Broadening the vision

‘Popular science’: for some readers this remains a problematic category. I’m sure proper scientists look askance at civilians reading such books on public transport, imagining their own abstruse specialities dumbed down for the hard-of-thinking. And the vast mass of arts graduates, who hate and fear science, remembering the bad trousers and unfortunate hairstyles of science undergraduates in their day, happily admit that they know nothing of the subject and understand even less. Some people I know have been boasting for nearly 20 years that they gave up A Brief History of Time before the end. It’s all too sad for words.

Stephen Hawking, though, has much to answer for. In his book, relatively straightforward ideas would be explained from first principles, while complex numbers, one of the most mind-blowing ideas in all mathematics, were swept aside in a single paragraph. Many of us had maths masters like this: so clever they could understand anything, except for the one thing they were paid to understand, which was that their pupils weren’t all as clever as they were.