PD Smith

Goodness, is it really that long since I did a blog? How time flies - I almost said when you're having fun, but in this case 'when you're suffering' would be more accurate.

Well, maybe suffering is a bit harsh - but we've got the builders in our house. They've been here 6 weeks and 4 days - and believe me, I am counting the days...

Have you tried writing to the accompaniment of a hammer-drill? On second thoughts: suffering is definitely the right word.

Anyway, apologies for a general lack of communication on my part. To make amends here is a piece I did on John Gribbin's latest pop science best-seller The Universe. It's a cool book - lots of stuff on cosmology and the quantum wonderland. Enjoy.

If you're looking for something to read (hopefully not to the sound of hammer-drills) you could do worse to check out some of the recent paperbacks I've been reviewing - here and here and here.

Got to go now - I think they've just drilled through the water main...

[originally posted on Myspace]

Just back from a much-needed break in Paris. It's a great place in which to just wander aimlessly around, absorbing the sights and sounds. And that's precisely what my partner and I have been doing for the last couple of days. The washed-out colours of autumn go well with the faded imperial grandeur of its avenues and monuments.

 Of course, when it comes to food and wine, France still rules the world. Even simple and inexpensive things like cheese and bread taste better here. How is it that we have completely forgotten how to make mouth-watering bread here in Britain? Answers on a (French) postcard please.

I've been meaning to read Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban for a long time and the Eurostar train journeys to and from Paris provided the ideal opportunity. I'm glad I did – it is a quite extraordinary novel: the kind of writing that haunts your memory for days and weeks afterwards.  The novel – which was published in 1980 – is set many years after civilisation has destroyed itself in its quest for the "1 Big 1". The world has been blasted back to the stone age, to use the unforgettable phrase of one Cold War general. Life for the inhabitants of the post-apocalyptic planet is now nasty and short. Their technology is virtually non-existent and they have an understandable fear of "cleverness" – anything that we might call science. The hubris of "Eusa" and his deadly fascination with "the Addom" that led to doomsday has become a mythic story that fills the people of the future with dread. Riddley Walker, the main character, is thrown into an intrigue involving "yellerboy", "chard coal" and "Saul and Peter". Sulphur, charcoal and saltpetre to you and me – the ingredients of what this future world calls the "1 Littl 1". Their society is about to take its first steps on the road that leads first to gunpowder and explosives, then eventually to atom bombs. It seems humankind is simply too clever for its own good.

Apologies for my silence over the last couple of weeks – the cause was a bad dose of the House Moving Blues. But now that my internet provider has kindly decided to reconnect me to cyber-space…I'm back!  The experience of moving home is every bit as traumatic as people tell you – and I don't just mean that awful moment when you arrive at your new home to find that the toilet is broken, the sinks leak and the central heating doesn't work. (Yes, it was that bad.) 

No, for me what is worse is having your books and notes shut away in cardboard-box limbo for weeks. For someone who could locate any text on his shelves – despite the deceptive appearance of chaos – after a moment's thought, that really is hell. It reminded me of a story about John Betjeman. A new assistant took it upon himself to reorganise the poet's library while he was away. Betjeman returned to find his delightfully disordered shelves transformed into pristine alphabetical order. He was utterly appalled; nothing was where he expected it to be. I don't think the assistant stayed in his job very long. 

Still, at least Betjeman could see his books. But as one of my new neighbours reminded me, there is life after cardboard boxes.  For the last few days I have been more preoccupied with DIY than Doomsday Men – although plumbing certainly has its apocalyptic moments. But the good news is that my book now has an American publisher – St Martin's Press. So my American friends won't have to make do with imported editions!  Here in the UK, Doomsday Men now has a cover, or at least a draft version of one. I saw it for the first time on Friday – an exciting although slightly fraught moment. After all, despite what people say, people do judge a book by the cover. But I think it's great; it has a 50s, pulp fiction feel to it and given the hours I spent reading old SF pulps and stories that's highly appropriate. I'll share it with you soon. Watch this space…. 

I have to say, it's fascinating seeing something you've been working on for the best part of three years gradually being transformed into an actual book, with a beautifully designed cover and a compelling blurb. Finally, after all those hours in the library and late nights in front of the computer, the dream has become reality. Now I just hope there will be someone out there who wants to read it…

[originally on MySpace]

Keep your fingers crossed for me – my edited manuscript just went off to my agent in the US, Zoe Pagnamenta. Hopefully it'll find a home at a publisher there – otherwise those of you across the pond who have expressed an interest in buying it will have make do with a UK edition… 

I also thought I'd tell you about a really great book I've just been reviewing – The Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations. Ok, so the title doesn't sound so hot, but believe me this is a wonderful book. Medical historians WF Bynum and the late great Roy Porter spent fifteen years accumulating quotes on science. This is the splendid result - to my mind, it's a lot more than just a reference book for it really opens up the cultures of science and allows you to dip into some of the most fascinating debates in human history. 

I also like the way they haven't just included quotes by famous scientists. There are ones from writers, poets, and critics. Passages from Max Born stand next to Borges, Frederick Soddy next to Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz: "Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?"); and Hans Bethe is alongside the Bible, which would have brought a wry smile to the face of the physicist who revealed the secret of the sun's energy.  

