From Einstein to Homer Simpson: Books of the Year

By P.D. Smith

UNITED KINGDOM-

It’s that time of year again: there’s a chill in the air, the sun barely shows its face, and the leaves are just golden memories long since carried away by the wind. A great time, in fact, to recall some of the outstanding non-fiction books that have landed on my desk this year.

It’s been a vintage year for biographies. Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe is a masterly and very readable survey of the great physicist’s life and work. Of course, Einstein is hardly a neglected subject in publishing. But Isaacson had privileged access to over 3,000 pages of family correspondence which were kept under lock and key until 2006, in accordance with the will of Einstein’s step-daughter Margot. As a result Isaacson’s sympathetic biography of “science’s pre-eminent poster boy” can justifiably claim to be more comprehensive than any before.

As well as revealing more details of Einstein’s many affairs, the correspondence casts new light on his relationship with his mentally-ill younger son, Eduard. Einstein found it immensely difficult coming to terms with Eduard’s condition, but Isaacson detects “a painful sweetness in his letters to his troubled son”. At one point, Einstein touchingly advises Eduard: “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving”.

Another immensely enjoyable biography was Martin Goodman’s Suffer and Survive: Gas Attacks, Miners’ Canaries, Spacesuits and the Bends - The Extreme Life of Dr J. S. Haldane. In his lifelong quest to understand the secrets of respiration, pioneering physiologist and serial self-experimenter John Scott Haldane (1860-1936) became a connoisseur of rare gases, an authority on their detection and effects.

He had a profound sense of public service and believed passionately that the world could be made a better place through the appliance of science. From miners dying of carbon monoxide poisoning and soldiers being gassed like rats in the trenches of World War I, to mountaineers and aviators coping with high altitudes, Haldane showed that science could bring light into the darkness. Goodman has a novelist’s eye for evocative detail that lesser writers might miss and the resulting biography is as compelling as a historical novel.

Andrew Robinson deserves an award for even attempting a biography of Thomas Young (1773-1829). He has been described as having “a wider range of creative learning than any other Englishman in history”. From medicine (“Young’s rule” is a method of adjusting adult doses for children) and Egyptology (he helped decipher the Rosetta Stone), to physics, in which he challenged Newton’s authority by proposing a wave theory of light, the versatility and originality of Young’s mind is simply breathtaking. Appropriately named The Last Man Who Knew Everything, Robinson’s account of Young’s achievements is an immensely impressive work, although you can’t help feeling that to really do justice to this extraordinary polymath you would need to write an encyclopedia.

In physiology too, Young made significant contributions to our understanding of the mechanisms of the eye, explaining how it focuses, defining astigmatism, and proposing the three-colour theory of how the retina detects the sensation of colour. This year there have been several memorable books on vision and how we perceive colours, especially the blue of the sky. Peter Pesic’s Sky in a Bottle (2005; published in paperback this year) and Götz Hoeppe’s Why the Sky is Blue: Discovering the Color of Life, both explore the fascinating history of how we have tried to explain and indeed replicate the blueness of the sky. It’s a question that has perplexed philosophers, scientists and children alike since the beginning of history.

For Pesic, answering this question leads us to probe “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 was one of the first to try to capture an “artificial sky” in a bottle, probably a saturated solution of copper sulphate and ammonia. Both books are excellent, although each has different strengths: Hoeppe journeys deeply into the science and Pesic, as ever, has a finely attuned ear for the way science resonates in other discourses, such as literature.

Two other studies of vision out this year that deserve to be mentioned are The Eye: A Natural History, by Simon Ings, and Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture, by Stuart Clark. The former is a wonderfully expansive book on just about everything you ever wanted to know about the eye and its workings; the latter is a densely argued but wonderfully subtle exploration of how, during the 15th to the 17th centuries, people developed a complex understanding of the relationship between what was seen and what was known.

One of the most significant cultural events of 2007 was undoubtedly The Simpsons Movie. The contribution of Homer Jay Simpson (aka the “Wizard of Evergreen Terrace”) to science is often sadly overlooked. Physicist Stephen Hawking is a great fan of the TV show and has appeared twice. He knows a good scientific idea when he sees one and Homer’s theory that the universe is shaped like a donut made an immediate impression: “intriguing….I may have to steal it.” This as well as many other weird and wonderful scientific moments in the series – such as what processes could produce Blinky the Three-Eyed Fish and do toilets in the northern and southern hemispheres really swirl in opposite directions (as Lisa claims in “Bart vs Australia”) – are explained in What’s Science Ever Done for Us? What The Simpsons can teach us about Physics, Robots, Life, and the Universe, by Paul Halpern. A delightful book; as Homer himself might say: “Exx-cellent!”

