Marcus Chown is a cosmology writer and author of We Need to Talk About Kelvin. His previous books include Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You and The Universe Next Door, and his first children’s book, Felicity Frobisher and the Three-headed Aldebaran Dust Devil. I reviewed his latest book here.  Marcus Chown and I had a chat about Tim Tams, time travel and writing children’s books.

Hi Marcus, welcome to With Extra Pulp. Can I ask how the blog tour is going so far? This is your first blog tour that has included Australian blogs, is that correct?

Hi, and thanks for inviting me.

The blog tour is going very well, thank you. I actually had no idea what a blog tour was! But, when We Need to Talk about Kelvin was published in the UK, I e-mailed Scott Pack asking him if he had any ideas on how to publicise my book. I didn’t know Scott (@meandmybigmouth on Twitter) but I knew that he had been chief buyer for the big Waterstone’s book chain and so one of the most influential people in British publishing. He was incredibly kind and helpful to me, and one of the things he suggested I do was a blog tour.

He told me what it was and told me how to get the ball rolling by asking bloggers whether they would like to host a leg of the tour. Very nervously, I tweeted my request — and was completely overwhelmed by the response from bloggers. All were incredibly enthusiastic and incredibly generous. So, when my book was published in Australia and New Zealand, I thought I would extend the tour to the southern hemisphere. In fact, it was Scott Pack who told me about your blog and suggested that I contact you! So, you are right. This is the first-ever blog tour I have done that has included Australian blogs. Mind you, that’s because it’s my first-ever blog tour, full stop!

You’re the resident cosmologist for New Scientist…can you briefly tell our readers what cosmology encompasses?

Yes, I am the cosmology consultant of the weekly science magazine, New Scientist. Maybe it sounds impressive. But actually, when the magazine made me a consultant, it already had a physics consultant so they had to invent another name.

I tend to write about things which are of no use to man or beast! Can time run backwards? Are there multiple realities in which all histories are played out? Was the Universe created as an experiment by aliens in another universe? Are we living in a giant hologram? http://tinyurl.com/8ah9az

As for cosmology, it is arguably the ultimate science. After all it deals with nothing less than the origin, evolution and fate of the universe.

When you started writing ‘Let’s Talk About Kelvin’, did you have your audience in mind? And (how) did this affect what you chose to include, and leave out?

I tend to start writing with no thought of an audience at all! What I am trying to do is understand things for myself. It just so happens that the process of trying to get things straight in my own head is pretty much the same as communicating to a nonscientist, perhaps because I think visually, and am always trying to translate arcane mathematics into mental pictures.

When I finish the first draft, however, I get palpitations, thinking, Will anyone read this? Is it of any interest at all? So, at that point, I really do start thinking about the reader and get desperate about not boring them.

My audience is a far more general audience than New Scientist’s. I don’t expect anyone to have a science background. In fact, if I write for anyone, it is my wife, who is a nurse and has no science background (apart from a medical background, of course!). If, when she reads what I’ve done, her eyes glaze over and she appears to be slipping into a coma, I go back and rewrite.

So, yes, in my desperation not to be boring, I drop anything that I think is too technical, or simply too dull.

The basic premise is a very firm structure: ‘every day thing’ followed by ‘what it tells us about the universe’. Did this structure govern your writing or did it come out of a more organic process?

Well, the idea for the book came from the publicity phase of the previous book. When you find yourself being interviewed on a radio programme, for instance, you may have only a few minutes to explain something. So all the careful explanation you put in your book goes out the window. In such situations, I find myself grasping for some every day thing that I can relate to deeper physics.

For instance, I was trying to explain the conflict which led to quantum theory, our best description of the world of atoms. The conflict arises because atoms are tiny, localised things, whereas the light they emit and absorb is a wave, which is fundamentally spread out thing like a wave on the pond. In fact, it turns out that the light waves emitted by atoms are thousands of times bigger than the atoms. So, thinking on my feet, I said, imagine you open a matchbox and out drives a 40-ton truck. That’s what it’s like when an atom spits out light!

Well, one thought led to another, and I thought, why don’t I just write a book where every chapter takes in every day observation and tells the reader what it tells us about fundamental reality — about the Universe? Simple as that. Immediately, I could see it was a unifying thread that would tie together many things I was interested in. So, for instance, in We Need to Talk About Kelvin, I write about:

• How your face reflected in a window tells you that, at its deepest, most fundamental level, the Universe is based on random chance – that things happen to no reason at all.

