Brian Clegg's Blog, page 90

Sidney Chambers and the Perils of the Night - review

I love detective fiction, but I'm very parochial about it - I'm only interested if it's English. Even Scottish is too alien. At the moment most of the big names in the field are silent, so it was interesting to discover on Waterstones' BOGOHP table this book by James Runcie.

I think it's fair to say I give it a mixed reception. I love that it's set in Cambridge and Grantchester, and unlike Colin Dexter's Morse books with its fake Oxford colleges, Runcie has chosen to use actual settings. It is much more satisfying to have real locations that you know and love. The period setting is reasonably well done - it is placed in the late 50s and early 60s, and there's none of the all too common tendency to give period characters modern views. These are very much people of their time. In fact the main character is almost too reserved for his own good.

On the downside, I find the situation a little far-fetched. The main character is the vicar of Grantchester who seems to spend most of his time helping the local police as an amateur sleuth. It's all a bit slow and leisurely. And there's an interminable section describing a cricket match that is deadly dull if you aren't interested in sport*. Oh, and there's a section where the crime involves a physicist and the physics as described is anachronistic, combining an enthusiasm for the basics of quantum theory that would be more appropriate for the 1930s with a mention of dark matter as if it were commonly discussed back then. Admittedly Zwicky mentioned the possibility of dark matter in the 1930s, but no one would refer to it as if were a commonplace in the 1950s and 60s. Oh, and I can't stand the Harry Potter-style naming convention of the books.

Even so, I enjoyed the gentle, slow pace. As one of the puff comments remarks it is 'perfect company in bed' - not challenging and decidedly cosy and nostalgic. I even quite enjoyed the rather unlikely timing of the main character's visit to East Germany that happened to coincide with the Berlin wall going up. This isn't going to be a book that appeals to someone who wants fast paced, modern dynamism, but if you enjoy a little period gentility with around four different crimes packed into the same volume, it's worth a try. There are three books available in the series. See more at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com. At the time of writing, this one (number 2) and the first in the series are bargains 51p as a Kindle.

* Less forgivable still, in another story, Runcie describes a backgammon game in which the same player doubles and then redoubles. Well, really.

Breaking the writing rules

Who wouldn't want a doorway that looked like this?Last night I had a quaint dream. Don't stop reading - I know the rule is to never tell other people about your dreams because it's so BORING, but the whole point of this post is about when it makes sense to break the rules.

In the dream I was helping out a company whose sole product was doorways designed in the style of the old Foyles building in Charing Cross Road (don't ask). They were worried about their advertising, which consisted of half page magazine adverts that were totally full of text apart from a backdrop of a Caribbean beach.

Now, one rule of advertising is Don't use too many words. People switch off. Get your message across with images and a few snappy words. (You can have small, secondary text to give follow-on information, but the main message should be short and big.) If you look at adverts on Tube stations these days, for instance, that's generally the case. But when I regularly caught the Tube when I worked at Hatton Cross, one company thought differently.

The adverts were for a Russian restaurant, and they reasoned that people waiting for a tube have nothing else to do but read the adverts - so why not give them something more significant to read? So their adverts had loads of text. And it caused a storm. People loved it. (And briefly other advertisers did the same, though they seem to have forgotten how effective it was now.) Rules in writing are all very well, but sometimes the best result is had from breaking them. Every great writer does this. It doesn't mean you  can write well without knowing what the rules are - but if you know what you are doing, you can consciously break those rules to superb effect.

We had a good example of this at the popular science book writing masterclass a couple of weeks ago. At the end of the event, a panel, including me, were giving feedback on book ideas. What we said several times was that the idea being presented to us was really just a collection of information. To make a good popular science book it needed an arc - an overarching development of a theme across the book. And then someone came up with an idea where each chapter in her book was effectively a separate story with no real connection, apart from the device that was used to link them together. The person with the idea was hesitant, because there was no arc - this was a separate set of individual stories. And the answer was - it's fine to break the rules. (I think I actually said 'There are no rules,' which isn't true, but I meant there are no unbreakable rules.) Here it worked because of the special nature of that linking device.

So the advice to writers (and I think this applies to both non-fiction and fiction) is simple. Learn the rules. Be aware how they apply to your book. Use them conscientiously. And then be prepared to ignore them if it works better that way.

Image "Soho foyles bookshop 1". Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons

Not in my global village

I have just read the 17 May edition of New Scientist. (My reading filing pile is somewhat random.) In the leader we are told how the illegal export of rhino horns, ivory etc funds terrorist groups like Boko Haram.

