Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding

30:00There is something about that sort of terrifying or, but I think there it's also a kind of an or just at the sheer feet of engineering that they represent that was done by obviously, you know, by hand. I mean, with very sort of primitive machinery for lifting and so on, but there was no mechanization there. The fact that these places were built and that they are still standing so many of them after a thousand years is truly extraordinary. And I think, I mean, I thought you might be talking about the fact that you do also, literally, and some of these cathedrals have the demons around you, the gargoyles, sort of up there, looking down at you.

30:41I think that to some extent, and we can see this in what was actually depicted, to some extent there's a playfulness there that I think people have always had, that this stone mason's had. There's a delight that they had in creating these grotesque and often quite playful carvings. High up there, sort of out of sight perhaps of the priests where they were free to let their imagination have free reign. Why are you so much late medieval culture or science? You could say music, tapestry work, concentrated in northern France. What was special about that region at the time? The early Gothic era certainly did starter in northern France, so it's this region called the Yield de France.

31:24So it's the region, I suppose it's within, I can't remember quite what distance it's typically said to be, but I think within about 50 mile radius of Paris. It was absolutely that was a center of learning at that time. Britain, I have to say, England was very much an intellectual backwater at that time. So France was certainly one of the regions where there was this Resurgence of learning there was some of it happening in Germany as well But France was a more unified country and it had been so to some extent ever since the Emperor Chalmein in the ninth century so it had had this stability and Chalmein in fact himself was famously wanted to sort of bring about a sort of Resurgence of learning it only really kicked off around the the 11th century 11th 12th centuries are often called the medieval Renaissance.

32:13But I have to say that a lot of that learning was imported, was brought from the Islamic countries, from Spain, which was occupied by what were then called the Maurs. And because in the centuries preceding that era, that was the era of the golden age of learning in the Islamic nations. They, the Islamic scholars, translated a lot of the works of the ancient Greek Sarastopol and Plato and many others into Arabic. And the European scholars, many of them from France, but also from Germany and from Britain, were coming down to Spain to get hold of those works and to translate them to learn Arabic and to translate them from Arabic to Latin.

32:59And so that was really what created this influx of learning into Western Europe at that time. It was coming from translations of Arabic works. if we think of the 17th century scientific revolution in England, putting aside the longer term role of the church and preserving manuscripts and the like. But do you view Christianity as being a net positive or net negative behind that development? I guess I feel in a way that's a question that it's hard to see what the counterfactuals would be to that because history is history, right? So to all of the scientists in the, certainly in the 17th century, the time that's often called the scientific revolution, Christianity was just a given, the fact that God existed and you know, no one really at that time questioned that.

33:50They had different ways of understanding that and of expressing that, but for those scholars, you know, that was just a given and so that informed everything that they were doing. So it, for some people, for example, the Anglo -Irish scientist, as we now see him, Robert Boyle in the 17th century, it was a Christian mission to try to find out all that we could about God's creation, about this world that God had created. That was a duty, a Christian duty, to be curious, to be interested in everything in nature and boil would make these long lists, this sort of random list of things he wanted to find out about, things he wanted to discover.

34:33It was really the first golden age of curiosity that time. And I think that's, to my mind, that's a better way of looking at it than calling it the scientific revolution. It was the age when curiosity was kind of liberated. So there was in early times, in medieval times, there was often a sense expressed by some theologians that curiosity was something to be at best cautious of and it was very suspicious of or even condemning of because they saw it as a prying into things that it was not humankind's preserve to ask about. By the 17th century, really through the process of the Renaissance and the humanism and the resurgence of learning, it had become, it became acceptable to have this almost universal curiosity about the world.

35:22And that's absolutely something that we see in people like Boyle and Newton and the Fellows of the Royal Society in London, but also of other scientific societies that started elsewhere in Europe. And as I say, underpinning all of that was a profound religious faith. So sometimes that was, you know, a motivation for that curiosity. And sometimes it was in the case of Isaac Newton, for example. That was the framework within which he was developing his theory of gravitation. The question with the picture that he presented of the planets, you know, revolving around the sun and the moon revolving around the earth because of gravitational force being held there by gravity.

