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Charge - Frank Close ****

Anyone who writes popular science books that are so thick they could act as doorstops should pay more attention to what Frank Close achieves. In a slim, small volume he manages to pack in a huge amount of information without compromising at all on quality. His latest such book is Charge - dealing with various types of charge from electrical to colour (in the quark sense).

This starts off brilliantly with a point about electrical charge that had never occurred to me. Close tells us that with every breath you inhale sufficient electrons to absorb a charge of around 15,000 coulombs 'enough to spark 1000 bolts of lightning'. And if breathing steadily, the equivalent current would be about 3,000 amps. Thankfully, though, the balancing positive charge from the nucleus means you don't fry. (This is slightly misleading as the comparison with lightning only works if you consider charge - the current in a lightning bolt is typically about 10 times higher as it lasts a much briefer time, but the general point is still amazing.)

If Close had gone on in the same vein this would have been a five star plus book. The reason I've pulled it down a little is that this kind of useful storytelling approach is lost fairly soon. Instead we get the kind of descriptive (non-mathematical) detail rarely seen in a popular science book as we progress from electromagnetism to the structure of atoms, bring in the strong and weak forces, exploring the relevance of charge in these, spend plenty of time with quarks, look at grand unification theories and take on the possibility of proton decay. The content itself is fascinating, if difficult to take in - but it would have been a lot more approachable if the style hadn't moved to a pure factual description of theory.

One small complaint is the subtitle. While it's true that it is the neutral structure of atoms that means that the much weaker gravity can beat electromagnetism, and that neutral nature is behind us surviving that paradoxically huge charge mentioned above when breathing, it is only a tiny part of the book, which is about far more.

All in all, provided you are prepared to put some effort into reading it, and accepting that the occasional point might have to be let go as not quite getting the meaning across, this is a great book.

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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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