The great German writer and Romantic scientist Goethe is well represented. They missed one of my favourites: "Life divided by reason leaves a remainder." But this was new to me: "Mathematicians are like a certain type of Frenchman: when you talk to them they translate it into their own language, and then it soon turns into something completely different."

For some reason Einstein only gets three or so pages of quotes, whereas Newton gets more than eight pages. William Blake (half a page) would have been displeased: "Pray God us keep / From single vision & Newton's sleep!"  

This is one of my favourites from Einstein: "I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."

On the subject of the future, there's this classic from quantum guru Niels Bohr: "Predictions can be very difficult – especially about the future." By the way, just in case you wondered (and I know Steven Hall did), Bohr is responsible for my profile quote too. 

There are some suitably incomprehensible passages from Stephen Hawking, as well as this wonderful side-swipe at Einstein's opposition to the unpredictability of quantum theory: "God not only plays dice, but also sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen."

This book gives science and scientists a human face. As the outspoken co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, Jim Watson, shows: "One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid."  

Watson's quote perhaps explains this classic misjudgement by industrialist Thomas J Watson, Sr.: "I think that there is a world market for about five computers."

Remember that the next time you listen to some technophile predicting that a shining scientific utopia is just around the corner. Or as George Bernard Shaw put it: "Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating ten more."

Carl Sagan has these wise words on the practice of science itself: "One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority'. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.)"

But it seems somehow appropriate when talking about quotes from the great and the good that the final comment should go to an anonymous saying: "Man occasionally stumbles on the truth, but then just picks himself up and hurries on regardless."

If any of you have got a favourite quote – not just on science, but on life, the universe & everything (it doesn't get broader than that!) – then I'd love to hear them. My own rather quirky favourite on science (not in Bynum & Porter's book) is from the cold war film Hell and High Water (1954):  

"That's no female. That's a scientist."

[originally on MySpace]

I've always loved that photograph of Bertolt Brecht from the 1930s in which he's wearing a worker's flat cap and smoking a thick Cuban cigar. It seems to capture something of his paradoxical personality - Brecht, the bourgeois Bolshevik.

There's a fine production by David Hare currently running at the National of what is for my money Brecht's greatest play. Brecht worked on The Life of Galileo longer than any other play. There are three versions: one completed in 1938, another finished in America just before the atomic bombing of Japan, and a final version from 1955.

Written in exile on the same Danish island where Niels Bohr worked on his doctoral thesis, Brecht's original play highlights the plight of intellectuals - such as those left behind in Nazi Germany - who resist authoritarian regimes in the name of intellectual freedom. But the atomic bomb changed everything for Brecht. "Overnight the biography of the founder of the new physics read differently," he wrote.

What had been a play about science as a discipline with the potential to liberate people from an irrational world-view, was recast into one which illustrates the refusal of scientists to accept their responsibility to humankind and their complicity in the misuse of science. For Brecht, Galileo's recantation before the authority of the Church came to represent the Fall of science. Galileo is no longer a hero but a traitor.

Einstein died on 18 April 1955, two days after the Cologne première of Galileo. In his notes, Brecht identifies Einstein's equation E=mc² as an example of how the ideal of pure science has become very dangerous in the modern era. Such equations can so easily be turned into the mathematics of mass murder.

Audiences in the cold war would have instantly seen that Brecht's Galileo was not just a history play, but about politics and the purpose of science. Brecht tipped his worker's cap to Francis Bacon when he wrote that science should be about relieving the drudgery of human existence. What is the point of the discoveries of Galileo and his fellow physicists (he asks) if all they ultimately lead to is bigger and better bombs? One day, predicts an older and wiser Galileo, the scientists' yells of Eureka! will be greeted by a universal cry of horror because of the ever more terrible superweapons their discoveries make possible.

David Hare's production is excellent (apart from the pseudo-Cabaret carnival scene, about which the less said the better). Simon Russell Beale's performance in the title role is superb and captures perfectly the passion for life and science that is central to Brecht's Galileo. But the contemporary relevance of Brecht's scientific message at a time of renewed fears about weapons of mass destruction seems absent from Hare's version, which is a missed opportunity. Although to my eyes, the stage set evoked the skeletal remains of the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Dome, a haunting reminder of the deadly power of the laws of physics. Or was it just meant to represent an observatory?

I spent the evening at the National with my editor, Jon Turney,and his family. The editing on Doomsday Men is complete, well almost. Less is more, was Jon's rationale and I kept repeating it to myself like a mantra as I decided whether to accept or decline his deletions. Being edited is a bit like going to the dentist. It's painful but you know it's for the best. And thanks to Jon, the final text is much improved. When you live and breathe a book project for years, it's difficult to find the distance necessary to see where a few more words are needed or some can be cut. That's why a good editor is so important. It's a lesson some publishers have forgotten. Fortunately Penguin is not one of them.

So now, after three years of researching the life and times of the Doomsday Men, I've returned my last library book (at one point I had fifty on loan) and checked the final endnote reference (there are over a thousand). It's at moments like these that you feel like putting your feet up and lighting a Brechtian cigar...

[originally on MySpace]