36:05That was all very well, but the question was, well, how did that get started? What got them moving in the first place? We understand now that once they are moving, they'll continue to do so. For Newton, that wasn't really a question at all, because of course God did it. It was God's creation, and it gave a coherence really to the picture that he was looking for. I mean, you can certainly find, of course, the obvious counter -example is the persecution of Galileo, which is often sort of misrepresented. Galileo was, to some extent, the architect of his own misfortune, which is in no way to excuse the kind of treatment that he got from the Catholic Church.

36:43So there were absolutely, there were tensions between this new understanding, this new way of thinking about the world and the old idea, according to some, that, you know, you shouldn't ask too much, or that it was, well, it was just God that did it all. There were tensions there, but I don't know that we need sort of see that as weighing in the balance, the pros and the cons. It was simply how history was, it was simply how ideas evolved. So, yeah, I kind of, you know, for most of the history of science, religion has been there as the backdrop, whether it's Islam or whether it's Christianity or whether it's Judaism, it's been there, and science developed.

37:22So, you know, I think this idea that there was somehow a big tension between science and religion. In many ways, it's a modern construct. It's something that really only started to become emphasized in the late 19th century. For various reasons, for various prelimical reasons, I don't think it's something that we can really see throughout the history of science. Now, you've written a book about myths. Do you think there were myths from the last ten or twenty years that will stick? say the way Robin Caruso is still around as a story or Sherlock Holmes is still around. What would those myths be?

37:58Yeah. Or would we stop producing them? No, I'm sure we haven't stopped producing them. So my book about myths was actually about what I call the modern myths and it's exactly those stories. So I'd begin with the earliest one that I look at from early modern times is Robinson Caruso. It wasn't difficult to identify the candidates for that sort of status. So they were things like Frankenstein, Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, Sherlock Holmes, and the latest myth I look at in that book is Batman. So, you know, that's 100 years old now, actually. It's amazing to think that that's the case, but it virtually is.

38:33And I don't think there's any reason to believe that we have stopped this process of inventing modern myths. I feel that it probably takes at least 50 years before some new narrative clearly acquires that sort of mythic status. And I think that one of them that is now emerging that has is the zombie myth. I mean, the idea of zombies is an old one. It started to become popularized in sort of Western culture in the 1930s. But I think it was really crystallized in the horror movie, the movie horror films of the 1960s, particularly the George Romero films. So I think that we now all have a sense that the zombie myth is something about the zombie apocalypse.

39:16and so it's not individuals on these, it's the, we're being, you know, the humanities overrun by a horde of mindless zombies. And that's, you know, so that's the sort of basis of the myth. We sort of have that now. And I think that we're going to continue, I think it's inevitable that we're going to continue to develop myths because what I argue in that book is that we have these narratives acquire mythic status is because they satisfy some need in us to explore anxieties, social anxieties in stories, in a way that allows us to look at them and explore them and think about them, myths are tools for thinking with.

39:57They don't have a moral, they don't have a clear conclusion, they allow us to explore those anxieties and there will always, sadly, there will always be new anxieties, the race we are starting to see, we already have to some extent a mythology of AI. That's absolutely going to be a nexus around which certain mythologies are going to start growing. And that's because it's a new technology, it's an old idea, but now that it's becoming a reality, those anxieties are really, really strong and with us and prevalent.

40:35And so pros and cons to that because the myth that we have around AI, and it's one that's being fed at the moment sometimes by tech companies, even, is the AI apocalypse. The AI take over that we suddenly AI becomes super intelligent, and it has no need for us and it wipes out humanity. That I think is a very convenient myth for AI companies, because it's something that's sort of out there in the indefinite future, and they can say, oh, sure, we're worrying about that, we're taking care of that. Whereas the real dangers and risks and things to be worried about with AI are much more mundane things that are here and now, you know, deep fakes, the production of misinformation.

41:17Trivial but but sometimes important misuses of AI because we attribute it too much power. Those are the things that we should really be concerned about now. So, you know, it could be that the myths that we develop kind of get in the way of the things we should really be worrying about in the here and now. Let's turn now to your new book again, How Life Works, a user's guide to the new biology, which I enjoyed very much and learned a great deal from. A simple question. Let's say an octopus loses an arm, and then the arm can grow back. Sort of what exactly in the octopus knows to grow the arm back, and where to have that growth stop.

