Jim Baggott — „Origins: The Scientific Story of Creation”

“For me, the most important scientific skill is to be always somewhat skeptical. ‘Okay, let me just see the evidence for that. How did you get that? Why should I trust you?’”

Hello! And welcome to the ScienceBorg Librarian. My name is Vasile Decu, I’m a science journalist, amateur astronomer and professional bookworm. And this is my book talk blog, where you’re invited to read (and soon listen to) interesting conversations with some of the best authors of nonfiction books, from media to tech, history and nature.

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Jim Baggott is one of my favourite authors of science books, because he manages to explain difficult subjects (from the history of the atomic bomb to fundamental particles and the quantum realm) in a style that demands attention and an active curiosity — and thus offers the satisfaction of understanding and learning.

Over the years, I had the pleasure of interviewing him on several occasions and he’s always happy to share his enthusiasm and joy of science, his strong support for good science communication and science journalism, and his contagious curiosity.

Origins: The Scientific Story of Creation is a perfect example of these defining traits of his storytelling style — and a great book to read and reread and keep in the library, with many honourable reading wrinkle marks on its cover. I hope you’ll enjoy our conversation — from the beauty of new scientific discoveries to media literacy and love of books — at least as much as I did. Then open his books and go on several great scientific adventures.

The text is slightly edited, in order to try to adapt it to ‘print’, from a discussion in a beautiful, but noisy cafe in Bucharest (back in 2018 — but the book and also our conversation stand the test of years). Any mistake or awkwardness of style comes solely from me — and my English as a fourth language.

Vasile Decu: Last time we spoke you were promoting Higgs. Now comes Origins, which is a bit different then your usual method. (You pick a subject, a breakthrough, and explain the heck out of it, in such a great way.) But Origins… How come? Why this kind of history?

Jim Baggott: I can only give you a kind of convoluted answer to that question. You know… Why does anyone write anything or commit a period of their life to researching and writing a book like this? It springs from a couple of factors. Firstly, there was a popular science book published in the early 1980s by John Gribbin, a very successful popular science author. It was called Genesis. And it set out then, in early 80s… It was much shorter than my book, but it attempted to sort of talk about the origin of the universe, what we currently understood, the origin of sun and planets, complex molecules, and so on and so on. I actually vividly remember reading that book in the early 80s and being very jealous, because I realised it was a book I would actually quite like to have written myself. But, having finished Higgs and a book called The Quantum Story just a little bit before that, I had also become aware that there were new discoveries being made in things like the origin of life, human evolution. And the seed that had been planted in the early eighties kind of sprouted again and I wondered in fact if it might be possible to think about trying to find a way to summarise what we believe we currently understand from currently accepted science — at least in terms of telling the scientific story of creation.

With new facts.

With many new facts. And so certainly this book doesn’t resemble John Gribbin’s original very much. I mean, of course, in some essential ways it does, but it doesn’t. I talked to Oxford University Press about it. I proposed it to them, they thought it was a great idea. So then I started to work on it… Of course, the first few chapters were straightforward for me, because it’s about cosmology, it’s about particle physics. I can pretend to know something about that. But, then, of course, we move in the intermediate stages. We talk about the origin of the first stars and galaxies. The origin of the various generations of stellar formation and supernova destruction, leading eventually to kind of stars born in molecular clouds, which is where our own sun effectively comes from, with its own planetary system. And I have a couple of reasons for writing a book and one overriding reason is that it gives me an opportunity to learn some new things. So I was in my element.

The internet is such an incredible resource, not least because it makes more easily accessible even those scientists at the front line — a lot of research. Who you can approach and say Look, I am writing this book, would you help me out with this chapter? They can say no. And some of them have. But it’s surprising how many say: yeah, sure, send it, I’ll help you. And I was able to get leading paleontologists, leading guys working in human evolution to read, so I could be confident at least I understood things correctly. They corrected me when I got it wrong.

