Born 1964
Before turning to writing I spent my years training to be a physicist. The lure
of Einstein's theory of gravitation had interested me from as far back as
my teenage years, and continued to hold me in a trance for a very long time.
Unfortunately, due to some manner of cosmic mis-timing, I was shunted into the
field of quantum optics, and ended up researching the quantum behavior of
objects known as optical solitons. There can be no doubt that quantum mechanics
and its application to real-world technologies is a worthy pursuit. But for
me it proved far too long on mathematical abstraction. More importantly, I never
sensed the level of physical understanding that I thought I had enjoyed when
studying the geometry of space-time as described by Einstein's extraordinarily
satisfying theory of General Relativity.
Despite the sense that I wasn't enjoying my work the way I should have been,
it still took me some years to face up to the fact that I really had
taken the wrong road somewhere back there. Even after receiving a doctorate in Physics
from the University of Queensland in 1993, and following an offer of a research
fellowship that allowed for three years of paid study at the California Institute
of Technology, I still thought something might come of my chosen path in physics.
Nothing did. But the period at Caltech allowed me to expand my interests
into the biosciences. It also prepared me for the two years of thorough biological
and physical research that was required to write
"Ninth Day of Creation"
[yes, it was a very difficult book to write!].
Rather than do science, I had decided I was better suited to writing
about it. Besides, when I looked around, it seemed there weren't too
many authors who could adequately handle hard science in the fictional setting.
I still think that's the case today.
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