Natalie Angier is a science writer (biology) for the NYTimes for which she has won a Pulitzer, so she is apparently doing a good job.
I liked the book, although I had it out from the Herrick Public Library for over two months, as I kept reading other books in between. I surely did not understand every sentence, but it didn't matter. It is not obtuse, boring writing at all. She is a word mistress, plays with words, makes word associations that make sense and are fun and aren't usually used in describing atomic structure or the Big Bang or evolutionary biology.
There is an introduction and nine chapters. I am just going to pick a sentence or two from each chapter to illustrate her style.
Introduction:
"They told jokes, like the one about Physicist Werner Heisenberg, whose famed uncertainty principle says that you can know the position of an electron as it orbits the nuclear heart of an atom, or you can know its velocity, but that you can't know both at once."
Thinking Scientifically:
"The last spring of my father's life, before he died unexpectedly of a fast-growing tumor, he told me that it was the first time he had stopped during his walks through Central Park in New York, and paid attention to the details of the plants in bloom: the bulging out of a bud from a Lenten rose, the uncurling of a buttery magnolia blossom, the sprays of narcissus, Siberian bugloss, and bleeding heart."
"Yes, our children should be taught much more math and in far greater depth than they currently are in the average American classroom. Absolutely. But we must face the sad truth that children can take it, and adults cannot. As a consequence of brain biology, children are brilliant at learning new languages of all sorts. Their neurons are practically liquid, pouring across local loci and making new friends and synapses with hardly a grunt of effort."
"After analyzing these and other statistics, you may conclude, as the young student did, that her weekly manicures are reasonably harmless, but that she wouldn't want to work ten-hour shifts in a nail salon and that maybe she should give really big tips to the women who do."
Probabilities:
"It is also a venue large enough for rarities to become regulars, where so many millions of lottery tickets have been sold that ridiculous patterns emerge. A sixty-year-old Australian man buys a Lotto ticket before leaving for vacation, worries that he bought the wrong sort of ticket, and asks a friend back in Sydney to buy another, then frets on returning home that his friend fumbled the request and so decided to spring for a third entry--and ends up with three winning tickets in hand."
(and more lottery stories, the way and why people invest money , medical test results...all of these more interesting and understandable because of probabilities)
"If you hear that the incidence of a childhood cancer rose by 50 percent between last year and this, take a look at the number for the preceding five years."
Calibration:
"As of late 2006, for example, the U.S. national debt stood at $8.5 trillion. You can write that out in long form, as 8,500,000,000,000 and almost feel the red ink flowing from your veins."
"The fastest computers perform their calculation in picoseconds, or trillionths of a second...."
...or how about the "attosecond, a billionth of a billionth of a second..." or the faster zeptoseconds and yoctoseconds or the "briskest time span recognized to date...the chronon, or Planck time, which lasts about 5 x 10 to the minus 44 seconds...(superscript -44)." FAST!
"...nearly everything is far away, farther away than you think....The one exception to this fearful farness is the moon. Our moon is only 240,000 miles away, or ten times the circumference of Earth..."
"A human white blood cell is twelve microns wide. If the surface of your pinhead were wallpapered with white blood cells, you would be looking at about 28,000 of them."
Physics:
"Even for the simplest atom, hydrogen, which has just one electron whizzing about the single proton of its nucleus, the electron has so many points it may be found, so many places it has been and will be again, that the entire boundary of the hydrogen atom can be envisioned as a spoonful of cloud. "
"The four fundamental 'forces' of natures: electromagnetism, gravity, the strong force, and the weak force."
"This last section ended with a paean to electron hostility...I love subatomic nomadism when it's not wasting time raising manes or sticking skirts to stockings but is instead making itself useful to toasting bagels and running blenders, or for that matter allowing brain cells to fire or muscle cells to extend or contract."
"Importantly, charged atoms seek to fill their vacant shells or to shed their excess electrons and return to the bliss of Swiss neutrality..."
Chemistry:
"...carbon makes for a just-right class of molecules. Carbon is strong, resourceful, flexible, sociable. With its outer shell of four electrons and four electron slots for rent, carbon is supremely suited to molecular bondage. It happily collaborates with nearly every actor on the periodic table, save helium, neon and the four other noble elements, so-called for their snobby refusal to connect chemically to anything."
Evolutionary Biology:
(Quoting David Wake from Berkeley): "My grandfather was Lutheran pastor...and he never, in his long, rich life, felt any conflict between his religion and his scientific knowledge....My grandfather was the one who first taught me about evolution. He taught me to respect evidence and to remember that religion must always accommodate reality."
There is so much is this chapter: Darwin, natural selection, mutation, immunity, fossils, biogeography, taxonomy, intelligent design, DNA....all in lively prose.
Molecular Biology:
"So how do mouth bacteria manage to hang on and hammer through the enamel of live teeth, and in less than a single lifetimes?"
"...most scientists argue that because a virus doesn't engage in such essential rituals of life as eating and excreting, and is entirely reliant on the apparatus of the host cell it infects to create new viral particle for it, a virus isn't a true life but a protolife, a wannabeing, a parasitic paralife..."
"you may be the proud possessor of 74 trillion cells, but the jargon of cell biology can make you fell like an alien without a green card or city map."
....and more about proteins, enzymes, DNA, genes, all interesting.
"Every time a cell divides and its DNA is replicated, mistakes are made....Most of the mistakes in DNA replication are spotted by proofreading proteins and corrected before cell division is through; and of those few that slip through, most don't matter, for they fall into a harmless region of the genome. Once in a while though, a serious mutation is overlooked and ends up in the final DNA script of the daughter cell, a change in the code that will yield a rotten, dysfunctional protein product somewhere down the line. And by far the rottenest proteins are those the 'liberate' a cell from the constraints of its community, for they are the proteins that turn a cell cancerous."
Geology:
"The deepest hole ever drilled got 7.6 miles down, a mere two-thousandths of the distance to the planet's searing inner core."
....and stuff about plate tectonics, the core, mantle and crust of Earth and how "calcium is cycled in great, intersecting loops through water, air, mud, body plans living and dead, now drifting into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide gas, now sinking into sediment as rotting gymnosperm forest."
"Earth is just right for life, and life has clung to its skin for more than 3 billion years, if sometimes just by the skin of life's teeth: 99 percent of all species that have ever lived have gone extinct."
Astronomy:
"The image of Jupiter you see in your backyard telescope is how the planet looked half an hour ago..." and the light from the North Star is seen "as it was back when Will Shakespeare was still wearing shorts."
"Our sun is a good star, a stalwart star, and its life span is only halfway through."
"Our sun, for example, fuses 700 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second, and in so doing radiates away pieces of itself each day, splashing warmth and light across the solar system and My Very Educated Mother and her Nine (or eight) Pies and their retinue of moons, and the asteroid belt, and Hale-Bopp, and Comet Kohoutek, too."
Astronomy really does boggle my mind and this chapter both clarified some of the bogglement and added to it.
This definitely got way too long, but perhaps it may entice someone to read this book.
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