Some wonderful classics were reissued this year. Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea-Wind (1941) is, says her biographer Linda Lear, “her most successful book”. It is indeed beautifully written: exquisitely crafted and meticulously observed – a perfect union of the poetic and the scientific. Carson’s book is a timeless evocation of life beneath the waves and at the water’s edge. Another remarkable study of the ocean is Seven-Tenths: The Sea and its Thresholds, by James Hamilton-Paterson, which first appeared in 1992. He emphasises the otherness of the sea, the sense that the true significance of the water that covers seven-tenths of the Earth’s surface is beyond the reach of science or even literature. He suggests its significance is both elemental (“the salt which is in seawater is in our blood and tears and sweat”) and ancestral: the thought of its otherness “makes us ache, sea creatures that we once were, as for a country we have lost on the far side of a frontier we can barely even discern”.

Stepping onto dry land for a moment, Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth (first published in 1995) by William Bryant Logan) is a glorious celebration of dirt – not soil or earth, but dirt: “It takes dirt to grow an oak from an acorn. It takes the rot and the shit that is the root meaning of ‘dirt’ – dritten means ‘shit’ in Old Norse.” If you want to know what makes your garden grow (or not as the case may be) then this is the book for you.

From the formation of the Earth’s surface some four and a half billion years ago as the planet began to cool, to the principles of composting (including a great recipe for scallop viscera compost), Logan writes with an almost mystical intensity about the science and the metaphysics of soil. Although these three classic books are very different in style, each offers the reader a masterclass in writing. Non-fiction doesn’t get any better than this.

In Britain we tend to take the stability of the ground somewhat for granted. It came as something of a shock, therefore, to learn that even though we don’t live on a geological fault, there have in fact been 500 tremblors recorded in our green and pleasant land since the 10th century. In 1580 what became known as the “London earthquake” damaged St Paul’s cathedral and caused tsunamis that sank over 100 ships. Shakespeare even referred to this quake in Romeo and Juliet: “’Tis since the earthquake now eleven years”. This and many other fascinating links between culture and the shifting sands on which we live can be found in Earthquakes in Human History: The Far-Reaching Effects of Seismic Disruptions, by Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and Donald Theodore Sanders, out this year in paperback.

While I’m on matters geological, I must mention Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet, by Ted Nield.

In what is one of the best popularizations of geology since Richard Fortey’s Earth, Nield tells the story of “the greatest cycle of nature”, the process by which supercontinents form and break up over a period lasting between 500 and 750 million years. The timescales involved are mind-boggling, but Nield manages to bring “this slowest of all unfolding dramas” vividly alive, giving us a wonderful sense of the ancient yet powerful forces at work underneath us. Supercontinent really will change the way you look at planet Earth.

The Asian Tsunami three years ago, on 26 December 2004, was caused by a massive earthquake with a force equivalent to almost a gigaton of explosive – ten times bigger than the largest hydrogen bomb ever built. It killed almost 300,000 people. We ignore the ground beneath our feet at our peril, for as poet Hugh MacDiarmid has said:

“What happens to us

Is irrelevant to the world’s geology

But what happens to the world’s geology

Is not irrelevant to us.”

As I write this, the news reports are dominated by the UN climate change conference at Bali. This year the climate crisis was scarcely out of the headlines. Two memorable books published in paperback in 2007 highlighted the damage we are doing to the environment – The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, by E O Wilson, and Field Notes from a Catastrophe: A Frontline Report on Climate Change, by Elizabeth Kolbert. Without being sensationalist, Wilson and Kolbert speak powerfully about what is undoubtedly one of the most important subjects today.

I’m sure I’ve left out some books that deserve to be mentioned. Feel free to put the record straight by leaving your own recommendations! If you want to read more about these books or others from 2007, they’re all on Kafka’s Mouse.

Happy Christmas to all of you and here’s to a New Year packed with equally great books!

The Baseball Player and the Atom Bomb

By P.D. Smith

UNITED KINGDOM-

In the 1920s and 30s, Morris "Moe" Berg was a Major League Baseball player. He started out with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1923 and finished in 1939 with the Boston Red Sox. Despite the length of his career, by all accounts he was nothing special as a baseball player.