• How fact that teacups break but don’t unbreak tells you that the Universe began in a big bang.

• How the fact that iron is common on Earth — it’s in our cities, in the core of the Earth, even in your blood — is telling us that out in space there must be a blisteringly hot furnace at a temperature of at least 5 billion degrees.

Were you always interested in writing?

Always. When I was at school, I liked English and I liked physics. But, in British schools, they didn’t let you do both arts and sciences, which is a terrible shame. So I went to university and did physics — first at University of London, then at the California Institute of technology in Pasadena (actually, I did radio astronomy, and the person who founded the radio astronomy group at Caltech – John Bolton – was an Australian). But I knew I wanted to be a writer. And I was always writing short stories, most of which I never finished (a big mistake – always finish!). So I gave up research in America and came back to London and tried to make a living as a journalist.

Most newspapers I wrote to told me to go away and get some experience and maybe in 10 years’ time I could come and clean their toilets! It was the old story of not being considered for a job without experience while needing a job to get that experience. Fortunately, after much persistence, I got my foot in the door (and if I have one piece of advice to anyone who wants to be a writer, it’s be persistent). I worked as a science journalist, then started writing popular science books, science fiction novels and even children’s fiction. As you can see, I am working my way back slowly to the kind of imaginative stuff I liked writing at school.

I still can’t quite believe it that I am a writer, something I always wanted to be. I can’t begin to tell you how fantastic it is to put “writer” under occupation on your passport. And how exciting it always is to see your books on the shelf in a bookstore. When a book comes out, I go in a bookstore and get my wife to photograph me holding up the book. I am that sad!

The title of this book is a little cheeky (my learned readers have already picked up the reference to ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’ by Lionel Shriver), was this always going to be the title, from the beginning?

Titles are the hardest things. Get the right title and your book could become a bestseller. The trouble is great titles are few and far between. I waste whole holidays scouring books of poetry, song lyrics and so on, looking for titles. For instance, The Universe Next Door was a line in a poem by e. e. cummings. The Never-Ending Days of Being Dead was a phrase I read in Jim Crace’s brilliant but macabre novel, being dead. Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You came from Adrian Mitchell’s poem, “Mashed potatoes cannot hurt you, darling”. I fought  like mad to keep the “darling” but my publisher vetoed it. I still hope that a future edition will come out under the title, Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You, Darling.

I rarely start off with the finished title. The Universe Next Door began as Despatches from the Frontier of the Imagination (thank goodness I dropped that one!). The Never Ending Days of Being Dead started off as Deep Space (boring!). As for the current book, actually, I never really had a satisfactory title, even at the beginning. Then, at a very late stage, I just happened to be coming down the stairs in my house in London, and We Need to Talk about Kelvin just jumped into my mind. When I mentioned it to friends, they very often laughed immediately. So I thought, that’s it, that’s the title.

As you point out, it’s a play on Lionel Shriver’s excellent though horrific novel, We need to Talk about Kevin, in which an American boy massacres his schoolmates and family (Actually, I went to a talk given by Shriver at the Cheltenham literature Festival in the UK but was too shy to ask to write me a Foreword!). But, actually, you don’t have to know about Shriver’s book. If you do, the title will hopefully amuse you. If don’t, maybe you will wonder, Who is Kelvin? Why do I need to know about him? Either way, you may be intrigued enough to pick up the book, which was really the aim of the title.

One of the theories you mention in the book is the multiverse theory. I’m not sure if you’ve read Timeline by Michael Crichton, but in it, multiverse theory is the scientific reasoning behind the group’s ability to travel to medieval France. Do you think this is something we could achieve in the future? (I’m hoping yes…is this a fool’s hope?)

Remarkably, Einstein’s theory of gravity — the general theory of relativity — appears to show that time travel is possible. This is basically because time flows at different in regions with different gravity. So, if you could find a bridge between two such regions — such a bridge is known as the “wormhole” — you could indeed go be back in time.

Of course, Einstein’s theory shows only that time travel is possible in principle not in practice (and most physicist think it’s impossible in principle, we just haven’t yet found the law that forbids it. The difficulties of achieving it – with the aid of black holes and wormholes – are formidable, to say the least!

The kind of time travel permitted by Einstein theory of gravity differs in two respects from that featured in H. G. Well’s The Time Machine. First, you have to travel into space travel in time. And, secondly, you cannot go back in time to time before you built your time machine. So, if someone built a time machine this year, next year it could be used to travel back to 2010. But not 2009. To travel back to mediaeval France, you would need to find a time machine abandoned on Earth by extraterrestrials before that time!

