If in some cataclysm, asked Richard Feynman, the late physicist-genius, all scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, what crucially important statement about science would contain the most information in the fewest words? “I believe,” he declared, “it is the atomic hypothesis that all things are made of atoms. Little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each when a little distance apart but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.” If you take that sentence and stir in a bit of “imagination and thinking,” he concluded, you have the entire “history of physics”.

Fine . . . if you have the imagination and thinking of a Feynman, but science can be difficult, physics notoriously so, and ordinary mortals need guidance. Natalie Angier, a science journalist on The New York Times, has written a somewhat more expanded set of “beautiful basics of science” for nonscientists from teens upwards. By calling her book The Canon, she is invoking the must-list of inspired books of the Bible. This is a bold claim, but it’s the prelude to a consistently gripping hi-sci read, if you can swallow her addiction to arch humour as in “A journey by jet to the sun would last 21 years, at which point passengers should be advised that contents in the overhead compartment may have melted.”

Science, she insists, is not a bunch of facts: it is a way of thinking, exemplified at the simplest level by the best way to check why the DVD machine is on the blink. Isolate the potential problems logically (power, plug, leads) and you’re thinking scientifically. But science, she points out, doesn’t always obey the logic of nonscientists. For example, most people believe that the reason we have winters and summers is the elliptical movement of the earth around the sun, which periodically takes the sun further from the earth. Wrong. 'It's to do with the Earth's tilt and hence the shifting angle of the sun’s rays. On the vexed theme of probability, she notes that if you imagine spinning a coin 100 times, instead of actually doing it, research shows that your instincts balk at imagining heads six times in a row, which is what routinely occurs.

Her main subject headings are traditional: physics, chemistry, evolutionary and molecular biology, geology and astronomy. Her canon excludes such topics as computer and environmental sciences, as well as sports, domestic, and technical topics that often pass for “science” in sixth forms today. Her emphasis is on understanding the fundamentals of how nature and the universe work as an essential prelude to subsequent levels of explanation. She shows how the basics of physics, for example, are crucial for explaining electricity, how evolutionary biology demonstrates the significance of genetics), and how molecular biology gives you sound reasons for flossing your teeth.

Unpacking the mind-bending problem of quantum physics, the science of infinitesimally small, she asks the top American theoretical physicist Brian Greene what we would see if an atom were to be enlarged to something visible with the naked eye? His answer, typical of the accessible tenor of the book, explains with admirable cogency one of the most counterintuitive aspects of physics. Observation of the everyday, as he puts it, involves “particles of light [photons], banging into our eyes. . . but when you get down to the scale of the atom, those photons can change the nature of the thing you’re seeing”. The electrons that surround the atom can absorb and emit photons, he explains, and the electrons consequently jump around, altering the atom’s conformation. “We long to impose the everyday experience of sight on the tiny little atom,” he goes on, “but to do so requires that we change the atom itself. We can’t literally see down there.” So what can we figuratively imagine? Greene sets out the mind-bending properties of the “electron cloud” structure of simple atoms without doing the least violence to the science: the vast expanse of inner space involved (why “most of matter is empty”), and the extraordinary conditions of solar heat necessary to squash two atoms together.

Why should we bother with science? Angier offers an unarguable response. Living in a world in which our health, longevity, sustenance, safety and future survival (those carbon footprints), depend on scientific literacy, an appreciation of the absolute basics is increasingly essential. As for the political, social and ethical applications, Angier takes an agnostic view. Is it up to scientists to tell us whether experiments should be allowed on human embryonic stem cells? No! she responds emphatically. “This is a matter,” she opines, “of conscience, politics, religious conviction, and, when all else fails, name-calling.” Amen to that, and a blessing on her secular canon, which is the best introduction to essential science I’ve read for many a year.

THE CANON: The Beautiful Basics of Science by Natalie Angier
Faber £17.99 pp293

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