What’s on your bookshelf ?
We asked Jim Al-Khalili, Professor of Physics and Public Engagement in Science, to tell us about five books on his bookshelf. Jim has recently been elected Fellow of the Royal Society for his work on the neutron halo, as well as his dedicated service to public engagement. He also presents The Life Scientific on Radio 4 and has fronted a number of radio and television documentaries.
Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
For some reason I got round to reading this classic novel recently. It is a hugely powerful anti-war sci-fi novel about one man’s reluctant recollections trudging through Germany towards the end of World War II. It’s full of jumps through time and not told in chronological order. It’s also full of very quotable philosophical observations that touched me profoundly.
Human 3WW.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Max Tegmark)
Artificial Intelligence is developing so fast at the moment that I have a genuine concern that society hasn’t engaged in enough debate about its implications beyond the headline-grabbing superintelligence taking over the world, as in Skynet in the Terminator movies, or the worries about AI taking our jobs. So, this recent book by the Swedish- American physicist Max Tegmark is a must-read. I have only recently
started it and so it is technically not on my bookshelf but in my bag, and gets pulled out on train journeys.
Many Worlds? Everett, Quantum Theory and Reality (edited by Simon Saunders et al)
OK, this one is heavy going. It is a 600+ page monograph on the latest thinking on the meaning of quantum physics with contributions from some of the most influential scientific thinkers in the world today. Hugh Everett was an American physicist who came up with the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, which describes the strangeness of the subatomic world as the result of overlapping parallel universes. But this is a proper physics textbook and not science fiction.
Secularism: Politics, Religion and Freedom (Andrew Copson)
I served for three years as president of the British Humanist Association (now Humanists UK) and found it
tremendously rewarding. This secular organisation promotes a rationalist, secular and evidence-based ideology and tries to ensure that no privileges or preferential treatment are given to people or organisations, whether religious or not, in society. In the face of rising religious extremist ideologies I feel a book like this is vitally important, and Copson is a brilliant and persuasive writer.
Ce que la science sait du monde de demain (Jim Al-Khalili ed.)
Yeah, yeah, I know, one of my own books! But in fact, I’m very proud of this, the first of my books to be translated into French. They have appeared so far in 24 other languages, but France has traditionally been quite a hard nut to crack. The publishers have sent me a dozen copies of this book which only appeared a few weeks ago and so if we’re talking about books on my shelves, well these are taking up a lot of space until I can offload them on French-speaking colleagues and friends.
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Forever Surrey 2018
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