41:58What's regulating this response? Because if I lose an arm, that doesn't grow back, right? I don't have that regulator. Yeah, yeah. This is an extremely active area of current research. My knowledge of Octopus anatomy is not sufficient to know whether altipuses can do that. I suspect they can't, but I may be wrong, but some creatures can, and certainly salamanders can, and axolotls can, they can regrow limbs that they have lost. So some creatures, some complex creatures, can do this. And we don't know exactly what enables them to do that, other than that in order to do that, you will have to have a reserve of something like stem cells, something that maintains a kind of stem cell like state, like the cells that we grew from in the early embryo.

42:46Those are stem cells that in the early embryo, they're able to grow to any tissue type in the body. And in our bodies, we have what are called adult stem cells, which can produce a limited number of tissue types. So we have them, for example, in our bone marrow, they continue to produce different types of cells in our blood, but they can't produce muscle cells or brain cells or something. Whereas in creatures that can regenerate their limbs, they seem to have a kind of stem cell that can regrow into many different, into all the tissue types that that limb requires. The question of how that is done in a body that is already grown, rather than an embryo where everything is growing and communicating and finding its way together, that is a profound one that I think we don't yet fully know the answer to.

43:41It's an area of intense research at the moment, not least because it raises that prospect of regenerative medicine, perhaps even in humans. So if we understood how that is possible in a complex creature like an axolotl, might it not be possible to develop some kind of capability like that in humans? We don't know the answer to that, but it's not obviously the case that we couldn't. Are you, or believe the axolotl cells are doing computational work? Is that one way to put it? That could be one way to put it. Certainly, it's got to be a sort of collaborative process that the cells will have to be communicating with each other and communicating with other cells in at least some part of the rest of the body, in order to figure out, literally, where they are and what they have to become as a result of that.

44:30So that is a kind of computation of, you know, one cell communicating with those around it and so forth. So that could be one way of thinking about it, but we don't know the language really of that computation, other than that we know that cells communicate with one another in various ways. They can exchange chemical signals just as they do in our synapses, in our brains. They can exchange mechanical signals so that if you tug on the membrane of a cell, that can induce the cell to do something or to grow or develop in a certain way that it wouldn't have done otherwise, and they also communicate electrically.

45:07So not just neurons, but all cell types pretty much in the human body have the potential to communicate with one another to sense the electric signals that other cells can produce and to respond to those. We know the languages that cells use, but we don't really understand the kinds of conversations that they're having in a creature like an axelothal to produce, you know, a fully formed, fully developed replacement limb. Do you think that my cells are doing computational work in a way that, though I cannot regrow a limb, in some manner makes me smarter? There's this big, well it's an argument really, sometimes it's a raging argument in neuroscience about whether we should think of the brain as a kind of computer, whether it's doing computation or not.

45:53And no one agrees about this. So I'm fairly agnostic on this except that I have a feeling that it's not necessarily the most useful way to think about what's going on during cognition, to think of it as being just like the kind of computation that's going on in the, you know, electrolytic circuits of our laptops. But you can see why that analogy is made because the neurons in our brains and other cell types are wired into networks that are clearly sending electrical pulses to one another and triggering each other to do likewise. So, you know, it looks very much like, in some ways, like the exchange of electrical pulses between transistors on silicon chips.

46:35But there are differences in that process as well, sometimes profound differences. And so, it's really not clear at the moment whether there is any straightforward or even any translation at all between the kind of computation that is done by silicon circuits and the kind of cognitive processing that is being done by neurons. But you're an atheist, doesn't it total logically have to be computation? So no one ever said it had to be like a computer like I have on my desk. But it's in some manner, you know, in the touring sense, a computation. Well, that's the thing. It really depends on the, you know, the context you're talking about.

47:15I mean, there are people, there are physicists who say, well, in some sense, we can think of everything that happens in the universe as a kind of computation of particles interacting with one another and responding to one another. And certainly, we can develop a quantum mechanical description of what's going on in terms of the exchange of bits of quantum information between particles. So that's one way of looking at it. If we mean computation in that sense of, you know, simply interactions between particles, then sure. I think, you know, that's at the most fundamental level that seems to be what we're going to find.

