A well-connected cousin was kindly able to arrange for me to go and stay at Kora National Reserve in Kenya, in the bush camp of George Adamson, an old-school conservationist who had shot to fame following the release of the book and film Born Free, which covered parts of his life and the life of his wife, Joy. It was Joy who wrote the book. My project compared the behaviour of wild lion cubs with hand-reared ones; their mother had been shot and George was raising them for release back into the wild. I spent a few weeks at the camp, watching and recording lion behaviour, before my then girlfriend and a couple of other friends flew to Kenya and we hitchhiked to Tanzania, and then Malawi, before flying home.
My time in Africa was once again fabulous, and I enjoyed every minute of it, even if my research project was scientifically underpowered. As a small child, I’d wanted to be Tarzan when I grew up. As a 21-year-old man working with lions, I got as close to that dream as I ever would, but I wasn’t very good at it. Nonetheless, there were various important African experiences that set me on the path to becoming a scientist.
At some point during my travels after leaving Kenya, I contracted cerebral malaria, caused by the pathogen Plasmodium falciparum. I had been taking prophylactics, but resistance to the drugs I was on was starting to emerge. The fact I had muddled up my water-purification and antimalarial drugs did not help. The water I was drinking was not potable, and I developed a waterborne stomach infection. While sick, I did not absorb the antimalarial compounds, and I caught the disease. It also explained why every time I took what I thought were my malaria pills I had a pain in my guts; it was the chlorine in the water-purification tablets burning the lining of my stomach.
Cerebral malaria comes in waves every few days, and I had been unwell in Africa but hadn’t known why. A day after my return to the UK, I became delirious and was rushed to Addenbrooke’s Hospital near my parents’ home, just outside Cambridge. I don’t remember much of this time, but I do remember that after the diagnosis and the beginning of treatment a doctor told me that the next episode would have killed me. Fortunately, this form of malaria can be cured, and in time I made a full recovery. I realized that I was lucky to have had this attack following my return, rather than by the side of the road while hitchhiking through Malawi, and I found this thought sobering. I had never before considered my mortality, and my brush with malaria went on to define aspects of my life.
Over the coming months I started to think about what I would like to achieve in my life. I thought about how I would want to feel on my actual deathbed. If I had died from malaria, I would have been disappointed with how I had wasted my earlier years. I decided that when I did die, I would like my last act to be to look back on my life and think it had been fun and that I had also achieved something. It was around this time that I also decided I did not believe in a god and started to truly embrace science as the way to find out new knowledge. I decided that by the end of my life I wanted to have a good understanding of why I existed, and why I had developed the personality that would soon blink out. That was also the period of my life when I decided I wanted to be a scientist.
I have spent the intervening years thinking about my existence and researching it. Many scientists want to make a difference, often by working on ways to reduce human or animal suffering, improve standards of living or address threats to humanity such as climate change. My motivation was more personal. I simply wanted to understand why I existed and what had to happen for me to be here.
I made these decisions over thirty years ago. It took me so long to get my act together because life intervened. I needed to earn a living, I married, had a family, divorced and married again. My life has sometimes been fun, sometimes sad, easy, hard, frustrating and rewarding, just like everyone else’s. The desire to understand why I exist has remained with me to this day, and seeing other authors like Bill Bryson and David Christian write fabulous books on the universe made me think I might also be able to write a book, but one that takes a different approach to those that have gone before. I do not have all the answers as to why we exist, but I do have a good understanding of what had to happen, and I also have an appreciation of how scientists have worked out why each of the key events occurred.
As I worked as a scientist, I also came to appreciate that quite a lot of people were distrusting of science and tended not to engage with it. Science can be difficult, some results are unintuitive, and it has not always been taught in an engaging manner in school curricula. Some distrust in science also arises because the technological advances it has permitted in recent decades are astonishing, yet not all technology has been used to benefit humanity. Splitting the atom was a remarkable scientific achievement, yet it ushered in the age of nuclear bombs that have the potential to wipe out humanity. Lasers can be used in eye surgery but also as weapons to burn through flesh, while unmanned drones can be used to plant seeds from the air without churning up soil but can also be used to blow people up hundreds of miles distant from the drone operators.
Science is not to blame for the way it is used. When it is used to harm or kill it is because someone has chosen to apply science for harm. Similarly, when it is used for good, it is down to human choice. Science is just a way of finding out facts about the world. Positive benefits of science include extending human life by eradicating, preventing and treating numerous diseases, through to increasing food security across many parts of the globe. Whether such positive impacts have also increased human happiness is less clear. Technology buys us more time, both in making our day-to-day lives easier and in extending the number of years we can expect to be alive, but it can also generate anxiety. Could artificial intelligence beat me to writing a book like this? Will future versions of ChatGPT make me redundant? I don’t know, but if people understand science, they can contribute to debates about how it should be used. As I focused on why we exist, I realized I also wanted to be an advocate for science. It is a harder subject than history or philosophy, but it does generate progress in a way that no other subject does. Without science and technology, we’d be sitting outside at the mercies of the weather, arguing over why events happened and speculating on whether earthquakes were due to us upsetting a powerful ancestral spirit or an omen of future strife. We now know, thanks to science, that earthquakes occur when huge slabs of rock that form our planet’s surface slide over one another. Science is remarkable. It is why we have a good understanding of how we came to exist, but our application of it has also led to us significantly changing the world in recent decades. The next chapter is about how science works, and how we find out facts. We would know nothing about how the universe works and came to be as it is without the scientific method, the development of which is arguably humanity’s greatest achievement.
The Scientific Method
Thales of Miletus has a claim to be the world’s first scientist. He was also the first of the seven sages of ancient Greece, men famed for their achievements in philosophy, law and politics who were revered for their wisdom and knowledge. Thales lived 2,600 years ago in the city that takes his name and, if everything written about him is true, he led a remarkable life and was quite a celebrity.
Piecing together the life of Thales of Miletus is not easy, as many of the achievements attributed to him were recorded decades after his death. Accounts of his accomplishments from the time of his life are scarce, and historians have failed to find any texts he wrote. But he was held in high regard by ancient Greek historians such as Herodotus and Eudemus, who list some of his most remarkable achievements as measuring the diameters of the sun and the moon, working out that the year is 365 days long, improving naval navigation by using the stars, predicting solar eclipses, setting the summer and winter solstices, diverting the flow of the River Halys so an army could cross it, developing numerous mathematical theorems, inventing economic futures trading and determining that the Earth is spherical. Evidence for some of these deeds is more compelling than for others, but one universal theme runs through these histories: Thales sought understanding via hypotheses he could test.