Fair enough. Then comes this statement: 'When it comes to wildlife crime it is easy to point the finger at Chinese demand for ivory, rhino horn and tiger penis while forgetting that all consumers contribute to some extent.'
What?  I'm sorry, I find this extremely offensive. You can't make a blanket statement like that without evidence, and a science magazine should know better than to do so. I simply don't accept that I, as it later puts it, as an 'affluent consumer', 'encourage the slaughter of endangered animals.'

I think the slaughter of these animals and the uses of their materials in what is nothing more than a pathetic attempt at magic is unacceptable. I don't in any way support the practices in which they are used. It is the people who believe in the magic and who pay for this indefensible trade who are to blame, full stop.

This is the concept of the global village gone mad. The world is not a village. I do not offer any encouragement to this activity, and for New Scientist to suggest that I do is the worst sort of appeasement. It's time people took responsibility for their own actions, rather than the responsibility being displaced on the rest of us in some kind of misguided internationalism.

"Rhino Killings" by Shaz Lock - Own work. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons 

Why I've ventured into eBay

One of my (many) favourite parts of the wonderful Buffy the Vampire Slayer is when they need a mcguffin called an Urn of Osiris. One is duly obtained and when someone asks, amazed that this rare item has been so quickly found, the answer is something to the effect of 'Oh, I got it on eBay.'
I have a mixed relationship with selling books on eBay. I used to regularly sell my Organizing a Murder ebook of party games that way, selling at least a copy a week, which worked wonderfully well as there was nothing to post (and I got really happy feedback). Eventually eBay stopped me from selling it because they said I didn't have the rights to do so. Despite many attempts to point out that, as the author, I had every right, I never got anywhere - any attempt to get an non-robotic response out of the supposedly human customer service team at eBay is a nightmare. I think they have now banned selling e-products.

I've never really bothered selling physical books this way, but I thought as an experiment I would try selling a signed copy of Dice World with a personalised dedication. It's on this week - you can take a look here - and at the time of writing it could be yours for £1.04 (UK only, I'm afraid). I've no idea what will come of it, but I think in the writing business you have to be constantly experimenting with different ways of being in contact with the audience, and I hope this will be an effective one. We shall see! I will update the post with the outcome after the event.

Stalking Mr Muybridge

One of my early popular science books, The Man Who Stopped Time, was on the photographic and moving picture pioneer, Eadweard Muybridge, who did most of his work in Pennsylvania and California, but who was born in Kingston-upon-Thames. Here's an account I wrote at the time of hunting for Muybridge in Kingston.

When getting under the skin on Edweard Muybridge you can’t avoid Kingston-upon-Thames. It inevitably means regular visits to the North Kingston Centre, an unfriendly, echoing civic building tagged onto a school, which houses the local history room. The room, entered through a strangely bunker-like door, resembles every reference library you have ever been in. Old well-used tables, a slightly musty smell and a few modern contrivances – PCs, photocopier, microfilm readers – sitting uncomfortably alongside the huge bound volumes of the local paper. Very friendly and helpful staff, though.

But that’s a little world of its own as is the Kingston Museum, with its dramatic Muybridge exhibit taking up a sizeable corner of the small, unassuming building. They are great sources of information, but they aren’t the Kingston that Muybridge knew. However, three significant sites remain for the Muybridge groupie – the King’s Stone, the Muybridge family house (and workplace) and the house he spent his last years in after returning from America.

 The King’s Stone, that one-time English Stone of Scone, later used as a mounting block in the marketplace, stands in splendid isolation outside the ugly curve of the Guildhall, a circa 1930s monstrosity of brick and verdigris. (The verdigris may be a false memory.) The stone itself is set around with protective railings, in a surprisingly pleasant tree-lined area with bench seats, a platform over the river that disappears underground just before reaching the site.

They’re a little faded now, but you can still make out those early English kings’ names, including the two distinctive ‘Eadweard’s that almost certainly inspired Edward Muggeridge to start his gradual transformation into the more dramatic Eadweard Muybridge. And surprisingly, the inset coins of the period are still there too. But the real surprise was to look up and realize why the King’s Stone was so likely to have influenced Muybridge when it was put in its fancy new setting in 1850. From the stone there is a clear view of the upper windows, the domestic windows, of the Muggeridge property. He could see the stone from his family home. (The stone has been moved a little since 1850, but was outside the old Guildhall on a very similar spot).