In December 1944, Moe found himself in the auditorium of the Zurich Polytechnic where a rebellious Einstein had once studied (one of his lecturers described him as a "lazy dog" for his failure to attend maths classes). On the stage that day was Werner Heisenberg, one of the central figures in the Nazi atomic bomb program, and Moe Berg was listening intently to what he was saying.

Moe was no fool. The six-foot one-inch tall baseball player had shone in his first appearance on the radio quiz show Information Please in 1938. A regular on the show later said he was the "most scholarly professional athlete" he'd ever met. At Princeton, Moe had studied seven languages, including Sanskrit. But it was German he needed that day in Zurich.

Despite his undoubted language skills, it's unclear how much of Heisenberg's abstruse discussion of S-matrix theory Moe Berg actually understood. After all, he wasn't a physicist. But what is clear is that Heisenberg didn't mention the atom bomb. For if he had, the baseball player from Newark would have reached into his pocket, taken out a .45 pistol, and shot him dead.

For Moe Berg - codename 'Remus' - was an operative of the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, America's first central intelligence agency. His mission that day was to kill Heisenberg if he gave even the slightest hint during his lecture that the Nazis were close to building an atomic bomb. Fortunately for the quantum theorist, they weren't and the .45 stayed in Moe's pocket.

It's an extraordinary story - one of many moments of individual bravery now consigned to the history books of the atomic age. I came across it while reading the new paperback edition of Jeffrey T Richelson's Spying on the Atomic Bomb, a fascinating and detailed account of America's struggle to force the nuclear genie back into the bottle. Berg's exploits take up just a few pages of Richelson's impressive study which brings the story of proliferation right up to date with the latest intelligence assessment on Iran's atomic ambitions. His book reveals the secret history of spies and nuclear science that governments have in the past tried to keep hidden from their citizens.

Of course, in the Cold War most people were well aware of the threat from atomic weapons. Pop culture was full of references to the atomic age: fallout, H-bombs (as well as C-bombs and N-bombs), Geiger counters, radioactivity, megadeaths, and Doomsday Machines - this was the vocabulary of mass destruction that filled the newspapers and airwaves.

The A-word featured in countless film titles, from Canadian Mounties vs the Atomic Invaders (1953) to The Atomic Man (1956). Giant radioactive ants and dinosaurs rampaged across cinema screens. And in the first James Bond film, Dr No (1962), spies and mad atomic scientists came together in a cinematic formula that would prove a perennial success at the box-office.

As well as B movies about the A-bomb, children played with their toy Geiger counters and ate atomic fire ball candy. There were zappy atomic ray guns and, for the serious atomic nerds, there was the atomic energy lab, with real samples of uranium ore. (Can you imagine the teacher's reaction today if one of her kids came up and said, "Hey, miss, Susie has stolen my uranium!"?)

But for the adults, there was always the fear nagging in the back of their minds about what to do if the sirens sounded. Would government advice on how to "Protect and Survive" or "Duck and Cover" really be any good? One government sponsored book On How to Survive an Atomic Bomb, published in 1950, gave sartorial advice for Doomsday: women should wear stockings and long-sleeved dresses, and men should wear wide-brimmed hats.

For those who didn't swallow the official propaganda, there were other fanatasies. Such as the survivalist dream of returning to a frontier existence after the bombs had fallen and society had dissolved into a Mad Max world. It was a warped dream that spawned atomic erotica and even post-nuclear porn - books like Jane Gallion's Biker (1969) and George Smith's The Coming of the Rats (1961).

Today references to atomic or nuclear imagery have dropped out of pop culture. In fact, when they do appear, nukes are more likely to be saving the planet than destroying it, as in films like Armageddon (1998) or Sunshine (2007). The Cold War and the Atomic Age seem like ancient history to a new generation - stuff people tell you in school. Few really believe any more that "This Could Happen Tomorrow!".

Personally, I was never a great fan of the Atomic Energy Lab. But, as books like Richelson's show, the nukes are still out there - in the UK and the US as well as Iran and Russia. We might not be so obsessed with them, but they haven't gone away. And as President Putin gloats over the launch of a new missile that can hit a target 3,800 miles away with pin-point accuracy, the headlines are once again speaking of a new Cold War. We may need people like Moe Berg sooner than you think.