47:54But, you know, whether that means we can use fully use computational concepts to try to understand brain circuitry is another matter entirely. I mean, we, you know, talk it in some ways. We talk about them in similar terms. We talk about memory and data storage and so on. And I think there are absolutely analogies to be had there. Whether they're strict formal parallels between those two processes, I think, is something that is, it's yet to be decided. And perhaps more importantly, it's yet to be decided whether that will be a useful way to think about those two processes, whether it will help neuroscientists formulate theories and understanding of how the brain works.

48:41I think that's still an open question. Tell us why you reject Richard Dawkins' vision of the selfish gene, as his book was titled. Okay. I think it's actually not quite as straightforward as rejecting it. You know, when I was writing my book, I wanted to think, you know, clearly this has been an extremely productive metaphor and way of portraying certainly what goes on in evolutionary biology. So I don't think it would be fair or proper to simply say, well that's nonsense, you know, it's time to get rid of that. So in what way has it been useful? How to put it in the right container, I suppose.

49:18And the way I saw it as this, I'm going to get, you know, set aside the question of selfishness, which I'll turn back to in a minute, whether that's a good metaphor, but the idea that we can essentially reduce everything in biology to what the genes are doing. That is a picture that has been very productive to evolutionary geneticists, to understand how particular mutations of genes alleles, as they call different variations of a given gene, how they spread in a population. So if you get an alleles arise, the mutation of a gene that conveys some kind of property on the organism that gives it an adaptive advantage, advantage, you know, in competition with all the others, then that alley always likely to spread because that organism will have more offspring and so on.

50:10And all of that is, you know, this is standard neo -toll windian theory and all of that is perfectly valid. So within that picture, a gene -centered view of that process of how alleles spread. You know, has been useful in that arena. The problem I have is when that comes to be seen as the basis for understanding everything that life is. Because, you know, the problem with that is that there is no life in that picture. It's as simple as that. I think it's really interesting that what happens there, that the genes themselves in that picture are portrayed as little agents. You know, Richard Dawkins, more or less explicitly, does that.

50:47Of course, he's not saying they have any, you know, any purposes or any goals or intentions or any life in reality, but that is how they are portrayed as though they are little organisms competing with one another, with goals, their goal being to replicate as much as possible. Even the fact that they can replicate, their portrayed as being able to replicate, no gene replicates. Genes are replicated, they are replicated within cells by cells. And that's an important distinction if we're going to think about how life works. but it may not be an important distinction to make in the context of evolutionary genetics.

51:24So that's really where I want to sort of locate that picture of that sort of gene -centric view, that it's a particular model, and the selfish gene metaphor is a metaphor for that particular model, for use within evolutionary genetics. It does not speak about what genes are in a biochemical sense, or what they are in a developmental sense. And in fact, it seems fairly clear that when we're talking about genes in terms of how an organism develops and what the role this particular bit of the DNA seems to play in that development, that's a rather different notion of a gene to this notion of the selfish gene in a pool of different alleles replicating.

52:10The evolutionary gene and the developmental gene aren't necessarily the same thing. And certainly when we try to think about a gene in molecular terms, it's become very fuzzy. More and more fuzzy, the more we've looked into what genomes really are, you know, what they really do. And what our DNA does and what the different sequences of DNA do, we find that what we think of as genes seem to overlap. There are some things that we call pseudo genes that maybe once were genes, and aren't any longer, but maybe they can come back as genes. There are regions outside the parts that we think of as genes that actually seem to have some important role in development.

52:48So the whole picture becomes very fuzzy. And also within that picture, I think the question of selfishness is important, because the selfishness refers to the tendency of a particular gene variant, an allele, to spread at the expense of other variants of that particular gene. That's very different from the notion of a set of genes in a genome working together to make an organism. But they have to work together to make an organism. So they're not competing with each other. The gene that produces one enzyme isn't competing with a gene that produces some other enzyme. They have to work together. So they're cooperative.

53:27So I think that that selfish metaphor isn't saying anything about what genes do biochemically. It's talking about that particular model. But say I want to defend the gene -centered view. It seems to me that CRISPR actually works. It's not counteracted by some complex set of macro interactions. If I look at genetically modified foods, corn, rice, and we apply genetic modification, it's quite predictable what will result, right? We're just not surprised at what we get. Yeah. Isn't that evidence that the gene -centered view, while maybe incomplete? In predictive terms is really doing very well. Like what would be a prediction your biological ecosystem view has in those cases that the gene -centered view would not have?

