What’s special about British writer Simon Singh? He’s a scientist with a common touch who has an amazing ability to turn out blockbuster bestsellers in quick succession. As a rookie author, he wrote a book called Fermat’s Last Theorem about a 17th century French mathematician and it zoomed to the top of the UK bestseller charts. He followed it up with The Code Book about how men have used secret codes from ancient times till the modern day, which also soared through the charts. Now his third book, The Big Bang, has made it to the New York Times bestseller lists.
Singh has just been in India promoting The Big Bang, a 450-page blockbuster that attempts to explain how scientists finally stumbled on to the Big Bang theory and the many scientific missteps on the way. It takes readers through the ‘cosmic’ battle between the supporters of the Big Bang theory and scientists like Fred Hoyle who preferred the less dramatic Solid State theory. One of Singh’s favourite characters in the book is George Lemaitre a Roman Catholic priest who first came up with the theory that the universe was born on a ‘day without yesterday’ in a single instant. Says Singh, “It’s a big story. I had planned to write a little book about the Big Bang but it grew and grew.”

As he criss-crossed the country, Singh has also talked about subjects like gambling and the sheer mathematical odds against ever winning the big one. It’s another subject dear to Singh’s heart and, financed by British newspaper Mail on Sunday, he once set out on a trip to Las Vegas in a bid to beat the ‘house’ at its own game. He ended up making about $285 but admitted that even this was mostly luck and not his reading up on the mathematics of winning at blackjack. Says Singh,“Gambling is a good way to learn about probability.”

But Singh’s trip to India turned into an education in itself. In Bangalore, as he stepped up to the podium, he noticed that many in the audience were carrying copies of The Code Book. For Bangalore’s hi-tech audience keeping cyber secrets is of paramount importance and they had all been through the book and understood what he was writing about. “The Code Book did very well here. In India people are interested in security.” Both The Code Book and Fermat have sold more than 1 million copies around the world.”

Singh has been on the road for several months now ever since The Big Bang was released. He has jetted from one American city to another on promotional tours. Unlike most authors he loves the travel except “when the arrangements go wrong, or it starts snowing when you are at the airport”. His visit to India coincides with the release of the paperback version of The Big Bang. His parents are originally from Punjab and Singh was brought up in Somerset in England.

For Singh, a career in science was on the cards from age nine, when he proclaimed that he wanted to be a nuclear scientist. He ended up studying at Imperial College in London and later doing a PhD from Cambridge. His PhD thesis was on the cutting edge branch of particle physics. He spent most of his PhD years with a team in Geneva that was trying to isolate a particle called the top quark. The top quark was discovered a few years later by an American team which used a larger accelerator to smash particles together.

He might have become a pure scientist but obviously figured that his real skills lay in communicating his infectious enthusiasm for science to a wider audience. Before doing a PhD he came to India and taught for a few months in Doon School and says that the experience taught him about how to hold an audience. A few years later after finishing his Phd, he turned up at the BBC with his curriculum vitae in hand and he soon found himself on programmes like the highly popular Tomorrow’s World and Earth Story.
Singh insists that he never really planned to be a writer and hadn’t charted out a detailed career path for himself. One day he found himself working on a television programme about the French mathematician Pierre de Fermat who devised a fiendishly difficult theorem that took 350 years to be solved. After the show went out, Singh discovered that he still had reams of unused material so he took a leave of absence to turn it all into a book. Much to his own surprise, he quickly found an agent interested in the project and a publisher.

Since then, he has never looked back. Fermat was the surprise hit of the year and one of the first books on science to make it to the bestseller charts. And Singh found that writing a book could also be stripped of its complexities and reduced to a simple exercise. He reckons that for his first two books he needed to write about 1,000 words a week and also do the research alongside. He always has a strict timetable and writing a book is a “seven days a week, 14 hours a day” affair without holidays. “If you take a holiday it’s tough to catch up on the work,” he says. The breaks come after a book is written and he has a trip planned — it could be to Turkey, Libya or Egypt — to catch an eclipse next year.

Is Singh a scientist or a writer? He has a passion for communicating mainly about physics and maths. He often makes television shows and used to do a radio show about numbers. He hit the headlines a few months ago for taking issue with singer Katie Melua about the words of a song which talked about being “12 million light years from the edge”.

“Katie Melua has no right to call the age of the universe a guess or quote it as 12 billion years when we now know it is 13.7 billion years old,” he argued in The Guardian. The argument ended with Melua recording a new version of the song — which rhymed very poorly — for a show in which both she and Singh took part. “Suddenly lots of people are thinking about cosmology. For me, that’s a real success,” he says.

What’s next for Singh? He says he hasn’t yet found a new scientific subject that can be turned into a bestseller. So he’s still taking a holiday from The Big Bang. But it’s a safe bet — even if not mathematically proven — that before long he’ll be back on the bestseller charts.

Photograph by Jagan Neg