magazines – Dr Andrew May

29 Dec 202429 Dec 2024

Another year, another 3 cover features

I’ve been writing regularly for How It Works magazine for over 5 years now, with at least one article in every issue this year. As last year, I’ve managed three cover features in 2024, as pictured above. Here’s a quick rundown of them:

Time (issue 187, February) – the history of timekeeping from the Antikythera mechanism to atomic clocks, together with a bit of relativistic theory on time dilation and spacetime
The Science of Eclipses (issue 188, March) – with a particular focus on the much-publicized 2024 solar eclipse, as well as ESA’s much less widely reported Proba-3 “artificial eclipse” mission, also launched in 2024
Quantum Physics Explained (issue 197, December) – covering all those things that used to give me nightmares as an undergraduate, such as the double-slit experiment, Schrodinger’s cat and the uncertainty principle, as well as newer developments like quantum teleportation and quantum-dot displays

12 Feb 202412 Feb 2024

Space Telescopes – book and Guardian article

I’m very pleased that yesterday’s Observer newspaper featured an article by me about space telescopes, which is now free to read – under the title Cosmic Time Machines – on the Guardian website. That’s one of the most prestigious mainstream news sites here in the UK, so hopefully I’ll reach a wider-than-usual audience with it.

The article ties in with my latest book, Eyes in the Sky, which was published last month by Icon Books. As with my previous books for them, it’s part of their “Hot Science” series – actually my 6th contribution to it. Here’s their blurb from the back cover of Eyes in the Sky:

Over 50 years ago, astronomers launched the world’s first orbiting telescope. This allowed them to gaze further into outer space and examine anything that appears in the sky above our heads, from comets and planets to galaxy clusters and stars. Since then, almost 100 space telescopes have been launched from Earth and are orbiting our planet, with 26 still active and relaying information back to us.

As a result of these space-based instruments, such as NASA’s iconic Hubble Space Telescope, we know much more about the universe than we did half a century ago. But why is Hubble, orbiting just 540 kilometres above the Earth, so much more effective than a ground-based telescope? How can a glorified camera tell us not only what distant objects look like, but their detailed chemical composition and three-dimensional structure as well?

In Eyes in the Sky, science writer Andrew May takes us on a journey into space to answer these questions and more. Looking at the development of revolutionary instruments, such as Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope, May explores how such technology has helped us understand the evolution of the Universe.

31 Aug 202331 Aug 2023

Three More Cover Features

In a previous post, I mentioned that I had three consecutive cover features in How It Works magazine between November 2021 and January 2022. I’ve just come close to repeating that feat, making the cover for three out of the four issues between June and September this year. As pictured above, the topics this time were near-Earth asteroids, gravity and the solar cycle. The first two are particular favourites of mine, having previously covered the asteroid threat in my book Cosmic Impact, while my PhD thesis was all about gravity and its effects on stellar orbits. Around 15 years after that, in the late 1990s, I had some peripheral involvement with BAE Systems’ “Project Greenglow” on the possibility of gravity control (or antigravity, if you like) – something I’ve written about on a number of occasions, for example in this blog post from 2015. As I said there, my link to the BAE project came through its leader, Ron Evans, who I’ve remained in touch with ever since. So I was really pleased when the magazine editor asked me to include something about “antigravity” in the How It Works feature, as it gave me the opportunity to include a brief Q&A with Ron as a sidebar at the end of the article.

8 Jan 20228 Jan 2022

Three cover features in a row

I made the cover of How It Works magazine for the third month in a row! The above screenshot is from the publisher’s website where you can buy copies even if you missed them when they came out. As you can see, the subjects are pretty eclectic. November’s feature was all about UFOs, which is a longstanding interest of mine (the weirder aspects of the topic are covered in my book Pseudoscience and Science Fiction, although the magazine feature is focused on more mundane causes of unidentified aerial phenomena). Then my December piece was about the James Webb Space Telescope, currently on its way to explore the depths of the universe – an online version is available on the LiveScience website. Finally this month’s article is about the huge nuclear-fusion-producing laser at the National Ignition Facility in California – that one is online too.

