The Importance of Being Interested: Adventures in Scientific Curiosity - Robin Ince
Friday, 26th November 2021, 13:00 - 14:30
About this event
The Hive, Belmont, SY1 1TE Tickets: Full £12 Friends £10 U18 £8
Robin Ince is many things...a comedian, a writer, a broadcaster and a champion of scientific ideas. The Guardian once dubbed him a 'becardiganed polymath' which seems about right.
He is probably best known as the co-host of the Sony Gold Award winning BBC Radio 4 series The Infinite Monkey Cage with Professor Brian Cox.
Robin Ince quickly abandoned science at school, bored by a fog of dull lessons and intimidated by the barrage of equations. But, twenty years later, he fell in love and he now presents one of the world's most popular science podcasts. Every year he meets hundreds of the world's greatest thinkers.
The Importance of Being Interested is Robin's latest book and he will be joining us at Shrewsbury Festival of Literature 2021 to talk about why scientific wonder isn't just for the professionals.
Filled with interviews featuring astronauts, comedians, teachers, quantum physicists, neuroscientists and more, as well as charting Robin's own journey with science, The Importance of Being Interested explores why many wrongly think of the discipline as distant and difficult. From the glorious appeal of the stars above to why scientific curiosity can encourage much needed intellectual humility, this optimistic and profound book will leave you filled with a thirst for intellectual adventure.
A delightful and scintillating hymn to science. Resolutely a non-scientist, Robin Ince discovers with awe that when science addresses the "big problems" and destroys familiar beliefs, it does not leave us in a cold, meaningless and de-humanized world, but in a one which is colourful, human, full of intensity and wonder.
Professor Carlo Rovelli, bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
Robin is the most engaging of science communicators. As someone who also struggled with science as a child, still finds physics an impossible foreign tongue, and came late to the fulfilment of a curious mind, I found this book by turns challenging, entertaining and moving.
Steve Backshall, BAFTA-winning British explorer, naturalist, presenter and writer
Robin Ince | Comedian | Writer | Broadcaster
Robin Ince's 100 Bookshop Tour - The Cosmic Shambles Network