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The Art of Science: A Natural History of Ideas   
by Richard Hamblyn   
Picador
This is a book that will make you fantastic company at dinner parties. Especially dinner parties where no one expects you to know much about particle physics.
I know this because, having read The Art of Science, I found myself with friends demonstrating with two wine glasses how astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington sought to reconcile Isaac Newton's law of universal gravitation with Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.
'I wish I was clever,' one said, enviously.
Richard Hamblyn's point, however, is that you don't have to be unusually intelligent to get most of this stuff - someone just has to write it down better. Einstein believed 'even the most esoteric idea can be explained in ordinary language to anyone'. And that, Hamblyn says  in his thoughtful introduction, 'has been a guiding principle of  this book'. 
Contrary to popular belief, many authors across the ages have expressed scientific ideas in clear and even beautiful prose. They might be Aristotle from ancient Greece, telling us why the sea is salty, or Lotfi Zadeh, an Azerbaijan-born mathematician, outlining the quantification of beauty. 
Hamblyn, himself a science writer of recognised talent, has compiled a 'broadly chronological' anthology of examples that illuminate many of the great discoveries of science, from Babylonian astronomy to the Higgs boson or 'the God particle'.
His intention 'was not just to showcase some accessible translations of key scientific ideas, but to situate the birth of those ideas in their cultural and historical contexts'. 
To tell stories, in other words, rather than simply presenting  the facts.
I have never thought much about the force of gravity, or the torturous idea that it is an illusion created by the curvature of space. (We may have learned about it once at school, but I cried a lot during science classes because they made me feel stupid, and consequently barely learned anything.) Now, thanks to a description in this wonderful book, selected from Marcus Chown's  The Quantum Zoo, I am talking to anyone who will listen about ants  on a trampoline.
In an attempt to clarify the definition of gravity as 'the warpage of four-dimensional space-time' or curved space, Chown asks us to imagine a 'race of ants that spends its entire existence on the two-dimensional surface of a taut trampoline' and what happens when a person with a third-dimensional perspective places a cannonball in the middle of it.
There are many moments like this in The Art of Science, when  an idea we know is important but have long since given up trying to grasp is revealed because someone  has found the art of explaining it. There is a complex thrill, as Hamblyn notes,  to finally understanding something we had assumed we never would. 
The book is as much about science writing as it is about science, and by appreciating one person's great translation of another's great idea, we are discovering discoveries of discoveries.
Occasionally we hear from the scientist himself (or herself, but there are far fewer instances of female authorship in this anthology - something Hamblyn graciously but rather helplessly acknowledges) and among these, an extract from Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species becomes poignant when put into context. 
Philosopher Daniel Dennett has described Darwin's theory of natural selection as 'the single best idea that anyone has ever had'. Yet, because he predicted its impact on Victorian society and theology, Darwin said that writing his life's chief work was like 'confessing a murder'. 
Less sensitive to public opinion were James Watson  and Francis Crick,  a pair of 'loudmouthed young men who devoted more time to talking and drinking than to experiment' (as a senior colleague  of theirs remarked), and who discovered the structure of DNA. 
The story goes that on February 28, 1953, Watson and Crick burst into the saloon bar at the Eagle pub on Bene't Street in Cambridge, and announced to a bemused lunchtime crowd that they had uncovered the secret of life. Today, the pub's wall boasts a plaque commemorating that moment. 
Here, in an extract from his book, The Double Helix, Watson derides the physical appearance of crystallographer Rosalind Franklin,  who was a rival scientist in London. He also notes, in response to the scepticism of his peers, that 'one could not be a successful scientist without realising that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid'.
His arrogance and cynicism blaze through the pages, and what emerges is so far from the stereotype of Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologists that the pair's vivacity is a  comforting revelation. 
What these stories do is remind us that behind every fact and equation, beyond the jargon and white coats and awards, there are human beings with hearts and minds who are passionate and anxious like the rest of us.
One source of anxiety for many 20th-century scientists was the moral ramifications of the second world war and, in particular, the use of the atomic bomb against Japan. A section on 'the impact of the war on scientists' is one of the book's most affecting and insightful. If you've ever wondered how the bomb's inventors slept at night, the answer is  in Hamblyn's opening: ''Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,' as J. Robert Oppenheimer claimed to have whispered as he watched the detonation of the first atomic bomb at the Trinity  test site in New Mexico on July 16, 1945; 'Now we are all sons of bitches', as the test director Kenneth Bainbridge  is reputed to have said in response.'
Hamblyn has achieved a terrific balance in the types of essays that appear in this collection. Not only does his natural history of ideas take us across disciplines, continents and millennia, but also the voices  range from grand and poetic to relaxed and witty. Readers get the sense of being at a cacophonous soiree with some of history's greatest minds. 
Hamblyn's enthusiasm for what he is doing - sorting, teaching, energising, celebrating - dances across every page, and it is contagious and brilliant. But if his minimum criteria are 'readability and documentary value', ours will be personal interest and taste. Ernest Hemingway could have written the entry on pasteurisation and I wouldn't have loved it because, try as I might, I don't care about milk and bacteria. Others will feel the same about paranoid schizophrenia, which I read with rapt attention. 
Overall, The Art of Science is a triumph, and I (who have never so much as said the word 'fractal') stand convinced of the thrust of the book, which is that 'science is, first and foremost, a product of the human imagination; it is a cultural endeavour like any other'.
And the sentence that  makes me believe science writing has a place in high literature is this, from the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg: 'The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.'




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