54:13Well, I don't see it as a, I mean, this isn't some rival to that position. This is an expression of what we have an attempt to summarize what we have learned over the past 10 or 20, the 30 years since the Human Geno project really about the way life really functions. And within that, it's absolutely beyond question that genes have a central role to play. Of course they do. They are the things that we that we inherit from one generation to the next. And it's absolutely the case, as you say, that we can use now a gene editing technique like CRISPR, and we're getting better ones now, more accurate ones even.

54:52We can use that to address some diseases that are caused by a gene mutation. So it's being used, for example, to cure sickle cell anemia, which it comes about because of a mutation to one particular gene. It's possible that it might be used for things like cystic fibrosis for which that is also true. All of these applications are for diseases that are in sickle cell anemia, maybe this is less so, but most of them are rare. And they are caused by, they They are traced back to, I should perhaps say, just one particular gene, or maybe, you know, might be a couple of genes, they're monogenic. In those situations, we can edit that gene, whether in principle, in the embryo, or sometimes in the adult body, as being done in sicker cell anemia.

55:41We can make that edit, and we can have a predictable response. On the whole, a predictable response from that edit. So that's absolutely true because the condition is being caused by a single gene. Most of the health conditions that concern the developed world are most in fact, the concern the entire world, you know, heart conditions, obesity, diabetes, as well as just about all the traits, the physical traits we have, you know, height and intelligence and so on cannot be traced back to just one or two genes. They seem to be correlated with, so differences in different individuals seem to be correlated with differences in the genetic profile of many genes, sometimes hundreds, sometimes even thousands of genes.

56:30So you know, a significant part of our total complement of genes. That has what's become clear and that is why it's not at all clear that techniques like and CRISPR gene editing are going to be at all useful to address diseases like that. Not only because you'd have so many targets you'd have to try to hit and you're going to get some off -target hits and you know that's going to cause problems, but also because all of those genes they're not just involved in that one thing. They're doing all kinds of tasks. They're doing many things. And so if you start changing them around you don't know what else you're going to be producing what other kind of phenotypic changes you're going to produce.

57:11And so what we need to understand is not to identify the genes and think we can address the problem there because or the you know the condition there because it's a rising at some other level in the organism at a higher level in somehow in the way all these genes are interacting with each other and with the other components of the genome or with the other components of the body, perhaps in directing cells to do something different, it's at a higher level that the real causation of a lot of these conditions arises. And so it's there that we need to be thinking about intervening. That's really one of the messages that I'm wanting to try to get across in the book.

57:51So it absolutely doesn't bring into question that idea that for some conditions we can identify specific genes that are in a real sense the cause of that outcome. But for most of the way life works, for most of the things we're interested in in development and in medicine, that's not going to do the job. We have to have a higher level understanding of how that condition, how that trait is coming about. That's a more complex business that I'm trying to kind of tease apart in my book. I have some general questions about science for you. So I read Carl Friston with the free energy principle, the notion that it makes sense to understand systems as somehow minimizing the difference between the state of affairs prevailing at a moment in the goals of an organism.

58:39In psychology, this translates into some view of minimizing surprise, think somehow happens so that what the agent expects and what happens, those two are brought together. I mean, are these useful ideas, or are they just semantic reorganizations, or scientists picking up on this? What's the status of all this work? So this is the so -called free energy principle that... Yeah. Yeah, the Carl Friston, if it's called as neuroscientist at UCL here, has been a central proponent of. And I see different views on this. I think it's too early to say to what extent it will be useful. I find it a very interesting idea and a lot of neuroscientists are looking into ways in which they might be able to use this idea to formulate and maybe even to answer questions.

59:26And it is something that can be formalized. There is a mathematical theory behind it. But others have said, and I think this is a common complaint I might have about these kind of, in some ways, they tend to be theories of everything. or theories of a very big thing at least, sometimes in order to be so, they become so abstract, so mathematically abstract, that it becomes very hard to see how you relate the ideas, which are interesting and maybe even producers of in themselves, but how to relate them to the lab work that a biologist, that a neuroscientist is doing. How does it relate to what they're actually finding out?