Of course, the multiverse envisioned by Crichton — I’m guessing one in which there are an infinity of realities playing out all possible histories — is a radical change in worldview from Einstein’s. So all bets are off as far as what might and might not be possible!

I’ve been reading a lot about your children’s book, Felicity Frobisher and the Three-headed Aldebaran Dust Devil (phew, what long title!). Can you tell us a bit about how you came to write this, and if there are any more children’s books on the cards?

Yes, Felicity Frobisher and the Three-Headed Aldebaran Dust Devil  (Faber) is a long title. I just thought it would be fun to write a children’s book. I didn’t want to get stuck in the popular science ghetto. So, I thought, what can I do that other children’s writers can’t do? And I thought, I know about wormholes – shortcuts through space-time permitted to exist by Einstein’s theory of gravity. So I used them as a plot device.

But, really, the book is about having a very bad friend. Felicity Frobisher is very ordinary – she wears big glasses, is not very good at school, not very good at sport…Then, one day, Flummff, a Three-Headed Aldebaran Dust Devil, shoots out of a wormhole in Felicity’s bedroom wall like a champagne cork from a bottle… and all hell breaks loose.

Felicity is quiet and polite and never gets into any trouble. But Flummff gets her into no end of trouble. She is chased out of parks by fist-waving park keepers, accuse of cheating in the school cross country run. On the plus side, during her science lesson, she does get to go down a wormhole to the International Space Station and visit Flummff’s very dusty, very gritty world around the red giant star Aldebaran.

I should point out that the book is actually very, very silly! And it is autobiographical! I am Felicity Frobisher. I was dull and boring and never got into trouble at school. And I had a bad friend who got me into all sorts of trouble.

For an extract and lots more, go to… www.felicityfrobisher.com

I so enjoyed writing Felicity Frobisher – and the reaction from children was so overwhelming – that I am currently writing Felicity Frobisher and the Newly Wedded Capellan Toast Weevil and have a third book plotted too. The only problem is I have to find a publisher.

Will you be returning to Australia for any writers festivals this year? I’ve heard (shock horror) that you can’t actually get Tim Tams in the UK…surely this is a good a reason as any to revisit…

I’d absolutely love to return to Australia. However, I haven’t been invited to any writers’ festivals! It was brilliant coming to the Sydney Writers’ Festival last year. Everyone was so kind and enthusiastic and welcoming. My wife and I had never been to Australia before but had wanted to go. It definitely lived up to expectations. We went up to northern Queensland where we snorkeled off the Barrier Reef and were pinned in our hotel room by a 5-foot cassowary called Barbara!

And, yes, the organisers of the Sydney Writers’ Festival very kindly supplied the writers with… Tim Tams. We became addicted to them. And, yes, they are a good reason for a return visit (Mind you, we have found them in an Australian shop in London’s Covent Garden, along with Cherry Ripe’s and other Ozzie goodies!)

Can you share with us a couple of your favourite (fiction and non-fiction) books of all time?

Sorry, once I got started, I got carried away! Fiction…

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Shikasta by Doris Lessing

The Waves by Virginia Woolf

How Late it was, How Late by James Kelman

The Vintner’s Luck by Elizabeth Knox

London Fields by Martin Amis

Explorers of the New Century by Magnus Mills

Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk

The Corner Boys by Geoffrey Beattie

Two Caravans by Marina Lewycka

The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene

A Star called Henry by Roddy Doyle

What I Loved by Siri Husvedt

Non-fiction…

The Cosmic Connection by Carl Sagan

The Promise of Space by Arthur C Clarke

Wasted by Mark Johnson

Love and War in the Apennines by Eric Newby

Chaos by James Gleick

Surely, You’re Joking, Mr Feynman by Ralph Leighton, Richard Feynman, and Edward Hutchings

Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman

The Prisons We Choose to Live Inside by Doris Lessing

The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo

Fermat’s Last Theorem by Simon Singh

Kevin and I in India by Frank Kusy

Protestant Boy by Geoffrey Beattie

Piaf by Simone Berteaut

My youngest brother’s name is Kelvin. He wanted me to ask you if you would like him to sign any copies of your book for you…

Yes!

(With Extra Pulp says: I’ll get right onto this!)

That was it! As I said this is a blog tour, so if you’re so inclined, go read someone else’s interview. There’s a handy little list of them all.