28 Dec 202028 Dec 2020

A reasonably productive year

In spite of all the difficulties this year, I’ve still managed to do a reasonable amount of writing as the following table shows:

Year	Books	Magazine articles
2019	3	12
2020	2	9

The main book this year (on the left in the picture above) was The Science of Sci-Fi Music from Springer. I also did a couple of music-related articles for Fortean Times – “Charles Fort and the Viennese Trichord” in FT390 and “The Music of the Spheres” in FT398 (that’s the issue you can see in the picture).

The high-point on the magazine side was a huge (eight and a half pages) article about the Hubble Space Telescope in the April issue of All About Space. This was great fun to write, as the editor wanted some quotes from scientists who have worked with Hubble, which gave me a chance to get in touch with (among other people) an old colleague of mine from the 1980s. The result was probably the best magazine feature I’ve ever written – and hardly anyone saw it, because it came out during the Covid-19 lockdown!

I also had several articles in How It Works, including ones on antimatter and “Deadly Weapons of the Future” seen in the above photograph. Related to the latter subject, my other book this year was The First Killer Robots: Guided Missiles in the 20th Century. This one was self-published, although based on material from several short ebooks previously published by Bretwalda Books.

Hopefully more to come in 2021!

27 Dec 2019

Writing for Magazines

I’ve been writing books, ebooks and online articles for about 8 years now, but it’s only recently that I can add print magazines to the list. Until 6 months ago, my only experience in this area was for Fortean Times, where I’ve had 15 short pieces published since 2012. But as unique and prestigious as FT is, that only averages 2 articles per year. Then back in June I made contact with another great magazine called How It Works, after they gave my book Cosmic Impact a 5-star review. I’ve had a steady stream of assignments from them since then – plus a few from its sister magazine All About Space – as you can see from the pile of issues pictured above.

All the covers have features by me mentioned on them. Most prominent is the one about the Big Bang for All About Space. I’m also responsible for “Secrets of Apollo 11” – the one in small print on the top-left How It Works, not the main cover feature of the same title for All About Space (my contribution to the latter issue being “Do We Live in a Multiverse?”). In the other HIW issues, look out for “Your Guide to Time Travel”, “The Amazing Power of Antimatter”, “How Jupiter Saved the Earth”, “Mapping the Milky Way” and “Deadly Weapons of the Future” – they’re all by me. Slightly miffed about the last title, though, as the article itself is mainly about non-lethal weapons!

There are a few other pieces by me hidden inside some of the issues, plus more on the way. I’ve added a new page to my website to keep track of them.

24 Jun 201727 Dec 2019

Seventy years of UFOs

Today marks the 70th anniversary of Kenneth Arnold’s seminal UFO encounter, on 24 June 1947. That was the event that gave rise to the term “flying saucer”, and kicked off a media frenzy that led to copycat sightings around the world … and a whole new subgenre of science fiction. As such I devoted several pages to Arnold’s sighting and its repercussions in my book Pseudoscience and Science Fiction last year.

The Kenneth Arnold sighting also provides the central theme of the latest issue of Fortean Times, pictured above (FT355, July 2017). To my surprise, I received three extra copies of this last week – something that puzzled me until I looked at the contents and discovered there was a six-page article by myself in it. I actually wrote this (and submitted it to FT) at the beginning of last year, before I’d even had the idea of writing the Pseudoscience and Science Fiction book. In fact it was while writing the article – about the pulp magazine editors Ray Palmer and John W. Campbell, and the way they blurred the boundary between science fiction and fortean-style non-fiction speculation – that I realized I could write a whole book on that sort of thing. Although the magazine article (called “Astounding Science, Amazing Theories!”) took such a long time to appear, it does fit the theme of this particular issue very neatly – including a couple of references to the Kenneth Arnold sighting and Ray Palmer’s role in publicising it.

