Coming of Age in the Milky Way

"I think that over the last 20 to 30 years, science writing has gotten better and better. But still an awful lot of writing about science is by authors who are writing for their peer group or the people who know a great deal about science already. Timothy Ferris, who is a professor of astronomy out on the West Coast and has been teaching in university of various kinds for years, is, I think, probably the best of all writers of modern science. Carl Sagan was a great populariser of science, but Timothy Ferris’s style is even better than Sagan’s and he’s now the author of probably about ten books. And although he is an astronomer, by training and disposition in many ways, he’s also a wonderful historian of science. And the book that I’ve nominated really goes over quite a lot of the ground that Koestler goes over in The Sleepwalkers , but from a scientist’s perspective. So the two of them are kind of bookends to the same examinations. He goes up pretty well to the present day, but it’s really just a different perspective. So for instance, when he’s writing about how navigators would try to work out from looking at the sun where they were on the high seas, when they were using a sextant or an astrolabe or whatever ancient instrument they had to hand, the chances of them moving along the deck or falling over or bumping into each other, were very high. And it’s just a human perspective on what could otherwise be a rather clinical account, which makes his books – I won’t say read like novels, they’re very far from that – give you this sense of a highly imaginative writer who is also wonderfully knowledgeable about science."