THOMAS GOLD is a physicist who is not afraid of controversy. Friend and
colleague Freeman Dyson introduces Gold鈥檚 The Deep Hot Biosphere with a brief
account of his way of working: 鈥淎bout once every five years, he invades a new
field of research and proposes an outrageous theory that arouses intense
opposition from the professional experts.鈥� If it turns out he鈥檚 wrong, Gold
concedes with good humour: 鈥淪cience is no fun if you are never wrong.鈥�
But he has been right about pulsars being neutron stars, about how we hear
sounds and about the Earth鈥檚 axial flips. His big new theory, now out in
paperback (Copernicus, $20, ISBN 0387952535) is that oil and natural gas
are produced by the geology and chemistry of the hot deep layers below the
Earth鈥檚 surface, not dead animals. All the remains of organic life we find in
oil are later invasions of organisms that can cope with physical extremes. The
book is the best kind of science writing: contentious and passionate, with all
the evidence there for you to weigh up.
Passionate and contentious also describes the new series from HarperCollins,
Voyager Classics. These are, say the publishers, the greatest works of science
fiction. In the first batch of titles you鈥檒l find Aldous Huxley鈥檚 Brave New
World (拢7.99, ISBN 000711589X), with its searing indictment of forced,
cloned uniformity as a stabiliser of society. It arrives in bookstores at an
appropriate time.
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Ray Bradbury鈥檚 Fahrenheit 451 (拢7.99, ISBN 0007117108)
also has modern
resonance: the TV soap-addicted rule the world, all choices made for them. Books
epitomise the 鈥渆vil鈥� of uncertainty, offering opinion after opinion, idea after
idea. A new film version is being made, even though Fran莽ois Truffaut鈥檚
vision will be impossible to oust.