Keep your fin­gers crossed for me – my edit­ed man­u­script just went off to my agent in the US, Zoe Pag­na­men­ta. Hope­ful­ly it’ll find a home at a pub­lish­er there – oth­er­wise those of you across the pond who have expressed an inter­est in buy­ing it will have make do with a UK edi­tion… 

I also thought I’d tell you about a real­ly great book I’ve just been review­ing – The Oxford Dic­tio­nary of Sci­en­tif­ic Quo­ta­tions. Ok, so the title does­n’t sound so hot, but believe me this is a won­der­ful book. Med­ical his­to­ri­ans WF Bynum and the late great Roy Porter spent fif­teen years accu­mu­lat­ing quotes on sci­ence. This is the splen­did result — to my mind, it’s a lot more than just a ref­er­ence book for it real­ly opens up the cul­tures of sci­ence and allows you to dip into some of the most fas­ci­nat­ing debates in human his­to­ry. 

I also like the way they haven’t just includ­ed quotes by famous sci­en­tists. There are ones from writ­ers, poets, and crit­ics. Pas­sages from Max Born stand next to Borges, Fred­er­ick Sod­dy next to Tom Stop­pard (Rosen­crantz: “Eter­ni­ty is a ter­ri­ble thought. I mean, where’s it going to end?”); and Hans Bethe is along­side the Bible, which would have brought a wry smile to the face of the physi­cist who revealed the secret of the sun’s ener­gy.  

The great Ger­man writer and Roman­tic sci­en­tist Goethe is well rep­re­sent­ed. They missed one of my favourites: “Life divid­ed by rea­son leaves a remain­der.” But this was new to me: “Math­e­mati­cians are like a cer­tain type of French­man: when you talk to them they trans­late it into their own lan­guage, and then it soon turns into some­thing com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent.”

For some rea­son Ein­stein only gets three or so pages of quotes, where­as New­ton gets more than eight pages. William Blake (half a page) would have been dis­pleased: “Pray God us keep / From sin­gle vision & New­ton’s sleep!”  

This is one of my favourites from Ein­stein: “I nev­er think of the future. It comes soon enough.”

On the sub­ject of the future, there’s this clas­sic from quan­tum guru Niels Bohr: “Pre­dic­tions can be very dif­fi­cult – espe­cial­ly about the future.” By the way, just in case you won­dered (and I know Steven Hall did), Bohr is respon­si­ble for my pro­file quote too. 

There are some suit­ably incom­pre­hen­si­ble pas­sages from Stephen Hawk­ing, as well as this won­der­ful side-swipe at Ein­stein’s oppo­si­tion to the unpre­dictabil­i­ty of quan­tum the­o­ry: “God not only plays dice, but also some­times throws them where they can­not be seen.”

This book gives sci­ence and sci­en­tists a human face. As the out­spo­ken co-dis­cov­er­er of the struc­ture of DNA, Jim Wat­son, shows: “One could not be a suc­cess­ful sci­en­tist with­out real­iz­ing that, in con­trast to the pop­u­lar con­cep­tion sup­port­ed by news­pa­pers and moth­ers of sci­en­tists, a good­ly num­ber of sci­en­tists are not only nar­row-mind­ed and dull, but also just stu­pid.”  

Wat­son’s quote per­haps explains this clas­sic mis­judge­ment by indus­tri­al­ist Thomas J Wat­son, Sr.: “I think that there is a world mar­ket for about five com­put­ers.”

Remem­ber that the next time you lis­ten to some technophile pre­dict­ing that a shin­ing sci­en­tif­ic utopia is just around the cor­ner. Or as George Bernard Shaw put it: “Sci­ence is always wrong. It nev­er solves a prob­lem with­out cre­at­ing ten more.”

Carl Sagan has these wise words on the prac­tice of sci­ence itself: “One of the great com­mand­ments of sci­ence is, ‘Mis­trust argu­ments from author­i­ty’. (Sci­en­tists, being pri­mates, and thus giv­en to dom­i­nance hier­ar­chies, of course do not always fol­low this com­mand­ment.)”

But it seems some­how appro­pri­ate when talk­ing about quotes from the great and the good that the final com­ment should go to an anony­mous say­ing: “Man occa­sion­al­ly stum­bles on the truth, but then just picks him­self up and hur­ries on regard­less.”

If any of you have got a favourite quote – not just on sci­ence, but on life, the uni­verse & every­thing (it does­n’t get broad­er than that!) – then I’d love to hear them. My own rather quirky favourite on sci­ence (not in Bynum & Porter’s book) is from the cold war film Hell and High Water (1954):  

“That’s no female. That’s a sci­en­tist.”

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