P. D. Smith is a British writer and independent researcher whose work explores the links between science, literature and popular culture. His most recent book is Doomsday Men: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon, a cultural history of science, superweapons and other strangeloves. This was published in 2007 by St Martin’s Press in the US and Penguin in the UK. In 2003 he wrote a brief biography of Einstein. His PhD thesis was a study of science in German literature, and this was published in 2000 as Metaphor and Materiality. He writes a regular round-up of science and cultural history books for the Guardian Review, as well as reviewing for The Independent and the Times Literary Supplement. PD Smith can be contacted through his blog and website, Kafka’s mouse (http://www.peterdsmith.com/).
By PD Smith December has a way of creeping up on you. It seems just a few weeks since summer was here and Abbas was making hay in the Alps. 2008 has been a year of fear and hope. Mighty financial institutions have collapsed overnight and America has elected its first African-American President. Apparently, Reinhold…
By P D Smith “the point is…this is exactly what happened in Vietnam…a technological solution to a human problem…” – Joe Penhall, Landscape with Weapon (2007) If you were a physicist in the 1920s and 30s, all roads led to Copenhagen’s Blegdamsvej 15. This was where Niels Bohr’s Institute of Theoretical Physics was located. The…
P D Smith Reden nur dort möglich ist, wo man lügen will. There is something about Kafka’s writing that gets under your skin. Perhaps that’s because he was always so uneasy in his own skin. Kafka described it as “a garment but also a straitjacket and fate”, suggesting that he saw skin as both clothing,…
P D Smith For a time, in the summer of 1933, the scientist who invented the first weapon of mass destruction – poison gas – was staying in the same genteel Georgian square in London’s Bloomsbury as the man who would play a key role in the creation of the atomic bomb. Fritz Haber was…
The other day I had an email from an angry reader. He accused me of maligning the good name of scientists in my cultural history of superweapons. Scientists were not “doomsday men” and the phrase “an organization of dangerous lunatics” should not be applied to the secret laboratories where scientists developed superweapons. As someone who…