So, yeah, it’s a book that gets to a point, about midway, where it stops being about the physics and the chemistry. And it starts being about the biology, the biological systems and evolution. And, again, fantastic, fantastic learning! I read books that led me to articles, many of them freely available and accessible. I had to pay for some of them here and there, but honestly not that many. And, as I say, then generous support from some leading academics in the various fields gave me the confidence that I could at least tell this story properly. Now, as a book, I have to say, again, like a lot of my books… It’s not for everyone. You need to take your time with it. You’ll need to read bits of it probably a couple of times to get a sense of what I’m saying. I don’t really apologize for that. I think I am not a pop-sci author that makes… I don’t want to call it trivializes, but it almost trivializes the science to make it accessible. I don’t believe in that. Science… It doesn’t do justice to those guys who give up their lives basically to dig deep into a subject like this. If you trivialize a little bit or make too accessible what they do, and I don’t mean that I deliberately make it inaccessible. I try to present as much of the detail as I can, so you can get the essence of it without becoming an expert. And that’s what I try to do. So I try to find a middle path between pop-sci and a textbook. Somewhere along the line there’s a middle route that says… Okay, let me tell you about the origin of life and the various different theories and let me give you a little bit… here’s a little bit of chemistry, here’s a little bit of the geology of alkaline hydrothermal vents. And I’ll give you just enough, so you get a sense for what these guys are saying and what they’re arguing.

You can’t be curious about something that you know anything about. You have to learn the hard way 10 or 15 percent in order to develop the right amount of curiosity to go further, deeper and deeper. I truly thing we live in a golden age of publishing, but there’s also too much simplification and bad science communication. And too many books and features brag that they can explain the world in 2, 3, 4, 5 things…

I think, again, it depends what you think those books might do. For individuals, for an audience that thinks that’s it… that’s disappointing. For an audience that might read something that’s quite superficial and think — that’s really interesting, I’d like to understand that a bit better and then they go on and read something more — then, for me, the original book has worked. I’ll take nothing away from that; then it’s been fully a success. If it’s piqued your interest enough to want to go beyond the superficial and get into a little bit more of the detail, then that still works for me. If you’re happy to stay at the superficial, then to a certain extent that’s also fine. But then don’t fool yourself into thinking that you know it well enough to have really understood it. That obviously then depends on what you’re going to go ahead and do with the information that you think you’ve learned.

Origins: The Scientific Story of Creation (Bookshop.org / Amazon)

I like that, from the beginning, you say that it’s important to say we don’t know. I would add the corollary “yet”. I’m pretty optimistic about our progress. For creatures that have been on that metaphorical clock of yours for only 300 milliseconds, we kind of know a lot…

It’s been a busy 300 milliseconds. It is pretty accelerated. But it’s a little bit of a two way street in the sense that, again, scientists tend to dig more deeply. Making it even more difficult sometimes to understand why they’re concluding what they’re concluding. At the same time, there are pressures on all scientists to issue the press release and generate media attention. So again, when you talk about trivialisation, I’m sorry, but a lot of publicists really strip out the essence of what scientists have done in order to make it accessible to journalists. And I think that’s a great pity sometimes because that, particularly in physics, I think leads to a great deal of fuss about nothing at all. That’s another story, though, to a certain extent. But the reason that perhaps I was a bit reluctant to use the word yet too often is that there are areas like consciousness and the origin of life that I think are… I won’t say that these are intractable problems, but they’re very, very difficult.

But, again, it’s lots of minds. I think one of the things that struck me and that I honestly think is unique in what I’ve tried to do in Origins is the way the story stitches together. If you look at the different disciplines — of course, I stress this in the preface — there’s a wide range of different disciplines and all of these guys are digging quite deep holes in terms of the detail. I just think… It just struck me as remarkable that you could still tell the story quite seamlessly. Yes, there are gaps, but, you know, you go from the origin of the universe, you’ve got current theories of physics that will take you all the way up to the origin of the solar system, planet Earth, you got geology, geophysics, geochemistry and apart from having to jump over a few chasms where we don’t have anything other than really handwaving arguments I think the story works. I really think it comes together in a kind of incredible way. It didn’t have any right to. You kind of almost imagine you’d end up one chapter and, oh, my god, where do I go from here? How do I join that with that? But it does, it joins up, which again if you think there are different scientists with different talents and different sets of expertise all drilling these deep hols — there’s no good reason to expect it to join up. But I find that it did in a way that I felt that I could convey. So there’s that aspect of it. But as I say there are… Well, maybe three. I would also add the origin of the universe. Those first 10 to the minus 30 odd seconds of the origin of the universe in the Big Bang. We don’t have theories that are up to the task, at the moment. Maybe a quantum theory of gravity will help sort that out. But I’ve actually just published a book on loop quantum gravity which… I think in the end is… Whilst it’s good, it’s not… It doesn’t fix the problems that we have in knowing for sure that we’ve got the right set of equations. But the origin of life is difficult because, as I say in the book, we’ve only ever seen life come from life. The notion of spontaneous generation of life from non-living matter… We presume it happened once and it’s never happened again. And you could, I guess, try and recreate the conditions that you think, that you’re second guessing because nobody really knows what the conditions were on planet Earth three and a half billion, four billion years ago. You can try and do some laboratory experiments that mimic alkaline hydrothermal vents but… Maybe that actually wasn’t how life began. So I’m not confident. I’m not saying you’ll never know. What I am saying is I don’t think we will know it in my lifetime.