1:00:07How does it help them to pose new questions and to construct and devise new experiments. And so, you know, I think at the moment it feels to me as though it's at the stage of quite an abstract idea that people are trying to find ways of turning into something more concrete to address a specific problem, whether it's in neuroscience or elsewhere, or maybe even computer science, to see whether it's going to be useful. But, you know, I applaud the fact that we have theories like this at a very general theory sort of trying to understand something like in this case, Carl thinks that in some sense it can be considered a generalized theory of agency.

1:00:46And whether or not that's true, I think that a generalized theory of agency is absolutely something that science needs. I have a number of friends who seem to be quite worried that they have too many microplastics in their testicles and in their bodies more generally. Is there serious evidence behind that worry? I, well, I mean, whether I haven't followed the work on whether they're accumulating in the testicles, it would be certainly concerning if that was the case. And there has been discussions about whether plastic pollution has some kind of role in what we seem to see as a declining end sperm count in male fertility.

1:01:23In the more general sense, microplastics are absolute, there's clear evidence that it's a problem that you see them everywhere. You see them in the Antarctic. you see them in marine organisms, it's very clear that they're now a global pollution problem. And one that's very... What's the harm to me as a body? I don't think we know yet. Actually, I mean, I think that's the problem, that it's maybe still too early to know to what extent that's going to be a problem. I mean, I can't help feeling that any substance that doesn't break down, that simply accumulates in the body in this way, that doesn't sound like something that you want to have happening in your bodies, and in your tissues, it's also sometimes suggested that some of the additives, the plasticizers that are added to plastics like this, can function a little bit, they look chemically or a little bit like certain hormones, and they, so they can mimic hormones and induce hormonal changes in the body.

1:02:20And there's a lot of research going to that at the moment that I'm absolutely not an expert in, but that's one of the concerns that's being raised about them. A Michael Webb put forward the hypothesis that progress in science has declined radically in percentage terms, and he points out in terms of the number of scientists we have many, many, many more, not to mention more in China, more in India, more around the world, yet overall rates of productivity growth. They're not higher, they're actually somewhat lower than say the 1960s. We now have many more women in science, so has there been this radical slowdown in the pace of actual discovery per scientist, not in absolute terms, but per worker.

1:03:00Like our scientists today, per worker, just much worse. Just worse. No more. Yeah, good question. There have been some studies that have tried to quantify this, and there have been suggestions that actually transformational discoveries seem to be slowing down more recently. I mean, that seems a bit of an odd thing to say in this of, you know, we talked about AI, but also biotechnologies, some of the biotechnologies that are, you know, appearing today are so incredibly powerful and transformative. I mean, I guess I, I, I'd say, first of all that it's not entirely obvious that we can expect to see advances in scientific understanding relating to productivity growth.

1:03:43It depends what science we're doing, you know, certainly if we're trying to understand the topology of the universe, say, we can't expect to see much commercial return from that or certainly not directly. But I think that what I do see happening is that the expansion of science, really, that maybe it is, to some extent, a victim of its own success, that you see the institutionalization, the increasing institutionalization of science. I think sometimes it seems that it gives rise to a more conservative approach to things, more cautious approach to things so that it becomes harder for scientists who are working at what you might think as a more high -risk frontier of research.

1:04:28It becomes harder for them to do that, becomes harder for them to find funding, becomes harder for them to get their papers published because of this, this, this increasing caution there. So there's a sort of what statisticians might say are aggression to the mean. Everything becomes a little bit more mediocre and safe and a lot of people in science complain that blue skies research, as they call it, research that is just saying, what if? What happens if? What would happen? Just curiosity -driven research. That's becoming harder and harder to do because there's an increasing demand for short -term commercial return on scientific research.

1:05:07And that, you know, perhaps gives rise to a greater timidity in what science is being permitted. So I think that that does seem to be a problem. You know, I think it's hard to know what to expect, I have to say, because one could also argue, well, we've got all their low -hanging fruit, right? You know, all the sort of easier stuff to figure out about how the world works and about what things to make. We've kind of done that, and now we're onto the really hard stuff. It's sort of diminishing returns. Now, I don't know if that's true. I think that there are still immense questions that we haven't answered in science, but they seem to be incredibly hard ones.

