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What's Gotten Into You - Dan Levitt *****

Tracing your atoms from the Big Bang to their role in sustaining your life, this book is very much of the 'Gee whiz wow!' school of popular science writing... and I really enjoyed it. While I couldn't cope reading too many books like this in a row, occasionally they are fun - and the great thing that Dan Levitt does is to dig a little deeper along the way. Not into the science itself, which is presented at a fairly summary level, but instead into the stories of those involved in the discoveries behind the science, including several that are not particularly familiar.

So, for example, in the early stages of the story we get the inevitable names such as Georges Lemaître, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (Levitt sticks with her pre-marital surname) and Fred Hoyle, but also the likes of Marietta Blau, Allesandro Morbidelli and Victor Safronov who are far less familiar, but deserving of introduction to the general public.

What makes the sequence of narratives that fill in the gaps between the Big Bang and complex cellular life particularly interesting is the number of times theories have changed. Although Levitt says that Hoyle always rejected the Big Bang, he doesn't mention the Steady State theory, which at one point (certainly in the UK) had far more support than Big Bang, but with various other stages in the book, such as the formation of the Earth, where Earth's water came from and the structure of cells, it's fascinating to see how the different views competed before coming to the current best theories - in some cases still not 100 per cent settled. 

Levitt does a great job of putting across the difficulties of reaching a solid outcome that get hidden when we present modern understanding as simply 'what's known'. This comes across particularly well when he explores the structures of cells, how these tiny features were discovered and the complexity of the molecular machinery that enables them to operate.

My only real concern is that because the science (and its history) has very little detail, it can sometimes involve statements that aren't entirely accurate. For example, we are told that in 1922 Edwin Hubble shocked the astronomical community by discovery that the universe 'contained an incredible number of other galaxies', where in fact Hubble only had data on a handful of galaxies, and did not go public until later than 1922. I was also a little thrown by the wording 'negatively charged sodium and positively charged potassium' when describing the sodium-potassium pump - negative sodium ions would be a distinct novelty.

There are lots of different ways to look at what makes us what we are, as demonstrated in What Do You Think You Are? - and it is great to have a much more expansive look at how the atoms that we are made from came into being, ended up in us and function in the body. What captivated me about What's Gotten Into You was not so much the science, as those stories of the people behind the theories and how those theories were disputed and specific ones came to dominate. Enjoyable stuff.

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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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  1. Akshat5 July 2023 at 13:03

    Picked it up on a whim at the library turned out to be absolutely fantastic , the title dosent do it justice though it ties the narrative together it is a wonderful book worthy of a re-read

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