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One of the world's great explainers, Cambridge polymath Brian Clegg has the gift of making leading-edge issues in both the sciences and humanities accessible and intelligible to the general audience.

BIOGRAPHY

Born in Rochdale, Lancashire, UK, Brian was educated at the Manchester Grammar School and went on to read Natural Sciences (specializing in experimental physics) at Cambridge University.

After graduating, he spent a year at Lancaster University where he gained a second MA in Operational Research, a discipline originally developed during the Second World War to enhance the effectiveness of warfare through statistical means. It has since been widely applied to problem solving and decision making in business.

From Lancaster, he joined British Airways, where he formed a new department tasked with providing all PC hardware, software and consultancy to the airline. When this was successfully running, he set up the Emerging Technologies Group, a team of the most eccentric but talented staff in the company who researched and trialled technologies from fingerprint recognition to electronic cash. This emphasis on creativity led to working with Dr. Edward de Bono and in 1994, he left BA to set up his own creative consultancy, running one and two day courses giving in-depth insights into the use of creativity techniques to develop new ideas and products, and to solve business problems. His clients include HM Treasury, British Airways, SmithKline Beecham, The Met Office, Sony, The BBC, Zurich Bank, The Royal Bank of Scotland and many other blue-chips.

Brian has also written regular columns, features and reviews for numerous business, consumer and professional magazines, including PC User, PC Week, Computer Weekly, Good Housekeeping, PC Dealer, Personal Computer World, Innovative Leader (US) and Professional Manager (UK). His books have been translated into many languages, including German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Turkish, Norwegian and even Indonesian.

Brian has given sell-out lectures at the Royal Institution in London and has spoken at venues from Oxford and Cambridge Universities to Cheltenham Festival of Science. He has also contributed to radio and TV programmes, and is a popular speaker at schools. Brian is also editor of the successful www.popularscience.co.uk book review site and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Brian lives in a Wiltshire village with his wife and twin children. When not writing, a considerable amount of his time is involved in music, having a passion for Tudor and Elizabethan church music.

“Science writer Clegg (“A Brief History of Infinity”), discussing the field of quantum mechanics, asserts that "[e]very experiment takes us a step closer to realizing just how strange the world is at the quantum level." Quantum entanglement is the oddest of them all. As Clegg explains it, entanglement occurs when two particles (photons, atoms, electrons, etc.) become so intensely linked together that for all intents and purposes they become part of one unit. The mystifying thing is that this link continues even if the two particles are in different parts of the universe: "Make a change to one particle, and that change is instantly reflected in the other(s)-however far apart they may be." Clegg does an excellent job of explaining this complex situation in nontechnical terms; he details the many experiments that have consistently suggested that entanglement is real. The implications for future technological advances are huge, and Clegg is at his finest as he embeds potential advances in a broad historical context. Data could be encrypted in unbreakable codes; computers could become thousands of times more powerful than today; objects, and maybe even living organisms, could be instantaneously transported. While highly speculative, these possibilities could change our notion of reality.” - Publishers Weekly April 2006

"It is a delightful book. The author does a superb job of presenting the story of a remarkable concept – quantum entanglement – in a relaxed and entertaining style. He succeeds admirably in steering the reader through a number of mind boggling features of the quantum world and their fascinating applications." Professor Artur Ekert, Leigh Trapnell Professor of Quantum Physics, Cambridge University

"A masterful account of the phenomenon Einstein thought so crazy it could not possibly be true (Only it is!) " Marcus Chown (author of The Universe Next Door)

"A marvelously clear and engaging account of the people and ideas involved in trying to understand the deepest mysteries of the quantum world and convert them into a useful technology." Gregory Chaitin, author of Meta Math! The Quest for Omega

#1 Bestseller in Amazon's Popular Science (General) and Popular Maths lists, plus Amazon's #1 recommended gift for bright sparks.

"This was an entertaining and interesting book... Clegg did a great job on making this book an interesting and (relatively) easy read on a topic which is definitely fascinating." Mathematical Association of America

"Clegg is immensely readable and manages to convey to a lay audience some of the key mathematical ideas concerning infinity... a success." Times Higher Education Supplement

"[T]he best book on the subject at a "popular" level I have seen... I love how Brian Clegg ingeniously expounds upon the concept of infinity challenging our minds to go beyond previously defined limits of the notion. Bizarre paradoxes, strange people and brilliant metaphors make the whole story move from the mundane to delightfully inspiring and I'm not really a fan of science.. Infinity : the quest to think the unthinkable is a trip to infinity and beyond!!." Reviewscout.com

