Fred Hoyle: A Life in Science by Simon Mitton

I picked up a copy of this book on a quick visit to the local library but was not expecting very much from it: I had already read Hoyle's own autobiograph 'Home is where the Wind Blows' a few years ago and don't remember being particularly impressed by it.

The first chapter of 'A Life in Science' with its somewhat cloying details of his childhood tended to confirm my low expectations (but maybe this is because these details are derived from Fred's own writings). But then Hoyle gets to Cambridge and the book suddenly takes off as he meets Arthur Eddington, P.A.M. Dirac, Rudolph Peierls. Then he goes off to Portsmouth to do war work. He stays with Herman Bondi and Tommy Gold: during the day they work on naval radar, during the evenings they talk astrophysics and, start generating new ideas and papers at such a rate that the RAS papers secretary can hardly cope.

After the war Hoyle returns to Cambridge and becomes one of the central figures in astrophysics for the next three decades. I had not really appreciated the key role Hoyle had played in the understanding of stellar structure and the creation of the chemical elements. Mitton covers all of this in just enough depth for me to follow and to want to find out more about these subjects. He also covers the controversies that Hoyle got involved in, for example that with Martin Ryle, and tries to give a balanced view, pointing out where Fred was being unreasonable or paranoid.

Over the years I had got the impression that many British professional astronomers and astrophysicists regarded Hoyle with a mixture of fondness and awe. After reading Mitton's account I now understand why.

A Reason for Everything by Marek Kohn

This is a popular  account of the lives and ideas of some of the major British figures in evolutionary theory.  

After rather sensibly omitting Darwin, whose life is already adequately covered by several excellent biographies, Kohn concentrates on Alfred Russel Wallace,  Ronald Aylmer Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, John Maynard Smith, William. D. Hamilton, and Richard Dawkins.  Although he tries to portray all of them, except Maynard Smith, as eccentric, I think that Wallace comes across as a fairly normal and sympathetic character, in spite of his interest in spiritualism.  The fact that the right-wing leanings of Fisher and Hamilton are balanced by the communism of Haldane and the young Maynard Smith refutes the common assumption that evolutionary theory supports right-wing politics.

Most of the book seems to have based on Kohn's researches into the letters of the main characters, but the material on Hamilton seems to be based largely on Hamilton's 'Narrow Roads of Gene Land' and concentrates rather too much for my liking on his apocalyptic views on the accumulation of damaged genes.  However, I think that the most valuable contribution of this book are the parts based on interviews with that epitome of evolutionary common sense, John Maynard Smith.  These give interesting insights into his relationship with Hamilton who apparently bore several grudges against him (for instance, Hamilton thought that Maynard Smith had abused his position as a referee of Hamilton's 1964 paper to get his own ideas on kin selection into print first) .   Maynard Smith's death in 2004 was a great loss.

Update on Sat 2005-08-13 by Tristram Brelstaff

Charles H. Smith of Western Kentucky University runs a wonderful web-site on Alfred Russel Wallace at http://www.wku.edu/~smithch/index1.htm.

Some Time with Feynman by Leonard Mlodinow

In 1981 a young physics graduate joined the faculty at Caltech.  He was given an office on the same corridor as Murray Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman.  This is his account of his conversations with these two giants of 20th Century physics.  It is a small, slight book - I read it in one evening and two half-hour train journeys -  but is a marvelous read, both witty and warm.

Update on Sat 2005-08-27 by Tristram Brelstaff

In this book Feynman tells of how he once discussed with his son what it would be like if there were two time dimensions instead of just one.  I was very interested to read this because the same idea occurred to me just a few months ago, arising from my thinking on formal specification and object identity. 

Free as in Freedom - Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software by Sam Williams

A competent biography of the founder of the GNU project, the Free Software Foundation, and creator of GNU Emacs, GCC and the GNU General Public License (GPL).  Stallman comes across as a prickly, awkward man with a mission.  Of his work, the GNU EMACS editor system is now fast fading into antiquity, but the GCC compiler and the GPL are keystones of the GNU/Linux world.  I think that the GPL will probably be what he is remembered for in the long run.

