talkingSCIENCE Edited by Adam Hart-Davis John Wiley & Sons, Ltd talkingSCIENCE talkingSCIENCE Edited by Adam Hart-Davis John Wiley & Sons, Ltd Published in 2004 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, England Phone (+44) 1243 779777 Copyright © 2004 Editing: Adam Hart-Davis Copyright © 2004 Contributions from scientists: MagRack Certain material included with permission of MagRack Entertainment LLC E-mail (for orders and customer service enquires): [email protected] Visit our Home Page on www.wiley.co.uk or www.wiley.com All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except under the terms of the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1P 0LP, UK, without the permission in writing of the Publisher. 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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the US Library of Congress British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0470093021 Typeset in 11/15 pt ITC New Baskerville by Sparks, Oxford – www.sparks.co.uk Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall This book is printed on acid-free paper responsibly manufactured from sustainable forestry in which at least two trees are planted for each one used for paper production. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Acknowledgements First, I would like to thank Rainbow Media, for organizing the ‘one-on- one’ television interviews in the MagRack series Maximum Science, from which this book emerged, and the Rainbow Media staff, who arranged for transcripts of the interviews. Next, I thank all the scientists who came along and talked to me; I was highly privileged to be given so much time by such busy and interesting people. I thank Emily Troscianko, who helped me greatly with the initial editing of the transcripts, and Sally Smith, my editor at Wiley, who encouraged and assisted but never demanded. And most of all I thank Tom Levenson, the producer of the interviews, for persuading the victims to agree to appear, and for guiding me with lines of questioning. My only complaint is that Tom would not allow me to ride my bike to the studio in London; he said it was too dangerous, and he wanted me to stay alive … Thank you all. Adam Hart-Davis Contents preface ix chapter one Jocelyn Bell Burnell 3 chapter two Sir Michael Berry 25 chapter three Colleen Cavanaugh 43 chapter four Richard Dawkins 61 chapter five Loren Graham 83 chapter six Richard Gregory 101 chapter seven Eric Lander 119 viii talkingSCIENCE chapter eight Lord May of Oxford 139 chapter nine John Maynard Smith 161 chapter ten Rosalind Picard 181 chapter eleven Peter Raven 199 chapter twelve Sir Martin Rees 217 chapter thirteen Eugenie Scott 239 chapter fourteen Lewis Wolpert 257 credits 271 index 275 Preface I have been asked to do a variety of things for television programmes, but few as stimulating and delightful as interviewing a galaxy of scientists for MagRack’s series Maximum Science. I have always loved science, and I have spent my working life trying to understand and explain its ideas. To have the chance to talk to these stars about their work was an immense privi- lege and a great pleasure. The interviews were transcribed, and tidied up, and this book is the result. Here are top-rank scientists talking informally about subjects ranging from deep ocean trenches to deep space-time, and from illogical sex to computers with attitude. They speak with humour, with passion, and with deep understanding. My favourite assertion came from the Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees: ‘Cosmologists are often in error but never in doubt.’ Here are a few other gems. Lord May, President of the Royal Society: ‘I went to university to be- come an engineer, and while I was at university I discovered there was this wonderful world where you can spend your life as a researcher. I always liked playing games; I’ve played chess, I’ve played bridge, and I played snooker a lot when I was at university. But I discovered there was this hedonistic life where someone was willing to pay me to spend my life x talkingSCIENCE playing games with nature, where the name of the game was to try to work out what the rules are.’ John Maynard Smith: ‘Sex is a puzzling problem for an evolutionary biologist. Why do we bother? The orthodox answer is that a species that has sex can evolve much faster to meet changing circumstances, because genes that arise in different ancestors by mutation can join together in a single descendant, whereas if there were no sex, there would be no way these good genes from different lineages could ever get together.’ Richard Gregory: ‘Science is much more interesting than Harry Potter – than magic. A test tube and a microscope and telescope – they’re much more powerful than magic wands, much more exciting in what they can do.’ Jocelyn Bell Burnell: ‘People think you shout “Eureka!” and run naked through the streets! But it wasn’t like that. This was a worrying period because this signal was so unusual, so bizarre, that we nicknamed it Little Green Men, because if it’s not Earth men and women, maybe it’s another civilisation out there!’ Sir Michael Berry: ‘Quantum mechanics has democratized music. You can go anywhere in the world, in the jungle, in the mountains, in Antarc- tica, and listen to almost perfectly reproduced music.’ Rosalind Picard: ‘If you’re wearing your computer it can watch you and say, “Oh dear, he’s looking like he’s getting agitated.” Maybe the compu- ter has noticed that in Word you get annoyed every time you see that lit- tle paper clip, the offi ce assistant, and it could offer to turn it off for you – completely disable it so you never have to look at it again …’ Richard Dawkins: ‘I feel I have a mission to persuade my scientifi c col- leagues to write their science as if they had a lay person looking over their shoulder, not to write in a language which is completely opaque to other people. I believe they’ll do better science if they do that.’ preface xi Loren Graham: ‘Palchinsky was a patriotic Russian; he shared the de- sire of the Soviet government to industrialize and become a great indus- trial power. He just wanted to make sure, when they went about such enormously costly activities as building the world’s largest steel mill, or building the world’s largest hydroelectric dam, that they did it the right way. They arrested him. They accused him of trying to overthrow Com- munism and re-establish capitalism in Russia, and they shot him.’ Eugenie Scott: ‘My colleagues and I are trying very hard to keep evolu- tion in the public schools. Evolution is a basic foundational idea of all sci- ences. The intelligent-design people say that some biological structures cannot be explained through natural process, and therefore have to be explained by “an intelligence”. They’re not talking about little green men. The intelligence they’re talking about spells his name with three letters, and the fi rst one’s a capital G.’ Lewis Wolpert: ‘I’ve been offering a bottle of champagne to anybody who will tell me one new ethical issue that cloning a human being would raise. I also say if you can’t think of one, give me two bottles. I’m against cloning because of the dangers of abnormality. You see, in order to get Dolly, they had to do about 270 trials. From what we know about the way the embryo develops, using the method of cloning to get a child, I think there’s a very high risk of things going wrong and having abnormalities.’ Eric Lander: ‘The public human genome project, of which I’m a proud member, felt strongly that this information belonged freely in the public domain so that anybody could use it. We put it on the Internet. Every 24 hours the team posted all the new information on the Internet.