I’m also a pragmatist. Yeah, life created in the laboratory… Let me tell you now, anyone announcing that better have their story straight, and they better have the data to back it up!

Science is getting harder — to do and to communicate. It’s getting more expensive, harder to do as a single individual. And harder to explain to people outside your research ‘mine’. That also raises the stakes for good science communication, both for the media and scientists themselves.

It may seem strange coming from someone like me. I am a former scientist, but I gave up academic science a very long time ago. I can’t profess to be a practicing scientist. Good science communication is best when it comes from those who are practicing it. Carlo Rovelli, who I know personally, has had quite some success because he’s a poet and so what he does is he creates, he weaves kind of poetic structures around current understanding, whilst conveying some useful, communicating some use scientific principles — for a very large audience. But the importance of good science communication is exactly because of the depth and the detail that modern science has now found itself needing to go to. These are reeeeeally complicated structures, whether they’re based or founded on mathematics or not. It’s really complicated to get the essence of this. And my own personal feeling is that people have a right to know. Particularly when science is working towards things that are profoundly interesting. Again, as you know, at the beginning of the book I say: Look, we’ve been telling each other these stories about creation since we were able to use language. It’s an innate human desire to want to understand how we fit in the universe and how we come to be where we are. But the mission, then, is to find ways, like I’ve said, of communicating the essence of what scientists are up to without overtrivializing, or oversimplifying what they’re doing.

I’ve been in a workshop with a group of scientists, most of them physicists, and another group of science journalists, in order to learn to talk more and play nice with each other. Good discussions, nice plans (on paper), but I was struck by this feeling of an unspoken contempt and thinly veiled arrogance those scientists had for the media. I know much of the media is trash, yes, but they thought they could easily do our job…

Let me tell you the story of my first popular science article. I had just quit academic life. It had been the end of 1988. Sometime beginning 1989 I found myself at a scientific event. Can’t remember what it was, but I got talking to a lady who was a features editor for New Scientist magazine. And I said to her Look, I’ve got this passion, I’d like to write a feature article about some aspect of femtosecond chemistry. So using lasers to look at the unfolding of chemical reactions in real time as a chemical bond breaks. This is work that was at the time being done by Ahmed Zewail, who later went on to win a Nobel Prize. And she said Sure, send me a draft and I’ll let you know. Anyway, I sent this draft. She sent it back… covered in red ink, for which I was eternally grateful. I had written this article as an academic. Completely unacceptable for a popular science magazine. But rather than just say… (he waives a very clear hand gesture) she gave me the opportunity to work on it, to edit it, to unstack all the nouns and to simplify it. While losing nothing of the essence of the science. And after a couple of iterations, the article was published. So I was quite lucky. I certainly wasn’t arrogant, thinking I could write this because I know all about the science. I was certainly accepting, of which maybe few, in the end, academic scientists are, of editorial comments that are coming back from popular science journalists or features editors. But it’s only that way, I think, can we then bring your knowledge of the science together with your ability to communicate that effectively and find a way to make it work. And I would still argue I’m still learning! I think I get a little bit better each time, with each book, but I am still learning, there’s still, always, ways you can improve and make it a little bit simpler, make it a bit more accessible.

You also work in a very hard field. My favourite book of yours is Atomic…

It’s a thriller!

