I have to admit it: The Lord of The Rings was one of my favourite reads as a child. By the age of thir­teen I’d ploughed through it three times in total. I can still remem­ber the pure escapist bliss of read­ing it while lying in a ham­mock beneath the fruit trees in our Essex gar­den dur­ing the sum­mer hol­i­days (no school!), fol­low­ing the hob­bits on every step of their trav­els through Mid­dle Earth.

Gol­lum was one of my favourite char­ac­ters. Admit­ted­ly, he was deceit­ful, mur­der­ous and had a seri­ous per­son­al hygiene prob­lem. Hard­ly a pos­i­tive role mod­el. In fact that was prob­a­bly why I liked him. There’s some­thing about wicked­ness that is always more intrigu­ing in fic­tion than good­ness.

But it might also have had some­thing to do with the fact that my dad did a very good impres­sion of Gol­lum.

Smeagol’s pre­cious, my pre­cious…

My dad was great at read­ing sto­ries aloud and it was this that got me hooked in the first place. He made me realise that there is a mag­i­cal place you can go to when the world seems bleak. It’s called imag­i­na­tion.

Yes­ter­day I had my very own Gol­lum moment – the arrival of fin­ished copies of my book. It’s deeply sad, but I have to admit that there was a very strong impulse in me to take a copy into a dark cor­ner and whis­per “my pre­cious” to it soft­ly.

I didn’t though. I resist­ed. But after work­ing on a book for four years you get strange­ly pos­ses­sive about it, and the moment when you can final­ly hold the fruit of your labours in your hands is spe­cial. Ask any writer and they’ll tell you the same.

Of course, as with any per­son­al­ly sig­nif­i­cant moment, there’s more than one emo­tion in the mix:

Relief that the work is com­plete. Sat­is­fac­tion that, despite all the dif­fi­cul­ties you’ve encoun­tered on the way, you final­ly man­aged to get there in the end. Pride? Yes that is there too, although it goes with­out say­ing that no work is per­fect and no one knows that bet­ter than the author. And of course there’s anx­i­ety, because as you hold that book in your hands, you know that it is about to go out into the world. That means you’ve lost con­trol over what has been up till now an intense­ly per­son­al rela­tion­ship between writer and text. In a sense, it is no longer just your book – the whole world (poten­tial­ly!) gets to share the intel­lec­tu­al jour­ney you’ve been on.

Maybe I’m read­ing a lit­tle too much into the moment. But obses­sions – and writ­ing a book has to rank as a major obses­sion – are like that. Just ask Gol­lum.

My pre­cious…

Of course, I haven’t just been read­ing my own book! There are two oth­ers that have caught my reviewer’s eye: A World With­out Time: The For­got­ten Lega­cy of Gödel and Ein­stein, by Palle Your­grau and Sky in a Bot­tle by Peter Pesic – both have just been pub­lished in paper­back.

Towards the end of his life, Ein­stein claimed he went to his office “just to have the priv­i­lege of walk­ing home with Kurt Gödel.” The two men could be seen strolling through the streets of Prince­ton where both worked at the Insti­tute for Advanced Study. The wild-haired pro­fes­sor was often seen lick­ing an ice-cream, which appar­ent­ly scan­dalised the prim Prince­to­ni­ans.

Your­grau tells how Gödel took Einstein’s the­o­ries to places even the great meis­ter of rel­a­tiv­i­ty dared not go: he imag­ined a world with­out time. For exam­ple, Gödel cal­cu­lat­ed how a space­ship could trav­el into the past or the future. He “worked out the pre­cise speed and fuel require­ments, omit­ting only the lunch menu”.

Gödel’s favourite movie was Snow White. “Only fables present the world as it should be and as if it had mean­ing,” he said rather poignant­ly. Gödel even­tu­al­ly descend­ed into para­noia and hypochon­dria (he died in 1978 weigh­ing just 65 pounds). But Yourgrau’s wit­ty por­trait of this friend­ship between two of the most extra­or­di­nary minds of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry is very read­able & I cer­tain­ly rec­om­mend it.

Physi­cist and musi­cian Peter Pesic con­cerns him­self with a ques­tion which has per­plexed philoso­phers, sci­en­tists and chil­dren alike since the begin­ning of his­to­ry: why is the sky blue? His illu­mi­nat­ing jour­ney into the his­to­ry of light and colour shows that attempts to answer this appar­ent­ly sim­ple ques­tion involve “the secrets of mat­ter and light, the scope of the uni­verse in space and time, the des­tiny of the earth, and deep human feel­ings.”

Leonar­do da Vin­ci, Horace de Saus­sure, and John Tyn­dall all tried to cap­ture the azure beau­ty of sky in a bot­tle. But as Pesic shows, it was poet and artist John Ruskin who first under­stood the mech­a­nism that makes the sky blue. Ruskin was in the audi­ence at Tyndall’s attempt to recre­ate the won­drous blue of sky in a bot­tle using pho­to­chem­i­cal reac­tions in 1869. Rather remark­ably “the vision­ary artist saw more clear­ly than the sober sci­en­tist.” For although Tyn­dall clung on to the idea that par­ti­cles in the air cre­ate blue sky, Ruskin grasped that air mol­e­cules them­selves were respon­si­ble. This was con­firmed by Einstein’s 1910 paper on opales­cence, show­ing that the colour of the sky is caused by gas mol­e­cules scat­ter­ing the sun’s light.

A fas­ci­nat­ing book from a writer who, like me, is intrigued by the par­al­lels between sci­ence and the arts. You can read my brief reviews of these two books for the Guardian, as well as a cou­ple of oth­er new releas­es, here and here.

Blue sky think­ing is a hot sub­ject in pub­lish­ing at the moment. In the last day or so Götz Hoeppe’s Why the Sky Is Blue: Dis­cov­er­ing the Col­or of Life has just land­ed on my desk from Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty Press. Ide­al sum­mer read­ing by the sound of it…

[orig­i­nal­ly post­ed on The Ner­vous Break­down]