Popular Science Feature - Four Way Interview - Michael Hanlon

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Four Way Interview - Michael Hanlon - June 2007

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

Michael Hanlon is one of Britain's most successful science writers. He has been Science Editor at the Daily Mail for many years, and has written three popular science books. His latest, Ten Questions Science Can't Answer Yet, received a 5 star review from this website.

Why science?

Because science is the only field currently asking the really interesting questions. In the past, issues of life, the universe and everything were mostly dealt with by philosophers, artists and theologians. It has been quite a long time since any of these people have had anything new or of interest to say about these things.

Why this book?

I wanted to counter the idea, a popular misconception, that science is on the verge of knowing everything. It isn't, and most scientist know this, but not enough say it. There's a whole load of really basic stuff we haven't got a clue about - what most of the Universe is made of, for instance, what time is, and even how minds work. Yes we've answered a lot of big questions, but every time we knock one problem on the head another ten crop up. A century ago no one knew about dark matter and dark energy, for instance. Now we know they are there (probably) but not what they are. So we know more, but paradoxically seem to know less.

What’s next?

For me? Or for science?

For me, I have another exciting book project cooking up. For science, I think the next big breakthroughs will come in cosmology (identification of dark matter particles and a proper theory of dark energy), maybe the LHC [Large Hadron Collider at CERN] will find the Higgs Boson, and maybe we will detect, in my lifetime, signs of life on terrestrial extrasolar planets. I am a bit pessimistic about big genetic/health breakthroughs, which were hugely overhyped at the time of the Human Genome announcements/cloning breakthroughs, but I may be wrong.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

Big Science seems to have stepped up a gear in the last few years, after some time in a rather theory-driven doldrums. That is, we now have some really big and impressive equipment (new spacecraft, the LHC, some of the new big telescopes) which can provide us with data rather than theory. Cosmology has become, finally, a proper observational science which is exciting. I think plans for a revival of manned space exploration of the Mars and the Moon are exciting, not so much for the immediate scientific gains (which could however turn out to be immense) but for the commitment to explore and expand our knowledge base. We are going to go to Mars sooner or later so why not do it now?

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