Tim Radford's Reading List

"This book contains within it the essay that turns up in every science writing anthology, “On Being the Right Size.” All science books get overtaken. You don’t normally read a science book twice — because it’s going to be out of date a year-and-a-half from now. It’s going to be comprehensively out of date in 10 years, and after 20 years you’re going to wonder why you ever trusted it in the first place. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But, strangely enough, these essays work. The ones that don’t work as science now work as a nice little picture of what people thought in 1920. It’s very well written and I’m immensely fond of it because Haldane was a man of great generosity. He was as happy, if not happier, to write for the Daily Worker as he was for the Guardian . All of these pieces of journalism are models of how to explain things to people without using long and arrogant words. He certainly was. You also get the sense that he looked for the unexpected. There’s a lovely description of being sick and then eating cheese. The cheese that he chooses to eat was a blue cheese, in a state of great bacterial decay. He describes all of that with great glee. What he’s doing there is approaching things through the sensual and the nowness of everything. Everything he starts with concerns things you can imagine. Then he goes on to the things that you can’t imagine, where you need his help. That’s what we should be doing, as journalists. We should be summing things up in one sentence if we possibly can. That’s a clear soundbite. A soundbite is a memorable sentence and there’s no point in having an unmemorable sentence. There’s a greater density of memorable sentences in Haldane’s collected journalism than there is in most great novelists’ writing. That’s a very strange trick to pull off. The same, however, is true for another book we’ll talk about."

"Mailer actually graduated from Harvard as an aeronautical engineer, was drafted into the army, and came back a novelist. It’s no surprise that when he writes about the hardware of Apollo, he writes not just exceptionally well but better than anybody I’ve yet to read. Those of us who were around and sentient journalists from 1961 to 1969 followed this story like there was nothing else on earth. The Vietnam War was going on and we did pay attention to that too. But mostly we were fixated on the American end of the Apollo programme and wistfully angry because we couldn’t find out more about the Russian end. It’s no surprise that Life magazine commissioned Mailer to do it. Esquire magazine had already gotten him to do two or three pieces which are among the best journalism I have ever read. Of a Fire on the Moon is not a book that’s likely to stay in print indefinitely because great chunks of it are self-indulgent rubbish. Whenever I pick it up—and I do so every year or two—I read his account of being a witness to the launch of Apollo and it is prose that brings tears to my eyes. I cannot tell you how good it is. There’s no substitute for picking the chapter up and reading it yourself. And it’s strangely uneconomical. With Haldane you feel he has said as little as he possibly can and packed meaning into it with wonderful clarity. Mailer has done the same by picking the words up and throwing them at you as if you were a wall. But they stick. Yes, there’s that wonderful passage about what it takes to actually make a rocket leave the ground: how you have to claw it down and hold it there before it can actually take off. All of that is terrific. And it puts into a strange perspective the odd dismissive tone he has for what you might call the ‘NASA engineer’ sort. At the time, none of us wanted to be NASA engineers. We thought that they were rather boring. But we couldn’t help revelling in their achievements. The idea that you could get 24,000 people to cooperate in getting a rocket off the ground and to the moon and back seemed to be an exercise is national self-indulgence but, of course, it was a great thing to do. It’s a cliché but we understand the world differently because we’ve left and looked back at it. Of a Fire on the Moon is still my favourite book about that great adventure."

