I grew up in a small town outside Boston, called
Marblehead, and spent a not-so-productive childhood dreaming, in more or less equal proportions, about a career as a professional basketball player and as a
sailor on a whaling ship.
Alas, it was not to be. I ended up a journalist and eventually became the chief science writer at the Boston Globe. From newspapers it was on to
magazines and eventually to books. The magazines ranged from journals that died before they ever saw a news-stand to such perennials as The Atlantic
and The New York Times Magazine. The stories ranged just as broadly. I wrote a cover story for The Atlantic on the science of dreams and how
Freud had it all wrong, and I wrote the first story on "the French paradox," about how it is that the French gulp down croissants and paté but manage
somehow to have only half the rate of heart disease that Americans do.
For about a decade now, I've concentrated almost exclusively on books. The first was on psychology—Madness on the Couch, it was called, and
it looked (critically) at Freud's legacy. Next came Down the Great Unknown, the true story of one of the epic adventures in American history.
A one-armed ex-soldier named John Wesley Powell led a band of nine novices down the Colorado River, through the Grand Canyon, in rowboats. None of the men
had ever seen a rapid.
Then came a four year stint in the art underworld. The Rescue Artist is a cops and robbers story—focused on a team of bumblers who stole The
Scream—about the thieves who snatch masterpieces and the cops who chase them. The Forger's Spell is a stranger-than-fiction story, set in
occupied Holland during World War II, of a Dutch forger who made millions from his fake Vermeers.
The books won notice of various sorts—an Edgar Award for best non-fiction, for The Rescue Artist, from the Mystery Writers of America; selection as
one of Barnes and Noble's "Discover Great New Writers" for Down the Great Unknown; a stint on the New York Times best-seller list for The
Forger's Spell.
My newest book, The Clockwork Universe, is a return to my roots (I have a master's degree in math, from MIT). It's about Isaac Newton and Leibniz and the
Royal Society—the story of a quarrelsome band of geniuses in powdered wigs and knee-length breeches who helped create the world we know today. The backdrop
is Europe during the black plague, and the Great Fire of London, and Louis XIV in high heels and gold-embroidered waistcoat at Versailles.
Chaotic as it looked, these earliest scientists declared, the universe was in fact an intricate and perfectly regulated clockwork. This was the tail-end of
Shakespeare's century, and these were brilliant, ambitious, confused, conflicted men. They believed in angels and alchemy and the devil, and they believed that
the universe followed precise, mathematical laws.
These rowdy geniuses were as rambunctious as schoolboys, eagerly setting off explosions and sampling snake venom and gawking through the first telescopes and
microscopes. Nothing was known; everything was new. In The Clockwork Universe we elbow our way next to the shouting, rowdy scientists, and we see the
mysteries of physics and astronomy clearly and vividly explained.
When I'm not writing, I spend considerable time trying to civilize a houseful of dogs. The leader of the pack, at present, is a 140-pound Great Pyrenees with a
pathological fear of loud noises. Blue combines the noble appearance of a carved lion with the temperament of a hummingbird on speed.