Looking for gold

By P.D. Smith

UNITED KINGDOM-

A few days ago I went on a walk with my partner through the water meadows not far from our home. It was a beautiful day, one of the few in recent months when it didn't rain. We let the course of the river guide our feet. The water beside us was as clear as crystal. Fish flickered among the green weeds.

Nietzsche once said that "only thoughts that come by walking have any value." I think he was right, about this at least. Things have a habit of falling into place while you walk.

Now that my book Doomsday Men has gone out into the world, I'm in writer's limbo. For the first time in four years I'm not writing a book. It's a bit unsettling. Although some say writing is a flight from reality, I don't feel I'm quite alive unless I'm writing something.

But although I'm not actually writing a book, I am dreaming books: I have several ideas in my mind for potential ones. One of these embryonic books has even got as far as a lengthy proposal. But even that is just a tentative beginning. I need to convince others - and perhaps even myself - that it is viable and can fend for itself in the real world. It can be mean out there, you know...

The proposal I have written is for a cultural history. Like much of my writing, it explores the way science and literature work together to inform our understanding of the world. I think the links between these two different fields are fascinating and important. (If you're interested, I wrote an article on this a while back and have just posted it on my website, Kafka's mouse.)

But since leaving London I've also begun researching a historical novel. It's a new direction for me, but the more I find out about the late sixteenth century, the more this period intrigues me. The ideas, language and people are drawing me back through time into their world. It's certainly different from what I've been working on for the last few years. And perhaps that's part of the attraction. New faces, unfamiliar landscapes...

I've just been reviewing Peter Marshall's The Mercurial Emperor, a wonderfully rich biography of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612). If you want to dip into the culture of this time, then Marshall's book is a great place to start. The characters that inhabit this world are extraordinary. Dr John Dee, for instance - the most celebrated magus of his era, an alchemist who conversed with angels and who spied for Queen Elizabeth I.

In 1584, Dee left his home by the banks of the River Thames for Rudolf's court in Prague. He shared his visions and unique wisdom with the Habsburg emperor for two years before rumours of necromancy forced Rudolf to banish him. Dee returned to England to find his home and the library he had spent forty years collecting had been destroyed by a mob that believed him to be a black magician. Undaunted, he continued his fruitless quest for the Philosopher's Stone and died without a penny to his name. Dee's real wealth lay in his thoughts and words.

Peter Ackroyd's superb novel about this magical character, The House of Doctor Dee (1993), sets an almost impossibly high standard for anyone tempted to explore this period in fiction. There's a wonderful passage in it about researchers who spend their lives among old books and in dusty archives: "we understand that we are at odds with the rest of the world: we are travelling backwards, while all those around us are still moving forward."

When I read writing as good as Ackroyd's, I ask myself why I even bother picking up a pen. How can I hope to equal such eloquence... Do other writers feel that too?

But perhaps writers are like alchemists. They are driven to discover some elusive, hidden knowledge, either about the world or about themselves. Pen and paper are their crucibles. Just add fire.

Whether they discover fool's gold or the real McCoy, only time will tell.

Strangeloves

By P.D. Smith

UNITED KINGDOM-

"Look, Dimitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the bomb?"

It's a classic moment in movie history: President Merkin Muffley (aka Peter Sellers) has just called the Soviet Premier on the telephone to tell him that in the next hour, 34 US bombers will each drop 40 megatons of H-bombs onto his country. As the Premier delivers a withering blast of Marxist-Leninist abuse down the phone line, Muffley looks pained: "Well, how do you think I feel about this?"

Unknow to the President and indeed the rest of humanity, the Soviets have just activated the ultimate weapon of mass destruction - the Doomsday Machine. This superweapon to end all superweapons is triggered automatically by a nuclear attack. At its heart is the cobalt bomb, a doomsday device that had filled people with fear since it was first suggested by one of the fathers of the atomic age, Leo Szilard, in 1950. Over a decade later, the Soviet Ambassador, De Sadeski, describes Szilard's deadly brainchild in Kubrick's film Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb:

"If you take, say, fifty H-bombs in the hundred-megaton range and jacket them with Cobalt-Thorium-G, when they are exploded they will produce a Doomsday shroud, a lethal cloud of radioactivity which will encircle the earth for ninety-three years."

