Beauty in Clamorous Times

Tim Radford is the only person British writer Peter Forbes can think of who has been both literary and science editor of the Guardian. Forbes continues, in a review of Radford’s new book: “He has been a journalist all his working life, and in The Address Book he brings his literary and scientific perspectives to bear on ‘our place in the scheme of things’. The structure of the book follows the old schoolkid’s game of writing one’s address as house, street, town, country, continent, earth, solar system, the universe. Radford writes of the cosmos without the straining for effect that its inhuman scale often induces. The Goldilocks enigma (why are the physical constants of the universe so finely tuned to allow the chemistry of life to have evolved?) and the multiverse theory inherent in some interpretations of quantum mechanics are unsensationally explored with admirable clarity. Radford is a valuable witness because he is a balanced man, at home in science, respectful, but not intoxicated by it. Or by anything else. His beautiful, meditative book is a surprise in these clamorous times: one good deed in a naughty world.” Radford left New Zealand for Britain at the age of 19. He worked for the Guardian for 32 years and has won the Association of British Science Writers award for science writer of the year four times.