‘There’s no point being subtle about science. You have to bang them over the head with it’

Popular science author Hugh Aldersey-Williams on why he hates the label, thinks scientists should shut up – and why he once spent 13 hours watching the tide

It sounds like satire but Hugh Aldersey-Williams’s account of the day he was dispatched by his publisher to a “branding workshop” is all too terrifyingly real. The author of Periodic Tales, Anatomies and The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century, one of the more interesting writers to labour under what he calls the “nasty label” of popular science, spent a day brainstorming his brand. He was, he says, less polite about the value of the exercise than his six fellow authors. “Unpredictability is my brand characteristic,” he says. “Am I a science writer? Are we forever stuck that way or are we allowed to write about other things? I’m interested in architecture and modern music and difficult things like that ... I’ve got lots of hare-brained ideas, none of which my agent likes.”

We are strolling along Norfolk’s rapidly eroding cliffs of Happisburgh (pronounced Haze-brrr, appropriate on a chilly day) because it seems like a good spot to talk to him about Tide, his new exploration of “this huge and rather mysterious physical phenomena”. There is something “rather curious and unaddressed” about our understanding of the tides, he says, which does not reflect “the fact that we all spend ages on the beach staring at the sea in a rather gormless way”. Some of the largest tides in the world ebb and flow on the shores of Britain, but the British are particularly inept at handling them, and Tide offers a fascinating short history of the tide’s role in military defeats. “It’s quite embarrassing when you tot them up,” he says. “You could do an article – 10 Times Britain was Disgraced by the Tide.”

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