Is Eadweard’s birthplace a museum, a National Trust, preserved in aspic view on this unique man’s origins? Not exactly. Crossing the High Street from the Stone takes you to a house that is actually significantly more handsome than its faded state and commercial use suggest. Downstairs, in Eadweard’s day, was the family coal merchant and corn chandlery. Handy for the Thames, running at the back of the property, it would have been  bustling, noisy and more than a little dirty. Now it’s a computer shop. Not a glossy chain store but one of those little places that rarely seem to have any customers, but somehow manage to hang on at the edge of the hi-tech revolution with a combination of bravado and individuality.

The upstairs, what would have been the family home, is now the offices of a business consultancy. Filing cabinets and a mix of modern and older office furniture sit in the Victorian spaces with the usual discomfort of a converted older building that hasn’t had a huge amount of money spent on it. But the biggest change is at the back.

Here, where the young Eadweard would have played among the coal heaps, where the Muggeridge yard would have stretched down to the ugly but practical banks of the suburban Thames, are now two mid-rise blocks of apartments, cutting off the house from the river, dividing the past from the present. I’m sure they’re meant to be stylish, but to me they just looked sad and out of place – but I was seeing them through Muybridge eyes.

And so to Liverpool Road, and Muybridge’s last home, from the place he was born to the place he died. I decided to walk and it proved quite a journey – if not quite a lifetime, the trek seemed to go on and on, through the town centre, then those scruffy streets that lurk on the edges, where everything is a bit run down, before appearing to leave Kingston entirely. At last, (long last) I was into classic leafy suburbs, the sort of streets where there’s never quite enough space for all the cars, and onto Liverpool Road itself. I’d got a blister by now and was feeling noticeably sorry for myself, so it’s no great surprise that I entered Liverpool Road and started to suspect that the solid villa Muybridge had lived out his life in was long gone.

For house after house there was a string of those 1930s brick non-entities that fill so many suburbs. The sort of houses that took just a touch of an architectural idea, but were never  brave enough to do anything with it. Some have a rounded porch. Others bay windows or a spot of half-timbering – but it’s always done so inoffensively that it has quite the opposite effect to the modern eye. There’s nothing wrong with these houses – I’ve lived in one. They’re comfortable and practical. But boring.

Now the house Muybridge died in is number 2, yet these houses had bigger numbers that grew rather than reducing as I walked along the road. And then it becomes obvious why. Suddenly I was in the real Liverpool Road with bigger houses, older, nothing fancy but much more effective. And there was number 2. Perhaps there was nothing else in Muybridge’s day – this was where the road started and the rest was what? A park? (Is it a coincidence that number 2 is called Park House?) No matter, I was there, the blister was worth it.

 Now I have to confess I was very nervous at this point. It’s one thing to go into a shop or even knock on the door of a business and ask if you can take a look, but it’s another to walk up to the front door of a private house and ask them, as I hoped to, if there’s anything left of Muybridge’s time there. Do they ever, when digging the garden, I wonder, come across the remnants of his scale model of the American great lakes, the garden feature he was working on when he died?

A deep breath and I approached. The house was almost hidden behind a wall and mature trees with a gate at each entrance – high, solid metal, green painted gates that you can’t peek through. High, solid, metal, green, locked gates. No way in. Okay, I thought, I’ll try the entryphone, ask for an audience. There wasn’t one. Even a prison has an entryphone, but 2, Liverpool Road was a blank, faceless, impenetrable mystery. I took some photographs, of the building and the couple of commemorative plaques on the wall. I stood a little longer.  But there was nothing left to do. Nothing but trudge back to the centre of town and the railway station.

There is a postscript to this. I couldn’t believe that the occupants of 2 Liverpool Road could have no interest in the fact that their home once housed a famous person. I wrote them a very nice letter, with a stamped addressed envelope enclosed. Asking for a little colour. Anything they could tell me. There was no reply. Is there anyone in there, or just cinematographic ghosts?

What were magic books for?

I'm currently reading Philip Ball's new book Invisible for review (you can find out more about it at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com) and there is a very interesting, if slightly pointed remark about magic books in it. Ball says:

'Magical books thus acquired the same talismanic function as a great deal of the academic literature today: to be read, learned, cited, but never used.'

I did rather enjoy the dig at poor old academics, though there is an element of truth to make that dig stick. But I was also interested in the idea that these kind of books weren't really meant to be used.

I was familiar with some of the early versions, as Roger Bacon was fond of one of the many (now known to be fake) books over the years called something like 'Secret of Secrets', usually claiming to be the wisdom of some ancient seer - in Bacon's case of Hermes Tresmegistus, a fabled mystic who seemed to combine Ancient Greek and Ancient Egyptian wisdom in one soggy whole.

