07 October 2007 | pop science, Reviewing, Science & literature
I’ve just reviewed a great popularization of geology — Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet by Ted Nield. Here’s the first paragraph:
“Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) grew up in Ripon, a part of Yorkshire blessed with a unique but rather alarming geology. Deep vertical pits are liable to appear without warning in the ground, swallowing up homes and gardens in seconds. It is quite possible that the memory of these holes inspired Alice’s fictional fall ‘down, down, down’ the seemingly bottomless rabbit hole. After all, as Ted Nield points out, Carroll’s fantasy was originally titled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. But Nield’s real interest lies in geology, not literature. Why, he asks, are the rocks of Ripon so prone to sudden collapse? To answer this, you have to drive out of Ripon and head west to the Pennines, the backbone of England. Gradually the fertile fields with their oak trees and hedgerows give way to moorland from where you can look down across the lowlands to Ripon. If you take a walk up the heathery slopes and stand on a rough lump of millstone grit, says Nield, ‘you are climbing the exhumed topography of Pangaea’.”
It’s a fascinating book and well worth reading. My review was in Saturday’s Guardian and you can read it online here.
30 September 2007 | Reviewing, Science & literature, SF |
I’ve just been reviewing Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea-Wind (1941) which has been re-printed for the centennial of her birth. It’s a beautifully written book exploring the life of the sea shore and the ocean. Carson was a zoologist and her descriptions are wonderfully detailed and evocative: a perfect combination of science and poetry.
Here is a passage in which she is describing that mysterious moment when an eel senses that it is time to begin the long return journey to the Sargasso Sea to spawn:
“Now it was autumn again, and the water was chilling to the cold rains shed off the hard backbones of the hills. A strange restiveness was growing in Anguilla the eel. For the first time in her adult life, the food hunger was forgotten. In its place was a strange, new hunger, formless and ill-defined. Its dimly perceived object was a place of warmth and darkness — darker than the blackest night over Bittern Pond. She had known such a place once — in the dim beginnings of life, before memory began. She could not know that the way to it lay beyond the pond outlet over which she had clambered ten years before. But many times that night, as the wind and the rain tore at the surface film of the pond, Anguilla was drawn irresistibly toward the outlet over which the water was spilling on its journey to the sea. When the cocks were crowing in the farmyard over the hill, saluting the third hour of the new day, Anguilla slipped into the channel spilling down to the stream below and followed the moving water.”
And while we’re on the subject of science and great writing, there’s an excellent review of Jeanette Winterson’s novel, The Stone Gods, by Ursula K Le Guin in the Guardian. I like Winterson’s writing and I’m looking forward to reading her latest one, but I do sympathise with Le Guin’s criticism of “literary” writers like Winterson who (apparently) makes it plain that she hates science fiction “even as she openly commits genre” — the novel is partly set in a polluted future world and in “Wreck City”, all that remains after an apocalyptic Third World War.
“I am bothered,” writes Le Guin, “by the curious ingratitude of authors who exploit a common fund of imagery while pretending to have nothing to do with the fellow-authors who created it and left it open to all who want to use it. A little return generosity would hardly come amiss.”
Ouch!
23 September 2007 | atomic bomb, Doomsday Men, Hahn, Heisenberg, Rosbaud, Science, spies, WW2
MI6, Hitler’s atomic bomb project and Cherie Booth QC — it was a potent mixture that was guaranteed to make headlines. The Guardian’s was: “Spy left out in the cold: how MI6 buried heroic exploits of agent Griffin”.
Paul Rosbaud was a physicist and the editor of the scientific journal Die Naturwissenschaften. Rosbaud encouraged Otto Hahn to publish the news of the fission of uranium in January 1939 thus ensuring that this breakthrough was shared with scientists around the world. He was friends with Germany’s top atomic physicists throughout the war and was therefore well placed to keep the British intelligence service briefed on German progress towards an atomic bomb. For Rosbaud was an MI6 agent, codenamed Griffin.
Now his nephew — represented by Ms Booth, wife of the former prime minister — is trying to force the security services to declassify all its files on Rosbaud so the full story can be told. And this is one story that will certainly be worth reading.
You can get a flavour of what Rosbaud was like from this remarkable passage from Paul Lawrence Rose’s excellent book Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project: A Study in German Culture (U of California P, 1998):
“During the war Rosbaud had realized perfectly well how Heisenberg’s self-serving moral sophistry was shared by his colleagues on the uranium project. A few days after the big Speer-Heisenberg meeting at Harnack-Haus in June 1942, the scientists learned of Speer’s decision not to press ahead with the bomb project. One evening at Restaurant Orient, on Fasanenstrasse near the Kurfürstendamm, a group of twelve physicists were professing their moral relief at not having to develop a bomb. A rather intoxicated Rosbaud was finally provoked by the cant he was hearing to shout out: ‘If any one of you knew how to make the bomb, he would not hesitate a minute and tell your Führer how to destroy the rest of the world in order to get the highest order of the Iron Cross.’ Rosbaud admits ‘they were decent enough not to denounce me after this, but my remark was followed by [icy silence].’ The stunned scientists, evidently frightened that Rosbaud might be an agent provocateur who would report their reactions to the Gestapo, quickly split up and vanished. But, of course, Rosbaud had hit both nails on the head – the first, that their advice to Speer stemmed from technical ignorance about how to build a bomb, and the second, that their moralizing was empty cant.”
The legal hearing is set to continue. Personally I hope Rosbaud’s nephew is successful.
20 September 2007 | atomic bomb, Brecht, H-bomb, Rotblat, Science, Soddy |
I was very interested to hear that the British government’s chief scientific advisor, Professor Sir David King, has set out a universal ethical code for scientists. As well as asserting the importance of honesty, integrity and responsible communication, it also calls upon scientists to “Minimise and justify any adverse effect your work may have on people, animals and the natural environment”.
Bertolt Brecht included the idea of a Hippocratic oath for scientists in the penultimate scene of his play Life of Galileo. The idea of an oath that committed scientists to using their knowledge solely for the benefit of humanity occurred to him before the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. But it was only after the hydrogen bomb was developed that this idea was incorporated into the 1955 version of the play.
By then others, including Rutherford’s co-worker on radioactivty at the dawn of the atomic age, Frederick Soddy, had publicly called for scientists to take such a Hippocratic oath. In 1969 philosopher Karl Popper would follow suit, as did physicist and peace campaigner Joseph Rotblat, who had taken the courageous decision to leave Los Alamos as soon as it became clear that Germany was incapable of developing an atomic bomb.
David King’s ethical code doesn’t go as far as Brecht would have liked. But it’s a step in the right direction. For, as Rotblat has rightly said, “a scientist is a human being first, and a scientist second”.
You can read reports on the ethical code on the British Association site and BBC News.
14 September 2007 | atomic bomb, Doomsday Machine, Doomsday Men, H-bomb, Haber, Kahn, Szilard, WW2 |
Bill Hammack of WILL Radio’s ‘The Afternoon Magazine’ has interviewed me about Doomsday Men. It was a wide-ranging discussion lasting 45 minutes, with calls from listeners in the US — I’ve never been on a phone-in before so this was an interesting experience! We talked about Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Herman Kahn, Fritz Haber, and the Doomsday Machine, which seems to have been provoking some comment stateside recently (e.g. Slate, Wired, Question Technology).
You can listen to the interview here (MP3).
By the way, if you can read German, there’s also an interesting article about my book and the Soviet “Doomsday Machine”, Perimetr, on Telepolis.