1:05:43Questions like, why is consciousness switch? You know, we don't even know if science will ever really answer that, whether it's a philosophical question, but it's possible that part of that decline in science is because we're looking at more challenging problems now. Last set of questions is about you. What's your favorite science fiction book? Ooh, that's a very nice question. I don't read as much science fiction as I used to, but I used to be, I read all of Philip K. Dick's books really in my younger years, and I think they were, they had that kind of mythic quality that I found in those older myths that I talked about.

1:06:21And I also devoured the works of J .G. Ballard, which is very interesting to me how back in those days, Ballard was just kind of dismissed as a genre writer, a science fiction writer, you know, and he never had any proper characters and so forth. than these days, Ballard is seen as a total visionary, as he clearly is. He saw so much of what was coming back in the 1960s. So I would certainly name those two as two of my favorite science fiction writers. Now you do not have a traditional academic post and for a long time have not had one. If you meet a young writer who's very smart, great worker, and he or she wants to go into science writing, what advice do you give or what is it they should know that maybe they don't know?

1:07:03Because you've done it. Yeah, well, I guess I did it back in the day when one could just kind of wander randomly into it, as I did, whereas these days it's much more professionalised and I think that's very good, that you can now take causes in science journalism and learn how to do things properly in a way that I had to learn on the job in a very sort of messy way. So, you know, I absolutely think that that would be something I would recommend get a training in science journalism because some of them are very good. They will equip you to do what you want to do. I would say for anyone thinking about wanting to go into a science book writing, it's really important that you aren't doing it so that you're going to become rich because I mean it's the same for any writer actually, you know, this is not way to become rich.

1:07:53You have to love what you're doing. You have to have a real passion for what you're doing. And I think certainly for book writing, it feels to me like, you have to have something to say. It's not enough there to just do a translation job of a difficult field. You really need to have something to bring to it, some insight to bring to it. So figure out what it is you want to say and figure out what kind of voice you want to say it in. And the way to do that is to read, to read very widely and to find out what works for you, what sort of voice works for you. So with someone who's written about 30 science books and most of them have more than one thing to say, like what trade is it in you that has given rise to you having so many things to say relative to so many of your peers?

1:08:39Well, I'd like to... What's the sauce in Philip Ball, the secret sauce? I'd hesitate to put it that way when somebody of my peers do such a fantastic job. But I think for me what it is is that I have this extremely privileged position of being able to choose a topic and spend two, three, however many years, really digging into it. And so I've always felt given that opportunity, I've really want to make the best use of it that I can. and so I want to continually be finding out about new topics to take the opportunity to discover something entirely new. So there are some writers, not just in science, who think who decide this is going to be my area, I'm going to become a specialist in this area, I'm going to become known for writing about this topic.

1:09:30That's fine, you know, if that's if you clearly want to do that. But for me, it's just such a wonderful opportunity to express my and you know give free reign to my curiosity to find out about these new topics and they pop up. They suggest themselves with, you know, I would never have imagined myself, you know, way back when working for nature writing a book about Gothic cathedrals that presented itself in one way or another. The more I started looking into it, the more I thought there's a story here and it's a story that I haven't really seen told. A story about how the cathedrals were built in connection with an emerging new view of the cosmos, a new view of how the world worked in the Middle Ages.

1:10:15So that's the kind of thing that I look for. I'm waiting for the sort of penny to drop of aha. I can see something new in here. And this is an area that I'm going to be enriched by spending two or three years finding out about. Before I pose my last question, just again, your latest book, How Life Works, a user's guide to the new biology? Final query. What will you do next? Ah, now that I have to keep under wraps. Well, I've just had a book deal pretty much agreed and I'm going to keep that under wraps for now. But I can want to tell you is next next, that is the book that is going to come out later this year, which I've already written.

1:10:57It's a relatively short book because it's highly illustrated. I've done one or two others of this sort with the same publisher. And it's an illustrated history of alchemy. So that's what I've been writing since finishing How Life Works. I've had a fantastic, as I knew I would, I've had a fantastic time writing it. And I know that because I've worked with these people before, it is going to look absolutely gorgeous. So an illustrated history of alchemy. Philip Ball, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

1:11:36If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm Attyler Cowan, and the show is At Cowan Convose. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.