"Clegg has an amiable, easy style; he chats us through complex ideas rather than lecturing to us. Like other good science populists (Isaac Asimov springs immediately to mind), he explores his subject through narrative and anecdote: hanging discussions of infinity onto their historical development puts flesh onto what might easily be dry bones in other writers' hands, and so we have a tour of fascinating personalities and slices of history, a subject breathed into life. Brian Clegg has just had me revisiting areas of mathematics I haven't even considered since university. And I enjoyed it." Dr Keith Brooke, Infinity Plus

"Clegg's book is engagingly written and includes several interesting biographical sketches, which animate the mathematics and give a good sense of the very human concerns that have helped to propagate the story of this (very inhuman?) concept... there is much to be learned from this book and much pleasure to be derived from it." Dr Adrian Moore, London Review of Books

"If I had to choose [from the books on infinity] I'd take Clegg… he is making it as simple as possible. One reason why Clegg is readable is that he likes to gossip about personalities. He tells us about Lancashire counting songs, of the assumptions, true and false, of the Pythagoreans, and how the Greeks, while being fixated on geometry, using an impossibly cumbersome system of numeration, and having no zero and no algebra, really did pretty well… the dazed humanist begins to see why Clegg calls his final chapter "Endless Fascination"." Frank Kermode, The Guardian

"Infinity can provide us with as many mind-bending paradoxes as special relativity or quantum mechanics, but it can also be grasped by anyone who intuits that, no matter how large a number is, you can always add one. ... As likely to quote William Blake or Douglas Adams as Newton and Einstein, he provides an accessible and, of course, open-ended overview of infinity as conceived of and wrestled with by theologians, mathematicians and philosophers, from Ancient Greece onwards... endlessly fascinating even for the rest of us." Laurence Phelan, The Independent

"Light's properties often seem mysterious to the point of being unfathomable. Yet in this extraordinary book, Brian Clegg manages to explain them through the lives of those so fixated with light that they have shaped our perception of it… Clegg's accessible writing style manages to encapsulate the lives of light's disciples with humorous and interesting anecdotes… quite awesome!" - New Scientist

"An excellent resource… makes for compelling reading." - ScienceScope, the magazine of the US National Science Teachers' Association

"Mr. Clegg is too good a writer to assert himself above his subject... a superb exposition." - The Midwest Book Review

"A fascinating book on a fascinating subject - It brings together all aspects of 'light' in an unusual and compelling manner. " - Sir Patrick Moore CBE

"This immensely likable work of pop science traces man's enduring fascination with light, from Aristotle's plans for a death ray (burning enemy ships with a giant array of mirrors) through to a recent experiment that seems to have sent Mozart's 40th Symphony faster than light, and thus back through time. Clegg is very good at explaining the bizarre properties of light, especially the head-scratching wave-particle duality… Clegg's style and lucidity shine when he is talking directly to the science, especially in the concluding speculations about information-crammed crystals and teleportation. " - Stephen Poole, The Guardian

"Interesting yet scholarly; it will break down the resistance which so many people have to acquiring some grounding in science. I am sure many readers will find this book very attractive." - Professor Heinz Wolff

"This is a fascinating book which illuminates and entertains. " - Sir Clive Sinclair

"As Brian Clegg's very readable account makes clear, light is at the very heart of the history of ideas and the evolution of science. Compelling reading." - Simon Patterson, Turner Prize nominee

"What makes Brian Clegg's account so readable is the awe he manages to communicate for something that the rest of us take for granted in our normal daily lives… For this reader, switching on the bedside light will never be the same again." - Simon Proctor, Eastern Daily Press

The author's talent for giving the reader an almost tangible feeling for the atmosphere of 13th Century Europe in general and of England in particular is marvellous - I found it fascinating. - Professor Heinz Wolff

"A fascinating chronology... in itself a wondrous tale, but Mr. Clegg's book sings because he shapes the shadowy bearers of ideas into real people." - Dana De Zoysa, New Book Reviews

"When science and Bacon occur in the same sentence, the Bacon meant is usually Francis ... Clegg's enthralling book launches Roger Bacon's re-revival. Ray Olson, American Library Association"

"In providing a readable account of Bacon's life in the historical context of his time, Mr Clegg has performed a valuable service." The Sunday Telegraph

"An excellent resource… makes for compelling reading." - ScienceScope, the magazine of the US National Science Teachers' Association

Brian is currently finishing MUYBRIDGE: THE MAN WHO STOPPED TIME - the illuminating story of Eadweard Muybridge, father of the motion picture, pioneer of photography - and murderer - for the Joseph Henry press / National Academy of Sciences Brian is also currently developing a major new series concept for children.