Skip to main content

Tom Jackson - Four Way Interview

Tom Jackson is a science writer based in Bristol, UK. Tom specialises in recasting science and technology into lively historical narratives. After almost 20 years of writing, Tom has uncovered a wealth of stories that help to bring technical content alive and create new ways of enjoying learning about science. In his time, Tom has been a zoo keeper, travel writer, buffalo catcher and filing clerk, but he now writes for adults and children, for books, magazines and TV. His latest title is Chilled: how refrigeration changed the world and might do it again.

 Why science?

 The obvious answer is that it is the best way of finding out about how stuff works. Some of my most wondrous and satisfying moments have come when I've learned something that gave me a bit more of the 'big picture'. Things that spring to mind are the Bohr atomic model, the rock cycle, natural and sexual selection, nucleosynthesis. I’m probably too impatient to be a real scientist though—at least I was when that was an option for me. I like the stories as much as the results, following the way knowledge changes, and continues to change, and seeing the many links between it all.

 Why this book?

 While I was writing Chilled I would often find myself saying something like, 'I’m working on a book about fridges, but it’s not really about fridges.' Cue quizzical looks. What interested me is what the kitchen refrigerator represents. It is the fruit of a long line of discoveries that involve many of the great names of physics and chemistry plus many awesome stories of unusual goings on. The fridge has obviously altered the way we produce, purchase, and consume food, and it was fun to illustrate just how it is utterly integrated into our day to day—just imagine life without one. But I wanted to extend that further by showing that the kind of thing that a fridge does also pops up in many applications far removed from food—eg you need refrigeration to make steel cheaply and make a strong concrete dam, and the Higgs boson was found using the world’s largest refrigerator. Absolute zero had to make an appearance, of course, but what interested me most about that was the strange behaviour of materials at temperatures close to 0 K, and how that might lead to technologies of the future. So, now you can see; it’s not really about fridges!

 What’s next?

 Well, I work on all kinds of non-fiction projects, some for kids, some for YA or family readerships, as well as adult non-fiction titles like Chilled. My top pick for a future project would be the story of standard candles. Again, it’s not really about candles, but the objects that tell us how big the Universe is.

 What’s exciting you at the moment?

 The Pluto flyby just happened, so I’m excited to see the up close images that will be with us come the autumn, I think. The snapshot from the approach has certainly put the dwarf planet debate back on the table. I just think the generation brought up with Pluto as a full planet don’t like the thought of its demotion. Perhaps a better solution is the one from Alan Stern, the New Horizon chief: Pluto and Eris et al are all planets, but the eight big ones are überplanets. Does that sound better? On another vein, my friend Hamish Johnston from Physics World has been telling me about quark novae of late. I’m interested to see where that might lead.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Roger Highfield - Stephen Hawking: genius at work interview

Roger Highfield OBE is the Science Director of the Science Museum Group. Roger has visiting professorships at the Department of Chemistry, UCL, and at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a member of the Medical Research Council and Longitude Committee. He has written or co-authored ten popular science books, including two bestsellers. His latest title is Stephen Hawking: genius at work . Why science? There are three answers to this question, depending on context: Apollo; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, along with the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl; and, finally, Nullius in verba . Growing up I enjoyed the sciencey side of TV programmes like Thunderbirds and The Avengers but became completely besotted when, in short trousers, I gazed up at the moon knowing that two astronauts had paid it a visit. As the Apollo programme unfolded, I became utterly obsessed. Today, more than half a century later, the moon landings are
Post a Comment
Read more

Space Oddities - Harry Cliff *****

In this delightfully readable book, Harry Cliff takes us into the anomalies that are starting to make areas of physics seems to be nearing a paradigm shift, just as occurred in the past with relativity and quantum theory. We start with, we are introduced to some past anomalies linked to changes in viewpoint, such as the precession of Mercury (explained by general relativity, though originally blamed on an undiscovered planet near the Sun), and then move on to a few examples of apparent discoveries being wrong: the BICEP2 evidence for inflation (where the result was caused by dust, not the polarisation being studied),  the disappearance of an interesting blip in LHC results, and an apparent mistake in the manipulation of numbers that resulted in alleged discovery of dark matter particles. These are used to explain how statistics plays a part, and the significance of sigmas . We go on to explore a range of anomalies in particle physics and cosmology that may indicate either a breakdown i
Post a Comment
Read more

Splinters of Infinity - Mark Wolverton ****

Many of us who read popular science regularly will be aware of the 'great debate' between American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920 over whether the universe was a single galaxy or many. Less familiar is the clash in the 1930s between American Nobel Prize winners Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton over the nature of cosmic rays. This not a book about the nature of cosmic rays as we now understand them, but rather explores this confrontation between heavyweight scientists. Millikan was the first in the fray, and often wrongly named in the press as discoverer of cosmic rays. He believed that this high energy radiation from above was made up of photons that ionised atoms in the atmosphere. One of the reasons he was determined that they should be photons was that this fitted with his thesis that the universe was in a constant state of creation: these photons, he thought, were produced in the birth of new atoms. This view seems to have been primarily driven by re
Post a Comment
Read more