I love Marcus Chown’s books. They are perfect for science geeks who don’t want to admit they’re geeks, i.e. people like me who love reading about the stuff even though they don’t necessarily understand it. Chown has a real talent for explaining things, everything, and in this latest book he’s turning his literary talents and scientific know-how to laser in on, as he says, the big stuff. I was thrilled to be asked to be a part of his blog tour, and so here is the fascinating conversation we had about the book and all sorts of things literary:
SG: Well, here we are again. Hard to believe, but it’s been nearly four years since we first discussed your work here on my blog, and that was all around the publication of your cheekily titled book, Let’s Talk About Kelvin. Fast forward a couple of years, and we had a good long chin wag around Afterglow of Creation. I suppose we could say we have to stop meeting like this, but then again…
Hi, Sue. Yes, we should stop meeting this way. People might start talking!
So now, let’s talk about your latest book. It’s called What a Wonderful World: One Man’s Attempt to Explain the Big Stuff. Some could imagine this to be a bit aspirational, so my first question is, why this? Why now?
MC: Usually, I come up with my own ideas for books. But I have an exceptional editor at Faber called Neil Belton. He’s actually written some very interesting books such as the novel A Game With Sharpened Knives, about Erwin Schrödinger’s tangled love-life in 1940s’ Dublin, and the Good Listener, the biography of Helen Bamber, the wonderful woman who set up the Medical Foundation for Care of Victims of Torture. Neil took me out to a Greek restaurant in Bloomsbury and said: “Why not use your skill of communicating physics to everyone to communicate everythingto everyone. Why not explain how the world works?”
I admit I was daunted. How do you write about everything? Where do you start? For a long while I tried to put Neil off because I thought what he was asking was impossible. I wrote several outlines but ripped them all up. What changed everything was doing an App, Solar System for iPad. I had to write about 120 self-contained stories about planets, moons, asteroids, and so on in just 9 weeks. I had no choice but to simply start writing about things I knew about, and, while I was writing, think about what I should research and write next. It must have worked because the App won several awards, though I cannot take all the credit since it was a team effort, involving Faber & Faber, Planetary Visions and Touchpress.
So, in the end, I thought: just start writing. If there was a plan it was simply to start by tackling the stuff I knew next to nothing about – phoning up economists and saying: “Tell me about money?” or biologists and saying: “Why do we breathe?” or “How does the brain work?”
Along the way, I discovered that babies are powered by rocket fuel – the same chemical reaction between oxygen and hydrogen – that powers the Space Shuttle; that the juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea looking for a rock to cling to. On finding one, it no longer needs its brain. So it… eats it; that IBM once predicted that the total global market for computers was… 5.
Once I had some of the hard stuff under my belt, I went on to stuff I was more familiar with, like quantum theory and cosmology. The hope was that, eventually, the book would gain a shape, organically. And, thank goodness, it did (Although, really, that’s up to readers to decide). Actually, I really can’t claim my book is one man’s attempt to understand everything. Think of it as one man’s attempt to understand everything… volume one!
But, to go back to your original question, the other reason for ‘why now?’ is that I am interested in lots of things other than science. The idea of going beyond my comfort zone and writing for a more mainstream audience really appealed to me.
SG: I must say, the first sentence of the book (actually the first two put together) make one of the best openings I’ve read in a long time.
I think I am me. But I am not.
I love the play on that old chestnut, cogito ergo sum. It also reminds me of an earlier discussion we had about your love of poetry (love the Blake quote before your physics section!) and your interest in writing being as strong as your interest in science. In your book you do refer to how you read fiction and I’m wondering if you are aware of the recent interest in “science-inspired” fiction and if you’ve ever thought about writing some of it yourself? (Of course, there is your children’s book, Felicity Frobisher…, but besides that).
MC: Yes. That’s what I am trying to do at the moment. I can’t say any more since I haven’t even mentioned it to my publisher (!) and I haven’t got the characters right yet. But writing What A Wonderful World has given me a taste for writing stuff that is more mainstream. As I think I said to you on an earlier occasion, what I liked at school was writing. I had no intention of being a science writer. It’s just that I did physics at university and, being risk-averse, writing about science seemed to be a way to be paid for writing!
By the way, since you mention Felicity Frobisher and the Three-Headed Aldeberan Dust Devil, I absolutely loved writing it. I have now written a whole series of Felicity books and am looking for a new children’s publisher for Felicity and more.
SG: Ooh. Good luck with that! Now for me, this new book finds you not only explaining the world to yourself and others, but also allowing yourself to dive into new and potentially scary areas of thought and writing such as economics and a bit of politics. How did that feel?
MC: I really enjoyed it – though it was stressful. When I write about physics, I generally identify someone to talk to and, when I phone them, there is a 95% chance they will be able to answer my dim, basic questions – or at least make an attempt to answer them. With subjects I knew little about like money or the brain, it was difficult even to identify people who might answ
er my questions. And I didn’t even know what were the sensible questions to ask. Add to that the fact the people I phoned up often appeared to be speaking a different language to me! But, when I did find people who could answer my questions, and door was opened Narnia-like onto a new country, it was exhilarating.
er my questions. And I didn’t even know what were the sensible questions to ask. Add to that the fact the people I phoned up often appeared to be speaking a different language to me! But, when I did find people who could answer my questions, and door was opened Narnia-like onto a new country, it was exhilarating.
For instance, I usually get totally bored when I hear about anything financial. But, when I realised that money allows trade to time travel, the light of understanding switched on in my head. If I have some fish which I want to trade for your hand axes, I have to trade them now or they will go off. But, if I trade them for money, I can use the money to buy hand axes or anything else at any time in the future. I also learnt that the crucial survival advantage that humans had over Neanderthals may have been… sewing. No Neanderthal bone needles have ever been found yet many human needles have survived. Some palaeoanthropologists think that the ability to sew baby clothes may have given human babies a crucial survival advantage in the bitter Ice Age winters and this may be how we outcompeted Neanderthals to extinction (Mind you, 2.5 per cent of DNA of modern humans living outside of Africa is believed to be Neanderthal so the story must be more complicated than this).
SG: I probably have enough questions to keep you here until your next book, but I better leave it with just one more. After all your research on everything in the world, do you think there is one thing that, really, nobody can get their head around (spoiler alert – for me it was electricity, that is, before I read your explanation of it)?
MG: I firmly believe that anything can be explained to anyone.
Thanks, Sue, for hosting a leg of my blog tour. And good luck with your books too!
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Well, that was fun! And it will be interesting to see what the other bloggers have to say about Marcus and his latest. Here’s the list:
15 October Penguin Galaxy
16 October Open Democracy
This is one of those books that everyone will use and enjoy. Go get it. You won’t be sorry.
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