PD Smith

I was very sorry to hear this morning of the death from cancer of the philosopher Richard Rorty. Simon Blackburn has talked about Rorty's “extraordinary gift for ducking and weaving and laying smoke.” But as a research student I found his ideas both challenging and liberating.

It's true that many scientists found his philosophy unacceptable. "The fact that Newton’s vocabulary lets us predict the world more easily than Aristotle’s does not mean that the world speaks Newtonian".

Today I too have real problems with statements like that. But for someone studying the relations between science and literature in the 1990s, the work of Rorty and others emphasising the key role played by language in our experience of the world offered a fascinating way into the problem.

In the end, he seemed to be saying that valuable knowledge about the world was not just to be found in the sciences. The real question was not whether it was science or literature (or religion?) that could claim to have the most perfect description of the world. Rather that each contributes a different understanding to the sum of knowledge. That was an insight I'm grateful for.

Appreciations: NYT, Washington Post, Waggish, Cosmic Variance

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...

[originally posted on The Nervous Breakdown]

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]

Finally, after four years of research and writing, yesterday I received finished copies of my book Doomsday Men. It's a special moment for any author, as I'm sure many of you will know... I've written a blog about it here, together with my views on a couple of other recently published books.

But just in case you're wondering what my book looks like, here are the front...

...and back views:

[originally posted on Myspace]

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, natürlich.

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. It's superb.

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.

[originally posted on The Nervous Breakdown]