Marcus Chown, shown above, on a recent vacation in Paris,
juggles numerous science journalism assignments, including
writing for magazines, producing science radio shows, and authoring books.

A Man for All Mediums

As a science journalist, Marcus Chown, MS ’84, has pretty much done it all—magazine articles, books, science broadcasting. The author of three popular-science books, Chown is also the cosmology consultant for New Scientist, the London-based science weekly, and an occasional contributor to the BBC, for whom he once was the designated science expert on a comedy radio show.

Moreover, he has authored the most-read popular-science book in the United Kingdom after (of course) Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Chown’s book Afterglow of Creation—which chronicles the 20th-century search for the relic radiation of the Big Bang—gained that distinction, he says, thanks to the British science magazine Focus, which bought 200,000 copies to give away to its readers.

“My royalty was 5 percent of the sales price and the magazine paid 30 cents for each copy,” says Chown. “So I didn’t exactly become a millionaire.”

Like many science journalists who pass through Caltech, Chown, a UK native, had dual interests in science and writing but first chose the path of science. After earning his physics degree at the University of London, he entered Caltech in 1982 as a graduate student. His research involved very-long-baseline interferometry, a subspecialty of radio astronomy. But he quickly became disenchanted with the subject.

“This was not an area where you could get quick results and it was not very sexy,” Chown says.

“The reality is that as a radio astronomer you never look through a telescope. It’s just number crunching in a computer. At some point, I felt that I wanted to do something with writing.” In 1984, while he was on summer vacation in London, he got himself a trial as a part-time news writer for the British science magazine Nature.

Chown found it thrilling to cover the latest science developments, to speak to the scientists who had made the discoveries, and to write under deadline pressure. So much so, that when it was time for him to return to Caltech, he called his advisor, Professor Tony Readhead, who was sympathetic to his dilemma, and told him that he was going to try writing. The next day, he was fired from his Nature job. But he soon rebounded, landing a position as education consultant for New Scientist. When the book-review editor left in 1986, Chown took over that job. In 1989, he became science-news editor of the magazine, a job that he held until 1995, when he left to freelance and write books.

Chown had already written a science book for children and coauthored two science fiction novels—Double Planet and Reunion—when Afterglow of Creation was published in 1993 to excellent reviews (the Times praised it as “witty, upbeat, and informed”). He followed up in 1999 with The Magic Furnace, an account of the quest to discover the origin of the atoms in our bodies and of the scientists involved, including Caltech’s 1983 Nobel laureate Willy Fowler, PhD ’36. Chown’s most recent book, published last year, is The Universe Next Door: The Making of Tomorrow’s Science, a collection of science essays on provocative subjects such as the possibility that time might run backward and that parallel realities exist in which all possible histories are played out. His publisher, Faber, has already asked for a follow-up, which Chown plans to start working on this summer.

Over the years, Chown has branched into broadcasting. From 1994 to 1995, he appeared once a week on a London radio station to discuss the latest science news. In 1997, he produced a series of 45-minute BBC radio shows called Probe, which examined science culture and policy issues, such as the role of whistle blowers and why some scientists win Nobel Prizes and others don’t.

One of Chown’s most unusual ventures has been his involvement in a science comedy pilot for BBC radio. Called It’s Only a Theory, the show, developed by British comedy writer Andy Hamilton, featured a live audience, a panel of three comedians, and a science expert. Selected as the gravity guru for one episode, Chown said that the ad-libbed repartee was so hilarious that his jaw hurt from laughing. While the audience seemed to like it too, the show never made it past the pilot stage.

“It was one of the most original things I’ve ever been involved with,” Chown says, but the BBC didn’t know what to do with it, since the network had never treated science with anything less than reverence. “Most science programs are made by people with science backgrounds.” They can be dry and pedantic, turning off the general public. “This show came from a comedy writer who was interested in science but who had no science background. The idea was that panelists and the audience would learn something about science” through comedy, and they did. “But the show became a victim of its courage.”

Whether he’s working on books or in broadcasting, “the greatest pleasure I get from science journalism is communicating all the amazing things I have learned to people who weren’t as lucky as I was to go to a place like Caltech. Richard Feynman once said that you only understand something if you can explain it to someone else,” says Chown, who adds that taking a class from Feynman was one of his most memorable Caltech experiences.

After The Magic Furnace was published, Chown received a letter from a reader who wrote that she had quit school at age 14 and never gone back. Reading Chown’s book about the origin of atoms inside stars jolted her into doing something new with her own life, she said. “She wrote to me saying that she was so moved by the book that she cried while reading it,” Chown recalls. The mother of three went back to school and will soon graduate from college.

“In journalism, you don’t always count on making a difference in people’s lives, but you actually can,” says Chown. “It means a lot to have someone say that I changed his or her life. You wouldn’t think it could happen with popular science books, but it does.”