Ball's assertion is an interesting one, because I had always assumed that the impossible-to-follow complexities of books of magic spells were primarily so the faking author could always say 'It's not the spell's fault, but yours that it didn't work, because you didn't quite do it right.' (Interestingly a similar argument is sometimes applied to alternative remedies in the health sphere.)

Rather than this, Ball suggests that the obscurity and impracticality is like a badge, a recognition of mutual membership of a secret and powerful society. And I think that when you realise that, you look at scientific papers and esoterically complex maths being employed in science in a new light. Not to say it mustn't be used, in some Stalinist-style attempt to impose political agendas on scientific theories but rather as further explanation to scientists that this why popular science, flawed though you may believe it to be, is so important, because it allows us to lift the veil and show that scientists are not just the latest proponents of magic, but doing something far better.

The fragility of physics

We are used to thinking of science as being logical and ironclad in its approach. Admittedly, it doesn't provide the ultimate truth or definitive facts. One of the hardest things for many to grasp (including some scientists) is that all science can ever do is give us the best theories supported by the current data. It only takes one new observation that can be verified to throw the best scientific theory out of the window.

At least that is the principle. But scientists are human and certainly don't want to start from scratch when this happens. So what they usually do is patch. They modify the theory until it does fit the data again.

The trouble is, you can only do this so far before the creaking theory becomes hard to keep alive, but by now it is often a Frankenstein's monster with a life of its own, sustained apart from anything else, by careers that have been dedicated to bringing it into being.

This was always the complaint Fred Hoyle had about the way his steady state cosmology theory was so easily discarded. Evidence came out from very distant observations, far back in time, that aspects of the universe were not as his theory predicted. So it was thrown out (American cosmologists never liked it, so this was easily done). Hoyle and his colleagues subsequently patched it in the usual manner so it would match current observations, but it was ignored. Here's the thing, though. Along the way, the rival big bang theory (Hoyle's derogatory title) was also patched. At least three times. So when data came along to show that big bang was wrong, it wasn't thrown out. Politics in cosmology? Quite possibly. I'm not saying steady state is right - it most likely isn't - but the decision when to accept a patch is arbitrary and has an element of politics about it, something outsiders would not expect from science.

However, the patch I was thinking of in my title 'the fragility of physics' wasn't in the field of cosmology which, let's face it, is always likely to contain an element of speculation.  What's more, this is a patch of jaw-dropping, ear-wiggling proportions. It was so extreme that Paul Dirac, one of the greatest physicists who ever lived, refused to accept the theories depending on it. And that's a problem.

A great book... but
spot the patchWhy? Because these are some of the most central (and wonderful) theories in physics. Quantum electrodynamics, for example, which explains the the interaction between light and matter (and the electromagnetic interaction between matter particles). QED is generally held up as one of the greatest theories in physics. It is astoundingly accurate in its predictions - as Richard Feynman was fond of pointing out, it makes predictions that match experiment with an accuracy that is the equivalent of predicting the distance from London to New York (he used two US cities, but let's not be parochial) to the width of a human hair. And QED depends entirely on this patch. As does the standard model, our current best model of how matter and three of the four forces of nature work and interact.

The name given to this patch makes it sound harmless - it's called renormalisation. So why did it get Dirac in such a twist? Because theories like QED are quantum theories that rely on adding together all possible outcomes with their associated probabilities. And because quantum theory allows interesting things to happen like pairs of matter and antimatter particles to pop out of nowhere and disappear again all the time, it has a tendency to predict that some essential values are infinite. So, for instance, without renormalisation, QED told its mystified developers that the mass of an electron was infinite.

This clashes a teeny bit with reality. We know the mass of an electron. It's around 9x10-31 kg. That's small. It's 9 divided by a very big number, 1 followed by 31 zeroes. Rather different from infinity. (To be fair, any number is as different from infinity as it gets.)

So what did Feynman and crew do to patch it? They knew the mass of an electron, so they ignored what the theory predicted and plugged the actual value in. And the result of this 'renormalisation' was that QED worked wonderfully.

We should never forget, though, that Dirac had a point. This is a very scary thing to do - and QED and the standard model and all the work that is built on that edifice has this patch as its absolute foundation. Renormalisation can be justified for the same reason that Newton got away with using his early version of calculus, which also had a flaw involving infinity at its heart. Because it works.

