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The One Thing You Need to Know - Marcus Chown *****

Getting a new Marcus Chown book is like receiving a warm science hug - of all the top rank science writers, he has the most friendly style, making complex science as simple and approachable as possible. Apparently, this book was inspired by planning a talk starting from 'What is the one thing you need to know... the one thing from which everything else follows?' The result is 21 short pieces on science topics ranging from gravity to the Big Bang, via global warming, quantum theory and evolution.

Of course, had Chown only provided us with those 'one thing' entries, we'd have had a collection of inspirational fridge magnet quotes, or at best tweets. (To be fair, what is arguably Chown's least successful book, Tweeting the Universe, did literally comprise a set of tweets about science.) Here, the 'one things' range from the extremely compact, such as 'It contains a lot of mass' for why the Sun is hot and 'Light is uncatchable' for special relativity, to the Standard Model's chunkier 'The complexity of the world stems from the permutations of just three fundamental building blocks glued together with three fundamental forces'. But in practice, each section uses its one thing as a starting point and then opens up the topic, typically over ten pages.

If you are regular popular science reader, a lot of these topics will be covering fairly familiar ground, so perhaps the ideal target of this book is someone who hasn't had much exposure to science beyond school. In each case, Chown packs in a considerable amount of information in those short sections, often bringing in stories of the discovery or development of the science to humanise it and make it more approachable. Chown is at his best in physics/cosmology areas (his background), but comes across well across the board. I was particularly impressed with his Higgs field entry. He gives the most approachable description I've seen of what's meant by gauge invariance and why it's important. And there are plenty of fun factoids along the way - I particularly liked the way he highlights how relatively inefficient the Sun is by telling us 'imagine your stomach and a chunk of the sun's core of the same size and shape as your stomach. Your stomach generates heat at a greater rate!'

There is a downside to keeping things simple that does occasionally peep through. It's possible to simplify so far that what's written is not really giving a clear picture of a theory or phenomenon (or the text might simply miss out a necessary explanation). For example, his 'one thing' for the second law of thermodynamics is 'There are many more ways for things to be disordered than ordered, so if each is equally likely, order will gradually morph into disorder.' But nowhere is that 'if each is equally likely' justified. Similarly he tells us 'The Higgs endows all the fermions with their masses'. Admittedly this is corrected in another section where Chown tells us 'actually, the Higgs field accounts for only 0.5 per cent of your mass' - here the subtlety is what is strictly meant by 'their masses' in that first quote. Also, dark matter as a substance is stated as a fact rather than one possible theory to explain the 'dark matter' phenomenon, a theory that has some real problems at the time of writing.

This kind of mild inaccuracy does wind up some scientists, but it is the price you have to pay if you are to make science extremely approachable. Pretty well all popular science has some over-simplification - and in a book with this kind of target audience, there is bound to be a fair amount.

Overall, then, a brilliant, highly simplified and approachable introduction to some of the biggest topics in science. Probably not a book I'd recommend reading end to end in one go, as I did - ideal, for example, to absorb a couple of sections at a time over a short train journey.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
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