Higgs is different, the science is harder. We live in a time, in a present where we have very easy free access to information, which sometimes we confuse with knowledge, but that makes us paradoxically want to get rid of or look down on experts. We forget to shut up around experts. From physics to vaccination and climate…

We’re seeing it in British politics right now. It’s appalling. I don’t know what the answer is. I think… Well, actually, no, I do. I do have a notion as to what’s needed. But I don’t think it’s necessarily easy or straightforward. I think that before even pushing a science agenda it’s becoming more and more important to include some program on critical thinking in school, college, university or wherever we think we can fit it in. But we’ve got to get people, young people in particular I think, to understand not to take things that they see, read, hear, at face value — always to be skeptical, always to question, always to look for another source. Okay, so he’s saying that — what’s the evidence for that? And under those circumstances one would hope that there might be then a need to reference those who do know what they’re talking about. The people that do have expertise in these different fields. And I think without that, the path is… we can see what path we’re taking and it’s not good.

If we keep on like this we’re going to crash…

Well, it won’t work until there’s a political disaster. And there’s economic disaster, you can see it happening in the UK now with Brexit. You can see it happening in the U.S. of course with Donald Trump. The people driving these agendas are little more than charlatans and… And the issue is that there’s still a great gullibility because there isn’t critical thinking, there isn’t challenge to the statements.

We have the same problem everywhere, from the UK to Eastern Europe.

It’s a growing problem everywhere. The rise of populism… There’s a paragraph I’m not sure it will survive in the latest manuscript of a book… I have a new book that I’ve been working on the interpretations of quantum mechanics. And by way of introducing a discussion of reality and the different ways of conceiving of reality, the philosophers view versus the pragmatic scientist’s view. I talk about my current take on the rise of populist politics.

The difficulty that we’ve got right now, I think…. Okay, it’s probably only a few people in the world that are getting worked up about this. The difficulty we’ve got right now is that there are certain aspects of contemporary theoretical physics that lead to stuff that I know is cool and appealing. But I hate it. So the whole notion of the multiverse… And I get why you want to put that in a click bait article. So scientists like Sean Carroll, Lawrence Krauss to a certain extent, quite highly esteemed and respected scientists are pushing this… this notion. Saying, well, you know, current theories lead us in this direction. No, they don’t! Our current theories, current accepted theories, are the Standard Model of particle physics and general relativity. They don’t need a multiverse. It’s only when you talk about hypotheses for how you might bring these structures together maybe you’re led to the notion of a multiverse, eternal inflation or the Cosmic Landscape of string theory. And yet these guys are talking about it like this is valid science and everyone agrees. I hate it! I really do!

In Romania, Michio Kaku is a star…

Ooh… He once interviewed me for one of his radio programs. I published a book called Farewell to Reality. And I was invited to appear in his show… You get the sense of what he’s all about just from the nature of his books and also from the nature of his program, which is called Fantastic Science… (we both laugh) It’s Star Trek.

You took quite a lot of flak for this stand of yours.

Not as much as I would like! No, I’d like people to throw rocks. I’m being a bit disappointed. There’s been more aggravation caused, I think, by Sabine Hossenfelder’s book. I don’t know if you’ve seen that — it’s called Lost in Math. Have a look at that. I was asked by her publisher to write an endorsement for the back cover. Which I was happy to do, I know Sabine quite well. We argue from time to time. But we agree more often than not. Her’s is the same theme, that this is… Lost contact with all empirical reality. The guys are lost in the math and it doesn’t mean anything anymore. But her book is different, in that she interviews a couple of… She interviews Nima Arkani-Hamed and Stephen Weinberg and one or two others. She actually captures that on paper, you know, spouting some of this misleading stuff. It’s well written, it’s written with a sense of irony. So I think it’s a very, very successful book. Have a look at it. You’ll find it very entertaining.

Farewell to Reality: How Fairytale Physics Betrays the Search for Scientific Truth, by Jim Baggott (Bookshop.org / Amazon)
Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, by Sabine Hossenfelder (Bookshop.org / Amazon)

We got to know a lot. The science knowledge is big. But what are the science races that they can and should enter?

That’s a tough question. I don’t… My span or my reach across all.. Although I know… I spanned several disciplines to write Origins, I wouldn’t regard myself as an expert in these areas.