In a MAD world there was an insane logic to the C-bomb. It certainly embodied the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction: You attack me and I'll blow us both up! That's a pretty big deterrent. Unfortunately it doesn't really work if you forget to tell your enemy that you've got a Doomsday Machine, a fact Dr Strangelove points out to the Ambassador.

"It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday," he replies. "As you know, the Premier loves surprises."

You can hear the clip of De Sadeski talking about the C-bomb in a radio interview I did about my book Doomsday Men here.

Recently I was fascinated to see that some of the themes I explored in my book are also at the heart of Joe Penhall's excellent new play, Landscape with Weapon. The world premiere was in April at the National Theatre in London.

Penhall shows what happens when a scientific and engineering genius thinks he can control how his discovery is used by the military. His character Ned has invented a revolutionary type of unmanned air vehicle that doesn't need GPS to navigate. Like a flock of starlings swirling in the twilight sky, his military drones develop "intuitive emergent behaviour" which allows them to navigate themselves. Such drones could penetrate underground tunnels and bunkers in pursuit of a target. Initially, Ned intended them for surveillance, but the military quickly saw the offensive potential and "weaponised" them.

Ned's brother is appalled when he finds out that he has been working on weapons of mass destruction. Ned defends his invention:

"as well as being a weapon...it's a 'deterrent'. A-a-a-a psychological weapon, it's so frightening and and and appalling...it works without even being used..."

Heard the argument before somewhere?

But, of course, the arms race didn't end with the thawing of the Cold War. There may not have been any WMD in Iraq but there are still tens of thousands of nuclear weapons around the world. And somewhere, in a town near you perhaps, today's Strangeloves are still chasing the dream of the superweapon. As Oppenheimer said about the original plans for the hydrogen bomb in 1951, they were "technically so sweet" that scientists and engineers couldn't resist the challenge of turning them into reality.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the superweapon promised to solve the most intractable problem facing humanity - to end war. In the many examples of novels and plays about the superweapon, the saviour scientist emerged from his laboratory carrying the technological solution that would make war redundant overnight.

Penhall's Landscape with Weapon is the most recent contribution to this genre and a compelling drama too. At the start of the play, Ned - like the real scientists Fritz Haber and Robert Oppenheimer - thought his invention would prevent or even abolish war. By the end of the play not only has he lost control of his technology, but he has learnt that such inventions - however brilliant - cannot end war; because as Ned says they are "technological solutions for a human problem".

If only we too could learn this lesson, we might avoid repeating the mistakes of the last century.

Einstein's Eyes

By P.D. Smith

UNITED KINGDOM-

When Albert Einstein died in 1955 his brain was removed, apparently for medical research. What is less well known is that his ophthalmologist, Henry Abrams, also cut out the great physicist’s eyes.

“The whole thing took about 20 minutes,” he said later. “I just needed scissors and forceps.”

Apparently, Abrams keeps the eyes in a bottle in a New Jersey bank. He told one of Einstein’s biographers that “when you look into his eyes you’re looking into the beauties and mysteries of the world.”

(Okay, so these aren’t really Einstein’s pickled eyes in this picture. After my biography of the relativity maestro was published my sister gave this to me as a delightfully ghoulish gift. But of course it’s the thought that counts.)

Eyes and seeing are the subject of two very different but equally fascinating new books that I’ve been reviewing. They are: The Eye: A Natural History by Simon Ings, and Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture by Stuart Clark.

Simon Ings tells the “sprawling and epic story” of the eye – a 538 million-year history from the crystal eyes of the prehistoric trilobites to our very own “squishy vertebrate eyes”.

On the way he explores the physics of other more exotic eyes, such as that of the dragonfly Anax junius. This creature is blessed with the densest compound eye on the planet – made up of no less than 28,500 “ommatidia”, or mini camera-type eyes. Spare a thought for the poor naturalist who had to count them all! Among the other weird eyes he discusses is the brittlestar (Ophiocoma wendtii) which “is one huge complex eye, its whole surface punctured by little eyespots linked by nerve bundles running just under the skin”.

There’s no doubt that The Eye: A Natural History is a feast of science and history. But for my taste it’s rather too rich a diet. The encyclopaedic coverage of the book tends to weaken the narrative. But if you’re looking for one big book to tell you everything about the eye, then this may well be the one for you.

Stuart Clark’s study is aimed at a more scholarly market. But if phrases like “the language of veridicality” or “ocularcentrism” don’t put you off, then this fascinating cultural history has much to offer.