The main Arnold-related article, however, is not mine but one by Nigel Watson. Called “Was it a bird? Was it a plane?”, this focuses on other potential explanations of the sighting besides the extraterrestrial hypothesis – in particular the possibility that the objects Arnold saw were saucer-shaped or flying-wing style military aircraft. Arnold was flying a light aircraft himself at the time, and Jenny Randles has a one-page piece in her “UFO Casebook” column about other similar aircraft-based UFO sightings. The Kenneth Arnold links don’t stop there, either. The magazine’s lead feature, by Brian J. Robb, is about the conspiracy theorist Fred Crisman – who had connections with Kenneth Arnold, Ray Palmer … and the hollow-Earth theorist Richard Shaver, who also features quite prominently in my own article. In passing I also mention L. Ron Hubbard (who started out as a protégé of Palmer’s upmarket rival, John W. Campbell) – and there’s a link there, too, since the “Building a Fortean Library” column in this issue happens to feature a classic biography of Hubbard.

So there are plenty of reasons to buy this month’s issue of Fortean Times – and my article is just one of them!

14 May 201727 Dec 2019

Freaky Times

If there really was a magazine called Freaky Times, I’d buy it – especially if it only cost £1.50, which is the price tag on the one pictured above. Actually this is a screenshot from a recent video game called Barrow Hill: The Dark Path , which I bought after seeing a full-page advertisement for it in last month’s Fortean Times (a magazine that bears an uncanny stylistic resemblance to Freaky Times – or perhaps it’s the other way around).

The original Barrow Hill game came out ten years ago, and I found it enjoyable to play but nothing really special. That’s essentially my verdict on this belated sequel, too. It’s probably slightly more fun than the original, with more immersive graphics and more interesting characters. The style is reminiscent of Jonathan Boakes’s Dark Fall series, or Daniel Peach’s Corrosion: Cold Winter Waiting which I wrote about last year . But those games have fascinatingly original storylines and vast, intriguing settings to explore, while the Barrow Hill games are shorter, with more mundane locations and a plot not too different from a hundred other games you can find on Steam. But if you like first-person adventure games (as I do) and wacky New Age weirdness (as I do) then you’ll enjoy playing Barrow Hill: The Dark Path anyway.

The main developer behind the Barrow Hill games is Matt Clark of Shadow Tor studios, but Jonathan Boakes’s name also crops up several times in the end credits. In fact he seems to have been the one behind the Freaky Times mock-up pictured above (and there’s another shot of it below). After a bit of Googling I found this post on his blog, which describes the design as “a little nod to the Fortean Times”. And right at the bottom of the cover he’s slipped in a reference to the “Dowerton ghosts”, from his own Dark Fall games!

30 Jan 201727 Dec 2019

As reviewed in Fortean Times

The latest issue of Fortean Times (FT350, February 2017) contains David Clarke’s great review of my book Pseudoscience and Science Fiction. It’s the first time any of my books has been reviewed in that magazine – or in any printed, as opposed to online, media for that matter. But it was worth the wait – David describes the book as “excellent” and gives it a score of 9 out of 10. I’ve put a teaser of his review in the picture above, but you’ll have to buy the magazine to read the whole thing – or better still, just buy my book!

Actually it’s a big relief to see a good review in FT, as that’s pretty much the book’s target audience. In other words people who are fascinated by wacky ideas like UFOs, ESP and conspiracy theories, but with a sense of amused detachment rather than a passionately pro- or anti- attitude – seeing them as popular entertainment on a par with science fiction. I’ve been reading FT on a regular basis since 1993, and I’ve still got every issue I’ve ever bought. That huge collection may take up a lot of space, but it was invaluable when I was researching this book – Fortean Times is mentioned no fewer than 55 times in its 180 pages!

Two of the regular features in this current issue focus on subjects covered in my book. David Hambling’s excellent science column on page 16 has all the latest news about the EmDrive – an alleged “reactionless” propulsion device which I discussed in Chapter 6: Space Drives and Anti-gravity. Whether it proves to be pseudoscience or real science (hopefully the latter), the EmDrive certainly follows in the footsteps of countless science-fictional space drives.

Then on pages 52 to 53, the “Building a Fortean Library” feature focuses on the Shaver Mystery of the 1940s, with its mind-controlling subterranean super-beings. I covered that in some depth in Chapter 3: High-Tech Paranoia – along with such topics as shapeshifting reptilians and the strange world of Philip K. Dick.