Let me rephrase it then. What would like to be discovered or explained? Soon :)

Right now I think that… — and this sounds less creative and imaginative and more practical — right now the biggest challenge we face, as a species, is climate change. And I think any young person wanting to commit themselves to study climate — geophysics, geochemistry, planetary geology, whenever — I think there’s tremendous value. The more people we can have engaged in that subject, the greater hope I think we’ll have ultimately of finding a way to deal with the problems that we’re creating for ourselves. But that’s a practical and pragmatic area and that’s not, you know, suddenly new knowledge created that changes our world view.

We’re all creatures with different talents and different drives. So it really depends on what they want and where they’re most comfortable. I would caution probably against… Sounds crazy because I’ve written so many books on theoretical physics, but it’s a bit of a swamp land right now and I think it might be difficult. My most recent book is about loop quantum gravity, Carlo Rovelli and Lee Smolin and their work. It’s called Quantum Space. They read the manuscript, kind of over my shoulders as I wrote. So although they didn’t collaborate with me, they certainly approved, they endorsed it. But the thing is that it’s really hard… If your drive is to work right at these frontiers, then it’s a heck of a commitment and it’s not for the faint of heart. Only a few will make it, only a few will have the abilities and the talent to really make a difference. Lee Smolin rounded up that book with an epilogue. I ran a three way Skype session with Carlo and Lee, and we had an email exchange of questions and answers and he was actually quite forthright. He just hoped the younger generation of theorists would come along and fix what they couldn’t fix. It’s very interesting. Carlo is more of an optimist, I think. The other thing that I would suggest is a commitment… Whatever branch of science they engage in, also to take note of the philosophy of science. I think that’s particularly important, increasingly as we get really down into the weeds, as we drill these holes ever deeper. And we end up starting to run out of the ability to make contact with empirical data. I think it becomes more and more important to understand when you cross a threshold into realms where, you know, you’re not really doing science anymore.

Our beautiful and fragile ball of life, photographed on October 31st 2022, by NASA’s DSCOVR: Deep Space Climate Observatory, from 1.5 million km away (971,629 miles)

You’re very curious person, your books seem like journey out of your curiosity. How did you keep this instinct sharp? Because it goes away.

It comes from a readiness to expose yourself to areas where you’re certainly not an expert. And yet… For me the whole writing process… if you don’t understand it, you can’t write a sentence about it. You’ll be found out. It’ll be obvious from what you’ve written that you don’t understand what you’re talking about. It motivates my curiosity, it stirs my curiosity up to a point where I actually have no choice. I’ve got to understand the subject enough to be able to write about it coherently and consistently. That does not make me an expert and I certainly would never pretend to be an expert in paleontology or planetary geology or anything like that. But if I can learn enough about a subject, again I always try and take care wherever I can to have proper experts read what I’ve written and say Okay, Jim, that’s okay, you’ve got that more or less, good enough — versus No, you have not understood that at all, that’s a terrible chapter. I don’t submit it for that kind of scrutiny unless I’m moderately confident I’ve got it more or less right, but it’s always a good safety check. So that’s how I keep that alive, by actually making myself feel uncomfortable. That I’ve now got this challenge, that I’ve imposed on myself, of writing about something that I actually don’t know that much about at the beginning.

We were disciplined in Romanian school, in the traditional way of schooling, for asking questions. You can sense when somebody’s from Eastern Europe because they fear or hesitate to ask questions.

I would characterize that as kind of rote learning. It’s unquestioned. This is how it is, you learn this, you have an examination question on it and if you don’t regurgitate this then, you know, you’ll fail the exam. It is a failure. It comes back to this notion of critical thinking, again. We need to instil in young people the kind of… The most important, for me, scientific skill is to be always somewhat skeptical. Okay, let me just see the evidence for that. Okay, so how did you get that? Why should I trust you and your view? What about this guy over here, who says something completely different based on the same evidence?

So, I think, in the future this notion of critical thinking will become more and more important as a way of combating this denigration of expertise. Trying to resist, I think, some of the mistakes of the past where we’ve been led by people with very much their own agendas into a dark place and often the only way out being stuff we don’t like to think about.

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