Skip to main content
Culture, history and society

Culture, history and society

Shelf life: Paul Davies

06 Jul 2005

Paul Davies started his career in the UK as a theoretical physicist, but is now based in Australia, where he is a writer and commentator on everything from cosmology and religion to astrobiology and the origins of life.


What are the three best popular science books?

Frontiers of Astronomy by Fred Hoyle. At a time when there was very little popular-science writing, this was a classic, a model of clarity delivered in an engaging, exciting style.

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. This book established a new genre of popular-science writing, replacing the methodical, didactic style of most texts with a swirl of startling ideas, interweaving diverse topics in a thoroughly mind-stretching way.

Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett. It wasn’t of course, but what a great read! Dennett is so lucid and thought-provoking, and organizes notoriously tricky concepts in a highly digestible form.

As the previous choice isn’t really a physics book, I would also like to nominate Theories of Everything by John Barrow. All of Barrow’s books are so thoroughly scholarly, yet such a joy to read. His prose is the most elegant of any physics writer I know.

What science books are you currently reading?

Time by Stephen Baxter. Although a work of fiction, it is as good an exposition of recent topics in multiverse cosmology and anthropic reasoning of any I have seen.

What else are you reading?

I have just finished Simon Mitton’s excellent biography of Fred Hoyle, entitled Conflict in the Universe. On the fiction front, I knocked off Michael Crichton’s Prey on the flight to a physics conference in Vancouver, and was able to use his definition of emergent systems in a lecture I gave at the conference!

Which popular-science book have you never read, but feel you ought to have tackled?

I have never read James Watson’s The Double Helix. Somehow it passed me by. I know it is a classic science-as-detective-story book, and discusses one of the great discoveries of the 20th century, but my interest in biology came too late and I had already seen the BBC TV dramatization of the topic, so I don’t now feel any compelling need to go back and read the book. But this is like failing to read Hamlet because you’ve seen the movie.

• A review of Conflict in the Universe will be published in a forthcoming issue of Physics World

Copyright © 2024 by IOP Publishing Ltd and individual contributors