Any literate person should be familiar with the central ideas of modern science, the author asserts. In this book, Peter Atkins introduces his choice of the ten great ideas of science. He leads the reader through the emergence of the concepts, working into his narrative an illustration of the scientific method and showing how simple ideas can have enormous consequences. His choice of the ten great ideas includes: evolution occurs by natural selection, in which the early attempts at explaining the origin of species is followed by an account of the modern approach and some of its unsolved problems; inheritance is encoded in DNA, in which the story of the emergence of an understanding of inheritance is followed through to the mapping of the human genome; and energy is conserved, in which we see how the central concept of energy gradually dawned on scientists as they mastered the motion of particles and the concept of heat.
Contents: Prologue: the emergence of understanding; 1: Evolution: the emergence of complexity; 2: DNA: the rationalization of biology; 3: Energy: the universalization of accountancy; 4: Entropy: the spring of change; 5: Atoms: the reduction of matter; 6: Symmetry: the quantification of beauty; 7: Quanta: the simplification of understanding; 8: Cosmology: the globalization of reality; 9: Spacetime: the arena of action; 10: Arithmetic: the limitation of explanation; Epilogue: the future of understanding.