Union is back in session for the Fall 2021 term, but I’m on sabbatical leave this year, so I’m not teaching. This has led to a lot of people asking me “What are you doing for the year?” I usually reply by noting that A Brief History of Timekeeping will be out in January (but you can pre-order it now!), so I’ll have a book promotion cycle to deal with, and that after that I’ll be working on whatever my next project is going to be.
Of course, right at the moment, I’m mostly just recovering from the push to finish the book-in-production, and sorta-kinda prepping for a couple of out-of-town trips over the next month or so. Finishing a book during the pandemic was a bit of a slog, and I’m a little burned out. It’s been a couple of weeks since I signed off on the page proofs, though, so I’m starting to actually think about what would be a good next project.
Unlike the last couple of times I finished a book, I don’t have a really clear idea in mind for What Comes Next. I’ve got a couple of really sketchy ideas, which are primarily motivated by a desire to do something that’s really not at all like what I’ve been doing these last several years; I’m sure that will really endear my to my agent and publisher…
One idea that I’ve toyed with off and on is to do a book about laser cooling and Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC). These are my home area of physics (my Ph.D. was on collisions between laser-cooled atoms, my post-doc on quantum phenomena in BEC), so might not seem like a huge departure, but I think if I were going to do it, I’d go for more of a life-in-the-lab, quasi-oral-history sort of thing. Most of the principal scientists in the development of laser cooling are still around, though getting on in years, and I’ve met most of them, and consider a few close friends and mentors. The vague concept would be to talk to them, get their stories about how the field came together, and write that story.
The problem here is that interviewing people is not in my core set of well-established skills. In fact, I’ve barely done it at all; I had a couple of Skype calls with physicists from CMS when I was writing a chapter on Big Science for Eureka, but that’s about it. I don’t know if that’s something I’d be good at, and it would suck to commit to that and then find that I hate it.
The other idea I’ve thought about is doing a pop biography of some individual scientist. Most of what I’ve written has a historical component, but it’s usually been spread over a long period, with brief anecdotes about lots of different people. It might be interesting to really dig into the story of one particular person and look at their whole career. I toyed with the idea of pitching a pop biography of Fermi, but David Schwartz’s really excellent book pretty much blocked that out, so the most likely subject would probably be Albert Michelson, who had a really fascinating life, and also worked in the US, so his work was in English (in contrast to somebody like Pauli, who I think would be a good subject but only for someone who can read German…).
Again, the big problem here is that things like poring through archives of some historical person’s papers are not really part of my skill set, so I don’t know how well I’d like it. That’s also part of the attraction, of course— as noted above, a major goal is to avoid writing the kind of thing I’ve written a lot of already— but it’s hard to convincingly propose that.
Probably what I need to do is to find some way to do one or the other of these at a shorter length— pitch it as a magazine feature, write that, and if the process is totally miserable, cross that one off. That involves something I definitely hate doing, though— pitching stories to editors— and as noted above, I’m a little burned out. So, for the moment, I’m doing a bunch of work around the house, blogging, and waiting to see if my subconscious latches more firmly onto one or the other of these. Or comes up with some entirely new idea that’s an absolute slam dunk.
This is a bit noodle-y, and kind of a mix of time-wasting and trying to prod myself into thinking more seriously about what comes next. If you’d like a front-row seat to find out, here’s a button you can click:
and if you think it would appeal to someone else, here’s a different one:
If you want to either encourage or warn me off one of those topics, or suggest an alternative, the comments will be open.
I really liked Jana Levin's "Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space" which was a series of interview style chapters outlining the story of LIGO (I'm sure you've read it, if not, I highly recommend). I think a similar for BEC and laser cooling would be awesome.