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Hello, my guest today Richard Dawkins, whose book Unweaving the Rainbow has just been

published, and Ian McCure and whose novel Enduring Love, a tale of Rationalism, Romanticism,

and religion at odds with one another has recently been successfully

launched in paperback.

His new novel is Amsterdam.

Richard Dawkins, unwaving the rainbow, most people I think that comes, it takes off from Wordsworth,

but in fact you take off from Keats.

Keats complained that Newton had spoiled all the poetry of the rainbow by

unwaving it, by explaining it.

And I've just taken this as a sort of symbol for the reluctance that some poetic minds

have to embrace science. And I'm really trying to say, the poetic mind should be embracing

science as one of the most poetic things that they could

possibly experience and inspiration for great poetry.

So it's almost a sort of take Keats by the hand and say, come on, look at science again, you'd love it.

A God in a Hayden's memo which you quote, what Keats said was, he destroyed the poetry of the rainbow,

this is Newton, he destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism.

Now you don't think a prism is a reduction at all, do you?

Well, in one sense it's reducing, it's taking white light which is a mixture of all lights

and then reducing it to the different colors that compose it.

But that's not reducing in any kind of demeaning sense.

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