For someone who reads only for “diversion and relaxation”, physicist and
author F. David Peat has a heavyweight reading list: Sophocles, Dylan Thomas,
Henry Fielding, Charles Baudelaire, Sir Thomas Malory, Fyodor Dostoevsky. He’s a
fan of Anthony Burgess’s books—he has read all of them—and of
Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers.
One of Peat’s earliest memories is looking at cut-away diagrams and
photographs of stars, volcanoes and atoms in The Marvels and Mysteries of
Science by Clyde Fisher, John H. Gerould and others (W. H. Wise, 1943). But that
was before he could read. He was later inspired…
