Stonehenge Decoded

"Well, this book was really interesting for me because it was the first popular science book I had come across. It was published in 1965 originally. I was doing my PhD at the time and this book came to me because I had just joined one of those new-fangled books clubs! I was surprised that there were science books that were readable. I had heard about treatises on the electron or whatever it is but I had never come across a book like this. And it was fascinating and fun. Computers were brand new and what he had done was use ‘the computer’ to analyse all the various sightings you can make across the stones at Stonehenge and tried to show that it was a great astronomical instrument. I think it’s not now largely believed. Some of things were right but many of them are clearly wrong. But the fact is that he used a computer, a scientific instrument to examine what was really a beautiful ancient building and this was a very odd and interesting thing. And it was certainly quite important to me to see that science could be made popular in this way and I think it influenced me quite a lot. I think it showed a lot of people science could be written for the layman. I met Gerry Hawkins many years later at the Explorers’ Club in Washington DC; he is a very nice chap and I talked to him about the Nazca lines in the Atacama Desert. Clear simple writing. It doesn’t want to be too heavy. It doesn’t want to go off into high-falutin’ stuff. When Stephen Hawking wrote A Brief History of Time, he says that his publisher told him that every equation he left in would halve the number of readers, which is a bit of an exaggeration but it is not very far off."