David Lindley
Describe your latest project.
I started noticing some time ago that Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, a central element of quantum mechanics, had become one of those grand ideas that gets bandied about in all sorts of contexts — such as an episode of The West Wing — whether or not the people doing the bandying actually have any clear idea what the principle means.
So I wrote Uncertainty partly to explain how Heisenberg arrived at his strange idea, and a good way to do that was to describe the enormous confusion in physics in the 1920s, when the modern theory of quantum mechanics was painfully emerging. But in telling the story I found myself delving into the very different ways of thinking of such people as Heisenberg, Bohr, and Einstein, and trying to understand how their attitudes and preconceptions shaped the debate. I tried to convey the idea that there is no one way to do science — individual scientists have their own particular talents and failings, their predilections and aversions, and it's only through a community effort that all their contributions merge into a coherent whole. Although in the case of quantum mechanics, it remains questionable whether real coherence has been achieved. In some ways the debate that the pioneers of the subject began is still going on.
I think part of the fascination for non-scientists of ideas such as the uncertainty principle is that it quickly becomes evident that physicists themselves don't completely agree on what it means, and haven't yet resolved all its strange implications for the way we understand the physical world.
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"A good overview of a historic scientific debate." Kirkus Reviews
"[D]elightful....Lindley brings to life a critical period in the history of science, explaining complex issues to the general reader, presenting the major players in an engaging fashion..." Publishers Weekly
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"Whether or not readers buy Lindley's judgment, they're well served by his first-rate exposition of the state of the science." Kirkus Reviews
What inspires you to sit down and write?
If I can write about something, it means I understand it — well enough, anyway. And if I'm struggling to write, it means I haven't understood whatever it is I'm trying to explain. So writing is my way of putting my thoughts on some subject into a coherent form. And then, like most writers, I have the absurd idea that the world will want to share in my hard-won understanding.
Describe your favorite childhood teacher and how that teacher influenced you.
Chemistry wasn't my favorite subject, but I had a great teacher, Mr. Day, who encouraged us to think for ourselves rather than dutifully following the textbook. He really conveyed a feeling that science was a way of figuring things out, not learning a bunch of rules. On top of that, he stopped me one day in the corridor and asked me if I had thought about applying to go to Oxford or Cambridge — I hadn't, and he said, well, you should, so I owe him for that.
Chess or video games?
Neither, although I like to play unserious bridge (meaning that wine and pizza are essential, and table talk is admissible).
What do you do for relaxation?
Mainly I like to fix things around the house. Spackling an old wall can be surprisingly soothing — and at the end of it you've got a nice smooth wall. My proudest achievement was putting up a drywall ceiling in the basement of my old house — single-handed.
What was your favorite book as a kid?
Through my early teens I devoured all kinds of science fiction, and one book that I still remember is Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, which in essence is about humanity as we know it coming to end but graduating to a new level of consciousness and ability. Clarke was scientifically savvy, of course, but he wasn't a nerd — his books had a great sense of the mysterious and wondrous qualities that scientific understanding can bring.
What was your best subject in high school? Your worst?
I was good at all the sciences, and I liked languages too. I wanted to take German as well the usual trio of physics, chemistry, and math in my last two years at school (this was in England), but the way lessons were scheduled didn't allow any such unorthodox combination. Knowing some German was helpful for Uncertainty, as quite a bit of the scientific correspondence from that era has not yet been translated into English.
Probably my worst subject was music, contrary to the common wisdom that mathematical and musical ability are related. In fact, I dropped music altogether, which I now regret, as I've come to appreciate various kinds of music over the years but still have only the barest understanding of how it works.
What are some of the things you'd like your computer to do that it cannot now do?
More often I find myself wishing my computer would stop doing things that it seems to do of its own accord: downloading endless updates to programs I don't use, whimsically reformatting paragraphs when I cut and paste, and so on. At least I figured out early on how to banish the annoying Mr Paperclip, which I think of as a digital implementation of Uriah Heep, all fawning and so very 'umble.
By the end of your life, where do you think humankind will be in terms of new science and technological advancement?
Scientists are quickly learning how to manipulate organisms, including ourselves, at the molecular and genetic level, but at the same time they're finding that the ramifications of this kind of tinkering are often far more complicated and subtle than they had expected. So I expect there will be enormous advances in our understanding of all the diseases of aging, for example, which involve the failure of our molecular machinery. But at the same time I have a feeling that these diseases are so complex that we will still be treating them in a piecemeal, trial and error kind of way.
Which country do you believe currently leads the world in science and technology? In ten years?
For now the U.S. holds the lead, and that will probably still be true ten years from now. But don't be surprised if China has surpassed us in some respects, particularly in nanotechnology and materials science.
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David Lindley holds a Ph.D. in astrophysics and has been an editor at Nature, Science, and Science News. He is the author of The End of Physics, Degrees Kelvin, Where Does the Weirdness Go?, and Boltzmann's Atom. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia.
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