But it doesn't meant that there isn't something missing from the theory, something that might send physics in a whole new direction, overthrowing everything we've done in this field to date. And that's why I love science dearly. Because if that does happen, while some will grumble, and some will never let go of their favourite old theory, science as a whole will move on, and most will be thrilled by this new development.

Proper summer reading

The actual beach I intend to be sitting on with these booksI recently mocked a feature in the Observer, where lots of the sort of people who always get asked this kind of thing, told the paper all the boring, worthy and generally show-offy books that (they claimed) made up their holiday reading.

The piece is labelled 'best holiday reads' - but these books really aren't holiday reads at all. We all know that these select literati will leave those classics and economics tomes at home and pack the Dan Browns (or, for the more tasteful, P. G. Wodehouse) in a plain brown wrapper. Or, even better on a Kindle. So I thought it was time to come up with an honest holiday reading list.
Here are three books I've just bought to take with my to sunny France later in the summer:Neal Stephenson: Reamde - because every holiday pile should include one book that's thick enough to act as a doorstop and/or to defend yourself against muggers and bag snatchers. And Stephenson is certainly good value for money - but also manages to entertain, and get the brain going at the same time.Dave Gorman - America Unchained - because I love a humorous travel book as light reading. While I'm not sure anyone can equal Bill Bryson, I'm sure Mr Gorman will prove highly entertaining on his trip around the US.James Runcie - The Perils of the Night - what could be more relaxing than a good British murder? And in this case it's set in Cambridge, so a double bonus. I've no idea if the books in this series are any good, I just picked it up off Waterstones' 'BOGOHP' table, but every holiday read should include one shot in the dark. ... what, you may, say, no popular science books? Well, no - I read about 40 popular science books a year, so for me it's time for a break. But that doesn't mean that they don't make great holiday reads for less regular popsci readers - so I'd be delighted if you called in at www.brianclegg.net to select some holiday fun (or even to rip me off as my Quantum Age is still 99p on Kindle) - but equally, should you want to confess to Mills and Boon or Agatha Christie, feel free. It's a holiday, after all!
So... what are yours? Honestly, now.

Masters of Grauniad Central

The panel looking gormless
(photo Debbie Gilpin @Deborah_Deborah)I had the pleasure of helping organise and taking part in a 'How to write a popular science book' masterclass on Sunday, and just wanted to take the opportunity to say that if the attendees enjoyed it as much as I did they will have had a good day indeed.

We had a fascinating keynote speech on why communicating science is important from Professor Stephen Curry, one of the organisers of Science is Vital and an early scientist blogger, a great talk from science journalist and author of Geek Nation Angela Saini on what makes a good popular science book (and what doesn't), various odds and sods from me, ranging from research to selling your book, and a spot-on fact-filled guide to producing the perfect proposal and the book production process from ex-MD of Icon Books and author of The Science Magpie, Simon Flynn.

The closing part of the event was a chance for members of the audience to give brief pitches for book ideas to panel made up of Simon, bestselling author M. G. Harris and me so that we could (hopefully) give some words of wisdom.

Throw in the most lavish 'light lunch' I've ever had and it was a day that went past remarkably quickly. Apart from seeing old friends in the other presenters, I really enjoyed meeting the audience, who were a fascinating bunch, and hearing some of their book ideas, at least three of which I would be rushing out to buy if they are ever published.
Lessons? Many. But I would particularly note the importance of having passion in your subject and narrative in your writing - plus having an utterly brilliant proposal. 

It was a great day and I hope we have a chance to do another.

Please rip me off!

Here's the thing - I'm very pleased with my new book The Quantum Age . It combines the weird and wonderful nature of quantum physics with an exploration of remarkable quantum applications, from lasers to superconductors, and the stories of the development of these ideas and technologies featuring some big (and sometimes decidedly strange) characters.

The Kindle edition usually sells for about £8.99, but as part of their 'Summer Reads' promotion, Amazon currently has it at 99p ($1.69) - because why wouldn't you want to read about something as mind boggling as quantum physics on the beach? Being a Kindle ebook, you can read it on a Kindle device, but also on tablets, smartphones, laptops, the better kinds of abacus* - so there's no excuse.

You are probably thinking, yes, but I don't want to deprive Brian of income. Don't worry - I really do want you to get a copy. Leaving aside the fact that not everyone would buy it at full price, if enough of you do buy it at 99p it can soar up the Kindle charts, become much more visible and that gives it a huge amount of momentum of its own.

So please do rush over to Amazon.co.uk (just click that link) or Amazon.com, and rip me off. You'll make my day. (And please spread this as widely as you can!)

*OK, maybe not the abacus.