Took a long time to get through this one, and maybe it's intended more as a reference book, but it's very readable all the same, and plenty of useful info: he covers cosmology, astronomy, geology, physics (classical and quantum), chemistry, biology, and psychology. In each case, the story of how the science developed is covered, with certain key experiments and characters described (just about every page has a sentence "for this he was awarded the nobel prize" - they mostly are men).

I think he's quite good on biology, but I did struggle on the section where he talks about the way that chemistry can be used to understand biological processes. I reread the explanation of nucleic acids a couple of times before giving up with it and moving on to "the origin of life".

One of the things I did like in the book were the frequent explanations of the etymology of certain words that are now in common use. E.g. "vaccine" deriving from the latin for "cowpox", which it was what the first vaccine contained, and "limelight" was what they got when they burnt calcium oxide to produce illumination on theatre stages.

Here are a couple of the sections I marked:

• The sun consumes 4,200,000 tons of mass per second [p40]
• For the first fifty years, until someone worked out how to frost the inside of lightbulbs, they were made of clear glass, because when you frost them on the outside they collect too much dust [p398]
• "electronics" is so named because it involves the manipulation of electrons (well I'd never realised that - duh!) [p412]
• really good description of how semiconductors work [p416]
• isomers (organic molecules which have identical atomic formulae but behave differently) caused a problem until Keluke came up with a structural formulae [p467]
• an enzyme is a type of protein that catalyzes a reaction - quite a good description of how this process works [p529]
• cells are so named because they looked like lots of uniform little holes to Robert Hooke, who found them in tree bark with his microscope [p554]
• good description of Mendel's theories, although he died before people came (independenly) to the same conclusions he had [p562]

I don't think I'll read it from cover-to-cover again, but it's definitely worth keeping on the shelf for reference.

Completed : 31-Aug-2004