the actual thesis, but here is the abstract for your delectation: This paper is a report based on the author’s experience of translating two chapters of Brian Clegg’s popular science book Armageddon Science , under the guidance of her supervisor. The report consists of six parts. The first part gives a brief introduction to the task. The second part describes the translation process and translation requirements. Translation process generally includes three stages:preparation, translation and proofreading. And the translation requirements fall into two parts:format requirements and quality requirements. The third part focuses on the source text analysis, in...