Magic Universe A Grand Tour of Modern Science

As a prolific author, BBC commentator, and magazine editor, Nigel Calder has spent a lifetime spotting and explaining the big discoveries in all branches of science. In Magic Universe, he draws on his vast experience to offer readers a lively, far-reaching look at modern science in all its
glory, shedding light on the latest ideas in physics, biology, chemistry, medicine, astronomy, and many other fields.
What is truly magical about Magic Universe is Calder's incredible breadth. Migrating birds, light sensors in the human eye, black holes, antimatter, buckyballs and nanotubes--with exhilarating sweep, Calder can range from the strings of a piano to the superstrings of modern physics, from
Pythagoras's theory of musical pitch to the most recent ideas about atoms and gravity and a ten-dimensional universe--all in one essay. The great virtue of this wide-ranging style--besides its liveliness and versatility--is that it allows Calder to illuminate how the modern sciences intermingle and
cross-fertilize one another. Indeed, whether discussing astronauts or handedness or dinosaurs, Calder manages to tease out hidden connections between disparate fields of study. What is most wondrous about the "magic universe" is that one can begin with stellar dust and finish with life itself.
Drawing on interviews with more than 200 researchers, from graduate students to Nobel prize-winners, Magic Universe takes us on a high-spirited tour through the halls of science, one that will enthrall everyone interested in science, whether a young researcher in a high-tech lab or an amateur
buff sitting in the comfort of an armchair.

This is a marvellously engaging tour covering the whole of modern science, from transgenic crops to quantum tangles. Written by one of the most experienced and well-known names in science writing, it is also assuredly reliable science. Although arranged for convenience and quick reference as a collection of topics in alphabetical order, it is very different from any conventional encyclopedia. Each topic tells a story, making the book eminently browsable. Packed with information, yet carrying its immense learning lightly, this is a book that would appeal to anyone with the slightest interest in how the world works.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the spider's web; Over 130 articles, from...; ALCOHOL: Genetic revelations of when yeast invented booze; ALTRUISM AND AGGRESSION: Looking for the origins of those human alternatives; ANTIMATTER: Does the coat that Sakharov made really explain its absence?; ARABIDOPSIS: The modest weed that gave plant scientists the big picture; ASTRONAUTICS: Will interstellar pioneers be overtaken by their grandchildren?; BERNAL'S LADDER: Pointers; BIG BANG: The inflationary Universe's sleight-of-hand; BIODIVERSITY: The mathematics of co-existence; BIOLOGICAL CLOCKS: Molecular machinery that governs life's routines; BIOSPHERE FROM SPACE: 'I want to do the whole world'; BITS AND QUBITS: The digital world and its looming quantum shadow; BLACK HOLES: The awesome engines of quasars and active galaxies; BRAIN IMAGES: What do all the vivid movies really mean?; BRAIN RHYTHMS: The mathematics of the beat we think to; BRAIN WIRING: How do all those nerve connections know where to go?; BUCKYBALLS AND NANOTUBES: Doing very much more with very much less; ...to...; SMALLPOX: The dairymaid's blessing and the general's curse; SOLAR WIND: How it creates the heliosphere in which we live; SPACE WEATHER: Why it is now more troublesome than in the old days; SPARTICLES: A wished-for superworld of exotic matter and forces; SPEECH: A gene that makes us more eloquent than chimpanzees; STARBURSTS: Galactic traffic accidents and stellar baby booms; STARS: Hearing them sing and sizing them up; STEM CELLS: Tissue engineering, natural and medical; SUN'S INTERIOR: How sound waves made our mother star transparent; SUPERATOMS, SUPERFLUIDS AND SUPERCONDUCTORS: The march of the boson armies; SUPERSTRINGS: Retuning the cosmic imagination; TIME MACHINES: The biggest issue in contemporary physics?; TRANSGENIC CROPS: For better or worse, a planetary experiment has begun; TREE OF LIFE: Promiscuous bacteria and the course of evolution; UNIVERSE: 'It must have known we were coming'; VOLCANIC EXPLOSIONS: Where will the next big one be?

Nigel Calder is a long-established and widely known science writer, and a former Editor of New Scientist.