Here’s an intriguing question to start the new year with. Last autumn I interviewed Marcus Chown about his latest popular science title, We Need to Talk about Kelvin. At the end of the interview (which you can find here), we made this short video in which Marcus tackled a question famously posed by the Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi, who developed the first nuclear reactor. Turning to his fellow scientists one day over lunch in 1950, he asked, “Where is everybody?” He wasn’t referring to absent colleagues, but the apparent absence of signs of other intelligent life in the universe. Click on the video below to hear Marcus’s take on whether we are alone…
Christopher Potter, after a distinguished career in publishing of over two decades, published his own first book this year: You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe, which the Sunday Times called “wonderful stuff, the most thoughtful pop science book of the last few years” and which New Scientist praised for its “crisp, authoritative writing and deft handling of difficult subjects”. In August, Christopher appeared in programme 29 on Podularity – “A Walk across the Universe” – which you can listen to by clicking here. [Author photograph: © Joyce Ravid] Philip Roth: The Humbling (2009) The Humbling is Philip Roth’s seventh novel of this decade, and though far from being his finest, even Roth under par is more appealing to me than the work of almost anyone else alive and writing today. The Human Stain, published at the beginning of this decade, still resonates in my mind. With another novel already promised for 2010 – Nemesis – we can only hope for another decade of astonishing fecundity. Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of …
Jenny Uglow reads from ‘A Gambling man’ “The old king had been killed in the winter chill at the dead, dark turn of the year; the new king had come in the warmth of spring, like life revived.” After years in exile, Charles returned to England in May 1660 to become king. Click here to hear Jenny Uglow read about his triumphant return, and the hopes and expectations which it gave rise to. “The packed theatres, suffocating on hot days, were ripe with the smell of sweat, powder and heady perfume… In the crush there was always a scent of sex, with assignations in the pit and the boxes, glances from audience to stage and back.” Click here to listen to an extract about the theatre during the Restoration. Marcus chown reads from ‘We need to talk about kelvin’ “The sun is mostly made of hydrogen and weighs about a billion, billion, billion tonnes. But put a billion, billion, billion tonnes of bananas or a billion, billion, billion tonnes of microwave ovens in one place …
“Why is there something rather than nothing?” asked the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz several centuries ago. It’s one of the main questions animating Christopher Potter‘s first book, You Are Here. And given that there is something, how did it come into being? And how for that matter did we come into being, several billions of years after the universe began? These are some of the potentially dizzying questions that set Christopher’s investigation of the universe and our place in it in motion. This “portable history of the universe” ranges in its purview from the infinitely large and far away – distances measured in billions of light years – to the infinitely small (which he calls “the realm of tininess”), which is equally important to our understanding of how the universe works.
