Science in Seconds: 200 Key Concepts Explained in an Instant

Book Preface

Science is an amazingly powerful tool for understanding nature. For instance, it has revealed compelling evidence that the universe was born in a fiery explosion 13.7 billion years ago. Scientists have cracked the genetic codes of complex life and eradicated smallpox, a disease estimated to have killed up to 500 million people during the twentieth century alone. When it comes to problem solving, scientific thinking is the best tool in the box.

But many science textbooks are neither fun nor easy to read. Science in Seconds aims to be a readable, user-friendly introduction to key topics in science without getting technical. There’s no reason why you can’t get the gist of Einstein’s relativity theories (see pages 16 and 18), for example, or how to clone a sheep (page 210) in a simple bite-size introduction. Hopefully, this book will inspire even a few people to discover a subject they love and then to dig deeper.

For simplicity, the book is structured into the traditional subjects such as physics, chemistry, and biology, with an index for easy navigation. Narrowing down the topics to two hundred wasn’t easy, but the book includes must-have basics—for instance how biological cells divide and how lasers work—as well as some of the more cutting-edge fields such as stem cell therapy and the flourishing hunt for weird and wonderful alien planets beyond our own solar system.

These modern adventures remind us that science is not just about rote learning long-established theories—a scientist’s real job is to find out things we don’t already know. How can we prevent devastating diseases and climate change? Why does life exist at all? Most of the matter in the universe remains stubbornly unidentified, while more people have been to the Moon than to the deepest parts of our oceans. The real buzz of science lies in detective work, which will keep future scientists busy for a long time to come.