Update on Thu 2004-12-16 by Tristram Brelstaff

Sam Williams has placed a version of this book on-line at http://www.faifzilla.org.  Also, Eric Raymond has some interesting things to say about this book at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/rms-bio.html.

Hip Priest - The Story of Mark E.Smith and The Fall by Simon Ford

The late John Peel has a lot to answer for.  A few months ago I came across three (yes three!) books about The Fall in the Reading Broad Street branch of Waterstone's bookshop.   I thought that Mark E.Smith must have died, or at least have been given a knighthood.  

I first heard The Fall when I was at Leeds University in 1978, on the Peel program of course.  Back then they were very rough indeed, but I was impressed enough to seek out and buy Bingo Master's Break-Out! and Live at the Witch Trials.  I followed them through Dragnet, Fiery Jack, How I Wrote Elastic Man, Totally Wired, and on to Hex Enduction Hour in 1982.  After that, I must have become more responsible, for the only other Fall records I bought were The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall (1984) and Bend Sinister (1986).  Then I lost track of them completely for several years.  It was only when I started listening to BBC Radio 6 on broadband that I learned that The Fall, or rather Mark E.Smith and the current version of The Fall, are still active and producing good stuff in 2004.

The key element of The Fall has always been Smith's inscrutable lyrics which are completely unlike anything else in contemporary music.  A lesser, but still important feature has been the driving wall of noise produced by the rest of the band.  The overall effect is best summed up by quoting Danny Kelly's description (NME 1984 Nov 10):

"The wall of rhythm generated by the Hanleys and the great and loyal Karl Burns is huge and brutal.  Craig Scanlon and Brix Smith drill shockingly harsh metal guitars into the heart of the beast.  Where the babblings of the wordSmith used to be a part of an urban guerrilla cell - mercurial, fragmented, chancy - they now find themselves riding atop Krupp's wet dream, a black, invincible war machine.  The noise is crude, cruel, inescapable and authoritarian.  Smith has always been a lucky bastard, chucking his writing bag of words into the music like a carcass into a set of propellers, to watch the result spin off not as gore and offal, but diamonds, a tour de force of inexplicable sorcery."

As well as quotations, Ford's book is full of interviews with many past and present members of  the band, some interviewed specially for the book, others culled from old music magazines and books.  Smith comes across as almost impossible to live and work with, and one has to admire the dedication of Steve Hanley, Craig Scanlon, Karl Burns, Martin Bramah, Kay Carroll, Brix Smith, and the others for sticking with him for as long as they did.  Whenever the band looked like it was getting to be successful, Mark E.Smith would insist on making a new start, for example by changing their record company.  On one occasion Smith apparently fired his whole band because they wouldn't make the sound that he wanted.  A few days later he went and got his ears syringed and found out the problem had actually been in his hearing, not in their playing.  But they stayed because they were in awe of his ability to come up with ideas and words.  Some of this awe comes across in reading Marc Riley's reaction after the recording of 'Iceland' as recounted by Colin Irwin (Melody Maker 1981 Sep 26):

"No, we didn't know what he was going to do either," says Riley in a state of euphoria later. "He just said he needed a tune, something Dylanish, and we knocked around on the piano in the studio and came up with that. But we hadn't heard the words until he suddenly did them. We did 'Fit And Working' on 'Slates' in exactly the same way.Yeah, I suppose it is amazing really..."

As Ford says, once you have been a fan of The Fall you can never escape it: even now when I walk past a pelican crossing and it goes beep-beep-beep... in the back of my mind I hear Mark E.Smith spitting out:

Got eighteen months for espionage,
Too much brandy for breakfast,
And people tend to let you down,
It's a swine.... 
Fantastic life!

Ours is not to look back, ours is to continue the crack.  (Argggh!  I think I had better go and lie down.)