I'm a British astronomer, science writer, and musician currently living in Dundee, Scotland, with my American wife Jill. We have two grown-up children and three grandchildren.

I was born in Glossop, Derbyshire, England, on July 29, 1953, and grew up in the beautiful Peak District, close to Kinder Scout for those who know the area. I went to New Mills Grammar School and then on to Sheffield University, where I earned my B.Sc. in physics in 1974, and Manchester University, for my Ph.D. in astronomy in 1977.

Around the time I left Manchester I met my future wife and decided to move to the States. I served as manager of applications software for the supercomputer company Cray Research in Minneapolis for several years, and it was during this time that our two children were born. While at Cray I wrote in my spare time for Astronomy magazine and, in 1982, decided to take the plunge into full-time freelance writing. That's been my main occupation ever since, interspersed with appearances on US and UK national radio, lectures, travel, and most recently, singing and songwriting. We moved back to England (Cumbria) around the time of my career change, spent the next 16 years here, returned to the US in 1999, and reemigrated again to the UK in 2004.

My first books – a 10-volume children's series called Discovering Our Universe – were published in 1984-85. In 1989, I wrote my first adult popular science book, Deep Time (Delacorte). This was followed by Equations of Eternity (Hyperion, 1993), Soul Search (Villard, 1995), Zen Physics (Harper Collins, 1996), The Extraterrestrial Encyclopedia (Random House, 2000), Life Everywhere: The Maverick Science of Astrobiology (Basic Books, 2001), The Complete Book of Spaceflight (John Wiley, 2002), The Universal Book of Astronomy (Wiley, 2003), The Universal Book of Mathematics (Wiley, 2004), Teleportation: The Impossible Leap (Wiley, 2005), Gravity's Arc: The Story of Gravity from Aristotle to Einstein and Beyond (Wiley, 2006), We Are Not Alone (co-authored with Dirk Schulze-Makuch, OneWorld, 2012), Megacatastrophes! Nine Strange Ways the World Could End (co-authored with Dirk Schulze-Makuch, OneWorld, 2012), The Rocket Man (OneWorld, 2013), and Weird Maths (co-authored with Agnijo Banerjee, Oneworld 2018). My other books are the children's series The World of Computers (6 volumes, 1986), Could You Ever (6 volumes, 1990-91), Experiment! (6 volumes, 1991-92), and Beyond 2000 (4 volumes, 1995). My articles and reviews have appeared in Astronomy, Omni, Penthouse, New Scientist, The New York Times, and The Guardian, among others.

I've also run this website, The Worlds of David Darling, since 1999. It's grown now to around 14,000 pages, several million words, and includes the Encyclopedia of Science, the Encyclopedia of Alternative Energy and Sustainable Living, the Encyclopedia of History, the Encyclopedia of Music, and the Children's Encyclopedia of Science. Over the years it has had tens of millions of visitors and contributed some of the original content to the science pages of Wikipedia.

A separate website, Songs of the Cosmos, is devoted to my music.

• Dark energy : More than two-thirds of the total energy of the universe is in a form we don’t yet understand. Two popular models for it are known as the cosmological constant and quintessence.

  
  

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• Skull : The human skull protects the brain and supports the structures of the face. It consists of two main parts, the cranium and the mandible, but at birth is made up of 44 separate bony elements most of which fuse during childhood.

  
  

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• Gemini Project : This was a series of two unmanned and ten manned NASA missions conducted between April 1964 and November 1966. With its two-seater capsule, it built on the success of Project Mercury and paved the way for Apollo.

  
  

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• Solar collector : A device used to collect, absorb, and transfer solar energy to a working fluid, such as water or air. The heart of it is the absorber, which is usually composed of several narrow metal strips.

  
  

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• Roman army : In the beginning one legion of 3,000 infantrymen and 300 cavalry made up the whole of the army of Rome. Under the Empire the number of legions, each of 5,000 or 6,000 men, was increased to 33.

  
  

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• Infinity : Don’t think of infinity as being like a very large number – because it isn’t. You’re no nearer to infinity at a trillion trillion trillion, or even a googol, than you were at 1. And there are infinitely many kinds of infinity!

  
  

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• Lincoln Beachey : Pioneering American aviator and early barnstormer, Beachey performed seemingly impossible stunts in the early days of powered flight including his infamous ‘Dip of Death’. Whenever he flew he dressed like he was on a big night out, complete with pinstripe suit, high collar, fancy tie, and golf cap turned fashionably backwards.

  
  

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• Gravitational waves : The first detections of gravitational waves – ripples in the fabric of spacetime – have recently been claimed. We are on the verge of being able to explore phenomena such as matter falling into supermassive black holes and neutron stars orbiting around each other by means other than electromagnetic radiation.

  
  

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• Industrial Revolution : It was not until the 18th century that scientific thought and experiment were applied to the needs of everyday life and trade and industry. In England, where the Industrial Revolution began, the steam engine was used first in collieries and then in rolling-mills, pottery works, and spinning mills.

  
  

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• Pompeii : On 24th August, AD 79, Vesuvius erupted burying the nearby town of Pompeii under a rain of hot ash and pumice stones. By the time the eruption was over Pompeii lay under 20 feet of volcanic debris – a suffocating avalanche that perfectly preserved buildings, objects, and people as they were at time of the tragedy for the next two millennia.

  
  

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