Popular Science Feature - Four Way Interview - Frank Close

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Four Way Interview - Frank Close - April 2009

Our four-way interviews give a quick insight into the current thinking of a popular science author.

Frank Close is a theoretical high energy particle physicist at Oxford University. He has given a wide range of public lectures, including the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in 1993, and has written a number of popular science books. His latest book is Antimatter.

Why Science?

If this means why am I a scientist, it is because I am curious - about how the universe works, why things are as they are, where did it all come from? All young children are curious about the world - they have to learn what is safe and what is not. Then they ask questions: why this, what's that, until adults get tired and tell them to stop asking so many. Some of us never stop asking. I am still astonished at the beautiful way nature operates; if we had been given the task of making a universe, who would have thought of atoms, and the different elements made from the same electrons but just put together in different ways? Who would have thought of the quantum, or relativity, or a host of other things, none of which the ancient Greeks or even Isaac Newton knew? What else is going on that we don't know but 200 years from now, if the human race survives, will be in the textbooks for future generations? Wouldn't you also like to know?

Why this book?

I was on Melvyn Bragg's radio show In Our Time in 2007 in a programme about antimatter. Afterwards I received lots of emails asking about antimatter and bombs. This led me to Dan Brown's book Angels and Demons which is fiction, but likes to be presented as if fact. There are certainly two correct facts in it: there is a laboratory called CERN and the scientists there have made antimatter. But as to making bombs, or solving the world's energy problems - as Brown hints antimatter might be able to do - those are utter fiction. So when I learned that his book was being turned into a movie, I decided to write a book about what antimatter really is, the amazing things that it can do (it can save lives for example) and explain why it cannot do the things that Brown claims in his book. I doubt that this will stop people believing that antimatter is really demonic, or that the director of CERN has a mach 5 aircraft (if only!), but I hope that at least the real wonder of antimatter and science comes across. My final sentence says it all. Having shown the wonders that antimatter has done for science in reality I conclude with
"With such inspirations in fact, who needs fiction?"

What's next?

I am writing about neutrinos - the ghost particle of the cosmos. It's turning into the story of Ray Davis, who spent 40 years trying to look into the centre of the sun by detecting neutrinos. Thankfully for him he lived long enough to pick up his Nobel Prize at age 87. Not everyone was so lucky. There's Bruno Pontecorvo who disappeared behind the Iron Curtain and did not survive long enough to see his great ideas verified by Davis; there's John Bahcall who worked with Davis for four decades but was not included on the Nobel Prize, and several others - some lucky, others not. Longevity has been an asset in the neutrino business.

What's exciting you at the moment?

The fact that my younger daughter has just announced that she is pregnant and has seen her child, my first grandchild, courtesy of an ultrasound scan. So we can see an image of an 11 week old living being with arms. Isn't science marvellous?

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