"It was a personal discovery of mine. It came into the Guardian books department of which I was not then the editor. I picked it up—I’d read about it in the New York Review of Books —and I said to the literary editor, ‘You’ve got to review this one.’ He said, ‘Oh do you think so, old boy?’ Or something like that. Later, he came to me and asked if I could review it. He said there was only one page for the six or seven thousand books a year that turn up at the Guardian. Most papers then only reviewed about 600 books in the course of a year. So it was quite difficult to make sure that this one would run. I had already read it by the time he came to me and I just jumped on it. I’m only sorry now that I didn’t say what I thought at the time, which is that this is a book that we’ll all be reading in 100 years. You tend to be a little guarded and I simply described the book as ‘gold’ all the way through — or some such remark. It’s a life story by a chemist seen through the prism of an elemental substance. Some of it doesn’t work very well and some of it works very well. There’s a lovely chapter on iron that refers to the arrival of the Fascist era. There’s a much more personal account involving mine tailings and the extraction of precious metals from mine tailing, which he was employed at. That gives him a chance to contemplate the nature of matter itself and why the stuff that’s in the ground is the same as the stuff that actually composes our bodies. And why things that happen in chemistry can be subtly different if you alter the element that’s involved in the process. All of it is illuminating. You read it and you understand the world around you much better for having read even a sentence of Levi. You just think, ‘God, I hadn’t thought of that before and isn’t this so beautifully put?’ But you don’t spend a lot of time doing that whilst you’re reading the book because I don’t know of another writer who can make the things that are important to us as important as they should be but he does. And then, of course, it’s not just an account of being a chemist in troubled times: he was an actor in one of the great dramas of the twentieth century, one that affected all of our lives. I was born in 1940 so by the time the war was over, I knew there had been a war. The photographs of Belsen and the other camp survivors had already started appearing in the papers. The world was full of refugees and people who were lost. Levi’s account is central to that. He, once again, uses the idea of a chemical element to tell the story of how he survived in a concentration camp and, later on, he tells a story—a little more slippery—of the identification of his Auschwitz slave master from the characteristic misspelling of an element in a consignment of goods. This too is a book that I refer to again and again and not just because he signed it for me! Yes, I know that that is what people want but whenever I write for anybody, all I want is for the reader to read it. I don’t care what it is that makes him or her read it but I do want them to read it. And any literary trick, imagery, bit of poetry, bit of hooptedoodle—as John Steinbeck called it—anything you can use to keep the reader reading is legitimate. In the case of Mailer and Levi, they know what they’re doing and they’re doing it in a very accomplished way. Even when they’re doing it badly, Mailer is doing it well. But the notion of a formula for science writing is one we should discard. It’s about understanding the world, it’s not about understanding science. Science is just a tool for unlocking some of the mysteries and puzzles that we’re all privy to. We’ve got a fine example of it in the clarity of Haldane, who I’m fond of quoting as the man who once said that, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose.” Although that’s simple and clear and unmistakable, it also seems, to me, to be quite profound and an idea that can take you in any direction."

"Not only is it the beginning of the universe, it’s the beginning of books about the universe — as far as I’m concerned. Until 1965, there was no evidence whatsoever that the universe had a beginning. The Penzias and Wilson findings begin there and it took another decade or so before anyone actually said ‘Yes, you were right.’ So, when Weinberg wrote The First Three Minutes, he was, essentially, the first popular science writer to take the subject up and run with it. He did it in a way that ought to appeal to every journalist’s heart. First of all, he’s got the title The First Three Minutes . You can’t beat it. I always say that the best books tell you in a sentence all you need to know about them — like Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire . It’s not about the rise of the Roman Republic. In the case of Crime and Punishment you get the crime and you get the punishment. In the case of The First Three Minutes , that’s also what you get. It’s a book that confines itself almost in its entirety to what happened sometime during the first second and it more or less stops at two minutes fifty-nine. After that, he says, nothing else interesting happened for the next 430,000 years. It’s full of wonderful lines like that. “Einstein remarked that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe was that it was comprehensible.” It instantly became a bestseller and that is quite a rare thing. There’s always a reason why a book becomes an instant bestseller. In the case of Weinberg, it became a Fontana Modern Classic because it sold a lot. You saw people reading it. And when you read it, you worked out why. It was an example of clarity and focus and sympathy for the unaware. He handles the timing of immense events happening inside a space so short that we can’t really imagine it at all and yet we can and we have and he’s imagined it beautifully. Like Haldane, he has a gift for saying things that you don’t forget. Einstein remarked that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe was that it was comprehensible. Weinberg tops that by saying, very near the end, that the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless — which, again, is a line that you don’t forget. And to have written a line that you don’t forget is, in itself, an achievement that very few of us are going to be able to record. All of his books are distinguished by a preparedness to be wrong. In two of his books he observes that we might just be too stupid to understand what’s going on, in the sense that you can’t expect a dog to understand chemistry. Yes, queerer than we can suppose. I suppose, in a way, we’ve described an arc with these books and I didn’t know that when I chose them. There is a logic to the succession of them. There was a mix of reasons for that. I could have chosen any one of at least three books by Richard Dawkins and at least three books by Richard Fortey. Then there is Edward O. Wilson for whom I have an unequivocal admiration. Lawrence Krauss is no mean thing. I’ve known Paul Davies for years and I think his stuff is terrific. In the end, I decided that I would sit on all of the ones who are still alive, except for Steven Weinberg. All the others are dead. The reason I’m happy to talk about the Weinberg is because even before preparing for this interview I’d already read it three times. The most recent was only a couple of years ago. I chose to re-review it because I enjoyed it so much. That tells you something about a book. Books that endure have a value that ephemeral books cannot ever match. Yes, I wanted books that I wouldn’t wish to be without. That’s a very large group, by the way, and is immensely catholic. There are brilliant women scientists and there are brilliant women science writers like Lisa Randall. Weinberg had the advantage because he was the first. In that sense, Homer had the advantage because he was the first. We’re always going to read Homer. In the case of Weinberg, once he’d written The First Three Minutes he’d set a standard for everyone else that follows."