Electric Universe

"Well, again, this is basically a book about scientific discovery. The field of electricity and magnetism now seems kind of banal: it is one of the more banal aspects of what we do. Yet if you look back 50 years, it’s clear that how the fundamental rules of electricity and magnetism came about is a pinnacle of theoretical physics. It’s genius and it’s beautiful – and I use that word advisedly. They’re very clever and very rich; they explain a host of phenomena, from radio to light. Many things. So it’s a book about a banal topic that is also a pretty important one. Also, Bodanis is an interesting writer because he too pins it on character and is very good at ferreting out the dysfunctionality of his subjects and the relationships between them. It actually reads very much like a selection of short stories which are interwoven, which I think is a brilliant technique. I think a lot of popular science writers try to do that but they’re not as successful as he is. I mean it really is very plot driven, in some sense, with these characters. To be honest, I do feel that the joy of writing science is often taken away from the people actually doing the science. The argument is usually that she or he is not very good at explaining what she or he does, but I think there is a real risk of handing all the communication of science to non-scientists or non-active scientists. They either don’t know or forget the thrill of doing science, which I think fuels good exposition, and have to convey it second-hand. This is not to say that, as a scientist, one is naturally better at communicating science. I wrote a book on cosmology called The State of the Universe in which I tried to construct a narrative just in terms of the science. It can be done but it doesn’t read as well as these books, it reads differently. I’ve become more and more convinced that people are led along more easily if there’s a narrative arc involving character."