PD Smith

What do you believe but cannot prove? This is the intriguing question posed by John Brockman at Edge.org. The "brilliant minds" he asked to respond are all members of Brockman's so-called "third culture", by which he means scientists and "thinkers in the empirical world". So presumably woolly-headed philosophers and other arts-based thinkers not trained in the sciences need not apply.

Despite this Ian McEwan somehow snuck beneath the wire and even gets to write the introduction to Brockman's book. As McEwan rightly says the contributions do indeed express "the spirit of a scientific consciousness at its best".

One contributor claims rather darkly that "we are simply overadvanced fungi and bacteria hurtling through a galaxy in cold, meaningless space" - a comment that probably illustrates the dangers of posting comments while suffering from a bad hangover (be warned bloggers).

But generally there is an emphasis on positive predictions: we are not alone in the universe (Paul Davies); we will circumvent the speed of light (Ray Kurzweil); "there is a future much better, in terms of reduced human suffering and increased human potential than the present". The latter, inspiringly upbeat prediction comes from Oliver Morton, author of the excellent Mapping Mars.

It's a great book for reading on the tube, as its bite-sized contributions are ideal for short journeys. My own favourite is from mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson: "most of what I believe I cannot prove, simply for lack of time and energy." I know the feeling. Back to the editing then...

So what do you believe but cannot prove? Let me know!

[originally on MySpace]

No more editing for me for a few days. I've reached about half-way through the 500 or so pages of my manuscript. Two reasons for the pause: to prepare my accounts and to do some reviewing. Being forced to confront the reality of how little a freelance writer earns is always painful, so I'll pass over the first fairly rapidly. But the second is more interesting.

Deborah Cadbury's Space Race is a great read. She tells the story of the space race through the lives of the Soviet rocket scientist Sergei Korolev and the ex-Nazi Wernher von Braun.

The material on von Braun may be familiar but it is an extraordinary story that shows the terrible ambiguity of science - its ability to turn dreams into reality and take people into space, but also its destructive potential. For the rockets that were built to take us to the moon were also meant to deliver H-bombs onto New York, London and Moscow.

That ambiguity was apparent at the release of the 1960 biopic about von Braun, I Aim at the Stars. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the number of his missiles that hit us, it flopped in Britain. One review was memorably headlined: "I Aim at the Stars, but Sometimes I Hit London."

As I'll show in Doomsday Men, von Braun was the original model for Dr Strangelove, the ultimate mad scientist of the Cold War. And it's the story of the Atomic Age, told in popular fiction, film and the lives of the scientists, that best reveals how our scientific dreams turn all too easily into nightmares.

You'll have to wait a few more months for Doomsday Men (there's the small matter of the editing to finish yet), but I hope to provide a few tasters of the book in this blog. So watch this space...

[originally on Myspace]

For the last week I've been going through the edited version of Doomsday Men. It's never easy seeing your favourite lines struck through, but you reassure yourself with the thought that a better book will emerge at the end.

This is one little anecdote that will probably be consigned to the cutting room floor:

Physicist Niels Bohr once greeted one of Wolfgang Pauli's latest theories with the comment: "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question, which divides us, is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough."

But don't worry - there are plenty more where that came from...

[originally on MySpace]