His theme is how people in Europe came to distrust the evidence of their own eyes in the early modern period (the 15th to the 17th centuries). The veracity of vision was unsettled by beliefs about how demons could trick our eyes.

According to Clark, people viewed the Devil as “a consummate still life artist, able to deceive the viewer into confusing an image of something for the thing itself”.

Apparently one of the Devil’s wickedest wiles was the illusory stealing of penises.

From madness and magic to dreams and demons, Vanities of the Eye is a detailed and densely argued account of the visual culture of this formative period. Clark’s findings will make a significant contribution to our understanding of the rhetoric of the Reformation and the scepticism which fuelled the Scientific Revolution. It is an impressive piece of research and a book which will open your eyes to a new aspect of intellectual history.

Most of us take seeing for granted. After all, what is there think about? You open your eyes and it’s all, well, there. But as both of these books show, vision is a complex and subtle process. And seeing has a compelling history – both biological and cultural. You can read the published review for the Guardian here.

I used to be professionally concerned with vision – I was a photographer.

This was one of my more commercially successful pictures, taken in Somerset. (And just in case anyone wonders: No, we don’t all live in thatched houses in England.)

There’s more of my photos on Flickr if you’re interested. I keep meaning to add some more…

Remember the bamboo I mentioned in my first TNB post? Well, it’s now planted and doing fine.

Which is more than can be said for my back after excavating the hole in our back garden. The ground turned out to be mostly brick and stone. I guess that’s what happens if you buy a house built on industrial land.

Actually some of the stones in the hole were rather beautiful pebbles.

I’ve often wondered how long it takes a river or the sea to create such perfectly smooth pebbles. Not quite as long, perhaps, as it took nature to come up with the eye...

My Precious

By P.D. Smith

UNITED KINGDOM-

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…

Beginnings

By P.D. Smith

UNITED KINGDOM-

There are two new beginnings in my life.

The first flower has opened in our new garden.

We recently left the Big Smoke (London) in search of time, space, and a garden. Maybe this camellia augurs well. Maybe we too can put down roots here...

And the second beginning?

Well, this blog, of course. (Thanks for inviting me, Brad!)

Anyone who has followed my blog on MySpace will have noticed I'm a lazy blogger.

But life has been pretty hectic recently, what with moving house and living with builders, plumbers, plasterers, and electricians. That lot can be noisy house-mates.

That's my excuse anyway. I'll try to turn over a new leaf. Promise.

What will the blog be about?

Well, my new book Doomsday Men traces the origins of the dream of the superweapon in science and popular culture. It's a reminder of how close we came to wiping out life on earth in the cold war.

This haunting image is of the first atomic explosion, the Trinity test, in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945. It was "the nearest thing to doomsday that one could possibly imagine", said one eye-witness.

Just before it exploded, physicist Enrico Fermi was taking bets on whether it would set fire to the atmosphere and destroy the world. He had some sense of humour.

But I don't want to just bang on about the Bomb.

Perhaps I'll keep that for my own site, which hopefully will be up and running in a few weeks.

I'd like to range a bit wider here.

As I do a lot of reviewing, and publishers are always sending me their latest offerings, there will certainly be highlights from new books in popular science and cultural history. And if any have caught your eye, then do let me know.

Beyond that, I hope to share some ideas I'm currently exploring in my own writing. It helps to talk about these things.

Want to join in?

Here's a great quote to whet your appetites:

"the precision of the artist should accompany the passion of the scientist".

(I'm tempted to add "Discuss". But I won't.)

It's from Nabokov, natuerlich.

As well as writing some of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, he was a scientist working at the cutting edge of lepidoptery. In the 1940s he spent 14 hours a day glued to his microscope at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. He was dissecting the genitalia of the South and North American polyommatine butterflies known as the "Blues".

Well, I suppose someone had to do it.

By the way, the Nabokov quote is from James Hamilton-Paterson's beautifully written book on the science and history of the ocean, Seven Tenths.

I've just been reading it for review. It was originally published in 1992 and now Faber have reissued it.

As a writer who is also fascinated by the links between science and literature, what Hamilton-Paterson does with words makes me green with envy. If you want a masterclass on prose writing, and particularly on how to combine science and literature, then read this book.

But now it's time to go.

I have to dig a hole in the garden. A big hole.

There's a six-foot bamboo plant just itching to gets its feet out of a pot and into the earth.